Politics and American Democracy – Page 270

Turn off the gas: is America ready to embrace electric vehicles?

The Guardian

Turn off the gas: is America ready to embrace electric vehicles?

Tom Perkins May 23, 2021

Joe Biden inside the new Lightning last week. ‘This sucker’s quick,’ he declared. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

Ford unveiled its new F-150 Lightning pickup this week – but the success of EVs in this car-loving nation is far from certain

In Detroit, auto plants have for decades churned out trucks built with Motor City steel and fueled by gasoline. But this week’s rollout of the Ford F-150 Lightning electric truck offered a vision of the future in America’s automotive heartland: aluminum-clad pickups running off of electric powertrains with lithium batteries.

An electric model of the nation’s best-selling vehicle at an accessible $40,000 has the potential to shift the auto industry’s course, and do more to advance the transportation sector’s electrification than any recent development, analysts say.

“Offering a well-known vehicle at a competitive price could really help push the EV agenda in the US,” said Jessica Caldwell, executive director of insights at Edmunds.com.

Meanwhile, Ford characterized the Lightning’s introduction as a “watershed moment”, but it also represents a major gamble. The F-150 embodies American ruggedness, and it raises the question: is the truck market’s meat-and-potatoes base ready to embrace environmentally friendly electric vehicles (EVs)?

It’s uncharted territory, said Michelle Krebs, Autotrader executive analyst. The success of the Lightning or any EV hinges on a major infrastructure build-out that’s far from certain.

“There’s no EV pickup market at the moment, so we just don’t know how big it could be, or what consumer acceptance will be,” she said.

Truck consumers are generally unwilling to switch to cars just to go electric, Krebs said. So pitching them on the Lightning not only opens a new market for Ford, but is a critical step in the nation’s efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, of which the transportation sector accounts for 29%. The EV transition is a key component of Joe Biden’s climate plan, which calls for the nation to cut emissions by 50% from 2005 levels by 2030, and net-zero emissions economy-wide by 2050.

Though EVs only make up less than 2% of new-vehicle sales in the US, there’s perhaps no better line to push the needle on those figures than the F-Series. Last year, Ford generated about $42bn in the sale of over 800,000 F-Series trucks, according to data from the company and Edmunds.com. Sales of the F-150, the line’s light-duty truck, exceeded 556,000.

The Lightning feature that seems to be catching the most attention isn’t under the hood or in the cab, but on the price tag. With EV tax incentives, the truck’s base model could cost about $32,000 – less than a $37,000 gas-powered F-150 with a crew cab. By contrast, the GMC Hummer EV and Rivian R1T, are priced at $80,000 and $70,000 though they are slightly flashier.

The Lightning also marks one of the first attempts to electrify a well-known, everyday vehicle that appeals to a mass market. Previously, EVs were mostly small, unconventionally designed cars that appealed to environmentally minded people who made a personality statement with their vehicle, Caldwell said. The “pendulum has swung” in terms of design, she added.

The Lightning’s range is also notable. One charge will take a base model Lightning 230 miles, or, for an additional $20,000, the extended range trim will travel 300 miles. It can haul up to 2,000lb of payload and tow up to 10,000lb. However, Ford doesn’t offer any data on range with a heavy payload or tow, and Car And Drive estimated it at as little as 100 miles.

That’s the type of detail that could keep consumers away from not just the Lightning, but all electric pickups. On a 150kw DC fast charger, the extended-range trim targets up to 54 miles of range in 10 minutes, or just under an hour for a full charge.

It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which someone who may be buying a truck to tow a camper a long distance once or twice per year opting for a gas-powered F-150 instead being inconvenienced with an hour-long stop to recharge every 100 miles or so, Caldwell said.

But several once-in-a-while Lightning features are generating a buzz, like a drain hole in case the cab needs to be hosed out. Its dual battery system can power tools in the field, or a house for three days during an outage. The F-150 Hybrid was utilized as a mobile generator in the recent deadly Texas blackouts.

Ford’s chief executive engineer Linda Zhang unveils the Ford F-150 Lightning in Dearborn on Wednesday. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/AP

The Lightning’s power is another selling point – it can go 0-60mph in just over four seconds, offers 775lb-ft of torque, and the extended range model targets 563 horsepower.

That was enough to impress the president, who test drove a Lightning during a Michigan stop last week. “This sucker’s quick,” he declared.

Among those who will need to harness the truck’s full power and hauling capacity are contractors. It’s worth consideration, said Dave Alder, an electrician in Detroit, especially if it could save on gas money. But he worried about where he would charge it, and said it’s a bit of a “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” situation with his gas-powered Chevy Silverado.

The Lightning has the support of the United Auto Workers union, which at times has been skeptical of electrification. The truck will be built at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, which sits just outside of Detroit and next to the Dearborn Truck Plant that produces gas-powered and hybrid F-150s. Lightning production is slated to start next spring, with the trucks hitting the lot in mid-2022.

Critical to its success is an infrastructure build out, and Biden’s $2tn infrastructure plan includes $174bn to support the EV transition.

Biden has framed his pitch by repeatedly claiming the US is in an electrification race with China.

“The future of the auto industry is electric. There’s no turning back,” he said during the Lightning’s unveiling. “The question is whether we will lead or we will fall behind in the race to the future.”

Buy-in from the auto industry could help Biden push his proposal with Congress, though it’s uniformly opposed by the GOP. Republican leadership has pointed to the lack of infrastructure as a chief reason for opposing spending on the EV transition, but at the same time opposes funding an infrastructure build-out.

American consumers have said they won’t buy an EV without the infrastructure in place, Krebs said, which leaves the industry facing a “chicken and egg” situation.

“That’s key – they have got to have the charging infrastructure in place or this will all go kaput,” she said.

Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before COVID-19 outbreak disclosed – WSJ

Reuters

Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before COVID-19 outbreak disclosed – WSJ

May 23, 2021

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) sought hospital care in November 2019, a month before China reported the first cases of COVID-19, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing a U.S. intelligence report.

The newspaper said the previously undisclosed report – which provides fresh details on the number of researchers affected, the timing of their illnesses, and their hospital visits – may add weight to calls for a broader investigation into whether the COVID-19 virus could have escaped from the laboratory.

