Life gets in the way...

I will be away from the blog for about two weeks, I am sure the world will have much new news in that time frame, I will be back to share...

NGC 6995

Do you see the bat? It haunts this cosmic close-up of the eastern Veil Nebula. The Veil Nebula itself is a large supernova remnant, the expanding debris cloud from the death explosion of a massive star. While the Veil is roughly circular in shape and covers nearly 3 degrees on the sky toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus), NGC 6995, known informally as the Bat Nebula, spans only 1/2 degree, about the apparent size of the Moon. That translates to 12 light-years at the Veil's estimated distance, a reassuring 1,400 light-years from planet Earth. In the composite of image data recorded through narrow band filters, emission from hydrogen atoms in the remnant is shown in red with strong emission from oxygen atoms shown in hues of blue. Of course, in the western part of the Veil lies another seasonal apparition: the Witch's Broom Nebula.

33M Covid vaccine doses

U.S. to defer 33M Covid vaccine doses to Africa

"This deal will get the continent Moderna doses that have been long-awaited and in high demand," said White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

By QUINT FORGEY

The United States will defer delivery of roughly 33 million doses of Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine so that they can be purchased by the African Union, the White House announced Tuesday.

"This deal will get the continent Moderna doses that have been long-awaited and in high demand," said White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

The U.S. doses are scheduled to be deferred between December 2021 and February 2022, "so that the African Union can instead purchase and take delivery of those doses," she said.

Psaki added that the "unique arrangement will help facilitate" a separate deal between the African Union's vaccine acquisition vehicle and Moderna "for a supply agreement for 50 million doses," with an option for a further 60 million doses.

A White House spokesperson told POLITICO the 33 million Moderna doses set to be deferred by the United States would be included in the forthcoming 50 million doses from the American pharmaceutical company to the African Union.

The United States has thus far delivered 55 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine to Africa, Psaki said. In addition, 17 million doses of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine "will be sent to Africa in the coming weeks," and "tens of millions" of doses of Pfizer's vaccine also are set to be shipped to the continent.

Hand-to-hand

White House enters ‘hand-to-hand’ combat stage of negotiations

The administration says they could finish it up when the president goes to Europe. But not everyone is convinced.

By LAURA BARRÓN-LÓPEZ and CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO

White House officials publicly and privately on Tuesday said they were confident President Joe Biden could still land a deal on his social spending bill even if it didn’t come before he departs for Europe on Thursday.

But some Democrats involved in conversations with the White House were less optimistic, openly fretting that talks risk losing momentum and stalling out if they aren’t done by the time Biden gets on that plane.

“They’re in hand-to-hand combat. The ammos all gone, they've switched to bayonets. They’re just trying to get it done,” said John Podesta, founder of the progressive think tank Center for American Progress and a leading climate activist, who recently joined a meeting with senior White House officials.

“They would like to get this done before they leave,” Podesta added. “It's hard to do what he's doing from Europe. It's not like the phones don't work, but you can't look somebody in the eye across the table and ... then try to get to ‘yes.’ It's just much harder to do that when you're far away.”

Biden is set to leave for back-to-back summits Thursday — first a G-20 meeting in Rome and then a climate change conference in Glasgow — just as Democrats are rushing to reach a framework on the president’s social spending bill that aims to boost child care, expand health care coverage and combat climate change. The administration would prefer an agreement inked prior to Biden’s departure, but multiple key components remain unresolved.

“We should hurry,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). “The President's foreign trip is an action-forcing mechanism for every Democrat and every patriot who wants the president to go on this important international trip with the strongest hand possible.”

“We're not done, but we're very close ... closer than we've ever been,” he added.

The White House on Tuesday argued that they are working non-stop to reach a deal and that the president is holding multiple strategy sessions a day — often more than six — with staff and Cabinet members, in addition to meeting regularly with lawmakers. Press secretary Jen Psaki and national security adviser Jake Sullivan both said the work would continue, if need be, should Biden go abroad. One White House official quipped that “there is internet in Europe.”

But in meetings with lawmakers and advocacy groups, White House officials conveyed a sense of increasing urgency at odds with the public confidence. A source who recently met with White House officials said there is a general sense of optimism in the administration but that negotiations are “incredibly fragile and a lot of the fragility is not in the climate space.”

In a meeting with climate and environmental justice groups on Monday, National Economic Council Director Brian Deese “did scare some folks in the room” with his candid assessment of the negotiations, the source said. “Because I think a lot of us assume it's a done deal. And we're not home yet.”

Podesta likewise expressed optimism about Biden’s ability to bring the Democratic factions together, but added that “until it's done, it's not done. And there's some chance that it never [gets done], that they literally can't close.”

White House officials have stressed that an agreed-upon package would be the realization of many long-sought progressive goals. Despite negotiating a deal well below the proposed $3.5 trillion starting line, administration officials are touting the generational nature of its contents. By Tuesday evening, some topline numbers for key provisions in the package began to take a more concrete form. The White House told lawmakers the climate change provisions in the package are expected to cost between $500 to $555 billion — a sizable chunk of the overall legislation and an historic investment in combating global warming.

“Do they want to be a part of the largest investment in early childhood education in history? Do they want to make health care more affordable and accessible?” Psaki said on Tuesday. “Or do they want to let the perfect be the enemy of the historic?... That's what we're talking about right now in these negotiations.”

White House officials in meetings this week were adamant that they needed to arrive at a framework by this week, the latest in a long string of self-imposed deadlines. Some people in the talks, however, said they took it as a sign of the administration’s lack of control over what’s primarily been a lawmaker-driven process when officials began downplaying the necessity to finish before Biden departed.

The stakes are high for Biden, who has bet a large portion of his first year in office on enacting a sweeping bipartisan physical infrastructure bill and the party-line social spending plan.

"I think it would be very unwise and unfortunate if we did not have a sort of framework agreement by which [Biden] could be judged,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), referring to the desire for an agreement before the president leaves for his overseas trip.

Calm raucous meetings

‘Threats of violence’: School boards curb public comments to calm raucous meetings

By ANDREW ATTERBURY and JUAN PEREZ JR.

Parents in one Kentucky school district must communicate with their school board via email after a meeting devolved into a shouting match. In northern Virginia, school officials restricted who is eligible to speak at their meetings. A Florida school board is considering shortening public comment to one minute per person.

School leaders nationwide are beginning to eye ways to rein in public commentary at local meetings in an effort to quell raucous crowds over hot-button issues like mask mandates and critical race theory.

The potential changes could add more strain between school boards and the public they serve, a domain that has emerged as a fierce culture war battleground amid the coronavirus. Parents across the nation are fighting for more control over what their children are learning in school, frustrations that have boiled over during the pandemic and are gaining support among the GOP.

Adding to the tension is the U.S. Justice Department, which pledged to probe threats against educators, a move that sparked more strife between the DOJ and Republican lawmakers who accused federal authorities of overreach.

“What I reject is this effort to create fear and division in the community that leads to credible threats of violence against me and my family,” said Jennifer Jenkins, a school board member in Brevard County, Fla.

Jenkins has faced a slew of threats over the past few months, she said, including people warning that they are “coming” for her. She also said someone made a baseless claim to Florida’s Department of Children and Families that her daughter was being abused.

School board meetings have been ground zero for intense debate on issues like masking students and critical race theory, which have emerged as critical points of division among Republicans and Democrats. In Florida and other states, parents and conservative activists are hounding board members for their policies as larger questions swell surrounding how or if the history of race in America should be taught in schools.

School boards in Florida counties like Brevard, Orange and Sarasota are also floating ideas to tinker with public comment as a way to lower the tensions and shorten the length of contentious meetings.

In Brevard county, for example, the board is proposing rules to prevent speakers from raising signs during meetings, limit the number of speakers and how much time they have when a large number of people are scheduled to weigh in on an issue. Some parents say the new policy would restrict their freedom of speech and further disenfranchise community members who are losing trust in the school board.

Already, Brevard’s board is facing increased pressure from the public and a local state lawmaker who are questioning how they are handling the ongoing debate over masking students in school. Florida has been a hotbed for debate about the issue since Gov. Ron DeSantis banned school mask mandates.

State Rep. Randy Fine (R-Palm Bay) filed a criminal complaint against Brevard’s board earlier this month claiming it violated Florida’s open government laws by clearing a public school board meeting that had turned rowdy and not allowing anyone back inside. Fine says the board is made up of “tinpot dictators” who are afraid to face the public over their decisions, including the school mask mandate that goes against the DeSantis administration’s rules.

“This is the problem: When you allow these politicians to flout the law, they’re just going to flout more and more of it,” Fine said in an interview.

The National School Boards Association asked President Joe Biden in late September to intervene against malice, violence and threats against public school officials, which the group said “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland then ordered federal law enforcement authorities and local leaders to huddle in response to what he described in an Oct. 4 memo as a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” against educators and school board members. After Garland faced intense GOP backlash over his move, including unfounded fears that federal agents would monitor typical school board meetings, Garland told a House panel last week that FBI agents wouldn’t be attending school board meetings and that federal authorities were simply looking to stop threats against educators.

