Twitter flags GOP lawmaker’s anime video depicting him killing Ocasio-Cortez, attacking Biden

Twitter flagged the tweet Monday evening, saying it violated its policy on “hateful conduct.” However, the post remained accessible for the “public interest.”

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/gop-lawmaker-tweets-altered-anime-video-depicting-him-killing-ocasio-n1283527
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Dartunorro Clark

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Trump bashes Senate Republicans, McConnell over bipartisan infrastructure bill

Former President Trump on Sunday doubled down on his criticism of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other Senate Republicans who voted in favor of passing a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure b…

Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/580471-trump-bashes-moderate-republicans-mcconnell-over-bipartisan
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What the 14th Century Plague Tells Us About How Covid Will Change Politics

Nearly 700 years ago, Europe experienced the single most devastating pandemic in recorded human history. Within a timespan of roughly four years (1347–1351), an outbreak of plague tread an awful path across most of the continent, claiming the lives of about half of the population. Economic activities like mining and metallurgy came to a complete stop. In some cases, villages constructed around marginal agricultural lands were entirely abandoned, to be reclaimed by the forests. Chroniclers at the time referred to the event as the “Great Mortality” — today we know it as the Black Death.

Yet the legacy of the Black Death goes well beyond human suffering. The unparalleled pandemic did not just devastate the population in the areas it hit the hardest; it killed off entire social and economic institutions — especially ones that had, up until that point, restricted human freedom and stifled prosperity.

In recently published research, we trace out how the regions that experienced the worst mortality and the most extensive destruction began to look different from those that had fared better. In regions with the highest death toll, the power and social standing of workers went up precipitously, while exploitative labor practices crumbled. As a consequence, government, particularly at the local level, became significantly more democratic and inclusive — effects that could still be seen centuries later.

Today, we may be witnessing the early stages of a similar development. The recent surge in workers quitting low wage jobs, especially in the leisure and hospitality industries, has left employers scrambling to fill empty positions. Some suggest that the Covid pandemic and its fallout have, at least in the short run, augmented the bargaining power of labor. While the available evidence on this point is mixed (there has been only a modest increase in inflation-adjusted wage rates and little change to overall levels of inequality), the history of the Black Death suggests that pandemic-driven shifts in the labor supply can have important and long-lasting economic and political ramifications.

How precisely did the Black Death have this kind of impact? Medieval medicine understood neither how the plague spread nor how it could be treated. Today we know that plague is primarily transmitted to humans by infected rat fleas, but doctors in the 14th century commonly attributed the disease to poison in the air. Easily treated by antibiotics today, treatments at the time consisted of ineffective and potentially damaging procedures such as bloodletting. If allowed to take its course, plague has extremely high mortality — roughly 60 percent-70 percent of afflicted individuals will succumb to the disease. So when the plague entered Europe via trading routes with Central Asia, the result was a calamity of unfathomable magnitude.

The effects of mass death on the economic fortunes of workers were profound. On the eve of the Black Death, Europe was characterized by feudalism, a hierarchical social and economic system with military aristocrats (and the clergy) at the top and a large mass of peasant laborers at the bottom. Because the economy was overwhelmingly agricultural, the elite’s capital was held almost exclusively as land. Peasants were tied to this land through a highly exploitative system of forced labor called serfdom, which demanded the uncompensated provision of labor and greatly restricted workers’ mobility.

The demographic collapse wrought by the Black Death was a fundamental shock to this system — at least it was in the areas where the toll of the plague was high. The basic laws of supply and demand explain why. In areas where the plague hit hard, it decimated the labor force. At the same time, the disease left the upper classes’ main capital asset, land, completely untouched. Thus, one factor of economic production, labor, suddenly became scarce and expensive, while the other, land, became abundant and cheap. The result was a massive increase in peasants’ bargaining power. Thus, workers were able to demand better working conditions, improve their access to land and, given the challenges elites faced in policing their movement, migrate to the cities. In the years immediately following the Black Death, serfdom collapsed and was replaced by a wage economy based on free labor.

Yet this reaction to the Black Death did not take place across the whole of Europe. Although much of Western Europe (including some western areas of what we now think of as Germany) suffered from the plague with particularly high intensity, leading to those massive changes to the bargaining power of labor, Eastern Europe, which was less exposed to trade and had sparser human settlement, saw significantly less death. Consequently, in the eastern parts of Europe, including the east of German-speaking Central Europe, the system of serfdom persisted for centuries longer than it did in the West.

These differences in labor freedom had important consequences for local politics and institutions. We find that areas of Central Europe that experienced high mortality from the Black Death — leading to an early end for serfdom — developed more inclusive political institutions at the local level, such as the use of elections to select city councils. These changes initially resulted from shifts in the organization of agriculture. In areas where the Black Death hit hard, elites were forced to decentralize much of the everyday control over agricultural management to the peasants themselves. This created a local need for coordination, since agricultural production at the village-level could only be successful if peasants agreed on the crops to be harvested and the division of labor in the agricultural round. As a consequence of these early experiences with self-governance, peasant villages began to demand the right to elect their own officials. Over time, this led to wider and wider participation in collective self-governance at the local level. Such experiences fostered a lasting culture of civic engagement and cooperation that proved essential for safeguarding the freedoms of laborers from future attempts by elites to roll back the gains won in the wake of the Black Death. In the southwest region of what is today Germany, for instance, the existence of institutions of local self-government allowed peasants to organize collectively to defend themselves against elites who would have returned them to the bondage of serfdom. They did so by collecting arms, forming armies and storming castles. This feat of collective organization — the Peasants’ War of 1525 — prevented the reimposition of labor coercion.

No comparable dynamic emerged in the areas that experienced low mortality from the Black Death, where serfdom ended late. Rather, in these areas, elites subjected peasants to an increasing array of exploitative labor obligations. Our research shows that the long-term effects of this major divergence in political cultures and institutional development was visible even centuries later: Citizens from regions that had a long tradition of democratic engagement rejected parties that were strongly antidemocratic in their orientation, such as Imperial Germany’s Conservative Party in the early 1870s or the National Socialists (i.e., the Nazi party) in the Weimar Republic’s fateful 1930 and July 1932 elections. In our analysis, the link between support for antidemocratic parties and the intensity of exposure to the Black Death holds irrespective of whether or not one takes into consideration factors such as pre-Black Death population densities and measures of exposure to trade. Moreover, we also make use of the fact that the Black Death had clear seasonal patterns and a decreasing intensity over time. These patterns allow us to infer the component of local mortality rates that is independent of specific political, economic, social or cultural conditions. When doing a new analysis that is based on this component of mortality rates only, we find very similar results and again confirm our theoretical expectations. For these reasons, we believe that the Black Death had a causal impact on long-run voting behavior.