The Journal said current and former officials familiar with the intelligence expressed a range of views about the strength of the report’s supporting evidence, with one unnamed person saying it needed “further investigation and additional corroboration.”

The first cases of what would eventually be known as COVID-19 were reported at the end of December 2019 in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the advanced laboratory specializing in coronavirus research is located.

Chinese scientists and officials have consistently rejected the lab leak hypothesis, saying SARS-CoV-2 could have been circulating in other regions before it hit Wuhan, and might have even entered China from another country via imported frozen food shipments or wildlife trading.

China’s foreign ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian, said on Monday that it was “completely untrue” that three members of staff at WIV had fallen ill.

“The United States continues to hype up the lab leak theory,” he said. “Does it care about traceability or is it just trying to distract attention?”

The Journal report came on the eve of a meeting of the World Health Organization’s decision-making body, which is expected to discuss the next phase of an investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

Asked about the report, WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said via email that the organization’s technical teams were now deciding on the next steps. He said further study was needed into the role of animal markets as well as the lab leak hypothesis.

A U.S. National Security Council spokeswoman had no comment on the report but said the Biden administration continued to have “serious questions about the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, including its origins within the Peoples Republic of China.”

She said the U.S. government was working with the WHO and other member states to support an expert-driven evaluation of the pandemic’s origins “that is free from interference or politicization.”

“We’re not going to make pronouncements that prejudge an ongoing WHO study into the source of SARS-CoV-2, but we’ve been clear that sound and technically credible theories should be thoroughly evaluated by international experts,” she said.

A joint study into the origins of COVID-19 by the WHO and China published at the end of March said it was “extremely unlikely” that it had escaped from a lab.

But China was accused of failing to disclose raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the WHO team, and the United States, the European Union and other Western countries called on Beijing to grant “full access” to independent experts.

A State Department fact sheet released near the end of the Trump administration said “the U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.” It did not say how many researchers.

(Reporting by David Shepardson and Andrea Shalal; additional reporting by Gabriel Crossley in Beijing, David Stanway in Shanghai and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Andrew Heavens)

‘It’s just shocking’: How Missouri Republican politics drove twin crises in Medicaid

The Kansas City Star

‘It’s just shocking’: How Missouri Republican politics drove twin crises in Medicaid

Jonathan Shorman, Jeanne Kuang May 23, 2021

Mike Levitt’s nursing homes have experienced a difficult 14 months.

Still recovering after being ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic, Levitt’s Tutera Senior Living & Health Care, which operates five facilities in the Kansas City region, suddenly finds itself at the edge of financial oblivion.

Missouri lawmakers are at fault.

The General Assembly adjourned earlier this month without renewing a tax that funds vast swaths of Medicaid in Missouri. Nursing homes are heavily reliant on Medicaid patients, who have spent down their savings and now depend on the program to pay for their care.

Levitt, Tutera’s vice president, was so frustrated in an interview this week he was reluctant to even discuss what would happen to the homes if the tax is not renewed before it expires this September. Medicaid recipients make up 45% to 95% of residents at Tutera’s facilities.

“It’s unthinkable,” he said. “I hate to think if it doesn’t … We’ve never been here before.”

Missouri’s $12 billion Medicaid program is in the midst of twin crises driven by Republican lawmakers that will play out in the weeks and months ahead. Hundreds of nursing homes, hospitals and pharmacies — and their hundreds of thousands of residents, patients and customers — are caught in the middle.

For the first time in three decades, legislators failed to approve a Medicaid provider tax that generates about $1.6 billion every year. More importantly, the tax allows Missouri to receive an additional $3 billion in federal funds that are then returned to the providers to care for elderly, disabled and low-income residents. Failure to renew the tax would set the program on the course to financial apocalypse.

Hard-right Republicans, led by Sen. Paul Wieland of Imperial, are demanding anti-abortion provisions be included in any renewal.

Gov. Mike Parson is all but certain to call a special session this summer to renew the tax, called the Federal Reimbursement Allowance or FRA. But it remains unclear whether he can focus the session narrowly enough to foreclose an acrimonious birth control debate and how much power Republican leaders really have to end what has become a high-stakes game of chicken.

“It’s just shocking to me and so disheartening to me that we’re using this to leverage any other piece of legislation,” said Nikki Strong, director of the Missouri Health Care Association, which advocates for nursing homes.

The consequences of not renewing the tax are catastrophic, Strong warned. “Without the FRA, every nursing home in the state will be out of business,” she said.

At the same time, Medicaid expansion is in limbo after most Republican lawmakers balked at budgeting the roughly $130 million in state funds needed to expand eligibility for the program on July 1 under the terms voters approved last August. Without funding, Parson officially halted expansion earlier this month.

Advocates for expansion sued Parson’s administration this past week, triggering a legal fight that may lead to a judge ordering the program extended. Months of planning by the health care industry and coverage for an estimated 275,000 residents hinge on the lawsuit’s outcome.

The simultaneous fights over the provider tax and expansion have led to an unparalleled moment of uncertainty for Medicaid. Health care workers and patients are contemplating worst-case scenarios even as they tell themselves Missouri must, eventually, pull back from the edge.

“I think right now people are in shock and feel like we’ve got four months or so to get this thing sorted out,” said Ron Fitzwater, CEO of the Missouri Pharmacy Association.

Michael Levitt, vice president of Tutera Senior Living and Health Care, said he believes nursing homes, such as Northland Rehabilitation & Health Care, are facing a dire financial situation and potentially closure if a key tax that funds Medicaid and pays hospitals and nursing homes is not renewed.

Contraceptives targeted

Wieland, 58, a Catholic who has been in the General Assembly since 2011, is no stranger to showdowns over abortion and contraceptives.

He sued in 2013 to stop his state health insurance plan from covering contraception, saying it violated his religious beliefs. He eventually prevailed in court.

Term-limited and due to leave office in 2023, he is waging one more fight over contraception coverage.

In late March, he inserted provisions into a bill renewing the provider tax that would ban Medicaid coverage of “any drug approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration that may cause the destruction of, or prevent the implantation of, an unborn child.”