“This is not about what happens inside school board meetings,” Garland told lawmakers. “It's only about threats of violence and violence aimed at school officials, school employees, and teachers.” The school boards group has since apologized for issuing its original letter.

School boards and local governments regularly set out rules and policies to govern the public’s participation at their meetings in an attempt to keep proceedings moving, keep them civil and still carve out space for residents to set out complaints or concerns. But the recent threats against teachers and education officials has many school systems weighing new steps to keep their staff and board members safe.

Members of the public didn’t speak this week, for example, when the board of Kentucky’s largest school system met to discuss reappointing its superintendent and hear an update on vaccination and testing requirements for employees and students. The public could instead set out their opinions via a 500-word-or-less email to the Louisville-area school board. That’s after a fracas over school security practices earlier this month cut short another board meeting, and left the panel’s president telling the Louisville Courier Journal that "it's not clear to me that the public comment sections of our meetings are fruitful at this point."

In northern Virginia, the Loudoun County School Board restricted eligible public speakers at its meetings to local residents, business owners, parents, students and employees in the months following a chaotic June 22 meeting that ended in arrest and injury.

“The school board is making these changes in order to ensure that the voices of our parents and the LCPS community are heard rather than out-of-town agitators who would make board meetings a platform for national politics or to enhance their own media profiles,” board Chair Brenda Sheridan said in a statement when the new policy took hold in September.

The Prince William County School Board in northern Virginia also overhauled its public speaker policy last month, allowing it to suspend “any citizen comment period, public hearing or town hall” if disturbances interfere with a meeting or threaten the safety of anyone in attendance.

DeSantis also railed against the DOJ’s involvement, using the issue to criticize the Biden administration. DeSantis and the Florida GOP are vowing to devote more resources to local school board races as issues like critical race theory and school mask policies pushed education to the forefront of the culture wars during the coronavirus pandemic.

“To mobilize the FBI, there’s no need for it,” DeSantis said at an last week event in Titusville. “The reason to do that is to intimidate parents, to squelch descent, to have them shut up and just take it even when they strongly disagree with what may be happening to their kid.”

Even some board members in Brevard agreed, saying the feds getting involved cast parents in a negative light and made the community feel like they were being investigated. But that doesn’t mean school officials want the threats to go unanswered.

In Sarasota, the first GOP county in Florida to enact a school mask mandate, school board Chair Shirley Brown, saw a dozen protesters assemble in front of her house earlier this month, complete with a siren and bullhorns and a man sporting a “Proud Boys” shirt, according to local reports.

“You could not have this kind of yelling and actions at a meeting at the Florida Legislature or the Board of Education,” said Brown. “You’d be thrown out.”

Antitrust muscle

EU flexes antitrust muscle to counter Putin’s gas gamesmanship

Brussels has used competition law to force Gazprom to change its business methods in the past.

BY AMERICA HERNANDEZ, PIETRO LOMBARDI AND SIMON VAN DORPE

Threatening Russian President Vladimir Putin with a massive antitrust fine has worked in the past as a way to improve the behavior of his export monopoly Gazprom in the EU, so why not try it again?

EU Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson told European energy ministers on Tuesday that Brussels' competition police had started gathering evidence on whether soaring energy prices can be blamed on illegal activity by any of the bloc's main gas suppliers. The European Commission confirmed that questionnaires had been sent to all the parties who could help piece together a case on this fall's most pressing economic crisis.

Brussels' competition investigators avoided mentioning Gazprom by name, but the company is an old sparring partner. Gazprom supplies more than 40 percent of EU gas imports and was the subject of one of the most high-profile antitrust cases Brussels has ever undertaken, from 2012 to 2018. Although that probe did not result in the eye-watering fine that Russia's leading critics like Poland and Lithuania had wanted, it did push Gazprom to radically alter its business model across Central and Eastern Europe.

Still unhappy that Moscow wasn't heavily fined in 2018, Poland is now leading the charge for EU enforcers to take fresh action over what it sees as market manipulation from the Russians, who are accused of driving up prices this year by undershooting on expected deliveries.

Putin himself is delivering mixed messages over Russia's motives. On the one hand, he is denying that Russia is using the world's biggest gas reserves as a geopolitical weapon. On the other, he is simultaneously suggesting that flows could pick up significantly if legal clearance were given to the highly contentious Nord Stream 2 pipeline that is designed to pump Russian gas straight to Germany. Gazprom did not respond to a request for comment.

No longer content to leave all the posturing (and potential bluffs) to Russia, Simson on Tuesday vowed Brussels would look into "widespread concern about market manipulation or speculation." That will be music to the ears of Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who said a probe could "sober up Gazprom."

Pipeline penalties

Lawyers agreed it made sense to turn to competition law, the European Commission's single most powerful policy weapon. “While the probe may be politically triggered by the energy price crisis, it does not seem unreasonable to study the current market dynamics through the lens of competition law,” said Natura Gracia, a competition lawyer at Linklaters.

“Brussels could be looking into an abuse of dominance by Gazprom, trying to collect evidence of the company withholding supply to increase prices, or of anti-competitive restrictions in contracts between wholesale gas suppliers like Gazprom and European retail gas suppliers,” Gracia added.

Alan Riley, an academic lawyer specializing in EU antitrust, trade and energy law, who has previously advised Polish and Ukrainian energy companies, said there was sufficient evidence to open an investigation into abuse of dominance by Gazprom.

"You’ve got a dominant provider seeking to deliberately refuse to supply gas without any commercial reasons, they are directly using their market power to limit supply,” Riley said.

A full Commission antitrust probe would, of course, be too slow to be a silver bullet for Europe's gas woes this winter. The case that the EU settled in 2018 began with dawn raids across Europe in 2011. But that may not be the immediate objective. Merely talking about a probe — which may never lead to formal charges, let alone a fine — could simply be intended to sharpen minds in Moscow.

Riley said the Commission's threat of an investigation "raises pressure on Russia and Gazprom" to make more gas available.

The European Commission can issue a fine of up to 10 percent of a company's turnover in a financial year. Although Gazprom was spared anything so severe in 2018, it was forced to stop divide-and-rule tactics in Eastern Europe, where it could dictate prices country-by-country. The EU case pushed it to stop writing contracts in which Eastern Europeans could not resell gas to neighbors and struck out clauses in which Gazprom's rivals were excluded.

U.S. Senior Adviser for Global Energy Security Amos Hochstein said on Monday that Russia had the gas required to keep supplies flowing.

"If Russia has the gas to supply [Europe] through Nord Stream 2, as they suggest, that means that they have the gas to supply it through the Ukrainian [system] or other pipelines as well ... that is what we expect and what I think any open, free market should expect." 

One foot on the hose

One of the more immediate concerns for Gazprom is that buyers with long-term contracts have clauses that link prices to the cost of gas on the openly traded spot market. If Gazprom puts more gas into the market, it will depress prices not only in the open market but in its longer term contracts too.

Any new case against Gazprom could indeed be made more complex by the various types of gas sales and contracts in question. The 2012-2018 case focused on the way Gazprom trapped countries into unfair contracts. The current objections hinge more on limits to open market supply, which could prove harder territory in which to prove abuse of a dominant position. As European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put it: "While Gazprom has honored its long-term contracts with us, it did not respond to higher demand as it did in previous years."

Explaining Gazprom's predicament, Jack Sharples, a research fellow at the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies, noted the boot had been on the other foot last year when prices were at rock bottom, and argued there was no contractual obligation for the Russian company to offer more gas.

"The contrast between 2020 and 2021 could not be more stark: Last year, when European demand declined and hub prices were at record lows, Europe had no problem with its long-term contract supplies from Gazprom being hub-indexed, and European companies were happy to make full use of their contractual flexibility to take less gas from Gazprom. A year later, with hub prices at record highs, although we would like to see Gazprom offer more volumes to the European market, we have to remember that they are not actually obliged to do so."

Russia argues that its deliveries are falling short of previous years because it is still filling domestic storage, but an energy economist who regularly consults for European gas market participants stressed the potential antitrust concerns.

The economist said that "it seems likely that what Gazprom is doing right now is profit maximization — if it delivered more it would likely reduce its profits, and that's sort of the definition of market power abuse. Withholding supplies to keep prices high is de facto anti-competitive."

"Gazprom: They didn’t start the fire, but they are standing over the hose pipe," he added.

Telecom operations

FCC votes to halt China Telecom operations within U.S.

Tuesday’s vote follows through on FCC actions begun last year during the Trump era.

By JOHN HENDEL

FCC commissioners on Tuesday unanimously voted to nix the agency’s domestic and global authorizations for China Telecom Americas — moves that will curb the company's ability to operate within the U.S.

The decision carries through on the scrutiny begun last year into the Chinese government-owned company.

Agency staff said the company, a subsidiary of China Telecom, poses a national security risk to the U.S. and is both subject to exploitation by the Chinese government and highly likely to comply with Beijing's requests, which could mean forking over customer data. The subsidiary, which provides phone and IT service, has operated within the U.S. for years and is headquartered domestically in Herndon, Va.

What the commissioners said: Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC's acting chair and likely soon to be its permanent chief, pointed to other federal efforts to take a harder line against threats to U.S. telecom networks. She said China Telecom Americas could surveil networks and disrupt service.