The Southern German state of Württemberg offers a good example of these dynamics. Württemberg was hit especially hard by the Black Death. As a consequence, in many parts of the state, serfdom was replaced by peasant-led forms of local self-government. The workers’ greater independence and ability to organize collectively meant that Würrtemberg became one of the earliest and most important sites of the Peasants’ War of 1525, where the peasants defended their freedoms against the nobility. The state’s long political tradition of local participatory government helps explain why, at key moments in German history, it stood as a bastion for liberal values in otherwise highly illiberal times. At the founding of the German Empire, the highly antidemocratic Conservative Party was only able to achieve an average of 2.3 percent of the vote across Württemberg’s electoral districts in the 1871 election. This stands in stark contrast to the double-digit results and majorities that it achieved in the far eastern parts of Imperial Germany. In those areas, there had not been a comparable, longstanding experience with participatory government, which made it easier for antidemocratic forces to succeed. Similarly, in the 1930 election, the citizens of Württemberg strongly rejected the National Socialists, which only achieved 9.3 percent of Württemberg’s overall vote (the second-lowest among all major electoral districts of Weimar Germany), while the party’s nationwide average was twice as high with 18.3 percent.

So, the experience of the Black Death makes clear that pandemics can contribute to greater bargaining power for workers and perhaps even long run gains in human freedom that echo across the centuries. But will today’s Covid-19 pandemic lead to lasting social changes akin to those encountered in medieval Europe? While we are very skeptical that Covid will lead to changes that are as drastic or long lasting — as neither the destructive power of today’s pandemic nor the technological constraints on the economy are comparable — some of the dynamics of social change we are currently witnessing do resemble those observed in the wake of the Black Death.

Just like in medieval Europe, the current pandemic has been followed by a scarcity of available workers — a shortage that has, in many instances, given laborers the necessary leverage to leave their jobs, participate in strikes and otherwise negotiate for better working conditions. Whether this is just a short-lived uptick in workers’ bargaining power or the antecedent to something more permanent will depend on whether these recent gains become enshrined in institutions that permit workers to act collectively in defense of their rights. This could take the form of national legislation such as the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would facilitate collective action across unions and enhance worker protections against retaliation for strikes. Or, it could be the result of reforms at the state-level, such as the extension of collective bargaining rights to all public employees in states that have a blanket prohibition or that limit that right to only certain classes of public employees. Alternatively, the state-level repeal of so-called right-to-work laws, which weaken bargaining leverage of unions, would also facilitate worker collective action. Initiatives like these might help American workers peaceably claw back their share of the productivity gains that have been overwhelmingly hoarded by owners, CEOs and upper-level management.

Still, the way in which Covid contributed to the current labor shortage is different from how the Black Death did so, which has implications for how long the effects of the pandemic will last. Unlike in medieval Europe, today’s labor shortage is caused by a combination of secondary pandemic effects — not the death of workers. Specifically, many laborers who would have worked a bit longer before retiring or who struggled to find jobs in the pre-Covid economy have dropped out of the active labor force. Additionally, many young parents are unable to find child care at affordable prices, which further amplifies the existing scarcity of labor. Individuals who belong to high-risk populations may be refraining from working right now due to fears of breakthrough infections or further variants of Covid emerging.

All of these changes are less permanent than demographic collapse, which was how the Black Death altered the labor supply. Some people who have dropped out of the active labor force might choose or be forced to reenter it. Similarly, once child care becomes more accessible, parents might return to work and increase the labor supply. Finally, with booster shots and increased vaccination rates, at-risk populations might be willing to return to work. If those dynamics unfold over the coming months, unless a substantially more deadly Covid variant emerges, the current level of labor power could potentially decline. Without the institutionalization of worker power through new laws or organizations (as occured in hard-hit areas after the Black Death pandemic), the return of the labor supply to its pre-Covid level could close the window of opportunity for workers to permanently gain a fairer share of the economic pie. Under such circumstances, the slow but steady erosion of labor bargaining power in the U.S. would not be reversed, but likely continue.

This contribution is based on the authors’ recent World Politics article, which can be accessed here.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/11/07/black-death-labor-politics-covid-history-519717
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New York man burst into flames after Taser used on him, police say

The man had doused himself with hand sanitizer before the confrontation at the Catskill Police Department.

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-york-man-burst-flames-after-taser-used-him-police-n1283394
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To combat homelessness, California is turning hotels into housing

In March 2020, as Covid-19 was beginning its assault on America, Jason Elliott found himself huddled in a windowless conference room late one night with about 15 other California state officials, advisers and epidemiologists who were using their phone calculators to tally up potential death rates.

The group — which included national guardsmen, emergency responders and academics who’d studied homelessness — had been banished by Gov. Gavin Newsom from an emergency Covid meeting in the state’s situation room and directed to come back when they had a plan to address the catastrophe Covid posed for the state’s massive homeless population.

“The early projection was that we would lose 25,000 homeless lives,” Elliot, a senior counselor in Newsom’s office and his top adviser on homelessness, said in an interview. “It’s enough to make you go numb, to make your stomach turn — ‘Oh my God, we got to get going.’”

Of the 580,000 Americans estimated to be homeless in January 2020, over 226,000 had no shelter at all. That meant they had little access to basic hygiene just as public health officials were directing everyone to wash their hands and wipe down surfaces. In overburdened homeless shelters, meanwhile, people were piled on top of each other with cots placed a couple feet apart, just as officials were urging Americans to socially distance and maintain six feet of separation from others.

In California, home to 28 percent of the nation’s homeless population and 51 percent of the unsheltered population, the outlook was particularly dire. Based on sketchy early case and fatality estimates cobbled together from the data coming out of China in the pandemic’s early days, epidemiologists told California officials to expect the homeless to be a major vector for spread of the virus and to die by the thousands.

As the group met into the pre-dawn hours, they batted around potential solutions. Maybe the state could use big wedding tents to shelter homeless people, someone suggested. No, they decided, amassing a bunch of people in tents would present the same contagion problems as crowded homeless shelters. How about using trailers to provide private spaces? No, they didn’t have the time or the money to procure enough trailers.

It was then that someone — Elliott can’t remember who — suggested hotel rooms.

Prior to the pandemic, homelessness experts including Elliott had considered using vacant hotel rooms to house homeless people in mostly theoretical terms — it was a wish-list idea, one that would require some real money to implement, especially at any kind of scale. Newsom had given hotel conversions the briefest of mentions in his “State of the State” address dedicated to homelessness the previous month, as one of a few potential “innovative approaches” to the homelessness problem, like building tiny homes.

But the more the group discussed the prospect over vending machine chips that night in March, the more sense it made to shelter the state’s homeless in hotels during the pandemic. They knew travel was about to plunge — state officials were already weighing a stay-at-home order — so plenty of hotels would have vacant rooms they’d be eager to lease on the cheap. And while FEMA had previously only reimbursed states for congregate, or group, shelter in the wake of past natural disasters, a former FEMA employee on staff in the room that night thought they had a shot of convincing the agency that non-congregate shelter was necessary in the face of a highly contagious virus.