That means the abortion pill, RU-486, but it also encompasses common forms of birth control, including IUDs.

Under federal and state law, Medicaid already does not cover abortions, including RU-486, unless the mother’s life is at risk.

“For several years I’ve been figuring out a way to make it so that the state of Missouri taxpayers do not have to fund these drugs that destroy human life,” he said. “I need to do it while I’m still there.”

Wieland’s proposal caused the provider tax to stall and, despite weeks of negotiations, an apparent compromise collapsed in the final hours of session.

With 18 hours left, at the urging of Sen. Bob Onder, a Lake St. Louis Republican, the Senate voted to send the bill to a conference committee where it would be paired with Wieland’s birth control ban. Senate President Pro Tem Dave Schatz cast the deciding vote.

His vote marked an apparent backtracking on a deal with Democrats and some Republicans to pass the provider tax without abortion-related language.

The move effectively killed the bill. Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo, an Independence Democrat, was furious at what he described as a betrayal. He moved with no opposition on the last day of session to adjourn four hours early.

Wieland said this week he, too, was betrayed. The Republican caucus, he said, had agreed to pass yet another version of the tax renewal with his contraceptive ban included.

“It sounds to me like they ignored the will of the Republican caucus and went and tried to make a deal with the Democrats and that blew up in their face,” he said.

Schatz has said he thought the move to send the bill to conference would succeed regardless of his vote, and found it “difficult” to “be in a position of voting against pro-life measures.”

Missouri Senate President Pro Tem Dave Schatz, left, speaks to reporters as Senate Majority Leader Caleb Rowden stands nearby. Schatz cast a deciding vote in whether to send a bill renewing a Medicaid provider tax back to conference committee.

As the fight over contraception was developing, lawmakers were also taking steps to block Medicaid expansion.

Wieland’s first proposal came days before a House committee voted down funding to expand Medicaid, the first in a string of defeats for expansion in the General Assembly. Lawmakers ultimately passed a budget without it.

Unlike the dispute over the provider tax, efforts to block expansion garnered the support of a majority of Republican lawmakers. Some justified their votes against the voter-approved initiative by saying their districts oppose expansion or that constituents didn’t have all the necessary information.

The refusal forced Parson to decide whether to implement expansion without funding or call it off. He chose to call it off and a lawsuit quickly followed.

Parson’s office didn’t respond to questions for this story. Parson has said that without revenue “we are unable to proceed with the expansion at this time” to keep Medicaid financially afloat.

“I think that was the appropriate response on their part,” Rep. Cody Smith, a Carthage Republican who chairs the House Budget Committee, said of Parson’s decision.

As for litigation, Smith said lawmakers “will sit back and watch that process unfold.”

Parson expected to recall lawmakers

The twin developments — the failure to renew the provider tax and the blocking of expansion — have rocked the health profession in Missouri.

The provider tax had been renewed on time so often that its continued existence was almost assumed. And the health care industry had been preparing for expansion for months.

“We’ve been on this wild ride on Medicaid expansion for quite a while now and this latest turn is a bit of a surprise,” said Timothy McBride, a health economist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Health care industry representatives said the tax renewal is nearly always a bargaining chip for conservative Republicans. But Alina Salganicoff, director of Women’s Health Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said she’s never heard of lawmakers trying to ban coverage of specific forms of birth control through the provider tax.

“The particular language that is being used in Missouri is not a language I have seen used in other states,” she said. “These are not medical terms. This is not how medical organizations define and classify drugs.”

Facing the prospect the provider tax will expire, health care advocates remain confident for now legislators will eventually act. They are unanimous in predicting Parson will call a special session.

At the same time, advocates are keeping up pressure. Missouri Foundation for Health President and CEO Dwayne Proctor said Friday that every day “this process is delayed is another day nearly 250,000 Missourians go without the access to health care they need.”

In theory, Parson could voluntarily reverse his stance and implement expansion. But even before advocates filed a lawsuit this week seeking to force him to open up eligibility, he had said he expected the issue to head to the court.

A Cole County Circuit Judge will almost certainly now decide at least the short-term future of expansion. The lawsuit seeks an order requiring Missouri to enroll newly-eligible individuals on July 1.

As for the provider tax, Wieland has vowed to bring up the birth control ban in any special session that allows it. Some political observers have suggested Parson could set strict limits on what lawmakers can consider in a special session.

“I don’t see how you can draft a call and say we’re not going to allow you to amend a bill, and I don’t think the governor will do it anyway,” Wieland said. “He’s not a dictator … I will fight on whatever I need to to get this done, yes.”

Running out of money?

The fights have left Sen. Bill White, a Joplin Republican, frustrated and concerned that Medicaid is likely to run out of money this year, sooner or later.

He voted against paying for the expansion, but acknowledged a court could force the state to enroll new recipients. That would leave the program underfunded regardless of whether the provider tax is renewed.

“It’s a have-to scenario,” White said. “Individual programs we’ve had little fights … they just don’t equal this dollar amount or this impact.”

Jillian Winkler, a nurse at Northland Rehabilitation & Health Care, prepares medication Thursday, May 20, 2021. Nursing homes are facing a dire financial situation and potentially closure if a key tax that funds Medicaid and pays hospitals and nursing homes is not renewed.

Providers like Tutera, the Kansas City-area chain of nursing homes, will be watching.

For Levitt, Tutera’s vice president, imperiling the tax only adds “insult to injury,” as nursing homes across the state struggle to recover financially from revenue losses and high costs fighting the pandemic.

Without the funding, services for 23,000 elderly Missourians, covering everything from changing bedpans to monitoring medications, are on the line.

“We have all these other challenges we dealt with and fought through, and now we’re faced with a 40% cut in Medicaid, just because?” Levitt said. “It’s unconscionable.”