“We take an important and necessary step,” Rosenworcel said during the open meeting following the vote. “This is not a decision we make lightly.”

She accused the company of making misrepresentations before the U.S. government. Commissioners cited evidence provided by executive branch agencies when justifying their vote to oust the company.

GOP Commissioner Brendan Carr said he’s pleased with the vote but called for further moves to curb foreign threats, such as using the agency’s equipment authorization rules to lessen telecom risks and expanding its list of dangerous companies. He noted his call to add drone-maker DJI to the agency’s list of national security threats.

How we got here: Tuesday’s vote follows through on FCC actions begun last year during the Trump era. The commission had requested information from the company last year and in December voted to begin proceedings on whether to yank its U.S. authorizations.

China Telecom Americas had unsuccessfully challenged that initial vote in court. A spokesperson for the company’s U.S. subsidiary didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

What’s next: The FCC is in the middle of examining whether to similarly yank the authorizations for multiple other companies with ties to China’s government. Rosenworcel said the example of China Telecom Americas sets a template the agency can follow with other providers, as needed.

Dean of political comedians

Mort Sahl, dean of political comedians, dies at 94

“I just sort of tell the truth and everybody breaks up along the way,” he once said.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS

Satirist Mort Sahl, who helped revolutionize stand-up comedy during the Cold War with his running commentary on politicians and current events and became a favorite of a new, restive generation of Americans, died Tuesday. He was 94.

His friend Lucy Mercer said that he died “peacefully” at his home in Mill Valley, California. The cause was “old age,” she said.

During an era when many comedians dressed in tuxedos and told mother-in-law jokes, Sahl faced his audiences in the ’50s and ’60s wearing slacks, a sweater and an unbuttoned collar and carrying a rolled-up newspaper on which he had pasted notes for his act. Reading news items as if seated across from you at the kitchen table, he made his inevitably cutting comments, often joining the laughter with a horsey bellow of his own and ending his routines by inquiring: “Is there any group I haven’t offended yet?”

“Every comedian who is not doing wife jokes has to thank him for that,” actor-comedian Albert Brooks told The Associated Press in 2007. “He really was the first, even before Lenny Bruce, in terms of talking about stuff, not just doing punch lines.”

Sahl took pride in having mocked every president from Dwight Eisenhower to Donald Trump, although he acknowledged he privately admired Democrat John F. Kennedy and counted Republican Ronald Reagan among his closest friends. Of President George W. Bush, he observed: “He’s born again, you know. Which would raise the inevitable question: If you were given the unusual opportunity to be born again, why would you come back as George Bush?”

Sahl became famous in 1953 at San Francisco’s hungry i (the i stood for intellectual), the perfect place for a comedian of his type. The city was a meeting ground for beatniks and college activists, and they crowded into the tiny club to hear someone who spoke to their disdain for the status quo. Word spread quickly about the young comedian with the distinctive style. Soon Sahl was earning $7,500 a week at nightclubs across the nation and appearing on television with Steve Allen and Jack Paar. He made the cover of Time magazine in 1960 and was profiled in The New Yorker.

A new generation of comedians, including Bill Cosby, George Carlin and the team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, was inspired by Sahl. Woody Allen would liken his work to the jazz of Charlie Parker and reviewers compared him to Will Rogers, who had tweaked politicians in a gentler manner.

“There was a need for a revolution — everybody was ready for the revolution. He totally restructured comedy,” Allen said of him, according to the Los Angeles Times.

David Letterman continued the iconoclastic tradition, and more recently Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver.

“I don’t have the image of myself as a comedian,” Sahl himself said. “I never said I was one. I just sort of tell the truth and everybody breaks up along the way.”

But Sahl‘s comedy albums became best sellers. At the Academy Awards in 1959, he was co-host along with Bob Hope, Laurence Olivier, Jerry Lewis and others. Fearing he would seem to be joining the establishment, Sahl cracked: “We’ve just lost the college crowd; all across the country they’re yelling, ‘Sellout!’”

In the 1980s he frequently ridiculed his friend Reagan, but he said the president was never offended.

“If you’re his friend, it doesn’t matter if you’re an escaped con,” Sahl once said of Reagan. Democrats, he added, were often not as forgiving. In the 1990s, Sahl had fallen out of favor with them when he complained that President Bill Clinton’s only lasting legacy would be his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

“A lot of people I have met in the Democratic Party are extremely expedient,” he said. “Once it’s over, they don’t want to know you. Of course, that’s not generic to the Democrats.”

Sahl thought so highly of Kennedy, however, that he even wrote jokes for him on the campaign trail, including one which inspired JFK’s quip at his own expense — about a telegram from his wealthy father. “Don’t buy a single more vote than is necessary. I’ll be d---ed if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”

But when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Sahl was devastated and the tragedy foreshadowed a decline in the comedian’s fortunes that lasted for years. He quickly became convinced that Kennedy had been killed as part of a CIA plot and he accused the government of staging a massive cover-up. He devoted much of his monologues to reading long passages from the report by the government’s Warren Commission, which had been appointed to investigate the assassination. Audiences stopped laughing and his bookings plummeted.

“A lot of people did not want to hear it. But I thought it was the end of the country,“ he said, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Sahl also suffered a personal tragedy in 1996 when his only child, Morton Jr., died at age 19. Ten years later, the subject was so raw that mention of his son’s name could bring him to tears.

“My kid was like a more human version of me,” he once said.

Through the tough times, he continued to work the college circuit and small clubs. Although he never regained his former stature, he eventually returned to making a comfortable living with comedy. He continued to carry his newspaper on stage with him, although as the 21st century dawned he joked that he should probably have replaced it with a laptop.

At age 80 he also began teaching a class in critical thinking at Southern California’s prestigious Claremont McKenna College.

It was a return to the academic life Sahl had known decades earlier when he earned a degree in urban planning from the University of Southern California in 1950.

Putting plans for graduate study on hold, he decided to make money writing jokes for comedians. He took to the stage himself, he once said, when he discovered the ones he was writing for were “too dumb” to get the material.

Morton Lyon Sahl was born on May 11, 1927, in Montreal, to a Canadian mother and a New York father who managed a tobacco shop. The family moved to the United States where Sahl’s father, Harry, worked for the Department of Justice in various cities.

After high school, Sahl joined the Air Force, spending 31 months at a remote Alaskan airfield where he edited the post newspaper, Poop from the Group. Discharged in 1947, he entered college. He took on a number of jobs before his girlfriend, Sue Berber, persuaded him to audition for owner Enrico Banducci at the hungry i in 1953.

Billionaires Income Tax

Wyden fills in details for 'Billionaires Income Tax'

It would be a fundamental change in how the tax system operates, and open up a new revenue stream for the Treasury — one some liberals hope will eventually be extended to millionaires as well.

By BRIAN FALER

The Senate’s top tax writer unveiled plans to create a special new tax on the uber wealthy that he hopes Democrats will use to help pay for their next big spending package.

Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wants to begin requiring people with more than $1 billion in assets, or who earn more than $100 million in three consecutive years, to begin paying capital gains taxes each year on the appreciation in value of their assets, regardless of whether they are sold.

Wyden figures it would hit around 700 people, and expects it to generate several hundred billion dollars, though Congress’s official scorekeepers have not yet put a number on the plan.

“We have a historic opportunity with the Billionaires Income Tax to restore fairness in our tax code, and fund critical investments in American families,” said Wyden. “The Billionaires Income Tax would ensure billionaires pay tax each year, just like working Americans.”

It would be a fundamental change in how the tax system operates, and open up a new revenue stream for the Treasury — one some liberals hope will eventually be extended to millionaires as well.

But it’s sure to be controversial.

Many House Democrats are already balking at the proposal, preferring a slate of more traditional tax increases approved last month by the Ways and Means Committee.

And the proposal, should it pass, would almost certainly be challenged in court.

The Constitution restricts so-called direct taxes, an antiquated term referring to levies imposed directly on someone that can’t be imposed on someone else. There’s a big exception for income taxes, thanks to the 16th Amendment, which allows Congress to tax earnings. The question with the billionaires tax will be whether it counts as an income tax.

The plan comes after Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) balked at fellow Democrats’ plans to finance their spending package with more traditional hikes on individuals and corporations, leaving Democrats scrambling to find other ways to cover their costs.

Wyden’s proposal would begin by imposing a one-time tax on all the gains that had built up before the tax had been created. So, under the proposal, Jeff Bezos would owe taxes on the appreciation of his unsold Amazon stock dating to its early days. He'd have five years to pay the bill.

After that, Wyden's plan would charge capital gains taxes on the subsequent annual appreciation, with different rules for different kinds of assets.

Stocks, bonds and other publicly traded assets, whose values are easily ascertained, would be assessed the levy each year. Harder-to-value assets like real estate or ownership stakes in privately held businesses would not be taxed until they are sold, but would then face an interest charge designed to approximate the tax people would have faced if they had been publicly traded assets.

They would be allowed to take losses against their gains, and carry them forward to future years to offset income. In certain circumstances, they could carry them back as well.

Wyden also has a phalanx of rules designed to prevent people from ducking the tax, for example, by stashing assets in trusts or Opportunity Zones or by renouncing their citizenship.

