Jay Godwin/Planet Pix/Zuma

Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as secretary of state, died today of cancer, her family said in a statement. She was 84.

Born in Prague to a Jewish family that converted to Catholicism to avoid persecution during World War II, Albright immigrated to the United States in 1948. As ambassador to the United Nations during Bill Clinton’s first term, she sparred with Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, blocking his bid for a second term. Around this time, the United States failed to take decisive action against the genocide in Rwanda, which Albright later called “my deepest regret from my years in public service.”

As secretary of state during Clinton’s second term, she worked to resolve conflicts in the Balkans, promoted NATO expansion, and was an early proponent of US military action in Iraq—although she opposed the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion.

In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “During her tenure,” the announcement of her prize states, “she worked to enlarge NATO and helped lead the Alliance’s campaign against terror and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, pursued peace in the Middle East and Africa, sought to reduce the dangerous spread of nuclear weapons, and was a champion of democracy, human rights, and good governance across the globe.”

White House/Zuma

Last week, President Biden approved a budget that included no additional Covid spending. None.

The consequences will be drastic. A federal program that reimburses health care providers for vaccinating, testing, and treating uninsured patients is set to end by April 5. The government will scale back its allocations of monoclonal antibodies. And the White House just announced that it won’t have enough funding to purchase fourth vaccine doses for all Americans.

How can this happen after all we’ve learned? Both political parties are responsible: President Joe Biden had proposed $22.5 billion in additional Covid funding, while many Republicans opposed any further Covid spending at all. A coalition of Democrats then refused the alternative option of repurposing individual states’ unspent pandemic relief funds. Add in concerns about the budget deficit, and, in the end, Covid efforts ended up with no funding at all.

But a still-mutating virus isn’t bound by the government’s whims. As Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic last week, “Before every surge has ended, pundits have incorrectly predicted that the current wave would be the last, or claimed that lifesaving measures were never actually necessary.” Public health experts warn that the coronavirus is not yet endemic, and that it’s too early for the government to get complacent.

The government’s failure to include Covid relief funding in its budget could have serious repercussions down the line. It could discourage the roughly 27 million uninsured Americans from seeking treatment if they become sick with Covid. It will thwart the United States’ attempt to export vaccines to countries that still need them, potentially allowing new variants to emerge as the virus continues to circulate. And it could leave the United States unprepared for the Omicron subvariant that is already increasing case counts in Europe.

We’ve been here before. Covid case counts are plummeting. Masks are coming off. Many yearn to put the pandemic behind us. That doesn’t mean we have the luxury of not preparing for what we know is potentially coming.

It seems that tests, vaccines, and hospital beds are always available when you don’t need them, and never when you do. Thanks to our collective failure to plan ahead, we’re screwing ourselves over in the event of another Covid surge. Now, all we can do is cross our fingers and hope it doesn’t come to that.

Andrew Spear/Getty

The Republican Party is expected to win the 2022 midterms. Mostly, this has been pegged to discontent with the Democratic Party and the fact that the president’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections. And that has left it unclear what the Republicans’ policy agenda actually constitutes. While House Republicans have said they want to implement a redux of the 1994 “Contract with America” (they’re getting help from original architect, and bad person, Newt Gingrich), it’s unclear if that’s the policy of the party. Mitch McConnell told a reporter that he’d “let [them] know” when he had figured out the Senate Republican agenda. And Florida Sen. Rick Scott’s plan—while ticking traditional Republican boxes of xenophobia and hatred of the poor—has not been accepted by McConnell.

But, last night, we got a step closer to figuring out the core of the Republican message in 2022. Here’s a video that explains the basics of the policies:

Last night’s Ohio GOP Senate debate: “Do you think … for the betterment of the Republican Party it’s time for Donald Trump to stop talking about the 2020 election and move on?”

Just one candidate, Matt Dolan, raised his hand. Timken, Mandel, Gibbons and Vance stared ahead. pic.twitter.com/h4UGOhOMVv

— Natalie Allison (@natalie_allison) March 22, 2022

I found that helpful.

It outlines the fundamentals of the GOP’s platform: Four of five members of the party don’t believe in democracy enough to admit that Donald Trump lost in 2020. The imagery is well placed here. It leaves one Republican waving his hand in a room of people staring ahead, silent. That’s just enough space to pretend the party has good folks there, fighting back. Usually, news highlights the loud, even bombastic, defenses of Trump by budding authoritarians. But this clip is a more solid explainer. It’s the silent complicity of adults trying to stand very still.

It’s particularly interesting because this video is from a GOP Senate debate in Ohio. As happened often in 2020, the race has been haunted by the question: Who will Trump endorse? This groveling has been, it seems, fun for the former president. And, as the Associated Press noted, the race is the most indicative in the country—with all the candidates gleefully sucking up—of how much the GOP has changed.

The current frontrunner is Mike Gibbons, former co-chair of Trump’s campaign in Ohio and a businessman who dabbled in racism against Asians in a podcast in 2013. But he has gotten less attention on the national level than the two can-you-believe-they-went-kind-of-fascist? candidates: J.D. Vance and Josh Mandel.

Vance, backed by the Silicon Valley money of Peter Thiel, had a Washington Post profile wondering how he kind of stopped believing in democracy. (It used his beard to explain it?) And Mandel got the Politico treatment, in which 75 people told the publication he had “been nothing if not an eager reader and rider of political currents.” (I have to mention here that Mandel and Gibbons squared up at another debate in a near fight, by the way.) 