Once More For the People in the Back: You Cannot Negotiate or Compromise With the Republican Party

Esquire

Once More For the People in the Back: You Cannot Negotiate or Compromise With the Republican Party

Jack Holmes May 20, 2021

Photo credit: Drew Angerer - Getty Images — Photo credit: Drew Angerer – Getty Images

Somehow, after everything, there remain creatures in Washington, D.C. obsessed with bipartisan compromise. One of our two major political parties has lined up in opposition to renewing what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, which swept through Congress on a strong bipartisan basis in the Bush years, when it actually still had some teeth. The same party’s Arizona affiliate is engaged in a circus “audit” of that state’s election results because they didn’t like who won. They’ve also responded to the 2020 election, which many Republicans continue to Just Ask Questions about, by passing hundreds of restrictive voter laws in state legislatures across the country. Through this and gerrymandering and court-packing and the undemocratic features of the Senate and the Electoral College, the party has devoted itself, root and branch, to clinging to power without crafting an agenda that actually appeals to a majority of citizens.

But even beyond any of that, they just submarined their own shared Bipartisan Bill to establish a commission to look into an attack on their own place of work earlier this year. If a mob broke into your company’s offices and ransacked the place, chanting that they wanted to hang the vice president of the firm, would the VP’s putative friends—and brother!—shut down an inquiry into what happened? This is not normal behavior, and it’s not the behavior of an organization whose members can be reasoned with. (As David Freedlander pointed out, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy used to back a Commission as a desperate escape from impeaching Donald Trump for his crimes against the republic. Now he’s against this, too. It’s almost like he’s not actually interested in any kind of accountability.) There will be no Bipartisan Compromise so long as the Republican Party clings to the increasingly kaleidoscopic fever dreams blasting out of the right-wing infotainment vortex. As my colleague, Charles P. Pierce, wrote, the Democrats will need to go it alone on a January 6 commission. In truth, they’ll have to go it alone on everything.

This ought to have been obvious before. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell has proven to be the most cynical operator that Washington, D.C. has seen in some time, and that’s saying something. McCarthy, in the House, is as craven as he is dense. And the party has a track record, going back to the Obama years, of demanding bipartisan consultation, extracting concessions and watering down bills, then voting against them anyway. This is what happened with the January 6 commission: Republicans got pretty much everything they wanted, and they still shut it down. They will do the same with the American Jobs Plan. As Catherine Rampell brilliantly laid out in the Washington Post, the initial lowball counterproposal they offered was actually vastly inflated. Their aim is to hack away at the bill, then vote against it. And you can probably forget about even that level of commitment to the American Families Plan. Josh Hawley might have some family-benefits proposals, and so might Mitt Romney on the party’s other wing, but when it gets to crunch time, you can expect at least the former (and very possibly the latter) to vote against the plan and fist-pump at the faithful.

This is an American political ecosystem where shame has ceased to function as a social force and, in fact, shamelessness has become a political superpower. To survive and thrive in the entirely degraded post-Trump Republican Party—the culmination of 40-plus years of self-replicating insanity—you cannot have any compunction about lying your ass off and acting in continual, ceaseless bad faith. There are people in this party who voted against the American Rescue Plan and then went bragging to their constituents about all the relief they’d brought home. Flip-flopping is passé. You now have to be able to juggle multiple contradictory positions at once. John Katko made the mistake Wednesday of thinking any principle—even that an attack on their own workplace should be investigated by Congress—was durable enough to survive the gauntlet of self-serving nonsense. Democrats should do their own commission, and then they should do their own bills. This will require Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema coming back to reality, and seeing all of the above for it is before signing off on filibuster reform. You cannot negotiate with the void.

Republicans Threw Their Own Guy Deep Under the Bus to Avoid a January 6 Commission

Esquire

Republicans Threw Their Own Guy Deep Under the Bus to Avoid a January 6 Commission

Every speaker tried to find a polite way to call John Katko either a rube or a sucker. The end result is that Democrats will need to go on their own.

By Charles P. Pierce May 20, 2021

united states april 14 rep john katko, r ny, speaks during a press conference following a house republican caucus meeting in washington on wednesday, april 14, 2021 the house republican members spoke about their recent trip to the southern border and the surge of migrants entering the united states photo by caroline brehmancq roll call, inc via getty images

CAROLINE BREHMAN/GETTY IMAGES

The It-Didn’t-Start-With-Trump element of the Republican recalcitrance on a proposed bipartisan (Gawd!) commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection is to recall that George W. Bush did all he could to derail the 9/11 commission that everyone now pretends to adore, and that C-Plus Augustus refused to testify under oath to that commission, and wouldn’t even sit for an unrecorded interview except in the White House with Dick Cheney, father of St. Liz of the Holy Soundbite, sitting next to him working the levers. And let’s not even get into the government-wide stonewalling of the Iran-Contra investigations before that, and let’s also remember that there were 33 investigations into Benghazi, BENGHAZI, BENGHAZI!

However, when Mitch McConnell came out on Tuesday as the devious reptile he’s always been, and announced that he was joining House Republican honcho Kevin McCarthy over in Coward’s Corner, the difference was an order of magnitude. These guys were shirking their constitutional obligation and abandoning their moral compasses because a) they lead a party that is very likely complicit in the events, and b) they’re doing so to cover for a crook and a liar who’s in so many crosshairs he looks like Bonnie and Clyde at the end of that movie.

After careful consideration, I’ve made the decision to oppose the House Democrats’ slanted and unbalanced proposal for another commission to study the events of January 6…So, Mr. President, it’s not at all clear what new facts are additional—or additional investigation yet another commission could actually lay on top of existing efforts by law enforcement and Congress. The facts have come out and they’ll continue to come out. What is clear, is that House Democrats have handled this proposal in partisan bad faith going right back to the beginning. From initially offering a laughably partisan starting point to continuing to insist on various other features under the hood that are designed to centralize control over the commission’s process and its conclusions in Democratic hands.

Mitch, my dude, this isn’t a job for grown-ups. And let us all wave farewell to Rep. John Katko, the Republican co-sponsor of the “bipartisan” commission proposal, as he disappears forever under a bus.

Later Wednesday afternoon, debate in the House began on the resolution establishing the commission. The overarching impressions were that, in the debate, the Democrats led with age and the Republicans led with crazy. The first three speakers in defense of the resolution—Nancy Pelosi, Bennie Thompson, and Steny Hoyer—are a combined 235 years old. The Republican side led off with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louis Gohmert, and some guy from North Carolina named Sam Bishop, who wanted to make sure everybody knew that what happened on January 6.

