US Politics

Oregon has reimposed restrictions on public gatherings as Covid-19 cases rise again, a reminder that even as 100 millions Americans are now fully vaccinated, states are still seeing localized outbreaks.Fifteen of Oregon’s 36 counties are now considered at “extreme risk” for coronavirus spread. This designation bans indoor dining and significantly reduces capacity at gyms and entertainment venues.“I was presented with data showing two paths Oregon could take,” Governor Kate Brown said on Friday, adding that tightening restrictions would save “hundreds of lives” and prevent as many as 450 hospitalizations in the next three weeks.“As your governor, I chose to save lives,” said Brown, a Democrat.Cases in Oregon have risen 21% in the last week, a fifth week in a row of increases greater than 20%.Importantly, the spread of Covid-19 in Oregon is still not as severe as in other parts of the country. Oregon has half the per-capita rate of cases of Michigan, which remains the worst-affected US state.New Jersey, Delaware, Puerto Rico, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Maine and Colorado follow behind Michigan. Nationally, the seven-day average of new cases has fallen from a peak of 254,000 in mid-January to just over 50,000.Brown’s decision places more pressure on the hospitality industry in particular, which has only recently begun to move toward recovery as people feel comfortable leaving home. However, a sense of relief washing across the US may also play a role in Oregon’s rising cases.“We are looking at multiple factors contributing to this surge,” Chunhuei Chi, director of Oregon State University Center for Global Health, told the Los Angeles Times, “including variants and people relaxing their guard because of pandemic fatigue and a sense of security or hope from vaccinations.”Officials warned the increase may be partly attributable to variants. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the more contagious B117 variant first identified in the UK is responsible for about 40% of cases in the region. That is lower than in other regions such as the midwest and parts of the south.At the same time, Oregon has seen a major slowdown in daily vaccinations. The state distributed more than 52,000 vaccines in one day in mid-April, but daily inoculations fell to about 34,000 on Friday.The increase in Oregon is driven by working-aged adults, who have proven among the most important and most difficult sections of the population to vaccinate. Nationally, working-aged adults are vaccinated at about half the rate of people older than 50.Unlike the elderly, this group is less susceptible to life-threatening Covid-19, may face difficulties getting time off of work or feel they can afford to wait to get a vaccine. About 40% of adults in Oregon have received at least one shot.The worst per-capita spread in the state is in rural Grant county, where a low vaccination rate has translated to “room to roam” for the virus, a local pharmacist said. Grant county experienced an early slowdown in demand and by the second week in April public health officials there had difficulty distributing doses.Today, just 31% of Grant county has received at least one shot, Oregon Health Authority data shows. Nationally, 42.6% of Americans have received at least one shot, according to the CDC.Also like much of the country, the worst vaccination rates in Oregon tend to correspond with the most Republican counties. In 2020, Grant county voted for Donald Trump by a 57-point margin. Polls have shown Republicans are the most likely group to report they will “definitely not” get a vaccine.“I think the issue is that we have this very fragmented response system to Covid,” Dr Javier Nieto, an epidemiologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis told Bloomberg News. “You have a fragmented response where one county is doing one thing, another county – something else.” More

Free childcare equals class warfare, say RepublicansJoe Biden wants to spend big money on small children. On Wednesday the president announced an ambitious $1.8tn plan to boost family assistance programs, childhood education and student aid. If passed, the American Families Plan would overhaul the current (dire) childcare system and inject billions into universal preschool, paid family leave and subsidized childcare. It would be paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy.Sounds great, right? Who wouldn’t support investing in children? The party of “family values”, of course! The party that loves advocating for embryos but doesn’t seem quite so keen on helping kids. Predictably Republicans are up in arms about the idea that the US, which one recent survey ranked as the second-worst place in the world to raise children, might become a little more family-friendly. As soon as Biden had finished speaking, out came the usual talking points about how Biden was pushing a dangerous socialist agenda and trying to indoctrinate American children. “You know who else liked universal day care?” the Republican senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted, linking to a 1974 article about day care in the Soviet Union.Think that’s an unhinged response? I think it may have been surpassed by JD Vance’s incomprehensible contribution to the debate. On Thursday, the Hillbilly Elegy author and vocal Republican tweeted that “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people.” His line of reasoning, if you can call it that, was that: “normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force”.Perhaps Republicans should just cut to the chase and say that they don’t support any policy that makes it easier for women to leave their houses. When you think women are just walking wombs then it’s expedient for childcare costs to be so staggeringly high that they push women out of the workforce. Earlier this year, Idaho lawmakers turned down a $6m federal grant to support early childhood care and education. Let me repeat that, they turned down millions of dollars earmarked for children. Why? Well as the Republican state representative. Charlie Shepherd explained, that money would hurt “the family unit”.