In any case, the gist of both Vance and Mandel is that, at the end of the day, people running for the US Senate will do anything to get power. Each right-wing radicalization can come down to the simple fact that a lot of Americans like what they’re doing. Vance and Mandel thought it would help them get elected. So, they went for it. Anti-democracy can be a career move, too, after all.

While both Vance and Mandel trail Gibbons, they are outpolling the one person who raised their hand: Matt Dolan.

To be clear about a small point here, it’s not even that these Republicans are saying it would run contrary to the “betterment” of the country for Trump to drop his continuing coup chatter. It is that they are afraid to even say the party should “move on” from the last election for political gain.

No one asked them to concede Trump lost. No one asked them to say he broke democracy. All they’d have to say is something like: “Real people care about real issues—kitchen table! meat and potatoes! honest folks!—and I want to talk about that to win in 2022.” Even this dirge of candidate-speak is just too much for them though.

A girl on a train from Kyiv that arrived in Przemysl, Poland in March.Picture Alliance/Getty

More than 10 million people in Ukraine have been forced to flee their homes, the United Nation’s High Commissioner on Refugees said on Sunday. This staggering number, and other new estimates from the UN, quantify the scale of the exodus of Ukrainians from what was a thriving and tranquil country up until the Russian army invaded, unprovoked, less than a month ago. 

About 3.3 million of this 10 million have left the country and become refugees in neighboring nations. More than 1.5 million of those refugees are children, the UN’s children’s fund, UNICEF, said earlier this week—amounting to almost one child per second leaving Ukraine. “Every day in Ukraine from the start of the war, more than 75,000 children have become refugees,” a UNICEF spokesman said at a press briefing. “Every single minute, 55 children have fled their country. That is, a Ukrainian child has become a refugee almost every single second since the start of the war.”

Ukrainian refugees have scattered through nearby countries in Eastern Europe. The majority, about 2 million, have gone to Poland, while half a million have fled to Romania. Smaller numbers have fled to Hungary, Moldova, and Slovakia. About 184,000 have gone to Russia.

Millions of other Ukrainians have been displaced within their own country, the chief of UNHCR Filippo Grandi said on Sunday on Twitter.

Among the responsibilities of those who wage war, everywhere in the world, is the suffering inflicted on civilians who are forced to flee their homes.

The war in Ukraine is so devastating that 10 million have fled — either displaced inside the country, or as refugees abroad.

— Filippo Grandi (@FilippoGrandi) March 20, 2022

The European Union has already enacted friendly legislation to ease the transition of Ukrainian refugees: One week into the Russian invasion, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that Ukrainians would be given rights to live and work in the EU for three years. (The US has also offered some Ukrainians temporary protected status.) 

The EU’s response to Ukrainian refugees has earned accolades around the globe, but it has also surfaced reminders of the less friendly treatment that Syrian refugees received in some European countries when they attempted to flee war within their own borders. This included pledges of hundreds of millions in EU funds to crack down on refugees arriving in Greece, and instances of officials in Hungary using tear gas and water canons on refugees.

A file photo showing a healthcare worker at a hospital in Harlem, New York City.Anthony Behar/Sipa via AP

With the Omicron surge finally cresting in the U.S., new data has begun to emerge showing the scale of the damage it caused—and the different populations it hit the hardest, especially among historically marginalized Americans.

On March 18, the CDC released a new Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which found that the racial disparities that have manifested throughout the pandemic persisted through its most recent wave. According to the data, hospitalization rates among non-Hispanic Black adults during Omicron’s peak was nearly four times as high as rates among white adults. To arrive at its conclusions, CDC investigators gathered and analyzed data on a representative sample of adult patients, constituting about 8 percent of those hospitalized from July 1, 2021 to January 31, 2022. 

Racial disparities in hospitalizations and deaths have cropped up in virtually every stage of the pandemic. From 2019 to 2020, life expectancy among Black and Latino Americans dropped by three years. While no single factor can account for these differences, experts have speculated that the gap stems from a disproportionate lack of access to healthcare among Americans of color, racism in the medical system, and increased rates of vaccine hesitancy. 

The report also found that booster shots played a much more significant role in keeping down hospitalization rates than was initially expected. The rate among adults who received boosters was three times times lower than the rate among unboosted adults and 12 times lower than unvaccinated adults. Counties and public health experts have condemned the federal government for muddled messaging on boosters during the start of the Omicron wave, which forced many Americans attempting to determine their third-dose eligibility to sort through a whirlwind of contradictory rulings. 

Kevin Dietsch/ZUMA

Were you under the impression that Mike Pence could join Donald Trump’s all but confirmed reelection bid? Probably not! For both men, and for yourself, that would take an enormous, Herculean bout of political amnesia to forget that the former president’s supporters once sought to hang Pence—and that Trump seemed very chill with those threats.

Well, Trump has effectively made it official, telling the Washington Examiner this week that he very likely wouldn’t pick Pence to be his running mate. “I don’t think the people would accept it,” he explained, citing Pence’s refusal to overturn the 2020 election results as the defining catalyst for the break-up.

“Mike and I had a great relationship except for the very important factor that took place at the end,” he continued. “We had a very good relationship. I haven’t spoken to him in a long time.”