“The pandemic provided us with a confluence of factors that allowed us to do things that a lot of us daydreamed about for years,” Elliott said. Those factors included the urgency caused by the public health emergency, relief money from the federal government and the timing of the crisis, which Elliott said coincided with rising political will to do something about out-of-control homelessness in the state.

“That was kind of the magic recipe,” he said.

So as travel came to a standstill and hotel occupancy rates plunged, California began moving thousands of homeless people into private hotel rooms in an effort dubbed “Project Roomkey,” which would eventually provide temporary shelter to over 48,000 people in hotel rooms leased by the state.

Within months, the state went all in on the strategy, launching an effort to convert hotel rooms into permanent housing. Between July and December 2020, the rebranded “Project Homekey“ would use $846 million — $700 million of it from federal coronavirus relief funds — to create more than 6,000 housing units, 5,000 of them permanent, in 94 properties throughout the state, mostly hotels. The average cost per unit came in at about $148,000. Normally the state spends years and about $500,000 per unit to develop new affordable housing.

David Grunwald, senior vice president for the Los Angeles region at National Community Renaissance, said he “went nuts” when he saw a request for proposals from the city of Los Angeles to turn hotels into housing for homeless people last summer. Grunwald’s team applied for, and won, contracts to develop housing at two old hotels under the first round of the program, including a 49-unit motel in the El Sereno neighborhood of LA now called Casa Luna.

He’s only grown more optimistic about the hotel conversion model since seeing it in action.

“I’ve been doing housing and homeless work since 1989, and it’s the first strategy I’ve seen that has promise to scale up in a way that makes a difference,” Grunwald said.

“The homelessness crisis is the affordable housing crisis”

When people think of homelessness, they often picture the visibly and chronically homeless — many of whom suffer from mental illness, behavioral disorders and substance abuse issues that keep them from holding down jobs. But chronic cases actually comprise a minority of the population. In California, only 30 percent of the people experiencing homelessness in January 2020 had been homeless for at least 12 months of the previous three years, according to a HUD count, which means about 70 percent were newly homeless — often low-income people who’d fallen on hard times and found themselves without a home for the first time in their lives.

“What you don’t see are that many, many of those folks who are out there are getting out of their tents and going to jobs,” said Margot Kushel, head of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative in San Francisco. Kushel, a physician who has studied homelessness’ impact on health, was one of the experts in the room when Newsom’s staff came up with the hotel conversion plan.

In part because of the temperate weather, most homeless people in California — about 70 percent, including about 84 percent of chronically homeless people — are unsheltered, sleeping in tents or cars or on sidewalks and park benches. By contrast in New York, just 7 percent of the homeless population is chronically homeless, and just 5 percent is unsheltered.

Both states have seen their homeless populations rise in recent years. One in four homeless people in the United States last year was in either Los Angeles or New York City.

It’s no coincidence that New York and California are also two of the states with the most severe shortages of affordable housing and the biggest obstacles to the construction of new units — from costly permitting processes to lengthy environmental reviews to strict zoning rules, often fiercely supported by property owners in the community. New York, Hawaii and California — all states with pricey real estate — have the highest rates of homelessness per capita.

“Rezoning is a political process, and most people — even if in the abstract they’re incredibly supportive of affordable housing — they don’t want to change the character of their neighborhood,” said Eric Rosenbaum, president and CEO of Project Renewal, a New York homeless services nonprofit.

That kind of “not in my backyard” mindset is prevalent in California, which has seen an explosion in population growth and property values as the tech revolution took hold, but little corresponding growth in wages for low-income laborers and service workers.

“The homelessness crisis is the affordable housing crisis. They are so deeply linked that it is almost impossible to separate them,” Elliott said.

Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, agrees: While a combination of factors has contributed to the rise in homelessness over the last 40 years, the affordability crisis is the primary cause, she said.

“In the ’70s there was an adequate supply of affordable housing for the number of low-income people,” Roman said. “By the late ’70s and early ’80s that equation had changed, and that’s what started homelessness and continues to be the major driver.”

According to the most recent HUD data, there are 7.8 million renter households who do not receive government assistance and live in inadequate conditions or pay more than half of their income on rent, above the economist-recommended 30 percent. The U.S. has a shortage of 6.8 million rental homes affordable for people whose incomes fall at or below the poverty line or 30 percent of their area median income, according to a National Low Income Housing Coalition analysis of Census Bureau data.

The numbers can be explained by a broader shortage of housing supply. New-home construction over the last two decades has fallen short of historical levels by 5.5 million to 6.8 million units, according to a report released over the summer by the National Association of Realtors. Construction has particularly lagged since the housing meltdown that sparked the Great Recession, and many of the workers who left the industry then haven’t returned. Total housing stock grew at an average annual rate of 1.7 percent from 1968 through 2000. That rate fell to 1 percent over the last 20 years, dipping to 0.7 percent over the last decade alone.

Housing is also a sector where trickle-down economics applies, to the detriment of lower-income renters. Home prices soared about 15 percent over the last year as white-collar Americans whose finances weren’t hurt by the pandemic crisis competed for a limited supply of housing, spurred on by historically low mortgage rates. The booming market has in turn priced other people out of buying their first home, so more people are renting: There are 1 million more renter households today than there were at the end of the second quarter of 2020, according to NAR data.

When more people compete for rental units, costs go up. They’re already rising at an alarming pace: In 2020, 22.7 percent of multifamily rental units rented for over $2,000, compared with just 12.3 percent in 2017, according to an NAR analysis of Census data.

In the past, low-wage workers had more affordable options. Single-room occupancy housing — essentially rented rooms with shared bathroom and kitchen facilities — used to be somewhat common in American cities.

Those units “started disappearing in the early ’70s and then the ’80s,” Roman said. “And it was largely gotten rid of by affordable housing advocates, who thought it was substandard and we should do better for people. Which I agree with, but we didn’t do better — we just lost all that housing.”

Between the 1970s and the 1990s, about 1 million SRO units were destroyed in different cities around the country, leaving about 200,000 today, Roman noted.

The general lack of supply, meanwhile, has aggravated the NIMBY problem. It’s not just wealthy people worried that a high-density affordable development would tank their increasing property values: low-income communities often oppose the construction of new developments in their neighborhoods, fearing the new buildings would accelerate gentrification and price them out.

“Measurably better outcomes”

California has been throwing ever-larger sums of money at homelessness for years, only to see the homeless population continue to surge, increasing by 40 percent in just the last five years. What made Homekey different was the way it streamlined regulations in a state notorious for erecting some of the most onerous and costly barriers to the development of affordable housing.

The Homekey project — and others like it — gets around those hurdles by focusing on existing buildings handpicked by the communities themselves.