“[A]ny bill that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child, I don’t think that’s a good direction for us to be going,” Shepherd said. Really saying the quiet part out loud there!Richard Nixon made pretty much the same argument in 1971, which was the last time the US was on the verge of creating a universal childcare system. Nixon vetoed the largely bipartisan effort, saying it would have “family-weakening implications”. By which, of course, he meant it would make it easier for women to work.You know what is really “family-weakening”? Making the costs of having and raising kids so ridiculously high that it’s getting harder and harder for anyone to afford a family. According to the Census Bureau, childcare expenditures rose more than 40% from 1990 to 2011; childcare has only become more expensive since then. The same geniuses who don’t want to expand access to childcare regularly wring their hands over declining birth rates in America. Why aren’t people having kids, they ask? It’s the economy, stupid.The pandemic cost women over $800bnWomen’s lost income in 2020 totaled the combined wealth of 98 countries, Oxfam reports. Women, who are overrepresented in low-paid, precarious sectors like retail and food services, lost more than 64m jobs in 2020, amounting to at least $800bn in lost income globally. This estimate doesn’t even include wages lost by women working in the informal economy, such as domestic workers.There could be a link between being teargassed and abnormal periodsNearly 900 people reported abnormal menstrual cycles after being exposed to teargas during protests in Portland, Oregon, last summer, according to a new study. Hundreds of people also complained of other negative health impacts. This is the first published, peer-reviewed study to confirm a link between teargas and abnormal menstruation but it’s far from the first time the dangers of teargas have been discussed. Researchers have previously found, for example, that the use of teargas in Palestinian refugee camps has a devastating effect on the mental and physical health of residents.Egyptian mummy was a pregnant woman, not a male priestPolish researchers have found the world’s first known case of such a well-preserved mummy of a pregnant woman. Insert your own mummy joke here.Why aren’t more moon craters named after women?That’s not a question I’ve really lost sleep over, I’ve got to admit. However, efforts are under way to increase cosmic equality.German bomb squad investigates suspicious sex toyA concerned citizen stumbled across what they thought was a second world war bomb in the Bavarian forest. After arriving at the scene and finding condoms in the area, the police suspected it might be rather more banal. “An internet search confirmed the suspicion,” police said. “There are actually sex toys in the form of hand grenades.”The week in pawtriarchyFour dogs who flunked out of guide dog training have now been trained to sniff out the coronavirus at a Florida hospital. More Labs in labs please! More

Ahead of a special election on Saturday to replace a Texas congressman who died after contracting Covid-19, former president George W Bush said the ascendancy of supporters of Donald Trump suggest Republicans “want to be extinct”.The special election is in the sixth district, whose Republican representative, Ron Wright, died in February. Twenty-three candidates will compete: all but one of the 11 Republicans are tied to the apron strings of Trump, the former president who still dominates the party.One candidate, the former wrestler Dan Rodimer, promises to “make America Texas again” and has said “commies in DC are ruining America”.Trump has endorsed another – Susan Wright, the former congressman’s widow who the former president said on Saturday “will be strong on the border, crime, pro-life, our brave military and vets, and will always protect your second amendment”.The one Republican not expressing fealty to Trump, former marine Michael Wood, told CNN he was “afraid for the future of the country”, given his party’s adherence to Trump’s lie that the election was stolen, its reluctance to condemn those who rioted at the Capitol on 6 January in support of that lie, and the prevalence of conspiracy theories such as QAnon.“I felt like I had to stand up,” Wood said. “Somebody needed to stand up and say this isn’t what the Republican party should be.”Nonetheless, it is. In a CNN poll released on Friday, 70% of Republicans said Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to be named president. Biden won more than 7m more votes than Trump and took the electoral college 306-232, the same score by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.Bush is promoting a new book, a collection of portraits and stories of immigrants. In an interview released on Friday by the Dispatch, an anti-Trump conservative podcast, he was asked about recent moves by pro-Trump extremists to form a congressional caucus promoting “Anglo-Saxon traditions”.“To me that basically says that we want to be extinct,” he said.If such trends continued, Bush said, in three to five years “there’s not going to be a party. I mean I read about that and I’m saying to myself, ‘Wow, these people need to read my book.’ And I mean, it’s like saying when I was running for governor of Texas, you’ll never get any Latino votes because you’re Republican. And I said you watch. And I worked hard.“And the key thing was to let them know that I could hear their voice. I mean, democracy is great in that sense. And the idea of kind of saying you can only be Republican ‘if’, then the ultimate extension of that is it ends up being a one-person party.”Asked if he agreed with “more than 50%” of Republicans who think the election was stolen, Bush said: “No. I guess I’m one of the other 50%.“By the way, I’m still a Republican, proud to be Republican. I think Republicans will have a second chance to govern, because I believe that the Biden administration is a uniting factor, and particularly on the fiscal side of things. So, you know, we’ll see. But I know this – that if the Republican party stands for exclusivity, you know, used to be country clubs, now evidently it’s white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, then it’s not going to win anything.”Wood, the anti-Trump Texas Republican, said he voted for Trump in 2020. But he also said he thought “the party is going to get to where I am eventually. I want that to happen without having to lose and lose and lose. Political parties sometimes only get the message they need to try something different after a string of losses. I think we should do that now as opposed to doing it after we lose in the midterms or lose another presidential election.”The Texas sixth district has trended towards Democrats in recent elections but remains unlikely to flip.Earlier this week, Trump told Fox Business he was “100% thinking about running” in 2024.Rodimer, the former wrestler who is among the top money raisers in the field in Texas, told CNN: “President Trump is still the leader of the Republican party. I don’t think he’s going to go anywhere, ever. I hope he doesn’t. If he runs again, I’ll be fired up, I’ll be excited.” More