“I still like Mike,” Trump added.

Pence is likely to welcome the latest remarks. In recent weeks, the former VP, who is reportedly mounting his own presidential bid, has signaled a break with Trump, particularly as his pro-Putin views have become problematic for Trumpist Republicans. “There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin,” Pence told GOP donors days after Trump called the Russian leader a “genius.”

Bloomberg/Bloomberg

It finally happened: For the first time since 2018, after months of murmurs, the Federal Reserve rose interest rates.

As I wrote previously, it has been clear for the past few weeks that the Fed would begin raising rates. For most of the pandemic, the rate has been near zero. Raising rates is a big deal, and it could (likely will!) have material effects on your life. There’s a reason that the Wall Street Journal has it splashed on its website’s homepage in aggressively large font, replacing its ongoing coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

The idea behind Wednesday’s move is to combat inflation. Prices have risen far above the targets set by the central bank, causing particular strain at (as you may have heard) the gas pump. A traditional view of interest rates is that raising them is monetary policy that helps curb inflation. In the speak of someone who doesn’t droll over stock returns, this means the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates to try to stop prices from increasing but in doing so it could also slow down the whole economy.

In this way, the central bank is edging a dangerous path. Yes, raising rates could help cool inflation, but it would likely do so by raising unemployment—which could harm workers, cause suffering (among a smaller set of people than are hit by inflation, but much more acutely), and wreck the economic recovery that has bounced us back from Covid-19’s shock.

Worth noting that the Fed *still* expects U.S. economic output at the end of 2024 to be *higher* than what they had been projecting before we got hit by a global pandemic and European war. pic.twitter.com/wySxcJea2X

— Matthew C. Klein (@M_C_Klein) March 16, 2022

Here’s the wonk version of Jerome Powell, Fed chair, basically saying we’re trying to stop prices rising without ruining workers’ lives: “The plan is to restore price stability while also sustaining a strong labor market. That is our intention and we believe we can do that. But we have to restore price stability.”

Quick thread from leave on why, in addition to supporting the administrative and legislative efforts to get inflation under control, I think it's wise for the Fed to be moving to liftoff today, cautiously and not losing sight of full employment, told through four graphics. 1/9

— Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) March 16, 2022

Some economists, even on the left, are hopeful we can edge interest rates up without hiking them aggressively. But this kind of action has a dark history. As I’ve written before, in the ’70s, the Fed was part of ushering in an era of austerity in the name of fixing inflation. We’ve barely peaked, as I wrote in a cover story for the January + February issue, at what a tiny bit of worker power looks like when the government doesn’t set things up in the traditional neoliberal mode that has dominated for the past five decades. We’re now risking going right back.

"Right now you have a very tight labor market, to an unhealthy level. Moving down the number of job openings would mean less upward pressure on wages. Less labor shortage, as we're hearing from companies across the economy."

— George Pearkes (@pearkes) March 16, 2022

The bottom line: We’re at a precarious moment. The Fed, in its own technocratic way, is deciding much about how the economy functions—both for bankers and everyday workers. While it explains itself in the language of finance, often clouding the decisions, it’s worth keeping a close eye on what happens next. It was the Covid-19 emergency economic measures that helped us through the crisis, but as the pandemic becomes less of an emergency, will we just enter a new crisis? Just a “normal” one.

In many ways, what happens next will be determined by Powell. There are at least some indications that he could move aggressively to tamp inflation, even if it hurts workers. That’s scary. That could mean he is going to be like Paul Volcker—the Fed chair in the 1970s who had a recession named after him. Still, Powell’s entire tenure as chair has defied the expectations of many. We’ll have to wait and see.

Raskin at a February confirmation hearing.Ken Cedeno/Cnp/ZUMA

In a political era dominated by Donald Trump’s assault on democracy, it’s easy to feel nostalgia for the normal politics of just a few years ago. Of course those politics remain alive and well and, as they did before, continue to do their own sort of damage to the country and the planet. This week’s example is the defeat of Sarah Bloom Raskin to be the Federal Reserve’s top bank regulator because she believes the United States’ central bank shouldn’t ignore climate change when making decisions. It’s a reminder that while politics as usual wasn’t as violent or immediately threatening, neither was it proving to be a workable system sustaining our democracy or planet. If the country is the proverbial frog, then outside money and special interests are the water being slowly warmed to a boil. 

Raskin pulled her name from contention once Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) joined every Republican in opposing her nomination. “Sarah was subject to baseless attacks from industry and conservative interest groups,” President Joe Biden said Tuesday afternoon upon withdrawing her nomination. (Just like the good old days!)

A former Federal Reserve governor and deputy Treasury secretary, Raskin was well qualified for the job. But she also believes in climate change, and in the Fed’s responsibility not to exacerbate, within the confines of its decision-making authority, this existential threat to the planet. In 2020, she urged the Fed not to prop up fossil fuel companies as part of the governments’ coronavirus economic rescue spending. “The Fed is ignoring clear warning signs about the economic repercussions of the impending climate crisis by taking action that will lead to increases in greenhouse gas emissions at a time when even in the short term, fossil fuels are a terrible investment,” she wrote in the New York Times. “U.S. regulators can—and should—be looking at their existing powers and considering how they might be brought to bear on efforts to mitigate climate risk,” she wrote last year. So, naturally, the fossil fuel industry opposed her nomination. Manchin, who comes from a coal state and is close to the industry, cited her energy beliefs in opposing her nomination.