The statute establishing Homekey included a provision deeming any project developed under the program to be exempt from discretionary permits and in line with applicable local standards and zoning rules. The law also exempted certain Homekey properties from a state environmental review requirement, reasoning that because the program relied on existing buildings there was little risk that the buildings would fail to pass the review.

“Because we had land-use conformance and environmental streamlining in place, our partners knew they could get to an occupied site,” said Geoffrey Ross, deputy director of the division of federal financial assistance at the California Department of Housing and Community Development. Normally, “the risk of a project being killed and the time it takes to get approvals increases the cost.”

The result was a much quicker process that for the most part sidestepped neighborhood pushback.

“It’s been a game changer, being able to say, ‘Hey, we have this underutilized building, we can use it to meet an immediate need, we don’t have to go through all the hurdles’,” said Vivian Wan, chief operating officer at Abode Services, one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s largest homeless services providers.

Crucially, the state also required that applicants for program funding be local public entities, which were in a better position to select potential sites based on community needs.

“The local jurisdiction has to go in with the developer, so it creates all this buy-in from the beginning,” Wan said.

The privacy provided by converted hotels is also a draw for some homeless people who would otherwise resist coming indoors, according to advocates, and getting people housed with supportive services like job training, medical services, healthy meals and on-call social workers reduces the strain on other community services like hospitals and jails.

“The dignity, the stability, the safety that comes with that leads to measurably better outcomes than congregate shelters,” Elliott said.

A resident named Ernie Guereca, for instance, has been able to live at Casa Luna while waiting for a voucher to move into permanent supportive housing. Guereca, a 53-year-old El Sereno native, had experienced homelessness for two years, living in an encampment on the center strip of the street on which Casa Luna is located.

The development is currently operated as interim housing for 49 formerly homeless people like Guereca; it will be redeveloped into permanent housing for up to 100 residents in early 2024, with plans for new construction on an adjacent property.

“Do we want to end homelessness or not?”

The idea of converting hotels and motels to housing isn’t new. But the pandemic – which sent hotel occupancy rates plunging to 37 percent and interest rates to rock-bottom lows – proved an opportunity.

“The price points were really high when we looked at this four or five years ago for previously homeless veterans,” said Douglas Guthrie, president and CEO of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles. “When Covid-19 struck, a lot of these mom-and-pop ownership places had serious financial problems, so the price points came down and became much more reasonable.”

Plenty of hotels were already struggling before the pandemic struck, thanks to the rise of AirBnb. And the American Hotel and Lodging Association doesn’t expect the industry to recover from the pandemic until 2024.

So the hotel conversion trend is taking off. And it’s not just high-cost cities eyeing vacant hotels as a potential solution to housing shortages: A community land trust converted a Baymont Inn and Suites in Essex Junction, Vermont, into housing using federal coronavirus relief funds, and hotels in cities as far flung as Branson, Missouri, and Kissimmee, Florida, have been redeveloped into workforce housing using private funding.

“The economic drivers are there for this trend to continue — the unaffordability of housing, which is pushing up demand for rental housing, and the lack of housing in general,” said Gay Cororaton, senior economist and director of housing and commercial research at NAR, which published a report on the conversion of vacant hotels into multifamily housing earlier this year.

Those factors are also continuing to drive up homelessness, including in California. The annual government count to gauge how many people are homeless on a given night was canceled this year because of the pandemic, so it’s hard to know precisely how the crisis affected homelessness rates.

But encampments have grown in major cities around California and the country, although it’s hard to know how much of that comes down to new visibility in the wake of CDC guidance urging officials not to clear encampments during the pandemic.

Homekey’s boosters readily admit the program was never going to solve the state’s homelessness issue: The program is an “arrow in the quiver of arrows that are necessary to tackle homelessness,” Grunwald said, calling it “one of the most intractable problems of our times.”

Washington was impressed enough with the approach to establish a new $5 billion homelessness program at HUD in the March relief package that includes money for the “purchase and development of non-congregate shelter.”

Ross, who oversaw the Homekey project before he was named to his current post overseeing California’s use of funding under the new HUD program, conceded that the economics of conversions may change in the future — interest rates are already rising, many hotels will return to regular occupancy, the political focus on homelessness may fade — but said “we really can deploy these tools in a wide variety of ways and still have very meaningful outcomes.”

“Just because we’re not in the same level of pandemic and lockdown we were in last year does not mean we can’t still be successful,” Ross added.

Grunwald, who used Homekey to develop Casa Luna, is now managing three Homekey projects, as the program enters a second phase with $5.8 billion in new state and federal funds. Grunwald himself was so excited about the concept that he wanted to apply to acquire every project in the L.A. area, before his boss talked him down.

“Once I saw what it was, I was absolutely convinced it was one of the best programs I’d ever seen,” he said.

In fact, with enough financial support, Grunwald sees a national hotel conversion plan as the key to turning the homelessness problem around. Now that the pandemic has created a path forward that works, Grunwald says the question is now, “Do we want to end homelessness or not?”

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/04/main-recoverylab-cities-la-sros-518602
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Hundreds of QAnon supporters gather in Dallas expecting return of JFK Jr.

Hundreds of QAnon supporters have gathered in Dallas expecting the return of John F. Kennedy Jr., who they believe would then help reinstate former President Trump, …

Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/579798-hundreds-of-qanon-supporters-gather-in-dallas-expecting-return-of-jfk-jr
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WaPost won’t publish full Trump response due to ‘unrelated, inflammatory claims’

The Washington Post said it will not publish former President Trump’s response to a new investigative series it published this week about the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol because the statement contained irrelevant an…

Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/579355-washington-post-decides-not-to-publish-full-trump-response-to-series-due-to
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How the Attica prison uprising started — and why it still resonates today

A new documentary goes behind the walls of the deadly 1971 uprising. Attica filmmaker Stanley Nelson and former prisoner Arthur Harrison reflect on the five-day revolt, and its lasting legacy.

(Image credit: Showtime/Firelight )

Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/10/27/1049295683/attica-prison-documentary-stanley-nelson
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Senate Democrats unveil new income tax for billionaires

Senate Democrats on Wednesday released a billionaires’ tax proposal, designed to help support President Biden’s social spending and climate change legislation.

Why it matters: Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said the Billionaires Income Tax would raise “hundreds of billions of dollars” and would affect approximately 700 taxpayers who have more than $1 billion in assets or incomes of over $100 million a year.

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Details: “Under today’s tax system, [billionaires] don’t have to pay capital-gains taxes unless they sell their assets, and they can borrow against that wealth to finance their lifestyles,” the Wall Street Journal writes.

• The new plan would require billionaires to give the IRS a detailed account of how much the assets they own gained or lost each year.
• It will ensure“the wealthiest people in the country pay their fair share toward historic investments in child care, paid leave, and addressing the climate crisis,” said Wyden, who released the proposal.