According to Republicans, Joe Biden was supposed to be sleepy, senile and socialist. He was also allegedly a puppet of secret powers – unlike his predecessor, who acted like the puppet of a former KGB officer.Sean Hannity of Fox News claimed, last month, to be worried about Biden’s cognitive health.This is quite something, coming from Hannity. He began a recent interview, with a Florida man by the name of Donald Trump, as follows:“I know a lot of people that are around you every day. This is what they are all telling me: You are working as hard as you did when you were in the White House, except you play a little golf more. That you’re keeping an insane schedule, seven days a week. You really don’t stop.”In one sense, it’s true that Trump keeps an outrageous schedule. In that same sense, he’s working as hard as he ever did.These are the dog days of the Republican resistance. As President Biden passes his 100th day in the White House, there’s little sign of a Tea Party rising up, as there was for the last new Democratic president. There are no green shoots of a growing coalition of grassroots anger and business astro-turf.There may be a universal expectation that Republicans will win back some part of Congress next year. But even with such overweening confidence, with a 50-50 tied Senate, the Republican party is remarkably incapable of stopping an allegedly faltering president who is, in fact, rapidly remaking the country and its reputation across the world.The challenge for Biden’s critics is not merely that he is nothing like their caricature of a walking communist corpse. It’s that he’s always been at the dead center of the Democratic party: a spirit level finding the most balanced point between wherever the left and right stands.That’s a Pennsylvania/Delaware Democrat for you: a liberal conscience who also knows his votes come from the white suburbs. Back in the day, Biden was for civil rights, but he was also against court-ordered busing to desegregate schools. He was the senate judiciary chairman who led the 1994 crime bill that vastly expanded the prison population. He was also the senate judiciary chairman who successfully blocked the supreme court nomination of conservative judge Robert Bork, who would likely have voted to overturn abortion rights and civil rights.What does his first 100 days as president tell us about Joe Biden? He’s the same split-the-difference centrist he always was, with more of an eye on what will sell to the suburbs than the stuff progressive dreams are made of.He’s a president who staged a climate summit, accelerated US targets for carbon emissions, and is proposing huge spending on green infrastructure. But he’s also a president who doesn’t sign up to the Green New Deal.He’s a president who won’t support defunding the police or anything that resembles it. But he’s also a president whose attorney general is investigating two police departments with appalling records on justice for people of color.Extreme, he is not. You can’t say that with a straight face about this Republican party. This is a supposedly conservative group whose extremist base idolizes a failed one-term president and thinks there wasn’t much wrong with a violent insurrection that tried to hang its own vice-president.Back in the 1980s, when Biden was admiring Britain’s Labour leader, the cultural warriors of liberalism and socialism were caricatured – not least by the rightwing Murdoch press – as the “Loony Left”. By that measure, today’s Republican party is barely on planet earth.Take Larry Kudlow, until recently Trump’s director of the White House National Economic Council. Kudlow used to yap about the markets on CNBC television. He now yaps about the markets and politics on CNBC’s arch-rival channel, Fox Business – which is, like its sister channel Fox News, not very interested in reporting on the subject of its own name.Kudlow read a scripted monologue to camera this week – scripted and edited, no doubt – that perfectly captured where the dead center of the Republican party is today, in the earliest stage of the Biden era.“Speaking of stupid,” Kudlow declared, “there’s a study coming out of the University of Michigan which says that to meet the Biden Green New Deal targets, America has to – get this – America has to stop eating meat, stop eating poultry, fish, seafood, eggs, dairy and animal-based fats. OK, got that? No burger on July 4th. No steaks on the barbie. I’m sure Middle America is just going to love that. Can you grill those Brussels sprouts? So get ready. You can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts and wave your American flag.”Speaking of stupid, the man who led Trump’s economic policy doesn’t know what goes into beer. He also doesn’t know how delicious grilled Brussels sprouts are.The Trumpified brains of Republican leaders are trying – really hard – to make sense of the planet Biden lives on. They somehow believe that Democrats are the ones who are outlandish radicals who don’t believe in American traditions.Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, told Punchbowl News on Monday that Democrats were retiring from Congress – like Republicans last year – because they know they are headed for defeat. “They’re voting for the most socialist agenda they’ve seen. They’re unpopular in the aspects of it, and they’re ignoring the crisis along the border. Those are not prospects of why they can win reelection,” he explained.McCarthy hit on a core truth about Biden’s Democrats: they know they have narrow majorities and could easily lose Congress in 2022. But his conclusion is something as outlandish as plant-based beer: “In ’94 and 2010, at the beginning of those years, they didn’t believe the majority was at play in the nation. I believe it is, and the Democrats, I think, believe it is too,” he said. “That’s why they’re going so far left, knowing that they’re gonna lose it.”You could listen to Joe Biden and say he’s going so far left. But only if you drink a lot of plant-based alcohol first.Biden’s speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday will certainly go far: $1.8 trillion gets you a long way down the road you’re headed. But is it really socialist to pay for roads and bridges and childcare?Republicans will try to pretend it is, for sure. But they risk sounding strangely out of touch with the reality of the suburban voters who will decide their fate in those congressional elections next year.They risk looking sleepy, supercilious and seditionist. It’s not a good look. More

That we are living in science fiction was brought home to me last week when I put down Kim Stanley Robinson’s superb climate-futures novel The Ministry for the Future and picked up Bill McKibben’s New Yorker letter on climate, warning of the melting of the Thwaites Glacier, “already known as the ‘doomsday glacier’ because its collapse could raise global sea levels by as much as three feet”. Where we are now would have seemed like science fiction itself 20 years ago; where we need to be will take us deeper into that territory.Three things matter for climate chaos and our response to it – the science reporting on current and potential conditions, the technology offering solutions, and the organizing which is shifting perspectives and policy. Each is advancing rapidly. The science mostly gives us terrifying news of more melting, more storms, more droughts, more fires, more famines. But the technological solutions and the success of the organizing to address this largest of all crises have likewise grown by leaps and bounds. For example, ideas put forth in the Green New Deal in 2019, seen as radical at the time, are now the kind of stuff President Biden routinely proposes in his infrastructure and jobs plans.It’s not easy to see all the changes – you have to be a wonk to follow the details on new battery storage solutions or the growth of solar power in cheapness, proliferation, efficiency and possibility, or new understanding about agriculture and soil management to enhance carbon sequestration. You have to be a policy nerd to keep track of the countless new initiatives around the world. They include, recently, the UK committing to end overseas fossil fuel finance in December, the EU in January deciding to “discourage all further investments into fossil-fuel-based energy infrastructure projects in third countries”, and the US making a less comprehensive but meaningful effort this spring to curtail funding for overseas extraction. In April, oil-rich California made a commitment to end fossil fuel extraction altogether – if by a too-generous deadline. A lot of these policies have been deemed both good and not good enough. They do not get us to where we need to be, but they lay the foundation for further shifts, and like the Green New Deal many of them seemed unlikely a few years ago.We have crossed barriers that seemed insurmountable at the end of the last millenniumThe US itself has, of course, made a huge U-turn with a presidency that has begun by undoing much of what the previous administration did, reregulating what was deregulated, restarting support for research, and rejoining the Paris climate accords. The Biden administration is regularly doing things that would have been all but inconceivable in previous administrations, and while it deserves credit, more credit should go to the organizers who have redefined what is necessary, reasonable and possible. Both technologically and politically far more is possible. There are so many moving parts. The dire straits of the fossil fuel industry is one of them – as the climate journalist Antonia Juhasz put it recently: “The end of oil is near.”The organization Carbon Tracker, whose reports are usually somber reading, just put out a report so stunning the word encouraging is hardly adequate. In sum, current technology could produce a hundred times as much electricity from solar and wind as current global demand; prices on solar continue to drop rapidly and dramatically; and the land required to produce all this energy would take less than is currently given over to fossil fuels. It is a vision of a completely different planet, because if you change how we produce energy you change our geopolitics – for the better – and clean our air and renew our future. The report concludes: “The technical and economic barriers have been crossed and the only impediment to change is political.” Those barriers seemed insurmountable at the end of the last millennium.One of the things that’s long been curious about this crisis is that the amateurs and newcomers tend to be more alarmist and defeatist than the insiders and experts. What the climate journalist Emily Atkin calls “first-time climate dudes” put forth long, breathless magazine articles, bestselling books and films announcing that it’s too late and we’re doomed, which is another way to say we don’t have to do a damned thing, which is a way to undermine the people who are doing those things and those who might be moved to do them.The climate scientist Michael Mann takes these people on – he calls them inactivists and doomists – in his recent book The New Climate Wars, which describes the defeatism that has succeeded outright climate denial as the great obstacle to addressing the crisis. He echoes what Carbon Tracker asserted, writing: “The solution is already here. We just need to deploy it rapidly and at a massive scale. It all comes down to political will and economic incentives.” The climate scientist Diana Liverman shares Mann’s frustration. She was part of the international team of scientists who authored the 2018 “hothouse Earth” study whose conclusions were boiled down, by the media, into “we have 12 years”.The report, she regularly points out, also described what we can and must do “to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System – biosphere, climate, and societies – and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.” It was a warning but also a promise that if we did what science tells us we must, we would not preserve the current order but form a better one.Another expert voice for hope is Christiana Figueres, who as executive secretary of the United Nations framework convention on climate change negotiated the Paris climate accords in 2015. As she recently declared: “This decade is a moment of choice unlike any we have ever lived. All of us alive right now share that responsibility and that opportunity. The optimism I’m speaking of is not the result of an achievement, it is the necessary input to meeting a challenge. Many now believe it is impossible to cut global emissions in half in this decade. I say, we don’t have the right to give up or let up.” She speaks of how impossible a treaty like the one she negotiated seemed after the shambles at the end of the 2009 Copenhagen meeting.Each shift makes more shifts possible. But only if we go actively toward the possibilities rather than passively into the collapseThe visionary organizer adrienne maree brown wrote not long ago: “I believe that all organizing is science fiction – that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle …” All these voices have taken the side of hope in the imagination battle, offering choices and possibilities and the responsibilities that come with those things, as does the actual science fiction in The Ministry for the Future, which takes a turn for the utopian by the end. When I began reading it, apocalyptic news seemed to chime in with the novel. But as I finished it I ran across stories about Scotland’s plans to rewild much of its land, which could have come from the book. And I saw the astonishing news that on the afternoon of Saturday 24 April, California got more than 90% of its energy from renewables.That we cannot see all the way to the transformed society we need does not mean it is impossible. We will reach it by not one great leap but a long journey, step by step. If we see how impossible our current reality might have seemed 20 years ago – that solar would be so cheap, that Scotland would get 97% of its electricity from renewables, that fossil fuel corporations would be in freefall – we can trust that we could be moving toward an even more transformed and transformative future, and that it is not a set destination but, for better or worse, what we are making up as we go. Each shift makes more shifts possible. But only if we go actively toward the possibilities rather than passively into the collapse. More

There is $6m from Donald Trump’s administration sitting on the table in Idaho, and trying to pick it up has caused an extraordinary uproar.In the months since a Republican house of representatives member first brought the grant for early childhood education to the legislature for a vote, far-right opponents have insisted, despite evidence and assurances proving otherwise, that the grant would be used to “indoctrinate” children five and under, and turn them into social justice activists.Supporters of the grant include the state’s two Republican senators and its business lobby, but the most vocal opponents have pitched it as a “battle for the soul of America”.The real battle, however, appears to be against the influence of fringe voices in Idaho politics. Though seemingly an obscure battle, the intensity of the fight in the state and the blood-curdling language used by its opponents reveals much about American politics in the post-Trump era.It is a place where conspiracy theories run amok and where even some Republican legislators are at a loss how to combat the extremism of many of their supporters, who have concluded that grant money for educating young children represents a dire threat to their way of life.Mike Satz, executive director of a new effort to combat extremism in Idaho, the Idaho 97 Project, said: “The politics have really started devolving and the extremists have really started taking control of the Republican party in the state, and now the policies are not for the people – conservative or liberal or whatever the ideology is.”When it comes to the early childhood grant, the people who would be affected by it are watching and waiting to see if the money will be available to improve access to care – a typical family in the state spends 25% of its annual income on care for an infant and a four-year-old.A vote in the house on whether or not to accept the money is expected any day. The house initially rejected the funds in early March, but the state senate approved an amended version of the bill by one vote earlier this month.Supporters have flooded local news with opinion pieces clarifying misconceptions about the grant and explaining exactly how the money would be used, but they face a mountain of misinformation coming from some rightwing lawmakers and the libertarian group Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF).The Republican representative Charlie Shepherd provided an insight into this last week, when he told the Idaho Press that he approves of the amended version of the bill after voting against it in March.Shepherd said that his earlier concerns about “indoctrination” had been addressed, but his constituents were not aware of that change. “And if I cannot educate them on what the bill actually does in time. At this point it’s almost political suicide for me to support the bill,” he confessed.The amended version of the bill includes language that specifies that the appropriated money “shall not be used to dictate curricula for use by local collaboratives”. That was also true before, but the additional language makes it legally binding.The executive director of one Idaho collaborative which could receive some of the funds, Andrew Mentzer, said the money would be beneficial for expanding childcare capacity and to help existing providers stay afloat in Valley County, a scenic, rural region in the west central part of the state.“We lost two childcare facilities in the past 15 months in our area and that put about 50 families in a pretty bad position, during a pandemic, with regard to how and when they can go to work,” said Mentzer, executive director of the West Central Mountains Economic Development Council.