Republicans also argued that Raskin would exceed her authority to go after the fossil fuel industry. “President Biden was literally asking for senators to support a central banker who wanted to usurp the Senate’s policymaking power for herself,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell argued. It’s one thing to argue that the Fed shouldn’t be setting climate policy, but the argument that it should do nothing is also a kind of climate policy—just a much worse one. 

Republicans saw a few other blemishes on Raskin’s resume, some more admirable than others. She’s a believer in regulating banks, which made her unsuitable to Republicans, even to fill a position that regulates banks. (Republicans have in fact only once agreed to confirm a nominee to this position—a Trump pick—which was created through the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform aimed at preventing a repeat of the 2008 financial crash.) Raskin had also done private sector work that raised red flags, including surrounding an incident when she put in a call to the Fed, her former employer, on behalf of a technology company where she sat on the board. The company, Trust Reserve, subsequently got an account at the Fed, a boon for its business and for the $1.5 million in stocks that Raskin held as a result of working with it.

The revolving door is also an unsavory yet common part of politics as usual. Meanwhile, the Trumpist threat to democracy, as demonstrated by a violent assault on the US Capitol, is attention grabbing and immediate. But Raskin and her rejection remind us that the way things generally used to—and still do—work isn’t a workable solution for the country or the planet either.

I feel like the prehistoric sun-worshippers would be with me on this one.Andrew Matthews/PA Wire/Zuma

There’s one thing we should all agree on: Early sunsets in the winter are terrible.

The sun simply should not set at 4:30 p.m., before the average 9-to-5 worker leaves the office. No sunsets before 5 p.m., period. For the love of God, end our winter misery and give us those glorious afternoon sun rays.

Literally everyone in the Senate agrees with me. This afternoon, the upper chamber of our esteemed government passed, by unanimous consent, a measure to make Daylight Saving Time permanent year round. The Sunshine Protection Act promises that you’ll never have to adjust your clock again. It will also mean more afternoon light in the winter—plus fewer transition-related heart attacks and strokes.

Daylight Saving Time was first proposed by Benjamin Franklin as a way to conserve candles in the summer. (I’m partial to old Ben—he became my hometown’s namesake when he refused to buy the townspeople the church bell they wanted and, “sense being preferable to sound,” gave them a bunch of books instead.) DST was observed in the US in the summer to conserve energy during the world wars, but our annual practice of springing forward and falling back wasn’t permanently established until the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Now, after more than five decades, is finally the time to agree to bring that glorious after-work sunlight into the winter months.

Still, the support of senators from all 50 states apparently isn’t enough for a lot of people. Some say that winter sucks no matter how the clocks are set. I can’t argue with that.

But then there are the contrarians who think changing the clocks is a good thing. The most prominent is probably Josh Barro, who has written about our experiment with year-round DST in 1974 and concluded that “people hated it.” Who knows? Maybe people were opposed because it was a Nixon policy. It was the ’70s. They didn’t know any better. (We also have tools in 2022 that we lacked 50 years ago—namely, computers. One in four Americans works from home full time. Those dark mornings will be a lot easier to handle in your PJs.)

Another argument against DST is that it will make religious practices like Jews’ sunrise prayers less convenient. Jews also have a pretty famous religious practice observed before sunset on Fridays, and year-round DST would remove the burden of them having to rush home from work in the winter. You take what you can get. Another solution that doesn’t involve not seeing the sun for months? Flexible work hours and expanded work-from-home options for people whose professions permit it.

The most annoying argument I saw is that kids will have to walk to school in the dark in the winter. I present to you myself waiting for the school bus in the dark at 6:58 a.m. in 2013.

Waiting for the school bus and the sun hasn't risen yet pic.twitter.com/EyiyiBmUvu

— Abigail Weinberg (@abigailweinberg) October 30, 2013

Not only do many kids already do this (see: me), but there’s a simple solution that would be much less disruptive to parents than two years of at-home schooling: start the school day an hour later. Kids need the extra sleep, anyway.

Finally, my editor, an absolute fool, has one more argument against year-round DST. He masochistically enjoys waking up early to run before work. He thinks that post-work activities—like drinking in a bar—are best enjoyed after sundown.

I run after work, because I’m a normal human being. And I won’t dignify his anti-daylight-drinking stance with a response.

So, kvetch all you want. If Congress can make it happen, I’ll enjoy it while it lasts.

Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

There is no shortage of people whose lives have been upended by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Nearly 3 million Ukrainians have had to flee their country. More than 1,000 of them have been killed. Tragedies of this magnitude affect every corner of our interconnected world and demand, at best, a healthy dose of empathy and, at worst, some kind of reality check.

Unless you are Chelsea, the London soccer club owned—until recently—by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who tried (and failed) to pull off one of the most callous moves of sports bullshit in recent memory today. 

First, some context. In 2003, Abramovich bought the English football club Chelsea. In the years after, his goal and timeline were clear: “World domination by 2014.” And, basically, it has worked.

