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Portraits of Chinese leaders, part of an exhibit in Yan'an. From left, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and current president Xi Jinping. (Jade Gao/AFP/Getty Images)
Mao Zedong 毛泽东 (1935-1976)
Hua Guofeng 华国锋 (1976-1981)
Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 (1978-1997)
Hu Yaobang 胡耀邦 (1981-1987)
Zhao Ziyang 赵紫阳 (1987-1989)
Jiang Zemin 江泽民 (1989-2002)
Hu Jintao 胡锦涛 (2002-2012)
Xi Jinping 习近平 (2012- )
Since the days of Mao Zedong, smooth leadership transitions have mostly eluded the Chinese Communist Party. Though it is one of the world’s largest political entities, it lacks an institutionalized means of succession, and China’s power brokers have taken control mostly through intense internecine battles among the party elite. Only the last two generations managed something close to an uncontested handover and transition — at the time, raising hopes of a true evolution.
Then came President Xi Jinping. China’s most powerful leader since strongmen Mao and Deng Xiaoping flouted the recent norms of succession at the party’s key meeting in Beijing last week. With his acceptance of a historic third term as party general secretary and chairman of its Central Military Commission — the two most important positions — the specter of a lifelong ruler again looms.
Here’s a look at how China got from the turbulent rule of Mao to Xi’s nearly unchallenged authority.
Mao took full control of the party during a 1935 power struggle midway through the “Long March,” the 6,000-mile retreat by Communist troops to escape the Chinese Nationalist Party’s army. In 1943, he formally became party chairman, a title he retained — often by purging rivals — from the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 until his death on Sept. 6, 1976.
Mao once told Hua, his designated successor, “with you in charge, I’m at ease.” Even with the chairman’s endorsement, Hua had to take down a group of Maoist leaders known as the “gang of four” to secure his position. (One of those four was Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing.) He didn’t stay in charge long. He had already begun to lose control when Deng Xiaoping, an influential revolutionary veteran, successfully schemed to supplant him in 1978. Hua stepped down as party chairman in 1981.
Although Deng was never general secretary of the party, he is considered to have replaced a diminished Hua as China’s paramount leader starting around 1978. Often referred to as the “architect” of the country’s economic reforms and opening to international business, he used his influence over the military and party elders to guide policy and select leaders. His authority waned after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when huge protests in Beijing were finally crushed and hundreds, if not thousands, of people were killed by authorities. Deng stepped down as head of the military following the protests but remained influential until his death in 1997.
The first of Deng’s picks for leader, Hu was party chairman until officials abolished the position as well as their long-standing party structure in 1982. His attempts at economic and political reform earned him enemies among conservative party elders, who ousted him as general secretary in 1987. Upon his death two years later, students took to the streets in mourning. Their calls for political freedoms, including freedom of speech, became the demonstrations that took over Tiananmen Square until troops crushed the protests.
Another of Deng’s chosen leaders, Zhao continued Hu’s reform efforts as general secretary. He was purged during the 1989 protests because Deng and other hard-liners considered him too sympathetic to the students. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Party elders picked Jiang to replace Zhao as general secretary at a particularly critical moment. Jiang oversaw a propaganda and political thought campaign to reinstate control in the wake of Tiananmen Square; he later combined that with economic liberalization as China prepared to join the World Trade Organization in 2001. He formally handed over party leadership in 2002 but remained head of the military until 2005. At 96, Jiang is China’s oldest past leader alive today.
Hu was arguably the first leader of the Chinese Communist Party to ascend after a gradual preparation process, rather than after a fierce internal struggle. But with his restrained leadership style, he was often overshadowed by Jiang and others. Government corruption, income inequality and party schisms marred his decade in power. Hu’s handover to Xi Jinping from late 2012 to early 2013 was the first time the country’s three top positions — over party, military and state — were transferred at once.
Like Hu, Xi ascended to the party leadership gradually, working as a local official for decades before being promoted to the top job in Beijing. Many outside observers assumed he would rule much like his immediate predecessor, perhaps even pursuing reforms. Instead, Xi purged rivals in a harsh anti-corruption campaign and cracked down on dissent, interning hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and crushing resistance in Hong Kong.
The 69-year-old Xi shows no sign of loosening his grip or designating a successor. State media regularly calls him the “people’s leader” — a near identical title to “great leader” Mao. At the recently concluded party congress, he declared that the party under his stewardship would make China a modern socialist superpower by 2049, a century after Mao founded the nation.
Lyric Li in Seoul contributed reporting. | 2022-10-24T05:20:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | China leadership succession, from Mao to Xi - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/mao-zedong-xi-jinping-china-leaders/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/mao-zedong-xi-jinping-china-leaders/ |
Can Meloni Learn From Berlusconi’s Failures?
Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy party, right, speaks alongside Silvio Berlusconi, leader of Forza Italia party, during a news conference following talks with Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella at the Quirinale Palace in Rome, Italy, on Friday Oct. 21. 2022. Meloni clinched a mandate from her coalition on the path to becoming Italy’s first female premier, after weeks of political stasis following her right-wing alliance’s election win. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
If Giorgia Meloni had expected a straightforward passage to becoming Italy’s first woman prime minister, she hadn’t counted on her coalition ally Silvio Berlusconi’s enduring desire to control. Italy’s three-time premier started undermining her far-right government even before its ministers were named. But Meloni has something to learn from Berlusconi too. He provides a cautionary tale for all populists how quickly their promise of change can turn rancid because of recklessness and corruption.
Berlusconi, who is celebrating 28 years in front-line politics, is the archetype of the modern populist. He is the template for figures from Donald Trump to Boris Johnson, and Meloni herself. He feted his return to Italy’s Senate nine years after having been kicked out for a tax-fraud conviction by assailing Meloni, the new leader of their coalition after the Brothers of Italy party she co-founded won far more votes than Berlusconi or Matteo Salvini’s League last month.
Clearly piqued by his waning political influence, he attacked Meloni personally, describing her as “self-important, bossy, arrogant and ridiculous” in notes to his party loyalists that were leaked to media. He then undercut her authority by cozying up to his old chum Vladimir Putin. In a 48-hour spectacle of self-aggrandizement, he threw into doubt her positioning as a responsible member of the European Union and its pro-Ukraine policy against Putin — and, ultimately, the longevity of her government. By the weekend, when Meloni was heading to President Sergio Mattarella to gain his official go-ahead to form a government, senior bankers told me they were expecting it would last no more than six to nine months.
The sight of 86-year-old Berlusconi, botoxed and perma-tanned, rekindling a bromance with Putin and seeking to assert his will over the 45-year old Meloni has revealed him to be still, unequivocally, unfit for office. But the arc of his extraordinary and appalling political career holds lessons for new leaders.
It’s instructive to remember when Berlusconi burst onto the political stage, his millions of supporters believed his novelty and entrepreneurial chutzpah would reform Italy’s sclerotic economy. Instead, his attention to personal profit for his own business, his corruption and sexual antics, his desire to be loved by the electorate made him unable to tell hard truths and apply his popularity to policy. Ultimately, the promise of Berlusconi died in a bonfire of vanities, and Italy’s economy sank further into decline.
His most sensational transgression was the lurid saga of his sex parties, which made “bunga-bunga” a term of derisionheard around the world. A conviction of his paying for sex with an underage woman was overturned on appeal. Still, the shameful spectacle of a prime minister being put on trial in Milan, sullied not only Berlusconi’s reputation, but Italy’s. Berlusconi’s fraud and tax trials resulted in convictions that were later overturned and then timed out by a statue of limitations on five separate occasions, undermining rule of law in the country which already had a shaky reputation among foreign investors.
But his greatest defect was to do virtually nothing to stem the decline of Italy’s economic competitiveness and growth of its debt load. It’s been left to successive technocratic prime ministers, including most recently Mario Draghi, to try too late to implement reforms. Instead, Berlusconi used his enormous political power and influence to help his private media empire Mediaset, and add to his family’s wealth, by rewriting media and competition laws. The 2004 Gasparri law eased antitrust rules to allow Berlusconi to become the dominant private media owner across TV, print and advertising. Stunningly, the very same senator behind that bill, Maurizio Gasparri, this month submitted a proposal to amend the civil code that could pave the way for abortions to be classified as murder, a key aim of Meloni’s new right-wing government.
The other secret of his success is the immovable nativist base that he has tapped. His Forza Italia! (Go, Italy!) party’s vision promised an Italy full of easy economic (and sexual) success, and laissez-faire government where the demonized “other” (in Berlusconi’s case communists and magistrates) was to blame for all Italians’ problems.
Meloni is familiar with Berlusconi’s playbook. The electoral success of her Brothers of Italy party owes much to Berlusconi’s use of media and nativist might. Her success comes after an adept campaign on law and order railing against threats to the “natural family” and the so-called LGBTQ+ lobby. She’s also keeping power in the family, giving a key ministry of agriculture and food sovereignty to her brother-in-law. But as she forms a government it’s time she heeded Berlusconi’s failures too. Especially the damage he has done — and can still do — by looking out for himself. | 2022-10-24T05:50:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Can Meloni Learn From Berlusconi’s Failures? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/can-meloni-learn-from-berlusconis-failures/2022/10/24/d906344c-5358-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/can-meloni-learn-from-berlusconis-failures/2022/10/24/d906344c-5358-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
How Credit Suisse Can Avoid a Costly Share Sale
Amazing what you can get out of a yard sale. (Bloomberg)
Credit Suisse executives really don’t want to sell shares to fund the restructuring they’re due to reveal on Thursday. The good news for shareholders: They shouldn’t need to do so. A string of rumored asset sales ought to get them mostly over the line.
For Credit Suisse, restructuring costs are estimated at $4 billion or more by analysts. Paying for this with a share sale would be horribly dilutive for existing investors: The stock is trading at more than a 70% discount to its book value. Axel Lehmann, chairman, and Ulrich Koerner, chief executive officer, are desperate to avoid that.
The value of these bits and pieces, put together from news reports, analyst estimates and my own calculations, adds up to a possible more than $5.75 billion in proceeds or capital freed up on Credit Suisse’s balance sheet. If it can realize even half of this, it would be well on the way to paying for its overhaul.
The biggest chunk comes from Credit Suisse’s Securitized Products Group, the profitable unit that creates and trades bonds made up of mortgages and buyout loans. The bank said it would look for investors to put capital into this unit while continuing to run it. I’ve been skeptical that this makes sense, and Kian Abouhossein, analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co., agreed in a recent note, saying an outright sale would be better. That would free up about $2.8 billion in capital, according to Abouhossein. Pimco and Apollo Global Management are among several bidders potentially interested, according to Bloomberg News.
The next biggest business is Credit Suisse Asset Management, which Bloomberg Intelligence values at $2.5 billion to $3 billion. This should be a core business for the Swiss bank because it fits with wealth management and private banking — Credit Suisse’s main focus. So it shouldn’t sell the whole thing, but it could offload a minority stake, say 25%, as Deutsche Bank did successfully with DWS Asset Management. That would bring in up to $750 million.
Credit Suisse has also considered selling a stake its advisory business, which helps companies with deals and fund raising, according to Bloomberg news. This could be the rebranded First Boston, but again it’s a service that ties in with its super-rich clients so only a minority stake sale seems possible. The unit has about $2.3 billion of capital and produces a return of 13%, according to JPMorgan’s Abouhossein. Assuming the capital is essentially its book value, those returns suggest a market valuation of $3 billion, so a 25% stake brings in $750 million. The business isn’t simple enough to work easily as a partial public listing in the way that asset management could, so it is more suitable for a large private investor who would have limited ability to resell their stake.
Next is SIX Group, in which Credit Suisse owns a 15% stake, according to a company release. The parent of Switzerland’s stock exchange is owned privately by a host of Swiss and foreign banks. Using SIX’s operating profits after tax and a price-earnings multiple of 20 times, in line with Deutsche Boerse and several US exchanges companies, that stake could be worth nearly $600 million.
An easier — and completely obvious — thing to sell is Credit Suisse’s 90% stake in the Mandarin Oriental Savoy Zurich. This isn’t the 19th century; a serious bank has no business owning a trophy hotel. That’s worth about $400 million, according to reports. It has just sold its 8.6% stake in publicly listed Allfunds Group, a technology company that produces data, analytics and research for wealth managers. The rise and fall in its share price has added distracting volatility to Credit Suisse’s earnings. That stake brought in $330 million. Lastly, there is Credit Suisse’s small Swiss finance and leasing business, Bank Now AG, which has equity capital of nearly $300 million. I’ll just factor that in at its capital value.
• Credit Suisse’s Gulf Suitors Need to be Smarter: Anjani Trivedi
• Bonds Will Determine Where Bear Market in Stocks Goes Next: Jonathan Levin
• Credit Suisse Isn’t the Lehman Moment You’re Looking For: Paul J. Davies | 2022-10-24T05:50:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Credit Suisse Can Avoid a Costly Share Sale - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-credit-suisse-can-avoid-a-costly-share-sale/2022/10/24/d94ed404-5358-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-credit-suisse-can-avoid-a-costly-share-sale/2022/10/24/d94ed404-5358-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Chinese President Xi Jinping is seen at the end of the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th Party Congress on a giant screen a commercial district of Hangzhou in eastern China’s Zhejiang province on Sunday, Oct 23, 2022. China’s economic growth accelerated in the latest quarter but still was among the slowest in decades as the country wrestled with repeated closures of cities to fight virus outbreaks. (Chinatopix via AP) (Uncredited/CHINATOPIX)
BEIJING — China’s economic growth picked up in the latest quarter but still was among the weakest in decades as the ruling Communist Party tries to reverse a slump while enforcing anti-virus controls and a crackdown on debt in its vast real estate industry. | 2022-10-24T07:22:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | China's economic growth accelerates but weak amid shutdowns - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/chinas-economic-growth-accelerates-but-weak-amid-shutdowns/2022/10/24/fcf64c36-5365-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/chinas-economic-growth-accelerates-but-weak-amid-shutdowns/2022/10/24/fcf64c36-5365-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
How Turkey Tries Balancing East and West as War Rages
Analysis by Selcan Hacaoglu | Bloomberg
Starting in the 1940s, Turkey, wary of Moscow, positioned itself as an ally of Washington and soon after joined NATO, the military alliance founded to protect Europe against Soviet attack during the Cold War. Since coming to power in 2003, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has gradually reinvented Turkey as a power in its own right that’s free to make new friends, even if it upsets the old ones. The policy faces a major test with the war in Ukraine. Erdogan has condemned Russia’s invasion of the country, but refrained from joining western sanctions against Moscow and welcomed Russian companies, investment and tourists into Turkey. As the conflict drags on and the stakes grow for all involved, it’s likely to prove increasingly difficult for Erdogan to maintain the balancing act.
During much of the Cold War, Russia was the hostile neighbor that forced Turkey to seek powerful allies to help defend its territory. In the past decade, it’s been courting some of Washington’s adversaries -- Russia, China and Iran -- while remaining inside NATO. Seeking a major role in world affairs, Erdogan has opened dozens of diplomatic missions in Africa and Latin America and vowed to make Turkey the first NATO member to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a China-led international security group that originally focused on Central Asia but is now expanding toward the Middle East. Russia has become a major economic partner, supplying almost half of Turkey’s natural gas imports and a record 4.7 million tourists to the country last year. In 2019, Turkey acquired Russian S-400 surface-to-air missiles in defiance of its NATO allies. Russian state company Rosatom is building a $20-billion nuclear power station on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast and Turkey’s government has asked it to construct another.
2. What’s Erdogan’s beef with western governments?
Erdogan has bristled at a series of perceived snubs by his western allies. When the US in 2014 began to supply weapons to Kurdish militants in Syria, who were helping in the effort to combat Islamic State, Turkey -- which is fighting its own conflict with affiliated Kurdish separatists -- saw the move as a betrayal. In 2016, decades of negotiations on Turkey joining the European Union stalled. Turkey took delivery of the Russian missile system in 2019 after dropping talks to acquire a comparable U.S. weapon, the Patriot, because of Washington’s refusal to share technology. Following the missile deal, the government of US President Donald Trump barred Turkey from buying F-35 fighter jets. Washington officials were worried that the Russian missiles could be used to collect intelligence on the stealth capabilities of the F-35. The US and many of its allies have grown increasingly wary of dealing with Erdogan, who has resorted repeatedly to anti-western rhetoric and accused allied countries of supporting an attempt to topple his government in 2016. Trump’s successor Joe Biden has criticized Erdogan for being authoritarian.
3. What’s behind the diplomatic pivot?
Erdogan’s Justice and Development party emerged from an anti-western, Islamic political movement that has long accused western nations of thwarting Turkish aspirations for a self-sufficient defense industry and strong economy. Suspicion deepened following the failed coup attempt, which Erdogan said was masterminded by a self-exiled Turkish cleric based in the US. Washington has refused Turkey’s request to extradite him. On a visit to New York in September, Erdogan called for an overhaul of the United Nations Security Council with its five permanent members. “By saying the world is bigger than five, we advocate a multipolar, multicentric, multicultural, more inclusive and fairer global order,” he said. Rather than burning bridges, the idea is to win more leverage with historical allies by showing that Turkey has alternative partners.
4. What difference has the Ukraine war made?
Erdogan’s doctrine is on display in the Ukraine conflict -- supporting the Kyiv government, while cultivating ties with Moscow. He’s condemned Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian provinces and barred Russian ships and aircraft from Turkish-controlled sea and air routes. A company headed by Erdogan’s son-in-law has sold dozens of armed drones to Ukraine. But Erdogan has refused to join sanctions targeting Russia, accused some western allies of provoking the war and warned them not to “underestimate” Russia. He met with Putin four times between July and October and positioned Turkey as a mediator, brokering a deal to allow grain shipments to resume from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports and a prisoner swap.
5. Has Erdogan’s approach benefited Turkey?
It seems to be providing economic benefits, at least for now. Russia’s investments are helping to shore up Turkey’s troubled economy, which Erdogan needs to stabilize before seeking re-election next year. In August, Erdogan and Putin agreed to expand economic cooperation. Erdogan asked for price discounts for imports of Russian energy, and requested to pay for them in Turkish lira, according to Turkish officials.
6. What are the risks?
Erdogan’s approach challenges western efforts to forge a unified international front and persuade Moscow to change course on Ukraine. But if the US tries to punish Erdogan, it could jeopardize relations with an important partner in the volatile Middle East. Turkey hosts US nuclear warheads at an air base close to Syria and an early-warning radar that’s part of NATO’s ballistic-missile defense capabilities. It’s also absorbed millions of refugees from the Middle East and Asia and acted as a buffer for that flow to Europe. If Erdogan tilts Turkey toward Russia, he could endanger Turkey’s most important military alliance and scupper a potential deal for Turkey to buy US-made F-16 warplanes and upgrade other military equipment. The US may impose further sanctions on Turkey. The mere threat of such penalties prompted five Turkish banks to abandon a Russian card payment system in September. | 2022-10-24T07:22:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Turkey Tries Balancing East and West as War Rages - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-turkey-tries-balancing-east-and-west-as-war-rages/2022/10/24/43b9df1e-5363-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-turkey-tries-balancing-east-and-west-as-war-rages/2022/10/24/43b9df1e-5363-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
NEW YORK — Yordan Alvarez and Alex Bregman delivered big hits and the Houston Astros advanced to the World Series again, finishing a four-game sweep of New York in the AL Championship Series with a 6-5 victory aided by another defensive gaffe from the Yankees.
NEW YORK — LSU re-entered The Associated Press College Football poll at No. 18 on Sunday and No. 25 South Carolina earned a ranking for the first time in four seasons.
WONJU, South Korea — Lydia Ko won her 18th career LPGA title in the country of her birth after a 7-under 65 final round at the BMW Ladies Championship.
RICHMOND, Va. — Steven Alker birdied three straight holes to break out of a late four-way tie for the lead and won the Dominion Energy Charity Classic, the opening event in the Charles Schwab Cup postseason on the PGA Tour Champions. | 2022-10-24T07:22:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Weekend Sports In Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/weekend-sports-in-brief/2022/10/24/eb9e3176-5368-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/weekend-sports-in-brief/2022/10/24/eb9e3176-5368-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Live updates Rishi Sunak on course to become U.K. prime minister
Many Brits ‘exasperated’ with head-spinning political changes
How the next prime minister is being picked
Leadership candidate Rishi Sunak leaves his campaign headquarters in London on Sunday. (Henry Nicholls/Reuters)
LONDON — Britain may know as soon as today who will serve as its next prime minister — the third within two months. After former prime minister Boris Johnson announced late Sunday that he was dropping his bid to return to power, the path was looking fairly clear for Rishi Sunak, the former finance minister who led the movement to oust Johnson over the summer.
Contenders to lead the ruling Conservative Party and the country face a deadline of 2 p.m. local time to secure the endorsements of at least 100 of their party colleagues in Parliament (out of 357). Sunak has already cleared that bar. The other declared candidate is House of Commons leader Penny Mordaunt, but it is unclear if she could meet the threshold even if most of Johnson’s backers swung behind her.
If only Sunak makes the cut, he will become the party’s new leader, to be installed as Britain’s prime minister. If there are multiple candidates, Conservative lawmakers will vote on those names today, with party members indicating their preference in an online vote closing at 11 a.m. on Friday. The new leader would be announced by the end of the week.
Sunak, who was born to parents of Indian descent, would be the first person of color to be British prime minister. He has talked about how his family gave him “opportunities they could only dream of” and how Britain “gave them and millions like them a chance of a better future.”
Prime Minister Liz Truss will step down after her replacement is determined, officially becoming the shortest-serving prime minister in British history, after she was unable to overcome the country’s poor economic headwinds, made worse by her own missteps and deep divisions within her party. Her successor will face the same daunting landscape, facing spiraling inflation, government finances in dire straits, and an increasingly distrustful public.
“Quite scary.” “Fed up.” “Just unbelievable, really.” That’s how Britons described their attitudes toward the country’s head-spinning political changes, after Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister resigned. “It just feels so confusing,” Louise Barclay, who works in finance, said outside the London Bridge subway station. “We’ve always felt like we had a kind of stable system, and the last few months have been absolutely crazy.”
Many others also appeared to be grappling with the thought that their political landscape was more shambolic than they had imagined, a little over a month since the death of Britain’s longest-serving monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. And politics aside, they voiced concerns about the future. Liz Truss’s abrupt resignation Thursday, only six weeks into her term, once again opened the race for someone to lead the country through record inflation, forecasts of a recession, and policy questions about immigration, climate change and the war in Ukraine.
The ruling Conservative Party has set an astonishingly short time frame to select a new leader, who will also become prime minister. Liz Truss announced her resignation on Thursday. The contest could be wrapped up today — and will be by the end of the week, at the latest.
In recent Conservative Party leadership contests, the transition of power has taken about two months, including several rounds of voting among the party’s lawmakers, followed by a period of campaigning around the country and a vote by dues-paying members of the party, who pick the winner between two finalists. But because the Conservatives just concluded that process last month, they rewrote the rules for their do-over contest. Contenders have until 2 p.m. Monday to get the singular backing of at least 100 Conservative lawmakers among the 357 in Parliament. If only one person clears that threshold, that’s it: The Tories have a new leader, to be installed as leader of the country. If two or three candidates qualify, the finalists will be determined through rounds of voting among Conservative Party lawmakers and then put to an online vote among the 170,000 dues-paying members of the party. | 2022-10-24T07:23:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.K. prime minister race live updates: Rishi Sunak leads Conservative leadership nomination - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/uk-pm-conservative-race-rishi-sunak/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/uk-pm-conservative-race-rishi-sunak/ |
Former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seen on a Likud election banner in Tel Aviv on Thursday. The text reads: “Netanyahu, strong right wing for four years.” (Oded Balilty/AP)
JERUSALEM — The unusual Israeli government that was formed last June had one job: to pry Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu from the prime minister’s office.
Netanyahu was clinging to power after four inconclusive elections, fighting multiple corruption indictments and, critics say, wreaking havoc on Israel’s democratic institutions. In stepped the unlikely “change coalition” of right-wing, left-wing and Arab parties that agreed on almost nothing but the need to oust Netanyahu and pull Israel out of its spiraling political crises.
It did work. They formed a government, freezing Netanyahu out of power for the first time in 12 years, but it didn’t last.
A year and a half later, Bibi is back on the campaign trail, along with the political deadlock that paralyzed the country for most of the past four years.
The new government, while passing a budget and giving Israel something of a respite from political chaos, collapsed after a year of infighting and defections. On Nov. 1, Israel will have its fifth election in 43 months, and Netanyahu is right where he was before: angling to win a majority of parliamentary seats for his Likud party and a coalition of extreme right-wing and ultra-Orthodox parties.
He could do it. Israel’s electorate remains split between those who see Netanyahu as the caustic and corrupt “crime minister” and those who hail him as “King Bibi,” a savvy Svengali whose only crime is driving his opponents crazy.
Polls leading up to the vote suggest that the underlying political dynamic remains much the same. The pro-Bibi and anybody-but-Bibi camps are neck and neck.
“We are still a hung country,” said pollster Dahlia Scheindlin. “It’s remarkably stable.”
Predictably, the two sides have opposite views of what a Netanyahu comeback would mean for Israel’s future. His critics warn of existential harm to Israeli democracy.
“Should Netanyahu win this election, Israel will be like Hungary,” said Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at Hebrew University and the author of a forthcoming book on Netanyahu. “This is a very dangerous moment, from the point of view of democracy and the rule of the law.”
As Netanyahu’s trial on bribery, fraud and breach-of-trust indictments unfolds in a Jerusalem court — with no verdicts expected for a year or more — he and some of his supporters have waged a scorched-earth campaign against the judges and prosecutors involved, some of whom he appointed. His allies support changing the law to prohibit the prosecution of a sitting prime minister. One of Netanyahu’s partner factions, the Religious Zionism party, is running on a platform of abolishing the crime of fraud and breach of trust.
“He wants to disable the judicial system and the critical mediating bodies in Israel,” Talshir said. “He would like to be the sole ruler.”
But his supporters celebrate Netanyahu as the leader who modernized Israel’s economy, held his own among world leaders and presided over recent diplomatic breakthroughs between Israel and Arab nations in the Persian Gulf and North Africa.
“People here understand that he is considered a statesman,” said Abe Katsman, a Seattle-born Jerusalem attorney who serves as counsel for Republicans Abroad Israel. “They understand he is not universally loved by the world’s leaders, but he is respected.”
Under the administration of President Donald Trump, Netanyahu largely based his campaigns on his close relationship with Trump. The two share a bombastic style — Netanyahu dismisses the charges against him as a “witch hunt” — and the liberal-conservative divide underlying Israel’s political schism is similar to the one afflicting the United States.
Warnings that Netanyahu would dismantle the rule of law are overblown, Katsman said, and ignore concerns about what conservative Israelis see as a politically motivated prosecution by a court system dominated by a liberal elite.
“The threat of reform, to put it in American terms, is to the judicial-activist wing of the judiciary,” he said.
As in the previous four elections, Netanyahu’s faction appears to be hovering just shy of an outright majority of 61 seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. And, as before, the victor probably will not be known on election night but only after weeks of jockeying among potential coalition partners.
Whether another coalition can emerge to block Netanyahu will depend on the final vote count and the distribution of seats among the 40 parties running.
The outgoing “change coalition” — which was assembled by Prime Minister Yair Lapid, a centrist, and former prime minister Naftali Bennett, a right-wing former settler leader — has fractured beyond repair. Bennett says he is stepping away from politics. The remnants of his Yamina party may not win enough seats to enter parliament at all.
Lapid, who heads the government, is hoping his allies on the left, including the vestiges of Israel’s once-dominant Labor Party, along with parties representing Russian and Eastern European immigrants, will get him close to a majority.
To cross the threshold, Lapid may once more need the backing of Arab parties that represent the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 20 percent of the population. It was one of these parties, Ra’am, a conservative Islamist faction, that put the change coalition over the top last time, in what was an unprecedented level of government involvement for an Arab party.
But Ra’am’s participation was controversial among Palestinians; the Arab parties are splintered and predicted to fall well short of their 2019 high-water mark of 15 Knesset seats. The level of turnout among Palestinian voters will be one of the determining factors in how the coalition horse trading unfolds, said Scheindlin, the pollster.
One potential new coalition could crystallize around Benny Gantz, the current defense minister and former army chief of staff. Gantz is signaling a turn to the right and a partnership with disaffected Likud members and others — including some Jewish settlers in the West Bank — who want a right-wing government but are fed up with Netanyahu.
Gantz also has made overtures to the ultra-Orthodox parties, which frequently are the kingmakers in Israeli coalitions but lost power when Netanyahu was ousted. These Haredi parties, which have watched their influence on social issues and financial support for Talmudic scholars eroded under the current government, may be willing to jump ship if Netanyahu is blocked from office again.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, is doubling down on his alliance with Israel’s ultranationalist fringe. In 2021, his embrace of Itamar Ben Gvir, a lawyer with roots in the Kach party, which was banned for advocating violence, gave Ben Gvir’s overtly racist party its first seats in the Knesset. Now Ben Gvir, who has advocated for expelling “disloyal” Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories, has become one of the most popular campaigners for the Netanyahu bloc.
Critics and supporters alike predict that this will be Netanyahu’s final attempt at a comeback. He is 72 and was hospitalized for a night earlier this month after complaining of chest pain. (He appeared in a video the next morning where he jogged briefly and said he was healthy.)
Even more, the rumbles of discontent within Likud have grown steadily louder among loyalists who believe they could easily win a majority under a less-polarizing leader.
“If he loses this time, I think there will be demands from within the party that he step down from the role of party leader,” Katsman said.
In the meantime, Netanyahu has stepped up campaign appearances in the last days before the vote in a bid to end his long absence from office — all 16 months of it. | 2022-10-24T08:53:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Netanyahu poised for possible return to power, dividing Israel again - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/israel-netanyau-bibi-election-lapid/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/israel-netanyau-bibi-election-lapid/ |
Everyone loves Sugarloaf Mountain. The fight for its future is still ugly.
A view of Sugarloaf Mountain in Barnesville, Md., on July 29, 2018. (Justin T. Gellerson for The Washington Post)
After more than two years of planning, late-night meetings and public squabbles, the future of one of Maryland’s most unusual natural landscapes hangs in the balance ahead of a public meeting this week.
But both land conservation groups and local public officials say the latest iteration of a plan for Sugarloaf Mountain that will land Tuesday before the Frederick County Council is less the product of back-and-forth than the result of threats hurled by park ownership.
Stronghold, Inc., the nonprofit entity that owns the popular hiking and birdwatching destination about 30 miles from the District, has long opposed aspects of a county conservation plan for the region. That opposition boiled over in recent months into threats from Stronghold’s lawyers to end public access to the park.
Late last week, legislation was submitted to the council that largely bends to the owner’s wishes. For some local activists, the new developments are a capitulation to the owner’s “extortion.”
“We will not view it as a total loss at all,” said Steve Findlay, president of the Sugarloaf Citizens’ Association, a community group deep in the trenches of the public debate. “But we cannot support it.”
The latest version of the plan will be the council’s last shot before the November election could push a new group of people onto the council.
“The bottom line was that even after a number of compromises that we made to some of Stronghold’s concerns, they were still threatening to close the mountain,” said Kai Hagen, an at-large member of the council.
The Sugarloaf debate also hints at troubling signs for future development across the Washington area, as more exurban grasslands and forests fall in the crosshairs of developers who want to build residential and shopping areas.
Sugarloaf’s future is being fought out by groups who all acknowledge the environmental importance of the region. But they have different ideas of how that legacy is best protected, whether by government oversight or private stewardship.
A representative for Stronghold did not reply to multiple requests for comment.
Sugarloaf Mountain is unique in that it is private land for public use. The area’s original owner was Gordon Strong, a wealthy patent attorney. He purchased the area to open to the public for hiking, birdwatching and other outdoor activities. Following his 1954 death, his will created Stronghold to maintain the area for the public at no cost to visitors. The area today includes more than 500 species of plants, high-quality waters and parts of a Civil War battlefield.
But over the past decade or so, local residents, conservationists and others repeatedly have had to fight off nearby land use projects that could have disturbed the nearby wilderness, including a gun range and megachurch. As part of a larger countywide planning process, Frederick planning officials began putting together what would become the Sugarloaf Treasured Landscape Management Plan.
“One of the stated reasons for the plan was extra protection for these landscapes to avoid these complete knockdown, drag-out fights every couple of years,” said Steven Black, a Frederick County farmer and president of the Sugarloaf Alliance, a nonprofit community group involved in past and current public debates over the land. According to Black, the pressure to develop more land along Interstate 270 is being acutely felt in the region around Sugarloaf Mountain.
“If you don’t take public action through land planning and zoning action to preserve the ground, you risk that the development pressure will eclipse the wishes of the people on the ground,” he said.
As part of the process for putting together a plan that would map out the future acceptable uses for the region, the county set up a 16-member advisory board that met seven times between early 2020 and July 2021. Stronghold had three seats on the board.
“We’ve had many, many meetings with Stronghold and their attorneys,” said Tim Goodfellow, the lead county planner on the project. “They have been involved intimately from day one.”
However the final management plan stretches well beyond the Sugarloaf Mountain area to include nearly 20,000 surrounding acres. The plan would restrict certain uses that could impact natural resources or obstruct views. The legal mechanism for implementing the plan would be the council’s passage of an overlay district for the covered area. That would rezone parts of the 20,000 acres, bringing consistent standards for development and banning uses such as rodeos and shooting ranges.
But when the Sugarloaf plan got to the council this October, the park’s owners bristled, saying they would be “unnecessarily restricted” by the conditions of the overlay . On Oct. 3, council members rejected legislation that would have exempted Stronghold’s property from the plan and overlay.
An attorney for Stronghold addressed the council with a stark ultimatum.
“If the Sugarloaf plan as presented for public hearing on Oct. 11, today passes, Stronghold will cease allowing general public access to Sugarloaf Mountain, a privately owned mountain, to allow Stronghold, my client, time to evaluate the effects of the plan on its operations,” attorney Noel Manalo told the council. He added that Stronghold representatives had been in touch with local law enforcement about where best to place signs reading “No trespassing.”
“Stronghold remains committed to its mission of the preservation of the natural resources of Sugarloaf Mountain,” Manalo continued. “We have successfully fulfilled this mission consistent with Gordon Strong’s intent for many decades without help from Frederick County government.”
Walling off the park from public access — was it a bluff or real possibility? Both council members and land conservation groups say they were not sure whether Stronghold was negotiating or serious.
To address the owners’ concerns, the council proposed a new zoning category that would designate the Stronghold acres a “private park.” This new zoning would allow Stronghold to add features such as pavilions, gift shops, and concessions stands.
The park’s owners, however, did not indicate they approved the plan going into the council’s Oct. 18 meeting, where the comprehensive plan, as well as the overlay and private park exemption, were on the agenda. According to council members and local activists, no one knew what Stronghold wanted.
“They have been bad-faith actors in our view in this process,” said Findlay of the Sugarloaf Citizens’ Association. “They have not been transparent about what they want or what their interests are in the future. The only thing they have been transparent about is the threat.”
At the Oct. 18 meeting, after hearing hours of impassioned commentary from locals that included tears, an a-Cappella rendition of a Woody Guthrie song, and no statement from the owner’s representatives, the council voted to push the Sugarloaf votes back a week, with Hagen announcing the seven-member body did not have the votes needed to pass the comprehensive plan and the overlay and private park exemption.
Later that week, Hagen released an update of the plan. In that version, the Sugarloaf Mountain’s area would be cut out from the larger overlay zone. Still, as Hagen pointed out, the Stronghold acres are already protected by the county’s most restrictive zoning category, known as resource conservation.
But after getting ostensibly what they want, Sugarloaf Mountain’s owners have yet to publicly endorse the compromise, which will be voted on at the Frederick County Council meeting on Tuesday.
“Their attorney has noted that the county has addressed all the specific issues originally raised by Stronghold,” Hagen said Sunday. “They are still conferring among themselves, it seems. They have not issued any public statements.”
Hagen added that he is “hopeful” that the plan up for consideration will satisfy everyone.
Many of those involved, however, just seemed exhausted with the process — a saga that had started with local residents, politicians and the mountain’s owners agreeing to work toward the future protection of a beloved area, and that ended with public threats and anger.
“We recognize the reality of needing this compromise to happen to make the larger plan and overlay happen,” said Black of the Sugarloaf Alliance. “So we support this. We recognize having no plan is worse.”
Rail-car factory is hailed as a boon for Metro, Maryland | 2022-10-24T09:54:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sugarloaf Mountain's future hangs in the balance - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/sugarloaf-mountain-frederick-council-vote/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/sugarloaf-mountain-frederick-council-vote/ |
Carolina Panthers defensive end Yetur Gross-Matos pressures Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady after a pass Sunday. (Jacob Kupferman/AP)
Dak Prescott returned from injury to start for the Dallas Cowboys, but otherwise, Week 7 provided a reminder that order is rarely restored during an NFL season. Geno Smith kept cruising, while Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers continued to slide. Christian McCaffrey became a San Francisco 49er, and his former team posted its best win of the season. P.J. Walker has one fewer victory than Russell Wilson.
This is what to know.
Tom Brady is not having a good time. This past week, Brady had to reassure reporters at a news conference that there would be “no retirement in my future.” Does he wish he had stuck to the one in his past? It’s possible after the Buccaneers lost for the second straight week as a double-digit favorite, falling to the Carolina Panthers, 21-3, two weeks after the Panthers fired their coach and days after they sold off two of their best skill players for draft picks.
Brady completed 32 of 49 passes for 290 yards, a respectable total that doesn’t explain his poor level of play. At 45 and behind a banged-up offensive line, Brady has been skittish in the pocket, eager to ditch the ball a split-second early rather than risk taking a hit. The game would have been drastically different had Mike Evans not dropped a sure touchdown on the Bucs’ opening series, but one play shouldn’t allow the Panthers to dominate.
Is this what Tom Brady came back for?
Brady needs to improve, but he is the least of Tampa Bay’s problems. The Buccaneers lack explosive players, especially along the lines. So stout in recent years, they cannot stop the run or run the ball. The Panthers ran for 173 yards, and the Bucs gained 2.9 yards per carry.
The Buccaneers are constructed around the same core that won the Super Bowl two years ago, which sounds like a feature but may be a bug. Time moves quickly in the NFL, and many of those players have aged out of their prime and into the start of their decline. Drafting in the back end of the first round, the Buccaneers have struggled to add impactful young players around them. “The older guys got to prove they can still play, and the younger guys have to prove they belong,” Coach Todd Bowles said.
Tampa Bay can find solace in the lousiness of the NFC South. Despite a sub-.500 record, the Bucs are tied for first with the Falcons, and Tampa Bay holds the head-to-head tiebreaker. But Brady did not return to merely make the playoffs. The Buccaneers are a long way from being a team capable of doing damage in January, and they only have four days to fix things before they host Baltimore on Thursday night.
As bleak as things are for Tampa Bay, Panthers interim coach Steve Wilks deserves immense credit. Wilks, who joined Brian Flores’s lawsuit alleging discrimination against the NFL, was given an unfair task and his team ended up trouncing the Bucs, who had not lost to the Panthers since Brady’s arrival.
Black Out: The Post's investigation into how the NFL blocks Black coaches
The 49ers made a great trade for Christian McCaffrey. As a sheer value proposition, trading four draft picks — including second- and third-rounders next year — for a running back is somewhere between inadvisable and indefensible. In the context of the 49ers acquiring McCaffrey, it makes perfect sense.
The McCaffrey era began with a rotten result, a 44-23 loss to the Chiefs, but that doesn’t change the smart calculus San Francisco employed in making the deal. The 49ers studied the NFC and saw a conference ripe for the taking, and that was before the Buccaneers and Packers each suffered another horrendous loss Sunday. The Philadelphia Eagles are a juggernaut now but unproven in the playoffs, and the conference stalwarts — the Los Angeles Rams, Green Bay and Tampa Bay — are in disarray. This is the right year for a team to boost its championship equity, and the 49ers had clear room to upgrade at running back after an injury to Elijah Mitchell.
In Deebo Samuel, the 49ers already had the best running wide receiver in the NFL. Now they can pair him with the best receiving running back. The possibilities with Samuel and McCaffrey on the field together are mind-blowing, and the defensive resources required to contain them should provide a turbo boost for George Kittle’s production.
The reasons to be pessimistic about spending on running backs are well-established. Though McCaffrey has succumbed to the injury volatility of his position, he has otherwise been an outlier in both skill set and overall talent.
In April, the Buffalo Bills may make their mid-round selections with regret. If they had matched the 49ers’ offer for McCaffrey, they could have filled their lone weakness with one of the best running backs in the NFL. The Bills are still the best team in the league, but they missed an opportunity to separate themselves further in a way that could haunt them come January.
In another torturous fourth quarter, the Ravens finally come out on top
Joe Burrow is heating up again. When Burrow started clicking last year, his deep passing carried the Bengals all the way to within a first down or two of winning the Super Bowl. The Bengals began their AFC title defense with two losses, but as Burrow has meshed with his rebuilt offensive line, Cincinnati is asserting itself again as one of the best teams in the AFC.
Burrow passed for 481 yards and three touchdowns, rushing for another, in a 35-17 victory over the Atlanta Falcons. Burrow threw for 345 yards in the first half, throwing two deep touchdowns to Ja’Marr Chase, who after a slow start has 262 receiving yards over the past two Sundays.
The Bengals have won four out of five, including a blowout of the New York Jets that looks more significant now than it did then. Only Buffalo and Kansas City have better point differentials among AFC teams than Cincinnati’s plus-41. The Bengals are dangerous.
This is who the Packers are. “I’m not worried about this squad,” quarterback Aaron Rodgers said after the Packers’ third straight loss, a 23-21 defeat against the lowly Washington Commanders. “In fact, this might be the best thing for us.”
Commanders find a way behind Taylor Heinicke
Rodgers’s optimism is not grounded in reality. None of the Packers’ flaws are easily fixed on the fly, and it’s hard to imagine them solving all of them. Their run defense is terrible and not helped by defensive coordinator Joe Barry’s stale designs. Their offensive line isn’t holding up, and stabilizing left tackle David Bakhtiari’s uneven recovery from knee surgery hit another snag this week, when the Packers made him inactive. The receiving corps is not up to the task of replacing Davante Adams, at least this season; promising rookie Romeo Doubs had a key drop on fourth down. Rodgers is 38, playing with a taped-up right thumb and providing a stark reminder that quarterbacks aging well into their 40s cannot be taken for granted.
The Packers failed to convert a single third down for the first time since Week 6 of 1999 (Brett Favre vs. Denver), per @ESPNStatsInfo
Aaron Rodgers was 15 years old. https://t.co/AINetBCNyb
On Sunday, the Packers got a pick-six from linebacker De’Vondre Campbell and led 14-3 in the first half. They could not surpass 100 yards of offense until the fourth quarter and needed an acrobatic touchdown catch from running back Aaron Jones to make it a one-possession game. The Packers already trail the Vikings by 2½ games in the NFC North.
Sauce Gardner called game. On fourth and three, with the Jets protecting a seven-point lead in the final minutes, Denver quarterback Brett Rypien saw Courtland Sutton, his best receiver, one-on-one with a rookie cornerback. He eschewed a short pass for a conversion and went for it, zipping the ball to Sutton in the end zone. Ahmad “Sauce” Gardner again showed he is not any rookie cornerback: He used his speed and long arms to erase the separation between him and Sutton and whacked the ball loose.
The Jets have plenty to be thrilled about within their 5-2 start in Coach Robert Saleh’s second season, but no development has been more significant than the instant emergence of Gardner as a cornerback an entire defense can be built around. Gardner, the fourth pick, has been a menace. He is a tall cornerback with an unusually long wingspan who moves like a small cornerback. He’s already one of the best at his position, and he’s a leading candidate for defensive rookie of the year honors.
The Titans own the AFC South. After the Titans dealt A.J. Brown for draft picks, it appeared they would use the season to reset their salary cap and start building the bridge from Ryan Tannehill to rookie quarterback Malik Willis. But Coach Mike Vrabel is too competent, and their division is too wretched, for that to happen.
Somebody has to win the AFC South, and it looks like it’s going to be the Titans. They improved to 4-2 with a 19-10 victory over the Colts, giving them a season sweep of Indianapolis and a lead in the division. The Jacksonville Jaguars and Trevor Lawrence have regressed after a hot start. The Houston Texans are feisty but devoid of talent. The Colts are 3-3-1 but have the advanced statistical profile of one of the league’s worst teams.
Saquon Barkley is an offensive player of the year candidate. The Giants did it again Sunday, collecting breaks and taking advantage of them on their way to a close victory. This time it was 23-17 over the Jaguars, and it ended with Jacksonville driving to the Giants’ 1-yard line but falling inches short as time expired.
The Giants are 6-1 primarily because they have outscored opponents 97-55 in the second half. Coach Brian Daboll deserves credit for making adjustments, but the driver of that success has been Barkley. His physicality and speed have worn down defenses and made the game easier for quarterback Daniel Jones. Barkley ran for 110 yards Sunday and gained another 25 on four catches. He is second in the NFL in rushing, and it’s hard to find a non-quarterback more essential to his offense’s success.
Why can’t the Seahawks win the NFC West? Seattle moved into first place Sunday with its 37-23 victory in Los Angeles over the Los Angeles Chargers. Nothing about the Seahawks’ 4-3 record is fluky. Geno Smith is playing quarterback better than anyone this side of Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes, and their running game might be the most explosive in the NFL. Rookie Kenneth Walker III rushed for 168 yards and two touchdowns, one of them a 74-yarder on which he ran away from the Chargers’ defense.
The Seahawks are challenging for the division title after dealing away Russell Wilson because they executed what could be a franchise-shifting draft. They took starting cornerbacks Coby Bryant and Tariq Woolen and in the fourth and fifth rounds. Starting offensive tackles Charles Cross and Abraham Lucas were chosen in the first and third rounds. Walker, the Doak Walker Award winner out of Michigan State, has replaced Rashaad Penny and provided an upgrade.
The only downer for Seattle was the sight of DK Metcalf riding into the locker room on a cart with a knee injury after he landed awkwardly making a catch. Metcalf was smiling and telling teammates he would be okay as he exited. Coach Pete Carroll told reporters that further testing Monday would determine Metcalf’s status. | 2022-10-24T10:11:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tom Brady is having a bad time; Geno Smith and Joe Burrow are doing great - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/tom-brady-joe-burrow-nfl/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/tom-brady-joe-burrow-nfl/ |
Columbian family bused to D.C. builds a life, with neighborhood support
Emmet the dog greets his new girl, Eilyn, who arrived in D.C. on one of the migrant buses in May. (Petula Dvorak)
The shaggy dog who greets Eilyn after school is one of few familiar comforts in the 8-year-old’s new life.
Her parents — fleeing threats of violence — told Eilyn and her brother that they were going on a beach vacation to Cancún when they boarded a plane in Colombia nearly five months ago. She never got to say a proper goodbye to the beloved family dog.
Or to her grandmother, or the rest of her family, her room, her friends, her school. Instead they headed on a long and uncertain journey north, winding up to the townhouse of a woman who doesn’t speak Spanish, who never really knew any Colombians, but who made up the three beds in her D.C. townhouse and told them to rest.
“We made the hard decision to leave our country above all for my children,” said Eilyn’s dad, Edison, in the sunny breakfast nook of a stranger who has become their American family.
The Colombian family of four is among the thousands of migrants who were sent on buses from Texas, Arizona and Florida to D.C., New York and Martha’s Vineyard, even. They were political pawns, sent by angry, Republican governors who thought shunting traumatized people looking for a new life around the country would show the northern cities just how hard it is to be on the border.
Republican governors are using migrants in a cruel, political stunt
Many went on to family or friends in other cities, joining immigrant enclaves along the East Coast.
But Edison, 40, and his wife, Liliana, 37, had no one. And no choice but to scramble after a Colombian gang extorting them over land that has been in his family for generations threatened to kill their children. They spoke on the condition that their full names not be used, to protect their privacy.
“I never thought I would come to this place,” said Edison.
After they got landed in Mexico, they walked for three weeks before crossing the border into Texas. That’s when they saw the buses to D.C. Here, they squatted and couch-surfed in temporary housing for months — a church, a refugee house, a hotel — as they tried to build a new life.
Then they met Peggy Pacy outside her Northwest D.C. neighborhood’s corner store. A child in their group was trying to buy candy. Pacy paid for it. When the child introduced her to the migrant families he was with, Pacy pieced their story together, through pantomime and the wispy memories of high school Spanish.
Edison was looking for work and her front garden looked like a jungle (As an independent media producer, she gets busy.) When he was done, the neighborhood crackled: “'Are you moving?’ they all asked, when they saw how good it looked.”
So she told them about Edison and one after another, they hired him. Buchanan Street never looked better.
Liliana got a job washing dishes in a Logan Circle restaurant. The couple’s 16-year-old son picked up part-time work for a car detailer and attends a D.C. high school. When they lost their temporary housing — again, Liliana couldn’t stomach moving them. Despite everything, they were thriving in school. This time, the D.C. government offered a hotel room on New York Avenue.
The District was unprepared for the migrants, and this family was among the first of nearly 10,000 people to be bused to D.C. — most to Union Station, some outside the residence of Vice President Harris.
“This is a new challenge for D.C.,” said Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, when she declared a state of emergency and created an Office of Migrant Services to help the new arrivals navigate the city.
At least 13 percent of D.C.'s population is foreign-born, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. But many immigrants come to communities and families already established in the city. Edison and Liliana are starting from scratch. One family who came on the bus with them — immigrants from Venezuela — bought a used car when they arrived. And that’s where they sleep.
“The owner where the son works said he has a van they could sleep in at night,” Pacy said. “A van. And I said ‘no way, you’re living with me.”
Liliana and Edison took the sunny, butter-yellow room upstairs. The kids helped Pacy move props and wardrobes out of a backroom and now they each have a little bedroom.
They communicate using Google translate, speaking into their phones and showing each other the results.
This is the slow, halting way they’ve told Pacy their story — about their stable life back home, about Edison’s job in a factory. About Luna, they dog they miss so much.
“They were solidly middle class,” Pacy told me. “They were so middle class, they had a Golden Retriever, for godsakes.”
It’s also been awkward.
Like when Google keeps telling Pacy to “calm down,” like she’s losing it or something.
But for Colombians, “tranquilo”, which translates literally to “calm down”, means something more like “no problem” or “don’t worry” or “all good.”
“A friend who speaks Spanish explained that to me,” Pacy said.
On their first night, Pacy made a huge batch of her beef chili, set the table, urged them to eat, then disappeared to her office for a couple hours to give them privacy. When she emerged, they were still waiting, the chili cold and untouched. They didn’t want to eat without her.
Then it was Portuguese seafood stew, and they waited until Liliana returned from her shift at the restaurant to join them. It was close to midnight. When Liliana asked if she could do some of the cooking, too, Pacy began to understand the importance of closeness in this family, and her place in it.
Quite simply, they are people not used to being dependent on anyone. And Pacy is learning to let them give to her, too.
Whenever the family needs something, she posts it on the listserve, and the neighborhood provides: clothing, blankets, a big pot of tomato soup. They are all trying to find a permanent home for the family, one near the kids’ schools.
Edison didn’t expect the generosity. It’s not the America he’d heard about — and experienced.
“In my country, we had another way of thinking and another way of looking at this place,” he said, through the translator. “There was a lot of talk about how much America dislikes immigrants.”
But Pacy “has been like an angel for us, that God has placed in our path,” he said.
Still, Edison and Liliana are constantly worried about overstepping, overstaying.
“I feel very good, being here with her, although sometimes I don’t know if she likes the situation,” Edison’s screen said, when he sharing a moment of doubt with me. Then he swept the stairs.
But Pacy wants to show them the America we are supposed to be. She remembers that when she was a little girl, her mother helped a family of refugees from Vietnam. A single mom raising nine kids found time to help others coming to this new world, like their Irish ancestors had.
And I told Edison and Liliana that I began my life in the spare bedroom of a home in San Francisco. My parents, when they decided to stay in a country they had only meant to visit when violence ripped through their nation, rented a room from a kind, Italian American woman who lived alone in her big house who. They spoke no English, had little more than their suitcases, but found this woman who just like Pacy, was extended a helping hand to the newest wave of immigrants.
My parents were welcomed as refugees. That was the America of 1968, not today.
Edison and Liliana don’t know what their next steps are. They want a home of their own and they want to work hard at any jobs they can get. Most of all, they want their children to keep thriving.
After school, Edison walks his daughter and another family’s little boy back to Pacy’s house. Eiyln races ahead. Emmet, Pacy’s huge, fluffy dog, is waiting for her to come home. | 2022-10-24T10:25:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. was never the goal, but threats forced this family to leave home - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/bused-migrants-dc-welcome/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/bused-migrants-dc-welcome/ |
Protesters to rally for people incarcerated on marijuana convictions
A protest in April 2016 at the White House calling for the legalization of marijuana. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)
Protesters are expected to rally in D.C. Monday, bringing simple possession quantities of cannabis with them as they join hip-hop artists Redman and M-1 of Dead Prez at the White House and Democratic National Committee headquarters to demand that President Biden use his executive authority to release people incarcerated on nonviolent marijuana-related convictions.
Biden’s Oct. 6 announcement that he would grant mass pardons for anyone convicted of a federal crime for simply possessing marijuana does not go far enough for protesters, who plan to wear green and gather at 10 a.m.
According to White House officials, Biden’s announcement will not result in anyone being released from prison because there is no one currently in federal prison solely for simple possession of cannabis. The White House has insisted the pardons fulfill a 2020 campaign promise and would apply to about 6,500 people nationwide who received federal convictions for simple possession of marijuana on their records since 1992.
The Last Prisoner Project, a nonprofit working on cannabis criminal justice reform that lobbied the White House on this issue, has estimated that there are roughly 2,800 people in federal prison from marijuana-related convictions, a statistic the organization said stems from a 2021 report from Recidiviz, a nonprofit that uses technology and data to build tools for criminal justice reform.
Adam Eidinger, a longtime cannabis activist and co-founder for DC Marijuana Justice, which worked to legalize the drug in the city, said protesters will first rally in the morning by the White House and then will sit in front of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, where some people will smoke marijuana at 4:20 p.m.
“The greatest civil rights tragedy of the modern era is putting people behind bars for cannabis,” Eidinger said. “If we get any kind of interest from the White House, and they are willing to schedule meetings with representatives of those protests, then I imagine that we’ll call off civil disobedience and declare victory.”
Although public perception around marijuana has shifted significantly, organizers worry about the people who were convicted and sentenced before this more widespread acceptance. Marijuana is now legal for recreational adult use in Washington, D.C., two territories and 19 states. It is on the ballot in five more states next month.
Organizers say the country must reckon with the ways harmful policies during the war on drugs disproportionally affected Black and Brown communities, through discriminatory policing practices and marijuana sentencing laws. White entrepreneurs make up most of the legal market as Black people continue to account for a bulk of marijuana-related arrests nationwide.
The protest organizers, including local marijuana advocacy groups, sent a letter to the president requesting he use his executive authority to release at least 100 people federally incarcerated on cannabis-related charges. They argue that there are thousands of people serving long-term prison sentences for activities involving amounts of marijuana “that are far less than what dispensaries routinely handle on a daily basis,” the letter reads.
One of those people is Richardo Ashmeade, who pleaded guilty in November 2008 to conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute marijuana. He was sentenced to nearly 22 years. He is currently incarcerated at a medium-security federal prison in Welch, W.Va. with an expected release date of April 2, 2027.
While incarcerated, he stays in touch with his four children and falls back on a Jamaican saying, where he is from: “You don’t know your strengths, until you don’t have an option but to be strong.”
He gives his daughters relationship advice and tries to be present in their lives — whatever it is they are going through. One daughter is in law school, so he has been studying law as he also fights his case pro se. Another daughter is studying nursing, so he ordered books about the topic to be able to talk with her about her interests.
Ashmeade requested to be released from prison during the coronavirus pandemic, but was denied. In court records filed by the government in opposition to his request for compassionate release, prosecutors included that Ashmeade was an “integral part” of a drug offense that lasted over 7 years and one that included between 3,000 kilograms and 10,000 kilograms of marijuana, the seizure of more than $2,000,000 in cash, multiple foreign bank accounts and properties and the use of a firearm by a co-defendant.