Obvious

What’s Kyrsten Sinema Up To? It’s Pretty Obvious.

Both allies and enemies say her time in the Arizona state Legislature showcased a commitment to personal ambition over party loyalty.

By HANK STEPHENSON

Walk the streets of Kyrsten Sinema’s old stomping grounds, Phoenix’s artsy Roosevelt Row, on a busy Friday night and you might see a dozen or so Kyrsten Sinemas, none of them flattering.

A local dance crew calling itself the Moderate Pixie Dream Girls, whose members dress in pink tutus and purple party wigs, perform on local street corners to protest the Arizona senator’s opposition to increasing the minimum wage or her resistance to immigration reform.

Stickers at the hipster coffee shop anchoring the neighborhood feature her face on a milk carton reading “Missing: Last seen defending the Jim Crow filibuster.”

At the national level, though, Sinema’s brand isn’t so much progressive betrayal as raw confusion. When Saturday Night Live parodied Sinema as one of two Democrats opposing President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, the writers knew how to have fun with her biographical details — “as a wine-drinking bisexual triathlete, I know what the average American wants” — and her fashion sense (“all the Scooby Doo characters at the same time”). But when it came to what motivates her, they drew a blank, settling simply on “chaos.”

Chaos isn’t a bad way to describe her impact in Washington right now; she’s not only holding up her own party’s biggest national priority, but she’s famously unclear about her reasons why. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), the other most-intransigent Democrat, can’t stop talking about his motives. Sinema isn’t even calling her friends. She’s rocketed into the national zeitgeist as an enigma, one of the least understood politicians in Washington.

Back home, some of her oldest allies — as well as critics — have an insight for the Democrats who are trying to corral her, and it’s not necessarily a comfortable one: Get used to it. Politically, Sinema’s career looks like she experienced a personal revolution; she began as a left-wing agitator and ended up as a Republican-friendly moderate. But in Arizona, many people see those positions as almost beside the point: For them, Sinema is better understood in terms of pure ambition, and the constant triangulation needed to hold office in a purple state that fancies itself charting an independent course, whatever that requires in the moment. Sinema declined to comment for this report.

“She’s usually the smartest person in the room and she wants to be treated that way,” says Phil Lopes, a former Democratic colleague in the state House of Representatives, who was once a Sinema ally, but no longer.

What exactly Sinema stands for appears to be less important. She voted against Donald Trump’s massive tax cuts but now refuses to raise tax rates on the wealthy and corporations; she says tackling climate change is a top priority but suggested slashing billions of climate dollars in Democrats’ sweeping social spending package.

Progressive activists are furious, with local groups already threatening to fund a primary challenge against her in 2024. Some of her old comrades say Sinema would be better off dropping the ‘D’ next to her name altogether and returning to her roots as an independent.

But for those still perplexed about Sinema, her rise offers an object lesson in how to get ahead by flagrantly eschewing loyalty to one’s own party.

The broad outline of Sinema’s metamorphosis is well-known: A former Green Party activist who protested the Iraq War in a pink tutu, she shifted toward the center as she set her sights on Congress. But the details of Sinema’s transformation lay in her time in the state legislature, where she learned to distance herself from progressives and made alliances with Republicans that she still leans on today.

Back in 2002, the Arizona Democratic Party deemed Sinema “too extreme” for the Arizona Legislature in her bid as a lefty independent candidate. But two years later, after adopting the label of Democrat and getting the nod from her new party, she won a seat in the Arizona House of Representatives.

For the next six years, she served in the state House representing the same Downtown Phoenix district as David Lujan, an era that culminated with him as House minority leader and her as assistant leader. But the first time they met in 2004, she was hesitant to team up with him because he had once been registered as a Republican. She interviewed him first to ensure he was sufficiently progressive — an irony that’s not lost on him now.

“We were very much a progressive team,” he says. “If you look at our campaign materials during those years, we ran on a progressive platform and the bills we introduced are pretty progressive. So that’s definitely different than the approach she takes today.”

As Sinema climbed the ranks into state Democratic leadership, she also learned the art of compromise so well that it began to concern some of her progressive allies and former liberal champions. She also stood out immediately for her ability to make friends with the most conservative Republicans, including now-Rep. Andy Biggs, leader of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus, and Russell Pearce, sponsor of Arizona’s SB1070, a controversial 2010 law designed to crack down on illegal immigration.

Many of those relationships were strategic, notes Kirk Adams, the former GOP speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives. She buddied up to the people who had the power to help her agenda, and Republicans held strong majorities in the state House and state Senate.

“Some of her caucus-mates were suspicious because she was so friendly with Republicans,” Adams says. “But there was also a fair amount of jealousy, because if you go back and look at how many bills she got through, I’d be surprised if any other Democrats came close to her.”

These days, it seems Sinema’s only fans are Republicans — and one of her biggest might be Biggs.

Biggs was recently captured on video praising Sinema and Manchin for holding up the Biden agenda, while Florida Republican Rep. Byron Donalds urged Republicans to call their offices and thank them for keeping the filibuster intact.

Her friendship with Biggs was the subject of considerable Capitol intrigue during her days as a state legislator and one of the first big signs that Sinema was changing, says Lopes. Notably, Sinema had helped whip votes for Lopes’ election to be House minority leader in 2006, but two years later was part of the team that toppled him in a leadership coup.

“She was getting closer and closer to Biggs. They hung out a lot and did things together, and she bragged about that,” he says. “I attribute all of that to a strategy in her head to stay in office. She’ll do anything, anything, to stay in office.”

That strategy shift included, per Lopes, sponsoring a pair of bills playing to the anti-immigration fervor seizing the state at the time, in the runup to her 2012 bid for Congress. The first measure made small changes to a human trafficking law to allow police to more easily prosecute human smugglers; it ultimately passed both chambers of the legislature unanimously, but it rankled progressives.

The next year, she came back with a more controversial proposal, which increased the penalty for forgery if forged documents were used in relation to a “drop house” — a landing pad for undocumented immigrants brought to the country by smugglers. To get the bill across the finish line, she turned not to her fellow Democrats, but to several conservative anti-immigration stalwarts, including Biggs, who signed on as a co-sponsor.

Immigrant rights groups swarmed on a press conference Sinema held after the bill passed, chanting “no más” — no more — until Capitol police arrested four people. But they had made their point: Sinema abruptly ended the press conference and left.

Soon after, Sinema enraged many in her party for refusing to back the recall of Pearce, the then-Senate president who had authored Arizona’s hard-line immigration law. Sinema had been elected to the state Senate in 2010, and she told a group of activists organizing the historic recall effort that she couldn’t help because Pearce was her “boss.”

She also went on a local news program and declared that Pearce, among the left’s most hated politicians, was a good friend who should also run for Congress. Her spokesperson later said it was a tongue-in-cheek remark meant to convey that she wanted him out of the state Legislature. But to many Latino activists, cozying up to the man who had demonized their communities all to get a few modest bills through the Senate was a bridge too far.

Today, Lopes is part of a group raising money for a potential Democratic challenger to Sinema in 2024, infuriated that she’s serving as a blockade to the Biden agenda.

“This is our chance to do something really, really meaningful,” he says. “And she’s holding that up. What kind of bullshit is that?”

Sometimes, Sinema succeeded in co-opting her conservative friends into backing a liberal agenda.

In 2006, when Sinema was still a true-blue progressive, she asked Jonathan Paton, a Republican legislator from Tucson, to take the lead on her bill ensuring women who breastfeed in public couldn’t be charged with indecent exposure.

“She was very matter of fact about it: ‘Look, if I sponsor it, it’s not going to pass. I’ll do all the work, I just need a Republican to sponsor it for me because that’s the way the world works,’” he recalls. “And I was like, ‘Okay, you know, whatever,’ and I didn’t really pay a whole lot of attention to it, to be honest with you, until the day of the hearing.”

He was shocked when hundreds of women showed up for the hearing — a mix of what he calls granola hippies and Mormon moms. The bill passed committee with their support, but Paton warned Sinema it still faced opposition within conservative ranks of the Republican Party, particularly from Pearce.

“And she looks at me and she says, ‘I’ll handle Russell,’” he says.

Sinema drummed up a campaign for moms and higher-ups in the Mormon Church to email Pearce, who is Mormon, to support the bill, and Pearce folded, Paton says.

“I was impressed,” Paton says. “She was smarter than most people in either party.”

The two went on to work on a host of other issues together, including the drop house bill that later put Sinema in trouble with members of her own party. But Paton still thinks back to that first project — the breastfeeding bill that he didn’t really want to sponsor — as the moment when he understood what a powerhouse Sinema could become.

All the Washington, D.C. intrigue about why Sinema is holding up Democrats’ legislation is based on a misreading of where the state is politically, Paton adds. It’s an independent, center-right state that can support a Democrat who leans conservative.

“Let’s just say she knows this state at least as well as she knew Russell Pearce,” he says.

Even among her critics, Sinema is widely regarded as among the savviest political operators in Arizona history. She has the book smarts of a lawyer, the emotional intelligence of a social worker and the determination of a triathlete, because she is all of those things.