The big picture: The unveiling of the plan comes as Biden and congressional leaders race to finish — and figure out how to pay for — their nearly $2 trillion social spending and climate package.

• The billionaire tax gained currency over the weekend because Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), a moderate and key negotiator, signaled her opposition to corporate, personal and capital gains tax hikes, Axios’ Hans Nichols writes.

Yes, but: Multiple Democrats in the House and Senate are skeptical of the billionaire tax proposal, including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), both for its implementation and its likelihood of getting tied up in the courts, reports Axios’ Alayna Treene.

• It would also fundamentally change the country’s tax system.

Of note: Senate leaders unveiled a separate plan to impose a 15% minimum book tax on corporations with more than $1 billion in profits.

Go deeper: Manchin waffles on billionaire tax

Source: https://www.axios.com/senate-democrats-billionaire-income-tax-8cd08775-b254-47ba-a80b-ad15805efbc6.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Oriana Gonzalez

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A history of humanzees, born from female chimps impregnated with human sperm

The early 20th century was a hotbed of genetic experimentation. One bizarre line of research explored human-nonhuman hybrids, such as humanzees. At least one such case of a humanzee making it to term is described in History of Yesterday:

An evolutionary psychologist by the name of Gordon Gallup stated that in the 1920s the first humanzee was “born” at a secret research facility in Florida.

— Read the rest

Source: https://boingboing.net/2021/10/27/a-history-of-humanzees-born-from-female-chimps-impregnated-with-human-sperm.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-history-of-humanzees-born-from-female-chimps-impregnated-with-human-sperm
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Mark Frauenfelder

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Abbott signs sports bill targeting transgender students in Texas

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Monday signed a law ban…

Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/578414-abbott-signs-sports-bill-targeting-transgender-students-in-texas
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Cameron Jenkins

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Over 100 million people in Africa threatened by climate change

WMO report warns 1.3 billion people remain ‘extremely vulnerable’ as continent warms more and faster than world average.

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/19/climate-change-threatens-more-than-100-million-in-africa-un
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13 LGBTQ royals you didn’t learn about in history class

The Dutch monarchy made international news last week after announcing that royals can marry a same-sex partner without giving up their right to the throne.

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/nbc-out-proud/13-lgbtq-royals-didnt-learn-history-class-rcna3097
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Dan Avery

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Senate to vote on sweeping voting rights bill Republicans promise to filibuster

The vote, which is likely to take place Wednesday, might be the last dance for federal voting rights legislation.

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-vote-sweeping-voting-rights-bill-republicans-promise-filibuster-n1281651
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Sahil Kapur

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Author of controversial Trump Russia dossier speaks out: ‘I stand by the work we did’

Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent behind the controversial “Steele Dossier” that gathered intel on possible links between former President Trump and Russia, has defended himself and his work against critics in his…

Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/577153-author-of-controversial-trump-russia-dossier-speaks-out-i-stand-by-the-work-we
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Sarakshi Rai

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Colin Powell Dies of Complications From Covid-19

Colin Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a key figure in multiple Republican administrations, and the first Black person to serve as secretary of state, has died of complications from covid-19 at the age of 84.

Read more…

Source: https://gizmodo.com/colin-powell-dies-of-complications-from-covid-19-1847883339
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Tom McKay

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Manchin hits back at Sanders criticism in fight over Biden investment plan

• Vermont senator chides Manchin over lack of support for bill
• Progressive-centrist impasse holds up Biden’s reform agenda

Internal party warfare between progressive and moderate Democrats over Joe Biden’s $3.5tn tax-and-spending package has burst dramatically into the open after Vermont senator Bernie Sanders launched a thinly veiled attack on West Virginia senator Joe Manchin in an op-ed published in the centrist Democrat’s home-state newspaper.

Sanders, writing in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, described opponents of the legislation as “every Republican in Congress as well as the drug companies, the insurance companies, the fossil fuel industry and the billionaire class”.

Continue reading…

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/16/manchin-sanders-democrats-biden-spending-investment
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Edward Helmore

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Winemaking and marathon running: what Kyrsten Sinema does instead of her job

Sinema is one of two Democrat holdouts against passing Biden’s Build Back Better agenda – but hasn’t made public why. Here’s what she is public about

Serving in the US Senate is a pretty good gig if you can get it. You’re paid $174,000 a year, only have to show up around 200 days and you almost always snag an even better-compensated private sector gig when you retire or lose an election.

For all these perks, all you have to do is occasionally give a thumbs up or down on matters of serious import. Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema seems to enjoy all of those aspects of her job besides the last one.

Continue reading…

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/16/kyrsten-sinema-senate-biden-build-back-better
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Luke O’Neil

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He Calls Himself the ‘American Sheriff.’ Whose Law Is He Following?

FLORENCE, Ariz. — The first thing to know about Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal County, Arizona, is that he just plain looks like a sheriff. It could be the Justin cowboy hat he wears pulled low over his eyes and his penchant for Western shirts and a tactical vest in lieu of a uniform. It could be his demeanor, at once confident and aw-shucks. It could be his size — he’s 6’3”, 240 pounds, or so he writes in his self-published book, American Sheriff: Traditional Values in a Modern World.

In public, Lamb commands attention. During a July interview at a local café here decked out in Old West paraphernalia, passersby interrupted to clasp hands heartily with him and chat. There was an older Latino man named Randy wearing a snap-pocket shirt who had recently retired from a wild horse-and-burro program at the nearby prison and asked Lamb if he knew any cowboys. There were middle-aged women with salon-styled hair hoping to take their picture with him. There was the waitress who told Lamb he needed to gain weight. They seemed unsurprised to see their sheriff talking to a reporter and flashing his TV-ready smile.

Lamb, 49, has jurisdiction over only Arizona’s third most populous county, a stretch of desert wedged between Phoenix and Tucson that’s home to about 500,000 people. Yet he styles himself as the “American Sheriff” — a moniker around which he has spent the past several years trying to build a national brand as a fervent defender of law enforcement.

Since taking office in 2017, Lamb has become the face of a new online streaming service called the American Sheriff Network and of a nonprofit coalition of sheriffs called Protect America Now; he also founded a charity, the American Sheriff Foundation. Lamb is a frequent talking head on Fox News and Newsmax, where he derides President Joe Biden’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’ handling of immigration, and he has spoken at political events like a Turning Point Action summit a few months ago in Phoenix, where he quoted Shakespeare and Thomas Paine (“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered”) and promised, “The sheriffs are going to hold the line.”

With an action figure-style charisma and a growing media platform, Lamb sees it as his mission to educate the American public about the role of the sheriff, which he described to me as to protect people from “the bad guys, and I always say the sheriff is also there to protect the people from government overreach.” As much as he glorifies law enforcement, though, Lamb is selective about which laws he chooses to enforce. He takes a hardline approach on immigration, for example, but when it comes to the government telling people to get vaccinated — or declaring the 2020 election legitimate — he fashions himself as more of a vigilante resister, with a heavy dose of anti-government, sometimes militant rhetoric.