But in the more than 14 years Ashmeade has been incarcerated, he’s followed news coverage of a “thriving cannabis industry that we actually helped create. There are big companies on the stock market … making so much money, more than we ever dreamed of.”
“It seems like a slap in the face, to tell you the truth, for Biden to pardon just for simple possession right before midterm elections just to get some clout. It’s very disheartening and it’s actually a let down,” Ashmeade said. “We feel in here like he has actually forgotten about us, the guys who have received draconian sentences.” | 2022-10-24T10:25:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Protesters rally in D.C. for people incarcerated on marijuana convictions - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/dc-protest-marijuana-biden-incarceration/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/dc-protest-marijuana-biden-incarceration/ |
Carlos Hang puts a primary ballot in the drop box at the Silver Spring Civic Center on July 19. (Robb Hill/for The Washington Post)
Early in-person voting begins Thursday in Maryland, and residents will have the chance to weigh in on several statewide races, including selecting a replacement for the outgoing governor, Larry Hogan (R).
Also on the ballot are races for comptroller; attorney general; Maryland’s eight House seats; the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Chris Van Hollen, who is seeking reelection; and various local offices. In addition, voters will decide on five statewide constitutional amendments, including the legalization of recreational marijuana.
Anyone eager to vote early may do so in person from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. starting Thursday and running through Nov. 3. A full list of early-voting centers is available at elections.maryland.gov.
Election Day is Nov. 8, and there are various ways to vote in person or by mail before then. Here’s a rundown of how to vote and what else you need to know:
When and where can I vote in person?
How do I request a mail-in ballot?
If I asked for a mail-in ballot, can I still vote in person? What if I changed my address?
What if I haven’t registered to vote? | 2022-10-24T10:25:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How to vote in Maryland’s 2022 gubernatorial elections - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/maryland-2022-gubernatorial-election-voting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/maryland-2022-gubernatorial-election-voting/ |
School systems throughout the country reported using less than 15 percent of the latest round of federal education funding allotted to them during the last school year
Sahana Jayaraman
A small hallway library at School Within School in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 29. School systems across the country have been slow to spend their allocations of the latest round of federal pandemic funding. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/for The Washington Post)
In March 2021, the Biden administration released the federal government’s largest pool of pandemic relief for public schools. The American Rescue Plan infused campuses with $122 billion to reopen buildings, address mental health needs and help students who had fallen behind academically.
The need was so urgent that two-thirds of the money — $81 billion — was released less than two weeks after the plan was signed into law and before the Education Department could approve each state’s spending plan.
Meanwhile, national test scores in elementary school math and reading have plunged to levels that haven’t been seen in decades, and education advocates worry that children continue to fall behind. “The excuse in education has always been, ‘We don’t have enough money,’” said Keri Rodrigues, president of education advocacy group the National Parents Union. “Now we have a historic amount of spending, like never before, and you’re not even spending the money.”
The money was not spent for a variety of reasons — including delayed access to funds, a nationwide educator shortage that has made it hard to fill new positions, and a desire to make the money last, according to interviews with school officials and education experts in six states. ESSER III expires in September 2024, well after two earlier rounds of relief funding dry up, and school leaders say they want to stretch it as long as possible. But while the money sat, millions of students continued to struggle in core subjects, the consequences of which might not be known for years.
School district leaders, however, insist they are making progress — particularly this school year as they plan to dip deeper into the remaining money. In many cases districts are still spending earlier waves of federal funding, a total of $67.5 billion released during the Trump administration that helped schools pivot to virtual learning and retrofit buildings to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.
“We didn’t even have approval from the state to start spending it until October 2021,” Hoffman said. “A lot of our planning on using that third pot of ESSER funds is really what’s going to happen this year in the ’22-23 school year and next year, in 2023-24.”
Using factors including test scores, family poverty data and the number of weeks students spent in remote learning, Edunomics estimates that children in Baltimore have lost an average of 18 weeks of learning in math and 15 weeks in reading. Remedying that could total $177.8 million in tutoring costs — 40 percent of the city’s ESSER III allotment — researchers estimate.
Hoffman said roughly half of Baltimore’s $443 million award is slated to address learning loss, much of which will take the form of tutoring as the district expands programs that started before the pandemic. In the months after ESSER III was announced, officials created a spending plan that included $39 million to pay teachers to tutor over the summer and $57 million to hire outside help for summer learning programs. That spending started this year and will continue over the summers of 2023 and 2024.
Millions more will be poured into one-on-one instruction, online tutoring and after-school learning programs — including $9 million to bring in outside organizations to tutor students in 100 schools over two years, according to the district.
Baltimore’s budget for the federal funding also includes more opportunities for students who failed courses to regain credits, as well as money to hire bus drivers, purchase WiFi hotspots for families and address long-neglected infrastructure needs — from bathroom renovations to air-conditioning installations.
Some districts have shied away from purchases that can’t be sustained once the money runs dry, such as new positions or salary increases, although dozens have reported doing so anyway. In North Carolina, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County school district said it would use $5.8 million to hire about 400 “guest teachers,” whose positions are set to expire at the same time as the funding.
But most districts are eager to reverse the academic damage cause by the pandemic. The influx of federal dollars presents an opportunity to give unprecedented support to “kids who weren’t getting the educational opportunities they needed before the pandemic,” including children from low-income families, English language learners and students with special education needs, said Segun Eubanks, a professor and director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Education Innovation and Improvement.
In the nation’s capital, Edunomics estimates that students in the public school system are 20 weeks behind in math and 12 weeks behind in reading, which could cost more than $116 million to reverse. The district has reported spending less than 3 percent of its nearly $195 million allotment, according to the District’s state superintendent of education. The city’s charter schools, which are publicly funded and privately operated by nonprofit organizations called local education agencies, were awarded about $109 million.
Chris Bergfalk, a veteran D.C. public school teacher, said last school year — when most children came back to the building — was the hardest of his 20-year career. He returned to his fifth-grade classroom a mile from the Capitol to children who were traumatized.
“I have students who are at the beginning reading level, which means they can’t read, and I have students who are in the 99th percentile,” he said. One of the higher-scoring students, he added, said their parent hired a tutor while schools were closed.
In many cases, a child’s academic standing can be traced to whether consistent internet access was available at home, said Eric Teutsch, a high school Spanish teacher in Youngstown, Ohio. Schools recorded attendance issues throughout the pandemic as children struggled to get online, and when they came back to the classroom “they were behind academically and socially,” Teutsch said. Edunomics estimates it will cost $12.6 million to catch kids up who are, on average, 20 weeks behind in math and 16 weeks behind in reading.
Tennessee’s state department of education is awarding extra state funding to districts and charter schools that spend half of their ESSER III award on academics and participate in a three-year tutoring program. In D.C., officials are pouring $40 million into frequent, small-group tutoring, with plans to provide services to more than 8,000 children over the next two academic years. This type of tutoring, often called “high-dosage,” is among the best methods to accelerate learning, research indicates.
The case has been the same with other staff positions — from teachers to bus drivers to mental health professionals. Districts set out last year to hire counselors to help children cope with the emotional fallout of spending months at home, around sick relatives or in neighborhoods beset by surging violent crime. Morgan County Schools, a rural district of about 2,100 students in West Virginia, is contending not only with the pandemic but an opioid epidemic. Officials planned to hire a school psychologist, a behavior support specialist and a social worker.
So far, the social worker position has been filled, said Kristen Tuttle, the district’s superintendent. The behavior support role was changed to a special education coach to make the position easier to fill, but the district has not been able to find a qualified candidate to take on the psychologist job, she added. The school system has reported using about 10 percent of its $4.7 million ESSER III allotment.
But even with plans in place, some districts acknowledge they are behind on spending, said Travers, who is working with about 30 urban and suburban school systems. “In some cases, probably, the plan review and approval took longer than they assumed,” he said. “I think the majority of cases, though, were about challenges getting management capacity to get spending initiatives kicked off.”
Education experts also warn the data available about ESSER III use do not fully capture what is happening in schools. The figure that gets reported — whether it’s zero, 5 or 31 percent of funding spent — reflects only how much money a district has requested from the state. School districts are not sitting on those dollars, they say, but rather tapping into local funds and getting reimbursed later.
“That’s one of the reasons there’s a difference between the budget and the plan to utilize funds versus actually pulling the money down, receiving it in your bank account and using it to pay someone,” said Dean Zajic, assistant director of special education and title services for the Kansas State Department of Education.
“Rather than a huge fire hose of funding in a single year, or even two years,” Rodriguez said, “we’ve been intentional to think about how do we stretch this funding to have supports for students as long as possible?”
Justin Jennings, the system’s superintendent, said it’s because officials started requesting money early. “When other people were buying hotspots and laptops, we already had them on the way,” he said.
The district of more than 4,000 students also requested funding for big-ticket expenses, from air conditioning units to roofing repairs. Officials bought 48 new school buses, Jennings said, adding that some of the older vehicles “should have been out of service years ago.”
But one thing that has stumped Jennings, and school leaders throughout the country, is how to sustain some of these purchases. For example, many districts in 2020 became one-to-one device districts overnight, meaning that, for the first time, every student had a laptop. But those devices last, at most, five years, Jennings said — at which point officials will have to figure out how to replace hundreds of devices.
But she also understands the reality. Children in the city — for myriad reasons, from poverty to exposure to violence — have long trailed their peers across the state. In districts like that, it may take more than one-time federal relief to reverse years of underinvestment.
“They may never meet certain standards,” Harris said. “But will they be readers and writers and thinkers? Yes, they will. I have faith in that.”
The pandemic’s impact on education
The latest: Updated coronavirus booster shots are now available for children as young as 5. To date, more than 10.5 million children have lost one or both parents or caregivers during the coronavirus pandemic.
In the classroom: Amid a teacher shortage, states desperate to fill teaching jobs have relaxed job requirements as staffing crises rise in many schools. American students’ test scores have even plummeted to levels unseen for decades. One D.C. school is using COVID relief funds to target students on the verge of failure.
Higher education: College and university enrollment is nowhere near pandemic level, experts worry. ACT and SAT testing have rebounded modestly since the massive disruptions early in the coronavirus pandemic, and many colleges are also easing mask rules.
DMV news: Most of Prince George’s students are scoring below grade level on district tests. D.C. Public School’s new reading curriculum is designed to help improve literacy among the city’s youngest readers. | 2022-10-24T10:25:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Federal covid funding is going unspent by many school districts - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/24/covid-spending-schools-students-achievement/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/24/covid-spending-schools-students-achievement/ |
If they choose to vote, numbers suggest nonpartisan voters could swing close races
By Rhonda Colvin
Nevada's nonpartisan voter numbers are large enough to sway an election. Senior Political Correspondent Rhonda Colvin talks to a group of unaffiliated voters. (Video: Ross Godwin/The Washington Post)
With a little over two weeks to go before the midterm election, both parties are nervously watching to see which way voters not affiliated with either Democrats or Republicans will choose to cast their ballots — or if they vote at all.
If they choose to go to the polls, numbers suggest nonpartisan voters could swing close races. A January Gallup poll found they make up 42 percent of Americans. That’s well ahead of the 29 percent who say they are Democrats and 27 percent who identify as Republican.
Unaffiliated, or nonpartisan voters, are often broadly called independents. But they should not be confused with members of the American Independent Party or the Independent American Party, which are party registration choices for voters in some states. Despite their names, those are considered minor parties that historically lean further right.
The unaffiliated momentum can be seen in Nevada, where those voters make up nearly a third of the state’s electorate. Nonpartisanship is even on November’s ballot there in the form of Question 3, which asks voters if they want to change to an open primary system, where unaffiliated voters can vote for a Republican or a Democrat without declaring a party. Fifteen states have open primaries.
Another state to watch when it comes to this voting bloc is North Carolina. In March, unaffiliated voters became the largest voting group in the state.
Christopher Cooper, political science professor at Western Carolina University, recently co-wrote research examining the rise of the unaffiliated voter in North Carolina and nationally. “Voters are signaling something to us. A lot of smart folks might disagree with me and say, ‘Look, so many of these are shadow partisans. Don’t worry about them,’ ” said Cooper, referring to voters who say they are nonpartisan but lean toward one party mostly. “I think the voters are trying to say they may not be able to escape the two-party system, but they’re going to push back on it when they can.”
Cooper gives further insight on this voting bloc in a Q&A with The Washington Post. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
From your research, what did you find out about the makeup of unaffiliated voters?
Cooper: We found that demographically they sort of sit as a bridge between the two major parties. They’re not as diverse as the Democratic Party, but they’re more diverse than the Republican Party. They’re also really, really young. The unaffiliated has become the largest group in North Carolina, but it’s been the largest group among young people for a number of years. So the growth is primarily young people and in-migrants to the state. Party switchers are a part of this. They’re more than a drop in the bucket, but they’re not more than a few drops.
This rise of unaffiliated voters, is it a trend that you think will continue on, or is just temporary right now?
Cooper: I don’t see it really slowing down any time soon. Eventually, clearly, the growth will stop, but I don’t think we’re to that point yet. As Americans increasingly, one, express dissatisfaction with the two major parties and, two, do some social covering — if you say you’re a Democrat or a Republican, you might be shut out of dating pools, you might be shut out of a job. So [choosing nonpartisanship] is a way to cover yourself, but it’s also a way to express dissatisfaction with the two major parties.
Are there races that may have seen an impact from unaffiliated voters?
Cooper: The most prominent example would be my home district, the 11th Congressional District in North Carolina. This is Madison Cawthorn’s district. Cawthorn, of course, infamous one-term member of Congress in North Carolina, lost his own party primary. Lost it for a host of reasons, but part of that is those unaffiliated voters got to choose which primary they wanted to vote in, and they came in much larger than the normal numbers to vote in the Republican primary. They voted Madison Cawthorn out of office.
Do you see politicians catering to unaffiliated voters or just making calculations of how they might win with or without them?
Cooper: They definitely cater to them. I mean, you know that you’re going to have your partisans in your corner, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican. Not all unaffiliateds are swing voters, but all swing voters are unaffiliated. The parties, and the candidates have absolutely changed their messages. They target messages to these voters. They clearly select different messages based on these voters. We are seeing campaign strategies change in response to this massive increase in unaffiliated voters.
Is there anything else from your research on the unaffiliated that really stunned you?
Cooper: Well, as unaffiliated grows in numbers, that means something for how parties are going to organize themselves going forward. If we play that forward a little bit more, we know that unaffiliated candidates don’t run and they don’t win. So you need to run as a member of the two major parties. Well, we’re going to have a candidate recruitment problem before too long. Twenty years from now, when young people grew up with no party labels, who are we going to have to run for Congress, for state legislature, for county commission or any office in our state or in any state?
I think the real challenge, the real meaning of this is, yes, it’s here today and it matters. But boy, is it going to play out institutionally in the long run. | 2022-10-24T10:25:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Side effect of divisive politics? Unaffiliated voter numbers rise. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2022/10/24/rise-of-independent-voters/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2022/10/24/rise-of-independent-voters/ |
Rosie Grant recorded the baking process and posted it on TikTok, “and it exploded,” she said.
Rosie Grant, 33, visiting Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson’s grave at a cemetery in Brooklyn, N.Y. Grant made Miller-Dawson's spritz cookie recipe, which is written on her gravestone. (Courtesy of Rosie Grant)
From her kitchen in Takoma Park, Md., Grant mixed the batter in a big bowl. There were no instructions to follow, only a list of simple ingredients: butter, sugar, vanilla, an egg, flour, baking powder and salt. The cookies were heavenly.
A daughter’s hilarious obituary unravels her father’s mysterious life. You have to read to the end to get it.
When she baked the spritz cookies last October, Grant had recently wrapped up an internship at Congressional Cemetery in D.C. — as part of her coursework for the master of library and information sciences program at the University of Maryland, from which she graduated earlier this year. | 2022-10-24T10:26:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | She bakes recipes she finds on gravestone epitaphs - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/24/gravestone-recipe-epitaph-ghostly-archive/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/24/gravestone-recipe-epitaph-ghostly-archive/ |
For LGBTQ teachers, academic freedom means the freedom to exist
Attacks on public education and academic freedom are not just about what gets taught but who has the right to teach
Perspective by Karen Graves
Margaret A. Nash
Demonstrators gather in front of the Florida Capitol in Tallahassee on March 7 after Florida House Republicans advanced a bill restricting LGBTQ discussion. (Wilfredo Lee/AP)
Last month Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration revised school policies adopted in 2020 to protect trans students. Under the modified rules, students are required to use school facilities for the sex they were assigned at birth, school personnel must defer to parents regarding students’ names and pronoun usage, and they are required to keep parents “fully informed” regarding students’ gender identity even when students wish to keep the information private. Nationwide, there has been a surge in adopting laws that censure references to LGBTQ people or issues in the classroom since Florida passed its legislation early this year. In Ohio last spring, a teacher was fired for giving a student a number to call for suicide prevention for LGBTQ youth; the district claimed the teacher violated a policy of not speaking about controversial topics.
These discriminatory attempts to marginalize the LGBTQ community reveal how attacks on public education and academic freedom are not just about what gets taught but who has the right to teach — and exist — in the nation’s schools. Indeed, as LGBTQ teachers have long understood, academic freedom is about more than just preserving space for divisive ideas to be explored — it’s also about preserving the right of people to exist.
Until the 1930s it was not uncommon for educators to live with lifelong partners of the same sex without public censure. For example, Chicago Superintendent Ella Flagg Young, who led the city’s school system from 1909 to 1915, one of the most prominent educators of her day, maintained a relationship with Laura Brayton for over 30 years, living and traveling together and caring for each other to the end of their lives.
In an extensive 1929 study of college-educated women, among female teachers and superintendents surveyed, 47 percent reported experiencing intense emotional or sexual relationships with women.
Following the end of World War II, new studies on human sexuality increased the attention paid to the prevalence of same-sex relationships. In 1950, a Senate committee investigated the extent of gay men and lesbians in government service, fearing that “young and impressionable people … might come under the influence of a pervert… .” The growing public awareness and acknowledgment of same-sex relationships coincided with the rise of the Cold War.
Politicians such as Sens. Kenneth Wherry (R-Neb.) and Clyde Hoey (D-N.C.) tapped into a moral panic that was sweeping the country, inciting the “Lavender Scare.” Aiming to link homosexuality with communism, critics characterized LGBTQ people and communists as subversive, immoral and a threat to the nation’s children. As politicians sought to remove ideas and books they perceived as threatening from school curriculums, they also sought to remove educators who didn’t conform to their desired norms.
The most relentless attack against educators came at the hands of the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee. Established in 1956 with an intent to deter the civil rights movement, the panel, known as the Johns Committee, named after state Sen. Charley Johns, soon shifted its attention toward homosexuality. Claiming that “Practically all children are susceptible to being recruited into homosexual practices,” the committee actively pursued LGBTQ educators for interrogation between 1957 and 1963.
Teachers and professors, sometimes taken for questioning directly from their classrooms, rarely had legal counsel present during the ordeal. Once suspected of being lesbian or gay they were fired and lost their professional credentials. One Johns Committee supporter argued, “Do I want my sons and daughters indoctrinated in the belief that there exists no right or wrong, no morality or immorality … that homosexuality is fine? And then told, in the name of academic freedom it’s none of your business?”
As the Johns Committee wound down, the American Civil Liberties Union, and later, the National Education Association, came to support individual LGBTQ educators seeking to challenge their dismissals on legal grounds in the 1970s, leading to a patchwork of court decisions on equal employment claims.
The case of Marjorie Rowland, who was dismissed in 1974 from her position as a high school guidance counselor in the Mad River School District near Dayton, Ohio, for being bisexual, is one example of critics’ entwined efforts to control not only what would be taught in the schools but who could teach there. Although U.S. District Judge Robert A. Steinberg ruled that “people have the right to be different,” a right they do not give up simply by virtue of being a teacher, his ruling was overturned on appeal in 1984 and Rowland’s dismissal was upheld.
In 1977 and 1978 anti-gay forces pushed back against the first wave of nondiscrimination laws addressing sexual orientation, making teachers a special target again. In 1977, voters soundly rejected a Miami anti-discrimination law, wakening LGBTQ activists nationwide to the intensity of the anti-gay campaign. In 1978 California voters decisively rejected the Briggs Initiative, a proposal that would have barred LGBTQ teachers from public classrooms. But that same year a similar bill passed in Oklahoma that curbed academic freedom by banning speech on LGBTQ issues in the classroom and by banning LGBTQ people from teaching. In 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down restrictions that limited teachers from talking about those issues but upheld the part of the law that kept LGBTQ teachers out of the classroom.
Beginning in the 1980s, many states changed their laws to include employment protection for workers based on sexual orientation, and even in states without those protections, like Ohio, some cities and school districts such as Yellow Springs wrote nondiscrimination laws and policies. Other states, however, such as Oregon and Colorado, passed strict anti-gay laws, including banning LGBTQ teachers and LGBTQ content from schools.
While some LGBTQ teachers were still fighting for their right to remain in the classroom, others were fighting for accurate portrayals of LGBTQ people in the curriculum. The award-winning film “It’s Elementary” documents how some LGBTQ educators and their allies in multiple states created curriculums that challenged stereotypes and addressed homophobia while also normalizing the presence of LGBTQ teachers in schools.
Attacks on academic freedom, in the past and today, are about control over what gets taught and by whom. In the mid-20th century, it was legal for districts to purge LGBTQ educators. Now that there are some employment protections for teachers, anti-gay attacks have focused on laws restricting LGBTQ discussion. These laws focus on the curriculum, to be sure, but they also target teachers by giving districts a way to fire LGBTQ teachers or allies. Under these laws and policies, teachers can be dismissed for discussing “divisive” issues about sexual orientation, gender or race.
The history of academic freedom for LGBTQ educators and LGBTQ issues in the curriculum shows us that progress is not linear and that old ploys resurface in new guises. One thing that separates contemporary attacks from the past is a wealth of knowledge on sexuality and gender identity. Using this knowledge to counter false information is critical in the current fight for academic freedom. But just as people in the past, such as Wherry and Hoey, used the threat of communism to gain political power, much of the fight over LGBTQ issues is about political posturing. Academic freedom is perhaps most needed where cultural clashes intersect with the drive for power.
This is the ninth essay in the Freedom to Learn series sponsored by PEN America, providing historical context for controversies surrounding free expression in education today. | 2022-10-24T10:26:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Academic freedom protects both LGBTQ topics and LGBTQ teachers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/24/lgbtq-teachers-academic-freedom-means-freedom-exist/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/24/lgbtq-teachers-academic-freedom-means-freedom-exist/ |
Windfall profit taxes have benefits. But the devil is in the details.
In times of crisis, the U.S. government has taxed excess profits — with mixed results
Perspective by Ajay K. Mehrotra
Ajay K. Mehrotra is the executive director of the American Bar Foundation, a professor of law and history at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and the author of "Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics, and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877-1929."
From the United Nations to the U.S. Senate, calls to tax oil companies have grown. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News)
In a recent speech before the United Nations General Assembly, Secretary General António Guterres demanded that advanced nations take a stand against the climate crisis by taxing “the windfall profits of fossil fuel companies.”
American lawmakers have pushed for similar action. This summer, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) introduced a bill, the Taxing Big Oil Profiteers Act, which would impose a 21 percent tax on the “excess profits” of oil and gas companies making more than $1 billion annually. “Our tax code should benefit the American people, not oil executives and their wealthy shareholders,” Wyden said.
Regardless of whether they are called “windfall” or “excess” profit taxes, these levies have had a mixed historical record. While some have raised significant and badly needed government revenue during national crises, others have been more about political symbolism than economic effectiveness. In short, they are not a panacea for economic and social woes. Understanding their promise and limits can help mitigate potential challenges.
An excess profits tax was first adopted in the United States during World War I. Even before the United States entered the Great War, large industrial corporations were benefiting enormously from war-related manufacturing. Between 1914 and 1916, U.S. Steel and Du Pont saw their annual profits increase by more than 1,000 percent each. In response to such “war profiteering,” social commentators supported steeply progressive taxes of all kinds to make the “war brides pay up.”
Once the United States officially entered the conflict in 1917 and began sending troops overseas, the clamor for profits taxation intensified. People on both sides of the political aisle called for a “conscription of wealth and income” to match the “conscription of men.”
Tax experts in the Treasury Department started to study several different types of profits taxes already in use in Canada and Europe. These existing duties generally fell into two categories: “excess or high profits” taxes and “war profits” taxes. An excess profits tax was levied on profits that exceeded some baseline deemed to be a “reasonable” or “normal” rate of return on “invested capital.” By contrast, a “war profits” tax was levied on profits that exceeded some average “prewar” profit level.
In October 1917, the idea of taxing excess profits won the day. The “war excess profits tax” exempted up to 9 percent of returns on invested capital and taxed all profits above that level at graduated rates ranging from 20 percent to 60 percent. Treasury economist Thomas Adams hailed the tax as “the most revolutionary development in public finance since the introduction of income taxation.”
That first excess profits tax in the United States accomplished a great deal. It generated nearly $7 billion in revenue, accounting for roughly 40 percent of all federal tax revenue raised for the war and making it the single most important source of wartime taxation.
But it was not long before the largest companies figured out how to avoid the full brunt of the excess profits tax. Working with their high-priced lawyers and accountants, these corporations were able to inflate their measure of invested capital, and thus reduce their excess profits tax liability.
As a result, one of the unintended consequences of the World War I excess profits tax was that it was hitting smaller companies more than the large ones it was designed to attack. This proved to be the death knell for the first excess profits tax. With the war over, Congress swiftly abolished the tax in 1921 as part of the Republican retrenchment of the wartime fiscal state.
The idea of taxing excess profits persisted, however. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was adamant about enacting an excess profits tax to fight war profiteering. “Our present emergency and a common sense of decency make it imperative that no new group of war millionaires shall come into being in this nation as a result of the struggles aboard,” he declared. “The American people will not relish the idea of an American citizen growing rich and fat in an emergency of blood and slaughter and human suffering.”
Once the World War II draft was instituted in 1940, Congress quickly adopted a new version of the levy, but this time the political compromise allowed businesses to choose which method they would use to measure their “excess” profits. Unsurprisingly, the World War II excess profits tax was not nearly as effective as its predecessor. It raised only about 25 percent of total wartime tax revenue, and it too was abolished soon after the war, with little discussion about its permanency.
It has not only been during wartime that Congress levied such taxes. In 1980, under President Jimmy Carter, the federal government enacted a “windfall” profits tax on the American oil industry in response to skyrocketing gas prices and the recent deregulation of the industry. The Crude Oil Windfall Profit Tax Act may have been the most poorly designed measure of its kind. In fact, it did not actually tax profits. Instead, it was an excise tax imposed on the difference between the prevailing market price of oil and a statutorily defined adjusted base price. In essence, it taxed the rising price of oil.
Since the price of oil soon stabilized, the revenue generated fell far short of projections. The complexity of calculating the tax made it a tremendous administrative burden for both the IRS and potential taxpayers. And because the tax was imposed mainly on domestic oil production, the law contributed to increasing dependence on foreign oil. Most economists declared it a colossal failure.
The American historical experience with excess and windfall profits taxes thus should be seen as a cautionary tale. When these taxes are well designed and carefully implemented to capture rent-seeking activity, they can be effective, as they were during World War I, at least initially.
To be sure, there are many parallels between today and the World War I experience. Today’s fossil fuel companies have profited handsomely from current geopolitical conditions, particularly the war in Ukraine, just as munitions makers did during the two world wars. In July, Exxon announced it had made a record quarterly profit of nearly $18 billion, while Chevron unveiled its own record quarterly profit of over $11 billion.
Even those who think that taxing extraordinary profits generated by current crisis conditions is a worthy goal should realize that historically, such levies seem to work mainly during shot-term crisis moments, such as the one we may be witnessing today. Their long-term longevity is hardly guaranteed. Such taxes might provide some political and moral solace now, but they rarely deliver on their promise of greater enduring tax equity, which ultimately doom their permanency. | 2022-10-24T10:26:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Windfall profit taxes have mixed results in recent history - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/24/windfall-profit-taxes/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/10/24/windfall-profit-taxes/ |
On-screen and off, men are subjects, women are objects
With ‘Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power,’ director Nina Menkes connects the dots between film language and real-world sexism
TTwenty years ago, filmmaker Nina Menkes began to deliver a lecture as a member of the film faculty at the California Institute of the Arts, exploring a hypothesis she had long held instinctively but had only recently begun to flesh out in earnest. Her talk posited that the way most mainstream movies are photographed and edited — the basics of composition, lighting, framing and camera movement — is inherently sexist, and that those fundamentals of cinematic style have real-world consequences, in Hollywood and beyond.
Informed by the groundbreaking work of such theorists as Judith Butler, bell hooks and Laura Mulvey — who in the 1970s originated the concept of a “male gaze” in cinema — Menkes kept refining her talk, loading it with clips from films considered masterpieces and urging her students to look deeper than narrative structure and subject matter to how films are staged, photographed and put together. Her thesis: Virtually since its inception, filmmaking has hewed to unconscious but inviolable “laws” wherein women are routinely reduced to hyper-sexualized objects, even when they’re the protagonists of the story.
In 2017, Menkes wrote an essay for the cinema journal Filmmaker connecting the aesthetic language of film — the voyeuristic habit of cameras panning up and down female bodies; the predatory metaphor of fragmenting those bodies into close-ups of breasts, behinds or other body parts; the flattening of women’s facial images into airbrushed, lifeless masks — to the behavior of former film producer Harvey Weinstein and his fellow executives in real life. “Within this system,” Menkes wrote, “men are subjects and young women are objects for gratification/consumption.”
Menkes’s essay, titled “The Visual Language of Oppression: Harvey Wasn’t Working in a Vacuum,” became a viral sensation. And it led to Menkes’s being invited to film festivals and conferences around the world to deliver what by then had become a provocative one-woman show propelled by germinal insights, galvanizing outrage and hundreds of film clips from some of the most beloved films in the canon. In January, Menkes debuted “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power,” the documentary version of her lecture, at the Sundance Film Festival. (The film, which opened in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, will have a special screening at Sun Cinemas in Washington on Nov. 9.)
In early October, Menkes discussed “Brainwashed” during a two-hour Zoom session. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Nina, in your introduction before the Sundance screening of “Brainwashed” in January, you said that making this film was an “act of liberation,” adding that “I didn’t even know I was in prison.” You’ve been working with this material for over 20 years, and yet this was a process of discovery for you.
A: My early films were automatically confronting that so-called male gaze way of filming intuitively, from very early [on]. And later, after three or four films, I did get introduced to Judith Butler and Laura Mulvey and bell hooks and all these great people who helped me articulate what I was feeling. And then I was like, “Okay, I’ve got to take this to my production students,” because there’s very often a split, I find. The production students never read film theory, and the film theory people generally don’t make movies. So, I was looking for clips to show my students, and that’s how the lecture developed, [and later] how the film developed. So, you’re talking about a person, myself, who is very well aware of all these issues, has made films that confront these issues, has felt on my skin the oppression of all of this. And yet sitting there for two years and reviewing 600 film clips and putting them together one after the other, was like, “Oh my God.” This poison has been sitting in my blood. It’s not that I’m completely free of it, but I’m more free of it.
Q: One of the things that “Brainwashed” illustrates is just how disorienting and even damaging the act of movie-watching can be for women, because we’re constantly asked to internalize a point of view that is often leering or mocking or reductive or violent. Do you remember the first time you experienced that disconnect as a spectator?
A: I grew up without a television. We had no TV at home. My mom was against TV. She thought it was a horrible thing. And obviously, when I grew up, there was no internet and no DVD store down the street. So I wasn’t exposed to this barrage that people are now. And, for whatever reason, I never got pleasure from those scenes. I was not the person who got pleasure and then woke up later and said, “Eew, that’s gross.” When I did see films, and it wasn’t that often, I remember seeing films with [images of] young, beautiful girls and I would dis-identify with them. They bothered me without [my] having a label for them [as sexist]. I remember having this thought that I’d better get married by the time I’m 25, because otherwise I’ll be too old. So thoughts like that I remember getting directly off the screen.
Q: For me, it was the scene from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” that you use in “Brainwashed,” when Robert Redford’s character is about to rape Katharine Ross’s character at gunpoint, until it’s revealed that they’re already lovers. I was probably 10 years old when I saw that movie, and it totally confused me. I understood that I was supposed to find it funny and sexy, but I was also deeply uncomfortable with the latent hostility of it.
A: I remember when we found that example, because the process of hunting for clips was quite massive, obviously. And we wanted to find a sexual assault kind of scene from an A-list film, but that didn’t — and this is very on point for our whole discussion — that didn’t [trigger] people who’ve been raped.
Q: It’s also the classic cake-and-eat-it-too that Hollywood has engaged with for decades. How can we get the titillation, but with a fig leaf?
Q: Another idea you explore in “Brainwashed” is how our notions of what’s good and beautiful and of high quality cinematically have been bound up with what the men who control this art form consider good and beautiful and worth looking at. For me, as a critic, that’s been really hard to unpack. I fall into that trance along with everybody else.
A: As a film viewer and a filmmaker, I didn’t get seduced by those images. But as a person who had to go on a date with a man who I knew was looking at me like that, I couldn’t navigate it. I remember saying to my psychoanalyst [while I was] making the film that it suddenly occurred to me that when I would go out on a date, I would leave myself at home. If you think about what is allowed for a heterosexual man in our culture, they’re allowed to be full-on human subjects who are also sexual beings. They don’t turn into objects when they’re having sex; they stay subjects. But the idea that a woman would just be a full-on human subject who’s also sexual without doing that little swivel to the object position, I don’t see a lot of films where we get examples of that.
Q: To me, that’s a function not just of what’s come to be accepted as film language, but the gatekeepers saying, “That’s what I want to see.” I’ve gotten to the point where I think all mainstream cinema is fetish filmmaking. It’s all just what those guys want to see and what turns them on.
A: Are you going to segue into “Blonde” right now?
Q: Actually, I’m going to loop back. When you talk about the split, I think a lot of women feel that way — that we have to leave our authentic selves behind if we want to be loved. But there’s also an element of play. There’s a pleasure we get from looking pretty.
A: But why is that objectification? I think that’s really important to distinguish. Let’s say it’s Academy Awards night and Mr. So and So is going and he might get an award. Is he going to take a lot of time and get his best suit and maybe go have a massage [and] make sure he gets a haircut or probably even a manicure, and look as flawless as possible? I would say yes. Getting dressed up for a special occasion is not objectification. Even getting dressed up to look nice for work, that’s not objectification. Wanting to look good is a normal human thing, and men want to look good, too. I think that what’s wrong is when looking good is the number one point and the only point, and the main determining point for, like you said, love and companionship.
Q: One thing you dissect in “Brainwashed” is something I’ve long been vexed by, which is the degree to which women filmmakers have internalized these values. Let’s talk about “Hustlers,” about strippers who mastermind a credit card theft scheme. When I saw that movie, I was in that trance, where I was just blown away by Jennifer Lopez and her physicality and her mastery and her ferocious screen presence. She’s such a charismatic performer and dancer, I didn’t have the presence of mind to unpack it the way you do in your movie, so please walk me through “Hustlers.”
A: [In] “Hustlers,” we have these women who are supposedly self-empowering through their own self-objectification. But if you look at the camera in “Hustlers,” most of the shots in the strip club have the men foregrounded so that we understand that [Lopez] is being looked at. So she’s embodying to-be-looked-at-ness. Also, this film brings up something that I have noticed is a key point for a lot of people, which is: Is self-objectification empowering? Studies have shown that teenage girls and young women who self-sexualize or self-objectify have higher levels of body surveillance and body shame. It also leads them to be desensitized to the victimization of girls and women in real life, and it translates into an increased tolerance for sexual violence and harassment. Another psychological study found that the more girls consume such images, the more they will suffer from low self-esteem, depression and eating disorders. So you have this incredible image of JLo, but she’s there as a sexual object. I think we just have to question why that has to be the way that women are empowered.
Q: It also exemplifies that cake-and-eat-it-too syndrome I talked about earlier. Now we have this concept of “agency” that is used as a narrative dodge, while leaving dubious sexual politics intact. I’m thinking of the movie “Red Rocket,” about a porn actor grooming a teenage girl, and the way the filmmaker gets buy-in from the audience is to have the girl make the first sexual move.
A: [Film producer] Amy Ziering calls it reversal of desire. “Lolita,” “Red Rocket,” there are so many examples where the young woman is the aggressor. What they’re trying to say is that this object, this underage person, is a subject when she’s not a subject. She’s the object of a predator, and yet they’re trying to make it okay by spinning it.
Q: Another film that engages some of these issues but lands much more ambiguously is Lena Dunham’s “Sharp Stick.” The protagonist isn’t a teenager, but she’s childlike. And she’s on this mission to explore her sexuality.
A: “Sharp Stick” actually starts with fragmented close-up body parts [of actress Taylour Paige], which I was like, “Really, again?” However, it does then cut, and we understand that the point of view is the sister filming her, so it a little bit mitigates it. I can say that on the level of shot design, it does not reinforce the male gaze, with the exception of that opening shot, which I’m really not sure had to be there, to be honest. Why do so many films start with that? “Lost in Translation,” “Titane,” “Sharp Stick,” the list is long.
Q: I want to get back to the fig leaves. In addition to “agency,” there’s the dodge of “commenting on.” And this is where I want to talk about “Blonde,” Andrew Dominik’s movie about Marilyn Monroe. To me, that movie is such a bad-faith exercise in a filmmaker doing the thing he’s pretending to critique.
A: Let’s look at it from the “Brainwashed” perspective. Let’s start off with point of view: Is the film from her point of view? When we’re talking about shot design, no, it isn’t. Is she objectified within the shot design? Yes, she is. The most extreme examples are the shots taken from the interior of her vagina [during an abortion]. They do it twice, first in black and white and then in color. It’s anatomically impossible for that to be from her point of view. So, okay, it’s got to be from the abortionist’s point of view.
Q: I thought it was the cervix’s point of view, because the speculum was coming toward the viewer. But maybe I’m misremembering it. Actually, I’ve been trying to block it for weeks.
A: Oh my God. It’s worse than I thought. Whoa.
Q: This gets into my own challenge unpacking pleasure. In “Brainwashed,” you use those creamy shots of Rita Hayworth in “The Lady From Shanghai” as examples of 2D versus 3D lighting, where men have crags and shadows and women look like these magazine covers. And even watching your film, while you’re critiquing it, I’m thinking, “Oh, God, she is so beautiful.” And I have the same experience watching Marilyn Monroe. So tell me, where do we put our pleasure in all of this?
A: Well, to return to something I said in “Brainwashed,” if you are a male director and you want to shoot someone’s derriere, I am not the sex police. I am not saying don’t do that. I’m just pointing out that, unfortunately, the vast majority of films we see do that. I don’t think that by itself there’s something wrong with seeing a shot of a beautiful woman. It’s just that it’s part of this tsunami of images which have created a situation where women are the only oppressed people who are a majority on planet Earth. We’re 51 percent [of the population] and we earn less, we have fewer rights, we can’t pass the ERA in this country. So this beauty thing is just loaded down with all this massive baggage that is all around it and on top of it and under it, and it’s damaging. Does that mean we can’t have beautiful women in films? No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying let’s let consciousness illuminate and see what happens.
Q: One film where I think we saw consciousness being brought to bear in a transformational way was “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” with Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack. Consent and humanism are just woven through that film in a way that feels hopeful to me.
A: Yeah. One of the incredible things about “Leo Grande” is that, basically, the whole movie’s about sex and having sex and sex scenes and she’s 60 and she’s a subject. It’s like, wow. That’s absolutely revolutionary. The fact that [ “Leo Grande”] was made and got a lot of attention is very hopeful. The fact that “Nomadland” won an Academy Award starring a 60-year-old woman and it’s her perspective — whether you like the film or not, it doesn’t really matter. It’s like, there was this 60-year-old woman in a leading role and it was her vision and feeling about life. I’m not saying you have to make a film about a 60-year-old woman, but just that it exists can also give young women, when they go to the movies, the idea that life isn’t going to end when they’re 35. Maybe it’s 45 now. | 2022-10-24T10:26:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | “Brainwashed” director Nina Menkes connects film language to real-world sexism - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/10/24/nina-menkes-brainwashed-interview/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/10/24/nina-menkes-brainwashed-interview/ |
A close-up photo of a carpenter ant was honored with a distinction in Nikon’s 2022 Small World Photomicrography Competition. (Eugenijus Kavaliauskas)
Yet for Kavaliauskas, the photo he captured by magnifying an ant’s face five times under a stereo 10x microscope is an example of “God’s designs and the many interesting, beautiful, unknown miracles under people’s feet,” he told The Washington Post.
Scientists have calculated how many ants are on Earth. The number is so big it’s ‘unimaginable.’ | 2022-10-24T10:26:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Close-up photo of an ant's face goes viral - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/24/ant-face-close-up-photo/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/24/ant-face-close-up-photo/ |
Sleep, work, eating, emotional expression and play are essential to a strong family foundation
By Charles Sophy
Charles Sophy is a psychiatrist and internal medicine physician in private practice, and was the former medical director of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. He is the author of “Family Values: Reset Trust, Boundaries, and Connection With Your Child.”
As a mental health professional treating children, I know how the pandemic’s heavy burden intensified the problems our youth were already experiencing.
As we move to the holiday season, you and your family can find a way back to each other. Not simply returning to the family or the people you were before the pandemic, but to create an even stronger, more secure foundation that will allow everyone to thrive.
That foundation is a concept I refer to as SWEEP. It’s an acronym representing the five key components that I have seen to be the most important and simple measures for well-being.
Ask yourself: What are the ingredients that are integral to your family’s recipe for a meaningful, fulfilling, balanced and joyful life? There are endless permutations of what each family values and wants to work toward, but the foundation that is necessary to achieve those goals is consistent.
SWEEP stands for:
Without solid sleep — both quality and quantity — you cannot be the best version of yourself and children may have behavioral issues.
Are you getting enough sleep? Do you feel rejuvenated when you wake up? Do you or your child depend on coffee or caffeine to get the day started? What time does your child go to sleep? Depending on their age, children older than 3 typically need between 10 to 14 hours of shut-eye. It is essential for their development, so treat it as such.
My clients, a couple, had been struggling for years to get their children to bed by a certain hour. I helped them set a bedtime routine for the children, which included removing stimuli such as loud music and video games, and adding calming activities such as meditation. For the couple, I suggest soothing activities such as a hot bath and body massage, as well as white noise or soothing music, and aromatherapy in their bedroom.
Always remember consistency is the key. It’s more important to institute one simple and consistent bedtime change instead of several intermittently.
W — WORK
Do you and your children have a purpose? Are you working toward that purpose and experiencing a sense of satisfaction? Do you talk to your children about the importance of the work they do every day — go to school, participate in family chores, show up for their teammates?
We are hearing a lot about “quiet quitting.” I’m suggesting the opposite — gaining clarity about what we want and need from work and school and making sure we’re living authentically.
One of my clients is a 42-year-old woman with a teenage daughter. With her divorce, my client’s income and lifestyle changed drastically, and she was struggling. I helped her see that she needed to find purpose, and a job would give her that. It was a vital piece for her overall stability. My client is now happily pursuing her degree in cosmetology.
E — EATING
Few people connect the dots between food and emotional or behavioral chaos. Ask yourself — are you and your children using food to stay healthy and energized?
A family I counsel ate on the run. I helped them find meaning in sitting around a table during mealtimes at least a few times a week, and raised their awareness about eating nutritious food. This helped improve their mental and physical health and strengthened them as a family.
Mealtime is a time when your family should be undistracted, adhere to rules such as no technology at the table and make eye contact as you connect over that day’s events, share feelings and solve problems so everyone feels heard.
E — EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION
For you and your children to be emotionally healthy, you need to be in touch with your thoughts and feelings and be able to express them. Do you let the important people in your life know how you are feeling through emotional expression?
A couple came to see me because they were constantly arguing over issues regarding their children. I taught them to express their emotions and feelings about what was happening in their home with their children. This brought them the clarity they needed to move forward and address their core problems.
Every relationship needs to be nurtured. If you or your children are not able to communicate your thoughts and feelings, it will be difficult to connect with the people around you to establish the emotional safety and sense of permanence we all need.
P — PLAY
Play is critical to our overall functioning. It helps us learn how to self-soothe, shift out of a bad mood, manage anxiety, maintain an individual identity and broaden our perspectives. What do you do in your leisure time with the primary purpose of having fun? Ideally, these activities would keep you physically and mentally fit, give you a creative outlet, and maybe even enable you to network or enhance other areas of your life.
One of my clients had a blank look when I asked about her hobbies and how she soothed herself. It took her some time to recall her two favorite things — needlepoint and ladies card night, which she had enjoyed before her marriage and early into it. She vowed to reinstitute them. And about six weeks later, she reported back — a happy wife and mother.
These five aspects of our life are at the core of our capacity to thrive as parents and individuals. Think of SWEEP as your family’s report card that you can turn to often to grade your family’s well-being.
Your children are watching and learning from you. Parenting begins with how you show up for yourself and how you model for your family the values that are essential for health and happiness. | 2022-10-24T10:26:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Five areas to nurture to build a strong foundation for your family - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/10/24/families-strong-foundations/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/10/24/families-strong-foundations/ |
From “As It Was Give(n) To Me,” published by Twin Palms Publishers, 2022. (Stacy Kranitz)
For over a decade, photographer Stacy Kranitz has been working in Appalachia. The fruits of that labor are now available in her book, “As It Was Give(n) To Me,” recently published by Twin Palms Publishers.
Much photographic work emanating from Appalachia over the years has proven to be both controversial and a lightning rod of strong emotions. Mostly, the very people who live in the region have taken exception to what they believe is an inaccurate portrayal of their lives.
This is very understandable since a lot of the work has focused on the poverty and “backwardness” of the Appalachian people. But of course, Appalachia, is far more complex than those kinds of depictioins.
In one sense, Kranitz’s book seeks to provide a way to encounter the region more accurately, acknowledging the problem that earlier representations of the place and people. The publisher’s description of the book on its website, gives us the following to contemplate:
“For the past twelve years, Stacy Kranitz has been making photographs in the Appalachian region of the United States in order to explore how photography can solidify or demystify stereotypes, and interpret memory and history in a region where the medium has failed to provide an equitable depiction of its people. Rather than reinforcing conventional views of Appalachia as a poverty-ridden region, or by selectively dwelling on positive aspects of the place and its people to offset problematic stereotypes, this work insists that each of these options are equally problematic ways of looking at place.”
Longform photographic works are, in essence, a kind of proposition put out into the world. Once out there, the work is open for interpretation by the viewer. This is really the case with any kind of creative endeavor meant to communicate in a broader sense. This is, of course, the case with “As It Was Give(n) To Me.”
Kranitz’s book is rife with the kind of images that have stirred up angst over the years—there’s poverty, religious snake handlers, coal miners—a lot of the kind of imagery we are used to seeing from Appalachia. But there’s far more than that.
Interspersed throughout the book are artifacts—pressed plants that Kranitz would pick up while not making photographs—along with snippets from a local newspaper of people sharing their thoughts about life. If the book is successful in charging past the stereotypical portrayal of Appalachians, it is not so much because of the photographs, but in the combination of all of the elements in it.
The photographs, on their own, can be utterly sublime at points. There are some powerful images. But the real star of the book, for me, are the emotionally charged words taken from a weekly column in The Mountain Eagle, a paper in Whitesburgh, Ky. These, along with the plants and cobwebs that Kranitz collected, bring the whole enterprise together. And it is only through this combination of elements that the idea of presenting an alternate perception of the region is achieved.
Once you begin to experience all of the elements together, and not JUST the photographs, a more nuanced narrative of Appalachia begins to reveal itself. There are, and have been, arguments circulating that photographs never really tell the truth. Instead, they are mostly impressions. And maybe that’s all we can hope for. With that in mind, “As It Was Give(n) To Me” is a weighty collection of Kranitz’s impressions, sometimes profound, sometimes banal, over the years. This book is her proposition thrust into the world, ready for us to accept, deny, or commune with. | 2022-10-24T10:27:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Photos of Appalachia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/10/24/photos-appalachia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/10/24/photos-appalachia/ |
Is the pathway to maintaining congressional majorities embracing liberal policies to fire up the base or moderating to win the middle?
Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) speaks at a campaign event at McCurdy Park in Corunna, Mich. Slotkin, a moderate, is in a tight race to retain her seat in the conservative central part of the state. (Emily Elconin for The Washington Post)
LANSING, Mich. — In between campaign stops, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) is taking calls from fellow House Democrats seeking her support for leadership races upon their return to Capitol Hill.
It’s a dumbfounding request for Slotkin, who may not even be serving in Congress next year.
“I’ve had some pretty tough conversations like, ‘Hey, I really like you as a person and I respect you as a lawmaker, but I’m trying to give you the privilege of running for chairman or chairwoman by keeping the majority,’ ” Slotkin said. “It’s by no means a sure thing.”
Slotkin and 38 of her colleagues belong to an exclusive group no House Democrat wants to join: vulnerable members who represent the most competitive swing districts in the country. Most of them paved the way to Democrats’ regaining the House majority in 2018, when the party flipped 41 seats by promising to protect health care access and restore faith that government can function after President Donald Trump took office.
“I stay in it because I think we’re still in the middle of this really tough moment in our history,” said Slotkin, who represents a district in the middle of Michigan that Trump won twice. “If we’re back to Democrats and Republicans treating each other decently and having a real exchange of ideas, I would happily go on my merry way and find something else that I want to do. But until things start to feel like they’re on a more even keel, I feel it’s mission-oriented work.”
Similar sentiments were expressed by other vulnerable Democrats who helped win the majority in 2018 in interviews with The Washington Post.
In the final weeks ahead of the midterm elections, these front line Democrats are working to convince voters that they are the last line of defense against extremism, arguing they have a track record of working across the aisle and protecting personal freedoms, particularly in light of the Supreme Court’s decision this summer to overturn Roe v Wade.
They also view their job as arbiters of democracy as far from over, as many Republicans continue to question the integrity of U.S. elections, even after surviving the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
“It’s not just the substance of what we accomplished, said Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), a member of the Class of 2018 also in a tough race, “but the evidence our democratic institutions can still function in a way that helps people, which I hope is enough to convince more people out there that the democracy is worth fighting for.”
Front line Democrats have tried to appeal to moderate and libertarian voters by telling them if the GOP regains the House majority, Republicans would codify federal laws that infringe on personal freedoms beyond abortion, such as rolling back same-sex marriage protections and access to contraception.
But with economic uncertainty top of mind in many of their districts, they acknowledge their final argument can’t simply center on defending freedoms and democracy from the extremes.
Upon her return to Washington last month, Slotkin warned her colleagues repeatedly against making abortion their party’s final midterm argument, bluntly telling them, “I don’t know what you’re smoking, but six weeks is a long time before an election.”
At a recent town hall in conservative Corunna, Mich., Slotkin tried to walk the walk. She told the roughly 50 people there that she had introduced a bill to suspend the federal gas tax, urged the Biden administration to release oil from the strategic petroleum reserve, and was now calling for the U.S. to reexamine its relationship with Saudi Arabia.
“In the face of this much inflation, do you use it as a political talking point or do you actually try to do something about it?,” Slotkin asked the voters, accusing the GOP of not proposing concrete solutions other than promising to cut spending.
Given the makeup of their districts, front liners consider themselves the forecasters of troubles ahead for their party. It’s not rare for some of them to be active in two group chats, flagging what lines of attacks are percolating in their districts and what is no longer resonating with voters.
They pride themselves on seeing the stakes much earlier and clearer than their liberal counterparts and are unafraid to confront leadership or the Biden administration about how the average American, their constituent, is viewing the Democratic Party. So front liners have been touting the Inflation Reduction Act, arguing it will help make life more affordable by allowing Medicare to negotiate drug pricing, capping insulin costs, and extending Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies. They also rely heavily on the bipartisan infrastructure and global competitive manufacturing bills as examples of Democrats creating jobs.
But selling the benefits is difficult since voters have yet to feel their impact.
It’s a marked difference from 2018, when voters chose Democrats to protect their access to health care after the GOP threatened to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Many of those same voters initially expressed deep skepticism about the program as government overreach just eight years earlier.
“It will be frustrating if we don’t, you know, hold the House in a couple years when people are really feeling this benefit,” said Rep. Kim Schrier (D-Wash.), a member of the Class of 2018 in an unexpectedly tough race.
Can abortion still drive voters?
The concerns over the economy make it harder to find the same energy from voters that propelled Democrats to victory in 2018. But Slotkin has found similar levels of enthusiasm nestled in very conservative towns now within the boundaries of her district where Democrats, for the first time in decades, have a chance of voting in a competitive race. Trump won Slotkin’s previous district by nearly 4 percentage points in 2020. With the redrawn boundaries, his margin of victory would have been less than 1 percentage point.
Slotkin’s motto in these rural communities is to “lose better” — exceeding turnout goals in areas where Democrats are destined to lose in hopes that it makes up potential votes lost elsewhere.
Both Republicans and Democrats are making a play to court suburban women this year, particularly those who strayed from Trump in both 2018 and 2020, helping propel Democrats to the House majority and sending Biden to the White House. Abortion could help drive Democratic voters to the polls in states where the issue is on the ballot, as in Michigan and California.
Polls had shown abortion becoming a top concern for voters after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade this summer, especially motivating Democrats. But a recent New York Times/Siena College poll found that Republicans now have an edge over Democrats because voters believe they are best suited to deal with the economy and inflation.
Slotkin draws contrasts here with her opponent, state senator Tom Barrett, who introduced legislation with similar provisions to the state’s previous law. He also believes states should enact their own laws about abortion rather than a federal ban, which Paula Alexander, 72, a Democrat from Owosso believes is a “cop-out” by GOP candidates who “refuse to take a firm stand” on the issue ahead of the election.
“I’m over being frightened. I’m pissed,” she said at the Owosso farmers market.
But to win reelection, Slotkin needs to win over a sizable number of independents like Iyla Waters, 74, from Owosso. While she is leaning toward voting for Slotkin, she worries about skyrocketing prices under a president she thinks is not doing enough to help. Voting for Biden — or a Democrat for that matter — was “a lesser of two evils” in 2020.
“I didn’t really want to, but that was my choice,” she said.
Republicans have worked to link Slotkin and other front liners to Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), painting her as an extremist who votes with her party on policies that have contributed to higher prices.
“The Democrat Party has got us to where we are now. They believe government can solve the problem, but government is the problem,” a Barrett supporter says in an ad while talking about inflation.
Vulnerable Democrats are betting that their personal interactions in the community have proved to constituents they are not the extremists Republicans make them out to be.
“Presumably, you could call me a lot of things, but if you’ve ever met me, you know ‘bombastic radical’ is hardly one that sticks,” said Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), who is in a competitive race in a district favorable to Republicans. “I think many of us won in 2018 because we reset expectations for what people should expect of their legislators.”
Martin Finucane, a market farmer selling vegetables at an Owosso weekend market, acknowledges that Slotkin appears to be more moderate than other House Democrats. But as a longtime Republican, he plans to vote for Barrett because he’s fed up with Democrats “handing out money that the government thinks is theirs, which is really mine and of other Americans.”
In these final weeks, Slotkin and her campaign also recognize they need to turn out Democrats in the Lansing area as well as college students who are registered to vote back home or are reticent to support her because she doesn’t have the stamp of approval from “the Squad,” a group of liberal House Democrats who also won in 2018.
Both liberals and moderates within that 2018 class believe they have been influential in shaping legislation that a Democratic Congress has been able to pass through slim margins. But the factions clashed often over the past two years, as the former pushed to pass a $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” social spending package that moderates knew had no chance of passing in the Senate. Moderates also spent this election year pushing leaders to prioritize passing bills that would alleviate economic concerns and measures funding the police to preempt attacks by Republicans.
Front liners acknowledge they are often “pissing off everybody a little bit” because their moderate view often causes voters and colleagues alike to consider them too lax for the Democratic Party or too liberal for the GOP.