Nobody gets to the U.S. Senate without a healthy dose of ambition and hubris. But her detractors say in that regard, too, she’s off the charts: That she’s only ever cared about herself, that she craves the limelight, that she’s abandoned all principles she once held dear in exchange for power.

“Kyrsten is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known, if not the most brilliant,” says a former Democratic lawmaker who once was close with her in the legislature and was granted anonymity to speak candidly. That’s what makes her conduct in Washington so disappointing: “I don’t think her motivation for casting the votes that she does today has anything to do with what her actual true beliefs are.”

Instead, the former colleague says her decisions are based on cold hard political calculations — and a need to feed her hunger for attention, more than power even.

“If she lost the Senate race and got a TV show on Fox or whatever, I think she’d be just as happy,” the former lawmaker says. “What she wants is Cecily Strong to play her on SNL. Anyone who thinks that she was insulted by that doesn’t know her.”

Other longtime allies and supporters of Sinema are bewildered.

Back when Sinema unsuccessfully ran for the legislature as an independent, Sandy Bahr, executive director of the Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter, was her biggest champion. She helped campaign for Sinema and was there on election night sharing in the devastating loss.

When Sinema ran as a Democrat two years later and won, she quickly became one of the Sierra Club’s most reliable votes at the Capitol. For years in Congress, Sinema and Bahr were still close. But these days, Bahr can hardly get a meeting with her, securing a single 5-minute session since Sinema became a senator three years ago.

And why, wonders Bahr, is Sinema pushing to cut $100 billion from funds to fight climate change — a stance at odds with the view of her own voters based on the polling. Sinema is typically a math whiz when it comes to politics, Bahr says, but in this instance, her calculations seem to be off.

“I’m really disappointed, and I’m perplexed,” she says, adding that she thinks Sinema still cares deeply about environmental issues. “But where she’s centering herself seems to have changed.”

Of course, Sinema isn’t the only Democrat standing in the way of passing Biden’s agenda. But politicos and pundits find it much easier to explain away the reservations of Manchin, a longtime moderate whose state Trump won by nearly 40 percentage points last year.

Manchin has come in for pressure from the left — protesters have been kayaking up to his houseboat — but he has had no problem debating them, even on the water.

Sinema, meanwhile, hasn’t been spotted around her old haunts since she was photographed in April flaunting a ring reading, “Fuck Off.” She rarely takes questions from the press or her constituents, whether they try to buttonhole her on airplanes or in the bathroom. She doesn’t ham it up with the press like Manchin.

To Lujan and other former allies, her silence is the most confounding part of her transformation.

As a state lawmaker, Sinema would sometimes speak at three public events a day and was among the most quoted and quotable lawmakers, he says. But now she’s “almost reclusive.”

Former Arizona Democratic lawmaker Debbie McCune Davis, a solid progressive who was something of a mentor to Sinema during her early years at the Capitol, says she saw a change once Sinema ascended to Democratic leadership. Suddenly, Sinema was keeping the door open to the payday lending industry and others who were in direct opposition to Democrats’ agenda.

“I watched the evolution take place. And what I saw was a pragmatic side of her that frustrated me a bit, because those were not people who were doing anything good for our community,” she says.

McCune Davis says Sinema still ultimately voted against the payday lenders, and she doesn’t hold it against Sinema for meeting with them and raising money for Democrats from them. But she, like others, has a hard time reconciling the Sinema she knew with the U.S. senator of today.

“It’s unsettling because you vote for someone because you believe you know what they stand for. And right now, I think people are very confused about what Kyrsten stands for,” she says. “I haven’t given up on her. But I know people who have.”

It’s nearly impossible to talk about Sinema without mentioning John McCain, the “Maverick” Republican who represented Arizona in the Senate for more than 30 years and was frequently at war with his own party.

McCain faced primary challenges, state GOP censures and hostile crowds any time he faced a room of Republicans — and that was even before he inflamed the grassroots by taking on Trump.

Sinema is said to be eager to inherit McCain’s mantle as an Arizonan with an independent streak; whether intentionally or not, her ostentatious thumbs down on Democrats’ minimum wage boost earlier this year instantly conjured memories of McCain’s own rejection of the GOP Obamacare repeal bill.

Republicans who have taken a recent shine to Sinema especially like to draw the comparison.

“I know another Arizona senator who faced primary challenges, even really stiff ones, and always came through — and that was John McCain,” says Adams, the former House speaker. “So there’s a model… of success, frankly, of how you can do it.”

But that comparison, Adams acknowledges, misses the first 20 years of McCain’s history, before Tea Party activists overtook the state Republican Party, when he built up a political machine and passed out favors like Halloween candy.

Sinema lacks the same strong relationships with local elected officials that McCain once had, which makes occasionally breaking with the party far more difficult. In addition to quite distinct biographies — McCain, of course, was a war hero and presidential candidate — their temperaments couldn’t be more different. Unlike Sinema, McCain would talk to the press for hours at a time. And Sinema doesn’t have the fiery, confrontation-loving spirit that leads one to hold court with critics. Agree with him or not, McCain had a way of making people feel heard, even if not convinced.

Sinema has always been a woman apart from her party. She reluctantly adopted the label of Democrat only after realizing it was her path to power. And she largely shed that label in her most recent campaign, opting instead to emphasize her independent voice.

Winning reelection in Arizona won’t be easy for any Democrat, but even most of her critics acknowledge Sinema is well positioned for the general election. The real threat may lie in a primary challenge.

Her support within the party is sinking fast, with recent polls showing her approval rating among Democrats at 25 percent. But her reelection is still three years away, and if she ultimately helps pass Biden’s legislative agenda, rank-and-file voters could grudgingly return.

But what if she doesn’t, and they don’t? Some Arizona politicos are increasingly floating the idea that she could sidestep her problem with the base entirely by formally quitting the party and running as an independent.

“By reregistering independent and running for reelection as such, Sinema would take the club out of the hands of progressive hardliners,” Arizona Republic columnist Robert Robb wrote recently. “The threat to primary her would evaporate. In fact, the harder left the Democratic nominee for the seat turns out to be, the better for Sinema’s chances in a three-way general election.”

That still sounds like a fantasy to most in the political chattering class here. But it’s one that Democratic state Rep. Robert Meza, one of Sinema’s closest allies from the state legislature and still a supporter, says is possible. In fact, he sees it as the most likely path to victory for Sinema.

Like others, Meza watched with a mix of inspiration and awe as Sinema transformed from self-described “bomb thrower” and “patron saint of lost causes” into a moderate power-player. She studied the playbook of dozens of winning candidates and campaigns in Arizona, he says, and integrated them “like an artificial intelligence computer absorbing all these different techniques.”

Meza has studied her playbook closely, too, and thinks he knows what’s next.

“I pretty much know her chess game,” he says. “She’s not gonna run it as a Democrat. She’s gonna run it as an independent in Arizona, and she’ll win.”

Lopes, the Democratic lawmaker who clashed with Sinema in a leadership contest, says he’s not sure he buys that theory. But in a way, it rings true.

“She’ll change her stripes,” he says. “She’ll just do whatever she thinks is the best thing to do right now for her.”

Gone too conspiratorial?

A fear grows in Trumpworld: Have we gone too conspiratorial?

There is growing worry that talk of stolen elections, machine rigging and foreign plots will hurt election reform efforts and sap turnout.

By MERIDITH MCGRAW

For months, conspiracies about the 2020 election being stolen from Donald Trump have fueled Republican efforts nationwide to rewrite election laws. But now, some GOP operatives and Trumpworld luminaries are worried that the truly wild conspiracists may be mucking it all up.

Hogan Gidley, one of Donald Trump’s top lieutenants, took a subtle dig at some Trump allies and put some distance between their efforts and his group’s work on election reform. Other Republicans have expressed fears that talk of “audits,” machine rigging and foreign plots will depress voter turnout and discourage some people from seeking office.

“People are going to do whatever they want, and I can’t answer for any of those other groups,” said Gidley when asked about misinformation and efforts by Mike Lindell and others to overturn the 2020 election.

“But as it relates to election integrity and voter protection, it is vital that we help states get these simple, popular security mechanisms in place to ensure honesty for the 2022 midterms,” added Gidley, who is heading the Center for Election Integrity at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. “I want to make sure that the data we gather and the information we share is built on solid ground as opposed to sinking sand.”

The comments illustrate the growing fissures erupting within Republican circles over how the party should address the last election. It’s a fissure that’s been caused mainly by Trump, who has been intent on continuously re-litigating the 2020 outcome with increasingly outlandish conspiracies that other Republicans echo. Gidley himself has pushed misleading arguments about some of the 2020 election outcomes, including on the day of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

When asked for comment, Lindell — who has led a national crusade to push false claims of fraud and voting machine hacking, and is being sued for defamation by voting machine manufacturer Dominion for $1.3 billion — said in a text message that he would be bringing his “voter fraud” case to the Supreme Court on Nov. 23 at 9 a.m.

The results of it all are evident in new polling which reveals just how intensely Trump voters distrust election security.

A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday shows that 77 percent of Democrats, 49 percent of independents and 28 percent of Republican voters trust the election system a lot or some. Just 9 percent of Republicans say they trust the election system a lot.