Lamb supported the “stop the steal” campaign in Arizona and has expressed sympathy for the Jan. 6 rioters. He has called vaccine mandates “garbage” and spoke at a recent anti-vaccine rally in Phoenix, where he told supporters, “We’re going to find out what kind of patriots you are. We’re going to find out who is willing to die for freedom.” He also makes direct appeals to citizens, an effort that looks more dangerous after former President Donald Trump riled up supporters on Jan. 6. For example, Lamb, an ardent defender of the Second Amendment, has spoken in support of the formation of private militias — “well within the Constitution,” he told a group of supporters in March — and emphasized the power of sheriffs in Arizona, an open-carry state, to call local civilians into service to “suppress all affrays, insurrections and riots that comes to the attention of the sheriff.” Last year, as Black Lives Matter protests swept across the country, he formed a local civilian “posse” to assist his office with law enforcement, even though there were no such protests in Pinal County.

Through Protect America Now, which was founded by a Republican strategist and two businesspeople working with Lamb and counterparts nationwide, he is marshalling dozens of other elected sheriffs and citizen supporters around these ideas — “building an army” as the group puts it. The message: Sheriffs are here to protect your freedom — including freedom from your own democratically elected government.

Lamb’s advocacy follows in the tradition of “constitutional sheriffs,” who for decades have propagated the idea — refuted by constitutional experts — that sheriffs are the supreme legal authority in America, above even the president and the Supreme Court, and that they can choose not to enforce any law they consider unconstitutional. Former sheriffs Joe Arpaio and David Clarke, along with an estimated 138 currently serving sheriffs, are self-declared adherents of the philosophy, which evolved out of the white nationalist, anti-Semitic movement known as “posse comitatus,” meaning the “power of the county.” Lamb, although he spoke at a convention for constitutional sheriffs last year and says he “appreciate[s] those guys standing up for the rule of law, the Constitution and freedom,” doesn’t call himself a constitutional sheriff. Instead, his pro-sheriff messaging — with media savvy and Trump-y politics thrown in the mix — seems designed for a wider audience.

There’s no question Lamb is a performer, but his calls to citizen action worry experts who see a segment of American law enforcement becoming a power base of its own — one that could further undermine trust in government authority. Devin Burghart, who runs the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which analyzes far-right social movements, says understanding sheriffs like Lamb is important in “the long-term fight for democracy.” Researcher Cloee Cooper said Lamb’s highly politicized approach to his job is “ultimately undermining a safe and just society.” Asked about how supporters might interpret his anti-government messaging, Lamb told me, “I’m a very pro-freedom person. I believe in letting people live the way that they feel like they need to live.”

To spend time with Lamb is to realize just how far a lawman can drift from the law itself — and how little people seem to care, as long as he says the right stuff on TV. In fact, Lamb’s constituents seem to love him: He was unopposed when he ran for reelection last fall and won another four-year term with 97 percent of the vote. Some locals here say he is focused more on playing a sheriff in the national spotlight than serving his constituents. But in a solidly conservative part of Arizona, Lamb so far has had plenty of leeway for more and more activities outside the county. He insists he doesn’t have political ambitions beyond the sheriff’s office, though. “You can actually effect change as the sheriff,” he says. “I’ve never had a desire to run for Senate or Congress,” Lamb told me at the café in Florence, before adding, “I’m a patriot at heart. I love America. And I will serve the people where I can.”

Another patron of the diner walked by. “Can we start calling you senator?” the man asked.

“No, no. Please don’t. Sheriff’s good with me,” Lamb said, looking abashed, like any good politician should.

We don’t go to a shooting range as much as an open, sandy field that Lamb says belongs to a friend of his. Pinal County is 5,400 square miles, roughly the size of Connecticut, and much of it is sand. Two weeks before, in mid-June, the temperature was a newsworthy 110-plus degrees. Today it’s closer to 100, and a faint whisp of cloud floats in the sky, daring itself to cover the blazing sun. Lamb loves it. He wears Wranglers, worn cowboy boots, a black shirt with rolled sleeves, a fully loaded tactical vest and a brown leather belt with “Sheriff Lamb” embossed across the back. He barely seems to sweat.

We’ve come to the range because shooting is Lamb’s favorite pastime. Pinal County Supervisor Jeff Serdy, who owns what he describes as a “very high-volume” gun shop in the area, told me, “You could not ask for a better advocate for the Second Amendment than Sheriff Lamb.” The back of Lamb’s black Chevy Silverado 2500 HD contains his workaday weaponry, including an AR-15 SBR. On his person, Lamb has a 9mm Glock pistol, plus a long knife, a taser, handcuffs and extra ammunition, including a magazine with a Punisher skull on it.

Lamb says he was always interested in guns but didn’t plan for a law enforcement career. Descended from a long line of Mormons and still an “unabashed member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” he grew up “all over the world,” he is fond of saying, including the Philippines, Panama and Argentina, where he did his Mormon mission. In his book, he describes spending much of his childhood in Hawaii, where, he told me, “I was a minority.”

Lamb went through a variety of jobs, including running a paintball business in Utah that ultimately failed. After filing for bankruptcy in 2003, Lamb decided to “start again” in Arizona, he writes in his book, where he moved with his five kids and his wife, Janel — who today has her own book, The Sheriff’s Wife, and often appears with her husband at public events. Initially, Lamb worked in pest control, with a focus on pigeons. One day, in the mid-2000s, he went on a ride-along with a neighbor who worked in law enforcement and, “armed with courage and a flashlight,” Lamb says, he found a suspect they were after hiding in a trailer. “That morning I came home, and I told my wife I was gonna be a cop,” he concluded. Compared with climbing on roofs all day to pick up bird poop, he says, law enforcement seemed safer. (Many job-safety rankings consider being a roofer more dangerous than being a police officer.)

Lamb’s first law enforcement job was with the Salt River Police Department in neighboring Maricopa County beginning in 2006. By 2016, he had moved to Pinal County and decided to seek the sheriff’s job, running as a Republican and, in his words, a “constitutional conservative”; he made a point of opposing abortion rights in his campaign, but he ran without the same cowboy image he has today. The sheriff at the time, Paul Babeu, had faced a series of scandals, including an affair with an undocumented man who alleged Babeu had threatened to deport him if he exposed their relationship. Babeu, who denied making threats and later came out as gay, ran for Congress in 2016. He lost, but the sheriff spot was left open for Lamb, who defeated Babeu’s anointed successor in the primary and took the general election.