“A lot of the families ended up with situations where they had to cut hours or had a parent who couldn’t go to work, and that’s food on the table at the end of the day for the individual families.”Already, the community is short 400 childcare slots. “Those are 400 kids whose parents can’t go to work,” Mentzer said.The people stirring the potThe grant money would be distributed to local collaboratives like Mentzer’s by the not-for-profit Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children (Idaho AEYC). This group is separate from its national affiliate, the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), a professional membership organization for people who work in education and childcare.But opponents to the bill see a conspiracy between the two groups.Their concern is that the NAEYC promotes anti-bias education and mentions critical race theory on its website and the Idaho AEYC partners with a local group, the Idaho Commission for Libraries (ICfL), that has received a grant unrelated to the early childhood money to diversify libraries. Many grant opponents have taken issue with resources for diverse books that the NAEYC and ICfL link to on their sites, though providing diverse books is not mandated by the early childhood grant.When the Guardian called the Republican representative Lance Clow he was working on a document to educate his fellow legislators about what the grant actually seeks to do: provide local collaboratives with money to best address early childhood needs in their community.Clow knows the ins and outs of the grant better than most: he is chairman of the house education committee and was involved with the first funding round used to assess the needs for early childhood education and childcare in the state.“I don’t know if I would call myself an advocate, but I’ve been in the middle of it, and I don’t see the issues that have been raised,” Clow said.He is sympathetic to his fellow Republicans’ concerns about critical race theory – he thinks some of its tenets are divisive – and last week voted for a bill that bans it from schools. He said the Idaho AEYC made a mistake in mentioning the national group on its website, something that provided material for the grant’s opponents, even though it was not actually connected to the money’s use.“This is a conservative state, and local control, the family, the parents … there is a big emphasis on protecting their rights and allowing those kind of freedoms and the focus of this grant unfortunately has drifted into a concern with the national association,” he said.He is not sure how receptive his colleagues will be to his attempts to clarify misinformation about the grant. He has noticed a difference in politicians: some will go out, speak to people and have a dialogue. Others show up to the statehouse, tell people about evils that must be stopped and stir the pot, he said.Another force stirring the pot is IFF, which continues to oppose the grant. Its advocacy arm, Idaho Freedom Action, created form letters for voters to send to representatives this month asking them to vote against the bill, warning it is “a battle for the soul of America”.“Senate bill 1193 would allow this radical group to teach toddlers and pre-school children to hate America,” the suggested letter reads. In response to interview requests from the Guardian, the IFF said it had a policy of not speaking to the media.One of the most vocal opponents to the bill, the Republican representative Priscilla Giddings, has in recent weeks appeared in “Woke Story Time” videos for IFF where she reads diverse books, even though they are not required by the grant.Giddings said in an email to the Guardian she still planned to vote against the money because it would be used to advocate for critical race theory. When asked to provide evidence of this, she said: “I have lots of evidence that I will discuss during debate when it comes up for a floor vote.”‘People don’t want Idaho run by an armed mob’Lori Fascilla, the executive director of the non-profit Giraffe Laugh Learning Centers, said she was “shocked by the lack of understanding in the statehouse of how important the childcare industry is to our state’s economy”.Writing in the Idaho Statesman, Fascilla explained how the pandemic has seen 200 childcare providers in Idaho close since September, a problem reflected nationally: one in six childcare jobs has been lost across the country since the pandemic started.“Our industry was already fragile before the pandemic and even more so now,” Fascilla wrote. “If it collapses, then so will our economy.”The fear-based tactics influencing legislation in Idaho including and beyond the early childhood grant has prompted broader concerns about what is happening in the statehouse.Earlier this month, the Idaho Statesman’s opinion editor, Scott McIntosh, published a reported two-part series titled: “Why even Republicans are calling this the ‘worst session ever’ for Idaho ‘legislature.” This series and other local media are littered with quotes from Idahoans including Republicans and business leaders concerned about the damage extremism is having on the state.A co-founder of the Idaho 97 Project, Emily Walton, said she was moved to help create the group when a local health board had to cancel their vote on a Covid-19 public health order in December because anti-mask protesters had gathered outside the homes of some of the board members, including one commissioner whose children were home alone.Months earlier in August, protesters against coronavirus restrictions shoved their way into the entry of the state capitol building and shattered a glass door, a small-scale preview of what was to come at the US Capitol on 6 January.The Idaho 97 project’s name is a play on the Three Percenters – a rightwing militia group. “I believe that there are more moderate people in Idaho who don’t want things run by an armed mob, and that’s why we started,” Walton said.The armed mob description is literal. Walton and other Idaho 97 members described how it had become common for individuals armed with assault rifles and dressed in fatigues to patrol the streets in Boise.And at least four House Republicans have ties to extremist, anti-government