Over the last twenty or so years, Abramovich has poured money into Chelsea. His wealth has transformed it from another contender in the English soccer pyramid to a perennial champion. Chelsea have won 18 major trophies since then, the most of any English club during that time. And it’s redefined how football works. Abramovich’s fortune—built from Putin’s kleptocracy—set the model for a slew of nation-states to buy football clubs. Just ask Manchester City, or Paris Saint-Germain, or Newcastle. (Or, actually, don’t ask Newcastle: Their manager wouldn’t even answer if the killing of 81 people in Saudi Arabia was wrong because, well, Newcastle is now basically owned by Saudi Arabia.)

This rush of other nation-states into football has somewhat dulled Chelsea’s supremacy. But not too much. They are currently champions of Europe. Their last major trophies was just a few months ago, back in February. On that day, as Abramovich looked down from the stands, the club won the FIFA Club World Cup, completing “the lot” under the Russian—they’d won every single major trophy during his reign.

Less than two weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine. And since then, it’s all gone to shit.

Abramovich’s ties to Putin have always been hard to write about. As David Klion describes in an excellent profile in Jewish Currents:

The reserved, gray-bearded Abramovich is notoriously litigious toward critics who seek to detail his close ties to Putin. Last year, he successfully sued the British journalist Catherine Belton, who claimed in her 2020 book Putin’s People that the Russian president dictated Abramovich’s major purchases, including his decision to buy Chelsea. He also extracted an apology from a British newspaper for calling him a “bag carrier” for the Russian president.

But, since the invasion, Abramovich’s free reign in London came to an end. After intense pressure, the British government finally took action.

Last week, the United Kingdom sanctioned Abramovich, meaning his various assets, including Chelsea, were effectively frozen. With its financial backer in legal limbo, Chelsea was permitted to keep playing games and paying its players, but could not sell tickets or merchandise. 

Now, here’s the part where, if you are Chelsea, you eat it. You take the hit and move on. You’ve lived and been rewarded—as fans and as a club—by the money that is fueling a war and you admit, hey, that was fucked up. 

But, no. They did not do that. Chelsea instead acted like idiots. They drew a line in the sand over a domestic cup match this weekend against Middlesbrough, a club in the second division of English soccer. The club sent out a public request that Middlesborough not invite their fans, too. “It is important for the competition that the match against Middlesbrough goes ahead, however it is with extreme reluctance that we are asking the FA board to direct that the game be played behind closed doors for matters of sporting integrity,” read a statement on Chelsea’s website.

Oh, an unfair advantage? Of having less fans than the other side? That’s an insane statement from  Chelsea, a club still (technically) owned by a Russian apparatchik, a club that last year tried to launch a breakaway league, a club with quite possibly the most shameless fans on Earth—that now suddenly cares about “sporting integrity.” Give me a break!  As Steve Gibson, the Middlesbrough chairman, said: “Chelsea and sporting integrity do not belong in the same sentence.”

Chelsea’s appeal was so remarkably tone-deaf that it did something not even Abramovich’s billions could do: make Boris Johnson’s government look good! In response to the club’s bizarre demand, an anonymous UK official told Politico that, in short, Chelsea should get lost.

NEW: UK Govt condemns @ChelseaFC statement in extremely strong terms pic.twitter.com/KY27VLAY19

— Alex Wickham (@alexwickham) March 15, 2022

Get lost, they did. After “constructive talks” with the FA, England’s governing authority for professional football, Chelsea quietly rescinded its request. 

With apologies to the many fans who were dying to watch the Blues take on the eighth-ranked squad in the EFL Championship, there are bigger problems in the world. Take a cue from your government and “spend less time” worrying about one game and more time rooting for your team to not be run by a warmonger. 

The best kind of sporting integrity is not punishing your opponent for your oligarch owner’s bill finally coming due. 

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty

On Sunday, exactly two years after Covid was declared a national emergency, former president Barack Obama has caught the virus, he announced via Twitter:

I just tested positive for COVID. I’ve had a scratchy throat for a couple days, but am feeling fine otherwise. Michelle and I are grateful to be vaccinated and boosted, and she has tested negative.

It’s a reminder to get vaccinated if you haven’t already, even as cases go down.

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) March 13, 2022

This is a breaking news post. We’ll update it with new information as needed.

People protest the possibility of a citizenship question on the census in 2019.J. Scott Applewhite/File/AP

Advocates for a fair census feared this would happen: The nation’s 2020 headcount undercounted Black, Hispanic, and Native American residents of the US, while white people and Asian Americans were overcounted, according to a Census Bureau report released Thursday.

The overall population count was largely accurate, despite the difficulty of tallying people during a pandemic. Among the ethnic groups that were undercounted, Hispanics stood out: They were omitted at more than three times the rate they were in 2010. The census impacts everything from the locations of schools and grocery stores to our congressional maps and the distribution of hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding. An undercount in a population can mean a decade of diminished economic and political power.

The 2020 census was plagued not only by a pandemic, but by confusion over former President Trump’s desire for a citizenship question, which immigrant rights groups feared could lead to an undercount among undocumented people. The Constitution mandates a headcount of all people permanently residing in the United States, regardless of citizenship status.

The Census Bureau calculates undercounts by analyzing government records and performing extensive surveys of 10,000 census blocks. It then compares these datasets to the existing census numbers. Overcounts could result from people being counted twice or the accidental inclusion of dead people. Undercounts represent people who have been passed over entirely.

The new report tells how accurate census data is nationally. State-level data are set to be released this summer.