Once elected, Lamb promised he would focus on building relationships within the county. “If it doesn’t benefit Pinal County, I don’t need to be on the news,” he said at the time. “If Fox calls, what are they going to do for me?” But it didn’t take long for him to begin leaning into national issues. Lamb won office the same year Sheriff Arpaio was defeated in Maricopa. (A federal judge later found Arpaio in criminal contempt of a court order to stop racially profiling Latino residents, but Trump later pardoned him.) Next door in Pinal County, Lamb embraced Arpaio’s anti-immigrant bent; before long he appeared, sure enough, on Fox News to talk about the “border crisis” (though Pinal County is not on the U.S.-Mexico border), and deployed officers and equipment to help federal authorities with immigration enforcement.

Since taking office, Lamb also has appeared with the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigration organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a hate group. (FAIR has dismissed the characterization, calling the SPLC a “partisan attack dog.”) Earlier this summer, Lamb gathered some two dozen other sheriffs for a Protect America Now rally along the border in Arizona, where he declared, “We are standing up for the Constitution, our oath and the rights of the people.”

Lamb, who oversees a medium-sized sheriff’s office with 650 employees and a $39 million annual budget, sums up his core beliefs, on everything from immigration to policing to guns, as supporting “the rule of law.” He repeated the phrase often during our conversations. But his interpretation of the phrase generally implies opposition to whatever rules or laws he deems overly intrusive. He opposes all limitations on the Second Amendment. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, he publicly resisted Arizona’s mask mandates and stay-at-home orders — before catching Covid himself last year, which he discovered when he was denied entry to the White House for a meeting with Trump.

The pandemic has given Lamb, like much of the GOP, a new pet cause. This summer, he made a short video saying he would not require, or ask, his staff to get vaccinated. (The spot got picked up on Fox.) One Instagram post from his account reads, “No vaccine, no mask…..I did test positive though for Americanitis!” underneath a photo of Lamb leaning back on a bench and smiling. I asked Lamb if he was vaccinated, and he told me, through his PR representative, Corey Vale, to print exactly this: “That’s nobody’s damn business.”

On Jan. 6, the day rioters stormed the Capitol in Washington, Lamb appeared at a rally in Phoenix to protest the presidential election results. About 1,000 Trump supporters had descended on the state Capitol; one group of them brought a guillotine. In a speech, Lamb talked about “issues with the vote” and blamed the state and federal governments. “I don’t know how loud we have to get before they start to listen to us and know that we will no longer tolerate them stripping our freedoms away,” he said. Later, rioters broke a window as they yelled out for Doug Ducey, the Republican governor who had certified Biden’s victory in Arizona.

Lamb insists he has never said Biden did not win the election. But on Nov. 12, he appeared on One American News Network and said the enthusiasm he saw for Trump in Arizona “does not compute” with the election results. And he still believes there was, as he put it to me, a “significant amount of concerning information” about the integrity of the election. (There is not, according to multiple courts; an audit in Arizona also reaffirmed Biden’s victory there.) He also argues the mob that overtook the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was more heavily policed than the Black Lives Matter movement. (In the two weeks after a police officer killed George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, some 10,000 protesters were arrested around the country, compared with about 600 Jan. 6 rioters so far.) “I don’t think that Black Lives Matter is productive for the Blacks,” Lamb also told me.

When I asked Lamb whether the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6 was an example of people violating the very rule of law he professes to cherish, he replied, “Just because somebody was there doesn’t necessarily mean they’re guilty,” then added, “I guarantee you [the rioters] are very loving, Christian people. They just happen to support President Trump a lot.” When I asked about the roughly 140 law enforcement officers who had been injured or killed while on duty at the Capitol — doing a job Lamb also professes to cherish — he demurred, saying he hadn’t been there and couldn’t say what was or wasn’t true.

It was the month after the insurrection, with Joe Biden in the White House and Democrats in the majority in Congress, that Lamb announced the launch of Protect America Now, his new coalition of currently serving sheriffs — Lamb calls them “patriots” — with a stated mission of “educating Americans about how our Sheriffs and the law enforcement community are standing for our Constitution and law and order.” It’s mostly a messaging operation: The group runs ads and has written letters to the Biden administration. Protect America Now’s 69 member sheriffs, who come from states including California, New Mexico, Virginia and South Dakota, also appear on right-leaning media to advocate for smaller government in all areas except immigration. The group’s website lists seven additional sheriffs — at least five of whom have been accused of some form of misconduct — as advisory committee members. Lamb, too, is on the advisory committee, but he’s also the group’s most prominent public representative.

Robert Tsai, a constitutional law professor at Boston University, told me he sees Protect America Now as political in nature — an effort to “leverage sheriffs in mainstream Republican politics,” while also “branding [sheriffs] for future political careers.” Lamb says Protect America Now is not a political organization, but that its efforts are “viewed as political sometimes.” Yet Protect America Now, a 501(c)4, was founded in June 2020 by a group that includes Nathan Sproul, an Arizona-based Republican strategist. Sproul, who has a long history in GOP political consulting, was accused of voter fraud between 2004 and 2012, allegations he denied and for which he was not charged. More recently, he was a consultant on Kanye West’s quixotic 2020 presidential campaign. Lamb, too, is a client; his PR representative, Vale, is employed by Sproul’s strategy group.

Burghart, the researcher of far-right movements, sees Protect America Now and the coalition it is building as a dangerous force, arguing the group represents “the next step” for the constitutional sheriff movement and its elevation of the power of sheriffs. To date, the movement’s largest formal organization is the Constitutional Sheriffs and Police Officers Association, formed in 2011 by former sheriff Richard Mack, who told me the association has attracted more than 700 sheriffs to its events and trainings. The Anti-Defamation League recently released a report calling CSPOA an “anti-government extremist group” and citing public appearances Mack has made with white supremacist individuals or groups. (Asked about the report, Mack said CSPOA “denounce[s] all racism and violence.”)

Mack said Lamb is not an official CSPOA member, but he clearly sees Lamb as one of his own. In an email, he wrote that Lamb “is a Constitutional Sheriff and is one of the best sheriffs in America.” Lamb, for his part, says he respects Mack and has a “good relationship with CSPOA.” But he emphasized to me that Protect America Now and CSPOA are different groups, and said he also does not support any form of white supremacy. Burghart says the distinction between the two groups might be more about style — that Protect America Now is taking a “slicker, more palatable” approach, with “a much better sense of PR than Mack and his crowd.”

Lamb’s nose for PR is apparent, and it extends beyond Protect America Now. Building off his social media popularity — he has more than 300,000 Facebook followers, high for a sheriff — and his desire to elevate law enforcement, this past May he announced the launch of the American Sheriff Network, which for $4.99 month allows viewers to watch 10- to 20-minute segments showing sheriffs and their deputies as they respond to calls for service — a mix of sheriff propaganda and reality television.