militia movements including the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, according to the Idaho Statesman. One of these representatives, Chad Christensen, lists the Oath Keepers and the John Birch Society, also an anti-government extremist movement, as organizations he is a part of in his official legislative biography. All four voted against the early childhood grant.Elizabeth Neumann worked in the Trump administration as an assistant secretary of homeland security for counter-terrorism and threat reduction. She resigned in April 2020 and has spoken about how the Trump administration ignored the threat of domestic extremism.A lifelong Republican, Neumann is co-director of the Republican Accountability Project, which seeks to uphold democracy and hold those Republicans who attempted to overturn the 2020 election accountable.Neumann said the uproar over childcare in Idaho was indicative of the times, where issues quickly become a part of the “constant outrage cycle” driven by far-right figures like Tucker Carlson and networks like One America News Network.“Right now what we see in a lot of conservative or Republican circles is very fear-based,” Neumann said. “So you can almost take out the issues and in six months it will be something else and that’s because on the right, especially as a minority party at this point, they are being told that their values are not appreciated, they are no longer wanted, that they are being ostracized and cancelled.” More

Joe Biden started his presidential campaign with promises to be a unifying force in Washington who would help lawmakers come together to achieve bipartisan reform. But over his first 100 days in office, Biden’s message to Republicans in Congress has been closer to this: get on board or get out of my way.This willingness to go it alone if necessary appears to be a hard-won lesson from the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency, when Democrats negotiated with Republicans on major bills only to have them vote against the final proposals.It has also prompted some – especially on the left of the Democratic party – to make early comparisons between Biden and Obama that favor the current president as a more dynamic, determined and ruthless political force for progressive change than his old boss.Just three months into his presidency, Biden has already signed the $1.9tn coronavirus relief package, which did not attract a single Republican vote in Congress. Delivering his first presidential address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, Biden signaled he was willing to take a similar approach to infrastructure if necessary.“I’d like to meet with those who have ideas that are different,” the president said of his infrastructure plan. “I welcome those ideas. But the rest of the world is not waiting for us. I just want to be clear: from my perspective, doing nothing is not an option.”Even though he has much smaller majorities in Congress than Obama did in 2009, Biden has decided to take a much more audacious approach. The Biden strategy centers on acting boldly and quickly to advance his legislative agenda. And if he has to abandon bipartisanship along the way, so be it.The numbers behind Biden’s proposals tell the story of this bold strategy.While the 2009 stimulus bill that Obama signed into law amid the financial crisis cost about $787bn, Biden’s coronavirus relief bill came in at $1.9tn. The president’s two infrastructure proposals, the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, would cost a collective $4tn.The size and scope of these policies have signaled that Democrats are intent on learning from the Obama-era stimulus bill talks, when Republicans successfully negotiated to get many provisions taken out of the final legislation. Democrats have blamed the watered-down legislation for their massive losses in the 2010 midterms.“I don’t just blame Obama. I could blame all of us – everybody,” the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, recently told writer Anand Giridharadas.Schumer said Democrats had made two crucial errors in allowing Republicans to “dilute” the stimulus bill and drag out negotiations over the Affordable Care Act. “We’re not going to make either of those mistakes,” Schumer said.Republicans are taking notice of Democrats’ new no-nonsense approach. In his response to Biden’s address on Wednesday, the Republican senator Tim Scott accused the president of further dividing the country by passing major legislation without bipartisan support in Congress.“President Biden promised you a specific kind of leadership. He promised to unite a nation, to lower the temperature, to govern for all Americans, no matter how we voted,” Scott said. “But three months in, the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further apart.”Biden and his team have insisted their proposals are bipartisan, pointing to surveys showing the coronavirus relief package enjoys the support of a broad majority of Americans, including many Republicans. They accuse Republican lawmakers of being out of touch with the needs of their constituents.“The most game-changing change in the dynamic that this White House has done is redefining bipartisanship to mean among the public and not among DC politicians,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.Green and other progressive strategists expressed hope that these widely popular policies will pay dividends in next year’s midterms, allowing Democrats to avoid their disastrous showing in 2010.“There are two huge regrets of the Obama administration,” said Reed Hundt, a member of Obama’s transition team and the author of A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions.“We didn’t spend enough to get the economy to be fully recovered by 2010, and we disastrously lost the House,” Hundt said. “And regret number two is we never made up for it over eight years.”Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, said the 2009 stimulus negotiations demonstrated the potential danger of prioritizing bipartisanship over progressive change.