Among self-identified 2020 Trump voters, just 22 percent said they believed the 2020 elections were free and fair; while 72 percent said they probably or definitely were not. They were slightly more optimistic about the 2022 elections, with 38 percent saying they believed that they would be free and fair. But 51 percent still said they believed they would not be. Asked if they would vote for a candidate who believed that the 2020 elections should be investigated, 75 percent of 2020 Trump voters said yes, while only 11 percent said no.

The numbers demonstrate the vast skepticism and distrust Trump voters have of elections and the potential challenges Republicans could have convincing voters their ballots count.

"When my fellow Republicans are focused on the wrong things, when they’re focused on conspiracies about secret algorithms on voting machines, and they’re focused on ideas there is a group of ballots printed in China snuck in the back door of the board of elections — all those things are easily disproven," said Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who is running for re-election next May. “But a focus on those things distracts from what I consider the real concerns about election integrity.”

The Morning Consult polI offers some measure of relief for Republicans worried that voters won’t turn out amid talk of vast election conspiracies. A full 92 percent of self-identified Republican voters said that they planned to vote in the 2022 elections, with just 4 percent saying they did not plan to. By contrast, just 70 percent of self-identified Democrats said they planned to vote, and 29 percent said they did not plan to.

Nevertheless, in recent weeks, some prominent Republicans have begun warning in increasingly sharp terms that so much talk of fraud and the 2020 election could depress turnout.

“I'm of the view that the best thing that President Trump could do to help us win majorities in 2022 is talk about the future,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), said on Meet the Press. “[B]etter off to talk about the future than to focus on the past in every election.”

Republican Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, meanwhile, said “re-litigating 2020 is a recipe for disaster in 2022.”

“The election is passed, it’s been certified, the states made decisions on the integrity of each of their elections and made improvements where it need be. It’s about the future, it’s not about the last election, and that — those kind of comments are not constructive,” he said on Meet the Press.

Neither Blunt nor Hutchinson are running for re-election in 2022. And their warnings seem likely to be drowned out by Trump’s routine statements calling for more investigations into an election that has been routinely certified as accurate and secure. In a recent statement, Trump threatened that voters will not show up at the polls unless election laws are changed. And in an interview for a new book by David Drucker, "In Trump's Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP," Trump admitted that his focus on 2020 could be an “asset” or a “problem” for the GOP.

Such proclamations have set off a scramble among Republicans worried voters might not show up. Notably, last week Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) tweeted, "I recently conducted a poll on Georgia's elections and if my constituents felt their votes would count during a teletown hall. Sadly, 4% said they won't even vote due to voter fraud. This is WRONG. Legal votes by Rs are just as important as stopping illegal ones."

And in interviews, Republicans have called on the ex-president to stop talking about 2020 and start focusing on 2022, instead.

“When people don’t trust elections they don’t participate, bottom line,” said LaRose.

In GOP primary races across the country, however, candidates have openly called for additional “audits” of the 2020 presidential vote, despite its continuous verification. Josh Mandel, a Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, has called for “audits” in all 50 states. And Trump endorsed candidate for Arizona governor, Kari Lake, has campaigned on her claim the 2020 election was stolen.

They’ve also fed the movement among elected Republicans to pass voter restriction laws in their statehouses. According to an October tally by the progressive-minded Brennan Center for Justice, “at least 19 states enacted 33 laws that make it harder for Americans to vote” in 2021.

On both sides of the aisle, this has led to an urgency to passing voting reform. According to the POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, over three quarters of American voters (78 percent) think working to ensure integrity in U.S. elections should be a priority or Congress. That cuts across party lines, with 79 percent of Democratic voters, 70 percent of independent voters and 83 percent of Republican voters agreeing.

The POLITICO/Morning Consult poll was conducted Oct. 22-24, surveying 1,999 registered voters. The margin of error is plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Last week, Democrats once again failed to push through voting rights legislation after Senate Republicans filibustered the Freedom to Vote Act and despite efforts by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to compromise with Republicans on the bill. The bill would have established Election Day as a national holiday, set standards for voter identification laws, expanded the ability to vote by mail and curbed partisan gerrymandering.

Gidley’s group, the Center for Election Integrity, is among the conservative groups working on election reforms with legislators, business and advocacy groups at the state level to try and address issues and concerns around voting procedures. The center has published a list of the “The Top 25 Common-Sense State Election Integrity Reforms” that includes verified voter identification, uniform ballot counting procedures and mail-in ballot reforms.

There are cases of bipartisan work on the issue. Earlier this year Kentucky passed bipartisan legislation that expanded early voting and set in place new voting measures that passed in the Republican supermajority legislature and was signed by Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear.

Republican Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, who testified before the Senate on Tuesday and said misinformation is the most serious threat facing the election system, credited his success working with a Democratic governor by making sure their messaging was in lock-step.

“Having both sides at the table meant that his concerns on access, and my concerns on security were all addressed,” Adams said. “That’s the biggest mistake Republicans are making in state legislatures and Democrats are making in Congress. When you do this on a one party basis, the other side thinks you’re trying to cheat them, and you can’t make policy that way.”

Selling out the world because he is a fucking pussy and cares more about keeping his job...

The Centerpiece of Biden’s Climate Agenda Is All But Dead. So Now What?

Progressives urge measures that achieve the same carbon reductions—or lose their votes.

KARA VOGHT

By the time a group of progressive lawmakers entered the Oval Office to meet with President Joe Biden on Tuesday, the centerpiece of his climate agenda was all but dead. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) refused to back the Clean Energy Payment Program, a $150 billion initiative that would incentivize utilities to transition to clean energy. Democrats had pinned their hopes for cutting the country’s carbon emissions in half by the end of the decade to that program, which would have contributed to a third of that goal.

So progressives came bearing a stark warning: Replace the program with measures that achieve the same carbon reductions or lose their votes. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) conveyed that point with “spirited but respectful” remarks to the president, in the words of a fellow lawmaker who was also present at the meeting. Huffman told the group he couldn’t support a deal that didn’t meet that target, and that some of the alternatives floated would be unacceptable. “It can’t just be throwing money at carbon capture and advanced nuclear and calling that a climate solution,” he told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday night. “It’s not.”

As Huffman warned, not all investments are created equal. On Friday, 60 Democratic lawmakers from the House and Senate sent a letter to the president demanding his “unwavering support for significant additional investments in climate priorities to close the resulting emissions gap” in the absence of the Clean Energy Payment Program. Now, the pressure is on Biden and Democratic congressional leaders to find a suitable replacement.

This wasn’t where things were supposed to stand roughly a week out from Biden’s appearance at the UN international climate summit in Glasgow. Had Democratic lawmakers lined up behind their initial $3.5 trillion domestic spending bill, Biden would be on the world stage touting the passage of a legacy-sealing domestic agenda that would reverse the toll climate change is expected to take in the absence of swift, bold, international action. But centrist Democratic lawmakers have insisted that the price tag drop significantly, down to roughly $2 trillion, and have voiced concerns over the climate provisions. So instead, he is left with what amounts to an aspirational vision as protracted negotiations over the details continue in Washington.

Back in the spring, the White House unveiled a $4 trillion economic agenda that included an ambitious climate plan that would have devoted hundreds of billions of dollars to decarbonizing the American economy. Some of those ideas made their way into a $1.2 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill. The bulk of them ended up in a $3.5 trillion budget bill that would have cut climate pollution by 45 percent, according to an analysis from the office of Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). By virtue of the budget process, this measure can pass with only Democratic votes.

But it needs every Democratic vote. Manchin, who chairs the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, represents a state that derives nearly 90 percent of its electricity from coal and has received more money than any other sitting senator from fossil fuel industries. He’s argued that the country is already in the process of transitioning to clean energy—to throw money at a process that’s already underway, his logic goes, would be a waste. “I’m not going to sit back and let anyone accelerate whatever the market’s changes are doing,” Manchin told CNN. (The New Republic pointed out that utilities are only adding renewable energy capacity at a rate of two percent per year, a pace too slow to meet climate goals.)

Now, attention has turned to a menu of options for squeezing as much carbon out of the economy as possible. Progressive lawmakers and allied climate groups have expressed some enthusiasm for increasing funding allocated to tax credits for solar and wind power to drive down the cost of renewable energy. “That’s the biggest piece of the puzzle,” Jamal Raad, the executive director of Evergreen Action, a climate think tank that worked closely with lawmakers on the bill’s climate provisions, tells me. Another idea gaining momentum is to replicate the incentives of the Clean Energy Payment Program with so-called “challenge grants” that would encourage states to create their own clean energy standards.

Schumer is discussing a menu of options with his Democratic colleagues and has expressed confidence there are good options to get to the targeted carbon reductions, Democratic sources familiar with the conversations said. There’s disagreement between lawmakers and advocates as to whether any other options can deliver the level of decarbonization benefits the Clean Energy Payment Program promised. “None of these are really CEPP alternatives,” Raad notes. “The goal is to get as close to that carbon reduction as possible.” 