“I think we get up every single day and we tend to, you know, not be your media darlings or your Twitter darlings,” Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.) said. “We get up every day and we just say — I know I do — how can I fight for good policy or at least push the country forward and in the right direction?”
Whether the front line perspective is favored by leadership remains a question. Several lawmakers privately said that their concerns are often overshadowed by progressives, who have much larger representation in the House Democratic caucus.
Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) reliably votes against most Democratic measures unless they are bipartisan. It has become so routine for him to do so that he said members of the leadership staff have told him, “We gave up trying to whip you a long time ago” for his votes.
“That’s just like not trying, man,” he said. “They didn’t even try to talk to me about the IRA, and I decided to vote for it because I thought it was really good policy.”
Golden said that Democrats have been unable to hold the majority for longer than two terms because the liberal wing of the party scorns compromise in favor of a grander, often times less achievable, goal.
“I wouldn’t say that [keeping the majority] means just focusing on individual districts like mine,” he said. “Rather, it’s just changing your mind-set outright. I think our party would be best serving America if we were holding majorities for longer periods of time.”
Slotkin says the inability to cater to both factions is a fault of a top-down power structure enabled by Democratic leaders. She voted against Pelosi (D-Calif.) as Democratic leader in 2020 and said that both front liners and liberal members from the class of 2018 are having an “active conversation” about rule changes they want to demand from those running for leadership.
Several members and Democratic aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, said that they want to add term limits for top Democrats on committees to allow younger members a chance to influence the legislative process. They also want to lower the threshold of support necessary to bring bills to the floor to prevent a handful of Democrats who have stalled the process. Front liners want to make sure those running for top slots also paid their dues to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, a major fundraiser for them, in exchange for their votes.
But front liners often acknowledge that thinking beyond November is premature, given that they might not be elected to a third term. If voters choose to oust them, front liners still hope to play an active role in defending democracy. They often compare themselves to the “Watergate babies,” members elected after the 1970s scandal that went on to become influential voices for decades.
“I believe that the 2018 class is the bench for the Democratic Party,” Slotkin said. “It’s the minor leagues before many of them will go on to be governors and senators and cabinet-level officials. I think this kind of forged-by-fire process that made you a tougher, smarter elected official and I think that will carry the party — if we can ever break through.”
Leigh Ann Caldwell contributed to this report. | 2022-10-24T10:27:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Can Democratic frontliners win and maintain the House from the middle? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/house-democratic-frontliners/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/house-democratic-frontliners/ |
Murkowski and Peltola cross party lines to endorse each other in tight Alaska races
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) speaks with reporters following an event in Anchorage. (Leigh Ann Caldwell/The Washington Post)
Despite being from different parties, Murkowski and Peltola are finding more things draw them together than drive them apart. They are running as abortion rights moderates who are independent-minded consensus-builders focused on Alaska’s needs, including juggling the impact of climate change and the state’s economic reliance on oil, not the partisan and culture wars playing out in the Lower 48.
A key constituency
In an election in a state of about 600,000 registered voters where every vote and every ranking matters, Alaska Native communities are a critical voting bloc for both Murkowski and Peltola. Alaska Natives make up 15 percent of the state’s population — 22 percent including mixed-race natives — and have flexed their political muscle in the past.
Alaska Native leaders persuaded Murkowski to run a write-in campaign in 2010 when she lost her primary to a more conservative GOP candidate. They launched a massive voter education “fill it in, write it in” campaign to teach native voters how to clearly write Murkowski’s name. Their vote made up the margin by which Murkowski won, her campaign manager at the time, Kevin Sweeney, said.
This year, “they could be the deciding vote,” said Zack Brown, a former communications director for the late Rep. Don Young (R), whom Peltola replaced after winning a special election in August.
Who is Mary Peltola, the first Alaska Native in Congress?
Another Alaska Native entity, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act regional association (ANCSA) also endorsed both candidates. Sealaska, an Alaska Native land ownership corporation, is teaching its members to rank both Murkowski and Peltola first on their ballots. (Alaska Natives’ land is divided by corporations and not the better-known reservation system in the contiguous 48 states.)
“She didn’t really sound like a Democrat; she didn’t really sound like a Republican; she sounded like an Alaskan. She has Alaskan priorities, Alaskan views,” Richard Peterson, president of the Tlingit and Haida tribes, said of Peltola. He noted his tribe last endorsed a political candidate in 2014.
“With Lisa, we’ve worked with her in the trenches,” Peterson said of Murkowski. “She’s been able to work and build relationships across party lines.”
Murkowski said she didn’t think her support for a Democrat would hurt her reelection chances.
“In Alaska, it’s different,” she said.
‘We are in Mary’s house’
Peltola was swarmed by supporters as she walked through the hallways of the Dena’ina Center in Anchorage. When she took the stage, the large room of Alaska Natives clapped, cheered and waved wooden sticks with Peltola’s face on them. When she finished speaking, the audience broke out in song.
Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and vice-presidential candidate who is running against Peltola, said during a candidate forum: “We are in Mary’s house. I love her dearly and am proud of her, as all of you are.”
Paul John from Ruby, a town on the Yukon River in the central part of the state, said he welcomes Peltola’s positive message of unity. “You see a lot of politics nowadays, it’s about dividing people. Hers is a positive message,” he said.
Peltola, who is a Yupik from Bethel, Alaska, has run a campaign of “pro-fish, pro-family and pro-freedom,” a catch phrase meant to address a large number of issues important to Alaskans and natives: abundant fishing, tribal self-determination and abortion access.
She is highlighting her close ties to Young, who represented the state for 49 years before his death earlier this year. Peltola hired Young’s former staffers, including one as her top aide. She received the endorsement of his daughters and a group of former Young staffers who released a letter of support.
“I think what we’re seeing is that the two spectra are widening, and it seems we’re even more middle-of-the-road because the left is so much further left and the right is so much further to the right,” Peltola said in an interview.
Murkowski, the top Republican on the Indian Affairs Committee, has also focused on issues important to rural Alaskans and natives, including playing a key role in funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to Alaska tribes in two pandemic relief bills, even though she voted against the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan in March of last year. On Friday, she gushed about the bipartisan infrastructure bill that can be used to build water and sewer systems and broadband networks for disconnected communities.
“When it’s time for me to campaign, I feel like it’s less me going into a community and asking for your vote as much as it’s just reconnecting with people,” Murkowski said.
Gauging the importance of the Alaska Native vote
The impact of the Alaska Native vote is difficult to quantify and compare from cycle to cycle. The state doesn’t differentiate between a rural Alaskan and a Native Alaskan, so there is no data on native voting. That’s something Michelle Macuar Sparck, a member of the Qissunamiut Tribe of Chevak and director of strategic initiatives at Get Out the Native Vote, a nonpartisan organization that works to educate native voters, is working to change.
“I think she’s going to turn out the vote, her and almost her alone,” Sparck said of Peltola. “It is very exciting.”
Ivan Moore, a pollster with Alaska Survey Research, said that Alaska Natives make up 50 percent of rural Alaska, but noted turnout in rural districts is usually lower than in Alaska’s cities.
“But Mary Peltola is a total game changer, and that’s good for Murkowski,” Moore said. “They both come to the table with the same base of supporters,” he said, including women, Democrats, nonpartisan voters and Alaska Native voters.
Peterson, the tribal president, said another motivating factor for his tribe to endorse was that the other candidates “take hard lines.”
Murkowski’s opponent is Trump-backed candidate Kelly Tshibaka, who also spoke at the AFN candidate forum, reading most of her responses on Alaska Native specifics from prepared notes.
Tshibaka said in an interview that Murkowski is “functionally a Democrat” and she slammed McConnell, who she said she wouldn’t support for Republican leader next Congress, for “not listening to the people of Alaska.”
Alaska Senate candidate challenging Murkowski says she will not support McConnell as GOP leader
“Mitch McConnell is not listening to the people of Alaska,” Tshibaka said. “In fact, Mitch McConnell is not listening to the people of America when we’re saying that this isn’t a person who represents us. She does not represent the best interest of the people of our state.”
The unknowns of ranked-choice voting
Other than Murkowski’s help from the Senate Leadership Fund, this election is almost entirely funded by the candidates. Neither the official House nor Senate Republican campaign committees are investing in the races. The House Democrats’ campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, isn’t investing because Peltola has raised so much money on her own and they are using those finite resources elsewhere.
The new ranked-choice voting system is adding a degree of uncertainty to the House and Senate races. Alaska used it for its primaries and the special election to fill Young’s seat, but turnout in both elections was quite low, registering no more than 29 percent. Turnout is expected to be much higher in November.
Begich — who comes from a long line of Alaska politicians and whose uncle, former senator Mark Begich (D), donated to Peltola’s campaign — is advocating less government spending and fewer dollars flowing to Alaska.
He is encouraging conservatives to “rank the red,” to choose he and Palin first and second to make it more difficult for Peltola to win. | 2022-10-24T10:27:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Murkowski and Peltola ready to do battle with Tshibaka, Palian and Begich - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/murkowski-peltola-alaska/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/murkowski-peltola-alaska/ |
Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) greets supporters at a campaign rally on Oct. 8 in Columbus, Ga. (Elijah Nouvelage for The Washington Post)
JONESBORO, Ga — Louis Johnson had several errands to run on a recent Saturday afternoon, but he decided to put them aside and come out to a local Jamaican restaurant and bar to see Sen. Raphael G. Warnock in action.
Like many Georgians, Johnson has seen the barrage of negative ads — personal attacks and partisan broadsides — being pumped out from both sides in the Georgia Senate race between the Democratic senator and Republican Herschel Walker. But he came to Warnock’s event in this small city just outside Atlanta looking for something else: Johnson wanted to feel out Warnock’s vibe. He left feeling upbeat about the senator’s positive message.
“It’s a breath of fresh air,” Johnson, 66, a technology consultant, said in the parking lot of the restaurant, where more than a dozen supporters were loudly chanting for Warnock as his campaign bus drove off.
“He’s got the demeanor of a winner,” he added. “He doesn’t act like, ‘I’ve got to belittle the guy next to me.’ And there’s some low-hanging fruit, you’ve got to admit … But instead he says, ‘No, I’m a pretty good guy on my own — and I just don’t need to go there.’ ”
But Warnock does go there in other aspects of his campaign. His campaign and outside groups have spent millions of dollars on ads attacking Walker. A new Warnock ad dropped Thursday calling Walker a “hypocrite” for campaigning in favor of a national ban on abortion, while a former girlfriend, and the mother of one of his children, alleged that he paid for her to have an abortion and pressured her to have a second one. An ad by a group tied to the Senate Majority PAC features comments by Walker’s adult son, Christian, who publicly accused his father of domestic violence against him and his mother. The group and Warnock’s campaign has also run ads using a television interview in which Walker’s former wife, Cindy Grossman, said he put a gun to her head and threatened kill her.
In a Senate debate a week ago that Walker skipped, Warnock offered one of his strongest rebukes of his opponent, mentioning everything from Walker’s misrepresenting his academic record to allegations surrounding his history of violence.
Walker has denied paying for the abortion and has said he doesn’t remember the incident with Grossman, and instead pointed to his history of mental illness.
The contrasting nature of Warnock’s campaign illustrates the balancing act the senator has tried to pull off in the final weeks of his campaign for reelection in a purple state. The race has remained tight, despite a constant stream of headlines about Walker’s personal life, as conservative Georgians have rallied to the defense of the Heisman Trophy winner from the University of Georgia. National Republicans are putting up a fierce fight for the seat, which they need to gain control of the Senate, and in recent days, polls have shown voters concerned about the economy and crime moving toward the GOP.
“I love all of the people of Georgia — the ones who voted for me and the ones who didn’t. I love them, too,” Warnock said during a campaign stop in Columbus earlier this month. “And I’m proud to represent all of the people of our state.”
Many of Warnock’s supporters agree with his approach on the campaign trail because they say they’re already hearing enough about Walker’s past and present controversies on TV and social media and would rather hear more about the Democratic senator.
Warnock has sought to build a brand of politics that is an extension of his career as a pastor. He still preaches at Ebenezer Baptist Church, which served as a home base for Martin Luther King, Jr. and has a long tradition in social justice. With decades of experience uplifting crowds from his pulpit, Warnock the candidate appears most comfortable offering a positive message to crowds on the campaign trail.
“The reason why I return to my pulpit and the church every week is I don’t want to spend all my time talking to politicians. I’m afraid I might accidentally become one,” Warnock said during his Jonesboro stop, prompting cheers from the crowd. “I confess: I’m in politics, but I’m not in love with politics. I’m in love with change.”
Michael Thurmond, the chief executive of DeKalb County and a Democrat, said likability is critical for Warnock to win his race.
“He speaks honestly and forthrightly … and, you know, there’s his willingness to work with people who he may not agree with 100 percent of the time to build consensus,” said Thurmond, who has known Warnock for years.
Thurmond added that it’s smart for Warnock to stay away from talking about Walker, because a winning coalition for him includes some independents and moderate Republicans.
“Georgia is a purple state. It’s not a blue state,” Thurmond said. “So you have to keep in mind he’s trying to do something that has rarely happened in the history of Georgia politics. It’s tough.”
W. Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, applauded Warnock for “doing an amazing job of not responding to the shenanigans about Herschel Walker.”
But he is deeply frustrated that Warnock is not engaging Black men, in particular, in a way that “creates community” and increases turnout.
“He’s running a traditional campaign — and I don’t say that as a compliment,” Robinson said. “He could have used his identity to create a safe space for Black men to have real political conversations. But, instead … he’s running a center-of-the-road campaign because of polls of likely voters. That’s the problem.”
Robinson worries that Warnock has focused too much on appealing to moderates and not enough on engaging key base voters.
Warnock’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Polls have shown Warnock holding a narrow lead over Walker in the race, which stands in contrast to Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams, who polls show is trailing Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. Polls also show some voters splitting their vote for Senate and governor.
A recent poll by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Georgia News Collaborative found 9 percent of Kemp’s supporters back Warnock, while only 1 percent of Abrams’ supporters back Walker. Separately, a Quinnipiac University poll found 7 percent of Kemp’s supporters back Warnock, compared with 1 percent of Abrams’ supporters who support Walker. Altogether, this suggests somewhere between 3 and 5 percent of Georgia’s likely voters say they plan support Kemp for governor and Warnock for U.S. Senate.
The Democratic senator has also been leading with moderate and independent voters in polls. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll found Warnock receiving support from 61 percent of moderate voters, and the Quinnipiac poll showed 55 percent of self-identified independents backing Warnock.
Warnock is running for reelection to a full term in the U.S. Senate after winning a special election runoff in 2021. He beat out then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who had been appointed to the seat by Kemp after former senator Johnny Isakson resigned because of health problems. Warnock became Georgia’s first Black senator and the first Black Democratic senator from a former confederate state.
Polls have consistently shown that Warnock is more liked than Walker among Georgia voters. Fifty percent of likely voters said they have a favorable opinion of Warnock, compared with 39 percent for Walker, a recent Quinnipiac poll found. In the same poll, more than half of likely voters said they felt Warnock is honest, has good leadership skills and cares about average Georgians. Meanwhile, half or more said they feel Walker is not honest, doesn’t have good leadership skills and does not care about average Georgians.
Last month, a majority of Warnock voters said the main reason they were voting for him was because they like him, according to the CBS News Battleground Tracker poll. Meanwhile, only 20 percent of Walker supporters said their main reason for backing him was because they like him; almost half said their main reason was to oppose the other candidate.
Warnock’s likability, however, has its limits. At a recent Walker rally in Carrollton, about 45 miles west of Atlanta, supporters were vocal in expressing their disdain for Warnock, frequently questioning how he could be a pastor and support abortion rights. Warnock has called himself a “pro-choice pastor” and said he supports women’s right to make their own health-care decisions. He often sums up his position by stating, “I believe a doctor’s office is too small for a woman, her doctor and the U.S. government.” However, he has not detailed what, if any, restrictions he supports on abortions. He would not elaborate on his position when pressed on the issue on the debate stage two weeks ago.
Jim Stevenson, 81, had sharp words to describe Warnock. “A man who professes to be a minister of the gospel and believes it’s OK to kill babies in the womb … is not a minister of the lord Jesus Christ. Maybe a minister of Satan but not of Jesus,” he said.
Stevenson, who attended Walker’s Carrollton rally with his wife, didn’t talk much about Walker specifically, but he emphasized that he thinks Warnock has been a failure on everything from the economy to the border since being elected almost two years ago.
Warnock’s supporters say his appeal transcends his party or his backing specific policies they support. They genuinely like him.
“I’ve very excited about what he had to say — the idea of really being about helping people and doing something with the office that you’ve been given in Washington and being concerned about the real lives of people on the ground,” said Charles Reed, who lives in Fulton County and sported a Warnock T-shirt at the Jonesboro event. “That inspires me to want to work on his behalf to get reelected.”
Kwinitha Lewis, 31, started volunteering for Warnock’s campaign less than a month ago. She said she didn’t go into it knowing too much about Warnock but felt connected to him because they both grew up in the church. She added that part of her support for him is because “he’s just more authentic” and “for the people.”
In Jonesboro, Warnock didn’t mention his opponent once. Instead, he spent a significant part of his 30-minute speech sharing his story: He grew up in public housing, was one of 12 children and both his parents were Pentecostal preachers. He went to Morehouse College, where he said he went on a “full-faith scholarship” because he didn’t have enough money to pay for the first semester. He’s father to two children, ages 3 and 6, joking that he’s a “mature dad” at 53. And he emphasized that he remains a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King was pastor, and looks at his political career as being focused on bringing change.
Earlier that day, Warnock held a rally in Columbus with more than 100 supporters out on a sunny morning outside the city’s first Black theater. Lula Knight, 76, and Steve Daknis, 56, were two of the first supporters to grab a seat next to the stage in anticipation of Warnock’s arrival.
In their small talk, Knight and Daknis, who are both retired from the military and met at the event, talked about being excited to hear from Warnock. They both want to elect Warnock to his first full term as a senator because he represents their “values.”
“Why am I voting for him? He’s a great guy. I think he’s representing Georgia’s values,” Daknis said. “Also, his opponent isn’t worthy of holding the office. So, I’m voting for Warnock, but I’m also voting against that guy.”
Knight said that Warnock stands for the same values she does.
“A lot of people vote for one thing, but he checks all of my boxes,” she said. “He has helped the people in Georgia since he’s been in office. He represents everybody.”
During his Columbus rally, Warnock again focused on his life story and emphasized his focus on working across the aisle to deliver for Georgians. He spoke at length about working with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) on an amendment to the bipartisan infrastructure package that targets the planned extension of Interstate 14 — a story he frequently tells at campaign stops.
His focus on talking about bipartisanship stands in stark contrast to how Walker and Republicans paint Warnock, repeatedly saying the senator votes with Biden “96 percent of the time.” Even with his moderate messaging, however, Warnock hasn’t shied away from embracing some policies that have been popular with liberal voters, including student-loan forgiveness.
After the rally, Warnock emphasized in remarks to reporters that he has always reached out to all the voters of Georgia and has a record of working with people he doesn’t always agree with. “I’d like to think that even those who don’t always agree with me respect me,” he said.
A small group of older Black women who attended the Columbus rally afterward stood in the shade next to the theater and talked about Warnock and how they’re feeling about the election.
Theresa El-Amin, 74, shared that she’s a registered independent still hoping one day the Green Party will have a ballot line in Georgia. But, in this race, she’s certain she’ll be voting for Warnock.
“I vote for the better candidates in the two-party system, and there’s no question that Raphael Warnock is one of them,” El-Amin said.
Burma Williams, 72, a former educator, said she planned to get involved in get-out-the-vote efforts in the final days of the race to ensure Warnock wins. Asked how she felt about his rally, Williams was quick to share that she’s seen the senator before.
“I really enjoy him,” she said. “For me, there’s really no argument who is the best one to send up there.” | 2022-10-24T10:27:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Raphael Warnock barely mentions Herschel Walker on the stump, but hits hard in ads - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/warnock-walker-senate-abortion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/warnock-walker-senate-abortion/ |
Normal kidneys can release up to a quart of fluid every hour. Drinking more than that can be hazardous to your health.
Advice by Joseph G. Verbalis, MD
(Chelsea Conrad/ Washington Post illustration)
Joseph G. Verbalis is the chief of the endocrinology and metabolism division at Georgetown University and a specialist in pituitary function.
Q: I know it’s important to stay hydrated, but what happens if I drink a lot of water in one sitting? Is it possible to drink too much?
A: What happens when you drink a lot of water depends on your health, your activity at the time and how much you mean by “too much.”
The most likely outcome is just that you’ll urinate more frequently to get rid of the excess water.
But it is possible to go overboard. Normal kidneys can release up to a quart of fluid every hour. If you drink more than that, you’ll retain the excess water in your body, which causes a condition known as hyponatremia and can be hazardous to your health. Mild hyponatremia causes few symptoms, but more severe cases — when your blood sodium levels go below 130 mEq/L — can lead to brain swelling and progressive neurological symptoms, including confusion, disorientation, seizures, coma and sometimes death.
Hyponatremia was the cause of death in a participant in a 2007 radio contest in California, in which the prize went to whoever could drink the most before having to urinate. The contestant died after reportedly drinking nearly two gallons of water over two hours — clearly exceeding what her kidneys could handle, which would be about two quarts, or a half-gallon, over two hours. Excessive water intake also has led to the deaths of students during fraternity hazing rituals.
But it’s important to remember that these are contrived situations that most people would never experience.
Your body carefully regulates water intake
To understand why this is unlikely to happen in your regular life, you need to know how we regulate the amount of water in our bodies. The controls of body water balance are twofold: thirst and the secretion of a hormone called arginine vasopressin (AVP, also known as antidiuretic hormone) from the pituitary gland.
When you’re outside on a hot summer day, sweat losses cause gradual dehydration. The brain senses changes in the blood concentration — mainly increased sodium — and releases AVP, which travels to the kidneys and tells them to save water. As a result, very little urine is excreted; it also becomes very concentrated and has a darker yellow color.
But at a certain point, urine concentration alone isn’t enough to prevent dehydration. That’s when higher centers in the brain are activated to stimulate thirst.
When you aren’t dehydrated and drink excess water, the brain also senses this through opposite changes in the blood concentration — mainly decreased sodium. Secretion of AVP is inhibited, which tells the kidneys to release more water. Then a large volume of dilute urine — very pale in color — is excreted to get rid of the excess water.
You also won’t feel thirsty. But that isn’t very helpful: We don’t usually drink fluids because of thirst. Instead, our fluid intake tends to be driven by flavor (like my daughter’s love of Diet Coke); our need to accompany solid foods with a beverage; and desired side effects, as is the case with coffee and alcohol.
That being said, there are certain conditions and activities that can limit how much urine the kidneys release and your likelihood of experiencing hyponatremia. These include health conditions such as the syndrome of inappropriate antidiuretic hormone secretion; medications, including diuretics and antidepressants; and even nausea and exercise.
Perhaps the best studied of these is exercise-associated hyponatremia, particularly in marathon, triathlon or ultramarathon races. These hyponatremia cases were initially thought to be caused by sweat sodium losses, but subsequent studies showed that they were mostly because of too much fluid intake during the events.
Fluid intake during exercise rarely exceeds one quart per hour. But exercise stimulates the release of AVP, so even “normal” amounts of water consumption can cause water retention and hyponatremia under these conditions. Nausea has a similar effect on AVP secretion.
So if you’re exercising or nauseated, you can’t excrete water as normally as when you’re sitting comfortably watching a movie — unless, of course, the movie makes you nauseous.
So how much water should I drink?
I participated in consensus conferences on exercise-associated hyponatremia, which came to a very simple conclusion: You should drink according to your thirst, during exercise or at rest, but not an arbitrarily determined amount. (I’ve consulted for Otsuka Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures a drug to treat hyponatremia.)
Ideal fluid intake varies by person, depending on a variety of factors. There are some medical conditions in which increased fluid intake is recommended, such as a tendency to form kidney stones.
Special concern should be given to older individuals, who generally have a decreased sense of thirst. This usually doesn’t result in dehydration, but under conditions of increased fluid losses (increased sweating during heat waves, diarrhea), they should be encouraged to drink more fluids even if they aren’t thirsty.
But for most people, drinking more than needed to maintain water balance is neither necessary nor medically helpful.
In fact, the recommendation to drink eight glasses of eight ounces of water daily isn’t supported by evidence-based data or known physiological principles.
The bottom line: If you don’t feel thirsty, chances are you’re properly hydrated. But if you do feel thirst, drink as much as you need until the thirst goes away.
That is not only the best medical advice to maintain body water balance, but it’s also common sense that has enabled the survival of the human species for millennia. We shouldn’t abandon that successful strategy now. | 2022-10-24T10:28:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What happens if I drink too much water? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/10/24/drinking-too-much-water-hyponatremia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/10/24/drinking-too-much-water-hyponatremia/ |
By Carra Anna and Munir Ahmed | AP
NAIROBI, Kenya — A senior Pakistani journalist living in hiding in Kenya was shot and killed by police after the car he was in sped up instead of halting at a roadblock near Nairobi, the police said on Monday. They said it was a case of “mistaken identity” during a search for a similar car involved in a case of child abduction. | 2022-10-24T10:28:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nairobi police say Pakistani journalist killed by mistake - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nairobi-police-say-pakistani-journalist-killed-by-mistake/2022/10/24/3da045dc-5381-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nairobi-police-say-pakistani-journalist-killed-by-mistake/2022/10/24/3da045dc-5381-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
FILE - Beate Zschaepe sits in the court room in Munich, Germany, June 20, 2017. Germany’s top court has thrown out an appeal by Zschaepe, the only known survivor of a far-right group that killed 10 people, most with migrant roots, against her conviction and life sentence. The Federal Constitutional Court said that Beate Zschaepe had failed to demonstrate that her fundamental judicial rights had been violated. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader,Pool, File)
BERLIN — Germany’s top court on Monday rejected an appeal by the only known survivor of a far-right group against her conviction and life sentence for her part in the killing of 10 people, most with migrant roots. | 2022-10-24T10:29:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Top German court rejects appeal over neo-Nazi murder spree - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/top-german-court-rejects-appeal-over-neo-nazi-murder-spree/2022/10/24/5abeac76-537c-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/top-german-court-rejects-appeal-over-neo-nazi-murder-spree/2022/10/24/5abeac76-537c-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Pedestrian fatally struck by vehicle in Montgomery County
A 39-year-old pedestrian was struck and killed by the driver of a vehicle on a highway in Montgomery County.
Local police said the incident happened just before 9 p.m. Saturday near Midcounty Highway and Miller Fall Road in the Gaithersburg area.
When officers arrived, the pedestrian was pronounced dead on the scene; the victim’s identity was not released, pending the notification of family. Police said the driver stayed on the scene. | 2022-10-24T11:25:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pedestrian struck and killed in Montgomery County - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/pedestrian-dead-montgomery-county/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/pedestrian-dead-montgomery-county/ |
Loudoun school board race partisan, tense and a test of GOP appeal
A Loudoun County School Board meeting in August 2021. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
This fall’s race for two Loudoun school board seats is tight and partisan, with the candidates’ agendas seemingly determined by their political affiliation — and with all six candidates grappling with some families’ lingering anger over the way the school district handled a high-profile pair of student sexual assaults.
The two seats up for reelection are those representing the districts of Leesburg and Broad Run, with three candidates seeking each seat. Although school boards are ostensibly nonpartisan, each race has a Republican, a Democrat and an independent or moderate candidate. The Republicans are broadly focused on school safety and parents’ rights, while Democrats are zeroing in on literacy education and staff recruitment, and the independent candidates are prioritizing achievement gaps in education, the needs of special education students and greater communication with parents.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) is also exerting influence on the campaign, with the Republican candidates largely echoing the education-related talking points he successfully relied on to gain the governorship in 2021. The governor has frequently blasted the Loudoun school district for its response to the sexual assaults, which his administration is now investigating. Youngkin unsuccessfully attempted to force all nine members of the school board to stand for reelection this November, rather than just the two who were slated to do so.
Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington, said the results of the Loudoun race could be a bellwether for the Republican Party nationally, many of whose members would like to imitate Youngkin’s success last year in Virginia.
“Loudoun County has really become ground zero in Republican efforts to win back the suburbs,” he said. “If the renewed Republican efforts translate to gains in Loudoun, you can expect similar efforts elsewhere.”
The trio competing for the Broad Run seat are Nick Gothard, a 22-year-old nonprofit program manager; Tiffany Polifko, a 40-year-old behavior analyst who provides treatment for children with autism; and Andrew Hoyler, a 26-year-old commercial airline pilot who currently serves on the school board. The three competing for the Leesburg seat are Lauren Shernoff, 38, a part-time Loudoun teacher; Michael Rivera, a 56-year-old sheriff’s office deputy; and Erika Ogedegbe, a 52-year-old chief data architect at American University. (Leesburg area incumbent Tom Marshall withdrew from the race in August after failing to receive endorsements from the county’s teachers group or the Democratic Party, among other reasons, according to news reports.)
Ogedegbe and Gothard received the endorsement of the Loudoun County Democratic Committee, while Polifko and Rivera won endorsements from the Loudoun County Republican Committee. Hoyler identifies as an independent and Shernoff wrote in an email that she refused to accept an endorsement from either political party because “the school board is supposed to be … nonpartisan.”
Increasing the competitive nature of the race, the six candidates have collectively raised tens of thousands of dollars as of late October. The fundraising is not unusually large for a school board election — especially in recent years, when fraught fights over what schools should teach about race, racism, history, gender and sexuality have seen school board races across the country draw hundreds of thousands of dollars from conservative political action committees or wealthy individuals.
Asked what they think are the biggest problems facing the school district, both Republican candidates said they believe parents have insufficient rights over their children’s education. Polifko said she is displeased that sexually explicit books are available to children in school libraries and that she does not believe grading policies are sufficiently rigorous.
In an email, Rivera listed “student and teacher safety” as his top concern. He also shared displeasure with Loudoun’s handling of the sexual assaults: When a student committed a sexual assault on one campus last year, the district transferred the juvenile to another, where he committed a second assault. Rivera said the school board, superintendent and top staff should have been more upfront with the public about the assaults.
“The manner in which the assaults were investigated and communicated were a catalyst in Loudoun that exposed just how morally vacant and corrupt the school board was and continues to be,” he said.
Rivera said he believes Loudoun’s leadership should have lost their jobs over the sexual assaults, as did Polifko.
These candidates’ platforms are resonating with some conservative parents — including Ian Prior, a Loudoun father and former Trump administration official who leads the parents’ rights group Fight for Schools. Prior said Fight for Schools has decided not to endorse any candidate in the race, but that he would prefer not to see either of the Democratic candidates (Gothard and Ogedegbe) elected.
“I do think [the candidates] are hitting the important points,” Prior said. “The issue of parental rights especially.”
By contrast, the Democratic candidates wrote in emails that they have different priorities. Ogedegbe said she thinks Loudoun needs to improve its early literacy teaching, improve its staff recruitment and retention and augment its communication with families. Gothard likewise said he is worried about literacy education and teacher recruitment and retention, as well as failing school infrastructure.
“These issues strike at the core of our education system and require policy-driven representatives that will tirelessly work to address them,” Gothard wrote.
Asked about Loudoun’s handling of the sexual assaults, Gothard and Ogedegbe were less harsh in their judgments than their Republican competitors. Gothard said he takes sexual assault very seriously and that he was frustrated that some of the details of what happened remain unknown by the public. But he did not call for the firing of top Loudoun school officials.
Ogedegbe wrote in an email that “it is very clear that something went terribly wrong” and that her “heart goes out to all those who have been impacted by these crimes.” She said she is unsure if the superintendent or other administrators should have lost their jobs because she does not know the full facts of the case.
These candidates’ campaigns are earning them appreciation from more liberal-leaning parents, including the members of the progressive parents’ group Loudoun 4 All. The group wrote in a statement that “Ogedegbe and Gothard have worked to refocus their campaigns on real issues,” as compared to their Republican counterparts. Both candidates have also been endorsed by the Loudoun Education Association teachers’ group.
Sandy Sullivan, president of the association, said in an interview that Gothard and Ogedegbe have the right priorities and would take the correct approach to leading the Loudoun school system.
“We have to take care of kids as individuals, and that is truly a goal of both those candidates — early literacy, they know that’s a big concern,” said Sullivan, whose association has roughly 3,400 members. “Both Nick and Erika are exceptional candidates, they have deep roots in our communities, they’re consensus-builders and peacemakers.”
Meanwhile, independent candidates Shernoff and Hoyler are both worried primarily by students’ academic performance. Shernoff wrote in an email that the Loudoun district needs to combat learning loss from the coronavirus pandemic, improve its offerings for special education students and implement a new literacy curriculum. Similarly, Hoyler wrote that Loudoun must narrow academic achievement gaps and figure out ways to better accommodate its special education students.
Both candidates also emphasized the need for Loudoun school officials to speak more often, and with greater honesty, to parents. Shernoff wrote that Loudoun’s leadership must work on its “transparency and accountability, two way communication, and parental involvement.”
Hoyler wrote: “Our community needs a transparent representative who prioritizes open and honest communication.”
When it comes to campaign funding, Shernoff, assisted by large donations from her family, has far outpaced her competitors.
In Leesburg, Ogedegbe reported she has raised $12,768, with 71 percent of the money coming from her neighbors, family, friends and current and former colleagues. Rivera said he has raised about $13,000, mostly from individuals’ private donations. Shernoff said she has raised $53,940.
“We’ve self-funded 10%, had the support of my incredible family … at 40%, and have had over 70 unique in-kind and cash donors that have supported our mission accounting for the other 50%,” she wrote.
In Broad Run, Gothard said he has pulled in more than $16,000. He said most of his donors are educators and that the average individual donation is around $40. Hoyler said he has raised $10,000 from “individuals from both sides of the political spectrum,” although he has accepted no money from parties, political action committees or special interest groups. Polifko did not respond to a question asking about her funding.
Shannon Pecora, a parent of two Loudoun County students, said she is overall displeased that so much of the school board race is focusing on issues that have become political footballs — for example, concerns over parents’ rights and displeasure with the handling of the sexual assault cases — and that she is further distressed by the fact both races are so nakedly partisan.
She said Youngkin is using Loudoun as “his testing grounds where he can work out his own political aspirations [and] unfortunately, there are many Loudoun residents who fall for rhetoric over reality — and more unfortunately, they allow that to steer their votes.”
Pecora added: “The School Board, at its true core, is not a political stage. There is nothing ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ in ideology that belongs in the workings of the school board.” | 2022-10-24T11:26:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Loudoun school board race could have national impact for GOP - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/24/loudoun-school-board-election/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/24/loudoun-school-board-election/ |
The truth is that California outperforms the US and the rest of world across many industries. That’s especially relevant with renewable energy, the fastest-growing business in California and Germany. The market capitalization of California companies in this business increased 731% the past three years, or 1.74 times more than their German counterparts, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Notable examples include Freemont-based Enphase Energy Inc., a solar and storage solutions provider, up 916%, or more than twice the 410% returned by wind-farm maker PNE AG in Cuxhaven along Germany’s North Sea coast. | 2022-10-24T11:56:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | California Poised to Overtake Germany as World’s No. 4 Economy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/california-poised-to-overtakegermany-as-worlds-no-4-economy/2022/10/24/d4df35a2-538b-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/california-poised-to-overtakegermany-as-worlds-no-4-economy/2022/10/24/d4df35a2-538b-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
To date, the Fed’s monetary tightening hasn’t done much to reduce inflationary pressures or loosen the labor market. As of September, the median consumer price index was up 7.0% from a year earlier, compared with 6.7% in August. Payrolls expanded by 263,000 in September, roughly triple the pace consistent with a stable unemployment rate. The ratio of unfilled jobs to unemployed workers stood at 1.7 in August, far exceeding the 1-to-1 ratio that Powell has cited as appropriate. None of this is consistent with even stable, let alone declining, inflation.
Given the lack of progress, one might expect the Fed to take interest rates even higher than previously planned. Yet officials’ recent remarks suggest they’re sticking to their September projections, which foresee rates increasing 75 basis points in November, 50 in December and 25 in January to a peak of 4.50% to 4.75%. In other words, they intend to take rates to a moderately restrictive level, then wait and see if this constrains growth and increases unemployment enough to bring inflation back down to the central bank’s 2% target. If they don’t get the desired outcome relatively quickly, they’ll keep rates at the peak longer, rather than going higher.
Emphasizing “longer” rather than “higher” has some advantages. It presumably reduces the risk of a hard landing: If monetary policy is somewhat tight, but not very tight, activity and employment should slow gradually. It gives Fed officials time to assess the consequences of their efforts, recognizing that monetary policy entails uncertainty and affects the economy with long and variable lags.
That said, the downside risks are significant. Because less-aggressive tightening takes longer to bring down inflation, it might allow inflationary expectations to become unanchored – a dynamic that only even-higher interest rates could counteract. Also, the rise in rates matters as much as the level of rates. Over time, the effect of the higher level will fade – when, for example, the housing market has completed its adjustment to higher mortgage rates. Once that happens, further rate hikes will be needed to exert further restraint.
There’s no free lunch. To increase its chances of getting inflation back down to 2%, the Fed has to be willing to push short-term interest rates higher when the economy doesn’t slow sufficiently and the labor market remains too tight. That increases the likelihood of recession. Volcker did what was necessary and beat inflation. Burns didn’t, and failed. How does Powell want to be remembered?
• Fed Is Giving Americans a Lesson in Lag Time: Allison Schrager | 2022-10-24T11:56:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Will Jerome Powell Be Like Volcker or Burns? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/will-jerome-powell-be-like-volcker-or-burns/2022/10/24/a1d80304-5387-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/will-jerome-powell-be-like-volcker-or-burns/2022/10/24/a1d80304-5387-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
How the owners of Z&Z manoushe bakery would spend a perfect day in D.C.
By Rudi Greenberg
Danny and Johnny Dubbaneh, the brothers behind buzzy Rockville manoushe bakery Z&Z, have always had an entrepreneurial spirit, starting businesses together over the years including a curated guide to date spots in D.C. and a furniture rental service at the University of Maryland.
“My first business that got me in trouble was when I used to sell my lunch to my friends at school because my mom would make us these great lunches,” Danny recalls. “Then I'd go get the free lunch at the cafeteria, but my mom found out and got super upset.”
In retrospect, Danny was laying the foundation for Z&Z, which brings their family’s food to the masses. Using their grandmother’s recipe as the base, Danny and Johnny have been selling manoushe — a Mediterranean flatbread (don’t call it pizza) topped with their signature za’atar seasoning, labneh, shawarma, veggies and more — at D.C.-area farmers markets since 2016.
The Dubbanehs grew up in Aspen Hill in a restaurant family; they have two sisters and another brother, Ronnie, who helps with strategy. Their dad owned a number of Chicken Basket restaurants in Maryland with his brothers, and their grandfather and an uncle opened Chicken Tonight in Rockville in the ’80s. In 2021, Danny, 34, and Johnny, 29, opened Z&Z’s first bakery in the same space that used to house Chicken Tonight — an extension of their family’s history, even if their parents weren’t always supportive of the business.
“They were against the idea because they experienced firsthand the struggles and challenges of working in the food industry,” Johnny says. (Though, as Danny notes, they’ve always pitched in to help.) “We're stubborn, and we wanted to share our culture and hospitality and try to make this an extension of who we are.”
There’s an approachable family vibe to Z&Z — Johnny manages their engaging, personality-driven social media presence — that helped them gain a cult following at the Central Farm Markets around town. You’ll also find their za’atar on the menus at Call Your Mother, Maydan and the Green Zone. “Everyone that comes by is like extended family,” Danny says.
Now they’re working on putting manoushe on the map. Last month, Z&Z was named one of Bon Appétit’s 50 best new restaurants; this month they started selling frozen versions of their manoushe at area Whole Foods stores.
“It’s the first of its kind in Whole Foods, and really any national grocery, so I think it’s quite iconic to see our culture represented in such a huge category in America,” Johnny says.
The Rockville High School graduates, who still live in Rockville, celebrate that culture and their home in their joint dream day.
Danny: I like to start my day with a cup of coffee and a book. I love to read outside in the morning. I was just reading a novel called “The Parisian” by Isabella Hammad. I generally alternate between literature and business books because I am self-educating. I spent the last five years trying to teach myself as much as possible with a lot of books and YouTube videos.
Johnny: I’m definitely going to the gym. It’s kind of my way to unwind. I go to Onelife Fitness in Rockville. It’s a way to really unwind. I enjoy working out, and it gives me time to be alone, which I don’t get a lot of.
After the gym, we head to the Bethesda Central Farm Market together. We spent about seven years there, made good friends and had a lot of good food there. We’ll drop by Yufka Bakery for some hand-stretched, phyllo-type savory and sweet pastries. One of the ones I really like is stuffed with bacon, egg and cheddar. Super delicious: crunchy on the outside and savory fillings. And then there’s also Cipolla Rossa Pizzeria, which does breakfast pizza. I know it’s the opposite of our ballgame, but it has a delicious crust topped with a fried egg, bacon and vegetables.
Danny: I’d definitely get coffee; Zeke’s is over there, and that’s a go-to. I get a black coffee just straight. And it has to be very hot — once it gets even slightly lukewarm, I lose interest. Johnny would probably make a chai tea at home before.
Johnny: One of our favorite activities is playing basketball. We would get our high school friends together and go to this little basketball court that we call the graveyard because there’s like a little graveyard of maybe 10 tombstones next to it. It’s on Muncaster Mill Road in Rockville. We’d always go play at night under the lights. It was kind of our own space. Nobody really knew about it but us, and we’d get mad when other people found out about it. It was one of the greatest activities of our high school days, and even after that we’d get together with friends and just play there.
Danny: After basketball, we’ll drive through College Park and visit our old alma mater. Then we’ll swing by this place that my brother-in-law put us on called Koite Grill on Colesville [Road]. They make the most amazing Senegalese charcoal chicken, grilled onions and then this rice. It’s probably the food I crave the most often. I like the smoky flavor and the simple pepper seasoning. It’s so juicy — I literally just eat it with my hands. Every time my brother-in-law comes, he usually brings some and we just devour it. Eat lunch, walk around, maybe reminisce on the old days and see how much we don’t even recognize the campus. Outside of the business school, we have a couple of stickers. One business we started when Johnny was in college was called Terpiture; we stuck it on a pole out there. We went back and added a Z&Z sticker next to it.
Johnny: We’ll split it up, and I’ll go to Glenstone museum. It’s a beautiful campus to take a stroll and look at any of the exhibits. It’s been a few years since I’ve been, but I love the architecture and the walking paths. I’m a sucker for foliage.
Danny: I’d meet my wife, Zerlina, and go for a nice long walk with our puppy, Bodie, who is named after a character on “The Wire,” on the Rock Creek Park Trail. I love walking in general. With the greenery and the water trickling and all the sounds and the sun — it’s my favorite way to relax.
Johnny: I head to Daru with my lady friend, Sarah, and get their lamb chops. I’ve been there before; they were on Bon Appétit’s list, too. I discovered them through our friends at the Green Zone, and they reached out to us to use our za’atar on their naan. I’ll do the Chai-Teani to drink.
Danny: My wife and I will go to Albi in Navy Yard. We’ll do the chef’s table at the hearth experience. My wife took me for my birthday there last year. You’re tasting new wine, you’re sitting right there in the kitchen, you can see everything happening, and they just keep bringing out plates and wine. They take really good care of you. I’m not even a big sweet person, but they served this labne soft-serve ice cream at the end of the meal that was phenomenal.
Then we’ll meet up for end-of-the-night cocktails at Green Zone. It’s such a cool cocktail bar with the same kind of environment that we’d like to create here with music and good drinks and the art and everything. We always see a lot of friends in the D.C. Arab community there. They make amazing cocktails, obviously, some of the best in the country, but I like the simple golden Arak. That’s what I like to finish my night with.
Johnny: Some of my friends that are in the burbs and never leave will come to the city — the only chance is on a dream day. I know it’s going to sound like we’re identical, but I’m also a simple guy and love the Arak. It’s got a licorice aftertaste and a smooth finish. They have a dance party upstairs, and I’m standing in the corner not dancing because I don’t dance.
Danny: I don’t dance either, unless I’ve had a lot of cocktails. But I might sneak across the street to Dan’s Cafe if I’m feeling young. | 2022-10-24T11:56:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How the owners of Z&Z manoushe bakery would spend a perfect day in D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/danny-johnny-dubbaneh-dream-day/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/danny-johnny-dubbaneh-dream-day/ |
A taco-by-taco look at the busiest shift of the week at La Tejana
By Jordan-Marie Smith
La Tejana draws long lines on the weekends. (Deb Lindsey for The Washington Post)
On a typical Saturday morning, La Tejana co-owner Gus May leaves his Mount Pleasant apartment, climbs down a rickety spiral staircase and hears the feasting rats below scatter. Sometimes, if the moon is out, he’ll look up at the sky and pray for good vibes.
“You know, I’ll look up to the stars and be like, ‘Hey, hope the taco gods are on our side today,’ ” May, 34, tells me later in the day.
Saturdays are the busiest days for the folks who work at the Mount Pleasant breakfast taco haven, which opened in its permanent home this summer. In true neighborhood fashion, everyone comes out for the weekly farmers market. And there’s almost always a line at La Tejana.
The Saturday I tagged along with May, vendors were already setting up around 6 a.m. in the neighborhood square between Mount Pleasant and Lamont streets. Sometimes, May says, Friday-night revelers are still going strong as he walks to work.
A sign outside the white-painted storefront reads, “La Tejana breakfast tacos y más.” Inside, there’s a shrine to all things Texas over the coffee counter. Opposite the pickup window, black hills are silhouetted against a pink and red sky in a mural by local artist Nate Mann.
May is the head of the kitchen, packing orders or making tacos when necessary. But he assures me that the journey from open to close begins with his staff: Lily, Rosa and Maria. Before the shop opens, they make their way to the street. All four exclaim in Spanish when they see the purple, pink and dusty blue sunrise over Mount Pleasant Street.
As they file back to the kitchen, I head to the front of the house, where Astrini “Detri” Biyanindita and Charlotte Dreyer handle the cash register. The storefront is about to greet its first customer.
7:30 a.m. The front door opens and a guy rolls in who says he gets his tacos there every Saturday morning. “So the first order is three of everything,” May says. A hefty order kicks off the day.
The rush has begun.
There are seven breakfast tacos on the menu — fillings include scrambled eggs, refried beans, fried potatoes, chorizo and queso — all wrapped in housemade flour tortillas. Lily, Rosa and Maria prepare and wrap the precious parcels before they go into the warming oven, while May packs orders in brown paper bags that feature the La Tejana logo: an illustration of his wife, co-owner Ana-Maria Jaramillo.
9:05 a.m. Jaramillo arrives.
She’s the reason the restaurant exists — and how the business got its name (“la tejana” means “woman from Texas”). Back when the pair were long-distance dating, May visited Jaramillo, 32, in her hometown of Austin, where he tried the breakfast tacos at her favorite taqueria. He knew then that he wanted to bring the same comforting flavor and Rio Grande Valley style to Washington.
But that would take time — and a breakup.
Jaramillo relocated to the District to pursue the relationship, but by 2019, she was ready to call it quits. While she was working as a speech pathologist, May had been bouncing around from job to job. She’d already made plans to return to Texas — even hired a moving company — when the pair met at Timber Pizza in Petworth for what could well have been their final conversation. Instead, over a pie at the bar, May made a pitch to win Jaramillo back.
“And [May] was basically like, ‘I have a pop-up booked, and I’m going to pursue the breakfast taco thing, and I want you to give me a chance,’ ” Jaramillo says. “I was like, our whole relationship depends on the success of this pop-up.” She not only took the chance, but showed up to work the register.
Fast-forward to 2022: The couple married in April and opened La Tejana’s bricks-and-mortar location in August. And one of its best-selling tacos, the 956, takes its name from the Rio Grande Valley area code.
11 a.m. The line has reached 12 people. Jaramillo points out a customer who’s been with the business since it began delivering tortillas at the beginning of the pandemic.
“Once they started doing pop-ups, I became a regular on the weekends, and then it just kind of built up since then,” says Brian Chou, a 25-year-old devotee who lives in the neighborhood.
“I’m pretty strategic about when I come,” Chou says. He explains that this is one of La Tejana’s busiest days. “The lines in general, like, yeah, we hate waiting, but, you know, it’s all for a good reason.”
Tom Sietsema’s Fall Dining Guide
11:20 a.m. Back in the kitchen, Jaramillo is explaining the latest addition to the taco menu: Uncle P, a.k.a. papas con huevo. Containing cheesy scrambled eggs, potatoes and a queso drizzle, the taco is named after local artist Pierre Edwards.
“Pierre featured us in his perfect day for The Washington Post. So we’re going to name our next veg taco Uncle Pierre, Uncle P — that’s it,” Jaramillo says.
11:52 a.m. At one point, Jaramillo stops talking. That’s right around when I learn the word “volando.” It means “flying” in Spanish, but in the La Tejana kitchen, it can mean “I need this right now!”
12:15 p.m. The tension heats up in the kitchen as the tickets keep coming and the line continues to lengthen. Twenty-eight people are queued for breakfast tacos. The wait time has reached 20 minutes.
With 45 minutes left in the shift, May and Jaramillo start to riff off each other’s fast-paced energy.
“Y’all are making Tios, right?” Jaramillo says in English, then repeats in Spanish when she doesn’t hear an answer.
“Si, mi amor,” May replies.
12:41 p.m. There are 12 tickets on the board. Jaramillo is still relatively silent — if you don’t count her maniacal laughter at the volume of orders coming in.
“Do one ticket at a time; stop worrying about organization — just do one ticket at a time,” May says.
12:50 p.m. Eleven tickets are on the board, meaning a crush of new orders is making it almost certain that the team will be making at least one more taco past 1 p.m., the standard closing time.
“Spare me the judgment; you see how many tickets we had? That’s the longest wait time we’ve ever had: 20 minutes,” Jaramillo says. “It’s supposed to be two minutes. It went south real quick.”
1:10 p.m. It’s time for La Tejana to close, and there’s one final ticket.
“One 9[56], one Migas, one Tio clears the board. One 9, one Migas, one Tio clears the board. Clear the board,” Jaramillo says. “Ana’s back to her normal self.”
After the day wraps, there are plenty of leftover tacos to give away. Across the street, farmers market vendors are packing up their booths, loading vegetables and flowers for the trip home. “Do you want some tacos?” Jaramillo asks them. They do.
“This is the best day ever,” one says.
Once all the tacos have been given away, Jaramillo heads back to the shop, smiling, ready to do it all again on Sunday.
La Tejana
3211 Mount Pleasant St. NW, latejanadc.com.
Hours: 7:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.
Nearest Metro: Columbia Heights, with a half-mile walk to the taqueria.
Prices: 1 taco for $4.50, 3 for $13 and 6 for $24; 50 cents to $3.75 for salsa andcoffees (small or large). | 2022-10-24T11:56:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Behind the scenes at La Tejana, D.C.'s hottest breakfast taco spot - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/la-tejana-district-taco-restaurant/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/la-tejana-district-taco-restaurant/ |
By Micheline Maynard
New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell in November 2019 at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new main terminal of the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport in Kenner, La. (Gerald Herbert/AP)
You could not blame New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell for being angry. On a brilliant late-September day, the mayor was confronted with crime statistics showing that New Orleans had the nation’s highest murder rate during the first half of 2022.
Commentators, inevitably, had tagged New Orleans with the “murder capital” label. The mayor, asked about the designation, bristled and said, “I do not embrace that at all.”
Although acknowledging an “uptick in crime” (the homicide rate had increased 44 percent over the same period last year), Cantrell contended that the killings were less likely to involve random victims than people in disputes that turned violent, with mental-health problems also sometimes a factor.
For me, it was déjà vu. I have now lived in two of the nation’s “murder capitals” — New Orleans and, in the 1980s, Detroit.
Sadly, once a city gets that label, shaking it off can take years. If social media comment boards are any indication, people still think of Detroit as a deserted, dangerous place, apparently unaware of a comeback in its finances and development over the past decade. Detroit still has work to do in combating violent crime, but at least it is no longer a contender for the “murder capital” title.
At a book event up north last month, I was approached by an older couple. “You live in New Orleans? Is it safe?” the man asked. The woman brought up a recent Wall Street Journal story declaring a crisis in the Crescent City.
Yes, we worry about crime down here, especially merchants and restaurateurs whose livelihoods depend on enticing people to leave the house. I had a long chat recently with a cafe owner who said business was fine on weekends, when tourists were out, but dried up on weeknights. Locals increasingly seemed to prefer staying safely at home after dark.
That reluctance can be difficult for a city to overcome, even with the most-focused municipal leadership. Unfortunately, Cantrell, now in her second term, has provided a steady drip of distractions.
In the past two years, according to news reports, the mayor has cost the city tens of thousands of dollars in travel expenses, including racking up $29,000 in airline upgrades to first class or business class. A trip to France this summer cost $43,000, Nola.com reported, with Cantrell’s airfare alone costing more than $18,000.
After initially refusing to repay the city, contending that her travel was needed to attract investment and tourism, Cantrell relented recently.
But the mayor’s extravagant taste in travel has become a New Orleans punch line. “Where in the World is LaToya Cantrell?” jibed the cover of Gambit, a lively local newsmagazine.
Another stumble: Cantrell caused gasps in August when she warned that Mardi Gras in February might have to be canceled because the city won’t have enough police officers.
The announcement was stunning: Mardi Gras is vital to the city’s financial health, with an economic impact in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Cantrell’s warning, in addition to potentially discouraging tourists, shocked the thousands of New Orleans residents who are members of Mardi Gras parade organizations, known as krewes.
The Krewe of Themis, my group, had been told that the 2023 parade route might be shorter if not enough police officers were available, as happened last year. But no one foresaw the possible cancellation of Mardi Gras itself.
The next day, Cantrell backtracked. On Oct. 13, the city announced that Mardi Gras would go on, but with limited parade routes.
The shortage of police officers, amid the murder rise, is one more daunting challenge facing the city.
Some New Orleanians have had enough. A recall campaign started in August, amid revelations about the mayor’s travel spending. By late September, the recall organizers reported that they had gathered more than 10,000 petition signatures; about 54,000 will be needed by the end of February to get the recall on the ballot next year.
Tourists riding the streetcar on St. Charles Avenue recently couldn’t miss the big banners hung on the fence of a cream-colored mansion reading. “Save New Orleans — Sign Mayor Recall.”
Nearby, a woman was collecting petition signatures. Wearing a big pink hat, pink suit, bright lipstick and bold jewelry, she barked at me, “Happy with this street?,” waving at the cracked roadway.
She had a point. Many streets are riddled with potholes, sidewalks are crumbling and water-main breaks seem as ubiquitous as beignets in French Quarter cafes. (Some longtime residents contend that decay is a sign of the authentic New Orleans.)
Cantrell has experience with salvaging success from unpromising circumstances. She rose to prominence in the city after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when she successfully lobbied to save the Rosa F. Keller Public Library and surrounding businesses that had been devastated by the storm.
I swung by the library recently. It’s located in a handsome vintage home with a modern addition, and clearly plays a vibrant role in the local community. Even if Cantrell survives the recall effort, she needs to recapture the unified spirit that preserved the library and launched her political career. | 2022-10-24T11:57:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell battles an array of problems - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/new-orleans-mayor-latoya-cantrell-struggles/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/new-orleans-mayor-latoya-cantrell-struggles/ |
A man holds a Bible during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. (John Minchillo/AP)
Many Americans remain puzzled by how self-described evangelical Christians can support a MAGA movement that increasingly normalizes bigotry and celebrates morally and intellectually unfit leaders. Robert P. Jones, CEO of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and author of “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” has studied the politics of White Christian evangelicals for decades. Our recent conversation appears below lightly edited for style and length:
What accounts for White Christian evangelicals’ acceptance of Republicans’ increasingly unabashed expressions of bigotry?