“It’s a lesson learned because, if you don’t push far enough on a major issue everyone cares about, then the compromise working with Republicans ends up being something that doesn’t satisfy the base,” Allison said.But Allison also made a point to emphasize that Biden is operating under much different circumstances than Obama was when he became president. Most notably, Biden arrived in office on the heels of Donald Trump, who made hardly any attempts to win over Democrats in Congress.“It’s really, really different times. We didn’t have the experience of a Trump,” Allison said of Obama’s early presidency. “There wasn’t quite that sense of urgency, whereas I think now there’s that expectation we got to get things done, and we need to get them done this year.”Obama also faced the unique challenge of being a barrier-breaker as the first African American president. Obama has acknowledged that the hurdles he faced in making history affected his ability to negotiate with Republicans, such as the Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, and even affected his choice of Biden as his vice-president.Obama writes in his memoir, A Promised Land, “One of the reasons I’d chosen Joe to act as an intermediary – in addition to his Senate experience and legislative acumen – was my awareness that in McConnell’s mind, negotiations with the vice-president didn’t inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of cooperation with (Black, Muslim socialist) Obama was bound to do.”Over his first 100 days in office, Biden seems to have used his image as the centrist “Uncle Joe” to his advantage – something that Obama obviously could not do.“There’s probably a large range of things that, had the exact policies been proposed by a President Bernie Sanders, they would face a lot more obstacles,” Green said. But he was quick to add, “There’s also a range of things that Biden will not propose that a more progressive president would have proposed.”John Paul Mejia, a spokesperson for the climate group Sunrise Movement, echoed that point, saying Biden still had a lot of work to do to meet the demands of the progressive coalition that helped put him in office.“While there is some sigh of relief for the president accomplishing or beginning to accomplish some popular demands, that’s really the floor that we’re examining right now,” Mejia said. “In order to truly deliver to the fullest extent of the crises that we face right now, we need a lot more.”On infrastructure specifically, Mejia said Biden should aim to spend much more money to combat climate change and build a green economy. While the president’s American Jobs Plan calls for $2.3tn in spending over eight years, Mejia and other progressives, including congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, say the US should be looking to invest $10tn over 10 years.While Ocasio-Cortez has applauded Biden’s legislative approach so far, she has also emphasized that the president – and Americans in general – should not forget the activists who pushed him on major policy and helped get him elected.“Not enough credit is given to the countless activists, organizers and advocates whose relentless work is why we are even hearing anything about universal childcare, white supremacy as terrorism, labor and living wages tonight,” Ocasio-Cortez said after Biden’s speech on Wednesday. “Yet we cannot stop until it’s done. Keep going.” More

The US will restrict travel from India starting next week, the White House said Friday, citing a devastating rise in Covid-19 cases in the country and the emergence of potentially dangerous variants of the coronavirus.The limits, which take effect from 4 May, with bar most non-US citizens arriving from India from entering the United States.Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said Joe Biden’s administration made the determination on the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.“The policy will be implemented in light of extraordinarily high Covid-19 caseloads and multiple variants circulating in the India,” she said.India’s healthcare system has been overwhelmed by the latest case surge, the worst the country has faced so far, with the virus is showing no sign of abating. With 386,452 new cases, India now has reported more than 18.7m since the pandemic began, second only to the United States. The Health Ministry on Friday also reported 3,498 deaths in the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 208,330. Experts believe both figures are an undercount.[embedded content]The US action comes days after Biden spoke with the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, about the growing health crisis and pledged to immediately send assistance.The US has already moved to send therapeutics, rapid virus tests and oxygen to India, along with some materials needed for that country to boost its domestic production of Covid-19 vaccines. Additionally, a CDC team of public health experts was expected to soon be on the ground in India to help health officials there move to slow the spread of the virus.The White House waited on the CDC recommendation before moving to restrict travel, noting that the US already requires negative tests and quarantines for all international travelers.In January, Biden issued a similar ban on most non-US citizens entering the country who have recently been in South Africa. He also reimposed an entry ban on nearly all non-US travelers who have been in Brazil, the United Kingdom, Ireland and 26 countries in Europe that allow travel across open borders. China and Iran are also both covered by the policy.The policy means most non-US citizens who have been in one of the stated countries within the last 14 days are not eligible to travel to the United States. Permanent US residents and family members and some other non-US citizens, such as students, are exempted.There was no immediate comment on the new limits from the state department, which on Thursday reissued a warning to Americans against traveling to India and said those already in the country should consider leaving by commercial means. That warning was accompanied by a notice that the department was telling the families of all US government employees at its embassy in New Delhi and four consulates in India that they could leave the country at government expense.US international air travel remains down 60% from pre-Covid-19 levels, while US domestic air travel is down 40%, according to industry trade group Airlines for America. More