Biden is still betting that his vision becomes reality. During a CNN town hall on Thursday night, he said he’s “presenting a commitment to the world” that the US will reach net-zero emissions on electric power by 2035 and “across the board by 2050 or before.” He promised that the $150 billion allocated to the Clean Energy Payment Program would be redistributed to other climate initiatives that would help meet that goal. Biden himself floated beefed-up clean energy tax credits, energy efficiency incentives, and infrastructure projects as alternatives. But the White House and congressional Democrats remain far from a deal. The party blew past a self-imposed Friday deadline to agree to a framework for the domestic spending bill.

“I urged the president, ‘Whatever the final state of this deal, we can’t walk away from 50 percent reduction by the end of this decade, or we’re off track and the world won’t take us seriously and we’ve got a planetary crisis,'” Huffman said. “He gets that, and he reaffirmed his commitment to that goal. But this is very unresolved on how you get there.”

Crisis planning is abstract...

I Played This Climate Change Game—and Lost Everything

The calculus of crisis planning is abstract—until you face it.

JOHN MORALES

This is not a game.

Regarding climate change, that much is abundantly clear. Even at a few tenths of a degree shy of the aspirational ceiling of 1.5 degrees C (about 2.7 degrees F) of warming above pre-industrial levels, the often-overwhelming impacts of extreme weather driven by the changing climate have hit hard in North America and beyond. During “our summer of hell,” as environmental author Jeff Goodell recently framed it in Rolling Stone, about a third of Americans have been hit by a weather disaster. We’ve had a killer heat dome in the Pacific Northwest, savage wildfires, devastating floods, and suffered a terrible toll from Hurricane Ida. Globally, a recent study showed that nearly 10,000 additional heat deaths per year can be directly attributed to human-induced global warming. And a comprehensive new report from the World Meteorological Organization calculated that disasters caused by weather have multiplied and are causing seven times more damage today than in the 1970s.

The silver lining is that despite a five-fold increase in disastrous weather events in the past half-century, the average number of daily deaths is down 75 percent. This is due to improved early warnings and better emergency management practices. Lives are being saved—but many are being ruined, nonetheless. Drought, floods, and storms displace thousands of people every year. Those that stay often endure significant uninsured losses, with communities hit so hard that they slip into local or regional economic depressions.

With a supercharged atmosphere making for chronic meteorological catastrophes, we need to move beyond short-fused disaster administration and quickly adopt best practices in climate risk management. A widely cited statistic about climate risk management: For every dollar invested in disaster resilience, society saves six dollars. But facts about humanitarian crises averted can feel abstract unless you face them, or at the very minimum role-play as someone who must confront them.

I did so myself. And I lost my beans.

Paying for Predictions is an experiential learning game designed for the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre by Boston University visiting fellows Pablo Suárez and Janot Mendler de Suárez. Players can gain an appreciation for the importance of preparedness and early action, the use of weather and climate projections, and disaster resilience and climate risk reduction. At a recent international climate forum organized by French nonprofit Météo et Climat, I joined other weather presenters from around the world in this eye-opening role-play activity.

I was told to think of myself as the elected leader of a district. I was given 10 beans—my district’s budget—and joined leaders from two other districts to form a country. Our country’s team started with a total budget of 30 beans. While beans could not be exchanged between players, I was allowed to contribute from my stash to the country’s preparedness budget to pay for collective mitigation and adaptation investments. But keep in mind that the winning players and teams are those with the most beans left in the end, so you want to be judicious about spending them.

The game consists of 10 rounds. Teams take turns rolling a green die hidden under a cup that represents regional rains. Each player is then expected to roll a white die which represents local district rainfall. If the sum on the dice is nine or lower, you can keep all your beans. But with any roll there is a 25 percent chance of hitting ten or higher, which for the purpose of the game represents a damaging flood disaster. And flooding will set you back four beans per player. That’s 40 percent of your district’s resources, with many rounds to go! If after a few rounds you end up with three beans or fewer and you can’t pay for the consequences of a flood, your district is deemed to be entering a humanitarian crisis.

And that’s where the lessons begin: Before rolling that second die, I was allowed to spend one bean on preparedness measures. Preparedness could take many forms, from early warnings, to positioning of aid in my district ahead of time, to procuring of insurance. If I rolled a 10 or more but had spent one bean on early preparedness, I would not lose any additional beans even if it flooded. But if I chose not to invest in preparedness and rolled a 10 or higher, I’d be hit with a four-bean disaster.

Knowing that I had to last 10 rounds, I feared acting in vain by paying one bean preparing for a disaster that was not likely to happen. After all, one bean is 10 percent of my budget. If I spent it, that money would be gone even if the weather remained sunny. But when I didn’t pay to prepare and was hit with the bad-luck roll of the dice that resulted in flooding, I regretted that I had failed to act early.

What if I had a chance to see what was on the green die before I rolled my white one? Meteorology and climate science allow us to “see” into the future. Investing in science could improve our weather and climate forecasts to make assessing the risk to our country easier. The team decided that it was worth investing in this science, and through a bidding process we were able to swap out the green die’s opaque cup for a clear one. This allowed me as district leader to see what the regional rains were “forecast” to be before deciding on preparedness expenditures. If the green die rolled a one, two, or three, I knew for a fact that there would be zero flooding in my district, even if I rolled a six on my white die. Investing in science cost me and my district a couple of beans, but the return on investment was huge at the local and national level.

Acting as a country, we were also later given the option to invest in disaster risk reduction in the form of reforestation. Planting many trees can reduce erosion and flooding even during excessive rainfall. While our team was asked to pay a few beans for this, the next time my district was hit with flooding I was only asked to turn over two of my beans instead of four. Another good investment!

In the game’s later rounds, a new and wicked twist was added. The green die was secretly replaced by an 8-sided die, representing how global warming has made extreme weather events more likely. Now the chance of rolling a ten or higher was 35 instead of 25 percent. Those countries that had not invested in prediction science were left in the dark and totally taken by surprise because the new climate-change-loaded-die was hidden. But at least those teams that had invested in disaster risk reduction would only lose two beans and not four, even if the likelihood of a flood in any district was higher.

I ended up with zero beans and more than one humanitarian crisis on my hands. Happiness after a couple of successful early rounds turned into anger and frustration as I realized that I should have known better and invested earlier in preparedness, disaster risk reduction, and science. Though even doing that would have been no guarantee that I’d end the game with any beans left. I was not alone—more than half of the players had no beans left at the end of the 10 rounds.

This role-playing exercise is no substitute for the real-life climate risk reduction decisions that policymakers are facing today. But it led to a real revelation for me.

Money (beans) spent on post-disaster relief and recovery was money that I no longer had to be spent on healthcare, education, and social programs. Once I started running low on beans, I had to think long and hard about investing in disaster risk reduction, or even science! It’s a predicament that eventually left the city, county, state, or nation that I was representing facing humanitarian crises and great hardships.

Individually, collectively, and across international borders we must invest in climate risk reduction to stop greenhouse gas pollution and adapt to a warming planet. Fear of acting in vain can no longer exist at this stage of the climate crisis. We must act swiftly and boldly. Acting too timidly won’t amount to a hill of beans.

Serious Threat

Climate Change Is a Serious Threat to America’s Financial System

It poses “credit and market risks” to banks, insurers, and pension plans, report notes.

ALEXANDER C. KAUFMAN

Climate change could bombard the US financial system on many fronts, and the nation’s growing dependence on natural gas for heating and electricity requires particular scrutiny as regulators scramble to catch up on the threat.

That’s the conclusion of a landmark report from the Financial Stability Oversight Council, the federal entity established after the Great Recession to guard against future economic disasters. It marks the first time the council has deemed climate change an “emerging threat” to the US economy since the council was created as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reforms of 2010.

“Are we behind? Of course we are,” a senior administration official on the council, who declined to be named on the record, said on a press call. “This is the starting gun going off for the US financial regulatory system.”

The assessment came just days after British regulators called on companies to disclose strategies to swiftly zero out planet-heating pollution and their European Union counterparts outlined plans to test banks’ ability to withstand climate-related shocks. Emphasizing the political challenges the US faces in confronting the crisis, the Biden administration’s plan to cut roughly one-third of the nation’s emissions appeared to die in Congress, setting policymakers scrambling for alternatives.

“This is the step we’re taking to catch up and put ourselves in a leadership role internationally, which is where we want to be,” said the staffer, who has worked at FSOC for 10 years. “And this is the way to do it.”

The myriad ways warming-fueled disasters, or hapless attempts to avert them, could upend the US economy unfold in dry, sober language across the report’s 133 pages.

Financial contagion could spread from the physical wounds of climate change. Extreme weather and flooding may render regions of the country too costly to insure, condemning entire communities—households, businesses and governments alike—to economic and financial precarity with unclear options. The mounting toll of physical damages could wipe out the income properties generate or destroy the value of assets used as collateral, “posing credit and market risks to banks, insurers, pension plans, and others,” the report states.

Another threat could come from the solution to climate change itself. With each passing month that pollution from burning fossil fuels and felling forests for cattle ranches increases, the speed of change that’s required to avert cataclysmic temperature rise climbs. If countries take divergent paths and fail to coordinate, it could “sow confusion or create large inefficiencies, thereby possibly straining the financial system.”

The rapid shifts could also quickly make previously valuable investments virtually worthless. “Delays and years of complacency eventually require larger, more disruptive policy adjustments … which would likely have more dramatic effects on economic activity and asset values.”