Let me say this, if it was an insurrection, it was the worst example of an insurrection in the history of mankind. It was a riot. It was a mob. And it was significant. And it was troublesome. But this is not bipartisanship. And I fear that the gentleman from New York may find that he has been played.

Personally, I think the passel of elderly Communist inebriates who tried to overthrow future Pizza Hut spokesman Mikhail Gorbachev back in August of 1991 are still the gold standard for insurrectionist clownery. (They got faced down by Boris Yeltsin, reportedly because, against all possible odds, some of them were drunker than Yeltsin was.) That, however, is beside the point. I would draw your attention to that last sentence in which John Katko returns to his place under the wheels.

washington, ca may 18 senate minority leader mitch mcconnell r ky gets on a elevator after leaving a senate republican policy luncheon news conference on capitol hill on may 18, 2021 in washington, dc kent nishimura los angeles times via getty images

Mitch McConnell joined Kevin McCarthy in the Coward’s Corner. KENT NISHIMURA/GETTY IMAGES

Watching Katko straddle the crazy to get the resolution he co-sponsored passed made you fear for every hamstring the man owns. Speaker after speaker tried to find polite ways to call Katko either a rube or a sucker. Meanwhile, the Democrats, in the person of co-sponsor Thompson, seem convinced that the fact that the resolution is “bipartisan” has some ultimate legislative salience in the Congress, and some ultimate political salience in the country, which is something I doubt profoundly. People don’t give a fck about bipartisanship. It’s neither a dealmaker nor a dealbreaker. It’s a green-room amenity, like sodas and a crudité plate. Thankfully, Rep. Tim Ryan showed up to inveigh against the futility of it all.

To the other 90% of our friends on the other side of the aisle, holy cow. Incoherence. No idea what you’re talking about. Benghazi, you guys chased the former Secretary of State all over the country, spent millions of dollars. We have people scaling the Capitol, hitting the Capitol police with lead pipes across the head and we can’t get bipartisanship. What else has to happen in this country? Cops, this is a slap in the face to cops across America. If we’re going to take on China, reverse climate change, we need two political parties in this country that are both living in reality and you ain’t one of them.

To which Katko responded in his best hall-monitor voice that things were getting impermissibly partisan and emotional. Because, when you come right down to it, John Katko is a Republican, too. At loose moments, he let that slip through. For example, the regular GOP stance on the commission is that it ought to investigate the disturbances last summer following the murder of George Floyd. (Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene ranted about them in her one minute of debate time.) But Katko tried another tack.

And of course we can’t forget the 2017 terrorist attack against Republican members of Congress during practice for the congressional baseball game. Were it not for the officers involved, there would be scores of dead congressmen. That’s the plain truth.

This is a matter of comparing apples and salamanders. The 2017 episode was the work of one man, James Hodgkinson, and he was killed by the officers at the scene. There was a Secret Service investigation almost immediately after the shooting. As far as I know, there haven’t even been rumors of other people involved in the shooting. Hodgkinson was vocal in his dislike of Republicans and clearly came to the ballfield to attack them that morning, but he did it all on his own. An awful event, certainly, but if Katko thinks a 1/6 commission should examine it, then he’s as invested in delay and deflection as Greene is.

And, unless Mitch McConnell is taken off to glory and replaced by Zombie Paul Douglas, this thing is as dead as Kelsey’s nuts in the Senate anyway. Ten Republicans would have to vote for it and, well, no. It’s time for Democrats simply to put together a select committee of their own, issue subpoenas, and let the chips fall.

County tells Arizona Senate to keep files, threatens lawsuit

Associated Press

County tells Arizona Senate to keep files, threatens lawsuit

Jonathan J. Cooper May 21, 2021

PHOENIX (AP) — Maricopa County officials on Friday directed the Arizona Senate and the auditors it hired to review the county’s 2020 election count to preserve documents for a possible lawsuit.

The county made the demand in a letter after the auditors refused to back down from their claim that the county destroyed evidence by deleting an election database. The GOP-controlled Board of Supervisors and Republican Recorder Stephen Richer, one of the top election officials, say the claim is false.

County officials earlier this week said they might consider filing a defamation lawsuit if the Senate President Karen Fann and the auditors don’t retract the allegation files were deleted.

“Because of the wrongful accusations that the County destroyed evidence, the County or its elected officers may now be subject to, or have, legal claims,” the county’s chief litigation attorney, Tom Liddy, wrote in a letter to Senate President Karen Fann, a Republican from Prescott.

Senate Republicans are overseeing an unprecedented partisan audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, including a hand recount of 2.1 million ballots and a review of voting machines and other data. Fann claimed the database was deleted, which a twitter account tied to the audit called “spoliation of evidence.” Former President Donald Trump amplified the claim in a statement last weekend.

County officials said Monday that no databases or directories were deleted and laid out a detailed explanation for why they believe the auditors couldn’t find them, accusing the auditors of ineptitude. The next day, a data forensics consultant on the audit team said he was able to “recover” the files, and the audit’s Twitter account later repeated the claim that files were deleted.

The letter directs Fann and anyone working on the audit to preserve any records related to it, including emails and text messages, computer files, cellphones and other devices.

The audit will not change the election result. But Trump and many of his supporters believe it will support their baseless claim that Trump’s loss was marred by fraud.

‘Impending disaster.’ Worsening algae bloom on Lake Okeechobee threatens coasts again

Miami Herald

‘Impending disaster.’ Worsening algae bloom on Lake Okeechobee threatens coasts again

Adriana Brasileiro May 14, 2021

The scene at Pahokee marina on Lake Okeechobee last week was a warning sign: A thick mat of algae in various shades of green, brown, gray and fluorescent blue covered the area around boat slips. In some spots, the gunk was so dense it stuck out two inches above the water.

Elsewhere on the lake, the algae wasn’t as chunky, but satellite photos were just as shocking: NOAA monitoring images on Wednesday showed nearly two-thirds of the lake, or 500 square miles, were covered with blue-green algae, the potentially toxic stuff that has fouled rivers and canals in the west and east coasts of Florida in past years, killing fish and scaring tourists away. Green streaks of algae are already visible moving down from the Moore Haven lock on the Caloosahatchee River, which has received Lake Okeechobee water releases in recent weeks to lower lake levels.