White evangelicalism, with its strong emphasis on personal salvation, has always had a weakly developed and myopic political ethic. It developed a theology obsessed with personal (especially sexual) morality, which largely screened out concerns about social or structural injustice outside the church. This was by design, given that for most of its existence, it required a theology that was externally compatible with slavery and segregation — in short, with white supremacy. More recently, White evangelicals faced a crossroads when [Donald] Trump entered the political scene in the Republican Party, the party to which they fled in the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the Democratic Party’s support for the civil rights movement.
Given that history, with the vast majority of White evangelicals supporting and blessing segregationist leaders just a generation ago, I wouldn’t characterize the current state of White evangelical responses, or lack of responses, as wildly inconsistent with this past. But the way White evangelicals have overtly given themselves over, not just to one political party but to one authoritarian personality, is deeply troubling.
On these questions, there is one public opinion survey question I keep coming back to, which gets to the heart of this continued White evangelical acquiescence of moral judgment and political responsibility. In 2011, PRRI asked whether people thought an elected official who committed an immoral act “can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” While just 30 percent of White evangelicals said such a candidate could fulfill their duties in 2011, that number jumped to 72 percent in 2016 when Trump was at the top of the ticket, and it remains at 68 percent today.
Which White evangelical leaders speak out about bigotry?
There are certainly voices who have spoken up about the dangers of the racism and misogyny in Trump’s MAGA worldview. But, reminiscent of the civil rights era, those who have spoken up have found themselves either compelled by their consciences or by the losses of their jobs to leave. The recent exodus of Russell Moore from the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and the announcement from Beth Moore (no relation) that she was leaving the denomination are two recent examples. With the loss of leaders of moral conscience, and similar losses in the pews already happening (White evangelicals are aging and are down to 14.6 percent of the population), we’re likely to see diminishing numbers left within the fold who have the inclination to speak out.
Recent events also demonstrate that the most energy inside White evangelical circles is actually being spent doubling down to prevent efforts to deal honestly with the history of racism and bigotry. Following months of protests for racial justice across the summer of 2020, the White male presidents of all six Southern Baptist seminaries came together to issue an unprecedented joint statement. While it paid lip service to condemning “racism in any form,” its main thrust — and clear purpose — was the defensive condemnation of “any version of Critical Theory” as incompatible with the denomination’s confession of faith. The president of the Southern Baptist Convention, J.D. Greear, also endorsed the statement, adding, “The Gospel gives a better answer.”
To my knowledge, no other issue in the denomination’s nearly 180-year history has warranted a joint official statement by its seminary presidents — not poverty, nor hunger, nor racial prejudice, nor the discovery of widespread sexual abuse perpetrated by the clergy trained in their seminaries. Not even evangelism. But the threat of exposing the complicity of Christianity with White supremacy, to those charged with perpetuating an organization that was explicitly founded in 1845 to defend the compatibility of slaveholding and the Gospel, warranted such a response.
When you see GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker in Georgia, you wonder: Do they have no limits on whom they’ll vote for?
I think we have yet to find the limits, or the bottom, of who and what White evangelicals might justify in their allegiance to Trump and the Republican Party. It’s notable that the Republican Party — with no outcry from its White evangelical base — has not developed an official party platform stating what principles, values and policies the party supports since 2016. In lieu of a platform, the GOP passed a resolution stating, “The Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the president’s America-first agenda.” This is a stunning abdication of political responsibility from the party of the self-proclaimed “values voters.”
What turnout do you expect among White evangelicals in midterms?
Despite diminishing numbers, White evangelicals have historically turned out to vote at rates higher than many other Americans. Given that track record, I’d expect them to remain around 1 in 5 voters in the 2022 midterms. | 2022-10-24T11:57:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | White evangelicals won’t recoil against MAGA in the midterms - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/white-evangelicals-maga-robert-jones-interview/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/white-evangelicals-maga-robert-jones-interview/ |
Post Politics Now Biden to give pep talk to Democratic staffers as Election Day rapidly approaches
On our radar: Warnock tries to stay positive on the stump, hit Walker in ads
On our radar: Trump Organization’s criminal trial on fraud charges starts today
Noted: Homegrown campaign against Sen. Grassley energizes Democrats
On our radar: Vulnerable House Democrats defend the middle
Noted: Cheney criticizes Youngkin, others campaigning for election deniers
The latest: U.S. economy is probably rebounding just before midterms
Noted: Right-wing roadshow promotes Christian nationalism before midterms
President Biden speaks in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on Friday. (Tom Brenner for the Washington Post )
Today, with 15 days until Election Day, President Biden plans to make the short trip from the White House to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington to give staffers a pep talk. While some analysts say the political terrain has recently grown more favorable for Republicans, Biden predicted last week a swing in favor of Democrats before voting in the midterms concludes. Democrats are likely to seize later this week on a report expected to show strong growth in the economy.
In New York, the Trump Organization, former president Donald Trump’s namesake company, is set to go on trial for alleged tax crimes. Though Trump is not charged personally, the case is among an array of legal challenges facing the former president as he weighs a 2024 presidential bid.
10:45 a.m. Eastern: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) holds a news conference from Croatia. Watch live here.
1 p.m. Eastern: Biden visits the DNC headquarters in Washington and delivers remarks.
2:15 p.m. Eastern: Biden and first lady Jill Biden participate in a tree-planting ceremony at the White House.
5 p.m. Eastern: The Bidens host a reception to celebrate Diwali. Watch live here.
There are two sides to the reelection bid of Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.): His campaign has pumped out a barrage of negative ads against Republican challenger Herschel Walker. But on the campaign trail, Warnock is projecting an upbeat, positive message.
Reporting from Jonesboro, Ga., The Post’s Sabrina Rodriguez writes that the contrasting nature of Warnock’s campaign illustrates the balancing act the senator has tried to pull off in the final weeks of his campaign for reelection in a purple state. Per Sabrina:
Irena Stolar has voted Republican for over half a century, from Richard M. Nixon to Donald Trump. But in the midterms, Stolar, 73, said she will cast her first vote for a Democrat.
Originally from Ukraine, Stolar refuses to support J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Ohio, who has said he wants to cut off aid to the war-torn country, The Post’s Cara McGoogan writes in a story reported from Parma, Ohio. Per Cara:
Stolar was one of 15 Republican voters or elected officials The Washington Post interviewed this month in Parma, a city of 80,000 near Cleveland that has one of the largest Ukrainian American populations in the state. Many said they would not vote for Vance. In a tight contest, such sentiments could have far-reaching implications.
The Trump Organization, former president Donald Trump’s namesake company, is set to go on trial Monday for alleged tax crimes — the result of a lengthy investigation into the company and its executives related to fraud and other potentially illegal business practices.
Reporting from New York, The Post’s Shayna Jacobs writes that Trump is not charged personally and the portion of the investigation for which he still could face criminal charges is not yet concluded by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigators. Per Shayna:
Iowa Democrats took a beating in 2020: Republicans won up and down the ballot, handily carrying the presidential race, retaining a U.S. Senate seat and expanding their majority in the state House.
The Post’s Dylan Wells writes that national Democrats have, in turn, largely walked away from the state. With Iowa’s Republican elder statesman Sen. Charles E. Grassley on the ballot for his eighth term, his Democratic challenger, Michael Franken, has not received money or support from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Grassley’s seat is considered so safe that national Republicans also have largely left the race alone. Per Dylan:
In between campaign stops, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) is taking calls from fellow House Democrats seeking her support for leadership races upon their return to Capitol Hill. It’s a dumbfounding request for Slotkin, who may not even be serving in Congress next year.
The Post’s Marianna Sotomayor writes that Slotkin and 38 of her colleagues belong to an exclusive group no House Democrat wants to join: vulnerable members who represent the most competitive swing districts in the country. Per Marianna:
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is criticizing Republicans who have hit the campaign trail for GOP election deniers, calling it “indefensible” to boost candidates who have promoted former president Donald Trump’s baseless allegations that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
The Post’s Amy B Wang reports that Cheney, who for nearly two years has sounded the alarm on Trump’s false statements and their deleterious effects on both the Republican Party and American democracy, specifically called out Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), who traveled last week to Arizona to hold a rally with GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, a prominent election denier. Per Amy:
The U.S. economy is expected to have grown robustly in a sharp rebound from the first half of the year, but most Americans are unlikely to notice anything about the turnaround.
The Post’s Abha Bhattarai writes that persistent inflation weighs heavily on economic growth and household budgets and has become a key flash point ahead of the midterm elections. Per Abha:
A strong reading on the next gross domestic product report, scheduled to be released Thursday, would be welcome news for Democrats, who have been struggling to convince voters they have a plan to contain rising prices and put the economy on more stable footing.
Although the newest numbers are likely to look like improvements on paper, economists say they don’t reflect major changes in the economy, which could be headed for a recession in the next year.
“This is going to look better than the previous two GDP reports, but conditions on the ground haven’t changed very much,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “Inflation is still taking a toll. Concerns about the Fed’s tightening remain. Things are not substantively different.”
Since April of last year, the ReAwaken America Tour has brought hard-line election deniers, anti-vaccine doctors, self-proclaimed prophets and conspiracy theorists to enthusiastic crowds across the country.
Reporting from Manheim, Pa., where thousands waited to be baptized in a black plastic animal trough, The Post’s Annie Gowen writes that the central message is that America’s White, evangelical Christian way of life is under threat from the globalist cabal on the “woke” left. Per Annie:
The traveling carnival of misinformation merges entertainment, politics and theology and makes an existential argument to those attending: The debate is no longer about Republican vs. Democrat, they say, it’s about good vs. evil. And it’s time to pick a side.
Since its inception, the tour has been denounced by mainstream religious leaders because of its extremist views. Its organizers have been forced to move venues twice — in New York and Washington state — because of community concerns. The Anti-Defamation League has targeted it in a report. | 2022-10-24T11:57:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden to give pep talk to Democratic staffers as Election Day nears - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/biden-democratic-national-committee-midterms/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/biden-democratic-national-committee-midterms/ |
Brazil’s presidential runoff is between two populists
Bolsonaro and Lula supporters alike show a preference for anti-traditional politics and strong leadership, a new survey shows
Analysis by Zoila Ponce de León
Gabriele Magni
Brazil's second-round runoff voting for president takes place on Oct. 30, between Lula da Silva and current President Jair Bolsonaro. Above, a Lula campaign event in Rio de Janeiro on Oct. 23. (Andre Coelho/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
On Sunday, Brazilians head to the polls to choose their next president in a runoff election between former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. Lula, the left-wing Workers’ Party leader, received 48 percent of the votes in the first round on Oct. 2. Bolsonaro got 43 percent.
Two central themes of this year’s campaign have been populism and the risk of democratic erosion. Bolsonaro rose to power four years ago thanks to anti-establishment anger. Once in office, he worked to curb the power of the judiciary and directly attacked electoral institutions.
During this year’s campaign, Bolsonaro has repeatedly cast doubts on the electoral system. He claimed, without evidence, that electronic voting could lead to electoral fraud — announcing that his receiving anything less than 60 percent of the vote would mean “something abnormal [had] happened.” Fear of violence permeated the campaign. Not surprisingly, many analysts see the vote as a referendum on Brazil’s young democracy.
What do Bolsonaro’s and Lula’s supporters think?
Between Sept. 29 and Oct. 2, we conducted an online survey with the market research company Cint. The sample, which comes from an opt-in panel, included 1,160 Brazilian citizens aged 18 or older and mirrored Brazil’s census breakdowns for age, gender and race. Overall, the sample was more educated and wealthier than the general population. On education, our sample was close to the quotas of the 2018 survey by Latinobarometer, one of the leading survey-collection efforts in Latin America (4 percent of respondents report having received no education, 32 percent an elementary education, 46 percent a high school education and 18 percent completed higher education levels).
Of our respondents, 419 indicated they would vote for Lula in the upcoming election, while 447 said they would support Bolsonaro. The remaining survey participants said they would choose another candidate, were uncertain about their choice or would not vote at all.
Our data suggest that populist and authoritarian values are widespread. An overwhelming majority of Lula and Bolsonaro supporters (72 percent and 70 percent, respectively) think that “the people, and not politicians, should make the most important decisions.” A key tenet of populism is the idea of a division between “pure people” and the “corrupt elite.” The anti-establishment feeling is often coupled with the belief that politics should express the will of the people. Bolsonaro and Lula both have been described as “populist.” Hence, it may come as no surprise that their supporters share the belief in the centrality of the will of the people.
Bolsonaro’s supporters also embrace the desire for a strong leader. A majority (55 percent) agree with the survey statement that “a strong leader in government is good for Brazil even if the leader bends the rules to get things done,” a position that’s also shared by 43 percent of Lula’s supporters.
The classic populist rhetoric in Latin America since the 1940s has focused on anti-traditional politics and the promise to let the people rule. Charismatic leaders of populist movements, especially on the left, often made this promise. But right-wing populism has also thrived in the region, including in Brazil and Peru. A commonality across the political spectrum has been the appeal of the strong leader.
Our data also capture Brazilians’ desire for strong authority, using a battery of questions scholars use to measure libertarian-authoritarian values. Two-thirds of Bolsonaro’s supporters and half of Lula’s supporters believe that “it is better to live in a society where law and order are strongly enforced than to give people too much freedom.” Three-quarters of Lula’s supporters and almost 90 percent of Bolsonaro’s supporters agree that “schools should teach children to obey authority.” Moreover, almost 1 in 3 Bolsonaro supporters and 1 in 4 Lula supporters think that “the person who contributes the most money to the home is the one who should have the final word in household decisions.”
These numbers suggest that authoritarian values are widespread among Bolsonaro’s electorate. But support for authoritarian values is relatively high even among Lula’s supporters on the left. After all, Lula is a populist leader in a country where crime and corruption are hot topics. This may explain why left-wing voters respond to appeals to law and order. We may be seeing elements of what political science calls working-class authoritarianism.
The two sides tend to agree on immigration
More than two-thirds of supporters for both presidential candidates think that “there are too many immigrants in Brazil,” suggesting that Bolsonaro and Lula supporters might agree more than disagree on immigration. This concern has grown with the large numbers of Venezuelan immigrants in the past few years.
Brazilians worry about how immigration affects the job market and welfare access. A third of Bolsonaro’s supporters and a quarter of Lula’s think that “immigrants limit the possibilities of finding work for people born in Brazil.” Nearly 40 percent of Bolsonaro supporters think that “immigrants take advantage of welfare services and government assistance,” and a quarter of Lula supporters agree.
Bolsonaro, who has described immigrants as a threat to Brazil’s economic stability, has enforced high levels of deportation. Yet he continued to implement the Operação Acolhida program, which offers some Venezuelan immigrants humanitarian assistance. He has capitalized on the idea of “saving Venezuelans from communism” — and also argued that Lula would bring communism to Brazil. Among Lula supporters, the immigration concerns related to jobs and welfare might reflect their worries during the covid-19 pandemic, as well as rising food prices.
The runoff has Brazilians on tenterhooks. Some predict that Bolsonaro will refuse to concede defeat if he loses, and that his supporters will respond with violence. If he wins, some fear democratic erosion in the country will continue.
Will the largest democracy in Latin America see a peaceful transition of power — a minimum requirement for democratic countries — or a revolt, like the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in the United States? Will Bolsonaro’s attacks on the democratic system continue once the election is over? We’ll have some answers soon.
Zoila Ponce de León is assistant professor of politics and core faculty member of the Latin American and Caribbean studies program at Washington and Lee University.
Gabriele Magni (@gabmagni) is assistant professor of political science and director of the Global Policy Institute at Loyola Marymount University. | 2022-10-24T11:57:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A popular former president is challenging Brazil’s current president - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/brazil-bolsonaro-lula-election-populism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/brazil-bolsonaro-lula-election-populism/ |
Federal report ignores cost savings of heat pumps, group says
Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! We spent much of the weekend listening to Taylor Swift’s new album, “Midnights.” Some TikTok creators joked that this lyric — “It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me” — was about Swift’s massive carbon footprint from her private jet. ✈️ But first:
Federal forecast fails to account for cost savings of heat pumps, group says
In recent weeks, a flurry of news articles have warned that home heating costs are set to skyrocket this winter, straining the budgets of low- and middle-income households.
NBC News reported that heating costs are headed “through the roof,” while NPR despaired that “gloom oozes from energy forecasts.” Bloomberg News, in an ominous headline, declared that “Americans will pay the most in 25 years to stay warm this winter.”
These grim predictions were based on an annual winter fuels outlook released earlier this month by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), which provides energy statistics and analyses on behalf of the federal government.
But the forecast fails to account for the cost savings that electric heat pumps are already delivering to consumers because of their efficiency, and it could discourage more consumers from taking advantage of the incentives to purchase new heat pumps in the recently passed climate law, according to experts at Rewiring America, a nonprofit group dedicated to electrification.
Heat pumps, which can both heat and cool buildings, push warm air out of homes in the summer and pull warm air into them in the winter. The devices are far more efficient than gas-burning furnaces, reducing electricity use for heating by 50 percent, according to the Energy Department.
When estimating the costs of heating a home with electricity, the forecast includes non-heating uses of electricity, such as lighting, appliances and electronics.
But the forecast does not make any distinction between highly efficient electric heat pumps and extremely inefficient electric-resistance heating equipment, such as electric baseboard heaters.
“This would be like averaging the fuel cost between a fire truck and a motorcycle and assigning that to a category called ‘motor vehicles,’ ” Rewiring America spokesman Rob O'Donnell said in an email.
If this perceived flaw is corrected, Rewiring America found that U.S. households would spend an average of $596 on heating their homes with an electric heat pump this winter, rather than an average of $1,359 as the report concluded.
For context, the forecast predicts that heating a home with natural gas this winter will cost $931 on average — a 28 percent increase from last winter because of surging fuel costs and slightly colder weather.
Heating oil and propane will remain the most expensive sources of heating this winter at $2,354 and $1,668, respectively, the EIA said.
“Once you do a more accurate comparison between an electric heat pump and fossil fuel sources, it is just far and away a superior product,” Rewiring America CEO Ari Matusiak said in an interview.
Asked for comment, EIA spokeswoman Morgan Butterfield said the agency recognizes the constraints of the projections.
“All modeling has its limitations, and we try to clearly point out the limitations of the Winter Fuels Outlook in the report,” Butterfield said in an email. “The report identifies that there could be differences in energy bills among houses with different heating technologies — for instance, an electric heat pump compared with electric resistance heating.”
Butterfield added that the agency would “welcome all of our data users to contact us if they have questions about our data.”
An ‘electric bank account’
Although heat pumps typically cost more upfront than furnaces, they can save homeowners hundreds of dollars on their annual energy bills because of their efficiency, according to the Energy Department.
The recently passed climate law, which President Biden signed in August, also seeks to slash the price tag of heat pumps.
The law, dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act, provides rebates of up to $8,000 for low- and moderate-income families to buy heat pumps, potentially covering the full cost of the devices for low-income households.
It also authorizes $500 million for “enhanced” use of the Defense Production Act, which Biden invoked in June to ramp up domestic production of heat pumps and other climate-friendly technologies.
Matusiak expressed concern that the federal fuels forecast — and the ensuing media coverage — missed a huge opportunity to educate more Americans about these incentives.
“What [the climate law] has effectively done is created an electric bank account for everyone in the United States,” he said. “But that bank account is only good if people know it exists.”
Meanwhile, Vice President Harris already has two heat pumps in her official residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory, according to Leah Stokes, a climate policy expert who hosted Harris on the podcast “A Matter of Degrees” last week.
One question we didn't get a chance to ask the @vp live comes from @brucenilles: "Will you put a heat pump in the VP Residence?"
Turns out there are already TWO heat pumps in the VP Residence! Heat pumps for ALL! pic.twitter.com/oGAFbrgpfW
— Dr. Leah Stokes (@leahstokes) October 19, 2022
(A spokesman for Harris did not respond to a question about whether Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff installed the heat pumps, or whether the residence came with the devices. But the pair had $3.8 million worth of upgrades completed on the grounds, including the replacement of heating and air conditioning systems, government contracts show.)
A U.S. Forest Service employee was arrested in Oregon last week after setting a prescribed burn in a national forest that spread too far and burned up a swath of private property, The Washington Post’s Joshua Partlow reports.
The arrest of a Forest Service employee is exceedingly rare, and it has become a fresh source of tension in a part of the country with a history of animosity toward the federal government.
The sheriff’s office in Grant County in Oregon said it arrested 39-year-old Rick Snodgrass for “reckless burning” after a prescribed burn in Malheur National Forest blazed onto timber land and grazing pasture. In a statement, Grant County District Attorney Jim Carpenter said Snodgrass’s position as a federal employee “will not protect him if it is determined that he acted recklessly.”
Snodgrass could not be immediately reached for comment, but a spokesman for the Forest Service said in a statement that Snodgrass was “conducting an approved fire operation.” Several current and former Forest Service employees have come out in support of Snodgrass, saying that prescribed burns are often needed and that the arrest sends a bad message.
The arrest comes after two fires purposely lit this year in New Mexico grew into the largest wildfires in state history. Prescribed burns, which are intended to clear vegetation that can lead to worse blazes, are becoming trickier as conditions in the West become hotter and drier because of climate change.
Appeals court upholds Biden’s social cost of carbon
A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the Biden administration’s higher estimate for the social cost of carbon, a key metric that assigns a dollar value to the damage that each additional ton of greenhouse gas pollution causes society, Clark Mindock reports for Reuters.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit said the plaintiffs — 13 Republican attorneys general — could not challenge the metric based on “generalized grievances” since it has not yet been applied to federal agencies’ final rules.
The office of Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who had asked the 8th Circuit to overturn a lower court’s dismissal of the case, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
President Biden last year directed federal agencies to apply an interim social cost of carbon of $51 per ton — the figure used under former president Barack Obama — while his administration weighed whether to raise it to as high as $125 per ton. Under former president Donald Trump, that figure had fallen as low as $1 per ton.
Hurricane Roslyn makes landfall in Mexico as Category 3 storm
Hurricane Roslyn slammed into west-central Mexico on Sunday as a Category 3 storm, bringing damaging winds and life-threatening storm surge and killing at least two people before being downgraded to a tropical storm, Amanda Holpuch reports for the New York Times.
Nearly 100,000 people across the country lost power Sunday, while roughly 90 percent of residents in the municipalities of San Blas and Santiago Ixcuintla were displaced in shelters or staying with relatives in higher areas. The storm is expected to dissipate by early Monday.
EPA solicits public input on first-ever national green bank
The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday announced that it is soliciting public input to help shape the implementation of a first-of-its-kind Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
The $27 billion program, commonly referred to as a national green bank, was authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act. It will provide low-cost financing for clean-energy projects that reduce climate pollution, especially those in disadvantaged communities.
The EPA will hold listening sessions on the green bank on Nov. 1 and Nov. 9. The agency has also created a new webpage for information about the program.
“In designing such an ambitious program, EPA is eager to hear from stakeholders across the country, especially in low-income and disadvantaged communities, whose voices are critical to shaping the Fund and ensuring these historic resources reach people who need them most,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement.
As Elon Musk expands his reach, Washington worries — Mary Jordan for The Post
Md. city’s $1.3M flood plan won’t stop storm water damage, critics say — Justin Wm. Moyer for The Post
Shell loses Dutch appeal over misleading carbon emission ads — Diederik Baazil and Cagan Koc for Bloomberg News
Climate protesters throw mashed potatoes at Monet painting — the Associated Press
A friendly reminder from Jim Halpert: | 2022-10-24T11:57:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Federal report ignores cost savings of heat pumps, group says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/federal-report-ignores-cost-savings-heat-pumps-group-says/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/federal-report-ignores-cost-savings-heat-pumps-group-says/ |
A former official talks past, present and future of cyber at the Justice Department
Welcome to The Cybersecurity 202! It’s getting too dark out too early in the day. And yet somehow fall is a “great” season to most people. Also, everything is dying, and I don’t get enthused about death.
Below: The U.S. government asked Mexico to not buy Chinese border technology, and hackers leak data from inside Iran’s nuclear agency. But first:
A Q&A with John Carlin
John Carlin had a lot of cyber in his portfolio as a principal associate deputy attorney general at the Justice Department. The New York Times described his job as “one of the most powerful and under-the-radar posts” at DOJ.
It was his second sojourn at the department, in fact, having previously served as assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s National Security Division in the Barack Obama administration. When he returned to serve under the Biden administration, Carlin was quickly confronted by hacks on Colonial Pipeline and meat supplier JBS.
As of this month, Carlin is co-head of law firm Paul Weiss’s cybersecurity and data protection practice and a partner in its litigation department. We spoke about his time at DOJ, what’s ahead for the department and his focus now that he’s returning to the private sector.
The Cybersecurity 202: What do you think you did at DOJ this time around that made a difference?
Carlin: We'll start structurally. And this is when I'm still acting [deputy attorney general], so very early in the administration. The ransomware epidemic had reached new heights, particularly during covid. And so, launching the ransomware task force in order to address that threat and ensuring not just that we employ the full resources of the department and prioritize the threat but also that we looked for new and innovative ways to tackle it. … We did that prior to attacks attracting the attention of the country because of the attack on Colonial Pipeline. So centralizing every ransomware case, requiring reporting.
In terms of successes: We did this effectively working with international partners, so I don't want to downplay the success of bringing people to justice in a criminal court, but changing the focus from success being criminal prosecution, to applying the full set of tools to try to disrupt the ecosystem of bad guy organizations and make victims whole.
And by that I mean, going after a digital currency, the proceeds from bad guys and either making it unavailable to them or returning it to victims; to go and take affirmative steps to take over the infrastructure, take over the command and control of the botnet; clean up people's computers who are otherwise unable to do it, so that another organization doesn't pick up where the one that you've disrupted left off. So really, working to just unleash the full creativity of the amazing prosecutors and agents throughout the department.
Launching the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team. This is at least true for the criminal groups and increasingly for some of the nation states like North Korea: It's about getting the money. So having a team that really focuses on depriving them to easily get their profits by disrupting the criminals' use of digital currencies and exchanges, and particularly making it difficult to convert it to fiat currency.
How would you say things changed from the first time working on cyber issues at DOJ to your return?
Carlin: When I first did it, the National Security Division … charged five members of the People's Liberation Army, meaning [Unit] 61398, in 2014. The idea of taking that which has been secret, and putting it into a public charging complaint, and charging by name the uniformed officers for what was essentially theft — economic espionage for the benefit of rival companies overseas — was novel. By the time I left, we had used similar approaches with regards to North Korea's attack on Sony Motion Pictures. Iranian Revolutionary Guard [Corps]’s distributed denial of service attacks on the financial sector and they also hacked the Bowman Dam in New York to gain access to the control systems. And of course, Russia, which resulted ultimately in the criminal charges for the Yahoo attack.
By the time I returned, that really was ingrained, the idea of the Department of Justice, the FBI, the criminal justice system was an important tool. With the threat landscape, we saw ransomware exploding as we left. But because of the reliance people had on communicating digitally during covid, it had reached proportions I've never seen before.
You talked about those criminal cases. You'll hear some people say, “Those don't matter, those people are never going to jail. You're just naming and shaming.” What's your thinking on that subject?
Carlin: I do not think we'll be able to prosecute our way out of the cybersecurity problem. But it's a tool and particularly when it came to national security-related threats, nation-state threats, there was a period of time where it was a tool that we were not using at all. And I actually don't think that was a conscious strategic choice, having lived through it. It's because people didn't realize the effectiveness when you apply the resources investigators could bring to doing attribution and figuring out not just generally, who did it — not, it was emanating from China, or from Russia, but specifically enough with sufficient evidence that you could prove beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
Then the other part of it is, there are many people who are in jail today because they travel or they go to a state that cooperated and they've been prosecuted. So these are real charges with real consequences.
What cyber challenges remain at DOJ that you'd be focusing on if you were staying longer?
Carlin: I still think [it's] under-resourced. The department, both on the prosecutor side and the FBI side, needs a dramatic infusion of resources to address the scope of the threat.
Is there an ideal number or increase in scale?
Carlin: I will put it this way: On a significant scale, there needs to be a re-architecting of the way that you're getting the most volume of resources and the technology, the personnel, but also getting the right recruiting and having the proper training and background in information technology and computer science.
I know you always planned to stay just for a year, but why return to the private sector, and what kind of cases, clients and problems do you look forward to tackling?
Carlin: I really enjoyed having a different way of helping, when you're able to directly help the clients and companies who are hit by these attacks. I'm happy to get back to advising clients as they navigate this changing world in terms of threat actors and ransomware, but also the political landscape where the tools of the U.S. government are sanctions, are export controls, a new focus on corporate compliance, trying to ensure the rule of law here to help them navigate and stay on the right side of what's just an unprecedentedly complex picture when it comes to cybersecurity and related national security concerns.
Ideally, you're talking to clients before the major incident to help them — to share the hard work, hard-earned lessons of living through the worst cyberattacks, on things they can think about ahead of time on the prevention side.
If you have a transaction that's being reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, that shifts from being about missiles and affects transactions like an acquisition of Grindr, a dating site, and that was because of cybersecurity and privacy. Or sanctions, where now as you're trying to contemplate whether or not to make a ransomware payment you need to think about this. It's really animating across a range of areas where it's new.
U.S. government asked Mexico to not buy Chinese technology for border
U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar’s letter to Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard urged Mexican authorities to not buy equipment from Beijing-based Nuctech, which U.S. officials worried would give China access to data about goods entering the United States, Kevin Sieff and Nick Miroff report. In the previously unreported May 2 letter, Salazar wrote that U.S.-Mexico bilateral cooperation “could be put at risk by the use of unreliable equipment.”
The letter was one of the millions of documents that hackers leaked after targeting Mexico’s defense secretariat. Internal documents show that Mexico already began purchasing Nuctech scanners even before May 2.
Civil society organization Mexicans Against Corruption shared the documents with The Post. The Post independently verified the documents.
The Department of Homeland Security said in 2020 that “Nuctech very likely has a close and enduring relationship with the Chinese Government to advance Nuctech’s business interests and develop screening and detection systems on behalf of the Chinese Government.” It also wrote that the company’s equipment likely has “deficiencies in detection capabilities, which may create opportunities for exploitation by the Chinese Government.”
Nuctech, which didn’t respond to requests for comment, said in an undated statement on its website that “it is not state controlled” and its customers are the “sole owners of all data generated by Nuctech’s systems.” The firm is “100 percent committed to the safety and security of our customers and their data and any suggestions to the contrary is categorically false and designed to stifle emerging market competition,” it said.
Hackers leak emails from Iranian nuclear agency
The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran confirmed that emails from a nuclear energy production subsidiary’s IT unit were posted online, Bloomberg News’s Arsalan Shahla and Golnar Motevalli report. A group calling itself “Black Reward” has claimed responsibility for the hack, which the group said was done to support protests in Iran.
“The Telegram messages contained a raft of links to email correspondence that Black Reward claimed involved the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, foreign contracts and Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power station,” Shahla and Motevalli write. “In its statement, the AEOI didn’t mention Black Reward and said the emails contained ‘normal everyday exchanges’ and were about ‘technical matters.’ ” The leak comes amid stalled international talks over Iran’s nuclear program.
Pro-Trump group gathers intel for its war on voting machines (Reuters)
Russia still using Israeli tech to hack detainees’ cellphones (Haaretz)
Australia to introduce tougher penalties for data breaches (Bloomberg News)
After cutting ties with Iran, Albanian PM arrives in Israel to talk cybersecurity (Times of Israel)
CISA chief of staff Kiersten Todt speaks at an event hosted by the Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine on Tuesday.
Me when I see someone that knows me in public.. pic.twitter.com/Sox3es7JV0 | 2022-10-24T11:58:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A former official talks past, present and future of cyber at the Justice Department - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/former-official-talks-past-present-future-cyber-justice-department/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/former-official-talks-past-present-future-cyber-justice-department/ |
Monday briefing: The next U.K. prime minister; student loan forgiveness; Xi Jinping; RSV outbreak; World Series matchup; and more
The U.K. could get its next prime minister today.
The latest: Former leader Boris Johnson suddenly quit the race yesterday after campaigning to replace Liz Truss, who resigned last week.
Why? A lot of Johnson’s fellow Conservative Party lawmakers criticized his attempted comeback, and he realized he wouldn’t be able to lead effectively.
What now? Rishi Sunak, the former finance minister, is the favorite to replace Truss. He could be declared winner later this morning.
Student test scores have fallen across the country.
How we know: Results from what is known as “the nation’s report card” were released today, giving us the fullest picture yet of how the coronavirus pandemic impacted learning.
The details: Math scores had some of the steepest declines in over 50 years of testing. Overall, scores fell to levels not seen in two decades.
Why it matters: This data will be crucial in the effort to help students make up learning that was disrupted during the pandemic.
President Biden’s student debt relief plan was put on hold.
Why? A federal appeals court temporarily blocked the cancellation of federal student loans on Friday as it weighs a request from six Republican-led states to stop the program.
What happens now? The Biden administration said eligible borrowers should keep applying for relief despite the legal setback, which experts said should be resolved within weeks.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping secured an unprecedented third term.
What happened? The president was given another five years in power at the twice-a-decade meeting of the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership yesterday.
Why it matters: It solidifies Xi’s status as China’s most powerful leader in decades, and clears the way for him to rule for life if he chooses.
There’s been a sharp rise in the number of patients infected with RSV.
What’s that? Respiratory syncytial virus. It causes cold-like symptoms for a week or two in most adults, but it can be more serious for children under the age of 1.
The outbreak: The U.S. has recorded about 5,000 cases a week this month, an unusually high number, which is making it hard to find a bed in some children’s hospitals.
The World Series matchup is set.
Who’s playing? The Philadelphia Phillies will take on the Houston Astros for Major League Baseball’s championship. Game 1 is Friday night in Houston.
The history: It’s the Phillies’ first World Series since 2009, and the fourth for the Astros since 2017. Houston hasn’t lost a postseason game this season.
A close-up photo of an ant is giving people nightmares.
What you’re looking at: A carpenter ant’s face magnified many times under a microscope. The red circles look like eyes, but are actually where its antennae start.
The reaction: The image went viral last week and terrified some. But the photographer said it shows there are “unknown miracles under people’s feet.”
And now … here’s a sneak peek of a project from Bob Woodward, the longtime Post journalist, who’s sharing his interviews with President Donald Trump as an audio book. | 2022-10-24T11:58:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The 7 things you need to know for Monday, October 24 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/10/24/what-to-know-for-october-24/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/10/24/what-to-know-for-october-24/ |
The American League champion Houston Astros will face the National League champion Philadelphia Phillies in the World Series beginning Friday. (Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
The Major League Baseball season is nearly complete, and it will culminate with a World Series matchup between the Houston Astros and Philadelphia Phillies beginning Friday night.
The Astros, who won 106 games during the regular season to claim the top seed in the American League, will host the first two games and try to maintain their perfect postseason record. The 87-win Phillies will look to extend their magical run as the National League’s lowest seed and steal at least one road win, which they’ve done in their first three series this postseason, before the series heads to Philadelphia.
Here is what you need to know about the 2022 World Series.
Who is playing in the World Series?
Where is the World Series being played?
How many World Series titles have the Astros and Phillies each won?
Who is favored to win the World Series?
What is the full World Series schedule and how can you watch? | 2022-10-24T12:18:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 2022 World Series schedule, matchup and what to know - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/world-series-astros-phillies-schedule/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/world-series-astros-phillies-schedule/ |
Review by Siri Hustvedt
An image of human colon cancer cells, with the nuclei stained red. Siddhartha Mukherjee, who wrote about cancer in his first book, now explores the history and implications of cell science. (National Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Research/AP) (AP)
Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, won the Pulitzer Prize for his first book, “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” (2010), and has had a large popular following ever since. In “The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human,” he repeats an engaging formula. He tells a vivid story — the fatal melanoma of a dear friend, a particular patient’s illness and successful treatment, his own experience of depression, the valiant struggles of a researcher in the past and present — and relates it to the broader science. Mukherjee writes lucid sentences dense with metaphors as pedagogical tools: the cell as “spacecraft”; the cell’s nucleus as “command center”; the genome as “library”; neutrophils, white blood cells crucial to immune response, as “teenage soldiers deployed to battle”; and MHC class 1 molecules on a cell’s surface as “two open halves of a hotdog bun.”
The book’s refrain is that the cell is “an independent living being — a unit — that forms a part of the whole.” Organisms, including human beings, are no more or less than the sum of those parts. The author’s sweeping ambition is to show “how the concept of the cell and our comprehension of cellular physiology, altered medicine, science, biology, social structure, and culture” and what he believes the future of cellular manipulation will bring — replacement parts for “the new human” of his subtitle.
Although Mukherjee’s cell saga is not strictly chronological, he summarizes its early history in the first part of the book, including the invention of the microscope in the late 16th century and its most famous users: Robert Hooke, the author of “Micrographia” (1665), who gave the cell its name, and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who spotted living creatures, “animalcules,” under the magnifying lenses he had made. The author covers the debates that raged in the 18th and 19th centuries between mechanists, who understood nature as a machine reducible to its discrete parts (reductionism), and vitalists who argued that this sum did not suffice to explain life. Mukherjee advances the conventional view that vitalists proposed a divine ingredient as the source of animation. Some did. Members of the French Montpellier school, however, proposed no supernatural ingredient but rather a functional, relational, dynamic biology that could not be reduced to its elements. In this “holistic” model, the sum is more than its parts.
Although the reductionists won this debate and “vitalism” is a word used in science only with caution, a struggle between reductionism and holism has been revived in the 21st-century philosophy of science and in systems biology. The authors of “Complex Systems are More Than the Sum of their Parts,” a 2015 paper in Integrative and Comparative Biology, are not alone in arguing that as organisms get more complex, new properties emerge from their dynamic networks. From this perspective, breaking a creature down into its discrete parts and putting them back together again will not give a full understanding of the whole organism. This contested issue is never mentioned in the book.
Mukherjee recounts the beginnings of cell theory among 19th-century European scientists and the growing consensus that the cell is the fundamental unit of life in plants and animals. He follows this history with more cellular tales related to medical interventions and retreats to historical scientific progenitors as needed — antibiotics, in vitro fertilization, gene editing, monoclonal antibodies, vaccines, deep brain stimulation (an implanted device that has shown some success with Parkinson’s and depression patients), immunotherapies for cancer, bone marrow transplants and stem cell research.
Mukherjee is candid about medical failures, the heartbreak of treating patients who suffer and die, and the moral risks that come with innovation, and he admits that much remains unknown in cell science. Borrowing from his pathologist hero, Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), who viewed the cell as a citizen in a larger society, Mukherjee stresses the limits of “atomism” and the importance of “interconnectedness.” He “expands” Virchow’s cell biology: “Beyond understanding cells in isolation, deciphering the internal laws of cellular citizenship — tolerance, communication, specialization, diversity, boundary formation, cooperation, niches, ecological relationships — will result in the birth of a new kind of cellular medicine.”
Metaphors are crucial to thought in science. As one philosopher of science, Evelyn Fox Keller, has argued, metaphors may both open avenues of discovery and shut them down. The figurative is easily confused with the literal. The idea of the genome as master molecule, commander, code and blueprint has often been mistaken for concrete reality, even though, as Mukherjee points out, quoting the great geneticist Barbara McClintock, the genome is “a sensitive organ of the cell.” It is inert without its cellular environment.
Throughout the book, Mukherjee uses a common metaphor for the immune system as a battleground between “us” and “them” — the cells that belong to a person (a self) and invading microbial or other “foreigners” (a non-self). Mukherjee explains that Frank Macfarlane Burnet codified the self/non-self framework for the immune system in the middle of the 20th century and provides many examples of cells that “recognize” and destroy antigens — substances that trigger immune response. Although Mukherjee takes the self/other distinction literally, it too is a metaphor, a riddled concept borrowed from psychology and philosophy, which is being challenged in immunology. “Human beings,” he writes, “don’t have to worry about cells from other human bodies invading and colonizing our bodies and trying to pass themselves as selves.” He describes the menace of mingling as “chimerism” and tells us that this “fusion of physical selves — is not a new age fantasy but an age old threat.”
Mukherjee does not mention that human reproduction is a cooperative fusion of cellular selves — the fertilized cell or zygote is made from two people — and the embryo-fetus is partly a genetic foreigner to the pregnant person. But the maternal immune system does not reject the embryo, something scientists have puzzled over for years. I have always wondered why pregnancy, during which the self/non-self paradigm is rendered moot, is rarely brought up in the discussion. Further, cell transfer via the placenta from fetus to mother and mother to fetus, another fusion of physical selves known as microchimerism, has recently been acknowledged as part of normal pregnancy. Fetal cells can endure for decades in the mother, and researchers are working to understand the role these migrated cells play in immune rescue and disease. Mukherjee also leaves out the fact that humans are hosts to vast numbers of “alien” microbes and viruses (the non-selves of the human microbiome and virome), which are not only tolerated but necessary for our survival. Philosophers of biology, including John Dupré, Polly Matzinger, Thomas Pradeu and Alfred Tauber, have challenged the self-other assumption Mukherjee takes for granted.
There is nothing odd about finding entrenched orthodoxies repeated in popular science books. What is odd is that Mukherjee, with his emphasis on “interconnectedness,” “cooperation” and “ecological relationships” in biological processes, hovers on the brink of countering his own reductionist argument that the whole is the sum of its parts. He flirts with a form of holism, an idea he calls “scientifically defiled,” though the word is ubiquitous in systems biology, a field dedicated, according to Christopher Wanjek, writing for the National Institutes of Health, “to understanding the larger picture — be it at the level of the organism, tissue, or cell — by putting its pieces together. It’s in stark contrast to decades of reductionist biology, which involves taking the pieces apart.”
Despite its omission of important current disputes in biology, which have roots in earlier centuries, “The Song of the Cell” is a lively, personal, detailed, often moving account of the cell in medical history and its promise in the present. Time will decide if Mukherjee’s new human, “a new sum of new parts,” belongs to our future.
Siri Hustvedt is the author of 13 books, most recently “Mothers, Fathers, and Others.” She is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.
The Song of the Cell
An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
By Siddhartha Mukherjee
Scribner. 473 pp. $32.50 | 2022-10-24T13:06:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/24/siddhartha-mukherjee-cell-book-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/24/siddhartha-mukherjee-cell-book-review/ |
Rishi Sunak leaves his office in central London on Oct. 24. (Tolga Akmen/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
LONDON — Rishi Sunak is one of the wealthiest people in Britain and will soon be the most powerful when he becomes prime minister. It would be the first time in history that the residents of Downing Street are richer than those of Buckingham Palace.
According to the Guardian, the Sunak family — they have two daughters, Krishna and Anoushka — spend the week in their five-bedroom house in west London and weekends in North Yorkshire at a Georgian manor house. The paper said it has been “transformed into something of a wellness retreat with a £400,000 indoor swimming pool, gym, yoga studio, hot tub and tennis court.”
“People do care about wealthy people fixing the rules for themselves. It’s non-dom status for your wife while you are the chancellor, it’s green cards in the U.S. in case things go south, it’s family tax numbers being massaged down. People are like, ‘Well, I don’t mind so long as you pay your taxes, but it really annoys me if you don’t,’ ” he said.
Earlier this year, Sunak’s wife was at the center of a tax scandal after it emerged that she had been filing in the United Kingdom as a “non-domiciled” resident, which allowed her to avoid paying British taxes on the substantial income she earned abroad. The family had been living at 10 Downing Street, in the apartment designated for Britain’s finance minister (the living quarters are smaller than 11 Downing Street, where prime minsters generally prefer to live). Moving vans arrived when the scandal was still simmering.
It also came out around the same time that Sunak had held a U.S. green card while he was chancellor of the Exchequer, or finance minister. His spokesman said he returned it last year.
He was also attacked for giving a speech to grass-roots Conservative Party members this summer where he said that, as chancellor, he tried to reverse funding formulas “that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas” so as to help wealthier towns.
He has consistently polled better than any of his contenders in this leadership race on economic competence. In the last race against Liz Truss, Sunak said that Truss’s plans were based on “fantasy” economics — a pronouncement that proved prescient when her “mini-budget” caused widespread turmoil in the markets.
Jeremy Hunt, the current British chancellor who will be hoping to keep his job, has come out in support of Sunak. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, he said the British people were looking for someone who could handle the current crisis.
“Our public finances, market credibility and international reputation have taken a serious blow. To restore stability and confidence, we need a leader who can be trusted to make difficult choices,” he wrote. "We also need someone who can explain those choices to members of the public who are worried about jobs, mortgages and public services. We have a leader who can do just that in Rishi Sunak.”
The matter of his wealth, however, could still be a vulnerability long after the current contest ends. Steven Fielding, a politics professor at the University of Nottingham, said that if Sunak does emerge victorious, the opposition Labour Party will likely to try score points on Sunak for being “out of touch,” like they did earlier in the year, when in a discussion about rising prices for foodstuffs, he described all the "different breads in my house.”
Fielding also said that Truss’s disastrous economic policy, which saw the market swiftly reject her plans for unfunded tax cuts, meant that the next leader’s policies will “basically be a prisoner of Liz Truss and the consequences of Liz Truss.”
“Whoever becomes leader, they have two years where their economic program is already decided. It’s going to be pretty bad for the British public,” he added, noting that it will mostly be damage control and balancing between taxes and spending.
"It’s still different colors of bad,” he said. | 2022-10-24T13:14:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rishi Sunak’s net worth would make him one of the richest U.K. prime ministers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/rishi-sunak-net-worth/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/rishi-sunak-net-worth/ |
Turkey deports hundreds of Syrian refugees, Human Rights Watch says
A Syrian migrant man and daughter stand in front of their shelter in Ulus district, the old part of Turkish capital Ankara, Turkey, Sunday. (Burhan Ozbilici/AP)
ISTANBUL — Turkey has arrested and deported hundreds of Syrian refugee men and boys this year, detaining them arbitrarily and forcing them to return to northern Syria, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said in report released Monday.
The group, citing interviews with dozens of refugees, said Turkish officials “beat and abused most” of the refugees, before forcing them to cross the border into northern Syria at gunpoint.
The allegations, which the group said were a violation of international law, were the latest sign of a surging hostility toward Syrians in Turkey, and another grim turn for a country that once opened its borders to people fleeing Syria’s war and still hosts at least 4 million of them.
With nationalism rising, Turkey turns against refugees it once welcomed
But over the last few years, segments of the public have blamed the refugees for a catalogue of woes in Turkey, including a stubborn economic downturn. Some opposition parties have seized on the anger, invoking anti-immigrant sentiments to garner support.
A government media office referred questions on the alleged deportations to the Interior Ministry which did not immediately respond. Human Rights Watch quoted the head of Turkey’s migration agency, Savas Unlu, as calling the group’s finding “baseless” and saying Turkey is complying with national and international law.
The deportations, which occurred between February and July, “provide a stark counterpoint to Turkey’s record of generosity as host to more refugees than any other country in the world and almost four times as many as the whole European Union,” Human Rights Watch said.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is facing a critical election next year, has struggled to respond to the shifting public sentiment, publicly defending refugees but also vowing to resettle a million Syrians in opposition-held parts of northern Syria, in a move officials maintain would be voluntary.
The report said refugees were forced to sign forms that they were not allowed to read, but that they understood amounted to consent for “voluntary repatriation” to Syria. “Many said that they saw Turkish officials beat other men who had initially refused to sign, so they felt they had no choice,” the report said.
Turkey was obliged to “respect the principle of nonrefoulement, which prohibits the return of anyone to a place where they would face a real risk of persecution, torture or other ill-treatment, or a threat to life,” the report said, adding that Syria — divided between areas ruled by a government that has carried out mass human rights violations, and opposition-held areas still riven by conflict — “remains unsafe for returning refugees.”
Turkey has deported hundreds of Syrian migrants, advocates and refugees say
Turkish authorities have rounded up and deported Syrian refugees on previous occasions over the last few years, including after local elections in 2019 in which voters expressed dissatisfaction with what some voters framed as Erdogan’s pro-refugee policies.
The current climate in Turkey has led to a rise in support for an anti-immigrant party and left Syrian refugees in bind. As Turkey pursues a crackdown, causing many Syrians to consider fleeing the country, neighbors like Bulgaria and Greece have also been accused of using violent tactics to turn refugees back to Turkey.
Some of the refugees interviewed by Human Rights Watch were not deported but were released, the group said. Even so, they “described life in Turkey as dangerous, saying that they are staying at home with their curtains closed and limiting movement to avoid the Turkish authorities.” | 2022-10-24T13:19:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Turkey forcibly deports Syrian refugees, Human Rights Watch says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/syria-turkey-refugees-deportation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/syria-turkey-refugees-deportation/ |
MESA, ARIZONA - OCTOBER 09: Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Legacy Sports USA on October 09, 2022 in Mesa, Arizona. Trump was stumping for Arizona GOP candidates, including gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, ahead of the midterm election on November 8. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) (Photographer: Mario Tama/Getty Images North America)
The Democratic presidential nomination cycle is somewhat unusual for a party with a first-term incumbent president. The Republican 2024 cycle? There has never been anything remotely like it.
Of course this is all about former President Donald Trump, whose unannounced campaign has been going strong since the day he left the White House.(1)Trump is doing all the things that presidential candidates do at this point in the election cycle; in fact, he is doing far more of those things than most past candidates have done. And he is, in several ways, quite a bit different than any other nomination frontrunner.
To begin with, no party has had a former president run for their nomination since Teddy Roosevelt did it in 1912. And even that isn’t an ideal comparison because Roosevelt was running as a third-party challenger against a sitting Republican president, William Howard Taft.
The last time a former president tried to capture the nomination of an out-of-power party was when Grover Cleveland did it — winning the nomination and the presidency — in 1892. But Trump shouldn’t take too much solace from that. Not only did Cleveland accomplish that feat before the modern nomination system began in 1972; he did it 20 years before presidential primaries were invented. So it’s hard to consider that a useful precedent. It’s also the case that Cleveland had won the popular vote twice at that point, so he looked a lot more like a winner with a flukish loss than Trump does after losing the popular vote twice.
Then there is the unprecedented fact that Trump is the first-ever frontrunner to be in deep legal trouble. It’s true that in 2016 Hillary Clinton was under investigation (as was, it turned out, Trump himself, multiple times). But it simply doesn’t compare. The 19-item list of criminal and civil trouble Trump faces right now is simply far more serious and extensive than … well, it’s probably more legal trouble for a presidential candidate than all other candidates combined over the last 50 years. Perhaps throughout US history.
That’s not all! Trump remains a rare and perhaps unique case of a nomination frontrunner who can’t be counted on to be loyal to the party regardless of what happens. He has recently shown that his implicit threat to turn against party nominees who aren’t sufficiently pro-Trump isn’t just an idle boast; he recently attacked the Republican Senate candidate in Colorado and essentially told his supporters not to vote for him. Added to that is the at least marginally real possibility that Trump would run as a third-party candidate if he failed to capture the nomination and the virtual certainty that he would declare primary losses fraudulent, and it adds up to something new in nomination politics.(2) Especially since in 2024, unlike 2016, it’s likely that a fair number of party actors, including elected officials, would stick with Trump if he turned against the party’s presidential nominee.
There is simply no way to know how this plays out. We might compare Trump the candidate with presidential aspirants who were sitting or former vice presidents, and note that those attempts have had a wide range of outcomes during the modern (1972 to present) era of nominations. Sitting vice president Al Gore drew only one challenger in 2000, whom he beat easily. Sitting Vice President George H.W. Bush and former VPs Walter Mondale and Joe Biden drew full fields and won nominations only after overcoming quite a bit of resistance. Former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who won a nomination under the old system in 1968, was narrowly defeated in 1972. Former Vice President Dan Quayle failed to gain traction and dropped out before the Iowa caucuses. Presumably a defeated president would enter the contest in a much stronger position than either sitting or former vice presidents, all things being equal.(3)
But all things are rarely equal. We have no way of knowing how Trump’s legal difficulties will play out, either in the courtroom or on the campaign trail. Neither does the Republican Party, including potential presidential candidates. Nor does anyone (including primary voters themselves) really have any way of knowing whether his strong polling numbers in horse-race surveys about the nomination reflect name recognition — in which case his lead could fade as other candidates emerge — or firm commitments from voters.
What little hard evidence we have so far indicates that candidates aren’t particularly intimidated by Trump. As we would otherwise expect with an unpopular Democrat in the White House, there is no shortage of Republican candidates running for 2024. That means they are doing things like traveling to key presidential primary states, currying favor with Republican politicians, beginning to put together candidate campaign organizations and giving campaign-like policy speeches. There appear to be at least a dozen candidates doing the things that candidates normally do at this stage.
Perhaps none of these candidates will still be running by spring 2023, let alone in 2024. But at least so far, Trump isn’t coming close to clearing the field. That certainly suggests that those with the most at stake don’t believe — yet — that Trump has it wrapped up.
It also might mean that things will be frozen for a while, with a lot of candidates running but reluctant to move to the formal announcement stage until they have a better indication of what they will be facing. And that could be a problem for the party. Nomination politics fulfills an important function for party participants as they define and redefine the party, and that takes time. But while Biden is likely to respond to pressure from Democrats to give them time to select a nominee if he decides not to run, Trump is far less likely to care about the fate of the Republican Party beyond what happens to him.
All of which means that anyone who says they can predict how the Republican nomination contest will play out is really just guessing.
Will Biden Run Again? Democrats Need an Answer Soon: Jonathan Bernstein
Steve Bannon’s Prison Sentence Has a Big Consolation Prize: Joshua Green
Are Republicans and Big Business Headed for a Breakup?: Author
(1) The political scientist Josh Putnam talks about candidates who are running for an upcoming presidential nomination and candidates who eventually will be running in primaries and caucuses, or as he puts it for this cycle, running for 2024 as opposed to running in 2024. The point is that we can identify candidates by what they do, rather than treating formal announcements as the dividing line between “candidate” and “potential candidate.” Trump and others are running, right now, for 2024. Whether they’ll still be doing so by January 2024, or even by March 2023, is a different question - one that no one can answer at this point.
(2) John Anderson ran as a third-party candidate after making a little noise in the 1980 Republican primaries, but he was a minor party figure, not a frontrunner, before 1980. Pat Buchanan ran third-party in 2000 after contesting the 1992 and 1996 Republican primaries. Before that, Democrat George Wallace ran a third-party race in 1968, but had not attempted to win the Democratic nomination.
(3) On the one hand, a former (elected) president has already proved he had the support to win a nomination; on the other hand, a party might not want to choose someone who had already lost a general election. | 2022-10-24T13:27:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A Trump Presidential Bid Would Be Unusual in Many Ways - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/a-trump-presidential-bid-would-be-unusual-in-many-ways/2022/10/24/660943b8-5398-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/a-trump-presidential-bid-would-be-unusual-in-many-ways/2022/10/24/660943b8-5398-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
The poorest-performing nursing homes are on the administration's radar
Happy Monday, where this morning we’re learning about why pets do the weird things they do. (Here’s my cat’s quirk.) Send pet tricks and tips to rachel.roubein@washpost.com.
Today’s edition: A look at how much major health groups spent on lobbying last quarter, and a deep dive inside the successes and missteps of President Biden’s presidency so far. But first …
The Biden administration has new criteria for ending federal funds to nursing homes that fail to improve
The Biden administration is toughening oversight and pledging steeper penalties for the nation’s poorest-performing nursing homes.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — the federal agency overseeing nursing homes — detailed on Friday its plan to crack down on certain lower-rated facilities, which includes setting new criteria for terminating federal funding for those that fail to improve. The policies specifically target a small slice of the nation’s nursing homes and are effective immediately.
Nursing homes were an epicenter of covid spread during the early days of the pandemic and have since faced heightened scrutiny from Congress and federal officials. Ahead of the State of the Union, President Biden promised to improve the safety and quality of care for residents of the nation’s over 15,000 facilities.
But some advocates and lawmakers are calling for expanding the number of facilities that are on the list of the nation’s poorest performing nursing homes. Those facilities are inspected more frequently and such a demand can only be met with more funding from Congress, CMS says.
In 1998, CMS established the Special Focus Facility (SFF) program, which focuses on nursing homes with a record of persistent deficiencies during health and safety inspections. There are 88 facilities in the program, representing less than 1 percent of the nursing homes across the country.
Here are the new policy changes the administration announced late last week:
Factoring in a facility’s efforts to improve when considering enforcement action, such as how high to set fines.