Coal, the report notes, is already widely viewed to be in irreversible decline, with 65% of US plants shutting down over the past decade. But in 2019, the US had nearly 200 gas-fired plants under construction. While natural gas produces less carbon than coal, it still spews tons of climate-changing pollution, including methane, which is an 86-times more potent heat trapper over a two-decade period than CO2.

Reaching the US goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 “would require sizable reductions in the use of natural gas,” the report warns, suggesting the value of gas assets could plummet even more chaotically than coal.

“A thorough assessment of the potential for stranded assets in these sectors should be a priority for financial institutions in their risk management processes and a component of a regulatory scenario analysis,” the report states. The senior official declined to comment further.

The report, which President Joe Biden called for in an executive order this spring, is “unprecedented” and “sends a strong signal to industry, to Wall Street, that regulators are waking up to this issue and taking it seriously,” said David Arkush, the managing director of the climate program at the consumer watchdog Public Citizen.

Still, he said, “It is extremely far short of what is needed. It almost reads to me like the memo that should have started this process in May when the president issued the executive order.”

The document could have offered more prescriptive solutions, including calling on the Federal Reserve to cap how much of an investor’s portfolio can include unmitigated fossil fuels or proposing banks that own risky oil and gas assets keep a certain amount of cash on hand, said Ben Cushing, the campaign manager of the Sierra Club’s fossil-free finance program.

“This report makes it clear that financial regulators understand the need for action to ensure that the climate crisis doesn’t cause the next financial crisis,” he said in an emailed statement. “However, by leaving out key risk-reduction tools, it is not treating the problem with the urgency it deserves.

Simon Johnson, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he was “optimistic that the needle is beginning to move.”

Asked whether the fact that US financial regulators are only beginning this process now, when the number of billion-dollar weather disasters increases each year and United Nations scientists say the emissions crisis has reached a “code red” level, the senior administration official said: “I reject that conclusion.”

“The whole purpose of this is to communicate the opposite,” the official said. “We are ready. Ready means we’re engaging in a significant way.”

Silver Lining?????

Joe Manchin’s Blatant Conflict of Interest Might Have a Silver Lining

But only if it creates an appetite to reform DC’s ethical cesspool.

PIPER MCDANIEL

Sen. Joe Manchin’s role in overhauling the spending bill has sparked national interest in reining in congressional conflicts of interest. The question is whether anything meaningful might come of it.

The Biden administration’s current predicament demonstrates what’s at stake: The ambition of enacting comprehensive climate action has been waylaid by two centrist senators. One of them, West Virginia Democrat Manchin, owns millions of dollars in coal industry stock and has received more donations from fossil fuel and energy companies so far this election cycle than any other senator.

Manchin has demanded a reduction in the size of the budget bill, from $3.5 trillion to $1.5 trillion. He specifically opposed the proposed Clean Electricity Performance Program, a $150 billion package of financial carrots and sticks designed to transition American industries from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

More than any other proposal, the CEPP was considered central to slashing the emissions of CO2 and methane—a more potent greenhouse gas—to pull the world back from the brink of climate catastrophe. Moreover, it would have slowly chipped away at fossil fuels, including coal, the industry that made Manchin and his family wealthy. But Manchin’s opposition killed the CEPP, and now Democrats are scrambling to remake the bill in a format acceptable to Manchin.

A politician controlling legislation that directly affects an industry their family profits from is “not illegal,” notes Craig Holman, an ethics lobbyist for the nonprofit group Public Citizen. “And it’s not a violation of congressional ethics rules. But it is a statement as to how pathetically weak congressional ethics rules are.”

Plenty of industries are governed by laws or codes of ethics that touch on financial conflicts. Under the Stark Law, doctors are forbidden from referring patients directly to outside medical services in which they hold a financial stake. Professionals certified by the American Bankers Association must agree to conduct their business affairs “in a manner that avoids a conflict of interest or the appearance of a conflict of interest.” 

Journalists, certainly at mainstream publications, are generally barred from accepting gifts from sources, or from writing about companies and industries in which they or any immediate family member holds a financial interest. Judges are ethically and legally bound to recuse themselves from cases that may affect their financial fortunes—and scandal erupts when, as of late, they fail to do so. 

The Democratic caucus recently had a chance to support a bill that might have prevented the Manchin situation, but they didn’t take advantage of it. In 2018, Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, a sweeping bill that would have tightened conflict-of-interest restrictions and prohibited members of Congress from owning or trading individual stocks—as the Federal Reserve demanded last week of its own senior officials. Even in the wake of the Trump administration’s brazen conflicts of interest—which prompted Walter Shaub, then director of the US Office of Government Ethics, to resign shortly after Trump took over—not a single member of Congress initially co-sponsored Warren’s bill.

Warren is reintroducing the bill, which Public Citizen helped draft, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) has introduced a House version, to which six other lawmakers—Reps. Ilhan Omar, John Sarbanes, Janice Schakowsky, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, Mark Pocan, and Eleanor Holmes Norton—have signed on.

At present, there is just one rule on the books governing the type of conflict Manchin faces, Holman explains, and it’s a narrow one. Lawmakers may not take any legislative action that would affect their businesses or investments solely. But they may act on legislation that affects a business sector even if they hold investments in that sector. “That’s exactly what Manchin is doing—trying to craft policies that benefit the coal industry generally, and will also personally benefit his wealth and the wealth of his family,” Holman says.  

Financial conflicts plague every corner of government, says Claire Finkelstein, professor at the University of Pennsylvania and founder and academic director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law. Congress is certainly no exception: “We’ve had case after case after case of members of Congress where we suddenly learn that they have stock or engage in transactions in areas relevant to their lawmaking. And it just keeps happening.” 

Take Georgia Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who lost her reelection bid last year. Loeffler was appointed to the Agriculture Committee despite owning  $5 million to $25 million worth of stock in companies that the committee oversees. (She later removed herself from the committee.) Loeffler was also investigated by the Department of Justice alongside Republican colleague James M. Inhofe and Democrat Dianne Feinstein for selling stocks after receiving a private briefing on the coronavirus early in the pandemic. The department did not pursue charges of insider trading because the lawmakers’ behavior was deemed legal.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi raised eyebrows by purchasing between $500,000 and $1 million in Tesla stock options in December 2020, a time when the EV sector stood to benefit from a Democratic expansion of renewable energy. According to her public disclosures, Pelosi also invested substantial sums in Apple and Disney. Pelosi’s purchases speak to the normalization of ethical lapses that many institutions won’t tolerate. “That’s a huge problem in and of itself, the absence of shock around conflicts of interest,” Finkelstein says. “It’s almost assumed that’s going to be the case.”

There are other ways to tackle conflicts, she adds, such as rigorously prosecuting lawmakers who violate insider trading laws, beefing up financial disclosure requirements, and increasing oversight. But “Congress would have to be willing to self-regulate, to say ‘we’re going to tie our own hands.’ Nobody else can do it, unfortunately.”

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have consistently proved reluctant to impose on themselves the same ethical standards that guide the judicial and executive branches. Reform efforts are scant, and only a handful have succeeded.

In response to Watergate, Congress passed rules, in 1978, that required public officials to disclose financial and employment activities of themselves and close family members. The Stock Act of 2012 barred top federal officials, including lawmakers from insider trading, and demanded their financial disclosures be made transparent and accessible. But in 2013, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) introduced a bill—which quickly passed—that rolled back the portions of the bill that made it convenient for members of the public to see the financial disclosures. 

But lawmakers have been violating even the weakened Stock Act. As NPR reported last month, the Campaign Legal Center filed ethics complaints stating that seven members of the House, including four Democrats, had failed to report stock trades. The findings, NPR reported, are “the latest example of a bipartisan trend that has emerged almost 10 years after Congress overwhelmingly passed a law to provide transparency and show lawmakers aren’t profiting from their jobs: Members of Congress are ignoring the disclosure law.”

The targets of the complaints include Republican Reps. Warren Davidson of Ohio, Lance Gooden of Texas, and Roger Williams of Texas, along with Democrats Cindy Axne of Iowa, Bobby Scott of Virginia, Tom Suozzi of New York, and Guam delegate Michael San Nicolas. Suozzi, the Campaign Legal Center alleged, failed to disclose roughly 300 transactions.

“With all reforms that I’ve been able to help push through Congress, it’s always in reaction to Congress being embarrassed by their own scandals,” Public Citizen’s Holman told me. That makes him somewhat hopeful that the Biden budget debacle will make ethics reform a higher priority: “Manchin undermining the global climate in order to gain another $20 million in his own pocket, something like that could help push through new changes.”

That damage is already done. The administration last week released intelligence reports that said climate change will exacerbate risks to national security interests and highlighted global problems that “no country will be spared from.” Next week, Biden will attend COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, where he will arrive with a package of watered-down legislation and possible executive orders that will likely fall far short of the heroic rhetoric with which his term began. Showing up with weak policies, experts predict, will undermine global climate efforts and American credibility at this pivotal summit.

If, as Holman suggests, party humiliation and voter disappointment are catalysts for ethics reform, Warren and Jayapal’s bill will stand a slightly better chance. Then again, they’d have to get Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema on board with that one, too.