Is South Florida in for another summer of slime? The answer has a lot to do with how much water will be flushed from the lake to Florida’s west and east coasts. Already, Lake Okeechobee is at 13.6 feet, 2.5 feet higher than what it was at this time last year. Forecasters are predicting a “well above average” hurricane season this year.

“This is an impending disaster,” said John Cassani, of Calusa Waterkeeper. He and other activists are asking Gov. Ron DeSantis to declare a state of emergency to protect the Caloosahatchee from harmful lake discharges as the rainy season approaches and the need to lower water levels will be unavoidable. “Think of the lake as a giant cesspool being flushed into the Caloosahatchee every day with no end in sight. It’s a catastrophic situation.”

Workers from Breen Aquatics vacuum up thick blue-green algae as they try to clean up blooms at the Pahokee Marina on May 3.

The bloom, which expanded quickly over the past few weeks as temperatures rose, is fueling heated debate about how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers should manage lake waters considering conflicting interests: the need to send water south for Everglades restoration and the guarantee of sufficient supplies for farming while also managing flood protection structures such as its aging Herbert Hoover dike.

The Corps is currently revising its lake management policies to take into account a massive $1.8 billion upgrade of the dike that is scheduled to be completed next year as well as Everglades restoration projects that will come online in the next few years. The projects include a vast reservoir and stormwater treatment area that, once completed in 2023, will allow managers to send more water south when lake levels rise, reducing discharges to estuaries on the east and west. The aim is to produce water clean enough to replenish the Everglades amid efforts to recreate something close to the original flow of the River of Grass, going south through Shark Valley in Everglades National Park, taking much-needed fresh water all the way south to Florida Bay.

The Corps recently presented five conceptual plans for its new Lake Okeechobee System Operating Manual (LOSOM) that will receive public comment before more detailed proposals are presented in July.

But water quality activists want the state to act now under an emergency order to try to avoid a repeat of the devastating 2018 season when massive blooms of cyanobacteria in the lake were discharged to estuaries, killing marine life and making pets and even people sick. The blooms coincided with a widespread red tide that started in the Gulf Coast but spread as far as the Panhandle and St. Lucie County on the Atlantic coast, fouling beaches with dead fish and hundreds of marine animal carcasses.

On Friday the Corps said it will reduce discharges to the Caloosahatchee to 1,500 cubic feet per second from the current 2,000 cfs as a result of the blooms. Col. Andrew Kelly, the Corps commander for Florida, said releases will be made in pulses to try to flush out algae-laden freshwater and allow for water with higher salinity levels to move up the river.

“Some types of algae don’t do as well in higher salinity so we are trying to get some of the higher salinity up into the Caloosahatchee, which will support the degradation of some of that algae, by doing a pulse release of freshwater,” he said during a call with reporters.

Send ‘all that you can’ south

Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Conservancy of South Florida and several water quality advocacy groups sent DeSantis a letter earlier this week saying the state must waive restrictions that stop water managers from moving more water south into conservation areas. Some of those restrictions exist to make sure the water is clean enough to go into conservation areas and beyond, into the Everglades.

DeSantis, who flew over Lake Okeechobee earlier this week to check on the problem, said he asked the District to send “all that you can south,” but didn’t respond to the request for an emergency order. He said he expects the Corps to come up with “a good regulation schedule that balances the equities” and mitigates negative impacts to coastal communities in the summer.

NOAA satellite images showed that cyanobacteria covered about 500 square miles of the lake earlier this week.

Treasure Coast Rep. Brian Mast threatened to sue the Corps to stop the discharges in an interview with CBS 12 on Thursday.

During a board meeting on Thursday, District staff said water conservation areas south of the lake were mostly full or couldn’t receive water because they were in the process of being restored or had projects under construction. Water Conservation Area 3, for instance, is undergoing restoration work after Tropical Storm Eta last year filled marshes to the brim, flooding tree islands and forcing deer to crowd onto levees to survive.

Communities around Lake Okeechobee said their needs must be taken into account. Hendry County Commissioner Ramon Iglesias expressed concern about a schedule that allows too much discretion and flexibility by the Corps every year. He said his fishing and farming community needs certainty so that residents can better plan their lives.

“No schedule should singularly prioritize the loudest people in the room,” Iglesias said during public comments. “We can have a schedule that takes everyone’s concerns into consideration, but not at the expense of my community or any other Floridian that depends on the lake when they need it for drinking, for fishing, for recreating, for farming and even for the environment.”

Sending water south to the Everglades during the dry season is common sense, but it’s important to hold the District accountable for how it manages water in the storm treatment areas, said Eve Samples from Friends of the Everglades. She said most of the water treated in these marsh-like reservoirs is runoff from farms and not water from the lake.

“Why is EAA farm runoff being given priority capacity in taxpayer-funded stormwater treatment areas when STAs could be cleaning water from the lake and sparing people east and west from exposure to these cyanotoxins?” Samples asked.

A decades-old fight for water

Organizations that defend agriculture said everyone is to blame. Nyla Pipes, a sugar industry advocate at One Florida Foundation, said nutrients come from multiple sources and all of them need to be addressed. She said people often blame agriculture because “the public really doesn’t understand that algae is already in our water” and it only gets out of control when there are too many nutrients.

“All this finger pointing … we need to be looking in the mirror because it’s all of us,” she said.

Blue-green algae blooms were observed in nearly two-thirds of the lake earlier this week.

The Everglades Foundation has said it’s about time the state started to manage the lake in a more equitable way and provided its own LOSOM idea to the Corps.

“Currently, we’re not managing Lake Okeechobee in a balanced way. It’s really managed for the needs of agriculture south of the lake, which is primarily sugar. They get the water when they want it. And when it rains, they dump all their stormwater into the Everglades,” said the foundation’s chief science officer, Stephen Davis.

The discussion highlighted the decades-old conflicts in lake water uses and needs. While higher levels benefit farmers that have for decades relied on consistently delivered lake water for their fields, environmentalists and coastal communities say the lake should be kept lower in the dry season and higher in the wet season, to prevent discharges of polluted water to the St. Lucie estuary in the east and the Caloosahatchee to the west.