Considering booting nursing homes from the Medicare and Medicaid program if they are cited for dangerous violations in two successive inspections.
Strengthening requirements for graduating from the program.
Continuing to closely monitor facilities for three years after they graduate the SFF program.
Several experts praised the move as a step in the right direction, noting that CMS has historically been reluctant to pull federal funding from facilities that weren’t improving. David Grabowski, an expert in long-term care at Harvard Medical School, said he couldn’t recall many instances where the agency shut down nursing homes in his over two decades studying the industry.
The view from the industry: The nation’s major nursing home lobby, the American Health Care Association (AHCA), expressed concern that the rhetoric around some of the changes “is degrading” to the millions of staff who have “risked their lives serving on the front lines during this pandemic.” Both AHCA and LeadingAge — which represents nonprofit aging service providers — reiterated their long-standing calls for more funding.
“Escalating citations and penalties have neither helped turn these facilities around nor prevented other facilities from becoming chronic poor performers,” Mark Parkinson, AHCA’s president and CEO, said in a statement.
Meanwhile, LeadingAge President and CEO Katie Smith Sloan said her group agrees with CMS that nursing homes that “do not demonstrate progress should close.”
Some advocates — such as Richard Mollot, the head of the Long Term Care Community Coalition — want to see the small Special Focus Facility program expanded, saying a much higher number of facilities are in need of increased scrutiny. Such nursing homes are inspected every six months, which is about twice as often as other facilities.
State agencies that survey nursing homes would need more funding to be able to inspect a greater number of facilities more frequently, a CMS spokesperson said, noting the annual budget for inspections hasn’t increased since 2015 despite the agency’s request for more dollars. “Therefore, CMS cannot expand the number of nursing homes included in the SFF program at this time,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) — the chair of the Senate Special Committee on Aging — acknowledged that the reach of the program is limited by its funding. He introduced legislation, along with Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) that would expand the program to no fewer than 5 percent of the lowest rated facilities, appropriating $14.8 million annually for the effort.
“The larger issue is, are we going to be serious about quality of care or not?” he told The Health 202. “And if you're not serious about funding, I don’t think you’re going to get to the reforms that we need.”
Follow the 💰: Third-quarter lobbying reports were out late last week, and we took a look at how much major groups and companies were spending to lobby Congress and the federal government. Here are some of the top spenders among health lobbies:
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America: $7.3 million ➡️ compared with $6.3 million in the second quarter
American Hospital Association: $5.1 million ➡️ compared with $4.6 million in the second quarter
AARP: $4.8 million ➡️ compared with $3.4 million in the second quarter
American Medical Association: $4.4 million ➡️ compared with $4.6 million in the second quarter
Pfizer: $3.3 million ➡️ compared with $3.5 million in the second quarter
Pfizer to market coronavirus vaccine for at least $110 per dose
Pfizer is planning to charge between $110 and $130 per dose of the coronavirus vaccine it developed with BioNTech once the federal government stops footing the bill for the shots, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The company expects that the vaccine — which has been offered at no cost throughout the pandemic by the government — will still be free for people with private health insurance or coverage through public programs like Medicare and Medicaid. That’s roughly quadruple the current price, although several analysts told Reuters they were expecting rising costs as demand for coronavirus vaccines has waned.
The drugmaker said the list price hike takes into account the value of the vaccine and manufacturing costs, which have increased because of a switch to single-dose vials. The U.S. government currently pays roughly $30 per dose.
Next steps: The new price will take effect sometime next year, according to company officials who said the vaccine’s commercial rollout depends on factors such as when its contracts with the Biden administration expire and when the country exhausts its stockpile of the shots.
In other covid news …
On tap Tuesday: President Biden is set to get his bivalent booster shot at a public event early this week as the White House continues its efforts to get the updated vaccines into Americans’ arms ahead of an expected winter coronavirus surge, The Post’s Dan Diamond first reported. He’ll also deliver remarks on combating covid-19, per the White House’s week ahead guidance.
Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tested positive for the coronavirus Friday night, the agency announced this weekend. Walensky, who is up to date on her vaccinations, is experiencing mild symptoms.
Our colleagues Ashley Parker, Tyler Pager and Michael Scherer were out this weekend with a deep dive on Biden's presidency so far. “The story of Biden’s first term so far is a roller coaster — complicated and contradictory, with remarkable achievements and enormous disappointment,” they wrote. Here are three standout details from the story:
Viral freedom: The president’s scientific advisers were growing increasingly nervous as the delta variant began to spread rapidly overseas in summer 2021, but inside the White House, planning for an “independence from the virus” July Fourth celebration barreled ahead. As the event drew closer, Biden flagged to his staff that they needed to add some caveats to his remarks, echoing the warnings he had been issuing about potential variants in the weeks prior.
There was too much momentum behind the idea of a patriotic celebration of victory over the virus to call off the event. “If we could have canceled it, we would have canceled it,” said one top covid adviser. So the celebration went on as planned, and the message delivered was ultimately one of victory: “We are emerging from the darkness,” Biden declared.
Omicron woes: The highly contagious coronavirus variant struck the country right before the holiday season last year. As Americans raced to buy tests, they found barren store shelves. Biden was furious, our colleagues report. In meetings in the Oval Office, an exasperated Biden repeatedly asked, “Why didn’t we order enough tests? Why didn’t we order enough of what we needed?”
“One former administration official involved in the process, however, said the problem was not one of a failure to plan, but one of capacity: There weren’t enough at-home tests available to order for the winter months ahead, even had the administration wanted to,” our colleagues write.
Abortion rights: Many Democrats were disappointed by what they viewed as Biden’s initial lackluster response to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Biden, a devout Catholic who used to oppose abortion, hasn’t always taken lead on the issue. But Mike Donilon, the president’s longtime adviser — who is also Catholic — urged the president to be more forceful on it. He also argued that the decision changed the nation’s political landscape and could be used to mobilize Democrats.
On tap this week: Our Washington Post Live colleagues will interview White House drug czar Rahul Gupta on Wednesday about the opioid epidemic and the nation’s evolving marijuana policies.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said yesterday that he will not sign onto legislation sponsored by fellow GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) to ban abortions at 15 weeks nationwide. He told “Fox News Sunday” host Shannon Bream that the decision should be left to the states.
Peter Marks, head of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine operations, said he thinks it's possible that some people may need more than one coronavirus booster dose in the next year given the rate at which the virus is mutating, Stat reports.
RSV, other viruses making it hard to find a bed in children’s hospitals (By Fenit Nirappil and Ariana Eunjung Cha | The Washington Post)
Inside Michelle McMurry-Heath’s departure from BIO: Firings, internal clashes, and a pivotal job review (By Rachel Cohrs | Stat)
Among Seniors, a Declining Interest in Boosters (By Paula Span | The New York Times)
On our radar: Split-ticket voters loom large in midterms | 2022-10-24T13:28:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The poorest-performing nursing homes are on the administration's radar - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/poorest-performing-nursing-homes-are-administration-radar/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/poorest-performing-nursing-homes-are-administration-radar/ |
Cal State banned caste discrimination. Two Hindu professors sued.
A professor at San Diego State University, shown here, and another professor are suing the head of the California State University System over the addition of caste to an anti-discrimination policy. (iStock)
“We fully and vehemently oppose all forms of prejudice and discrimination,” Kumar said in a statement announcing the federal lawsuit, previously reported by Religion News Service. “But CSU’s Interim Policy singles out all Indian origin and Hindu staff and students solely because we are Indian and Hindu. This by its very definition is discrimination and a denial of our basic civil rights.”
Caste is a social hierarchy to which people are assigned at birth. Dalits, sometimes pejoratively called “untouchables,” face prejudice and violence in South Asian countries despite laws against caste discrimination. In India, the caste system originally applied to Hindus but now applies to people of various religions.
California State, the nation’s largest four-year public university system, announced in January that it had added caste to its anti-discrimination policy after years of activism from Dalits. The policy now identifies caste as a subcategory of race and ethnicity.
That university system followed the lead of several other colleges, including Brandeis University and Colby College, that have made caste a protected characteristic in recent years as younger Hindus increasingly advocate against caste-based bias. Lower-caste Hindus in the United States often report microaggressions aimed at revealing their caste status, said Dheepa Sundaram, a professor of Hindu studies at the University of Denver.
California State officials did not immediately respond to a message from The Washington Post, but spokeswoman Toni Molle told Religion News Service that adding caste to the anti-discrimination policy “reflects the university’s commitment to inclusivity and respect, making certain each and every one of our 23 CSU campuses always is a place of access, opportunity and equity for all.”
Google’s plan to talk about caste bias led to ‘division and rancor’
Naming caste as a protected characteristic, however, is contentious among some Hindus. The D.C.-based Hindu American Foundation, which represents the California State professors, says the university system is unfairly targeting Hinduism and that it has no right to define the religion at all, much less as a discriminatory faith.
Suhag Shukla, the foundation’s executive director, said no other California State policy “demonizes” any other religion, ethnic group or race — a fact that means Hindu community members are being denied equal protection under the law.
“CSU has turned non-discrimination on its head by adding a category that it defines as inherent to an already minoritized community and exclusively polices only that community — Indian and Hindu students and faculty,” Shukla said in an email.
In their lawsuit, Kumar and Sinha point to times when California’s state government has referenced caste in conjunction with Hinduism; they say those instances bolster their argument that making caste a protected characteristic targets Hindus.
Kumar, an engineering professor at San Diego State University, and Sinha, an accounting professor at California State University at Long Beach, also said they do not identify as belonging to any caste. They said they worry that the university system will ascribe a caste to them for purposes of adjudicating discrimination cases.
India’s engineers have thrived in Silicon Valley. So has its caste system.
Opinions on naming caste as a protected characteristic tend to diverge along the lines of age and immigration status, Sundaram said, with immigrants less likely to support such a move than Hindus whose families have lived in the United States for generations. Nearly 9 in 10 U.S. Hindus are immigrants, according to the Pew Research Center. But Sundaram said many younger Hindus have formed alliances with other affinity groups, such as Black Lives Matter, and are more inclined to call out caste discrimination.
Sundaram, who supports making caste a protected characteristic, said critiquing Hinduism — even in a country where Hindus are a minority — is not akin to promoting Hinduphobia. She said most discrimination against Hindus is based on the fact that many are South Asian, rather than on their religion, and that Hinduphobia is not a widespread problem.
The Hindu American Foundation was among the advocacy groups that last year protested an online academic conference about Hindu nationalism, a right-wing political movement linked to India. Protesters sent nearly a million emails to universities, arguing that the event was Hinduphobic. The HAF said then that the conference promoted activists who support “extremist movements” and deny the “resulting genocides of Hindus.”
The foundation has also objected to a lawsuit filed by California regulators on behalf of an engineer at the technology company Cisco who alleged that his upper-caste supervisors did not promote him because he is a Dalit. The HAF argued that the discrimination claim falsely suggests that Hinduism is inherently discriminatory. | 2022-10-24T13:28:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hindu professors sue Cal State over ban on caste discrimination - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/10/24/hindu-caste-discrimination-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/10/24/hindu-caste-discrimination-lawsuit/ |
Commanders co-owner Tanya Snyder greets a former player before Sunday's win over the Packers.
Late Sunday morning, a few high-ranking Washington Commanders officials — including co-owner Tanya Snyder — stepped onto a stage on a plaza at FedEx Field and attempted to bridge the franchise’s past and present.
For the team, the moment was set to be a high point. Business executives had spent months planning how the organization would celebrate its 90th anniversary, and on “alumni homecoming weekend,” they had gathered about 130 former players, cheerleaders and others to parade around the stadium and be recognized on the field.
But the rally also highlighted Washington’s complicated relationship with its past. Despite the team’s apparent desire to avoid all references to its old name — its banners and clothing used the phrase “Washington Legends,” which the team has favored for its official communications since its rebrand was unveiled in February — a pair of executives seemed to go off-script and use it as appeal to the crowd.
“Hail to the Redskins, and let’s beat Green Bay!” Snyder said to applause.
Team president Jason Wright, who told alumni they were living proof that the team with a new name has heritage, said they could help make “a difference in bringing that next Lombardi Trophy, and y’all know we need that more than anything else.”
“Hail to the ’skins, and hail to the Commanders,” he added.
Buckner: Even a win won’t drown out Commanders fans’ refrain: Sell the team
Since July 2020, when the franchise retired its old name under pressure from corporate sponsors, the team has rarely used the moniker in official capacities. In January, at the end of a Super Bowl XXVI 30th anniversary special live broadcast on YouTube, a group of former players sang the old fight song. And in August, during a speech at a team luncheon, Snyder said that while the franchise had “evolved,” it would never forget its “history as the Redskins.”
Sunday’s game provided the team’s first public moments since Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay applied pressure last week by saying “there’s merit to remove” team owner Daniel Snyder amid the team’s many off-field issues. And despite the franchise winning consecutive games for the first time as the Commanders, fan dissatisfaction seemed to remain high. During the game, a large group of fans chanted, “Sell the team!” — and when a few held up signs with the same message, staff members asked the fans to stop.
“They should not have been asked to take down the signs,” a team spokesperson said.
Initially, the rally seemed like an oasis from the chaos. The alumni paraded around FedEx Field to the delight of fans, some of whom may have cheered the same players as they rode down Constitution Avenue decades ago. A few fans followed the procession to the rally at Legends Plaza. The banner above the stage read “Thank you Washington Legends,” and the former players wore gray quarter-zips that read “Washington Legends Football.” The only references to the old name came from a small sea of fans, some of whom wore jerseys of the players who helped lift the franchise to greatness.
In his opening remarks, director of alumni relations Tim Hightower praised the former players and the fans who had supported them through difficult times.
“It is important we appreciate the fans who have come out to support these guys all the way from the Boston Braves to the Redskins to now the Commanders,” he said. “We’re one family. This is one legacy. We promise to honor you all.”
Hightower called up Tanya Snyder. She appeared to read from prepared remarks and used many of the team-approved phrases, such as “Washington legends” and the “history, legacy and tradition of the Burgundy and Gold.” She also announced the team had hired “former Redskins cheerleader” Terri Lamb to work with Hightower and lead cheerleader alumni efforts.
But Snyder’s decision to sign off with the team’s old slogan was notable because, since her husband ceded day-to-day control of the team in July 2021, the NFL and the team have presented her as the one overseeing the transformation and culture change.
In between Tanya Snyder and Wright, the Commanders called up four franchise legends: wide receiver Art Monk, quarterback Doug Williams, quarterback Mark Rypien and linebacker Monte Coleman. Rypien mostly emceed, and when he thanked “our extended family, the greatest fans in the NFL — the Washington Football team, Commanders fans,” a fan quickly yelled out to correct him, “Redskins!”
“We’re going to hail the Commanders from here on end, but we hailed the hell out of the Redskins back in the day!” he said to perhaps the loudest applause of the morning. “It’s because of our fans and because of you we had that bond!”
Even amid the gauzy glow of old heroes, of the distant past resurrected, Wright addressed the turbulence of the past two-plus years.
“Thank you for being here, and thank you to so many of you as individuals who have helped us navigate a very challenging moment of transition in the franchise — into a new name [and] trying not to lose our history in the process,” he told the crowd of former players. He listed off a few mentors.
“To all of you, to a person, thank you very much for what you’re doing for our franchise just by being here,” he added. “[You’re] signaling this is not an expansion team. This is not something that’s new. This team has a championship legacy that goes back 90 years, and you are the representation of that.”
Doug Williams got Art Monk tell a short story about what it was like playing in RFK: pic.twitter.com/JhzEktOaxK
Wright said it was critical to connect the players past and present. He said he remembered how he felt when, as a running back with the Cleveland Browns in the mid-2000s, he spent time with franchise legends such as Jim Brown, Kevin Mack and Bernie Kosar.
“I felt like I was a part of something bigger,” he said, adding to the alumni: “When they see you all together, they will remember that it isn’t just the last two years that matter. It isn’t just Chase Young and Terry McLaurin. There is a rich history of champions that they play alongside, and I believe that is going to give them something extra on the field.”
Then Wright added something that for most NFL teams would be simple — but in Washington requires more navigation: “You will see us year after year after year doing more and more to honor you all and to incorporate our history into what we do.” | 2022-10-24T13:28:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Commanders' rally highlights complicated relationship with the past - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/commanders-alumni-rally-tanya-snyder/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/commanders-alumni-rally-tanya-snyder/ |
Despite an Amazon setback this week, unions have gained footholds at big companies such as Apple, Chipotle and Starbucks
Amazon warehouse workers protest outside their place of employment on Oct. 14 in San Bernardino, Calif. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)
It has been a year of firsts for the U.S. labor movement, with successful votes for unions’ first Amazon warehouse, first Apple Store and first Trader Joe’s, Chipotle and REI locations. The most promising of all for union organizers have been victories at some 250 Starbucks stores.
The labor movement has continued to gain traction this fall, despite a high-profile union defeat at an Amazon warehouse in Albany, N.Y., last week. With 21 months of strong job gains, the tight labor market has resulted in unusual worker shortages across many sectors over the past year, giving workers more leverage with employers.
“There’s a combination of things that have contributed to this organizing wave that we’re seeing, and the pandemic and post pandemic economy have been a large part of that,” said John Logan, a labor studies professor at San Francisco State University. “It has opened up an opportunity for unions that didn’t exist before the pandemic.”
There are other objective measures of increased enthusiasm for unions this year. The National Labor Relations reported a 53 percent year-over-year increase in union election petitions over the past 12 months. Meanwhile, more Americans say they approve of labor unions, a high not seen since 1965.
“In a time where most institutions, including the Supreme Court, are becoming less and less popular or trusted, unions have their highest level of popularity in decades,” said David Weil, the Department of Labor’s top wage and hour regulator under President Barack Obama. “We certainly see a restiveness that is coming out of the pandemic. There’s a greater willingness of working people to show dissatisfaction.”
However, as the economy teeters toward a downturn in coming months, the window for cementing more victories could be narrowing. Already job openings have fallen, and some companies — particularly in technology and interest-rate sensitive sectors such as mortgage finance — have ordered hiring freezes and layoffs, igniting fears that the paradigm of power in favor of workers could be short-lived.
“Workers have a lot of bargaining power, and that is fueling a resurgence in the labor movement,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “Unions are trying to make real lasting inroads during this period. That’s going to change in 2023 and almost by definition lead to a reduction in worker bargaining power.”
For now, momentum appears to be accelerating in certain sectors, with walk outs at Amazon warehouses last week in Atlanta, Joliet, Ill., and San Bernardino, Calif. A Home Depot in Philadelphia could become the company’s first location to unionize next month, and workers at a Trader Joe’s in New York City will vote on whether to make it the company’s first union store in that particular region. Quality assurance testers at Blizzard Albany, a subsidiary of games giant Activision Blizzard, will vote on whether to join a union. The country may also get its only unionized strip club in November.
It is not clear whether these developments will increase union worker numbers. Last year, despite polls showing elevated enthusiasm for organized labor, union membership in the United States fell to 10.3 percent of U.S. workers, after a pandemic-related uptick the previous year.
Amazon workers near Albany, N.Y., vote against unionizing
While Amazon has been a hard nut for unions to crack, with just one union victory at a Staten Island warehouse in April, organized labor has made inroads throughout the retail and service sector. There have been multiple union election successes at Starbucks, Apple, REI and Trader Joe’s this year. Labor experts say those retailers’ workforces are easier to unionize because their workplaces are smaller and less physically spread out than Amazon’s.
Employees at unionized stores also tend to be younger, more educated and left-leaning politically, experts said. Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said that the upsurge in union interest among young, college educated people has been taking shape quietly for years — particularly in media and higher education — but it’s only recently captured national attention because of high profile efforts at companies such as Starbucks.
For example, if Republicans do well in next month’s elections, organized labor could face a less favorable environment. Tennessee has a GOP-backed ballot measure that would enshrine in the state constitution a “right-to-work” law that exempts workers from paying dues for union representation. Such measures typically correspond with declines in union membership.
When employers have more power, it is easier for them to retaliate against staffers who try to organize, said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington. Workers tend to be more emboldened to unionize during periods of low unemployment and high job availability, she said. “The consequences of taking the risk to unionize are lower if lots of jobs are available,” Shierholz said.
Recessions and other economic downturns have often corresponded with declines in union activity and popularity — with a few important exceptions, such as the Great Depression. For example, the approval rating of unions in the United States dropped to its lowest point in 2009, during the height of unemployment following the Great Recession.
The Amazon Labor Union lost a high-stakes union election in Albany on Tuesday, in a decisive 406-to-206 defeat. Despite this defeat, workers seeking to unionize Amazon warehouses say they are undeterred.
They accuse Amazon of engaging in an anti-union campaign that prevented a “free and fair” election. Union leaders said they were deterred from organizing in company break rooms during the Albany campaign, a tactic that was crucial to the union’s historic Staten Island victory in April.
“We’re glad that our team in Albany was able to have their voices heard, and that they chose to keep the direct relationship with Amazon, as we think that this is the best arrangement for both our employees and customers,” said Kelly Nantel, Amazon spokesperson.
The National Labor Relations Board is investigating 27 unfair labor practice charges that the union has filed against Amazon in Albany. A recent charge alleges that Amazon suspended a worker after he complained about being harassed during the election by anti-union consultants Amazon had hired.
The independent union has faced growing pains as it has tried to expand beyond its initial victory in Staten Island without substantial funding, or the staff and legal resources of an established national labor union. The union, which says it has about several hundred thousand dollars in its budget, is still battling Amazon for certification and a contract at the 8,300-worker Staten Island warehouse.
Still, there are few signs that labor activity at Amazon is cooling off, with a variety of labor organizations and unions taking their shots at organizing the nation’s second largest employer. Amazon Labor Union filed last week for its first union election on the West Coast, at a warehouse in Moreno Valley, Calif.
Other groups around the country are trying to form independent unions. Home Depot’s Philadelphia workers want the company to address deteriorating working conditions caused by labor shortages and understaffing, according to Vince Quiles, 27, a leader of the Home Depot unionization effort in Philadelphia.
Home Depot has an open-door policy to ensure that employees can bring their concerns to leadership, company spokesperson Sara Gorman said. Home Depot respects its employees’ right to unionize, but does not believe collective bargaining is the solution to worker concerns, she said. | 2022-10-24T13:40:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Can the labor movement stay hot as the job market cools? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/24/unions-amazon-recession-economy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/24/unions-amazon-recession-economy/ |
Neil Greenberg
Patriots Coach Bill Belichick likely has a good defensive game plan to stop the one-dimentional Chicago Bears on Monday night. (Washington Post illustration/Photo by Nick Cammett/Getty Images)
Bill Belichick last week shared some thoughts about the Chicago Bears, whom his New England Patriots play Monday night in Foxborough, Mass.
The Bears, it should be noted, are 2-4. They’re averaging 15.5 points a game — better only than the Pittsburgh Steelers and Denver Broncos. They’re coming off a home loss to a Commanders team that won despite playing the entire second half with a quarterback (Carson Wentz) who had broken the ring finger on this throwing hand. But to hear Belichick say it, this Chicago team is worthy of its Monsters of the Midway past — “a pretty impressive group and really a young team that you can see getting better all the time.”
As of Monday morning, the Patriots are an 8.5-point favorite, up from 7.5 when it opened, and the total has been set at 40, up from 39 at open. But neither of our picks will focus on the spread or the total.
David Montgomery, over 11½ receiving yards
Montgomery might not get many opportunities to run the ball — the expectation is that his team will be trailing for much of this game — but that should not affect his ability to catch passes out of the backfield. Montgomery has caught 10 passes on his 11 targets this season, averaging 22.6 receiving yards per game. The Patriots, meantime, are among the league’s worst at defending pass-catching running backs. According to Football Outsiders, New England is the fifth-worst in this regard after adjusting for strength of schedule, allowing opposing running backs to produce an average of 41 receiving yards on six targets per game.
Bears team total under 15.5 points
Despite the effusive praise of his Monday night opponent, Belichick must be licking his chops to play such a one-dimensional offense. The Bears have run the ball an NFL-high 58.8 percent of the time this season, and one doesn’t have to go too far back to see what the Patriots have done against teams with a similar offensive imbalance.
In their previous game, the Patriots faced a Cleveland Browns offense that entered with a 52 percent rushing rate, which at the time ranked fifth in the league. And after giving up 15 yards combined on Cleveland’s first two rushing plays, New England held the Browns to just 3.4 yards per rush over the rest of the game. Cleveland would run the ball only 18 times, compared with 45 Jacoby Brissett passes, and the Patriots won going away, 38-15.
New England ranks 26th in the league in defensive rushing DVOA and was allowing 4.8 yards per carry before the Cleveland game, so teams have been able to run on the Patriots. But Belichick knows that the Bears’ passing game is nonexistent, just as the Browns’ was: Chicago is averaging an NFL-worst 122.8 passing yards per game, nearly 30 yards less than the team above it in the rankings. Take away the Bears’ running game — and I think New England will do this — and what’s left for Chicago’s offense? Not much, and New England’s defense ranks sixth in passing DVOA. I don’t think the Bears top their team total here. | 2022-10-24T14:20:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Monday Night Football picks, odds and predictions for Patriots-Bears - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/bears-patriots-picks-monday-night-football-odds/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/bears-patriots-picks-monday-night-football-odds/ |
Taylor Heinicke celebrates with fans after leading the Commanders to a win Sunday. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
A look at the good (Hail!) and bad (Fail!) from the Washington Commanders’ 23-21 win over the Green Bay Packers on Sunday.
Making his 2022 debut in place of the injured Carson Wentz, Heinicke rebounded from a dreadful start to help the Commanders overcome a 14-3 deficit and improve to 3-4. The pylon-seeking former Old Dominion standout led scoring drives on Washington’s first three possessions of the second half and finished with 201 passing yards and two touchdowns. The win was especially meaningful for Heinicke, who grew up rooting for the Packers because his late father was a huge fan. He said his dad, who died in 2011, was on his mind Sunday.
“He’s up there right now drinking a beer, having a good time,” Heinicke said afterward. “He’d be proud of me and this one’s for him, for sure.”
Fail: Green Bay’s offense
The Packers failed to convert a third down for the first time since Oct. 17, 1999, when Heinicke’s childhood idol, Brett Favre, was their quarterback. Aaron Rodgers finished a respectable 23 of 35 for 194 yards and two touchdowns, but he attempted only five passes of more than 11 yards, and the Packers’ offense struggled to move the ball for much of the game. Rodgers was visibly frustrated with his wide receivers, and after one of four drops by rookie wide receiver Romeo Doubs, cameras captured the veteran quarterback appearing to ask, “What the f--- are we doing?”
Rodgers improved his touchdown-to-interception ratio to 16-to-1 in seven regular season starts against Washington, his best mark against any team. Strangely, with Sunday’s triumph, the Commanders join the Indianapolis Colts as the only teams with a winning regular season record (4-3) against the future Hall of Famer. Rodgers did lead the Packers to a win in his only playoff matchup against Washington.
It took a couple of quarters for McLaurin and Heinicke to rediscover the chemistry they displayed last year, but it was a thing of beauty when things clicked. Despite catching only one pass in the first half, McLaurin finished with five receptions for 73 yards, including a 37-yard touchdown. The duo’s most important hookup was a 12-yard gain on third and nine just before the two-minute warning, which enabled Washington to burn valuable time off the clock.
Commanders deny the Packers with a 'pretty good formula' on offense
The Commanders welcomed more than 100 franchise greats to FedEx Field as part of their alumni homecoming weekend, which was cool. Less cool: One of those greats, former Washington kicker and 1982 NFL MVP Mark Moseley, had his name misspelled on his team-issued nametag, as documented in a photo tweeted by his son. “It’s really sad,” Mark Moseley Jr. wrote. It’s also nothing new. Three years ago, Washington spelled London Fletcher’s name “London Flecther” in a graphic on the scoreboard when the linebacker was inducted into the team’s ring of honor. Earlier this year, the website where fans were invited to vote on the players to be added to the franchise’s “90 Greatest” team featured numerous spelling mistakes and other factual errors.
Hail: Muffed punts — and a souvenir
For the second straight game, a Washington rookie recovered a muffed punt by the opposition. In Chicago, cornerback Christian Holmes pounced on Velus Jones Jr.'s botched catch, setting up the game-winning touchdown. On Sunday, safety Percy Butler’s recovery of Amani Rodgers’s muffed punt in the first quarter led to a Commanders field goal. Butler celebrated the win by trading his gloves to one of the thousands of Packers fans in attendance for a Cheesehead, which was a hit in the locker room. It’s the second consecutive week the Packers have watched an opponent sport their trademark headgear; Jets rookie cornerback Sauce Gardner donned a Cheesehead after New York’s win at Lambeau Field in Week 6.
After a video circulated on Twitter of FedEx Field security personnel telling fans to put their “Sell the Team” signs away, a Commanders spokesperson said the sign enforcement was misguided. For future reference, signs are permitted at FedEx Field, provided they’re “handheld, event-related, in good taste, and cannot obstruct another guest’s view,” but wearing paper bags over one’s head is prohibited for safety reasons. The incident was reminiscent of the Burgundy Revolution of 2009, when the team banned all signs before reversing course less than a month later.
“We’ve disappointed our fans so far this season, and I’m as disappointed as they are,” owner Daniel Snyder said in the release announcing the change to the sign policy 13 years ago. “I understand that some fans want to express their feelings with signs and they should do so, as long as they stay within the boundaries of good taste and don’t block the view of other fans.”
Rivera won his first coach’s challenge of the season, and it came in a big spot. On a first-down play from the Green Bay 38-yard line in the third quarter, Heinicke dropped back to pass and was hit as he threw. Officials initially ruled the play a fumble recovered by Washington’s John Bates, resulting in a loss of 10 yards. Upon review, officials reversed the call to an incomplete pass. Rather than second and 20, Washington faced second and 10. The Commanders picked up a first down on the next play and capped their long drive with a field goal. | 2022-10-24T14:20:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Highlights and lowlights from the Commanders' win over the Packers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/commanders-packers-highlights-and-lowlights/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/commanders-packers-highlights-and-lowlights/ |
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu speaks during a meeting in Moscow on Oct. 4. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service/AP)
Officials in Kyiv and several Western countries rejected claims made without evidence by the Kremlin that Ukraine is planning to use a “dirty bomb” — an explosive weapon designed to scatter radioactive material — on its own territory, characterizing them as an attempt by Russia to create a pretext for escalating the conflict.
“We all reject Russia’s transparently false allegations that Ukraine is preparing to use a dirty bomb on its own territory,” foreign ministers from the United States, France and the United Kingdom said in a Sunday joint statement, after Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made the unfounded claim in conversations with the countries’ defense ministers.
“The world would see through any attempt to use this allegation as a pretext for escalation,” the Western diplomats added.
According to summaries of Shoigu’s calls posted by the Russian Ministry of Defense, he told defense officials Sunday that he was concerned about “possible provocations by Ukraine with the use of a ‘dirty bomb,’ ” and noted that the situation in Ukraine is “rapidly deteriorating.”
Ukrainian officials immediately rejected Shoigu’s claims and accused Russia of making false threats to justify its own escalatory attack on Ukrainian territory. Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, said he extended a formal invitation to U.N. nuclear inspectors to independently establish that Ukraine has “nothing to hide.”
The Washington Post could not verify either side’s claim. The Institute for the Study of War said that “the Kremlin is unlikely to be preparing an imminent false-flag dirty bomb attack.” Instead, the think tank noted, “Shoigu likely sought to slow or suspend Western military aid to Ukraine and possibly weaken the NATO alliance” with his allegations.
The incident has thrown Western and Ukrainian fears of a Russian nuclear attack into sharp relief, as the conflict hits the eight-month mark Monday, and frustrations grow within Russia that what officials initially conceived as a quick victory is turning into a protracted and costly conflict.
Faced with war losses, Russian propagandists retreat to anger and patriotism
For many, it has also raised the question: What is a dirty bomb?
Dirty bombs are made of conventional explosives and radioactive material, designed to spread the material once they explode. They are not nuclear weapons and bear no resemblance to the atomic bombs used by the United States in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Dirty bombs are far less powerful: Their “radiation could be dispersed within a few blocks or miles of the explosion,” according to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
As the department notes, the explosive substance in a dirty bomb is more likely to cause harm to humans than the radioactive material it carries. The goal of using a dirty bomb may not be maximal destruction, but rather an attempt to “create fear and panic, contaminate property, and require potentially costly cleanup,” it explains.
Shoigu’s claims that Ukraine would use a dirty bomb are particularly sensitive because Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 in return for a guarantee from Russia that it would not attack Ukraine.
Russia’s claims also come as analysts say the war in Ukraine has entered a new chapter — one that has seen Russia face several military losses, including Ukrainian gains in the south and the explosion that damaged the Crimean Bridge, which links Crimea to mainland Russia.
Moscow has retaliated forcefully, with massive strikes against Ukraine’s capital and its energy infrastructure ahead of winter. But Russian President Vladimir Putin is facing increasingly vocal criticism at home, as a growing number of war propagandists bemoan a perceived lack of progress and thousands of Russian men flee their country to avoid being forced to fight in Ukraine.
Setbacks in its invasion of Ukraine have led to increased nuclear threats by Russia, echoing Cold War events like the little-known 1983 nuclear crisis. (Video: Joshua Carroll/The Washington Post)
IAEA warns of ‘catastrophic’ threat from shelling in Ukraine nuclear report
Against this backdrop, Putin has threatened to use “all means available” to defend Russian-occupied territory. “I want to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction … and when the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, to protect Russia and our people, we will certainly use all means at our disposal,” Putin said Sept. 21. “This is not a bluff.”
Shortly after that, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, wrote on Telegram that “Russia has the right to use nuclear weapons if necessary.” But he said Russia would do so only “in predetermined cases” laid out in its nuclear-policy documents.
CIA Director William J. Burns told CBS News last month that it was difficult to assess how serious Putin is about the potential use of nuclear weapons. He said the U.S. intelligence community has not seen “any practical evidence” that there is an “imminent threat.” Still, he said the United States should take the comments “very seriously.”
U.S. officials previously told The Washington Post that the United States for several months has been privately warning Russia’s leadership of the grave consequences that would follow the use of a nuclear weapon. Recent, more specific statements from Moscow appear to have set off alarm bells in Western countries and in Ukraine.
When asked about Putin’s nuclear threats, Col. Oleksandr Syrsky, commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, told ABC News in an interview released Monday, “We are and should be worried.”
Karen DeYoung, Paul Sonne and John Hudson contributed to this report. | 2022-10-24T14:59:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Western countries reject Russian claims about ‘dirty bomb’ in Ukraine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/dirty-bomb-russia-ukraine-war/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/dirty-bomb-russia-ukraine-war/ |
Rishi Sunak. (Jon Super/AP)
NEW DELHI — Rishi Sunak has become the United Kingdom’s first prime minister of color, and many in India and its diaspora hailed the milestone in British politics as a testament to the country’s multiculturalism.
In India, the development took on additional meaning, particularly among nationalists who celebrated the prospect of a politician of Indian origin — and a practicing Hindu — taking the reins of a former colonial power that once ruled their country.
Sunak, 42, cruised to victory in the Conservative Party’s leadership contest Monday on his way to the prime minister’s office — coinciding with Diwali, the most important festival of the year for Hindus.
Rishi Sunak to become U.K. prime minister after Penny Mordaunt withdraws from leadership contest
In Britain, Sunak’s heritage was being celebrated as “going against the grain of deeply racial hierarchies of 21st-century Britain,” said Avinash Paliwal, a lecturer in diplomacy at the School of Oriental and African Studies. But in India, he added, “it’ll be celebrated and feed into the popular narrative of rising Indian — even Hindu — global power.”
Sunak secured the backing of Conservative Party lawmakers five days after Liz Truss resigned — his former boss Boris Johnson dropped out of the leadership race, and his other challenger, House of Commons leader Penny Mordaunt, conceded that she did not have enough support from the party.
Who is Rishi Sunak? What to know about the U.K. prime minister
After George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis and the Black Lives Matter movement swept much of the world in 2020, Sunak spoke out about the racism he has faced in public life and about the struggles his family overcame as immigrants to Britain. “As a British Asian of course I know that racism exists in this country,” he tweeted. “But a better society doesn’t happen overnight — like all great acts of creation, it happens slowly, and depends on the cooperation of each of us toward that common goal.”
Suliman reported from London. Jennifer Hassan contributed to this report. | 2022-10-24T14:59:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rishi Sunak’s ascent to U.K. leader hailed in India as ‘incredible feat’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/rishi-sunak-first-prime-minister-color-india/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/rishi-sunak-first-prime-minister-color-india/ |
Rishi Sunak, UK member of parliament, departs his home in London, UK, on Friday, Oct. 21, 2022. The Conservative Party is desperate to draw a line under Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership, with a rapid leadership contest aimed at trying to give the winner a shot at overturning an unprecedented deficit in the polls. (Bloomberg)
In many ways, Sunak is a completely conventional British prime minister. He was educated at Winchester College (where he was head boy or “Sen. Co. Prae” in the idiosyncratic language of that institution) followed by Lincoln College, Oxford where he read PPE (that is, received a degree in philosophy, politics and economics, the staple subject or aspiring politicians and civil servants). He is inordinately fond of football. If the naughtiest thing that Theresa May did while growing up was to run through a field of wheat, the naughtiest thing that Sunak did as a schoolboy was to smuggle a handheld television into the school so that he did not miss any key Euro 96 matches. On his 18th birthday, he received a card signed by the entire squad of his favorite team, Southampton, a gift that became one of his most prized possessions.
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Are the Tories Intent on Appearing Ungovernable?: Martin Ivens | 2022-10-24T14:59:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rishi Sunak Is a New and Old-Fashioned Tory - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/rishi-sunak-is-a-new-and-old-fashioned-tory/2022/10/24/c136bb26-53a7-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/rishi-sunak-is-a-new-and-old-fashioned-tory/2022/10/24/c136bb26-53a7-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
U-Md. to cover tuition and fees for low-income state residents
The university said the Terrapin Commitment program aims to increase access to the flagship campus in College Park.
The University of Maryland, College Park announced a new financial aid effort to help boost access and enrollment of low-income students to the university. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
The University of Maryland in College Park said Monday that it is enhancing efforts to attract low-income students by launching a new need-based financial aid program called the Terrapin Commitment.
The program starts in January and will ensure that tuition and fees are covered for in-state full-time students who are eligible for federal Pell Grants and have unmet financial need after scholarships, grants and family contributions.
The program will provide up to $20 million in aid annually to students from the state of Maryland. It is the largest single-year investment in need-based scholarships at the university, U-Md. officials said.
“We don’t want any of our students who are from certain socioeconomic backgrounds who are Pell-eligible to really carry any loans or any debt going forward,” U-Md. President Darryll J. Pines said in an interview. He said he hopes the program will enable students to “come to school, have minimal work-study if possible, and simply just be able to focus on their education, and do well and take the next step for their families.”
More colleges rethink student loans
The U-Md. aid program joins similar efforts at other universities to help attract more students from diverse backgrounds. “Education is sort of the great equalizer that gives people opportunity,” Pines said.
Princeton University, for example, currently covers tuition, room and board for students from families making less than $65,000 and announced last month that it will expand that aid to most families making up to $100,000 starting in fall 2023.
Princeton to cover all college bills for families making up to $100,000
“In alignment with our Fearlessly Forward strategic plan, we continue to find new and meaningful ways to invest in people and communities,” U-Md. Senior Vice President and Provost Jennifer King Rice said in a news release. “Our investments in need-based financial aid better position us to serve the people of our state — opening the door for more Marylanders to attend a world-class flagship institution.” | 2022-10-24T14:59:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | University of Maryland to cover tuition and fees for in-state low income students - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/24/umd-terrapin-commitment-financial-aid/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/24/umd-terrapin-commitment-financial-aid/ |
You know that feeling of technological dominion when you use Waze or some other navigation app, and you beat the projected arrival time? I felt this way a few weeks ago, when driving 90 minutes from Washington, D.C., to Chestertown, Md. I’d driven from Pittsburgh to D.C. for an event, stayed two days in a hotel, and then drove to speak at Washington College in Chestertown. I had to make it to a 9 a.m. creative writing class, so I left my hotel at 6:30 — inserting a time cushion in case I was swallowed by the notorious Beltway traffic. But my drive was so linear (and, occasionally, illegal) that I beat Waze by seven minutes, arriving at 8 a.m.
There were no margins for error on this shoulderless fiend. | 2022-10-24T14:59:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Damon Young: I conquered the shoulderless demon named the Chesapeake Bay Bridge - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/24/damon-young-conquered-demon-chesapeake-bay-bridge/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/24/damon-young-conquered-demon-chesapeake-bay-bridge/ |
The extraordinary success and thorny politics of a bold policy idea
Perspective by Megan Greenwell
From left, former Stockton Calif., mayor Michael Tubbs; Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, center right; guaranteed-income advocate Nika Soon-Shiong. (Photo illustration by The Washington Post. Photos: Scott by Kenneth K. Lam/The Baltimore Sun/Tribune News Service/Getty Images; others by Ian Maddox. Check by IRS.)
In January 2019, Zohna Everett was sitting in an airport when her phone rang. On the other end of the line, a voice informed her that she had been randomly chosen to receive $500 a month as part of something called the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration.
When Everett had first heard about SEED a few weeks earlier, she’d wondered if it might be a scam, as things that sound too good to be true often are. Her pastor assured her that it was real — that 125 residents of poor neighborhoods in Stockton, Calif., would receive money as part of a groundbreaking experiment. When she got the call, Everett thought she was receiving a one-time payment, which was thrilling enough. Then the woman on the phone told her she’d receive $500 every month for a year and a half, with no strings attached. She nearly collapsed from joy right there in the airport.
Suddenly, Everett — who in 2018 had lost her job as a Department of Defense logistics specialist, had subsequently tried to make ends meet by driving for DoorDash, then had taken out significant unsubsidized loans to attend college online in a bid to improve her employment prospects — saw a path back to stability. She would be able to cover her car payments and the rent, to keep her phone on without giving up her monthly tithe to her church.
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For Mayor Michael Tubbs, that was exactly the point. Since childhood, Tubbs had watched his mom and his friends struggle with everyday expenses while receiving only minimal help from the government in Stockton, one of the poorest cities in the country, which sits in California’s Central Valley. He theorized that a relatively small guaranteed income — just $6,000 a year per recipient, enough to cover the occasional emergency expense or supplement a minimum-wage salary — would single-handedly eliminate the insecurity that governed the lives of many poor Stockton residents. And so, with funds and guidance from the nonprofit Economic Security Project, he created a pilot program — one of the first of its kind in the country. His goal was as simple as it was ambitious: to run a demonstration project so successful that national politicians would have no choice but to consider adopting guaranteed income as national policy.
Sitting in a Stockton Starbucks nearly three years later, a soft-spoken Everett remembered nearly every detail of that fateful phone call from SEED. Swaddled in a white puffer coat on an unseasonably cold day, her hair in a low bun, she looked younger than her 51 years as she cradled a caramel Frappuccino and choked up as she described the immediate impact the payments had on her life. She quit driving for DoorDash, which gave her the time to find a job as a factory worker at Tesla’s plant in Fremont, 60 miles from Stockton. She was able to escape a dysfunctional marriage and move into her own home. “For me, it was a steppingstone. It got me to where I was okay by myself,” she says. “It was right on time. Everything in me was just like, ‘Oh, thank you so much, Lord.’ ”
The SEED program was scheduled to end in the summer of 2020, but its founders secured additional donations to fund an extra six months to get people through the worst days of the pandemic. That was another lifesaver for Everett, who was diagnosed with a severe case of covid-19 and struggled with lingering symptoms, leaving her unable to work for most of that year. Fortunately, the $500 a month from SEED, plus disability payments, proved to be enough to pay her bills.
If you just learned about guaranteed income in the past few years, chances are it was from the presidential campaign of Andrew Yang, who got a lot of attention for his proposal that the government offer $1,000 monthly payments to all Americans. But versions of this concept had been circulating for decades among academics and progressive activists. And as the country shut down in the early days of the pandemic, the conditions appeared ripe to try something new, something radical. Pilot programs launched in Los Angeles, in New Orleans, in Denver, but also in historically less progressive cities like Birmingham, Ala.; Columbia, S.C.; and Gainesville, Fla. In March 2020, even a vast majority of congressional Republicans backed a $2 trillion stimulus bill that included unconditional cash payments for tens of millions of Americans. Since then, the Mayors for a Guaranteed Income coalition, which grew out of SEED, has swelled to more than 90 members and three dozen programs; a $15 million donation from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey helped fund many of the pilots.
Now, though, as the country emerges from the pandemic, the guaranteed income movement sits at a crossroads. The pilot programs have created scores of stories like Everett’s about how a small amount of money led to massive change in a recipient’s life. And a growing body of research based on the experiments shows that guaranteed income works — that it pulls people out of poverty, improves health outcomes, and makes it easier for people to find jobs and take care of their children. If empirical evidence ruled the world, guaranteed income would be available to every poor person in America, and many of those people would no longer be poor.
But empirical evidence does not rule the world, and it is far from clear that there is a political path forward for guaranteed income on a large scale. The city-level experiments cannot last forever: Stockton’s lapsed in early 2021, a few months after Tubbs lost his reelection bid to a Republican successor who showed no interest in trying to keep SEED going. On Capitol Hill, too, political momentum for handing out cash has waned. At the end of 2021, an extension of the expanded child tax credit — which was seen by many advocates as a key steppingstone to guaranteed income — was blocked by a Democrat representing the state with the sixth-highest poverty rate in the country.
Early in the pandemic, some in the guaranteed-income movement had begun to whisper about accelerating the timeline for taking their efforts nationwide. America’s most progressive social policies have always grown out of economic crises, so maybe covid would bring about a guaranteed-income policy in the next few years. But the failure of the expanded federal child tax credit diminished some of that optimism; many of those same advocates are now looking toward the long game. “You have to be willing to fight for something to the end,” says Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, who recently launched a guaranteed-income experiment, “even if it doesn’t happen, even if you only push it a few feet further, even if it means that you die doing it.”
Without a radical solution — like, say, giving people money with no strings attached — America will continue to be home to one of the worst rates of income inequality of any rich nation in the world. And from city to city, there is massive energy and momentum to keep expanding this experiment. But true believers also harbor a sense of anxiety about what the future holds. “I’m worried,” says Sean Kline, the associate director of Stanford University’s Basic Income Lab, “that these guaranteed income demonstrations are going to sunset and then it’s just going to go quiet.”
For as long as America has had a poverty problem — which is to say, for its entire history — a small group of dreamers has proposed guaranteed income as a solution. The idea dates to the year the country was founded: Thomas Paine proposed a type of basic income in his 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense.” In the mid-20th century, it gained traction among Black American thinkers: In 1966, the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program demanded “employment or a guaranteed income” for everyone. A year later, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his last book — “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” — that government aid programs all have a “common failing: they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else. I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
The first official proposal for a federal basic income program, though, came not from a paragon of progressivism, but from Richard Nixon. In 1969, Nixon introduced the Family Assistance Plan, which would have provided additional cash to poor families through a negative income tax — cutting checks to the poorest Americans instead of them paying the government — of $1,600 (about $13,000 today) for a family of four. The proposal was motivated by Nixon’s desire to replace the welfare system, which was unpopular with White blue-collar voters, but it never made it out of the Senate Finance Committee.
Many skeptical politicians and voters feared that giving people cash would allow them to quit their jobs, stop looking for work or work less. Around the same time, a series of negative-income-tax experiments benefiting about 7,500 people in six states appeared to confirm those concerns: In Seattle and Denver, where the two largest programs took place, married men worked an average of 7 percent fewer hours after three years of the program, while married and single women worked 17 percent fewer hours. And while researchers didn’t look at any other measures of stability — whether participants were more likely to seek medical care, for example, or whether their children missed fewer days of school — they did observe a modest increase in the divorce rate. Those two factors were enough to destroy widespread interest in guaranteed-income experiments for several decades.
Over time, however, interpretations of the 1970s experiments have morphed. Participants don’t seem to have dropped out of the labor force entirely, suggesting that the money may have given them the luxury of waiting a little longer for the right job to come around instead of rushing into the first available option. And working less sometimes means getting more education, which is almost always a net positive for the economy. An uptick in divorces can be a good thing too: Studies show that financial insecurity is a major contributor to keeping women in failing relationships, as in Everett’s case. In retrospect, the legacy of the first significant guaranteed-income pilots was a whole lot of complicated questions and limited information with which to answer them.
If empirical evidence ruled the world, guaranteed income would be available to every poor person in America, and many would no longer be poor. But empirical evidence does not rule the world.
Meanwhile, the concept of conditional cash-transfer programs — in other words, paying poor people for desirable behavior — was gaining steam in middle-income countries like Mexico and Brazil. In 2007, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg launched a program called Opportunity NYC, which rewarded parents for tasks like taking their children to the doctor and completing job-training courses. The experiment had a moderate positive effect on families’ overall finances but did not boost academic performance among elementary-schoolers or increase families’ likelihood to seek preventive medical care, researchers found. Bloomberg did not extend the program when it expired in 2010.
Among many poverty scholars and activists, conditional cash transfers are seen as a step in the right direction, but only a small one. To maximize the impact on poor people’s lives, they say, money must be a right, not a reward, because that’s the only way to empower people to make their own choices. “There are positive outcomes from conditional cash, there are positive outcomes from unconditional cash,” Kline says. “But I think for me, making it conditional misses a really fundamental value around trust, dignity, agency, freedom.”
The word “dignity” comes up a lot among guaranteed-income advocates. Research shows that the vast majority of people don’t “waste” cash on vices like drugs and alcohol, but rather use even small amounts to improve their life circumstances dramatically. In a 2019 working paper, Nobel Prize-winning development economist Abhijit Banerjee and two co-authors concluded that the distribution of unconditional cash in low-income countries had positive effects on “income, assets, savings, borrowing, total expenditure, food expenditure, dietary diversity, school attendance, test scores, cognitive development, use of health facilities, labor force participation, child labor migration, domestic violence, women’s empowerment, marriage, fertility, and use of contraception, among others.”
Banerjee is part of the research team studying the world’s largest basic-income program, which is midway through a 12-year run across 300 rural villages in Kenya. For about 5,000 people, that means an extra $22 a month for more than a decade. Thus far, the researchers have found, participants have been less likely to get sick or go hungry, and more likely to start a business.
In the United States, which has the world’s largest gross domestic product, the basic-income calculus is different than in places like Kenya, where a significant minority of people live on less than a dollar a day. But America has its own unique factors, like that inequality rate and a history of racist policies that have left a disproportionate number of people of color at the bottom of the income scale. Indeed, Tubbs and his counterparts frame basic income as something akin to reparations — a way to alleviate harm done to marginalized people by decades of biased and ineffective policy. The SEED recipients were struggling to survive because society had let them down, Tubbs argues, and the conventional methods of helping them were paternalistic and inadequate.
In Baltimore, where more than 1 in 5 residents live below the federal poverty line, a new guaranteed-income pilot gives $1,000 a month to 200 recipients, all of them parents in high-crime neighborhoods. “We’re like the birthplace of racial redlining, right?” Scott says. “You’re not going to erase inequality, inequity that was caused by policy, without creating policy to do the opposite.”
The notion of guaranteed income as a government-backed corrective for decades of racist policies has spread to dozens of cities, many led by young, Black mayors. Scott, 38, consults regularly with St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, 50, whose city launched a guaranteed-income pilot in December 2021. St. Paul, Minn., Mayor Melvin Carter, 43, serves as co-chair of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, and is a mentor to Tubbs, 32. According to Tubbs, guaranteed-income programs in Columbia, S.C.; Shreveport, La.; and Atlanta were the result of a Black mayors’ group text shortly after George Floyd’s murder in which he evangelized for King’s approach to solving urban poverty, before sending everyone a copy of “Where Do We Go From Here.”
It’s no coincidence that these are the people plotting the future of guaranteed income in America, Scott argues. Many of them grew up in families that would have benefited from guaranteed-income programs. “We’re the first group of elected folks who actually lived through all of the s---,” he said, looking up from his phone for a rare moment during a 30-minute interview at Baltimore City Hall and drawing out the vowel sound in “lived.” “We lived through crack and heroin. We lived through zero tolerance. So all the stuff that folks are now talking about, we understand it in a way that no one else will.”
The most basic objection to guaranteed-income programs is about cost. Providing $1,000 a month to every American regardless of income — which some scholars argue would make the policy more palatable than one targeted to people in poverty — would cost $3.1 trillion a year, nearly half the federal government’s entire budget in 2021.
And yet, the adage that it is expensive to be poor applies not just to individuals, but to their governments. A mountain of evidence shows how tightly income inequality correlates with crime rates, education levels, drug abuse, incarceration, intimate-partner violence, and physical and mental health, which together cost billions upon billions of tax dollars. Numerous studies, for example, have found it would be cheaper to give homes to unhoused people than it is to cover all the costs associated with allowing them to stay on the streets, but progressives have faced an uphill climb to convince policymakers and voters that providing free housing is a worthwhile strategy. While there isn’t yet research on the potential economic benefits of guaranteed income specifically, studies of similar initiatives have shown that pulling people out of poverty generates a huge increase in tax revenue as well as savings on public assistance programs.
First, though, the guaranteed-income movement had to show that its idea worked at all. When the current wave of experiments kicked off, the goal was to drown opponents in data demonstrating that the simplest idea for alleviating poverty was in fact the silver bullet it appeared to be.
Of course, whether something “works” depends on the definition. Obviously giving people more money makes them less poor, but the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration team set out to show that as little as $500 a month — not nearly enough to replace actual income — would have a multiplier effect, allowing recipients to improve their employment prospects, their physical health and mental well-being, their children’s education, and their overall stability.
A research team from the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research laid out three overarching questions: How does guaranteed income affect volatility? To what degree do changes in income volatility alter financial well-being, psychological distress and physical functioning? How does guaranteed income generate agency over one’s future?
To conduct their randomized controlled trial, the Penn researchers tracked purchases on the debit cards provided to the 125 recipients, asked recipients and control-group members to input monthly income data, and conducted biannual surveys to learn how people’s lives were going. The questions focused on recipients’ well-being, but also on some of the most common objections to guaranteed income: Did they quit their jobs, content to live on “free money”? Did they blow all their funds on cigarettes and liquor?
“I never came in asking for permission,” Tubbs said on a sweltering November day in Los Angeles, where he moved after losing his reelection bid in Stockton. “I was not ready for a vote; I was going to do this. But I did go in wanting to make sure I understood sort of where the sentiment was, where the opposition was. I said, ‘Well, look, we’ll evaluate this and see how the money is spent and we’ll see who’s right.’ ”
In March 2021, the researchers released preliminary data from the first year of the pilot. While their first peer-reviewed paper is still in the works, their self-reported results showed an unqualified success. More than 50 percent of recipients said they could pay for a $400 emergency expense in cash, compared with 25 percent before the program began and 28 percent of the control group. Recipients experienced statistically significant improvements in their mental health as determined by a common test of psychological well-being.
“Even my staff cautioned me about being so optimistic and confident,” says former Stockton mayor Michael Tubbs, “but I was going to bet on people.”
Importantly for Tubbs and other politicians looking to sell conservatives on guaranteed income, the study found that SEED participants were more likely to find full-time employment than members of the control group. Recipients spent the biggest share of their cash on food, followed by other merchandise, utility bills, and gas and car maintenance. Less than 1 percent of the total allotted funds were used to buy tobacco or alcohol. “Honestly, I don’t think SEED could have gone any better,” Kline says. “I’m astounded at what a small little demonstration can do.”
A year later, data from a D.C.-based guaranteed-income experiment showed similarly promising results. Thrive East of the River provided $5,500 to 600 families in Ward 8 during the pandemic, either as a lump sum or as five monthly payments. Although the program was too short-term to measure effects on employment, Urban Institute researchers found significant positive effects on recipients’ mental health, food security and ability to meet their children’s needs. Thrive wasn’t part of the mayors’ consortium launching guaranteed-income pilots, but policymakers embraced the Urban Institute data as an important part of the overall work.
