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. 

Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA

Being on Twitter this past week has required a herculean supply of patience. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, no shortage of extremely dumb takes have graced the timeline, few more dumbfounding than the various people asking—because why not?—if we could just bomb Russia or shoot down its jets. Certainly the idea of a quick ending to a needless war sounds appealing—that is, if you somehow manage to forget that Russia is a nuclear power.

No one seems to have run these crucial facts by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who took to Twitter on Thursday night to argue this:

The only people who can fix this are the Russian people.

Easy to say, hard to do.

Unless you want to live in darkness for the rest of your life, be isolated from the rest of the world in abject poverty, and live in darkness you need to step up to the plate.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) March 4, 2022

Your eyes are not deceiving you. A US lawmaker is calling for regime change by tweet.

No one needs to defend Vladimir Putin—though some of Graham’s colleagues on the right have certainly tried—but the notion that Russia would be inherently safer or more stable with him out of the picture is too credulous by half. One need only look at the power vacuums that formed in countries where recent, US-backed interventions took out dictators (Iraq, Libya) to see what took their place (ISIS, a devastating civil war). 

On Friday, Graham went on Fox News to defend his comments. “The Russian people are not our enemy,” he said. “I’m convinced it’s a one-man problem surrounded by a few people.”  

Putin’s war has already led to needless death in Ukraine and devastation for his own people, whose economy is in tatters. But a Russia without Putin is no guarantee of peace or stability. No less a figure than Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.), fresh off of her appearance at a white nationalist conference, said Graham’s idea was “irresponsible, dangerous & unhinged.” She may not know the difference between gazpacho and the Gestapo, but Green is correct there. (If you can get Green, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to all agree your idea is bad, maybe rethink it!)

Graham and others arguing for a tidy, violent solution to Putin’s reign would do well to remember what became of Brutus and others like him—spoiler alert: it didn’t go well. Killing Caesar did not stop ancient Rome’s descent into one-man rule. Envisioning a better world is great. Making it happen is more difficult and, often, more unpredictable. Or, as Graham may have put it: “Easy to say, hard to do.” 

REI staff at its New York flagship decorated their green vests with pro-union buttons.Ron Adar/ZUMA

The rock-climbing, canyon-crossing, river-rafting workers at outdoor gear giant REI love a challenge—even when it comes from their bosses. Overcoming stiff corporate opposition and a slick anti-union campaign, staff at the company’s New York flagship store voted Wednesday to unionize by an overwhelming 7-to-1 margin.

REI SoHo, the nearly 40,000-square-foot Manhattan store, is the first of the company’s locations to unionize. Eighty-six percent of its 116 staff, from tech specialists to shipping and retail workers, voted to form a new local of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union—the same union that workers at Amazon’s huge Bessemer, Alabama, facility are now voting on whether to join. The REI vote follows an expensive, full-bore effort against the union, including an anti-union podcast that drew laughs online for “progressive” flourishes like an Indigenous land acknowledgement and executives’ recitation of pronouns. (REI CEO Eric Artz, who opened with the land acknowledgment, earned $3,284,590 in 2019.)

The REI workers filed their union petition in January, citing widespread concerns across the retail sector: They wanted more transparency about pandemic protections, benefits, full-time status, and better pay. Store staff members have told reporters that they’re paid $18.90 an hour, less than the borough’s living wage for a single adult without kids. “These are very basic things that REI has gotten away with not doing despite this facade of being a progressive, liberal company,” Kate Denend, who works at the store and supports the union, told Motherboard.

But throughout the day, REI employees—”green vests,” in company slang—were flooded with messages of support as they filed into a break room to vote. Their union drive, like the high-profile unionization efforts at Amazon and Starbucks, has benefited from a new wave of support for organized labor: Polls show that unions haven’t enjoyed this much public favor since the 1950s, and workers across the country have been launching increasingly ambitious union drives. While union membership is still trending downward overall—in the early 1980s, twice as many Americans were unionized as are now—retail unions, driven by young, energetic organizers, are spreading fast.

“We’re hopeful that REI meets us in good faith during negotiations for our first contract,” said REI worker and union organizer Claire Chang in a press release, calling the vote a chance for REI workers to take the company up on its motto—”a life outdoors is a life well lived”—by bargaining for pay and hours that would make it possible.

REI’s pushback came with a cost. Its public image and anti-union campaign couldn’t jibe. The company’s online forum, where co-op members meet and talk, is loaded with posts from irate customers, many threatening to withhold their business: “End the union busting activities or I will shop elsewhere, never to return and never to recommend.” “Many of us would PREFER to shop at a unionized store!” “Do better, REI.”