Paul Hennessy/ZUMA

The false narrative of rampant voter fraud defouling US elections has been around for decades. But fueled in large part by Donald Trump’s persistent lies about the 2020 presidential election, which he lost, the myth of voter fraud appears to continually be reaching an apotheosis, only to pass it.

Now, enter another dystopian turn: Election cops. The country’s first election police force is poised to make its debut in Governor Ron DeSantis’ Florida.

The state’s GOP-controlled legislature on Wednesday approved a bill that includes a measure to create the “Office of Election Crimes and Security,” which will hire election investigators that aren’t sworn officers of the law, in order to crack down on voter fraud at the ballot box. According to CNN, the squad will have the power to launch independent investigations “into allegations of election law violations or election irregularities in this state.” Voting organizations found in violation of Florida’s already stringent election laws will have their fine caps increased from $1,000 to a staggering $50,000.

Critics say the plan is a recipe for disaster that’s all but certain to intimidate voters and suppress the vote. But it’s also a curious one for DeSantis, considering his own praise for how the 2020 election was conducted. “The way Florida did it, I think inspires confidence, I think that’s how elections should be run,” the Florida Republican had said at the time. Only three instances of voter fraud were identified in the state—and two of the cases involved registered Republicans.

But as my colleague Ari Berman has reported, the exceedingly low instances of voter fraud haven’t stopped the GOP, let alone DeSantis, from adopting extreme voting measures around the country. Thanks to DeSantis, who is widely expected to run for president, we can now add an election police force to the list.

John Raoux/AP

Hey, I’m about to say a series of things that makes it feel like you have lived past the point of the world making sense—maybe even gives you the creeping concern democracy (or at the very least America) is, as Lou Reed sang, “done.” I apologize.

Anyway: The former president (the one from the violent attempted coup and leader of the ongoing effort to enshrine minority rule via legalese) went on a YouTube podcast called “Full Send,” which focuses on the UFC and masculinity, to talk about the war in Ukraine.

On the show—titled “Donald Trump on WW3, Talking to Putin and Joe Rogan!“—he said that the war would never have happened if he were still president. And then it segues into talking about how windmills are bad.

Here’s the clip:

OMG I’m dying!!! On a UFC podcast today, Trump is asked how he sees the war in Ukraine playing out and he launches into a riff about windmills! pic.twitter.com/S2nV6hLIbP

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) March 10, 2022

Yeah, it’s weird.

But to connect the dots (which Trump does not), Trump is basically getting at the idea of energy independence from Russia. Gas prices are spiking because of our reliance, and the world’s, on Russian fossil fuel. (It’s not helped by the United Arab Emirates seeming to collude with their fellow oil barons.) In response, many on the left have noted that this is a good example of how we need to switch to a greener economy—which is a compact way of saying it’d be nice if the entire economy did not rely on something causing climate change (which is in the process of wrecking the world) and that also empowers oligarch regimes (who are attempting to speed up that whole world ruination process).

The thing is, despite that tangential connection, and despite this being really weird—and kind of funny, I guess, if you don’t think too much about the fact that he could still be president—Donald Trump actually does this a lot. He is obsessed with windmills.

You know what he did in one of his speeches after he was impeached in 2019? He talked about windmills. “I never understood wind,” Trump said at the time. “I know windmills very much, I have studied it better than anybody.” He went on to talk about how they kill birds. 

And it wasn’t the first time. Before that, in April 2019, Trump talked about how wind turbine noise “causes cancer.” (There is no evidence of this.) In 2019, the Washington Post ran down the longer history “of Donald Trump’s feud with his one true nemesis: Windmills.” (Nice photoshop here of him looking like Don Quixote.)

This is a consistent villain he will critique. Putin: not as consistent on the critiques. But a windmill? Donald Trump will talk shit about a windmill.

Starbucks Workers United members celebrate a victory after watching the union vote count in Mesa, Arizona, last month.Alexandra Buxbaum/AP

Starbucks workers at three more Buffalo-area stores voted to unionize on Wednesday afternoon. The votes were close. The union won by a 15-12 margin at two locations and a 8-7 margin at the third store.

Starbucks Workers United, an SEIU affiliate, has now won six of the seven elections that have been held since December. In total, workers at 126 Starbucks locations across dozens of states have petitioned for union representation.

After using progressive branding to become a $100 billion company, Starbucks has resorted to an aggressive union-busting campaigns to try to prevent its workers from organizing. In the lead up to Wednesday’s vote workers at the Depew, New York location said the company used aggressive tactics: scheduling pro-union workers for opening and closing shifts during the same week and subjecting employees to frequent surveillance from out-of-state managers. 

Starbucks has taken their union busting campaign to a new level for the next 3 Buffalo stores preparing for a union election. They changed their strategy from playing the ‘nice guy’ to waging psychological warfare on partners. Here’s what’s going on at the Depew location:

— SBWorkersUnited (@SBWorkersUnited) December 14, 2021

The three Buffalo-area locations asked the National Labor Relations Board to hold union elections four months ago. Like at other locations, Starbucks responded by using lawyers from Littler Mendelson, a firm well known for its union-busting work, to delay the elections as the company tried to undermine support for unionization. That led to the votes at the three Buffalo-area locations being impounded last month. They were finally counted on Wednesday. 