Lamb says the network takes its inspiration from “Live PD,” an A&E show that ran from 2016 until 2020, when it was canceled after deputies in Williamson County, Texas, were caught on camera tasing a man named Javier Ambler, and ultimately killing him. (In response to the incident, Texas passed a state law that forbids law enforcement agencies from partnering with reality television shows.) Before its cancellation, “Live PD” was immensely popular, capturing more viewers than any other cable program on Friday and Saturday nights. Lamb was a fixture on the show, as well as a host of a spinoff, “Live PD: Wanted,” which focused on catching fugitives.

The trailer for the new network features lots of shots of Lamb, his profile against a desert sunset as the camera pans slowly over the shadows of cacti. He flashes a Hollywood smile as he talks about “the shine on the badge.” Many of the episodes are filmed in a low-budget style and feature Lamb as a guide, introducing viewers to other sheriffs in Nevada and Arizona. Lamb says the new network is important because “we just felt like it was important to give [sheriffs] their voice back.” When I asked if Lamb was concerned about a repeat of what happened in Texas, Vale dismissed it saying that “lots of things are out of [the sheriffs’] control.” One episode features deputies tasing new recruits as part of their training, and watching as they scream pain.

All of Lamb’s activities outside Pinal County raise the question of whether he is making money off this work. Protect America Now is new enough that its tax filings have not yet been made public, but Vale told me Lamb does not get paid by the group, outside reimbursements for expenses. (State records show, and Vale confirmed, that Lamb’s 2020 campaign provided a $10,000 loan to the group in August of last year.) When I asked Vale whether Lamb made a salary from the American Sheriff Network, he said Lamb was a partner of a Virginia LLC that produces the content but declined to give any other details. Vale declined to say anything else about the company or provide any details about funding, revenue or viewership. He told me Lamb does make some money from occasional appearances at gun shows and other events but likewise would not disclose the amount.

Sheriffs in almost every state operate independently with limited oversight, giving them the freedom to engage in political advocacy and appear in the media. The National Sheriffs’ Association, of which Lamb is a member, has a model code of ethics for sheriffs that prohibits using the office for “private gain,” among other things. I asked Sean Kennedy, a professor at Loyola Law School who is on the oversight commission for the Los Angeles County sheriff, about Lamb’s involvement with Protect America Now and other outside activities, and he said he believes Lamb’s behavior violates the NSA’s code. Kennedy pointed to the provision about private gain, as well as one requiring equal protection of all citizens, without allowing “personal opinion, party affiliations, or consideration of the status of others to alter or lessen this standard of treatment.”

Asked to respond, Vale said Lamb keeps a strict division between his work as the Pinal County sheriff and his image as the “American Sheriff.” Vale added, “All of his activities, both as sheriff and in his private time, are vetted through the [Pinal] County attorney.” The attorney, Kent Volkmer, told me Lamb has consulted with him, including on Protect America Now and the American Sheriff Network, but said he does not review every single appearance Lamb makes outside his capacity as sheriff. A spokesperson for the NSA told me that, while the code of ethics is the “basis of an organizational creed,” sheriffs generally rely on their state laws for legal guidance. The spokesperson also took time to praise Lamb’s messaging skills, calling him a “unicorn.”

Local activist Roberto Reveles, who through the ACLU of Arizona has organized against racial profiling and other anti-immigrant policies in the state, has known Lamb since his earliest days as sheriff. Reveles hoped Lamb would not turn out to be another Arpaio or Babeu. But now Reveles is among those Pinal County residents who say Lamb’s involvement in politics and entertainment has gone too far, distracting him from the job he was elected to do and perhaps even influencing how he does it. “He clearly has politicized law enforcement, and that covers a lot of territory,” Reveles says, calling Lamb a “self-centered, extremist, anti-immigrant individual.” Some Pinal County residents have called for an audit of the sheriff office’s finances.

While Lamb has gotten more and more scrutiny in Arizona, he has mostly brushed it off. The Arizona Republic investigated his charity, which aims to “bridge the gap” between law enforcement and communities, and found the group had misreported $18,000 in spending — in fact, the charity didn’t report any spending in 2018. Lamb chalked that up to an accountant’s error. The state ethics committee investigated Lamb for intervening to stop the seizure of a Republican lobbyist’s land, for which the lobbyist was behind on paying property taxes, but the investigation was dropped after accusations of impartiality. A local newspaper also accused him of having an affair with a woman who died over the summer in a car accident, but Lamb denies that he has been involved with any women outside his marriage.

Ultimately, many residents of Pinal County, which voted 58 percent for Trump in 2020, align politically with Lamb. The county also enjoys relatively low levels of crime. Out of five Pinal County supervisors, only one, Serdy, a Republican, would comment on the record about Lamb, telling me over the phone, “As long as the job is being done, then we support [his other work].” Lamb argues his outside activities help him bring in new recruits.

Because sheriffs are not usually term-limited, Lamb can stay in office as long as he gets reelected, or until he decides to run for another office, as many other sheriffs have — though Lamb says he is happy where he is. While he is gaining national attention, it’s not clear yet whether Lamb will become the law enforcement equivalent of, say, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) or Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), but it’s plain that he has a similar commitment to Trumpism and desire for the spotlight, in Arizona and increasingly elsewhere.

Lamb has appeared multiple times with Trump at the White House and other political events. This month, he also was a featured speaker — alongside Clarke, the former Milwaukee sheriff, and others — at the American Priority Conference, a far-right convening held at Trump’s resort in Miami. Lately, Lamb has been supporting the campaign of Kari Lake, a Trump-endorsed former Fox anchor running for Arizona’s open governor’s seat in 2022. (According to Vale, however, Lamb has not officially endorsed Lake or any other candidate in the race.)

As we left the gun range during my visit to Pinal County and stopped by a gas station to hydrate, we again ran into more fans of Lamb’s. A man with tattoos and well-groomed blond facial hair wearing a “Proud American” T-shirt (a design sold by the right-wing shock jocks the Hodgetwins) ran across the parking lot for a photo with the sheriff. A group of kids gathered around Lamb’s truck for sheriff-branded stickers. Another man walking by said, “The sheriff is a good dude.” Everyone gathered for a picture, just one more.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/15/mark-lamb-arizona-constitutional-sheriff-elections-republicans-514781
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Jessica Pishko

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Top Boeing pilot indicted over 737 MAX scandal

A now-former chief technical pilot for Boeing was indicted on fraud charges over his involvement in the 737 MAX scandal, which claimed the lives of hundreds of passengers when two of the defective jets crashed. Mark Forkner, 49, was in that role during the certification process for the jet and is accused of deceiving the Federal Aviation Administeration during that process in 2016 and 2017. — Read the rest

Source: https://boingboing.net/2021/10/15/top-boeing-pilot-indicted-over-737-max-scandal.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=top-boeing-pilot-indicted-over-737-max-scandal
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Rob Beschizza

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