The company stressed its “co-operative values” in anti-union statements, especially during captive-audience meetings against unionization. It’s true that REI is the country’s largest consumer co-op—but that means consumers, not workers, get a share of ownership and accompanying benefits. (REI chose not to stress the “consumer” part.)

In an emailed statement, REI said that it “firmly believes that the decision of whether or not to be represented by a union is an important one, and we respect each employee’s right to choose or refuse union representation. We are, at our core, cooperative.”

Students walk on the UC Berkeley campus. Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

Hey, here’s a neat example of how housing works in progressive cities for you—and the costs of it.

In mid-February, 150,000 applicants to the University of California, Berkeley, received a letter warning them that “a recent court order” could force the university to slash its enrollment by 3,000 slots and reduce acceptances by 5,000, sending students and their parents throughout the country into a panic. 

“We want to assure you that we are pursuing every possible option for avoiding what would be a dire situation for prospective students and our campus,” wrote Olufemi Ogundele, assistant vice chancellor and director of undergraduate admissions at UC Berkeley. 

Ogundele’s letter was referencing an August 2021 order mandating that Berkeley cap its enrollment at 2020 levels. In February 2022, an appeals court upheld the ruling, and shortly after Berkeley announced that it planned to appeal to the state Supreme Court. 

Today, however, the California Supreme Court refused to strike down the lower court’s ruling in a 4–2 decision, virtually guaranteeing that the university will have to make good on its warnings. As a result, 5,000 students who would otherwise have been admitted will receive rejection letters in the Spring. 

The decision is the result of a protracted legal battle between residents of Berkeley and the university that has played out over the last few years. In a move that the Atlantic has deemed the “apotheosis” of NIMBYism, a neighborhood group called Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods filed a lawsuit challenging the university’s plan to build new housing and academic space for Berkeley faculty and graduate students. In arguments, Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods invoked the California Environmental Quality Act, a law often used by homeowners to block new housing and homeless shelters and–ironically–stymie developments that would help the state reduce its carbon footprint. 

Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods claims (with some justification) that Berkeley has continued to increase the number of students without building more dorms, displacing people in the broader community and driving up rents. However, the organization is also resistant to what is widely regarded to be the best solution— namely building more places for people to live. Instead, Phil Bokovoy, the president of Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, has advocated that Berkeley build a “satellite campus” in another town, far away from his backyard. 

If the university continues to add students, he told Slate, “We’ll end up like Bangkok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur—dense Asian cities where there’s no transportation network. Nobody’s talking about that.”

Ukrainians and other war escapees rest in a school sports hall temporary transformed into a shelter due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Dominika Zarzycka/AP

It’s only been a week since Russian tanks and soldiers poured across the border into Ukraine, but the conflict has already seen 1 million refugees flee Ukraine, the United Nations refugee agency said. 

“I have worked in refugee emergencies for almost 40 years, and rarely have I seen an exodus as rapid as this one,” UN High Commissioner Filippo Grandi wrote in a statement. “Unless there is an immediate end to the conflict, millions more are likely to be forced to flee Ukraine.”

If the count from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees is accurate, that would be more than 2 percent of Ukraine’s population, and the agency only expects the number to swell as the ferocity of the conflict continues to escalate. The UNHCR estimates that more than 117,000 people have fled the country per day from the second day of the invasion onward. By comparison, the height of the Syrian civil war took about a month to produce 1 million refugees, with the total number eventually reaching a record 5.7 million.

According to the UNHCR, more than half of the refugees have fled into Poland, with Hungary so far having accepted the second-largest number of Ukrainians during the conflict. These numbers are striking. Both the Polish and Hungarian governments have in recent years demonized refugees and adopted policies explicitly designed to punish migrants.

Shortly after the Russian invasion, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has previously faced international condemnation for spearheading legislation hostile to migrants, seemed to soften his hardline anti-immigrant position, saying in a statement that his country was “prepared to take care of” Ukrainians. 

Polish citizens have likewise rallied to feed and house Ukrainians who have streamed across the border over the last week—a sharp contrast to 2021 when Polish border guards beat predominantly Syrian and Iraqi refugees that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko had expelled from his country, a dozen of whom eventually died in the forests crisscrossing the Poland-Belarus border. 

Grandi praised the “heartwarming” international response and the willingness of neighbor states to harbor those fleeing the conflict. But he also added that the only solution to the growing crisis was an immediate ceasefire.

“But nothing—nothing—can replace the need for the guns to be silenced; for dialogue and diplomacy to succeed. Peace is the only way to halt this tragedy.”