“Even my staff cautioned me about being so optimistic and confident, but I was going to bet on people,” Tubbs said, tilting back in his chair in the messy shed-turned-office that sits behind his home in a historically Black neighborhood of L.A. The SEED results “were particularly vindicating because everyone was like, ‘We need cash,’ but there were all these racist tropes. And the opposite of all the tropes is what the data showed was true.”
The question Tubbs and his allies did not originally confront, however, is what would happen if they showed that guaranteed income works — but still didn’t convince enough lawmakers to support it. Toward the end of 2021, guaranteed-income advocates got a harsh lesson on the limitation of data when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of policymakers and voters.
Earlier that year, in response to the pandemic, President Biden had signed a dramatically expanded version of the child tax credit (CTC). Suddenly, parents would be paid as much as $3,600 per child per year, up from $2,000. But there was a bigger change, too: The money became fully refundable, meaning parents would receive the funds even if their total tax liability was lower than the credit itself. Historically, the poorest one-third of parents didn’t benefit from the CTC because they pay the least in taxes. Now, they would receive an extra several thousand dollars a year, delivered monthly — essentially a small guaranteed income. Scholars called it one of the most important moves to fight poverty since the creation of Social Security.
As soon as parents began receiving the extra CTC funds, several groups of researchers began studying the results. “We were hopeful that people would be able to see the immediate benefits — the poverty reduction that was happening, but also … the impacts for families in terms of reducing stress and the ability to afford the basics,” says Chris Wimer, who co-led one such team, at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy. With that proof of effectiveness in hand, Wimer hoped, Congress would feel compelled to make the policy permanent.
In December 2021, Wimer and his colleagues released a report on the first six months of the expanded CTC. Each month, they found, the policy single-handedly kept as many as 3.8 million children out of poverty, reducing the child poverty rate by nearly 30 percent. The largest percentage of money was spent on food, followed by essential bills, clothing, rent or mortgage payments, school expenses, and paying down debt. The number of families who didn’t have enough to eat in a given week dropped by 24 percent; parents were no more likely to stop working because of the extra funds.
A separate Columbia study found that a permanent expansion would have generated 10 times as much revenue as it cost. But ultimately, none of that mattered. The Build Back Better bill, which included a one-year extension of the CTC expansion, narrowly passed the U.S. House in November 2021, but all 50 Senate Republicans opposed it. When Biden’s negotiations with Sen. Joe Manchin III, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia, broke down just before the holiday break, Biden stopped publicly advocating for the new version of the CTC.
After the expanded CTC ran out, Wimer and other scholars found that child poverty rates increased immediately, spiking 41 percent in the first month. About 1 in 7 American children lives below the poverty line, which — at just $27,750 for a family of four — dramatically underestimates the number who are simply too poor to eat well or to have consistent electricity access or to afford registration fees for school sports.
The child tax credit saga forced many in the guaranteed-income movement to give up the hope that a federal policy was imminent. Advocates talk openly about the lessons they learned, including that statistics are not sufficient and that upfront costs feel more tangible than long-term fiscal benefits. A partial solution to both problems, they believe, is encouraging recipients to tell their own stories rather than being rendered anonymous in a list of statistics.
Nearly every guaranteed-income pilot program selects a small subset of recipients — Zohna Everett was one — to speak publicly about their experiences, providing them professional media training. The chosen storytellers are taught to focus on specific details — what emergency expense were they able to cover with their guaranteed income? what smaller treat, whether a restaurant meal or a night away from home, did they splurge on? how could they tell their children were feeling more stable? — and several pop up regularly in national media outlets.
“We have a goal of changing or challenging narratives around people,” says Juliana Bidadanure, a philosophy professor at Stanford and director of the university’s Basic Income Lab. That’s long, slow work; the current initiatives are like adding a few individual stones to the base of a cathedral so grand it might not be completed for decades. “It’s always about more than just actual policy. It’s about how we view each other and when we think of each other as deserving of support and when we don’t, and what stands in the way. And if we understand that and we make progress on that, we make progress on many other things.”
Despite the setbacks at the federal level, philanthropic interest in guaranteed income continues to increase and the body of research on local programs continues to grow. No two experiments work exactly the same way — some are only for people making under a certain income, others are limited to certain neighborhoods or just for single parents — making each city feel like its own laboratory.
Still, as in any movement — especially one where the greatest energy is at the local level — there are disagreements, some over substance and others over who gets the most attention. Unanswered questions range from the fundamental (should guaranteed income be provided to everyone, or more narrowly targeted to lift people out of poverty?) to the ultra-specific (should money be provided on prepaid debit cards or via online transfers?), and there is plenty of jockeying among movement leaders over who knows best.
Three hundred and fifty miles down Interstate 5 from Stockton, the Compton Pledge has replaced SEED as the nation’s buzziest guaranteed-income experiment. The key difference: While most pilots are designed to investigate whether basic income works, the team in Compton sees that question as too obvious to merit discussion. Instead, they are studying the factors that make it work best. “Now we know that we should do this policy,” says Nika Soon-Shiong, the Compton Pledge’s co-director. “The question is really how. And unless we get more future-oriented, thinking about how and asking questions to inform the answer, we’re going to fail.”
Soon-Shiong, 29, stands out among movement leaders. Its most visible proponents are Black; she is the daughter of ethnically Chinese, natively South African parents. She didn’t grow up in Compton, and she began studying basic income as a PhD student at Oxford University. And whereas many guaranteed-income advocates talk in detail about how a policy would have helped their own families, her father is billionaire bioscientist Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns the Los Angeles Times and a share of the Lakers. She also voices a more radical case for guaranteed income, laced with language about prison abolition, defunding the police and reparations.
Soon-Shiong is uncommonly focused on the nitty-gritty of guaranteed-income programs. The 800 Compton Pledge recipients are split into several groups: Some receive money biweekly, others monthly, quarterly, or in one lump sum, and amounts range from $3,600 to $7,200 a year based on family size — allowing researchers to draw conclusions about what schedule works best for recipients and how much is necessary to make a substantive difference. Participants can choose from four ways to receive their funds (direct deposit, Venmo, PayPal or debit card), and can track their payments, find resources and ask questions on an online platform orders of magnitude more attractive and intuitive than any government website in the history of the internet. While a raft of third-party companies have begun competing for contracts to operate guaranteed-income pilot programs and payment systems, Compton’s homemade system is significantly cheaper, meaning more money for actual people in need.
While Soon-Shiong and Tubbs have a good relationship, she is sensitive to the common narrative that he is the leader of the guaranteed income movement. “You talk to Michael Tubbs and then you maybe put Nika in at the very end” was how she summed up most reporting on the topic. Their relationship goes back to Stanford, where she was a few years behind him. (SEED executive director Sukhi Samra was two years behind Soon-Shiong; Tubbs’s connection to Jack Dorsey, which led to Dorsey’s $15 million donation to Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, also came through Stanford.) And while Tubbs did play a role in the Compton Pledge, introducing Soon-Shiong to then-Mayor Aja Brown, she is quick to make clear that she asked for the connection, then presented Brown a 14-page, intricately detailed proposal, because she was independently committed to creating a guaranteed-income pilot.
Last year, Soon-Shiong submitted a proposal for the Compton Pledge’s parent organization, Fund for Guaranteed Income (FGI), to oversee a pilot program in neighboring Los Angeles, her hometown. Instead, L.A. chose to work with Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, using a third-party payments platform instead of the one FGI created. She is occasionally exasperated that having what she sees as unequivocally the best product hasn’t made her team the recognized leader in the field, describing the Compton Pledge as the “black sheep” of the movement. She’s also concerned that an endless string of pilots showing the same results isn’t an effective way of building on the momentum created early in the pandemic.
“We know that we are the best at what we do, and it is disheartening and frustrating when the nonprofit world is centered around who’s focusing the most on communications, who is focusing the most on funder outreach,” she said, sitting at the dining room table in her bright white West Hollywood apartment. “We are focusing the most on how to build something that works, and that’s not really rewarded. I still think we’re right. I still know we’re doing it the right way, and it just looks different from what others are doing.”
Ask Soon-Shiong which other pilot programs are “doing it the right way,” and she won’t name the big ones launched by city governments this spring and summer, in places like Baltimore, New Orleans and Chicago. Instead, she brings up some of the tiniest programs in the country, ones less focused on the academic questions than simply putting money in people’s hands.
One of the pilots Soon-Shiong likes to promote, the Boston-based Community Love Fund, started by funding five formerly incarcerated women in the Roxbury neighborhood, with a budget of $30,000 a year. After FGI came in as a partner in late 2021, the program expanded to 25 currently and formerly incarcerated women. A similar program, the Chicago Future Fund, is using FGI support to provide $500 a month to 30 formerly incarcerated residents in the West Garfield Park neighborhood, entirely independently from the $31 million pilot the city launched this past summer.
In the earliest days of the Community Love Fund program, founder Andrea James says, she asked the mayor of Boston for a small grant to support the group’s work but was turned down, which she now considers a gift. Running the program through her nonprofit, the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, makes the program feel like mutual aid, not a tool of the establishment. “We’re building alternate systems from within communities, because even when we can get a city or state entity to work with us on things, they mostly commandeer our language and then replicate something that is still attached to law enforcement, attached to government bureaucracy, attached to things that aren’t community-led,” James says.
Ultimately, though, getting more money to more people requires the type of massive funding that only governments can provide. FGI recently announced partnerships with two government-run programs in California, one in Sonoma County and one in Long Beach. Tubbs, meanwhile, is now working as an adviser to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who last year approved a $35 million fund to create additional guaranteed-income pilots. “I am a hyper-pragmatist,” Tubbs says. Community Love Fund “is great for the five women in Roxbury. It’s going to change their lives. But there’s thousands who need it, and governments scale, right?”
Many of the newest pilots are doing their best to have it both ways: running the program through the city government — which allows them to combine philanthropic dollars with pandemic-relief funds — but planning the details with an unusual level of input from ordinary residents. In Baltimore, three representatives from neighborhood groups sat on the pilot steering committee alongside scholars, lawyers and nonprofit executives. In July 2021, the group proposed three potential target populations for the pilot, asking Mayor Scott to choose among young parents, residents of neighborhoods with the highest crime rates, or formerly incarcerated residents. Instead, he asked for a hybrid approach: 18- to 24-year-old parents in high-crime neighborhoods, all of them making under the city’s median income.
In August, 200 young parents in Baltimore received their first $1,000 payments of the two-year pilot. By the time they get their last, in summer 2024, the guaranteed income movement will be in a very different place. Where that will be, no one is entirely sure. Perhaps the wave of evidence-based support for anti-poverty initiatives will have grown into an unstoppable groundswell, forcing conservatives and moderates to get on board. But it’s disconcertingly easy to imagine the opposite: that poverty rates continue to rise unchecked after a precipitous drop during the pandemic, and most of us silently agree to look the other way.
Back in Stockton, Zohna Everett still hadn’t been able to return to work as of September, because of chronic illness, and since her $500 a month ran out in early 2021, she has struggled to make ends meet. She’s on a variety of state benefits programs, picks up a little extra money doing nails for friends and neighbors, and occasionally swallows her pride enough to accept handouts from church, but it’s never quite enough. A few months after SEED ended, her car was repossessed.
If the current pilots end without a clear path toward a larger policy, thousands of people will be left in Everett’s shoes. She remains thankful for the $12,000 she received over the two years of SEED, but these days, an early poster child of guaranteed income’s possibilities has yet again been left to fend for herself.
Megan Greenwell is a journalist in New York. She is writing a book about private equity and how it affects workers. | 2022-10-24T14:59:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Universal basic income has been tested repeatedly. It works. Will America ever embrace it? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/24/universal-basic-income/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/24/universal-basic-income/ |
Oxford school shooter pleads guilty, including to rare terrorism count
Students hug at a memorial in Oxford, Mich., on Dec. 1, 2021, the day after four people were killed in a shooting at Oxford High School. (Paul Sancya/Associated Press)
The teenage student who killed four classmates in a shooting rampage at a Michigan high school last year pleaded guilty on Monday to two dozen charges, including terrorism — an extraordinarily unusual charge in a school shooting.
Crumbley’s guilty plea to even one count of first-degree murder could lead to him spending the rest of his life in prison.
Parents of accused Oxford school shooter seek to have case tossed
Unusual charges and unclear impact
Crumbley’s case is notable for the fact that most defendants in school and mass-shooting cases never make it to trial; most kill themselves or are killed by police during a standoff. But his state terrorism charge represents a relatively novel approach to prosecuting mass shootings.
Michigan was an early adopter of the post-9/11 trend in making terrorism a state-level felony and has among the most-robust laws of the 34 states and District of Columbia that prosecute terrorism at the state level. The laws were originally developed for a very different purpose than the way they’re being used in the Crumbley case, according to Javed Ali, a University of Michigan public policy professor who worked in counterterrorism for the federal government.
“Even though the [laws] have been on the books for years, for some reason it only seems now that prosecutors and attorneys general are using this part of their tool kit to be more aggressive about mass shootings,” Ali said.
Michigan’s law is one way state and local authorities can fill the gap in federal law, since there is no federal charge of domestic terrorism, only a statutory definition of it. That’s why every act of violence in the United States that fits the definition of domestic terrorism is never federally charged as such, Ali said.
“It’s usually a hate crime or a conspiracy charge,” he said.
“What about all the children who ran, screaming, hiding under desks?” McDonald said at a news conference. “What about all the children at home right now who can’t eat and can’t sleep and can’t imagine a world where they could ever set foot back in that school? Those are victims, too, and so are their families, and so is the community. And the charge of terrorism reflects that.”
‘What about all the children who ran, screaming?’
“It can be used to investigate and prosecute,” he said of the charge. “But will it deter? that’s the $64,000 question.”
Focus to shift back to shooter’s parents
Crumbley’s plea means he could be compelled to testify at his parents’ trial; if subpoenaed, he could not invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination because he has already pleaded guilty to his charges.
James and Jennifer Crumbley last year were charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, another relatively rare move in which prosecutors sought to spread liability for a mass shooting to a suspect’s parents. Investigators said the Crumbleys purchased a firearm for their son as a gift and allegedly did not intervene when he showed signs of distress.
After the shooting, prosecutors revealed that the Oxford High teachers had raised concerns about Ethan Crumbley to his parents up to the day of the shooting when they summoned the family to school for a meeting.
“I am by no means saying that an active-shooter situation should always result in a criminal prosecution against parents,” McDonald said at the time. “But the facts of this case are so egregious.”
On the day of the shooting, a teacher found a drawing of a semiautomatic handgun with a written note: “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” James and Jennifer Crumbley met with school administrators that morning, but refused to take their son home, allowing him to return to class.
Hours later, when news of the shooting broke, Jennifer Crumbley texted her son: “Ethan, don’t do it.” | 2022-10-24T15:00:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Oxford school shooter Ethan Crumbley pleads guilty to terrorism, murder - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/24/oxford-shooter-pleads-guilty/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/24/oxford-shooter-pleads-guilty/ |
Afghan girls’ will to learn is powerful. Even a bomb won’t crush it.
Afghan female students chant "Education is our right, genocide is a crime" in Herat on Oct. 2, two days after a bomb attack in a learning center in Kabul. (Mohsen Karimi/AFP/Getty Images)
Hearts may break, but spirits do not. So listen, murderers of Afghan women. There is steel in us, forged in fires that have burned across generations. You underestimate the strength of steel.
In Kabul on the morning of Sept. 30, nearly 400 young Afghans, primarily members of my country’s Hazara ethnic minority, were gathered inside a tutoring center to take a practice college entrance exam. They were separated by sex per Taliban-imposed restrictions, the girls in one area, the boys in another. The girls outnumbered the boys, as the Taliban’s closure of girls’ schools had made privately run centers such as this one the only places where girls could hope to continue their education.
It was a Friday. Islam’s holy day. The students were quietly taking their tests when a man walked into the girls’ section and detonated the explosives strapped to his body.
“Kabul attack kills girls with big dreams” was the headline in The Post. It’s a headline that describes both the crime and its motive. More than 50 people died that Friday morning in my native city, and almost all of them were girls for whom education was the path to becoming independent women. They had dared to dream. And for that, they died. But what they strove for lives on.
My Afghan girls’ school and I have operated in exile since the Taliban’s return, and since the day my students and I arrived safely in Rwanda last summer, I’ve made one request of the world: Don’t look away from Afghanistan.
Don’t look away from the women who rallied in the streets of Kabul the day after this bombing, calling out the Taliban’s inability to protect them and their freedoms. In response, the Taliban beat them and fired bullets to scatter them and called them prostitutes whose protests are funded by the West.
Still, “we won’t stop fighting,” one woman declared.
Don’t look away from the Afghan girls — made refugees by the Taliban — who have applied to join our school: the 14-year-old who wants to attend MIT and become a surgeon and who, in her words, admires “the tired face of a doctor.” The 15-year-old who has written 30 pages of a novel. The 17-year-old who told me in her admissions interview that if she could go anywhere in the world, “I would go back to Afghanistan. We are the new generation, and the country needs us.”
Afghanistan needs her, and so does the world. If it’s true that educated girls marry later, have fewer children and earn higher incomes — and it is — then it follows that their education brings benefits that aren’t just familial or societal, but transnational, too. Girls’ education must be regarded as a foreign policy imperative, just as it is properly regarded as a moral necessity and a basic human right.
I’m far from the only voice speaking this truth, and I know that policymakers can hear. Just this month, the United States imposed visa restrictions on Taliban leadership “involved in repressing women and girls.” It’s a start — but only a start. Other nations must follow and must act with urgency to ensure free and safe access to the classroom.
Urgency. It’s what’s lacking and what’s necessary. So many girls are waiting.
Girls including the 16-year-old who spoke to me from within Afghanistan, hoping there was some way she could attend our school. “I really have a lot of wishes,” she said. “I want to be busy serving my society where people are treated equally and respectfully. For a girl who loves education, there can’t be a bigger cruelty than to close the doors of schools in her face.”
“I am currently under the Taliban’s flag,” she said. “But even if I go under their sword, I won’t give up on my dreams.”
On Sept. 30, and in the heartsick days that followed, I read the lengthening list of names of dead Afghan girls pulled from the wreckage of their tutoring center. I was looking for this girl’s name.
It wasn’t there.
In these days of pain, she fights on, a girl with big dreams. A girl of steel.
Opinion|The world continues to ignore the radicalization of India | 2022-10-24T15:00:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | A learning center bombing won't stop Afghan girls' education - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/afghan-girls-bombing-education-protests/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/afghan-girls-bombing-education-protests/ |
Cheney imparts 5 critical observations on the eve of the midterms
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) speaks during a hearing of the House Jan. 6 select committee on Oct. 13. (Al Drago/Bloomberg News)
1Failed Republican leaders
2The fate of Ukraine
3Cheney vs. Trump apologists
4The Justice Department does its job
5No election deniers
These days, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), like many Republicans of a different era, stands proudly apart from the MAGA movement that has taken over the party she championed her entire life. Some surly critics on the left won’t applaud her because she, after all, supported the Iraq War. (If ever one needed an example of allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good, this is it.)
On the right, she is a villain for speaking truth about Jan. 6, holding former president Donald Trump responsible for his actions and supporting the defeat of Republican election deniers. (By the way, if we take her literally, there are nearly 300 Republican candidates whom she urges that voters reject.)
Cheney remains a unique figure in today’s tribal politics who proudly puts principle above political advantage. She imparted five essential points in an appearance on “Meet the Press” on Sunday that all Americans would do well to ponder.
Failed Republican leaders
First, both Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) failed the country — but especially McCarthy. “At every moment since, frankly, the aftermath of the election in 2020, when Minority Leader McCarthy has had the opportunity to do the right thing or do something that serves his own political purpose, he always chooses to serve his own political purpose,” she said. While McCarthy kissed the ring of the man who led the insurrection and bolsters the worst MAGA crackpots, McConnell’s sins are those of omission.
“Leader McConnell has thought we can ignore [Trump] and go forward as a party without him continuing to have power and authority,” Cheney said. “That’s clearly not the case. And my view from the beginning has been, you know, we have to, as a party, reject insurrection. … So clearly, you know, Leader McConnell and I do not see eye to eye on this.”
In the history of the republic, we have rarely seen such spineless leaders atop their party in both the House and the Senate.
The fate of Ukraine
Second, the fate of Ukraine is at stake. Cheney excoriated McCarthy for suggesting that House Republicans might cut off aid to Ukraine. She declared that “for somebody who has a picture of Ronald Reagan on the wall of his office in the Capitol,” McCarthy’s decision “to make himself the leader of the pro-Putin wing of my party is just a stunning thing.”
She argued that the United States should “be doing more, faster, in terms of what we’re providing to the Ukrainians.” And McCarthy’s hinting that he’ll cut the country off is “incredibly damaging to America’s standing in the world.”
Cheney vs. Trump apologists
Third, there’s no doubt what separates Cheney from Trump’s apologists. She said bluntly, “I really believed growing up … you know, when the chips were down, people would do the right thing. And it turns out that not very many people do.” No doubt, Cheney couldn’t face her family or herself if she, like the rest of her party, chose dishonor over patriotic duty.
Politicians, the media and even voters have become so cynical they cannot imagine a perspective that treats politics not as a game, a career effort or a partisan sales gambit, but rather as a moral undertaking. In that, Cheney is part of a noble tradition.
Jon Meacham, in a recent interview about his exquisite new book, “And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle,” urges us to follow the “Lincoln example of a humble recognition that no human being has a monopoly on truth, but that there is a moral intuition, there is a conscience and you want to do everything you can to be in accord with this universal law of treating others as you would be treated.”
Lincoln knew one need not and could not be perfect. But like her party’s first president, Cheney has shown that doing the right thing is “a durable political vision.” Cheney asks her fellow Republicans to be better leaders, better citizens, better patriots. Alas, that’s too hard for most — hence their undying hatred and resentment of her.
The Justice Department does its job
Fourth, the Justice Department is doing its job. Cheney observed, “Look, I think [regarding Trump] that there are multiple criminal offenses. … If the Department of Justice determines that they have the evidence that we believe is there and they make a decision not to prosecute, I think that really calls into question whether we’re a nation of laws.”
However, she appears certain the Justice Department is on the right track both with the Jan. 6 investigation and the Mar-a-Lago document case. “I have confidence in the professionals at the Department of Justice,” she said. “I have confidence in the attorney general, that they are taking very seriously their obligations with respect to every aspect of the potential criminal conduct by the former president.” That is a powerful endorsement of their work.
No election deniers
Finally, voters must not elect election deniers. “I think no one of any party should be voting for people who are election deniers, and I think we have to be clear what it means to be an election denier,” she said. “It means in the case, for example, of Kari Lake and Mark Finchem in Arizona, they have both said, ‘We’ve looked at all of the facts, we’ve looked at the results of the election in 2020, we’ve looked at the law, we’ve looked at the fact that the courts all ruled against Donald Trump, we’ve looked at the audits and the recounts. We are willing to ignore all of that, and we are saying we would not have certified that election.’”
She added, “They’re telling you that they’ll only certify an election they agree with. And that — there’s not much graver threat to the democracy you can imagine than that.” | 2022-10-24T15:00:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Cheney imparts 5 critical observations on the eve of the midterms - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/liz-cheney-midterm-observations/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/liz-cheney-midterm-observations/ |
By Raquel Redondo and Isabel Debre | AP
In this frame grab from video, 41-year-old Santiago Sánchez, a Spanish man who was documenting his travel by foot from Madrid to Doha for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, speaks to The Associated Press on a street, in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, Sept. 28, 2022. Sánchez has not been heard from since crossing into Iran three weeks ago, stirring fears about his fate in a country convulsed by mass unrest. That’s according to his family, who spoke to The Associated Press on Monday, Oct. 24, 2022. He was an experienced trekker, former paratrooper and fervent soccer fan. (AP Photo) (Uncredited/AP) | 2022-10-24T15:00:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Spanish man trekking to World Cup reported missing in Iran - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/spanish-man-trekking-to-world-cup-reported-missing-in-iran/2022/10/24/746fd858-53a3-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/spanish-man-trekking-to-world-cup-reported-missing-in-iran/2022/10/24/746fd858-53a3-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Photos provided by the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office in Minnesota show Tou Thao, left, and J. Alexander Kueng. (Hennepin County Sheriff's Office/AP)
MINNEAPOLIS — A former Minneapolis police officer who held George Floyd’s back as he begged for breath and ultimately lost a pulse beneath the knee of officer Derek Chauvin nearly two and a half years ago pleaded guilty Monday to a state charge of aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter in the killing.
J. Alexander Kueng entered his guilty plea Monday, just as jury selection was set to begin in the third trial over Floyd’s killing. As part of the plea deal, prosecutors dropped a count of aiding and abetting second-degree unintentional murder against Kueng in the case.
Kueng had previously rejected a plea deal in the case, but after weekend negotiations between prosecutors and his defense, the former officer appeared in court Monday as his attorney announced they had negotiated an end to the case.
Asked to enter a new plea by Hennepin County District Court Judge Peter A. Cahill, who is overseeing the case, Kueng replied, “Guilty, your honor.”
The developments came as jury selection was set to begin in a joint trial for Kueng and former officer Tou Thao on state charges related to Floyd’s death. Thao, who held back bystanders at the scene, proceeded with his case, but asked for a trial before Cahill instead of a jury.
Kueng and Thao, along with their former colleague Thomas K. Lane, were previously convicted in February in federal court of violating Floyd’s civil rights when they failed to render medical aid to Floyd as he begged for breath and ultimately lost consciousness during a fatal May 2020 arrest.
A jury also found Kueng and Thao guilty of violating Floyd’s rights when they didn’t intervene when Chauvin pressed his knees into Floyd’s neck and back for nearly 9½ minutes.
Lane, who held Floyd’s legs, was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison in July for violating Floyd’s rights. He pleaded guilty in May to a state charge of aiding and abetting manslaughter and was sentenced last month to three years in prison. The plea deal allowed Lane to serve his state sentence concurrently with his federal sentence. He is in custody at a federal prison outside Denver.
Chauvin pleaded guilty in December to violating Floyd’s rights and was sentenced July 7 to 20 years in federal prison. He is already serving a 22½-year state sentence for Floyd’s murder that he will serve concurrently.
In July, a judge sentenced Kueng to 36 months in prison and Thao to 42 months in prison on the federal charges related to Floyd’s death. Both officers have filed notice that they plan to appeal those charges — though it was not immediately clear how Kueng’s guilty plea would affect that case.
According to details of the plea deal read in court by Kueng’s attorney, Thomas Plunkett, his client agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a state sentence of 42 months in prison — which he will be allowed to serve concurrently with his federal sentence.
Kueng earlier this month began serving his federal sentence at a facility in Lisbon, Ohio. Thao is serving his federal sentence at a prison near Lexington, Ky. — though he is currently being held at a county jail in Minneapolis. | 2022-10-24T15:21:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Former Minneapolis office pleads guilty in George Floyd killing - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/24/george-floyd-guilty-plea/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/24/george-floyd-guilty-plea/ |
Stewart Rhodes tests covid-positive, delaying seditious conspiracy trial
Mandatory quarantine could delay the trial of Rhodes and four others by a week or longer unless he is willing, able and permitted to participate by videoconference
Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, at a rally outside the White House on June 25, 2017. (Susan Walsh/AP)
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, 56, has tested positive for the coronavirus in jail, his lawyers said, potentially delaying by a week or longer his trial on a seditious conspiracy charge stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta on Monday morning recessed trial for Rhodes and four others for the day. Monday would have been the start of the fourth week of testimony for the trial in Washington.
Rhodes’s defense team said he could waive his in-person presence at trial and participate by videoconference during what the U.S. Marshals Service told them was a mandatory five-day quarantine preventing his transport to court under health protocols.
Mehta required Rhodes’s approval, however, and his attorneys said officials at the Alexandria City Jail told them that he was in “total isolation” and that they had been unable to speak with him and would be unable to do so before Monday afternoon.
“Ultimately, it’s his decision,” Mehta said, adding that he was not sure whether the jail, courthouse or marshals could accommodate Rhodes’s participation while he is “symptomatic and transmissive.”
The latest: Members of the extremist group Oath Keepers, led by founder Stewart Rhodes, planned for an armed rebellion “to shatter a bedrock of American democracy” on Jan. 6, a prosecutor told a jury. Here’s the latest from seditious conspiracy trial. | 2022-10-24T16:13:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Stewart Rhodes tests COVID-positive, delays seditious conspiracy trial - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/stewart-rhodes-covid-delays-trial/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/stewart-rhodes-covid-delays-trial/ |
The effort to break America’s elections
In this file photo taken on January 29, 2022 attendees hold up signs before former US President Donald Trump speaks during a "Save America" rally in Conroe, Texas. (Mark Felix / AFP)
As she did the week prior, she told ABC’s Jonathan Karl that three-quarters of a million votes in Arizona’s largest county should have been thrown out because they “violated chain of custody requirements” — an argument that is both false and bizarre: because someone moving ballots from a dropbox to a counting facility didn’t sign a form, thousands of votes should be tossed? When Karl pressed her on this, she insisted that it was a “fact” that this had happened, when it didn’t.
That tracing Lake’s efforts to overhaul voting in her newly blue state back upstream leads to misinformation about voting isn’t a surprise. The GOP’s long acceptance of false claims about voter fraud — an acceptance rooted in part on blocking expansions of voting access to Democratic-voting constituencies — tilled the soil for Donald Trump’s enthusiastic, multiyear effort to shred confidence in American elections. Republicans in particular, but not exclusively, now have little confidence in elections and, relatedly, in democracy itself, thanks in part to constant misinformation about election security.
But there’s an unrecognized aspect of the effort. The system tolerated claims of widespread fraud for years in part because the effects were limited in scope or abstract. America’s elections are a mishmash of local administrators and tools, varying state laws and differing political outcomes. It’s imperfect both in general and at the local level, but it is distributed in a way that people could retain confidence in their own elections even if they were skeptical of them broadly — or, say, in heavily Black cities like Philadelphia, far from where they lived.
In the Trump era, doubt rooted in false claims of fraud has infected those local systems. By design. A rickety process dependent on old bureaucracy and volunteers has come under attack from both the outside and the inside, both nationally and at the county level. As the midterm elections loom, we see increasing reports of an effort to overwhelm elections systems and break confidence in their reported results with an obvious desired outcome: Seizing power whatever those results say.
There have been multiple recent stories about one aspect of this often uncoordinated effort. Elections administrators in multiple states — Nevada, Georgia and Virginia among them — are simply resigning rather than suffer the abuse that now comes with the job. (Earlier this month, a Nebraska man was sentenced to 18 months in prison for threatening poll workers.) The common theme? Republican activists and, often, officials pressuring them as a function of false claims about rampant fraud.
Earlier this year, I spoke with Michella Huff, the elections administrator for Surry County, N.C. Huff told me that she had been threatened by the chairman of the Republican Party in the county as he sought access to voting machines, under the mistaken belief that he (and those he was working with, like Mike Lindell ally Douglas Frank) could prove the machines facilitated fraud. Trump won Surry County by a 3-to-1 margin in 2020, but Huff believed that the county’s politics made the attack more likely: It was, she said, a “soft target” for conspiracy theorists since the party had more leverage over the elections. See also: Otero County, N.M., where Trump-loyal officials sponsored a failed “audit” of the vote and even attempted to block election results this year out of nonsensical “fraud” concerns.
At the same time, there’s what might be described as a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack underway on local elections systems. In computing terms, a DDOS attack renders a website unusable by flooding it with requests for information. The electoral analogue is the concerted effort to systematize challenges to election operations and to increase the cost of casting ballots.
There are a number of groups that have recruited Trump-sympathetic volunteers to “watch” the polls and vote-counting. Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who eagerly joined Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, has been training volunteers to staff polling places with an eye toward catching “fraud” — an effort supported by the Republican Party.
The practical effect of that was seen in South Carolina this summer, as the New York Times reported. Supporters of a pro-Trump candidate went to various polling places, raising unfounded complaints about the process or the available tools. Those claims were also posted online, which is how things work now: False or unsupportable assertions are posted on official-looking websites where they bolster a sense of wrongdoing, even if they don’t actually demonstrate any.
It is not new that candidates or political parties send people to polling places to observe what’s happening. But those individuals, like those tasked with observing vote-counting, are trained. They’re instructed on what is and isn’t normal and when it is and isn’t appropriate to raise a challenge with an official at a polling-place. Ginning up an ad hoc group of poll watchers is something very different — as is tasking people with going to the polls under the assumption that illegality is underway.
Politico obtained a recording of a training run by Mitchell earlier this year. In it, she suggested that one central aspect of the effort was to oppose the left’s efforts to make voting more widespread. Democrats were trying to register more people from groups and areas where voting rates have traditionally been low, Mitchell said, and “we have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Overwhelming polling places and elections systems with complaints or baseless claims of impropriety has a practical effect: It is the fuel for post-election efforts to undermine the results. On Sunday, Rolling Stone reported that Trump and his allies have been strategizing about how to elevate questions about the results in close races this year, following his own failed playbook from 2020.
“[T]hey’ve gamed out scenarios for how to aggressively challenge elections, particularly ones in which a winner is not declared on Election Night,” the magazine’s Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley report. “If there’s any hint of doubt about the winners, the teams plan to wage aggressive court campaigns and launch a media blitz.” And, of course, there will be plenty of “doubt” about the winners because there is an existing structure in place to generate that doubt. (Not that doubt can’t be invented after the fact, as we’ve seen in the past two years.)
Why might it work now when it didn’t in 2020? In part because 2020 helped test the weak spots in the system. And, in part, because the effort is more determined and more deliberate than simply Trump complaining about his loss.
“We are 100 times more prepared now,” former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon told the Times. “We’re going to adjudicate every battle. That’s the difference.”
Again, though, the formal effort convened by Trump or Bannon or Mitchell sits alongside a fervent grass-roots effort to uproot purported fraud. The Washington Post reported last week that voters using drop boxes in Arizona had been confronted by self-appointed poll watchers deceived by rhetoric like the debunked film “2000 Mules” to believe that rampant ballot-stuffing occurs. No, Georgia was compelled to remind people, you can’t simply challenge the right of someone else to vote.
The aftermath of the midterm election will no doubt see a flurry of nonsensical claims about “fraud” and illegality from a thousand directions, claims that can be elevated by any campaign within shouting distance of victory to pressure efforts at certifying the outcome.
This is deliberate. Sow doubt about elections. Overwhelm elections with observers both in polling places and elsewhere. Gin up claims of illegality and fraud everywhere. Apply those claims as needed to try to change the outcome of elections. The system — an ad hoc system operating for decades on good-faith participation — wasn’t built for this sort of attack.
In his interview with Kari Lake, Jonathan Karl also asked her if she would accept the results in her race, no matter what happened.
“I will accept the results of this election if we have a fair, honest, and transparent election,” she replied. “Absolutely, 100 percent.”
That’s how it works, of course. If she or any number of other Republicans lose, the election was therefore not fair and honest, as scads of “evidence” collected by observers can attest. The formality of “voting” over, the real fight for power begins. | 2022-10-24T16:13:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The effort to break America’s elections - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/trump-false-claims-elections-kari-lake/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/trump-false-claims-elections-kari-lake/ |
‘No Russ, no’: Westbrook’s pride continues to cost the Lakers
Los Angeles Lakers guard Russell Westbrook has only made 11 of his 38 field goal attempts this season and 1 of 12 three-point attempts. (Mark J. Terrill/AP)
LOS ANGELES — The eager bouncing on the Portland Trail Blazers’ bench began once Russell Westbrook zipped past the three-point arc, and it morphed into a full-fledged celebration when the Los Angeles Lakers guard couldn’t resist an open look.
A Lakers fan in a purple jacket, seated along the right baseline, threw his hands into the air to protest the shot when it went up, then clutched his face when it rimmed off. Standing near midcourt, LeBron James and Anthony Davis turned their palms to the sky as if asking, “Why?” The Lakers’ longtime play-by-play broadcaster Bill Macdonald moaned on the television broadcast: “No Russ, no.”
Welcome to another uncomfortable day in Westbrook’s life, where opponents beg him to shoot, teammates often appear perplexed by his decisions and the home crowd can’t take the misses any longer.
The Lakers fell to 0-3 with a 106-104 loss to the Blazers on Sunday, blowing a seven-point lead in the game’s final two minutes to complete a demoralizing opening week. Portland’s comeback was led by Damian Lillard, who tallied a game-high 41 points, but it wouldn’t have been possible without Westbrook’s latest late-game follies.
While Westbrook’s pride powered him to nine all-star selections, the 2017 MVP award and an NBA-record 194 triple-doubles, it is now the leading cause of his fall. At 33, he doesn’t draw fouls or finish at the rim like he did in his prime. His shaky three-point shot has completely deserted him, and his midrange pull-ups are no longer reliable enough to keep defenses honest. Even though he is shooting just 28.9 percent from the floor and 8.3 percent from deep so far this season, he can’t help himself. If someone gives him a shot, he takes it.
Lakers Coach Darvin Ham subbed Westbrook back into the game with about five minutes remaining in regulation and Los Angeles leading, 98-90. Blazers Coach Chauncey Billups responded by switching center Jusuf Nurkic onto Westbrook, deploying the Bosnian big man like a shortstop executing a shift. Instead of conceding the left side of the infield, Nurkic intentionally played so far off Westbrook that he was free to take an uncontested jumper from anywhere he liked.
The simple strategy worked brilliantly. With a little over three minutes left, Westbrook missed a three-pointer that quickly led to a Lillard three on the other end. Then, with Los Angeles leading by one point with less than 30 seconds left, Westbrook hoisted his final wayward jumper instead of milking the clock or driving to the basket. As Nurkic laid back in the paint, Westbrook pulled up from 15 feet with 18 seconds left on the shot clock, triggering collective disbelief from James, Davis, Macdonald and thousands of groaning fans.
“I’m not really sure what to do [when centers switch on to me], but I’m just trying to do the best I can,” said Westbrook, who explained that he was trying to execute a two-for-one so that the Lakers would have the final possession.
Ham expressed his disapproval, saying that Westbrook should have driven to the hoop to try to draw a foul on Nurkic.
“If you’re going to go two-for-one, I think it has to be either going downhill to attack the rim or going downhill for a draw-and-kick,” he said. “I felt like we settled on that.”
On the surface, Ham’s candid take was refreshing. James, by comparison, has adopted an evasive approach to queries about Westbrook’s poor play, suggesting Sunday that reporters were “try[ing] to set me up to say something.”
Dig deeper, and it’s clear that the time has come for Ham to take a firmer stance with Westbrook, whose $47 million contract has proved difficult to trade. When Ham was hired in June to replace the fired Frank Vogel, he promised to hold Westbrook to a higher standard of accountability.
Ham’s first test came when he experimented with moving Westbrook to the bench in the Lakers’ preseason finale. Westbrook left the game after playing five minutes, citing a strained hamstring. Later, Westbrook said that he “absolutely” felt that the move to the second unit had contributed to his injury.
“I’ve been doing the same thing for 14 years straight,” he said. “Honestly, I didn’t even know what to do pregame. Being honest, I was trying to figure out how to try to stay warm and loose.”
ESPN analyst Richard Jefferson led a chorus of observers who felt Westbrook “was sending a message” by using the injury talk as a veiled threat to dissuade Ham from benching him in the future. Ham said that he had addressed the situation with Westbrook, who promptly returned to the starting lineup.
After the Portland game, Ham said that he had put Westbrook back in late because he wanted “another athletic perimeter defender” to help switch defensively against Lillard. If that was the goal, there were other qualified options, including Austin Reaves and Juan Toscano-Anderson. If Ham was instead deferring to a mercurial star who expects to play in big moments, he should survey the Pacific Division for examples of healthier alternatives.
Los Angeles Clippers Coach Tyronn Lue has utilized an unconventional rotation that keeps franchise forward Kawhi Leonard on the bench until midway through the second quarter. Leonard, who missed all of last season with a knee injury, is on a minute restriction, and backloading his minutes ensures that he can be fresh in the fourth quarter.
Meanwhile, Phoenix Suns Coach Monty Williams benched Chris Paul for the final six minutes of a 107-105 win over the Dallas Mavericks on opening night. Paul is a first-ballot Hall of Famer who led the Suns to the 2021 Finals, but the 37-year-old guard shot just 1-for-6 against Dallas and was replaced by backup Cameron Payne.
Leonard and Paul are better and more accomplished players than Westbrook; If they can sit early or late, so can he. Compromises are necessary when stars age, and savvy players understand the need to evolve their games and expectations.
A year into their failed experiment, the Lakers must have learned by now that Westbrook’s pride blinds him from that type of honest self-assessment. Until a divorce frees all parties, Ham is the only thing standing between Westbrook and his worst impulses.
“We don’t have time for feelings or people being in their feelings,” Ham said. “We’re trying to turn this thing around.”
Surely, he understands whose feelings must get hurt first. | 2022-10-24T16:13:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russell Westbrook's pride continues to cost the Lakers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/russell-westbrook-lakers-bad-shots/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/russell-westbrook-lakers-bad-shots/ |
Police identify victim in fatal shooting near Nationals Park
Kevaughn Washington, a 31-year-old from Oxon Hill, Md., was fatally shot in the unit block of N Street SE
Police on Monday identified the man fatally shot Sunday afternoon just outside Nationals Park as Kevaughn Washington.
Washington, a 31-year-old from Oxon Hill, Md., was shot inside a vehicle in the unit block of N Street, SE and died on the scene. His relatives could not be immediately reached.
The incident occurred before 1 p.m. near a line of sports bars, restaurants and the BetMGM Sportsbook betting facility — sending pedestrians and customers ducking for cover.
D.C. police previously said that the victim was likely the target of the attack. Security footage appears to show a dark-colored SUV speeding out of the area after the shooting, the first district commander said Sunday.
Police have yet to make an arrest in the fatal shooting. Their investigation was active and ongoing Monday.
Washington was the 166th person slain in the District this year. Homicides were down 7 percent compared to the same time last year, when 178 people had been killed in the city. | 2022-10-24T16:30:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Police identify victim in fatal shooting near Nationals Park - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/homicide-victim-identified-nationals-park/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/homicide-victim-identified-nationals-park/ |
FILE - Brian Johnson of AC/DC performs with the Foo Fighters at “Vax Live: The Concert to Reunite the World” in Inglewood, Calif., on May 2, 2021. In his new memoir, the “Highway to Hell” singer recounts how he went from being a vinyl car roof fitter to leading one of the most hailed bands in the world. (Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File) | 2022-10-24T16:30:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | AC/DC's Brian Johnson writes about his Cinderella lives - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/acdcs-brian-johnson-writes-about-his-cinderella-lives/2022/10/24/3b34b254-53b0-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/acdcs-brian-johnson-writes-about-his-cinderella-lives/2022/10/24/3b34b254-53b0-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
By Karl A. Racine
The Garfield Terrace housing complex, run by the D.C. Housing Authority. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
Karl A. Racine, a Democrat, is the D.C. attorney general.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a damning indictment of the DC Housing Authority (DCHA) this month, confirming what my office, the D.C. auditor and residents have been saying for years: DCHA is failing tenants. The 72-page audit paints a picture of an agency that is neglecting residents and unequivocally failing to live up to its mission. In other words: DCHA is our city’s biggest slumlord. Trust in the agency has fallen to such low levels in the past decade that some residents are wondering if the dysfunction is because the agency can’t do its job or won’t do its job. In the words of one resident, “I’m convinced they want us to live like this.”
DCHA has two core responsibilities: to provide seniors, retirees, people with disabilities and workers with a place to live and to keep these homes safe and sanitary. It is clear both from this report and years of resident complaints that DCHA is failing on both fronts.
DCHA has the highest vacancy rate of any large public housing agency. Nearly a quarter of units are empty while the waiting list to get into a home is more than 40,000 names long. It is unconscionable that thousands of people who desperately need a place to live are made to wait years, if not decades, for a home while DCHA has empty units available.
Furthermore, even when DCHA is providing housing, it fails to ensure decent, safe and sanitary conditions. DCHA housing is so deplorable that my office has had to sue DCHA not once, but twice in recent years over its mistreatment of residents with disabilities and the lack of basic safety infrastructure in its buildings.
The current state of DCHA is an embarrassment to our city and demands an urgent response. We do not have the luxury of time when it comes to remedying these problems; every day that DCHA is not addressing these problems is another day that D.C. residents are living in inhumane conditions and don’t have a safe place to call home.
That is why Council member Elissa Silverman (I-At Large) and I collaborated to introduce emergency legislation to begin the reforms that are desperately needed at DCHA. This legislation, which the council passed unanimously, will increase transparency and oversight, ensure board members receive appropriate training and will clarify that DCHA, as with all other D.C. landlords, must follow D.C.’s consumer protection laws.
Though this legislation is a vital first step toward getting the agency back on track, permanent legislation is needed to ensure we comprehensively address all 82 violations identified in the HUD report.
When DCHA became an independent agency after exiting receivership in 2000, its leadership structure was designed to prevent improper political influence and ensure competent management. These goals are not being met.
Our most urgent priority should be to reassess the composition of DCHA’s Board of Commissioners. The 13-member DCHA Board of Commissioners has six members appointed by D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), in addition to Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development John Falcicchio, who serves as an ex officio member. The HUD report found that these appointees tend to “vote as a group without individual review.” The control of the board by mayoral appointees voting together has undermined the independence of the agency.
The board has led the agency down a path of focusing on market-rate development, in line with the broader goals of the administration and to the benefit of some of the mayor’s closest developer friends but counter to the agency’s mission of serving those with the least economic resources. In addition, the board has appointed an executive director with, in HUD’s words, “no experience in property development, property management or managing federal housing programs,” who is a close political ally of the mayor. To return independence to the agency, we must remove the deputy mayor for planning and economic development from the board.
Second, we must address the report’s finding that there is inadequate expertise among DCHA leadership. We must create stricter qualifications for appointees to the board and the executive director to ensure DCHA’s leaders have the knowledge and experience to properly serve tenants. We need to require a minimum number of years of experience and ensure that requisite experience is directly related to housing.
Housing is fundamental to the safety and well-being of all people, but DCHA has lost the confidence of the very people it is tasked with serving. It’s past time we make the structural changes needed to earn it back. | 2022-10-24T16:31:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Karl Racine: D.C. Housing Authority demands urgent response - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/karl-racine-dc-housing-authority-demands-urgent-response/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/karl-racine-dc-housing-authority-demands-urgent-response/ |
Welcome to The Daily 202! Tell your friends to sign up here. On this day in 1940, the 40-hour workweek went into effect thanks to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
President Biden is making what might be called a quality-of-life argument in his final stretch of campaigning before the midterm election, talking up everything from jobs growth, to lower prices on hearing aids or medicine, to the construction of literal bridges, to efforts to rein in gas prices.
One recurring theme on Biden’s schedule throughout September and October: variations on “lowering costs for American families,” a direct nod to American concerns about painfully high inflation, which has smothered real-wage gains and made it harder for him to capitalize on the kind of job creation that should be an electoral asset.
So a White House Competition Council meeting on Sept. 26 was about steps “to help lower prices for consumers” and “preview new actions that will save families money and lower costs.” Remarks in Orange County, Calif., on Oct. 14 and in Portland, Ore., on Oct. 15 were both billed as focusing “on lowering costs for American families.”
“Starting this week, we’re making — this is a big deal — we’re making hearing aids more affordable, but we’re also making them available over the counter so people don’t have to pay the expensive visits to a specialist,” he said in Portland.
Feeling their pain
It’s not that Biden has stopped sounding the alarm about Republicans who have suggested they will only respect the election outcomes if they win, or warning the GOP will target Social Security and Medicare and cut taxes for the rich if they recapture Congress. Not at all.
Instead, it suggests the struggles of a president trying to find a way not just to attack Republicans, who poll considerably better on the economy than Democrats, but to talk up his own approach to the top issue on voters’ minds with time running short before Election Day.
The quality-of-life approach (to be clear, that’s The Daily 202 term, not the White House’s) hasn’t just been about lowering costs. There was the Americans With Disabilities Act celebration, and an event on battling hunger, both on Sept. 28. An Oct. 12 appearance focused on conservationism and outdoor spaces. Infrastructure-focused remarks on Oct. 13 and 20.
The strategy can take the president all over the rhetorical map. On Oct. 18 he focused on restoring and safeguarding access to abortion. A day later, he was talking about efforts to rein in gas prices. A day after that, he was talking up his bipartisan infrastructure law.
What the future holds is anybody’s guess, though The Daily 202 has a pretty decent line on what Biden will be talking about come Thursday, due to this reporting from my colleague Abha Bhattarai about a report on U.S. economic growth that’s expected to have good news for him.
It’s been interesting, though, to listen to recent comments from two prominent leaders on the left — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — who have both expressed urgency about fixing the Democrats’ midterm message on the economy.
“When I hear people talk about inflation, as I heard them there, we have to change that subject. Inflation is a global phenomenon,” Pelosi said Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation. “The fight is not about inflation. It’s about the cost of living.”
Asked about the risk of campaigning on abortion, Pelosi replied: “Elections are about the future. They're about the economy. Everybody knows that. Nobody said we're doing abortion rather than the economy. But it's, it's about both.”
(Last week, Pelosi suggested time was running out for Democrats to figure out how to talk effectively to voters about inflation. “We’ll have to message it better in the next three weeks ahead,” she told Punchbowl News.)
Sanders has expressed concerns about Democrats failing to energize the working-class and younger voters they need to preserve their congressional majorities. He’s about to launch an eight-state blitz with at least 19 events before the midterms. And he wants more focus on the economy.
“Is the abortion issue important? Yes. But we have also got to focus on the struggles of working people to put food on their table,” Sanders said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “What Democrats have got to do is contrast their economic plan with the Republicans.”
So Biden, Pelosi and Sanders seem to agree. The question, with barely more than two weeks before what we all still agree to call Election Day, is whether Democrats can fully implement this consensus.
Rishi Sunak to become U.K. prime minister after rival withdraws from contest
“Rishi Sunak will be Britain’s next prime minister, the first person of color in the job, after winning the Conservative Party’s leadership contest on Monday. Sunak, a 42-year-old former finance minister who led the revolt against Boris Johnson and was runner-up to Liz Truss in September, will succeed them both, becoming Britain’s third leader in less than two months, with the challenges of improving the country’s economic trajectory and public trust in the Conservative Party,” William Booth, Karla Adam, Jennifer Hassan and Leo Sands report.
Trump Organization’s criminal trial on fraud charges to start today
“The Trump Organization, former president Donald Trump’s namesake company, is set to go on trial Monday for alleged tax crimes — the result of a lengthy investigation into the company and its executives related to fraud and other potentially illegal business practices,” Shayna Jacobs reports.
“Student test scores declined across the country, particularly in math, and not one state saw an increase, according to the most comprehensive look at the impact of the pandemic on student achievement to date,” Laura Meckler reports.
“In the shooting’s aftermath, many of Uvalde’s children were plagued by post-traumatic stress, but, to most people, Caitlyne [Gonzales] wasn’t one of them. By September, she had become Robb’s most public survivor, a voice for her friends who were dead and for those who were alive but too daunted to say anything,” John Woodrow Cox reports.
“But the girl Caitlyne had been before ‘that day,‘ as she’d started calling the May 24 massacre, was gone. In her place was a uniquely American amalgam, a child who didn’t know how to ride a bike without training wheels but did know about ballistic windows and bulletproof backpacks and the movement to ban assault weapons. Who spent as much time following the Instagram pages of her favorite gun safety champions as she did Bad Bunny’s TikTok account. Who was 10, but seldom acted her age, speaking in public about fear and death with the eloquence of an adult, while in private, enduring flashbacks so vivid that she needed bedtime lullabies meant for toddlers to soothe her.”
“If they choose to go to the polls, numbers suggest nonpartisan voters could swing close races. A January Gallup poll found they make up 42 percent of Americans. That’s well ahead of the 29 percent who say they are Democrats and 27 percent who identify as Republican,” Rhonda Colvin reports.
“When Wilfredo Molina arrived in the U.S. from his native Venezuela, he told border agents he wanted to go to Miami but didn’t have an address. They directed him to what he thought was a shelter in midtown Manhattan but turned out to be a gray office building. ‘It was a fake building. I didn’t understand what it was,’ he said,” the Associated Press’s Claudia Torrens and Vanessa A. Alvarez report.
“Consumers are subject to a host of predictive scoring systems — hidden rankings based on factors like their demographic profile, socioeconomic status, online activities and offline interests,” the New York Times’ Natasha Singer reports.
“Retailers and other services often use ‘customer lifetime value’ scores to try to predict how much money individual clients might spend over time. Universities use ‘retention’ scores to identify students at risk of dropping out.”
“Some people closest to the president describe an administration that achieved significant victories while repeatedly running up against the limits of the federal bureaucracy, a tissue-thin majority in Congress and a deeply divided nation. Aides also often failed to anticipate and plan for worst-case scenarios and regularly set expectations above what they could achieve. Biden and his team were elected on the promise of a new era of competent governance, only to find that the most rigorous science and best expert advice could not protect the country from new waves of disease and economic hardship,” Ashley Parker, Tyler Pager and Michael Scherer report.
“Energy executives and analysts expressed doubts the plan would spur a large increase in production in the short term. Many oil companies are wary of locking in sales when commodity markets have swung wildly. They hope to capture high oil prices while they are in place. Rising drilling costs and pressure from investors to limit production and return excess cash to shareholders are also dimming the outlook for production growth, they said,” the Wall Street Journal’s Benoît Morenne reports.
“The Biden administration is moving ‘full speed ahead’ in preparing for the implementation of its plans for widespread student debt forgiveness, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said Saturday, a day after a federal appeals court temporarily blocked the loans from being immediately canceled,” Bryan Pietsch reports.
Unused pandemic relief for schools, visualized
“Despite having access to the dollars, school systems throughout the country reported spending less than 15 percent of the federal funding, known as ESSER III, the most recent installment of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, during the 2021-2022 school year, according to a Washington Post analysis of data collected by Edunomics, an education finance group at Georgetown University,” Lauren Lumpkin and Sahana Jayaraman report.
“Problem is, Biden’s low approval ratings and the dearth of popular interest in his reorientation and rehabilitation of America’s role in the world combine to make his foreign and military policies politically fragile. He deserves great credit for turning the ship of state, but it would be disturbingly easy to turn it back to old waters,” the American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper writes.
“Democrats are increasingly concerned that Florida, once the nation’s premier swing state, may slip away this fall and beyond as emboldened Republicans capitalize on divisive cultural issues and demographic shifts in crucial contests for governor and the U.S. Senate,” the AP’s Steve Peoples, Adriana Gomez Licon and Brendan Farrington report.
At 12:45 p.m., Biden will leave the White House for the Democratic National Committee, where he will speak.
The Bidens will plant a tree at the White House at 2:15 p.m.
At 5 p.m., the Bidens will host a Diwali reception. Vice President Harris will attend.
“The bad news is NASA estimates that it tracks only about 40 percent of the asteroids large enough that they could cause calamity if they were to hit Earth. To save us, the space agency needs fair warning — years, not months or weeks — to muster the defenses in space needed to safeguard the planet,” Christian Davenport reports.
Analysis: The effort to break America’s elections | 2022-10-24T16:31:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden’s pushing all-of-the-above in final midterm sprint - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/bidens-pushing-all-of-the-above-final-midterm-sprint/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/bidens-pushing-all-of-the-above-final-midterm-sprint/ |
D.C.'s troubled sports-betting app could soon have some competition
Sports gamblers in the District soon could get more choices. (Matt York/AP)
D.C. Council member Elissa Silverman (I-At Large) on Monday introduced legislation that would end the monopoly held by Intralot over the District’s troubled mobile sports-betting operation, opening it up to other companies such as DraftKings or FanDuel.
Silverman said the bill would “reboot” sports gambling in the District “by introducing competition into the procurement process and allowing competition among a larger number of mobile apps.” The bill also would terminate the contract with Intralot when it ends in 2024 and require that the city take competitive bids for future sports-betting contracts.
Months after the Council voted to legalize sports betting in the District in December 2018, it awarded a $215 million, no-bid contract to the Greek company Intralot, which also operates the city’s lottery. In turn, Intralot introduced GambetDC — the only sports-betting app that can be used across the city — in May 2020.