To prevent a breach on the aging dike when there’s too much water in the lake, the Corps has historically discharged the excess to coastal estuaries. But Lake O is growing increasingly polluted with fertilizer from surrounding farms and communities, and decades of phosphorus and nitrogen that has accumulated on the bottom.

This “legacy pollution” can get stirred up by strong winds over the shallow lake, releasing nutrients that feed blooms. Davis said that’s probably the case now, as blooms are happening early in the season.

“Typically, we don’t see this much algal coverage on the lake until June or July, when we have the longest day lengths,” and sunlight drives the photosynthesis that makes algae grow and reproduce, he said.

Republican lies have thrust America into its third revolution. We are a nation in crisis.

USA Today

Republican lies have thrust America into its third revolution. We are a nation in crisis.

Carrie Cordero and Edward J. Larson May 17, 2021

Angry supporters of President Donald Trump scale the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.

To read and listen to the headlines after House Republicans voted to remove Rep. Liz Cheney from her leadership post, one would think that the “turning point” in the Republican Party began with its denial of the 2020 election result after Nov. 3, or the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. Neither of those moments, however, is or was the actual turning point. Instead, the transformation one of the nation’s two major political parties took place well before each of those events. And the longer it takes for the public conversation to recognize how dramatically the Republican Party has already shifted, the longer it will take to develop a coherent civic strategy to protect U.S. democracy going forward.

And we do need a strategy, because this political crisis is not just the internal machinations of a single political party; it is a political crisis of a nation. Indeed, it might not be hyperbolic to characterize our present national state as in the midst of the third revolution.

Tectonic shift in the Republican Party

What was at first an acquiescence to Donald Trump since his nomination at the Republican National Convention in 2016 slowly became a public acceptance, and then an entanglement. Some who were slow to realize the tectonic shift taking place in the Republican Party over the past five years have awakened from their slumber in the wake of the attack on the Capitol. They are a little late. Those who thought they could wait out Trump’s presidential term before getting on the right side of history were wrong; the time for choosing in a way to actually affect the trajectory of the modern-day Republican Party was earlier.

One explanation for this delayed acknowledgement could be that even sophisticated political participants forget how quickly political parties can completely transform or disappear. Some political actors perhaps thought that they had more time. In the 1850s, a decade before the Civil War, the relative balance that had lasted for a generation between the two political parties – the Democrats and the Whigs – collapsed. The Whig Party disintegrated between 1852 and 1856. As this historic transformation shows, fundamental change to a political party need not take decades. It can happen in just a few years.

From left, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Osaka in 2019.

From 2016-20, it appeared that the Republican Party might disintegrate like the Whigs. First, the GOP looked away as Trump relied on family members instead of government professionals as White House advisers. Second, midway through his term, the president fired or solicited the resignations of political appointees of his own party who had been confirmed by the Senate. He repeatedly turned on his own appointees, particularly when they sought to carry out their lawful functions. Third, the Republican convention in 2020 declined to adopt a political platform; instead, it allowed the party to reflect the whims of its highly personalized leader.

Donna Brazile: Liz Cheney’s ouster should alarm all fact-based Americans who believe in our country

Since then, the vast majority of Republican voters and officials have embraced denial of the 2020 election results and refused to acknowledge the severity of the Jan.6 attack on the Capitol. These developments reveal that the Republican Party will not give up like the Whigs. The party will persevere, emboldened by taking pride in belligerence and transformed into a political movement that embraces fraud and deceit as fundamental to its survival and electoral success.

US democracy’s existential crisis

We are all familiar with the first American Revolution: an actual war, a rebellion for self-governance. But it was not long after that Thomas Jefferson called the election of 1800 the “second American revolution.” The election of the Democratic-Republicans over the Federalists set the course for the nation in Jefferson’s vision of American democracy, and permanently marginalized the Federalist Party and led to its ultimate replacement by the Whigs.

In the hours after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, former president Trump tweeted, “Remember this day forever!” Participants in the melee he incited openly invoked 1776.

American Revolution reenactment in Lexington, Mass., in 2006.

We will not know until after the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election whether the result of 2020 set the nation on a path toward Democratic Party domination for a generation, like the election of 1800. But we think this moment in our nation’s history is best understood as the third American revolution – hopefully primarily of competing ideas and minimally of political violence – where the effective functioning of American elections and democratic institutions hangs in the balance.

Leaving no doubts: Liz Cheney removal makes it official. Republicans pick Trump over truth and Constitution.

It is no longer enough to characterize the present political crisis as an internal party dispute. Instead, we are witness to a political revolution that will define American society and governance for decades to come.

Carrie Cordero is the Robert M. Gates Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security and adjunct professor at Georgetown Law. Edward J. Larson is a Pulitzer Prize winning legal historian and a professor at Pepperdine University whose latest book is “Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership.“

COVID fight could return ‘to square one’: experts sound vaccines alarm

Reuters

COVID fight could return ‘to square one’: experts sound vaccines alarm

By Kate Kelland May 20, 2021

FILE PHOTO: Nurse prepares to administer the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine against the COVID-19 at the Eka Kotebe General Hospital in Addis Ababa

LONDON (Reuters) – India’s export ban on COVID-19 shots risks dragging the battle against the pandemic “back to square one” unless wealthy nations step in to plug a gaping hole in the COVAX global vaccine-sharing scheme, health specialists said on Thursday.

COVAX, which is critical for poorer countries, relies on AstraZeneca shots made by the Serum Institute of India, the world’s biggest maker of vaccines. It was already around 100 million doses short of where it had planned to be when India halted exports a month ago amid a surge in infections there.

Rich countries with plentiful COVID-19 vaccine stocks must now share them immediately, at scale, the global experts said, otherwise the pandemic could be prolonged as the world struggles to contain a virus that is continuing to spread and mutate.

“It is a huge concern,” said Anna Marriott, health policy manager at the global charity Oxfam. She and others said it was imperative that wealthy countries and regions make good on their rhetoric and share excess vaccines now.

“The current approach that relies on a few pharma monopolies and a trickle of charity through COVAX is failing – and people are dying as a result.”