Colin Cochran, a barista at the Walden & Anderson store in Buffalo, said in a statement that Starbucks closed the location for two months and hired more than 20 new workers after workers petitioned for union representation. “They upended our store in every way, scared and divided partners, and demonized those of us who believe that we deserve better,” Cochran added. “And we still won.”

As I wrote last month, describing the expansion of the union drive to the company’s flagship stores, the pandemic and the initial victories at another Buffalo-area Starbucks locations in early December have been turning points for many of the company’s workers.

[Melissa Slabaugh’s] perspective shifted during the pandemic, when the Seattle Roastery ran on skeleton crews as colleagues got sick with Covid-19 and managers refused to reduce the store’s hours. She internalized how degrading it could be to hold one of the supposedly low-skilled positions that lead to being treated as dispensable. Then there’s the perennial frustration of working as a bartender at a place where customers are not allowed to tip via credit card. Sam LaGow was similarly excited to join the New York Roastery after a few years at a Starbucks off Union Square. The labor shortages and other stresses of working in food service during a pandemic got to him, too.

But for both, the idea of forming a union seemed impossible. Buffalo changed that. LaGow started seeing how unions could protect service workers, not just people in industries like construction. Slabaugh realized unions weren’t reserved for people like her mom, a teacher. Their colleagues, who skew young and left, were quickly coming to the same conclusion.

Wilfredo Lee/AP

The Florida state Senate voted Tuesday to approve a bill that would ban discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade classrooms. The bill, having already passed in the state House of Representatives, now heads to the desk of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is expected to sign it into law.

Most of the bill is innocuous fluff, outlining parents’ rights to access their students’ medical records. This buries the offending bit, which reads:

Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.

DeSantis has been very upset that people are calling the bill “Don’t Say Gay.” But how else would you describe the effect of the above clause?

The bill also specifies how parents may bring a lawsuit against the school district if they believe their rights have been violated. Critics fear that the vagueness of the phrase “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate” could lead to superfluous lawsuits while creating uncertainty for students and teachers of all grade levels about how much discussion of LGBTQ issues the law permits.

Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’ press secretary, has been tweeting her defense of the bill non-stop. This weekend, she caused an uproar among liberals when she referred to the legislation as the “Anti-Grooming Bill,” implying that discussions of gender identity or sexual orientation with kids were tantamount to child abuse. “If you’re against the anti-Grooming bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4- to 8-year-old children,” she wrote. “Silence is complicity. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn’t make the rules.” (Please read my colleague Ali Breland’s fantastic essay on why right-wingers are obsessed with pedophilia.)

This is just the latest in a series of Republican-backed “culture war” bills that seek to legislate problems that don’t exist. While health care consistently ranks among the top issues for Florida’s aging populace, DeSantis & co. continue stoking the flames of issues that matter only to Twitter addicts, to no one’s benefit.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo and his partner in crime, Gov. Ron DeSantisJoe Cavaretta/South Florida Sun Sentinel/TNS/Zuma

Contrary to both good sense and the CDC’s advice, the Florida Department of Health plans to be the first to recommend against vaccinating healthy children for Covid.

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who has promoted hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin while remaining publicly skeptical of Covid vaccines, made the announcement at a roundtable discussion with Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis this afternoon.

“We’re kind of scraping at the bottom of the barrel, particularly with healthy kids, in terms of actually being able to quantify with any accuracy and any confidence the even potential of benefit,” he said. In reality, the Pfizer vaccine has been found to be 91 percent effective in preventing symptomatic infections in children 5 and older.

Children have always been at lower risk of hospitalization and death from Covid than adults, but the arguments against vaccinating them amount to little more than fear (ironically for Ladapo) of an extremely rare inflammation of the heart more likely to be caused by the coronavirus itself. Plus, kids can likely still carry the virus and spread it to adults. More than a harsh rebuke of established scientific knowledge, Florida’s decision is, like the state’s Don’t Say Gay bill, a politics of grievance paraded as one of common sense. Science will always have doubts. But using those quirks to advocate for policies that harm others doesn’t make sense. That is, unless the only data you care about comes in the form of polls.

Evan Vucci/AP

In his forthcoming memoir recounting his time in the Trump White House, Bill Barr is clearly eager to shed the image of a doggedly loyal attorney general. “Off the rails” is how Barr describes his former boss in the book, a disparagement that made headlines last month. Trump’s persistent election lies are “bullshit,” Barr told NPR in a recent interview promoting his book release. Even the title of Barr’s memoir, One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of An Attorney General, gestures at seething frustration.

Barr’s resistance to Trump’s lies about a stolen election, which sparked his resignation in December 2020, is indeed notable; his new interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, in which Barr repeated his condemnation of Trump’s ongoing election fraud claims, has already produced a three-page letter from the former president. (You can read Trump’s response, full of petty insults for Barr, here.) 

But it’s difficult to square these new gestures of defiance with Barr’s stubborn defenses of some of his most notorious actions as Trump’s top lawyer. He’s still the person who released a four-page letter summarizing then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. He helped bring back the federal death penalty, dabbled in voter suppression, and lied. And he seems largely fine with that record, even proud.

In the interview with Holt that aired Sunday, Barr said he “totally” rejected criticisms about the 2019 letter. The next day on the “Today Show,” Barr also said that he had mostly been content with the Trump presidency—that is until the 2020 election. He went on to defend his decision to fire Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose office was overseeing multiple Trump-related investigations.