GambetDC immediately was met with poor reviews from sports gamblers who found fault with its bad odds, which gave GambetDC a much bigger house edge over its customers than is standard. Technical issues and wonky geolocation also have plagued the app, which crashed during this year’s Super Bowl, one of the biggest sports-gambling days of the year. (Intralot paid the D.C. Lottery $500,000 to compensate for the lost revenue stemming from the outage.)
Because of those and other reasons, GambetDC has not delivered the profits that were promised by the Office of Lottery and Gaming, which initially predicted $26 million in revenue for the District from sports betting in fiscal year 2021. Instead, GambetDC actually lost $4 million in its first fiscal year of existence, a stunningly bad result in an industry where the house almost always wins.
“We need to turn the page on this embarrassing episode,” Silverman said in a statement. “Residents deserve an online app that works, taxpayers deserve a program that brings in money for the District, and we all deserve a system where we don’t hand huge contracts to a preferred company and its subcontractors without even looking at the competition.”
At a Council oversight hearing in March, D.C. Lottery officials said they expected GambetDC to bring in only $1.5 million to the city in 2022, far short of the city’s initial revenue targets. The brick-and-mortar sportsbooks that have opened up in the city, meanwhile, have overperformed their revenue estimates.
A city audit in 2021 found that Intralot had fallen short of a legal requirement to spend money with locally owned businesses, and that government agencies had failed to oversee the company’s spending
Neighboring states that have legalized sports gambling have allowed multiple companies to enter the space. In Virginia, gamblers can make online bets with 13 companies, and Maryland is about a month away from the start of its own mobile sports-betting operations, with 60 companies possibly signing on.
“Given its bad reputation and the establishment of mobile sports betting in Virginia (launched January 2021) and Maryland (launching late 2022), Gambet is a longshot to ever realize its promise,” said Silverman, who was one of five council members to vote against the sole-source Intralot bill.
The bill, named the “Sports Wagering and Fair Competition Amendment Act of 2022,” has three co-sponsors: Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2), Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3) and Charles Allen (D-Ward 6). Silverman is running for reelection; two at-large Council seats will be decided on Nov. 8. | 2022-10-24T16:35:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | GambetDC could soon have sports-betting competition in Washington, D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/gambet-dc-sports-betting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/gambet-dc-sports-betting/ |
Why Hong Kong’s economic free fall is partly self-inflicted
Shuttered storefronts on Wing Wah Lane in Hong Kong. (Keith B. Richburg for The Washington Post)
For a snapshot of Hong Kong’s economic malaise, walk through the once-heaving entertainment district of Lan Kwai Fong and count the number of boarded-up restaurants and bar fronts. At the end of Wing Wah Lane, where property was once at a premium, most of the establishments are shuttered and plastered with “For Lease” signs.
Hong Kong’s stocks hit a 13-year low this week, with markets unimpressed by Beijing’s new leadership lineup for President Xi Jinping’s third term and spooked by bad economic news from China. The city is in a recession after two consecutive quarters of contraction, and analysts are concerned that the year-on-year growth figure will be flat at best. The once-superhot property market is in a slump. The hotel industry is in the doldrums. And the city is suffering from a brain drain, with many professionals decamping for regional rival Singapore.
This once-thriving metropolis is in many ways a victim of outside forces beyond its control — a worsening global economy, rising inflation and interest rates in the United States, as well as a sharper-than-expected slowdown in mainland China.
But many of the wounds are self-inflicted.
The economy first took a hit from the tumult of the widespread, often-violent protests and the heavy-handed police crackdown of 2019. Then in 2020 came the covid-19 pandemic, and Hong Kong — following the lead of mainland China — enacted some of the world’s strictest anti-virus measures, including regular banning of international flights and a strict 21-day hotel quarantine for incoming travelers. In addition, the border between Hong Kong and mainland China has been largely shut since the onset of the pandemic, with cross-border population flows reduced to a trickle.
At the same time, China’s Communist authorities imposed a draconian new national security law on the city in 2020, retooled local election procedures to guarantee only pro-China “patriots” could win seats, dismantled civil society and shuttered the most widely read newspaper, pro-democracy Apple Daily.
China’s backers say the measures restored order after about a half year of protests and chaos. But the wholesale makeover of Hong Kong, alongside the anti-covid restrictions, contributed to the biggest exodus in the city’s recent history. Some 140,000 people have left the workforce.
The foremost beneficiary of Hong Kong’s malaise has been Singapore, which has overtaken Hong Kong in some rankings as Asia’s key financial center. Singapore has rolled back virtually all covid restrictions and set out to lure financial professionals with special visa incentives and talent schemes.
Hong Kong is left playing catch-up. The new chief executive appointed by Beijing, John Lee Ka-chiu, rolled out a series of measures to “trawl the world for talents” and try to restore the city’s lost global luster. In his maiden policy address on Wednesday, Lee also unveiled plans for large-scale infrastructure spending, building new rail lines in the northernmost part of the territory to try to drive growth and add construction jobs.
Can Hong Kong eventually recover?
The city has a long history of bouncing back from adversity. The Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in 1989 — eight years before Hong Kong was set to be handed back to China — prompted a widespread exodus of people fearful of the pending takeover. Yet many of them eventually returned once they had secured foreign passports.
Then, in 2003, the SARS epidemic devastated the local economy, as the World Health Organization slapped on a travel advisory and locals largely avoided going to restaurants, malls and other crowded places. But mainland China stepped in to help the next year, introducing a new “individual visit scheme” to allow ordinary Chinese to come to Hong Kong as tourists, a privilege previously allowed only to business travelers and tour groups. That prompted an influx of Chinese visitors. Hong Kong also launched a multimillion-dollar advertising blitz to lure back foreign tourists, including hosting a costly three-week waterfront concert series called Harbourfest, and flying in big-name acts including the Rolling Stones and Prince.
Hong Kong officials are hoping they can once again revive the city’s fortunes with events and targeted policies. In November, the city is planning to host global banking chief executives for a financial summit and bring back the popular rugby sevens tournament after a three-year hiatus from the city, albeit under strict covid controls.
Still, it’s unclear whether the magic can work this time.
The city’s newly relaxed anti-covid rules remain draconian relative to other countries in the region. Residents are required to wear masks in public places or face hefty fines, vaccine passes are necessary for most premises, and visitors are barred from entering restaurants for three days and forced to undergo multiple coronavirus tests. That’s not exactly inviting to tourists.
The chief executive’s recent address made no mention of when the government would scrap the remaining rules. As a result, many viewed it as a letdown. And, unlike in 2003, China is keeping the border partially sealed as the mainland persists with its rigid “zero covid” policy.
Hong Kong might eventually find its way back. Its citizens are resilient. But this time, they will have to overcome not just external shocks, but their own government’s increasingly shortsighted policies. | 2022-10-24T16:56:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Why Hong Kong’s economic free fall is partly self-inflicted - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/hong-kong-economy-recession-recovery/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/hong-kong-economy-recession-recovery/ |
President Biden delivers remarks regarding the Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade in the White House on June 24. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
Last week, President Biden promised to send Congress legislation codifying Roe v. Wade — if voters elect more Democrats to the Senate and help the party keep control of the House. “If you care about the right to choose, then you got to vote,” he said in a speech Tuesday. But Democrats don’t need to wait for a new Congress to start aggressively pushing to protect reproductive rights. A bipartisan Senate bill introduced in August would guarantee rights to contraception and enshrine the protections formerly provided by Roe.
The Reproductive Freedom for All Act — co-sponsored by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) — would bar states from imposing an “undue burden” on abortion before fetal viability. To appeal across the aisle, it would also allow health-care workers to refuse to provide abortions on religious grounds. Mr. Kaine has described it as a “time machine,” because it would reinstate the protections women had enjoyed for nearly five decades before this summer’s Supreme Court ruling on abortion. Yet the bill has stalled amid intense criticism from abortion rights advocates and some progressive lawmakers, who believe it doesn’t go far enough.
These figures prefer another bill, the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would not only uphold the right to abortion but also bar the kinds of cynical restrictions on access enacted during the Roe era. Though it has twice passed the House, it is a non-starter in this Senate: Moderate Republicans such as Ms. Collins and Ms. Murkowski oppose it, as does Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.). For it to pass, Democrats would need to gain at least two Senate seats and eliminate the filibuster — steps that are, respectively, unlikely and unwise.
The Reproductive Freedom for All Act faces its own hurdles: Even if it won the support of the entire Democratic caucus, earning the 10 GOP votes it would require to avoid a filibuster would be difficult. And there are questions about whether congressional action on abortion would withstand legal challenges. Still, in the current political landscape, this compromise represents Democrats’ best chance at passing a federal abortion law.
The bill does not have to be the last word: Legal hurdles notwithstanding, Congress could propose more comprehensive legislation in the future. But here, as in so many other instances, lawmakers should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There is no time to waste: In states with strict abortion bans, the human toll is already mounting. Meanwhile, Republicans such as Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) are hypocritically pushing for a federal abortion ban, even as they argue that the question should be one that is left up to the states.
Mr. Biden is right to argue that reproductive freedoms in the United States are inextricably linked to the results of the midterms. The Republican Party has spent decades relentlessly attacking abortion rights, and are threatening to go even further. Yet, as polls tighten, his case would be more convincing if Democrats rallied behind this middle-ground measure — and placed the onus squarely on the GOP to respond. | 2022-10-24T17:09:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The Reproductive Freedom for All Act would codify Roe v. Wade - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/reproductive-freedom-act-roe-v-wade-abortion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/reproductive-freedom-act-roe-v-wade-abortion/ |
Review by John Fabian Witt
In his book, Jon Meacham aims to recraft a usable mythology of Abraham Lincoln for leaders in the 21st century, when dissension and talk of civil war have returned. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Every generation gets its own Abraham Lincoln biography. But if time seems to move faster these days, then perhaps it is altogether fitting and proper that our generation should have so many. The latest — Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham’s “And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle” — offers an account of the life of the United States’ 16th president that is worldly and spiritual, and carefully tailored to suit our conflict-ridden times.
Meacham bids to be the redeemer in chief of the narrative of American exceptionalism: the venerable if now-shopworn story in which the United States has a providential and world-historic role as a nation distinctively dedicated to human liberty. He is almost certainly the most well-connected presidential biographer of the moment. His 2008 biography of Andrew Jackson, “American Lion,” won a Pulitzer Prize for balancing Jackson’s many faults, including his relentless efforts to destroy Native American Indian tribes, with his success in holding together a country whose “protections and promises,” as Meacham asserted, eventually extended to all. Meacham’s 2015 biography of George H.W. Bush, “Destiny and Power,” maintained a respectable critical distance while treating his subject with sufficient dignity that the Bush family asked him to deliver the eulogy at the National Cathedral. His 2018 book “The Soul of America,” a spirited defense of the promise of America for the Trump years, captured the attention of Joe Biden, who used the title as a catch phrase in his 2020 presidential campaign while relying on Meacham for speechwriting counsel. Biden gave Meacham a coveted four-minute slot on the final evening of the Democratic National Convention. Since Biden’s election, Meacham has been something of an insider historian for the White House, helping to organize occasional dinners with historians at which the president seeks to take stock of the historical moment.
Meacham’s new Lincoln is not just a text; it is an event. The book aims to recraft a usable mythology of Lincoln for political leaders in the 21st century, when dissension and loose talk of civil war have returned. It is thoroughly researched and highly readable, written with all the artful craftsmanship of a veteran writer and editor. The book is not especially long for a contemporary biography; it clocks in at just over 400 pages of text. But it boasts more than 200 additional pages of endnotes and bibliography in support of an interpretation of Lincoln that focuses on the moral life of the politician and statesman. Lincoln’s hardscrabble log-cabin childhood and his marriage to the oft-troubled Mary Todd appear. So do scars from the childhood deaths of two of their four sons. But in Meacham’s treatment, such personal details function as supporting pieces in a story designed around high-stakes campaign speeches, the constitutive ritual of inaugurations and grave moments of statesmanship.
Two big ideas about Lincoln and politics animate the book. The first is that statecraft, when practiced as Lincoln practiced it, is a noble art. For all the sordid pettiness of modern partisanship, and for all the venal corruptions of political life, Meacham’s account of the life of Lincoln aims to persuade us that leadership in a democracy is a distinctive and indispensable moral enterprise — a kind of high-wire act of pragmatic compromise on the one hand and moral principle on the other. The practice redeems itself, Meacham contends, when the moral calculus nets out positive.
Consider the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which Lincoln, as the anti-slavery Republican candidate for an Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate in 1858, challenged the incumbent Democrat, Stephen Douglas, to a series of seven debates. Douglas, who would soon be the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidency, disparaged Black people as inferior and treated them as mere property rather than people. He insisted that new Western states should be open to slavery if White voters in those states so chose, a view he called “popular sovereignty.”
Lincoln, by contrast, was implacable in his resistance to the spread of slavery into Western territories. He insisted that Black people were “entitled to all the natural rights” of the Declaration of Independence. But as Meacham painstakingly describes, Lincoln was “not a full-time reformer but an office-seeker,” not “a preacher but a politician.” What that meant in practice was that he leavened his moral commitments with the prejudices of those he hoped to represent. On speaker’s platforms in Illinois, Lincoln renounced the idea of “political and social equality between the white and the black races.” When he described slavery’s wrongfulness, he focused on its threat to White voters and their families. “It is far easier to convince the multitude that Slavery is a baleful evil to them,” he later explained, “than to possess them with the idea that it is a cruel wrong to the enslaved.”
From early in his life, to be sure, Lincoln believed that slavery was wrong. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” he wrote in 1864, adding, “I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” But Lincoln disappointed abolitionists time and again. He deferred emancipation until the third year of the war, and even then he relied on military necessity rather than the justice of the thing as the basis for his decision. Lincoln doubted that White and Black communities could live together; he endorsed what he called “separation of the races.” He pursued cruel and desperate colonization schemes to send the country’s Black population to Liberia, the West Indies or South America. In December 1862, Lincoln even proposed a settlement of the Civil War that would have guaranteed slavery’s persistence in the South until the 20th century.
Lincoln’s compromises with evil were so grave that prominent abolitionists — the Black leader Frederick Douglass, women’s movement advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Massachusetts orator Wendell Phillips among them — endorsed John Fremont as a rival presidential candidate in the 1864 election. Meacham is impatient with such radicals. Lincoln, he contends, could not both lead sinners to a better world and live apart from them.
The second theme of Meacham’s biography is the vitality of religious faith as a guiding force in politics, even and perhaps especially in moments of acute pressure. Many a past biographer has observed that Lincoln understood himself as an actor in a providential drama. Meacham agrees. Douglass’s searing 1852 address on the contradictory legacies of the Declaration of Independence for Black America invoked the Book of Genesis. Douglass resolved that God’s edict “Let there be Light” had “not yet spent its force.” In Meacham’s telling, “It fell to Abraham Lincoln to shed that light in the darkest of hours.”
Meacham’s lucid account nicely captures the religious framework with which Lincoln approached the most difficult decisions of his presidency. Deciding on emancipation in the summer of 1862, Lincoln resolved that he would do “whatever shall appear to be God’s will.” But how to discern the will of God? “These are not … the days of miracles,” he told two pastors from Chicago. Religious leaders, he pointed out, urged him down divergent paths. Some insisted that Christianity’s ethic of love required the immediate abolition of slavery. Others cited the Bible’s story of original sin and observed that Christianity had coexisted with slavery for 2,000 years. Ultimately, Lincoln found worldly evidence of God’s plan on the battlefield at Antietam in Maryland. The president, recalled Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, “made a vow — a covenant — that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine will.” When Union forces repelled Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North, in a battle that killed or wounded 23,000 men in a single day, Lincoln read the grim victory as a sign. His Emancipation Proclamation, issued five days later, decisively turned the war for the Union into a war against slavery.
But Meacham is not content to rest at a description of Lincoln’s psychology. He takes the point a step further. “To Lincoln,” he writes, “God whispered His will through conscience, calling humankind to live in accord with the laws of love.” There is no endnote for this, no bibliographical support, because how could there be? Meacham offers us a Lincoln who is a modern Moses, a prophet carrying out in mysterious ways the inscrutable will of God and leading a New Testament Israel through the wilderness to rescue an “experiment in liberty under law.” Meacham is a man of faith as much as his subject.
The belief that God has chosen a nation to carry forward the plan of history has been a dangerous tenet for millennia. The Old Testament’s genocides illustrate the point, as do those of the New World (in which Lincoln himself played a modest part), not to mention the many religiously inflected crises of violence around the world today. The conceit of “manifest destiny” helped produce an American empire whose structure remains today at odds with basic ideals of liberty and equality. Meacham’s contention nonetheless is that in the right dose, and with the appropriately humble human agents, faith supplies a moral framework adequate to our gravest moments. At the very least, faith offered Lincoln a language for communicating seriousness of purpose. It’s fair to say that it offers Meacham the same.
In the end, Meacham makes a good case for Lincoln’s calculus of noble compromise. Capitulation would have either preserved slavery in the United States for decades, or created a new and aggressive slaveholding empire in the Americas. After his death, even his erstwhile abolitionist critics came around: “I see now the wisdom of his course,” said Stanton. He was “the black man’s President,” decided Douglass. W.E.B. Du Bois would later call him the “greatest figure of the nineteenth century.”
Meacham’s pitch is that Lincoln’s politics of compromise and faith would serve us well today. As a biographer, he is exquisitely attuned to the resonances between 21st-century polarization and the life of “a president who led a divided country” a century and a half ago. He dwells on Vice President John Breckinridge’s courageous decision to carry out the electoral college count faithfully in February 1861, just as Vice President Mike Pence did in January 2021. With an eye toward the Trumpian “big lie” about the 2020 election results, Meacham observes that Lincoln pledged publicly to respect the outcome in 1864 even though success for Democrat George McClellan would have reversed emancipation. The entire book is about rebellion by a White national minority chafing against the Declaration of Independence’s commitment to equality for all people. Lincoln’s experience reverberates into our own era of anxious White voters and new threats of insurrection.
Ultimately, “And There Was Light” stands for the claim that the demigods of American historical mythology, Lincoln foremost among them, can help us carve paths through our forbidding 21st-century wilderness. But can Lincoln do the work Meacham sets for him? Can a man who took part in the final genocidal clash of White settlers with Indians east of the Mississippi rally a multiethnic democracy to the flag? Can a man who opposed Black citizenship until the end of his life mobilize a diverse coalition of voters? What, moreover, does Lincoln’s moral North Star — the Declaration’s ringing promise of equality for all — mean today? Does it mean higher progressive tax rates for the 1 percent, or perhaps more student debt relief? Does it mean an end to race-based government action, or a rededication of the nation to the principle that Black lives matter? Is the next Lincoln a teenager who wants action on climate change — but is prepared to make compromises in bringing the world closer to carbon neutrality?
Faced with such challenges, we owe it to one another to pray we do our best. And that is Meacham’s deadly serious point.
John Fabian Witt teaches law and history at Yale and is the author, most recently, of “American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law From Smallpox to Covid-19.” He won the Bancroft Prize for “Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History.”
And There Was Light
Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle | 2022-10-24T17:31:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/24/jon-meacham-lincoln-book-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/24/jon-meacham-lincoln-book-review/ |
Rishi Sunak, former UK chancellor of the exchequer, arrives at his office in Millbank, in London, UK, on Monday, Oct. 24, 2022. Sunak took a huge step toward becoming the UKs next prime minister as former premier Boris Johnson pulled out of the contest after a weekend of vacillation and as he won the endorsement of Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
For those who like narratives with neat resolutions, the rise and fall and rise again of Rishi Sunak offers a certain sense of justice served. The son of immigrants of Indian descent, Sunak now becomes Britain’s first ethnic minority prime minister during Diwali (the Hindu, Sikh and Jain festival of lights). He replaces Liz Truss, the woman whose policies he warned would amount to economic suicide, and he’s edged out Boris Johnson after the former PM dramatically parachuted in from his Caribbean holiday to seize the prize.
(Corrects former prime minister’s name in 5th paragraph) | 2022-10-24T18:02:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | UK Tories Are Finally ‘Ready for Rishi.’ Is It Too Late? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/uk-tories-are-finallyready-for-rishi-is-it-too-late/2022/10/24/9e35dbc6-53ba-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/uk-tories-are-finallyready-for-rishi-is-it-too-late/2022/10/24/9e35dbc6-53ba-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
A stretch of Gandys Beach has been turned into an experiment to test resilience strategies for rising seas threatening New Jersey’s famed and highly populated coast.
By Colleen Hagerty
A home foundation overtaken by water and vegetation at Fortescue Beach in Fortescue, N.J., last week. Due to flood damage and destructive storms like Hurricane Sandy, scientists and engineers have identified key areas along the Jersey Shore on the Delaware Bay side for the use of preventive measures to ensure a healthy ecosystem and to adapt to rapidly rising sea levels. (Michelle Gustafson for The Washington Post)
Ten years after Hurricane Sandy charted a deadly and destructive course up the East Coast, reminders of its impact remain across the New Jersey shore. Abandoned buildings, first damaged in the storm, now wear a decade of further disrepair. There are docks missing rows of wooden planks and telltale water lines etched into garage doors like old, faded scars — signs not necessarily noticeable to outsiders, but clear to storm survivors, many of whom now tower over these properties in houses propped up to comply with new insurance guidelines.
Gandys Beach, a popular fishing area along the Delaware Bay, fits into another category: places transformed and now almost unrecognizable. After Sandy’s storm surge met a row of homes on Bayview Road, the state bought out most of those buildings, and the street itself is now more sand than road. What’s left is a stretch of unmanicured beach with a new purpose. It’s been turned into an experiment, where officials, scientists and engineers work together to test nature-driven resilience strategies for the rising seas threatening New Jersey’s famed and highly populated coast.
While climate change is causing widespread sea level rise, the Jersey Shore experiences it at a rate more than double the global average, a Rutgers University study found. That’s in part because land there is sinking, due to natural and human-caused factors. In the past century, Gandys Beach alone has seen a foot of sea level rise, and lost almost 500 feet of shoreline. Experts familiar with the area describe the tide there as “aggressive,” “dynamic” and “crazy” — the water swells enough to go from lapping at your toes during low tide to rising above your head during an average high tide. These conditions make adaptation increasingly critical.
After Sandy, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service received $167 million in federal funding for restoring facilities and wildlife habitats that were damaged during the storm. They dedicated $880,000 of that to Gandys Beach. If a project can survive and thrive in an environment like Gandys, Fish and Wildlife biologist Danielle McCulloch believes it can stand up to conditions anywhere. The progress and failures experienced on this shrinking slice of shore are now informing mitigation strategies up the coast, including the creation of “living shorelines” made with natural matter like oysters and marshes to stave off land loss.
On an overcast July day, the thick air promising rain, McCulloch convened some members of the team behind the Gandys Beach’s project to survey their work. Sporting tall wading boots and carrying binoculars around her neck, McCulloch apologized in advance for interrupting anyone to point out interesting wildlife — “I feel like missing nature is worse than being impolite,” she explained. That morning, there were a number of reasons for interruptions along the Delaware Bay beaches, from the squalls of shorebirds to a parade of horseshoe crabs leaving swirls in the sand as they headed to the water. The Delaware Bay is home to the largest population of horseshoe crabs in the world, and Gandys Beach serves as a migratory rest stop for the endangered rufa red knot birds, who come to snack on the crab eggs.
McCulloch and her colleagues came to look at a series of offshore structures known as “breakwaters,” installed about four years post-Sandy. Stretching intermittently across 3,000 feet parallel to the shore, the 10-by-30-foot formations serve as physical barriers between the waves and the beach, visible during low tide and fully submerged as the water rises.
Oyster castles — solid, interlocking blocks composed of a concrete-and-oyster-shell mixture that entices marine mollusks to latch on — make up the barriers. Bags filled with oyster shells were added as reinforcements to solidify them; closer to the shoreline, the Nature Conservancy, the nonprofit that owns this section of the beach, planted vegetation and put in compact tubes of natural fibers to “hold the line,” as McCulloch put it.
This design aims to serve dual purposes: dampen the waves to curb further beach erosion and grow the oyster population, which naturally improves water quality and creates a reef-like habitat for other marine life. To test those hypotheses, the Fish and Wildlife Service used Sandy appropriations money to fund ongoing research from the Stevens Institute of Technology, Rutgers Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory and Partnership for the Delaware Estuary.
So far, their findings are split. Along the broader beach and a quieter stretch of Nantuxent Creek, where the water has less wave energy, the oyster castles have been a boon, sustaining multiple generations of oysters and mussels. On the shore, the shell bags have provided stability for plants to take root and grow, while the compact tubes of natural fibers, called coir logs, failed to have much of a perceived impact.
The higher-energy wave areas have proved more challenging. While the oyster castles did support some marine life, it was not as robust, and the Stevens researchers found they actually amplified some of the waves behind the structures. Recognizing this, the group made some quick changes. Additional breakwater structures were added, creating a perpendicular “spine” stretching out from the beach. Researchers are still monitoring whether this change has made a difference.
The waves also untethered the shell bags, some of which ripped open and scattered along the beach, leaving behind plastic waste. To address this, the team attempted to make “lemons out of lemonade,” said Adrianna Zito-Livingston of the Nature Conservancy. The bags were naturally piling up by the vegetation, so the team decided to place them in areas that needed more reinforcements — that way they can help protect the plants and accrue more sand. In the future, Zito-Livingston said, they are eager to explore options for bags made of other materials.
“We’re learning these are not a great restriction on their own for these kinds of energetics,” Zito-Livingston said. “But they make really nice little speed bumps, they trap sediments and can slow things down.”
Some of the practical takeaways from the research on these shores have been applied to other in-progress projects along the New Jersey coast, including those in more populated communities. That includes plans to rehabilitate marsh areas, which research proved played a key role in protecting inland areas during Hurricane Sandy. For example, the Fish and Wildlife Service is using funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law to support restoration of a marsh in Barnegat Bay. There, teams are using a similar combination of wave-attenuating structures in the water and shell bags to build back marsh vegetation at the shore.
When Sandy swept through this area, resident Pat Doyle said, she was displaced from her longtime family home. Now, she’s one of the most ardent supporters of another nature-based initiative borne out of the Gandys Beach research that could help prevent further erosion and flooding in her neighborhood. Another nonprofit organization, the American Littoral Society, is using federal and state funding to set up seven “reefs” of rock-and-shell-filled baskets along the coast meant to serve both as breakwaters and as aquatic habitats.
Although a few dozen residents came out to help the society build those baskets, Doyle said they are also controversial: Some people have complained about the look of the installations, which poke out of the bay and are particularly prominent during low tide.
“What I try to say is, it’s not about what we want, at this point, it’s about what we desperately need,” Doyle said. She believes there needs to be more education in shorefront communities about the rising sea levels, and more support for homeowners who are continually paying the price of climate change.
After Sandy, she said, she asked the town about buyouts and was told that was not an option in her area. So, she “emptied a bank account,” as she described it, to raise her home in compliance with flood insurance standards. At first, her rates dropped, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s new pricing methodology for flood insurance has sent them spiking. Though she’s hopeful about the reefs, she said the area is still experiencing significant flooding. Residents have been appealing to elected officials for funding to add more protections, including additional physical barriers.
Doyle’s experience exemplifies another lesson from the work at Gandys Beach: the need for long-term, collaborative projects. It’s not just that experts are needed who understand science or engineering — there’s also a need for those in the government like McCulloch who can help navigate the red tape and complex funding processes that can prove prohibitive to community efforts.
“No one you meet today is going to say that they know it all — that’s why we have these big partnerships, that’s why we all are working together, and that’s why we collect the data,” McCulloch said. “We need it to make sure we’re doing the right thing because people’s homes depend on it, these species depend on it, [and] we’ve got to figure this out now because we’re running out of time.” | 2022-10-24T18:02:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In place of Sandy-ravaged homes, a ‘living’ beach helps N.J. prepare for next storm - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/10/24/sandy-hurricane-new-jersey-gandys-beach/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/10/24/sandy-hurricane-new-jersey-gandys-beach/ |
Students stand in a parking lot near the Central Visual & Performing Arts High School after a shooting that killed two people Monday, Oct. 24. The gunman died after an exchange of gunfire with police, authorities said. (David Carson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP)
Police confronted the gunman, estimated to be about 20 years old, and exchanged gunfire with him, Sack said. He was taken to the hospital along with seven others, where he was pronounced dead. Police had not identified him late Monday morning local time.
“It’s terrible to think about,” the police commissioner said. “Here is a safe place where kids go to learn, to grow, to develop, and something like this happens. it’s just heartbreaking.” | 2022-10-24T18:02:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | St. Louis shooting: Two dead at Center for Visual and Performing Arts - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/24/st-louis-school-shooting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/24/st-louis-school-shooting/ |
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Capitol Hill on July 29. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
Polls suggest that the economy and crime are among the most important issues for voters in the midterms — and that, as a result, Republicans are surging in the home stretch. I think a lot of voters are missing the point. These elections are actually a referendum on whether you favor the continuation of democracy in America — and Ukraine.
Those issues are more closely linked than most people realize, because most of the same MAGA candidates who support Donald Trump’s strongman rule at home are either indifferent or hostile to the fate of democracy abroad. J.D. Vance, the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate in Ohio, exemplifies the trend: He has said the 2020 election was “stolen” and “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”
That makes it all the more disturbing that Vance and other MAGA candidates are in the lead two weeks before Election Day. Vladimir Putin must have a smug smile on his face as he reads reports of recent political developments in the “Main Enemy,” as KGB agents of his generation referred to the United States.
A Post analysis found that “a majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices — 291 in all — have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election.” Put another way, this means a majority of the most important GOP candidates reject the fundamental premise of democracy, which is to accept the outcome of an election even if your side loses. Yet in a recent New York Times-Siena College poll, 39 percent of voters (and 71 percent of Republicans) said they are open to supporting candidates who reject the results of the 2020 election. If these candidates prevail, it will mean that aspiring authoritarians could have a stranglehold on our democracy.
It’s especially worrisome to see so many election deniers running so strongly as candidates for governor or secretary of state in swing states — positions in which they would have to certify the results of the next presidential election. Their terrifying credo is expressed by Jim Marchant, the GOP nominee for secretary of state in Nevada, who said: “When my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we’re going to fix the whole country, and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024.”
State-level election deniers will have a lot of support from election deniers in Congress. It’s hard to imagine MAGA members voting to certify a Biden victory in 2024. It’s easy to imagine them doing everything possible to harass and hinder the Biden administration — from launching politically motivated investigations to forcing a debt default — to prepare the ground for a Trump comeback in 2024. And if the orange emperor does take power again, you can bet he will try to Orbanize – i.e., euthanize – our democracy.
The fallout could reach all the way to Ukraine, where an embattled democracy needs U.S. aid to beat back the Russian invasion. Last week, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the likely next House speaker, said: “I think people are going to be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine. They just won’t do it.”
His comment drew criticism from other leading Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and former vice president Mike Pence. But McCarthy pays closer attention to the far right than they do because so many MAGA extremists sit in the House — and he knows they have been turning against Ukraine in recent months.
The Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans saying that the United States is sending too much aid to Ukraine has shot up from 9 percent in March to 32 percent last month. That’s hardly surprising, given that the two most influential right-wing voices in the country — Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump — are hostile to Ukraine and sympathetic to Russia.
If McCarthy were so inclined, he could put together a coalition of Democrats and hawkish Republicans in the House to pass more aid for Ukraine, but he would have to risk incurring the wrath of Trump and his MAGA minions. It’s hard to imagine McCarthy, who has a spine of Jell-O, doing anything so principled. If he faces a choice between the loss of his speakership and the loss of Ukraine, you can guess which he would choose. | 2022-10-24T18:03:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The midterms are a referendum on democracy in America and Ukraine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/election-deniers-ukraine-war-assistance/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/election-deniers-ukraine-war-assistance/ |
The letter, sent to the White House on Monday and obtained by The Washington Post, could create more pressure on Biden as he tries to sustain domestic support for the war effort, at a time when the region is heading into a potentially difficult winter and Republicans are threatening to cut aid to Ukraine if they retake Congress.
“The longer the war in Ukraine goes on, the greater the risk of escalation — to widespread, devastating effect,” Jayapal said in a statement to The Post. “We should have no illusions about the challenge ahead of us, but ... my colleagues and I are urging the Administration to engage in a proactive diplomatic push in an effort to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.”
The liberal Democrats note that the war’s disastrous consequences are increasingly felt far beyond Ukraine, including elevated food and gas prices in the United States and spikes in the price of wheat, fertilizer and fuel that have created global food shortages, not to mention the danger of a nuclear attack by Moscow.
The lawmakers are at pains to differentiate themselves from the Republicans who are also challenging Biden’s approach to Ukraine. Some conservatives are now questioning U.S. aid to Ukraine because of its cost and, in a few cases, voicing apparent sympathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The liberals’ appeal for a shift in strategy comes amid some of the most significant U.S.-Russian diplomatic engagement in some time, as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently talked with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, for the first time in months. The two spoke by phone Friday and again on Sunday at Shoigu’s request, Austin wrote on Twitter.
In the United States, most of the challenges to date have come from the right, as some conservatives question spending billions of dollars on the faraway war. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — who would be likely to become speaker if the Republicans retake the House on Nov. 8 — signaled last week that a GOP-led house would oppose more aid to Ukraine.
“I think people are going to be sitting in a recession, and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” he told Punchbowl News. “They just won’t do it.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), speaking Monday at an international summit on Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, downplayed the possibility that U.S. aid to Ukraine would end if Republicans take the House.
“I believe that the support for Ukraine and the people of Ukraine … will not stop,” Pelosi said, adding that “support for Ukraine is bipartisan, it is bicameral.”
But the liberals’ letter suggests pressure may now start coming from the left as well — albeit for different reasons — creating a political pincer movement that would make it harder for the president to blame opposition to his Ukraine policy solely on Republicans.
When asked how long the United States can be expected to pour billions into the war effort, Biden and his top aides frequently say, “as long as it takes.” But privately, U.S. officials say neither Russia nor Ukraine is capable of winning the war outright, suggesting a fundamental change in dynamic would be required if the conflict is to end in the foreseeable future.
Congress so far has provided the White House with nearly all the money and weapons it has requested for Ukraine, but surveys suggest that public support for the war effort is softening. A Pew Research poll found that the share of Americans who are extremely or very concerned about a Ukrainian defeat fell from 55 percent in May to 38 percent in September.
In all, the United States has authorized upward of $60 billion in aid to Ukraine. The Senate voted to finalize more than $40 billion in new military and humanitarian assistance in May, the largest investment in Ukraine thus far.
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said that neither Russian nor Ukrainian leaders are likely to agree to negotiated compromises right now. The United States has argued that Russia flagrantly violated the United Nations charter by invading its neighbor, which complicates any negotiations because it would put the burden on Washington to explain how any compromise respects the U.N. charter.
“One of the norms at stake is that territory is not to be acquired through the use of force. For those who favor the United States pushing for a deal, the burden is on them to explain how does the United States do that in a way that’s consistent with that principle,” Haass said. “At the end of the day, the United States cannot subcontract out its foreign policy to Ukraine or anybody else. We never do that.”
The letter’s signatories indicated that for now they will still support Ukraine aid packages, but it remains unclear whether that would continue if Biden does not soon pursue a diplomatic track. | 2022-10-24T18:03:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Liberal lawmakers urge Biden to shift Ukraine strategy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/biden-ukraine-liberals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/biden-ukraine-liberals/ |
Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., left, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) listen as President Donald Trump speaks in July 2019. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Among the many Republicans who walked a fine line on Donald Trump’s voter-fraud claims after the 2020 election, perhaps no one walked a finer one than Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).
He offered to argue Trump’s case before the Supreme Court, and even spearheaded the ill-fated challenge to the election results, during Congress’s certification of Biden’s win, that preceded the Jan. 6 insurrection. All the while, though, Cruz — like many — avoided engaging in detail on the actual evidence of purported fraud. He instead pitched his effort in a just-asking-questions style that feeds baseless suspicions while allowing some plausible deniability.
And when the whole thing blew up on Jan. 6, Cruz exercised that deniability: He called Trump’s voter-fraud claims “reckless” and “irresponsible” and “way too far over the line” — despite having offered to argue Trump’s case — and even said Trump “plainly bears some responsibility” because of his “angry rhetoric.”
Cruz, like virtually everyone in his party who dared to criticize Trump after that infamous day, has since backed off that posture. And now he’s coming out with a book this week that he’s pitching as “the first inside account of what happened on January 6th.”
Among the book’s focal points, according to Cruz’s interview on Fox News on Sunday night? “I take them through the evidence of election fraud and voter fraud in November 2020, which the Democrats and the corporate media insists doesn’t exist,” Cruz said.
The resulting text should be extremely telling — both when it comes to the dearth of actual evidence and for Cruz’s and the GOP’s ultraconvenient post-Jan. 6 conversion.
To be clear, despite sharply criticizing Trump after Jan. 6, Cruz continued to cling to the notion that significant voter fraud took place, even if Trump’s particular allegations were fake. And it’s at least theoretically possible that he could provide a sober-minded review of the evidence, such as it exists.
Much more likely, it seems, is that Cruz will provide just enough smoke to appeal to the many Republicans who continue to harbor baseless doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. This is the price of relevance in today’s Republican Party, and Cruz has shown he’s more than willing to pay it.
It referenced “unprecedented allegations of voter fraud.” It added that “the allegations of fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election exceed any in our lifetimes.” It even cited a poll that showed 39 percent of Americans believed the election was rigged.
Of course, such allegations, perceptions and beliefs flourished in large part because almost nobody in Trump’s party would say in the lead-up to Jan. 6 what Cruz ultimately said in its aftermath: That it was “reckless” and “irresponsible” for Trump to claim the election was “stolen everywhere” and that there was “massive fraud.” Rather than correct him, his party just offered watered-down comments about supposed “irregularities” and state election procedures.
If we’re being charitable, Cruz and his colleagues perhaps thought this effort was doomed and didn’t see “the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time.” They didn’t have to say what Trump was saying; they just wouldn’t contradict him. And soon enough, he’d be gone.
That turned into a fateful decision — fateful for democracy and almost fateful for them personally. And for a brief period after Jan. 6, Cruz and his fellow Republicans seemed to believe this might be their chance to move past Trump — or even that they had to move past him. They could finally call it like it was.
Then things changed. Kevin McCarthy made his pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to atone for his sin of blaming Trump for Jan. 6. Soon, Republicans were pitching Jan. 6 as much ado about nothing — even casting Liz Cheney out of House leadership for having the temerity to continue pressing the issue.
Cruz actually held out longer than some others. For months after Jan. 6, even as some in the conservative movement cast doubt on whether it was an insurrection (it was), he actually went a step further and repeatedly called it a “terrorist” attack. But then Tucker Carlson called him out. On the anniversary of Jan. 6, Cruz appeared on Carlson’s show to take his medicine and assure he would no longer be calling it a terrorist attack.
And if you want a preview of what you’re likely to read about with Cruz’s voter fraud “evidence,” you need only look at what he said Sunday night.
“So if you’re at home talking to people about January 6th, the left uses wildly politicized terms like ‘insurrection,’ which is complete political garbage,” Cruz said. “Anyone who uses that word is engaged in partisan spin.”
The guy who repeatedly called it a terrorist attack is now policing other people’s language. And the guy who called Trump’s claims “reckless” and “irresponsible” is now going to lodge his own evidence of voter fraud — all, apparently, in the service of playing up his efforts to object to the 2020 election results, including when the Jan. 6 riot meant (as Cruz said in Sunday’s interview) that “some senators were getting wobbly."
It seems unlikely those allegations will go as far as Trump’s did. Cruz probably won’t delve into the theories about voting machines and Antrim County, Mich. But the fact that he’s promoting his book in these terms says plenty about the GOP’s commitment to looking like loyal soldiers in that reckless crusade.’’ | 2022-10-24T18:03:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Cruz called Trump’s fraud claims ‘reckless.' Now he promises his own evidence. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/cruz-2020-elkec/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/cruz-2020-elkec/ |
Just because the parties see the other as a danger doesn’t make each right
A frayed American flag blows in the wind in Bladenboro, N.C., as Hurricane Ian makes landfall at Pawleys Island, S.C., on Sept. 30. (Travis Long/The News & Observer via AP)
Jay Rosen is a journalism professor at New York University. Earlier this year, he offered one of the more insightful analyses of the state of American politics that I’ve seen.
Rosen’s articulation is also a litmus test of the moment because, of course, it works backward from conclusion to cause. Both parties do see the other as a danger to the country, as new polling from NBC News makes clear. More than three-quarters of Republicans and Democrats agree that saying the other party “poses a threat that if not stopped will destroy America” matches their own view at least somewhat well.
Among independents, about half do, though far fewer say that that formulation matches their own view “very well.” More than half of partisans told the pollsters that saying the other party poses an existential threat matches their own view “very well.”
One way to consider this finding is through the lens that sufficiently captured American politics for decades: partisans disagree on policies and priorities and that manifests as disagreements in other areas. But this lens is obviously insufficient for the moment, largely for the reason that Rosen describes. This disagreement is far more dangerous than past political disputes, and the arguments for each side’s position are not themselves equivalent.
Last week, the New York Times published the results of a survey conducted by Siena College that got at a similar question. It found that, while partisans (and independents) all viewed American democracy as being at risk, the reasons for that perception varied. Democrats and Republicans pointed to each other and party leaders: President Biden, Donald Trump. Both also pointed to the media.
In that poll, respondents were also presented with a list of possible triggers for erosion of democracy. Importantly, that list included “voting machines” and “voting by mail,” two democratic processes that have come under fire since 2020 thanks to baseless and debunked claims of voter fraud. Yet despite there being no evidence that voting by mail or voting machines damage democracy — and in fact, despite plenty of evidence that they facilitate democracy — two-thirds of Republicans said voting machines were at least a minor threat to democracy and 4 in 5 said the same of mail-in voting.
That is a detachment from reality.
It’s no secret how Republicans think that the Democratic agenda is a threat to democracy. There are various flavors, many of which center on the idea that the Democratic Party is socialist or communist or fascistic, take your pick. Over the weekend, Donald Trump made the second claim during one of his heavily branded midterm rallies.
“I used to say socialists, but we’ve skipped socialism. We don’t talk about that. I don’t even mention it anymore. We’re not socialists anymore, we’re communists,” Trump said. “We’ve gone over socialism, we’re gone. It’s over. It’s communist. They’re talking about communist. This is a communist system that we’re putting up with right now.”
This is unquestionably false, demonstrating at the very least a lack of familiarity with the tenets of communism.
Others have slightly more nuanced articulations of the question. That the government imposed restrictions as a result of the coronavirus pandemic has been commonly cited as evidence of the left’s fascistic tendencies — though of course, the initial restrictions were imposed by executives of both parties (including Trump) and though those restrictions have been almost universally lifted. But that played to a perception that has been stoked on the right for a long time.
“If you look at what fascism is,” Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) said last month, “it’s more government dictatorial control. That’s Democrats’ policies and positions hand in glove. It’s Democrats who are the ones to tend to be more fascist because fascism is the opposite of liberty and freedom and the Democrats don’t trust us to make our own decisions.”
There’s also a recurring insistence that the left’s efforts to broaden inclusivity in American culture is, in fact, an effort to impose unacceptable norms at odds with American traditions. This is the “wokeism” debate, one that gobbles up a truly remarkable amount of right-wing attention. It overlaps uncomfortably with a more extreme rejection of diversity, the idea that the left is intentionally seeding America with non-White immigrants to upend politics. This “great replacement” idea, pushed by people like Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, has enormous traction — though not surprisingly, given how much of this is driven by concerns about America’s evolving demography.
When the discussion is about making America great again, of course, it’s often about unwinding that evolution.
The NBC News question was different than the Times one, certainly. The latter centered on democracy; the former on “America as we know it.” But they overlap. The cultural threat and the “fascist” threat are intertwined as attacks on America broadly, the latter often used as a way to exaggerate the danger of the former.
In considering our original question, it’s important to consider the response about “wokeism.” In a number of places, the response to increased awareness of LGBTQ people has been removing books from libraries and schools, legislation constricting mentions of gay relationships and physical threats to gay and transgender people. Some of those, of course, are governmental actions, somewhat undercutting Brooks’s assertion about how it’s the left that abuses power. In fact, there’s been an increasing volume of calls for the right to explicitly use government to win cultural fights.
Which brings us invariably to the question of democracy itself.
Donald Trump, veteran journalist Bob Woodward wrote in an opinion piece published this weekend, is “an unparalleled danger.” This is not a Democratic activist (even if you’ve been convinced, thanks to a determined and deliberate campaign, that the media is necessarily biased); this is someone who has covered national politics for 50 years. Nor is he alone. Veteran conservative jurist J. Michael Luttig has repeatedly described Trump and his allies as a “clear and present danger” to the nation, one of myriad voices within the traditional establishment on the right to make a similar claim. We see how Republicans are actively implementing a scheme that will facilitate challenging election results nationally, something Trump tried and failed to do in 2020.
This is the starkest contrast. The right is actively trying to figure out escape hatches for losing elections. Meanwhile, its claims about Democrats tainting elections are either explicitly false claims about rampant fraud or, more bizarrely, complaints that letting more people cast votes is somehow an erosion of American politics.
Why do members of both parties “call the other party a danger to society?” The evidence does not suggest that it is because both parties went off the rails. | 2022-10-24T18:03:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Just because the parties see the other as a danger doesn’t make each right - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/elections-democracy-trump/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/elections-democracy-trump/ |
Supreme Court puts temporary hold on Graham grand jury election testimony
Then-President Donald Trump with Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) on Nov. 6, 2019. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Justice Clarence Thomas Monday put at least a temporary hold on an order that Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) appear before a Georgia grand jury investigating possible attempts by President Donald Trump and his allies to disrupt the state’s 2020 presidential election.
Thomas’s brief order appears to be an attempt to maintain the status quo as Graham’s petition to the Supreme Court advances. Prosecutors face a Thursday deadline for responding to Graham’s request.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit last week turned down an attempt by Graham to block a subpoena from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D), in which the lawmaker claimed a sitting senator is shielded from testifying in such investigations.
A district court judge had said Graham must appear, but narrowed the range of questions that prosecutors can ask.
Without a stay of the lower courts’ rulings, Graham’s lawyer, Donald F. McGahn, told the Supreme Court, “Sen. Graham will suffer the precise injury he is appealing to prevent: being questioned in state court about his legislative activity and official acts.”
Thomas is the Supreme Court justice designated to hear emergency requests from the 11th Circuit. His one-sentence order said the lower court’s ruling “is hereby stayed pending further order of the undersigned or of the Court.” Such language usually indicates that the court does not want the action being challenged to occur before the court can act.
Willis said in a previous interview with The Washington Post that the grand jury will not be active until after the midterm elections on Nov. 7. A subpoena for Graham’s testimony orders him to appear on Nov. 17.
Jeff DeStantis, a spokesman for Willis, said “we will decline to comment” on the Thomas order, pending the filing of prosecutors’ response to the Supreme Court.
The Atlanta grand jury investigating alleged 2020 presidential election interference has already heard testimony from several Trump lawyers, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Boris Epshteyn. Willis also wants to question former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
But Graham has said his actions were legitimate legislative activity protected by the Constitution’s “speech or debate clause.” The senator’s lawyers have said that they have been informed that Graham is a witness in — and not a target of — the investigation.
Last month, a district court judge said prosecutors could not question Graham about portions of the calls that were legislative fact-finding. But the judge said Willis’s team could explore coordination with the Trump campaign in its post-election efforts in Georgia, public statements regarding the 2020 election and any efforts to “cajole” or “exhort” Georgia election officials.
In its order Thursday, the 11th Circuit panel agreed with the lower court judge that those actions “could not qualify as legislative activities under any understanding of Supreme Court precedent.” Two of the three judges on the panel were nominated by Trump.
Graham may still assert his rights, the court noted, if there is a dispute about certain questions.
Tom Hamburger and Ann E. Marimow contributed to this report. | 2022-10-24T18:03:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Supreme Court puts hold on order that Graham testify before grand jury - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/supreme-court-lindsey-graham-clarence-thomas-grand-jury/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/supreme-court-lindsey-graham-clarence-thomas-grand-jury/ |
Bystanders take pictures of a federal police vehicle damaged when Brazilian politician Roberto Jefferson fired at police Sunday while resisting arrest ordered by the country's Supreme Court in Comendador Levy Gasparian. (Ricardo Moraes/Reuters)
RIO DE JANEIRO — A Brazilian former congressman and supporter of President Jair Bolsonaro fired a rifle and threw grenades at federal police officers who were attempting to take him into custody on Sunday, authorities said, wounding two and further stoking fear of violence around Sunday’s presidential election here.
Roberto Jefferson, who boasted in 2020 of a personal friendship with Bolsonaro, was under house arrest when police converged on his home in Rio de Janeiro state. Brazil’s Supreme Court had ordered him detained after he broke the conditions of his confinement by attacking Justice Carmen Lucia online, calling her a witch and a prostitute, and spreading misinformation.
After an hours-long confrontation, the former lawmaker was taken into custody Sunday evening and charged with attempted murder.
The incident came a week before the second and final round of Brazil’s bitterly contested presidential election Sunday, pitting Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist, against former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a left-wing populist. Lula has maintained a narrowing lead in head-to-head polls throughout the campaign, but Bolsonaro and some of his allies and supporters have suggested they won’t accept an election loss.
The confrontation followed efforts by the Supreme Court to rein in the rampant disinformation flooding the internet ahead of the vote, amid rising tension between Bolsonaro and his most radical supporters on one side and the Supreme court and top electoral court on the other.
Bolsonaro condemned Jefferson’s actions Sunday, saying in a tweet that anyone who assaults police “is a bandit,” and criticized Jefferson’s attacks on Lucia.
But he also repudiated the court’s investigations of Jefferson, who was arrested in 2021 as part of a crackdown on misinformation and disinformation by the so-called digital militias that have allegedly attempted to undermine democracy.
Such investigations, he argued, do not have “any support in the Constitution.”
Electoral authorities say misinformation, disinformation and violent content online, including claims that candidates are Satanists, cannibals or alcoholics, have increased in Brazil in recent weeks. The top electoral court last week authorized the elections chief, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, to remove any posts or posts that have defied takedown orders.
The electoral court has also opened an investigation into an alleged misinformation scheme on social media involving Rio City Councilman Carlos Bolsonaro, the president’s son, and several social media accounts linked to Bolsonaro supporters. The Bolsonaros have denied wrongdoing.
The court actions have been harshly criticized by Bolsonaro’s supporters, who have called them acts of censorship and tyranny.
He attempted to distance himself from Jefferson, telling a television interviewer “We are not friends, we have no relationship.” Opponents responded by posting several images of the two men together on social media.
Lula, meanwhile, said Jefferson is “everything that Bolsonaro stands for.” He alluded to a spate of violent episodes in recent weeks, including the alleged killings of two Lula supporters by self-proclaimed Bolsonaristas for their political affiliations.
“Hate, violence and disrespect of the law,” Lula tweeted. “Roberto Jefferson is not only a criminal, he is one of the main allies of our adversary: he is the face of everything that Bolsonaro stands for.”
Lula, who has tacked to the center during the campaign, said attacks on Lucia “cannot be accepted by anyone who respects democracy.”
“They have created a violent faction in society,” he tweeted. “A machine to destroy democratic values. This generates behavior like the one we saw today.”
Jefferson barricaded himself in his home in the rural municipality of Comendador Levy Gasparian for eight hours, authorities said. He resisted arrest using “firearms and explosives,” they said, including a grenade that injured two officers with shrapnel, the police said. The officers were treated for minor injuries.
In a video posted to social media, Jefferson said he had fired a gun but he did not intend to injure the officers. He said he would “not surrender” to “tyranny” the and “oppression” of the supreme justices.
“Fight for our flag to be on top of the world so that we can put the cross of Christ on top of the world again,” he said.
Gabriella Sá Pessoa in São Paulo reported contributed to this report. | 2022-10-24T18:04:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Roberto Jefferson, Bolsonaro backer, fires on police before election - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/roberto-jefferson-grenade-brazil/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/24/roberto-jefferson-grenade-brazil/ |
Edward Blum, the force behind the Harvard and UNC admissions cases, has spent decades challenging race-based laws aimed at repairing historic inequities
Edward Blum, the affirmative action opponent behind the lawsuits challenging admission procedures at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (Shuran Huang for The Washington Post)
SOUTH THOMASTON, Maine — Edward Blum is early to bed and early to rise: By 4:30 each morning, he says, you will usually find him in his study overlooking Penobscot Bay, scrolling the internet and looking for someone to sue.
It pays off, at least at the Supreme Court. On Monday, the justices will soon hear the seventh and eighth cases Blum has offered up, all relating in some way to his belief that considering an individual’s race and ethnicity violates the Constitution and federal law, even when the purpose is to help minorities who have been historic victims of discrimination.
It’s an extraordinary track record for any person or group, but especially for a stockbroker turned conservative activist and policy wonk, who is neither a lawyer nor the head of a large organization. Backed by conservative donors and sympathetic lawyers, Blum says his work is a different front in the nation’s civil rights battle.
Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 case that Democrats and liberals decry as blowing a hole in the protections of the Voting Rights Act? That was one of his. On a related front, he also spent years trying to convince the justices to prohibit his alma mater, the University of Texas, from considering an applicant’s race when making admission decisions — falling one vote short in 2016.
But there has been a regime change at the Supreme Court since then. Now Blum (pronounced “Bloom”) is back with essentially the same challenges to admission procedures at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University, respectively.
“He’s teeing up precisely the concerns that the right has articulated about efforts to achieve racial equality in this country — taking race into account,” said David D. Cole, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. A finding by the court that the Constitution forbids “any consideration of race — period,” Cole said, would be “earth-shattering in terms of our society today.”
Poll: More than 6 in 10 Americans favor leaving race out of college admissions
As with the University of Texas case, lower courts said Harvard and UNC have complied with Supreme Court precedents regarding the limited use of race in building diverse student bodies. But few think the justices accepted Blum’s cases simply to affirm those opinions.
If things go his way, Blum said in an interview, “I think this is just the beginning of the restoration of really the founding principles of our civil rights movement.”
“The founding principles were that your race and your ethnicity should not be used to help you or harm you in your life’s endeavors,” he said. “I think the majority of Americans will think of this as a good outcome and then be a steppingstone to other good outcomes, not just in the law but in the way we see each other.”
The Supreme Court in 1978 ruled in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke that some racial considerations in higher education did not offend the Constitution or federal law; Justice Lewis Powell wrote that the nation’s future leaders should be “trained through wide exposure to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples.”
The rationale was endorsed again by the court in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger, with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor writing there was a “compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.”
The court did not upend that ruling when it considered Blum’s challenge to the Texas plan in 2016.
Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said it was “disappointing” the justices granted more of Blum’s college-admissions cases so soon after disposing of the last one.
“He’s been unduly rewarded for his tenacity by the Supreme Court,” she said. “The idea that he gets a hearing, and this issue is thrust into the public zeitgeist every few years for debate, is I’m sure reward in and of itself, and I think that’s unfortunate.”
But Blum is all about endurance — he is a trim 70-year-old former marathon runner whose full-time passion is looking for policies he considers actionable. “I think it is not unusual in the course of people’s lives to stumble on things that they find compelling and interesting,” he said. “And I think I’m fortunate that most of the endeavors I have engaged in, I enjoyed.”
Blum’s soft-spoken and unfailingly polite demeanor is at odds with his legal warrior reputation. He is a former Democrat, raised by liberal Jewish parents. In the 1990s, when he informed his mother he was running for Congress in Texas as a Republican, her response, he says, was “WHAT?”
He lost badly. But what stuck with him, he says, is his feeling that his Houston district had been racially gerrymandered, with more attention paid to separating voters by race and ethnicity than maintaining communities of interest. He sued over how the district was drawn, and the Supreme Court in 1996 agreed that race had played too prominent a role in that process.
“After the Supreme Court opinion came down in Bush v. Vera, my interest in the world of business and investment dramatically declined and my interest in law and public policy dramatically increased,” Blum said. “Over the years, those trendlines have continued.”