Reuters reported on Tuesday that India is extending its ban, meaning it is now unlikely to resume major exports before October.

Will Hall, global policy manager for the Wellcome global health trust, said COVAX’s heavy reliance on the Serum Institute left it vulnerable. India’s extension of its export ban made it even more crucial for rich countries to share doses via the scheme, he said, “not in six months’ time, not in a month’s time, but now”.

“We’re not going to beat this virus unless we think and act globally,” he added. “We all should be concerned about this – the more the virus continues to spread, the greater the risk of it mutating to a stage where our vaccines and treatments no longer work. If that happens we’re back to square one.”

A highly transmissible new variant of the novel coronavirus first identified in India has spread to several countries around the world.

‘VERY FEW OPTIONS’

COVAX aims to get vaccines to at least 20% of the populations of the more-than 90 low and middle-income countries signed up to receive the shots as donations. It has so far distributed about 65 million doses of mainly the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, many of them to Africa.

A spokeswoman for the GAVI vaccines alliance, which co-leads COVAX, said the facility was working hard to make up supplies.

“We’re trying to find different ways of making sure that those countries that have received the first dose are able to also receive a second dose and that vaccinations can continue,” she told Reuters. “What we need right now, to meet the immediate needs, is dose sharing.”

The United States said on Wednesday it would share a total of 20 million doses of Pfizer’s, Moderna’s and Johnson & Johnson’s vaccines by the end of June, donating a significant amount via COVAX, on top of 60 million AstraZeneca shots it had already planned to give to other countries.

EU trade commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said this week that the bloc was working to significantly ramp up vaccine donations through COVAX in the second half of 2021. Vaccine sharing announced by EU member states has so far amounted to 11.1 million vaccines, he said, of which 9 million are being shared via COVAX.

Britain, meanwhile, will have enough surplus doses to fully vaccinate at least 50 million people in poorer countries once every adult at home has been fully vaccinated, according to analysis by UNICEF’s UK office last week.

The GAVI spokeswoman said COVAX’S reliance on the Serum Institute was based, largely, on its vast production capacity, ability to deliver at low cost and on assurances that it would be able to produce the millions of doses needed at speed.

“It always was COVAX’s plan to grow and diversify its portfolio to 10-12 vaccines but at the start of the year when approved vaccines were only slowly coming online, we had very few options available to us,” she said.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Additional reporting by Francesco Guarascio in Brussels and Ludwig Burger in Frankfurt; Editing by Pravin Char)

Thanks to Kobach, Trump and conservative think tank, we know extent of voter fraud

The Kansas City Star

Thanks to Kobach, Trump and conservative think tank, we know extent of voter fraud

Charles Hammer May 20, 2021

We Kansans owe Kris Kobach warm thanks for his greatest triumph: He proved that voter fraud is virtually nonexistent in our state. He achieved that by fiercely striving to prove the opposite.

In 2010 he got himself elected as Kansas secretary of state, then won legislative authority to prosecute illegal voters — a power no equivalent state official elsewhere holds.

He secured a 2013 law requiring that those registering to vote prove they are American citizens. His bar to voting was among the most severe in the nation until overruled in federal court.

Kobach recently filed to run for Kansas attorney general in the next election.

So how many fraudulent voters did Kobach’s dragnet convict during his eight-year tenure in office? Just nine. Nine convictions in a state with nearly 2 million registered voters. Among those were older citizens who mistakenly voted in two different places where they owned property.

A college student filled out an absentee ballot for her home state before voting months later in Kansas, both times for Trump. Steve Watkins, a former Republican congressman, was charged with three felony voting offenses and got off with diversion.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, supports the arguments of Donald Trump and Kobach. Going back as far as 2005, Heritage lists 15 convictions for voter infractions in Kansas, presumably including those from the Kobach era. Over 15 years, one offense per year.

The Heritage website also reports 1,322 “proven instances of voter fraud” in the United States since the early 1980s. How could America have passed 40 years with a measly 1,322 proven instances of voter fraud? Among our 168 million registered voters?

Both for Kansas and the nation, the rate of fraud has been less than one one-thousandth of 1%. Would that we religious Americans sinned at such a microscopic rate.

Fully armed, Trump, Kobach and the Heritage Foundation marched out on an elephant hunt and bagged a gnat.

But, see, there must be horrendous voter fraud. Otherwise, how can Republicans defend their gerrymandering of voting districts so they win even when they lose? How can they defend suppression of votes from minorities, the elderly and young people?

Only fraud can justify shutting down polling places, banning drop boxes, cutting short mail voting and requiring notary public signatures on such ballots — make it, in other words, very hard for certain people to vote.

Here’s another high-flying way they strive to overcome “fraud.” The U.S. president telephones the Georgia secretary of state and says: “So, look…I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state…And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated.”

But what if the man answers: “Well, Mr. President…the data you have is wrong”? Then direct threats are necessary. “You know, that’s a criminal,” says the president, “that’s a criminal offense….”

Then there’s the oft-repeated claim by Kobach and others that undocumented immigrants swarm to the polls and elect Democrats.

My research on this went only as far as the Heritage Foundation’s own list of their illegal Kansas voters’ last names: Watkins, Garcia, Christensen, Criswell, Doyle, Farris, Hannum, Kilian, Weems, Wilson, Gaedke, Kurtz, Duncan, Scherzer and McIntosh. Not a plethora of Hispanic last names there.

The Heritage tally also includes one Hispanic name, Lleras-Rodriguez, among 17 voter fraud cases in Missouri.

I’m tender myself on the immigrant issue since I’m half German. My father embarked from Hamburg just five years before Adolf Hitler seized power in 1933.

As an immigrant hater, Trump should be tender himself since his grandfather was German and his mother immigrated from Scotland. Two of his three wives, one now an ex-wife, immigrated from Eastern Europe.

Long before he died in 1974 my dad (naturalized as an American citizen in 1934) got to feeling easy about his origins. I fondly remember him tilted back in his green recliner, puffing his pipe and musing, as we immigrants often do, on who should be Americans.

“That’s de trouble mit this country,” he would say with a grin. “We got too dang many foreigners. They gettin’ all de good jobs. Ha, ha, ha!”