“I hadn’t really thought much of him,” Barr said, effectively shrugging off the outrage that Berman’s firing had prompted. Barr also declined, on multiple occasions, to say that Trump was legally responsible for the January 6 attack on the US Capitol or the apparent mishandling of classified information.

But perhaps the most damning moment of Barr’s current media tour came Monday when the former attorney general said that it would be “inconceivable” for him to vote for a Democrat even if Trump, a man he now publicly describes as unhinged, was the Republican nominee. “Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party, it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee,” he told Guthrie.

So there you have it. There’s not much love lost between Barr and Trump—especially if the alternative is a Democrat. Add him to the long list of former Trump appointees trying to cash in on their unreliable narratives.

In this May 15, 2015 courtroom sketch, Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, center, stands with his defense attorneys at the Moakley Federal court house in the penalty phase of his trial in Boston.Jane Flavell Collins/AP

In a 6-3 party-line ruling, the Supreme Court today restored the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the notorious terrorist who planned and carried out the 2013 bombings at the Boston Marathon with his brother Tamerlan.

In one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism since 9/11, the Tsarnaev brothers placed two pressure cooker bombs near the marathon finish line, which detonated, killing three people and injuring 260 more. In the days following, the brothers murdered an MIT police officer and engaged in a firefight with law enforcement in Watertown, Massachusetts, during which Tamerlan Tsarnaev sustained injuries that led to his death. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was later apprehended during a massive manhunt that effectively shut down the greater Boston area. 

Tsarnaev received the death penalty in 2015. Five years later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld his conviction but ruled that he should not have been sentenced to death, citing concerns that the trial judge had not taken adequate steps to ensure that jurors had not been swayed by pretrial coverage of the case. In addition, the appeals court ruled that the trial judge should not have excluded evidence linking Tamerlan Tsarnaev to a triple murder that took place before the bombings, saying that it could have helped shore up Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s argument that his brother had dominated him into carrying out the attack. This ruling was in turn appealed to the Supreme Court. 

In a strange twist, the Supreme Court’s conservative members today sided with the Biden Department of Justice. The department argued for the restoration of Tsarnaev’s original death sentence, over the objections of the court’s liberal justices, and despite assurances from the president about a change in policy on executions.

Joe Biden, who personally opposes capital punishment, had previously vowed to “eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.” In addition, the Justice Department’s decision to take up the case from Trump lawyers seems to contradict a moratorium on death penalty cases that the department announced last year. 

Justice Amy Coney Barrett also seemed to change her stated opposition to the death penalty by filing a concurrence supporting Tsarnaev’s execution. When Barrett was a law clerk, she coauthored an article published in the Marquette Law Review arguing that orthodox Catholic judges (such as herself) should recuse themselves from death penalty cases rather than put themselves in the position of potentially having to violate the teachings of their church. As a justice, Barrett has previously voted to allow federal executions to proceed, but her vote today was additionally striking because it helped reinstate a death sentence that had previously been overturned. 

Migrant family wearing face masks crosses the border into El Paso, Texas.Christian Chavez/AP

Cities across the country may have been winding down pandemic restrictions in response to a downward trend in Covid cases, but the Biden administration has continued to enforce an obscure Trump-era public health order, known as Title 42, to summarily expel migrants and asylum seekers arriving at the US-Mexico border. But on Friday, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that even though the government has the authority to return migrants under the provision invoked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in March 2020, it can’t send migrant families to countries where they could face harm.

“From a public-health perspective, based on the limited record before us, it’s far from clear that the CDC’s order serves any purpose,” Judge Justin Walker wrote in a 32-page decision on behalf of a three-judge panel, two of whom were appointed by then-president Donald Trump. Title 42, the ruling further states, “looks in certain respects like a relic from an era with no vaccines, scarce testing, few therapeutics, and little certainty.” 

The Biden administration has fiercely defended the policy in court, despite opposition from immigrant rights groups and public health experts, and the fact that ports of entry have been open for tourists and travelers. As my colleague Fernanda Echavarri wrote in January, the Department of Justice has argued that the policy is necessary to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in crowded detention settings, which would pose a risk to migrants and border patrol agents alike. 

However, ACLU lead attorney Lee Gelernt, who represents the refuge-seeking migrant families suing the US government, argued that the people affected by Title 42 expulsions make up only 0.01 percent of the traffic coming in from Mexico—and that the other 99.9 percent is able to come and go between the two countries even as the pandemic continues. All ports of entry have been opened for travelers and tourists, and air travel between the two countries continues unrestricted. So, it’s hard not to ask: What makes this small percentage more of a risk to US residents than travelers with visas and US passports? 

During fiscal year 2021, the Biden administration conducted more than one million expulsions under Title 42, which denies migrants the right to request asylum. Unaccompanied minors and some families have been exempted. The policy also pushes migrants to take more risks by undertaking repeated attempts at crossing the border through ever more dangerous routes, increasing the rates of rescues conducted by CBP and of migrant deaths, as my previous reporting for Mother Jones has shown. 

“Today’s decision is a win for immigrants and confirms what we have been fighting for,” Tami Goodlette, director of litigation at the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), said in a statement, “that the expulsion of immigrants under Title 42 is inhumane, immoral, and illegal and it must end.” The group asks the Biden administration not to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.