Blum’s specialty is identifying a policy or federal law he finds offensive, locating a plaintiff he thinks will have standing to challenge, finding a lawyer to take the case and securing funding from sources he does not publicly identify. Conservative foundations such as the Donors Trust and Searle Freedom Trust have disclosed their support for Blum’s work, and he says he is also backed by small contributions and several “high-net-worth individuals.”
“Most of those individuals wish to remain anonymous. Many of them would have their careers jeopardized,” Blum said. “Some of them, in the world in which we live, may be physically at risk.” He said his donors are no different from those who donate to the “NAACP or an environmental group or a pro-life group or a pro-choice group — if they wish to remain anonymous … we’re not going to disclose that.”
As Supreme Court test looms, UNC defends use of race in college admissions
Blum has mastered the art of putting forward a compelling Supreme Court case — even as his targets complain that he identifies a policy first and then must scramble to find a client actually harmed by it.
When he targeted the Voting Rights Act, Blum set his sights on a portion of the law that required states with a history of discrimination to have changes to their election policies approved in advance by the Justice Department or federal judges. His organization, Project on Fair Representation, illustrated the breadth of the restriction by showing the Supreme Court the measures a tiny Austin utility had to meet to comply with the law. For a follow-up case, Blum searched a Justice Department database to find Shelby County, Ala., which he bet correctly would make an attractive plaintiff.
The result was the landmark opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. striking down the formula Congress had implemented to decide which states had to have the Justice Department or judges preclear election-law changes.
Since then, a host of voting restrictions have passed in mostly Southern states that previously would have had to have the changes reviewed. While critics have blasted the restrictions as repressive, Blum said they can be challenged under another part of the Voting Rights Act that applies to all states.
“If there is really a problem in the state of Alabama, go for it,” he said. “If there’s really a problem in Wisconsin, go for it. But to treat Alabama differently from Wisconsin, or Ohio, from Florida, that doesn’t comport with my understanding with how laws apply throughout the country.”
Setting the next target
The group Blum created to challenge Harvard and UNC — Students for Fair Admissions — has been criticized for lacking, at least at the time the lawsuits were filed eight years ago, actual students who had been turned down by the universities. The organization was nothing but “a founder and a generalized grievance” UNC says in its brief. On its pushback website, Harvard refers to the case as “a politically motivated lawsuit brought by Edward Blum and the organization he created.”
But lower courts agreed Blum’s organization, which has grown over the years of litigation, had legal standing to proceed with both cases, even while ruling against him on the merits.
The organization says on its website that its members include “20,000 students, parents, and others who believe that racial classifications and preferences in college admissions are unfair, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.” Still, Blum recently was unable to connect The Washington Post with any students who were turned down by UNC.
Blum’s approach — finding sympathetic plaintiffs to challenge government policies — is a time-honored one for civil rights groups. But Nelson, of the LDF, resists the comparison.
“He’s clearly on a mission to roll back the gains of the civil rights movement and to attack some of the key statutes that are the platform of our multiethnic, multiracial democracy,” she said, adding that voting rights and affirmative action “really go hand in hand — the political representation of our diverse population as well as the ability to produce people who can adequately represent that population. Look at the project in tandem, it’s a very dangerous one.”
Blum is used to such criticism and presenting his alternative view.
“Have Asians as individuals and groups been discriminated against? Yes. Have individual African Americans been the target of racism and bigotry? Yes. Have Jews been the target of antisemitism? Yes. All of this is true,” he said.
“The question is how do we become a better country and put as much of that behind us and move forward as we can? The way we don’t do that is to say, well, we’re going to treat this person differently because of what you may have experienced and what historically may have happened to you decades and decades ago … That cannot be the path forward for reconciliation of past bigotry and discrimination.”
Regardless of what happens in the higher education cases, Blum is looking ahead.
Last year, he formed the Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment. It already has filed two lawsuits to challenge efforts to apply diversity goals or requirements to corporate boards.
The latest: Liberals urge Biden to pursue direct negotiations with Russia | 2022-10-24T18:19:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Edward Blum brings Harvard, UNC racial admission cases to Supreme Court - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/edward-blum-supreme-court-harvard-unc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/24/edward-blum-supreme-court-harvard-unc/ |
A court placed her with her father. He is charged with killing her.
A man walks past a “missing child” poster for Harmony Montgomery on May 5 in Manchester, N.H. (Charles Krupa/AP)
For two years, officials had no idea that she was missing.
Harmony Montgomery, who was 5 when she disappeared, had bounced from home to home in search of safety until a Massachusetts judge placed her in her father’s care in February 2019.
By the end of the year, prosecutors say, her father had killed her.
Adam Montgomery, of New Hampshire, was charged Monday with killing Harmony by repeatedly striking her in the head in December 2019, New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella (R) said.
Montgomery, 32, is charged with second-degree murder on allegations that he recklessly caused Harmony’s death, falsified physical evidence for concealing her body, committed abuse of a corpse for removing her body and tampered with witnesses for pressuring his wife, Kayla Montgomery, to testify falsely.
He is being held in jail and is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday.
“While today’s arrest is a major step in this investigation, there is much work to come,” Formella told reporters Monday.
From January: A 7-year-old girl disappeared in 2019. Police say they learned about it last week.
The search for Harmony captivated New Hampshire residents’ attention for months after police revealed late last year that the girl had vanished while in her father’s custody. The case prompted increased scrutiny of the Massachusetts child-welfare system, which an investigative report found repeatedly failed to protect Harmony before sending her to live with her father, who had a violent criminal history.
In August, prosecutors said Harmony appeared to have been killed in Manchester, N.H., in late 2019, although her remains had not been found. Officials did not answer questions Monday and did not say whether Harmony’s body is still missing.
Harmony spent part of her life in foster care in Massachusetts after her mother, Crystal Sorey, lost custody of her in 2018 because of substance abuse.
When a judge sent her to live with her father in 2019, he did not require an in-home visit from officials as a prerequisite. He ruled that Montgomery was fit to parent and that the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children, which governs the placement of children across state lines, was inapplicable.
Sorey reported her daughter missing late last year, and a search for her began. New Hampshire prosecutors then charged Montgomery with assault and related charges for allegedly hitting Harmony in the face and giving her a black eye.
“I bashed her around this house,” Montgomery told his uncle, according to court records. He pleaded not guilty to the assault and related charges. | 2022-10-24T18:23:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Adam Montgomery charged with murder in Harmony Montgomery's death - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/24/adam-montgomery-murder-harmony/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/24/adam-montgomery-murder-harmony/ |
Gleyber Torres and the New York Yankees were eliminated from the postseason on Sunday with a Game 4 loss in the American League Championship Series. (John Minchillo/AP Photo)
NEW YORK — Strip away the pinstripes and the facade, the history and the city, and the situation New York Yankees face is a lot less complicated than it may seem. For all the scrutiny the Yankees’ prominence invites, their circumstances often blur their reality. But nothing was blurry about the way their season ended Sunday night.
New York was swept by the Houston Astros in an American League Championship Series that never, for one second, looked like it would go the Yankees’ way. They have not advanced to a World Series since 2009. Their most beloved player of this generation, Aaron Judge, is effectively a free agent. There is no core. There are pieces. There is no title. There is disappointment.
If these were not the Yankees, all of that would be just fine. They have not had a losing season since before almost everyone on their roster was born. They have not missed the playoffs since 2016. They remain the most prominent franchise in the sport. By the standards to which many teams hold themselves, they are aspirational.
But by their own standards, they are failing. Because this team once owned a 64-28 record after two absolute drubbings of the rival Boston Red Sox in mid-July. And everything after that led downhill to a 99-win season and a grueling five-game set with the Cleveland Guardians in the National League Division Series, just to have a chance at the Astros.
“It’s an awful day, just an awful ending. It stings. It hurts,” Manager Aaron Boone said Sunday. “ … So much goes into it and trying to climb to that top of the mountain. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to get there yet.”
The Yankees might as well have tried to climb that mountain with a broken leg, flip-flops and half a bottle of champagne long since devoid of any of its fizz. Because while other teams around them improved down the stretch, coming together around trade deadline acquisitions or simply coalescing into something greater than the sum of their parts as the season rolled along (see: Phillies, Philadelphia or Padres, San Diego) the Yankees fell apart.
“No one was expecting the Phillies to be where they are. They were not the best team before the playoffs. In the playoffs, something switched,” Yankees starter Luis Severino said Sunday. “ … The playoffs change everything from the regular season. They change everybody. We need to find a way to do that.”
For years now, they haven’t found that way.
Maybe the answer is as simple as the one fans scream on talk radio and from the seats at Yankee Stadium: Maybe Hal Steinbrenner just isn’t spending enough. He told reporters in Tampa before the season that the Yankees cannot spend as freely as it might seem they should, as they seemed to in his father’s time. The coronavirus pandemic hit them, too. They pay a hefty lease. And while he didn’t say this that day, they also seem especially averse to crossing the luxury tax threshold year after year, something many teams try to avoid — but many teams do not have the resources the Yankees, from the outside, seem to have available.
Then again, according to Cot’s Baseball Contracts, New York finished with the second-highest payroll in baseball every year but one since 2013 and will finish in the top three again this year. So perhaps it is what the Yankees are doing with the money that is the problem.
To that end, the Yankees face a pivotal question this offseason: Their longtime head of baseball operations, Brian Cashman, is not under contract beyond this season. He has run the team since 1998, in the midst of the greatest October run in recent baseball memory. But he has not led them into a similar era since.
If the Yankees wanted to overhaul, this might be a natural time to part ways with Cashman. One could argue he has done what many general managers cannot and kept his team winning, year after year, in a bruising division, under more pressure than any of his colleagues experience. One could also argue, particularly after the last week or so, that the Yankees are far from being the kind of annual powerhouse the Astros have become — or even that the Los Angeles Dodgers and Atlanta Braves have become.
But the Yankees, at least recently, do not feel like they are as credible contenders as those teams are. Their minor league pipeline is not churning out the next generation of stars, at least not obviously yet. They have success turning pitchers into better pitchers, but not enough to build the kind of depth that allows them to have plenty of firepower left this time of year. Maybe top prospects like Oswald Peraza and Jasson Dominguez and Anthony Volpe will be the next core. But they are not going to be that in 2023.
Similarly, the Yankees have not done a good job building sturdy big league rosters.
When the Yankees needed to fill in around Judge and fellow towering slugger Giancarlo Stanton, they did so not with stars, but with players that could adequately do the job. For example, instead of pursuing one of the many high-profile shortstops on the market last year, the Yankees traded for Isiah Kiner-Falefa — whose defensive struggles in the playoffs were not unforeseeable — and Josh Donaldson to play third. Donaldson is no longer the MVP-type player he once was, and the Yankees did not plan for him to be that. But they could have had an MVP-type player in their infield were they willing to spend for it. They were not. He struck out 10 times in 13 at-bats in the ALCS and frustrated fans so much they booed him to the dugout.
After Game 4 on Sunday, as players said their goodbyes, former AL and NL batting champ DJ LeMahieu, who was unavailable in the playoffs because of injury, limped to the shower in flip-flops. Aaron Hicks, wearing a knee brace, crutched his way out of the room. Andrew Benintendi, another deadline acquisition who might have helped had he stayed healthy, slid quietly away. Injured relievers like Zack Britton and Scott Effross were not present. Aroldis Chapman, who was left off the postseason roster after missing a workout, was not present, either. Boone spent part of his postgame news conference talking about the injury that pushed Nestor Cortes from the game.
“I think we have a lot of the right ingredients in there. I think there were a few really impactful people that weren’t able to play in this postseason that would have potentially been a real difference,” Boone said. “We got thinned out a little bit by injury. Again, everyone’s got to deal with that.”
It’s true that injuries undermined the club later in the season. In fact, when explaining how they achieved such a remarkably dominant start to the season, people around the Yankees often brought up their remarkable streak of good health. But injuries seem to hamper this team more than others because they do not build the depth to withstand them. Whatever depth they believe they have, it seems they need more.
And then there is Boone, the constant easy target of consternation who made multiple decisions this series that were not the obvious ones. Boone is not the reason the Yankees lost to the Astros. They are not close enough to the Astros — in terms of depth or talent — to have their manager make the difference.
But the undeniable truth with recent Yankees teams is that they are noticeably, undeniably devoid of joy. No Yankee team could ever live carefree, not in the Bronx, not in this city. But a tour of clubhouses would leave the Yankees as one of the quietest, most palpably taut groups in the game. They do not sit around their lockers and chat. They do not linger there after games, at least not where reporters can see them. They do not joke much. They rarely smile.
They are Yankees, so they cut their hair and shave their beards and say what they’re supposed to say and fall in line. They do not, it seems, have any fun at all. Maybe no one can alleviate the pressure that comes with playing in New York. But it does not seem Boone has been able to shield them from it. He certainly does not seem to have been able to shield himself.
Whatever the reason, the Yankees finished yet another season trying to be better than they are, built on expectations without the weapons needed to meet them. The pinstripes, as they say, are heavy. And the Yankees, as constructed, are just not strong enough to carry them. | 2022-10-24T18:41:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why the New York Yankees fell short in MLB playoffs - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/yankees-postseason-failure/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/yankees-postseason-failure/ |
The agency’s rare decision to single out Drizly chief executive James Cory Rellas signals a new approach to data security abuses
The Federal Trade Commission building in Washington. (Alex Brandon/AP)
The Federal Trade Commission plans to take the rare step of bringing individual sanctions against the CEO of alcohol delivery company Drizly for data privacy abuses, following allegations that the company’s security failures under his watch exposed the personal information of about 2.5 million customers.
In singling out Rellas, the FTC signaled it could use a wider range of tools to address data privacy abuses under the leadership of chair Lina Khan, who was widely expected to bring tougher oversight of the tech industry. The inclusion of Rellas follows a push from Democrats to more aggressively penalize individual executives involved in major data privacy breaches. Democrats on the commission previously criticized the agency’s record-setting settlement with Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica data scandal because it did not name Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
“CEOs who take shortcuts on security should take note,” said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection said in a news release.
The agency voted 4-0 to support the order, but the commission’s lone Republican commissioner, Christine Wilson, dissented to the decision to name Rellas.
After months of deadlock, Lina Khan is unleashed
Khan, who came in with high expectations to bring a regulatory reckoning to Silicon Valley, is under increasing pressure to follow through on promises to reinvigorate the agency’s data security enforcement now that she once again has a Democratic majority. But she has limited tools at her disposal in the absence of a federal privacy law that would allow the FTC to bring fines for first-time offenses. The order against Drizly and Rellas carries no fines, but the company and executive could face financial penalties if they fail to comply with the proposed data security requirements.
The FTC has sought to use such data privacy orders like the one proposed against Drizly and Rellas to hold companies accountable when they allegedly abuse or misuse consumer data. These orders are very limited, and repeated data breaches at companies under order have raised questions about their efficacy and whether companies take them seriously. Current and former FTC officials have told The Washington Post that the agency lacks the personnel and technical expertise to effectively monitor and enforce the orders.
Twitter whistleblower exposes limits of FTC’s power
The agency has sought to make its orders more prescriptive to ensure that companies are adopting stronger data protections. Drizly employees will be required to use multifactor authentication to access critical databases, and implement new controls over personal data access.
The action follows allegations that Drizly failed to implement basic security measures to protect its customers’ personal information. The company also allegedly stored important login credentials on the software development service GitHub, even though the FTC previously brought action against Uber for similar actions. The agency also alleged that Drizly didn’t have a senior executive in charge of securing data.
The FTC will take public comments on the consent order for 30 days, after which it will decide whether to finalize the order. | 2022-10-24T18:58:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Drizly CEO hit with rare FTC order that cites him as an individual - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/24/ftc-drizly-privacy-violations/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/24/ftc-drizly-privacy-violations/ |
Leslie Jordan, actor and Internet sensation, dies at 67
Actor Leslie Jordan, who appears here in a portrait from April 2021, died Monday in a car accident. (Damian Dovarganes/AP)
While known in recent years for appearing in the television series “American Horror Story,” “Will and Grace” and “Call Me Kat,” Jordan became a viral Internet sensation early in the pandemic because of videos he posted to Instagram. He filmed himself doing all sorts of humorous activities, from baton twirling as exercise to singing Lizzo while impersonating Sia with a fringed pillow atop his head. At the time of his death, Jordan had 5.8 million followers and nearly a thousand posts on the platform.
Jordan’s agent, David Shaul of the BRS/Gage talent agency, said in a statement that “the world is definitely a much darker place today without the love and light of Leslie Jordan.”
“Not only was he a mega talent and joy to work with, but he provided an emotional sanctuary to the nation at one of its most difficult times,” Shaul wrote, referring to the Instagram videos Jordan filmed during the pandemic. “What he lacked in height he made up for in generosity and greatness as a son, brother, artist, comedian, partner and human being. Knowing that he has left the world at the height of both his professional and personal life is the only solace one can have today.”
In an April 2020 interview with The Washington Post, Jordan said he joined Instagram at the urging of casting executive Tess Sanchez Greenfield, who said it would be “perfect for you.” His follower count grew swiftly as his videos were widely reposted — at first by castmates such as Megan Mullally, he said, and then by absolute strangers. At one point, according to Jordan, he “posted something a tiny bit off-color once and something called ‘the best of Grindr,’ some sort of hookup site, posted it.”
Jordan didn’t quite understand his sudden fame at the time — “Who are these people? I had no idea,” he recalled of his initial response to the surge in followers — but embraced it all the same. | 2022-10-24T19:29:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Leslie Jordan, actor and Internet sensation, dies at 67 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/24/leslie-jordan-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/10/24/leslie-jordan-dead/ |
Son of Confederate flag-toting man in Capitol on Jan. 6 sentenced
Hunter Seefried, 22, was sentenced to two years in prison after leading charge through broken window, chasing police officer
Kevin Seefried, second from left, holds a Confederate battle flag as rioters loyal to President Donald Trump confront U.S. Capitol Police officers defending the Senate Chamber on Jan. 6, 2021. Hunter Seefried is at his father's side pointing toward the camera. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
A Delaware man who helped lead the initial break-in and mob pursuit of a police officer in the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol was sentenced to 24 months in prison Monday after delivering what a federal judge called “probably the most sincere and most effective” statement of apology by anyone he has sentenced in the attack.
Hunter Seefried said he was deeply sorry for and ashamed of his actions, asking himself every day how he came to participate “in a day that will forever represent a stain on the character of our country.”
“I offer my sincerest apology to the country, its schoolchildren, and everyone who saw the worst of me and everyone on January 6,” Seefried said. He also apologized to the courts, government and his parents, “who my criminal behavior has placed in the spotlight.”
“I pray our country can recover,” added Seefried, a drywall delivery truck driver who said he is 22, but who prosecutors said was 24.
Seefried was found guilty with his father, Kevin Seefried, 53 — who paraded with a Confederate flag in the building — at a bench trial in July of obstructing an official proceeding of Congress as lawmakers met to confirm President Biden’s 2020 election victory. The obstruction charge is a felony and both were also convicted of trespassing and related misdemeanor offenses. The elder Seefried faces sentencing in January. Both men are from Laurel, Del.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Benet Kearney requested a 64-month prison term for the younger Seefried, saying he was one of the first handful of rioters who broke into the building after clearing glass shards from a shattered window at the Senate wing door.
Seefried confronted an officer inside, and then with his father joined a group of rioters who pursued U.S. Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman toward the main entrance to the Senate chamber.
“Hunter Seefried’s participation in the riot was purposeful, aggressive, and rife with disregard and disrespect for the police officers whose duty on January 6 was to protect the Capitol and guard the peaceful transition of power during the election certification process,” Kearney and Assistant U.S. Attorney Brittany Reed wrote, adding that he should be sentenced more stiffly than rioters who pleaded guilty to the same offense before trial.
Defense attorney Edson Bostic said Hunter Seefried showed no trace of ideological motivation or planning for violence, was barely 21 at the time and was heavily influenced by his father.
Senators unanimously awarded Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman the Congressional Gold Medal on Feb. 12, 2021. (Video: The Washington Post)
“You have a young man who for 99 percent of his life did things right,” Bostic said. Seefried dropped out of school in the ninth grade but has worked continually since, his attorney said.
U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden asked why Seefried did not stay back in the crowd with his mother and his girlfriend rather than help lead the mob break-in.
“The crowd, the energy was just overwhelming. It’s no excuse,” Seefried said. “I would say my father, but I’m old enough to know.”
McFadden said the men participated in “a national embarrassment” that injured more than 100 police officers and caused millions of dollars of damage to a “sacred” building. The judge also called their pursuit of Goodman “humiliating and degrading to everyone who believes in law and order” and an “affront to our system of government.”
Still, McFadden said he was very aware of the younger Seefried’s age and the “impulsiveness attributable to age.”
“I believe you are a good man who messed up badly,” McFadden said, “but I believe you recognize you messed up, and that also is part of criminal justice.”
He rejected a government request to raise Seefried’s recommended sentencing range to 57 to 71 months, finding that it did not involve “causing or threatening injury to a person or damage to property ‘in order to obstruct the administration of justice.’” But it did result in substantial interference, McFadden said, ruling out probation and home confinement as the defense requested.
Seefried “owes a debt to society,” McFadden said. He added that while this period is no doubt the bleakest of Seefried’s life, he believes the letters of support offered by friends and family of the defendant’s “strong work ethic” and that he has “a lot to offer those around him” upon release, concluding: “It is up to you.” | 2022-10-24T19:33:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Son of Confederate flag-toting man in Capitol on Jan. 6 sentenced - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/son-confederate-flag-toting-man-capitol-jan-6-sentenced/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/24/son-confederate-flag-toting-man-capitol-jan-6-sentenced/ |
Chest pain can signal something serious, and it’s often an emergency. But discomfort in your chest area can also be a sign of a minor annoyance. That means that when you notice it, you may be uncertain about whom to call or what to do.
Experts agree that in the moment, it’s key to take the right action without hesitation, erring on the side of caution. Here are the most common causes of chest pain and guidance on when to seek help as soon as possible and when you can wait.
Simple or serious?
Chest pain is one of the most common reasons people go to an emergency department or a doctor’s office, says Martha Gulati, a cardiologist and president-elect of the American Society for Preventive Cardiology.
Discomfort in your chest is sometimes a result of gas, heartburn, inflammation in your rib cartilage or anxiety. But it’s important to be aware of the serious and even deadly problems that also can cause pain.
Women can have heart attacks without chest pain. That leads to dangerous delays.
For instance, the risk of a heart attack — a blockage in any artery that delivers blood and oxygen to your heart — increases with age. An aortic dissection, which is a tear along the vessel that delivers blood to the rest of your body, causes chest pain, too. The pain can sometimes be a warning sign of a lung blood clot called a pulmonary embolism, or even a rupture of the esophagus, the tube that connects your throat to your stomach. Each one of these problems is an emergency.
What doctors refer to as chest pain is generally centered in the chest area but can include other sensations and even extend to other areas of your body. The American Heart Association guidelines for diagnosing and treating chest pain list “pain, pressure, tightness, or discomfort in the chest, shoulders, arms, neck, back, upper abdomen, or jaw” as potentially serious symptoms. Another sign of a possible emergency is chest discomfort plus fatigue or shortness of breath.
Your symptoms can help you determine whether you need help immediately. And there are a few key factors to consider when you’re deciding what to do.
When to consult your doctor
If you’ve already been diagnosed with a condition such as angina, you may have discomfort that hasn’t changed significantly and that your doctor has already assessed. You also may have a chronic problem that’s getting worse but only gradually. Maybe you’ve already talked to your doctor about the heartburn you get after eating, but lately you’ve noticed it’s more severe and more frequent.
In such cases, you should consult a doctor as soon as possible, but not necessarily in an emergency room. “If it’s a symptom you’ve had in the past, and it feels similar and it has already been evaluated, that’s when a non-urgent evaluation would be appropriate,” says Michael Nanna, an interventional cardiologist and an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine.
When to call 911
Acute chest pain, or sudden discomfort you haven’t experienced before, always warrants emergency care. When in doubt, call 911.
Don’t research your symptoms online or call your doctor’s office when you have such chest pain, Nanna says. Your medical provider will probably send you to the emergency department anyway, because it’s not possible to diagnose a serious problem over the phone.
“I always suggest the patient be evaluated as soon as possible, because there’s no way for a patient to be able to differentiate a heart attack from reflux,” Nanna says.
If you thought CPR was too hard, start humming ‘Stayin’ Alive’ and read this
For potentially serious causes, quick treatment can be critical to survival. That’s one reason it’s best not to drive or get a ride to a hospital if you have acute chest pain. If you call 911, paramedics can begin administering necessary medication in the ambulance, and a team will be ready for you when you arrive at the hospital.
If a serious cause is ruled out, Nanna says your provider will work with you to manage whatever is causing your chest pain and discuss ways to prevent future problems. Either way, never be embarrassed about a false alarm.
“Yes, for the majority of people, it will not be cardiac or life-threatening, but we don’t want to miss anyone,” Gulati says. “We can joke about it later being reflux or gas, but I would rather you be around to joke about it.” | 2022-10-24T19:33:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How to tell whether your chest pain is — or isn’t — an emergency - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/24/heart-attack-red-flags/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/24/heart-attack-red-flags/ |
FILE - Secretary General of the Organization of American States, OAS, Luis Almagro addresses the OAS during the opening of the 52nd General Assembly of the OAS in Lima, Peru, Oct. 5, 2022. According to an administrative ruling on Oct. 24, 2022 by the OAS’ top review panel, Almagro unfairly maligned the reputation of Brazilian lawyer Paulo Abrao who he abruptly fired as the region’s top human rights watchdog. (AP Photo/Guadalupe Pardo, File) | 2022-10-24T19:33:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Org. of American States boss slammed over watchdog's removal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/org-of-american-states-boss-slammed-over-watchdogs-removal/2022/10/24/826b5034-53cd-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/org-of-american-states-boss-slammed-over-watchdogs-removal/2022/10/24/826b5034-53cd-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
FILE - Kelli Ward, with her husband Mike at her side, concedes to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. in the race for the Republican nomination to U.S. Senate, at her primary night party at a hotel in Scottsdale, Ariz., on Aug. 30, 2016. A federal appeals court panel has upheld a ruling Saturday, Oct. 22, 2022, requiring phone records of the Arizona Republican Party’s leader to be turned over to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. (David Kadlubowski/The Arizona Republic via AP, File) | 2022-10-24T19:34:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Appeals court OKs Jan. 6 panel subpoena to Arizona GOP chair - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/appeals-court-oks-jan-6-panel-subpoena-to-arizona-gop-chair/2022/10/24/96f91e98-53c6-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/appeals-court-oks-jan-6-panel-subpoena-to-arizona-gop-chair/2022/10/24/96f91e98-53c6-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html |
Damascus and its star running back are bouncing back together
Running back Dillon Dunathan has powered Damascus this season. (Jess Rapfogel for The Washington Post)
Through eight weeks of regular season play, this has proven to be a bounce-back season for the Damascus. The 10-time state champions, coming off their first four-loss season since 2008, are 7-1 after beating Springbrook, 42-0, on Friday night.
“Last year was not the best season,” senior running back Dillon Dunathan said. “So this year we wanted to make a statement.”
Dunathan might be the best example of that bounce-back spirit that has taken hold of the program. He spent the summer unable to participate in football activities because of a months-long bout with mononucleosis.
“It was terrible, I couldn’t do anything besides sit in bed and rest,” Dunathan said.
Even after the feelings of true sickness went away after a few weeks, Dunathan’s spleen remained enlarged, meaning he could not play football for most of July and August. Not only did this mean missing out on seven-on-seven events and summer camps, which are key recruiting tools, but he also missed the first few weeks of preseason practice.
“I got back the week before our scrimmage,” Dunathan said. “Luckily I felt pretty good and the playbook and stuff was similar to last year so I got in the flow pretty easily.”
Throughout the experience, Dunathan had to deal with the lingering possibility of missing part of his senior season. He tried to keep that thought at bay, but it was frustrating to feel mostly good and then be told that the spleen was still an issue.
“I was just so eager to get out there,” he said.
That excitement and energy has found an outlet once Dunathan returned to the field, as he rushed for 177 yards and two touchdowns in the team’s season-opening win against Northwest. Since then, he has helped set the tone for a physical Swarmin’ Hornets team with his hard running style and thumping play at linebacker.
“Our best brand of football is an effort thing,” Dunathan said. “We’re at our best when everybody is flying to the football.”
KIPP positioned for playoff success
Since opening its doors in 2011, KIPP has established itself as one of the best charter school football teams in Washington. But despite posting nine winning seasons in 11 years and winning multiple Public Charter League championships, the Panthers have yet to experience true success in the D.C. State Athletic Association playoffs.
“It’s something that’s definitely a point of emphasis for our program this year,” Coach Trey Walker said. “We’ve developed a winning culture here but haven’t put it all the way together yet at the state level.”
While KIPP has fared well against most public and charter school programs, private schools such as Maret and Sidwell Friends have vexed the Panthers, who have yet to advance beyond the second round of the DCSAA playoffs.
Walker and the Panthers (7-2) have adopted a new slogan this year: “The only way to is through.”
“Outside of last season, it’s not like we have been getting blown out in these games,” Walker said. “We’ve been right there, and it just hasn’t gone our way. But we’ve made some changes that will hopefully help us get over the hump.”
One of the biggest changes has been on offense. After years of dominating on the ground, the Panthers have shifted to a more balanced attack. Early on, the results were mixed, as the team dropped two of its first three games.
But since losing to Anacostia, 14-0, on Sept. 9, KIPP has won six straight, including a 34-27 come-from-behind win over Friendly on Saturday. The Panthers face Richard Wright in the Public Charter League Championship on Nov. 5.
“Obviously, you never want to lose games, but I think those first two games really focused our team on the task at hand,” Walker said. “We’ve always had a talented team, but now they’re also super focused and bought in. I think that combination will be a recipe for us to break through.”
Nyckoles Harbor, Archbishop Carroll: The area’s top-ranked recruit accumulated 251 receiving yards and three touchdowns on five catches in the Lions’ 54-0 win over Bishop O’Connell. He also blocked two punts.
Kendall Johnson, Quince Orchard: The two-way senior caught a touchdown and returned a blocked field goal for a score as the Cougars remained undefeated with a 41-6 win over rival Northwest.
Mac Lewis, Madison: The Warhawks are red hot in district play thanks to their senior signal-caller, who completed over 80 percent of his passes and rushed for two scores in a 21-16 victory that halted Westfield’s six-game winning streak.
Kevin Montague, Theodore Roosevelt: The junior’s 111 rushing yards and three touchdowns helped the Rough Riders overcome an uncharacteristic three turnovers in a 51-14 win over Woodson.
Seneca Valley at No. 18 Damascus, Friday, 6:30
Champe at No. 20 Patriot, Friday, 7 p.m.
No. 4 St. John’s at No. 1 Good Counsel, Friday, 7 p.m.
No. 12 Rock Creek at Friendship Collegiate, Friday, 7 p.m.
Lack Braddock RB’s recovery proves crucial
Elliot Meine kept coming back. An ACL injury at the end of his sophomore year erased any hope of a junior season. So he waited on the Lake Braddock sideline. He watched film with quarterback Daniel Lipovski, addressing his weaknesses and becoming a more vocal leader. The wait would make the running back better. It had to.
On the first play of this season, he ran for a 60-yard touchdown.
“Yeah, it felt really good,” Meine said. “Now when I play and I think back to that [injury] I’m like, yeah, that sucked, but it’s the reason I keep moving forward and pushing myself.”
Meine has taken center stage through the 7-1 start, averaging almost 200 yards per game and scoring both Lake Braddock touchdowns (his 23rd and 24th of the season) in Friday’s loss to No. 16 Fairfax. He is confident the team can get back on track.
“You hit up the group chat and say ‘Let’s get a workout in,’ everyone’s coming,” Meine said. “There is a trust that comes from being together since we were kids. We all went to the same elementary school. We trust each other when we get on the field.”
Dougherty knew Meine and Lipovski would be vital to the program after they led the freshman team to an undefeated record in 2019. His assessment hardly considered their talent. He saw the way they embodied his five core principles: urgency, discipline, toughness, competitiveness and significance.
“Everyone can see what they do on Friday nights. What they do for me in the locker room and practice field is twice as significant,” Dougherty said. “I’ve had two kids make it to the NFL in 25 years, and they’re both millionaires right now. The other 99.9 percent are dads, husbands, employees, and community members. It’s important to me that they take something from our program that they can apply to their lives.”
Annapolis Area Christian confident after first win
Since Annapolis Area Christian began workouts in June, first-year coach Marcus Bell has preached messages to his players about resilience. His sayings of “Keep fighting through adversity” and “On the other side of failure is success” fell flat at times early this season as the Eagles lost their first five games.
But in their 13-7 win over rival Saint John’s Catholic Prep on Oct. 15 in Severn, AACS players saw the results of their training. Trailing by a point in the third quarter, the Eagles compiled their best drive of the season: 12 plays and 95 yards leading to the game-winning touchdown.
“To continue to experience the failure part of it, it can be disheartening and demoralizing at times,” Bell said. “But to really see it all come together and actually get a win under our belt, it does wonders for the confidence of those young guys in particular, so that they can see it’s not all talk.”
On Friday, AACS (1-5) will host Severn, which beat the Eagles by 16 points on Oct. 8. AACS led, 20-14, early in the second quarter of that defeat.
“Once you kind of get that first win, it increases the hunger of our guys,” Bell said. “We talk about believing a lot, but now you kind of get to see that manifestation of when we come together … we can do great things. Now that we’ve seen that we can push through the adversity together, it puts us in a better position moving forward.” | 2022-10-24T19:35:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Damascus and its star running back are bouncing back together - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/damascus-its-star-running-back-are-bouncing-back-together/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/10/24/damascus-its-star-running-back-are-bouncing-back-together/ |
Transcript: Race in America: Giving Voice with Wendell Pierce
MR. CAPEHART: Good morning. I’m Jonathan Capehart, associate editor at The Washington Post. Welcome to Washington Post Live and another in our series on Race in America co‑produced with the “Capehart” podcast.
"Death of a Salesman" is Arthur Miller's classic drama, a tragedy, really, about a man's tortured relationship with the American dream and its impact on his family and the people around him. Each revival of the classic has featured a white actor as protagonist Willy Loman until now.
Venerable actor Wendell Pierce, best known for his role in "The Wire," brings his heft to the role, not only that, for the first time, the Loman family is Black in this latest revival, and it puts Miller's words into a whole new light without changing a word.
And, as you see right there next to me, joining me now is the great Wendell Pierce. Wendell, welcome to "Capehart" on Washington Post Live.
MR. PIERCE: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Jonathan. This is a real honor.
MR. CAPEHART: Well, sure. No, the honor is mine.
So, Wendell, what does it mean to you to play Willy Loman, first, as an actor?
MR. PIERCE: This is one of the great challenges of the American canon of this classic play that has challenged actors for the past 70 years. From the moment it was introduced, it was groundbreaking. It was one of the first times we even deal with the idea of flashbacks and a man and character having to deal with the repercussions of his past and his actions in the past.
It is a deep psychological dive as you see someone who is tortured by first those unknown factors in his life that are torturing him and then the revelations that ultimately destroy his spirit, so much to the point that it destroys his life, those unconscious things.
So not only is the play a challenging piece of work when it comes to the material and the script itself and creating the world so strong that it induces the behavior, creating the relationship so strong, and creating all the incidents that are at stake, but it also is a deep psychological dive, understanding the pathology of the psychosis that is happening to the man, and trying to allow that to create the three‑dimensional character that you're trying to do.
MR. CAPEHART: Mm‑hmm.
MR. PIERCE: So it challenges the actor in a multitude of complex ways, and that's it's‑‑that's why I call it the "American 'Hamlet.'"
MR. CAPEHART: Mm‑hmm. And this isn't our first time talking about this role. I interviewed you for my Sunday show on MSNBC, and in that conversation, you told me this play, quote, "speaks to our humanity." What spoke to you about the character of Willy Loman?
MR. PIERCE: It spoke to me‑‑is something that was very personal. I and a middle-aged man, considering all the same things that he's considering are my best days behind me. What have I entrusted to some sort of legacy? How have I impacted people's lives, my family's life? Have I made a mark in this world? Willy Loman says, "Man can't go out the same way he came in," and that's something that I was considering too as an actor at this point in my career. What is my body of work? Where have I triumphed? Where have I failed? And what am I going to do about it at this point, stage in my life and my career? So it spoke to me, and a real deep personal reflection has happened within me as I considered the role.
And that's what great art should do. It challenges us to reflect on our journey here and decide what our values are and act on them and hopefully in a positive way, because the cautionary tale is making sure you don't take those actions that ultimately could destroy you in a negative way.
MR. CAPEHART: You know, let's talk about your role as Willy Loman as a Black man. "Death of a Salesman" is set in 1949, smack in the middle of segregated America. Talk to me about exploring the American dream through that lens.
MR. PIERCE: Well, you know, doing the research on this was amazing. First, I thought of my father, who at 17, drafted, goes into the war, fights in Saipan in the Pacific theater, fighting fascism around the world, while ultimately living in New Orleans. He returns to the fascism of America.
And people always say that sometimes that's a strong word to use, but it has been. It is the American paradox that my father was as much in danger in New Orleans when he returned from the war as he was on the beaches of Saipan, that his life wasn't valued. He could not go wherever he wanted to and at the same time to try to struggle to achieve that American dream. And that is the paradox that is heightened with the pursuit of the American dream and the American aesthetic in "Death of a Salesman" and wondering if that pursuit itself is a disillusionment.
There was no evidence for African Americans that the American dream was going to be fairly distributed and allowed to flourish in our community. There had been multitudes of examples of how your life was going to be, at the very least, impacted by obstacles that were going to be placed in front of you, institutionalized obstacles, not random, but specifically to make sure that your pursuit of the American dream was stunted.
And so, to explore that into play, I first thought of my parents who, in spite of everything, believed that they could make a way out of no way, and that is something that is flourished in the African American culture, that in spite of everything, we will flourish. We will find a way. So that was the thing that inspired me to make Willy unlike the other portrayals that had been accustomed and normalized in the history of the play of this slow dirge to death, this overwhelming weight that the man carries.
It inspired me to play the role differently, which was this firebrand of a man who would fight to the very end to make sure he left something for his family and for his sons and his wife, and so it's a different portrayal for me.
I also think of the men in my industry who were heroes of mine‑‑Ossie Davis and Roscoe Lee Browne,
James Earl Jones, Sidney Poitier‑‑who because of the ignorance of racism and cultural exclusion were never allowed to play the role. No one ever thought to do this interpretation prior and allow them to take on one of the great roles in the American canon. So I owe a great debt to them, and I have a great obligation to them as I step on the stage every night.
I think about that as a part of the journey of Willy Loman. He understands that he has a great debt to all of those who had gone before, and he's an orphan. So he's trying to connect to that history and trying to connect to that legacy of Black men and women who fought so hard to make sure that he had a footing was rooted in the earth to kind of bring a better life to his existence, and so the Black experience is about that fight. It was about that journey, and that's the legacy that is passed on from the Moses generations to the Joshua generations time and time again that make a way out of no way and understand that there are those who do not have your best interest at heart, will try to institutionalize a violent, ugly racism, to do everything to impede you truly, truly living out your full humanity. And that's the thing that I think about when I do the interpretation that we have of this African American Loman family.
MR. CAPEHART: Mm‑hmm. I love that you said the interpretation of the African American Loman family. I want to go back to what you said. You described Willy Loman as a "firebrand of a man," and I want to play this scene from the production. It's you as Willy Loman. You're speaking with your boss, Howard. Let's play that, and we'll talk about it on the other side.
MR. CAPEHART: So, Wendell, there is so much going on in that scene, and when I saw it in the theater, it just hit me differently. None of the words were changed from Arthur Miller's original production. None of the words were changed, and yet here we are. And the key thing in that scene is a Black man raising his voice, not just at his at his boss but at a White man. Talk about the power of that scene for you performing that, but also in your answer, tell me if I'm wrong here, because there's another character on the stage or throughout this production, and that's race. When I'm watching‑‑when I watched "Death of a Salesman," race stalked that stage, and is that‑‑am I seeing it that way because I'm a Black man and Arthur Miller's words from 1949 are landing on me in a completely different way in 2022?
MR. PIERCE: That's what the interpretation does. It heightens. It heightens the very conflicts that Arthur Miller was pointing out. The humiliation of Willy Loman in that scene is heightened to an nth degree because here's this Black man in 1949, subscribed to a position of subservience to his boss, who he remembered as a child, who he actually named as a child when his father brought him in and said, "What do you think of the name of 'Howard'?" and Willy actually approved. So he's talking to someone he knew as a child and as a baby who now has complete authority over him and controls his entire existence in this one moment where he can either give him a job and allow him to stay here, because he is failing on the road, and be with his family.
And, ultimately, he humiliates him to no end, and you see the social morays just in that scene. If the tape had played on, I have to step back from the vehemence that I argued with him and almost apologize to him, and then he humiliates me more and ultimately destroys me, sets me on a path of destruction because I'm fired and I lose everything. I lose any possibility of changing my life and my family's life.
People don't even remember that in the middle of the scene, people who had seen it before, that it is written that a lighter falls, and he picks it up, and he gives it to his boss in the middle of the scene. And it's a humiliating moment after he's told his son, "Don't ever do something like that. If something falls on the floor, let someone else pick it up." But to be there for me to pick it up every night, there is a audible "howl," I'd like to call it.
There was a woman there one afternoon who just let out this primal scream of a "no" from the balcony, and it was the one of the most cathartic moments I have ever experienced in the theater, because I knew that she understood that humiliation that the character was going through, that she had experienced it in her own life and just let out this primal scream. And that's a catharsis that allows folks who have been there before, no matter who you are, to feel it in a way that is changing. It allows you to understand that we understand your pain and ultimately know that there's a healing that can happen, but don't make the mistakes that Willy makes after he goes through the same experience that you go through.
It is a depiction of the African American experience and humiliation of racism and the ugliness of the American paradox that you see how destructive it is to a community, how destructive it is to a family, how it is institutionalized in our policies and laws, but also in our cultural morays, and how destructive it can be to an individual's humanity.
So you see through the course of the play that sort of sweeping consciousness of the racism that impacts our lives on a macro and micro level, micro and macro aggressions that are so completely multifaceted and complex in their destructiveness. And that is what the cautionary tale is, how destructive these conditions can be to the human condition.
And is that what we are? Is that the American dream? Is that what we say our values are? Are we going to allow this to continue, a play that was written 70 years ago that's speaking to us today, as if it was written just last week? It should give us a sense of shame as an American culture that we cannot evolve away from the original American sin‑‑
MR. PIERCE: ‑‑and allow it to destroy us and destroy our humanity and ultimately destroy our institutions, our families, everything.
MR. CAPEHART: There's another scene in the play that folks who have seen it maybe multiple times, it might hit a lot differently with you in the scene. Folks, remember Willy Loman had an affair.
MR. PIERCE: Right.
MR. CAPEHART: And, in your interpretation of "Death of a Salesman," you insisted on having a White woman cast in that role.
MR. PIERCE: Yes.
MR. CAPEHART: Why was that important to you?
MR. PIERCE: They did a reading of the play with this interpretation. The original directors were British, and Miranda Cromwell, who continued on as the director here in New York on Broadway, is British also. So they had a reading with American actors when they were thinking of the concept, and to a person, the American actors said, "No. No, you can't do it that way. I mean, that would be so dangerous. That would be so scary for him to go‑‑that would‑‑for him to go that far in that time and have an affair with a White woman, really, it's a bridge too far. It's too outlandish." And I told the directors then‑‑and the producers‑‑I said, "That is the very reason we have to do the interpretation. What you experienced is what the American audience will experience." There will be those who cannot conceive of the idea. There will be those who will feel the danger and the desperation of the act at that time, that someone would go that far as to try to find a way to not fail, to succeed, that he would risk his life because ultimately if he is‑‑when the affair happens, it's in flashback. It is the year after the Scottsboro Boys. So, as she says in the hotel room, as she's in her underwear, "If I step out of here with no clothes on, I hope no one sees me in the hall," which is a unveiled threat that is saying, "If I step into this hall as a White woman with you in this room and your son who discovers you in this room, as two Black men, the slightest implication of any impropriety, you could get killed and lynched."
It has been the heart of so many violent episodes in America of Black men, just being accused of a slight towards a White woman, ending in their death. The most famous that we think of is a young boy from Chicago, Emmett Till‑‑
MR. PIERCE: ‑‑who supposedly winked or whistled or whatever, and to this day, the woman who made that accusation knows that that accusation killed him, and there's no accountability on her part.
So it's very real, and I said that is why we have to have the woman as a White woman. It shows the desperation that Willy has, that he would go so far as to endanger himself in this pursuit of a monetary success in business, and that also it endangered his son where that one incident was the one destructive moment in their lives that destroyed their relationship as well.
So the epiphany of it has to have the strongest impact as possible, and it also allowed us to really, in that moment, heighten everything even more because the destruction of the relationship with his wife, Linda, it's a betrayal that goes even deeper than the original impact.
And the other day, I was very fortunate of meeting a woman who's a hundred years old. She had seen the original production‑‑
MR. CAPEHART: Wow.
MR. PIERCE: ‑‑and most other productions in the course of the other five revivals, and she expressed how much she really appreciated our interpretation, because so much more was at stake because of the interpretation.
MR. CAPEHART: Now, you mentioned a moment ago that the director is British, and folks should know that before it came to Broadway, you performed this in London.
MR. CAPEHART: I'm wondering, am I wrong in thinking that the words in‑‑the words hit differently in London than they do here in the United States. I'm wondering if the British audience was as attuned to the nuances on display in this decidedly American story.
MR. PIERCE: Yes, they were. We all have a shared humanity and with an understanding of the conditions of the African American experience, especially in 1949, and the conditions that were happening for the family and what's happening into play, and it's our responsibility of making sure that people understand that and feel it as artists. People in London were acutely aware of how it would land on this Loman family as African Americans in these conditions in 1949.
But it was with the understanding that a British person would have from outside the situation and an understanding and an empathy and some catharsis, but I have found doing it here in New York on Broadway with an American audience and especially with African Americans in the audience, it is a more deep, visceral impact, a catharsis of understanding for all in the audience, not just African Americans but everyone is this is our conditions. And what happens is with the revival, you are speaking to the audience at the time right now with the understanding that this was written 70 years ago and it's a classic. What makes something classic is it speaks to our humanity across time and space and race and gender and will speak to our hearts and our humanity long after we're gone, but within that reflection to know that it is still a timely and relevant message today sets a fire of indignation and shame.
The word "shame" keeps coming up. We should have a sense of shameful‑‑shameful inheritance of an ideology that we see burgeoning again and again and again, especially in our culture and our politics, that is so self‑destructive to where we want to go as a society. And that's the role of art, what thoughts are to the individual where you reflect on who you are, where we've been, where you hope to go. What are your values? Where are your failures? Where are your triumphs?
As we twist and turn at night when we're thinking about our own personal decisions, it's in the form of the theater that we come together, turn out the lights, and collectively, all of us, no matter how disparate we are as people, reflect on our culture and society, who we are, where we've been, where we hope to go, what are our values, and hopefully, we as artists move you to walk out of the room and out of the theater and act on those values.
MR. PIERCE: That's my contribution to the political spectrum right now‑‑
MR. PIERCE: ‑‑to move people and that they should be moved to participate in our political process, because more now than ever is, it can have an adverse effect on our lives more than any other time than right now.
MR. CAPEHART: Mm‑hmm. Wendell, we've got less than two minutes left, but I cannot let you go without asking this final question. You've always wanted to play Willy Loman. So, personally, what will you take away from this experience?
MR. PIERCE: That I left my mark, I did my best, that this is the accumulation of all that I had seen and experienced as an artist, as a man over the course of my 40‑year career. I tried to take that distillation and put it on the stage each night. Hopefully, I have moved at least one person in the course of the weeks and months that I've done the role. I hope that I can move someone's heart. I hope I can move someone's spirit, that they will leave the theater and make a positive impact on not only their life, but on someone else's life. And then with that, people will remember Amos and Althea's youngest son, Wendell Pierce.
MR. CAPEHART: I can't think of a better way to end this extraordinary conversation. Wendell Pierce, thank you so much for coming to "Capehart" on Washington Post Live.
MR. PIERCE: Thank you very much. It was a great honor, Jonathan. I really, really do appreciate it.
MR. CAPEHART: Absolutely.
And thank you for joining us. To check out what interviews we have coming up, go to WashingtonPostLive.com.
Once again, I'm Jonathan Capehart, associate editor at The Washington Post. Thanks for watching "Capehart" on Washington Post Live. | 2022-10-24T19:36:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: Race in America: Giving Voice with Wendell Pierce - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/10/24/transcript-race-america-giving-voice-with-wendell-pierce/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/10/24/transcript-race-america-giving-voice-with-wendell-pierce/ |
Concussions are a bigger problem for kids’ football than the NFL
A football game at Grass Lake High School on Oct. 7. (J. Scott Park/AP)
The evidence is strong. In a 2017 study, all but one of 111 deceased former NFL players who donated their brains for research had evidence of CTE. Among former college players, 48 out of 53 showed the signs, as did three of 14 who played only in high school.
Chris Nowinski, chief executive of the nonprofit Concussion Legacy Foundation, agrees. His organization recently started a campaign called “Stop Hitting Kids in the Head” that aims to reduce repetitive head impacts by increasing the age at which children start tackle football and other high-risk activities such as heading in soccer, checking in hockey and tackle rugby.
For those children high school age and above, football can be made safer by limiting tackling during practice. I was surprised to learn that the NFL has already embraced this strategy, while most college and high school teams have not. Thanks in part to the advocacy of their players association, the NFL has rules that prohibit live-tackling during the offseason and allow only 14 full-contact practices during the regular season.
Among college football conferences, only the Ivy League has eliminated tackling from regular season practices. In youth football, which Nowinski calls “the wild West,” no national regulatory body exists to enforce player-safety rules.
This makes a dramatic difference. Nearly 60 percent of concussions in high school football and more than 70 percent of concussions in college football occur during practice. In the NFL, that number is 19 percent — and it’s down to about 6 percent during regular season.
O’Neil’s advocacy has resulted in several state high school sports-governing bodies restricting the amount of time they can tackle their teammates during practice. And he has seen schools have major successes afterward. Ramapo High School in New Jersey won a state title. American Heritage School won four Florida state championships in six years. | 2022-10-24T20:38:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Concussions are a bigger problem for youth football than the NFL - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/concussions-nfl-football-brain-trauma/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/concussions-nfl-football-brain-trauma/ |
Which candidate puts on the meanest show should not be a factor
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor, at a campaign event in Tucson on Oct. 7. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
In his Oct. 21 Friday Opinion essay, “The quality of candidates is an issue for Democrats, too,” Jim Geraghty suggested Katie Hobbs is a coward for not debating Kari Lake, her Republican opponent in the Arizona gubernatorial race. It is not an issue of cowardice but of dignity. It is the same reason that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) would not allow Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to serve on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Why invite a rabid attack dog into a serious matter?
Ms. Lake and Mr. Jordan operate from the same playbook: be loud and combative for the purpose of creating red-meat content for the base. It should go without saying that each voter is responsible for deciding which candidate would govern most effectively. Which candidate puts on the meanest show should not be a factor.
Bob Johnson, Burke | 2022-10-24T20:39:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Which candidate puts on the meanest show should not be a factor - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/dignity-not-cowardice/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/dignity-not-cowardice/ |
Felons deserve the right to vote
In her Oct. 23 Local Opinions essay, “Maryland should give incarcerated people access to the ballot,” Kimberly Haven urged lawmakers to give incarcerated individuals the right to vote.
The U.S. justice system should be one of reform; criminals can learn from their mistakes and protect themselves and their rights, as well as the rights of others in the community. Because prisoners have experienced the darker side of the system, lawmakers should take into account their perspectives on specific concerns, which can be done through voting.
In the system’s eyes, a convict is a convict; the crime, not the sentence, matters. But that unfairly impacts the population. As Ms. Haven wrote, felony disenfranchisement disproportionately affects minorities. By giving felons the right to vote, we ensure that more minorities have a voice in society, changing the skewed system and creating a more just society.
Nidhi Varada, Ashburn | 2022-10-24T20:39:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Felons deserve the right to vote - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/felons-deserve-right-vote/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/felons-deserve-right-vote/ |
No diplomatic immunity
The parents of 19-year-old Harry Dunn — from left, father Tim Dunn and stepmother Tracey Dunn; mother Charlotte Charles and stepfather Bruce Charles — leave court in London on Sept. 29. (Kin Cheung/AP)
The Post reported in its Oct. 21 news article “American pleads guilty in death of British teen” that Anne Sacoolas, a so-called U.S. diplomat but in fact a U.S. intelligence agency employee formerly in Britain, after three years as a fugitive in the United States abetted by the State Department, has pleaded guilty to a British court of causing the death of a 19-year-old motorcyclist through “careless driving” (on the wrong side of the road).
Ms. Sacoolas entered the plea by video from the United States. It remains to be seen whether she will travel to Britain to accept punishment. In the meantime, she has been shielded here by a U.S. declaration of diplomatic immunity. That is a scandalous abuse of the concept. Diplomatic immunity was designed to prevent retaliation against diplomats by foreign governments displeased by the diplomats’ home country policy positions (“don’t kill the messenger”), not to protect criminal behavior, especially when the foreign country seeking justice has a fair and honest judicial system such as Britain’s.
Adding insult to injury, Ms. Sacoolas was not really a diplomat but was apparently under “diplomatic cover” provided to our intelligence agents by Britain as a courtesy, which the United States has exploited with unknown consequences. That the State Department agreed to thumb its nose at British justice is shameful and, I suspect, reflects a cowering surrender to pressure from Ms. Sacoolas’s home intelligence agency. Her diplomatic immunity should be withdrawn forthwith so that extradition to Britain, if necessary, can be effected.
Marc E. Nicholson, Washington
The writer is a retired Foreign Service officer. | 2022-10-24T20:39:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | No diplomatic immunity - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/no-diplomatic-immunity/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/no-diplomatic-immunity/ |
Some distractions are positive
In his Oct. 23 Sunday Opinion column, “I’m hooked on ‘Clash Royale.’ It’s a problem.,” Matt Bai conveyed the negative effects of “Clash Royale” on his life and how it, along with other distractions, affects those in broader society. These diversions completely remove silence and idleness, an important time to collect thoughts and ponder.
It’s true that idleness plays an important part in these ways, but there’s a reason these distractions are so widely used. People who want to ease their mind don’t want to think about what’s stressing them out. Instead, they would rather watch videos on TikTok or browse Twitter. Students, for example, often enjoy playing a quick game of “Clash Royale” between classes. It acts as a mental break before getting ready to absorb the material in the next class. This is not to say that an addiction to “Clash Royale” is a good thing. When the game can incite irritation and arguments, it’s a good time to stop. Yet distractions such as “Clash Royale” can be beneficial in balanced amounts.
Alex Yung, Chantilly | 2022-10-24T20:39:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Some distractions are positive - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/some-distractions-are-positive/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/some-distractions-are-positive/ |
Plummeting U.S. test scores aren’t a red-state vs. blue-state thing
A fourth-grade class at Arthur Elementary in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on May 24. (Geoff Stellfox/The Gazette via AP)
It turns out that all the bitter back-and-forth between red and blue states about how quickly to reopen schools during the covid-19 pandemic was nothing but political theater, as far as test scores are concerned. Student performance suffered across the board, and it could take years to make up the ground we’ve lost.
There are some puzzling findings in the NAEP data. Fourth-graders who were already the lowest performers lost more ground — falling even further behind — during the pandemic, especially in math. That raises the question of whether many of those students have grasped the fundamental principles they will need to survive their math classes in the higher grades.
Roughly 70 percent of students said they had at least some experience with remote learning during the pandemic. Higher-performing students — those who lost less ground — were significantly more likely than low performers to have full-time access to a computer or tablet; to have high-speed internet access; to have a quiet place to do their homework; to have a teacher available remotely to help them almost every day; and to have an adult help them in person with their schoolwork at least once or twice a week. | 2022-10-24T20:39:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | U.S. test scores plummeted in both red and blue states - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/test-scores-plummet-red-and-blue-states/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/24/test-scores-plummet-red-and-blue-states/ |
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