The House Majority Retreat turned out to be excruciatingly on-brand for the Republican majority. Republicans could not assemble a majority of the majority and so the thing they were hoping to do together wound up not happening. (This has been a theme of late!) Some refused to attend on the grounds that “retreat” was something they vowed to their constituents never to do, and that they would not look at a dictionary about it on the grounds that the dictionary was “the largest of books and thus the most deadly.” When told that “retreat” was actually a gathering to figure out how to work together, they said that this was even worse.

But that is a shame, because I think that a second day of retreat activities would have solved all their problems. I got a look at the proposed agenda and it seemed very promising.

8 a.m.: Wake up. Gentle stretches. Enjoy hearty breakfast of bacon (no eggs, after the IVF controversy, just in case the bar moves any further).

9 a.m.: Brief opening prayer from Speaker Mike Johnson and his most cherished colleague, God.

At the Seattle airport, heading home with yet another award in his luggage, Rich had a full-blown anxiety attack. The lines, the people — everything was pissing him off. He clenched his fists. He yelled at people. Maybe it was the upcoming anniversary of the shooting.

Rich and Jess got separated going through security. After they found each other, Rich said: “Where the fuck were you? We’re fucking late.”

Jess did not respond in kind. They made their flight, but Rich couldn’t stop twitching.

Jess reached for Rich’s hand. She didn’t say anything. She just held his hand.

Rich told his therapist about this episode. His therapist said to him: “Do you know how hard it was for her to do that, having endured the same trauma as you?”

Rich spent two days working up the willpower to tell Jess what he was feeling about this. When she came into the house and he was sitting at the kitchen table with a serious look on his face, she thought yet another bad thing had happened. He asked her to sit with him.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Rich said: “Dude, I want to say something — ”

He couldn’t get it out. His eyes watered.

“Why is it so hard?” Jess asked.

“I don’t know, when it comes to you,” Rich said.

But this time, he did it. He told her about how he felt when she took his hand. That gesture, that moment — that’s what makes him happy. That’s what feels like home. And that’s what she had been doing all these years, through wars and peace. Jess was there for him, holding it all together.

And what he wanted to say now — he heard it so many times, from total strangers.

And he didn’t say it enough to her.

Jess deserved to hear it as often as he did.

And so Rich looked at his hero, and said: “Thank you.”

Ultra-processed foods, including packaged baked goods and snacks, fizzy drinks, sugary cereals, and ready-to-eat or heat products, undergo multiple industrial processes and often contain colors, emulsifiers, flavors, and other additives. These products also tend to be high in added sugar, fat, and/or salt, but are low in vitamins and fiber.

They can account for up to 58% of total daily energy intake in some high-income countries, and have rapidly increased in many low and middle-income nations in recent decades.

Overall, the results show that higher exposure to ultra-processed foods was consistently associated with an increased risk of 32 adverse health outcomes.

Convincing evidence showed that higher ultra-processed food intake was associated with around a 50% increased risk of cardiovascular disease-related death, a 48-53% higher risk of anxiety and common mental disorders, and a 12% greater risk of type 2 diabetes.

Highly suggestive evidence also indicated that higher ultra-processed food intake was associated with a 21% greater risk of death from any cause, a 40-66% increased risk of heart disease-related death, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and sleep problems, and a 22% increased risk of depression.

As we recently hit—March 11, 2020—the 4-year anniversary of when WHO finally declared Covid a global pandemic, and today, March 13th, when the US declared it a national emergency, we’re still learning every day about SARS-CoV-2’s impact, its evolution, protection from vaccination, and more. Here’s a quick summary of what I think is worth reviewing:
Impact

The global excess mortality has reached about 30 million lost lives attributable to Covid, and the Global Burden of Disease published a major paper this week in The Lancet on the toll it has taken for reducing life expectancy in 204 countries summarized as "The COVID-19 pandemic caused the most severe drops in life expectancy seen in 50+ years." The study did not address disability among survivors, with multiple concurrent studies reinforcing the prevalence of Long Covid in tens of millions of people.

Here in the United States, it is striking to review the updated data on partisan gap death rates, as reflected by counties who voted Republican in the 2020 election. As you can see below from Ashley Wu, graphics editor at the New York Times, the curves are continuing to diverge, both weekly and cumulatively. There was no divergence when vaccines were first administered (right panel below) but since that time the death rates continue to worsen in counties with 70%+ Republican voters compared with

We were thrilled yesterday to announce a new regular columnist to the Guardian US: journalist and broadcaster Mehdi Hasan. I’m sure Mehdi is familiar to many of you from MSNBC, where he hosted The Mehdi Hasan Show until last month.

As our editor Betsy Reed put it, “When Mehdi left MSNBC, many of us hoped it wouldn’t take long for him to return to the public square. We are so excited to provide a platform for his essential political commentary, fearless accountability journalism and relentless championing of human rights and free speech.”

You can read Mehdi’s first column now – Biden can end the bombing of Gaza right now. Here’s how – and he’ll be writing for us at least monthly going forward.

A pair of U.S. Internal Revenue Service agents are attempting to interview a billionaire they suspect of cheating on his taxes. But across the table from the agents is a formidable entourage of esteemed tax professionals hired to defend the billionaire. They include white-shoe attorneys — each of whom knows more about their own arcane corner of tax law than just about anyone on earth — along with highly specialized accountants and economists.

Neither of the two IRS agents has a law degree. Complex arguments from the billionaire’s entourage fly over their heads. The IRS agents are outmatched by a team whose combined years of experience in tax law and accounting exceed their own by over a century.

This stark example, laid out by former IRS officials in interviews with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, isn’t a hypothetical so much as a glimpse into the agency’s regular challenges in auditing the United States’ highest earners. These battles often come down to experience and expertise. The IRS has been losing, former officials said.

“The really experienced people tend to be on the outside [of the IRS],” Charles Rettig, who ran the IRS under former president Donald Trump and left the agency in 2022, told ICIJ. “That’s a major hurdle.”

Better unwoke than woke

Still image from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985).

It’s one thing to watch a Terry Gilliam film. It’s another to live inside one. But the white, Christian-nationalist MAGA right wants to. And a child named Tucker will lead them.

Friends circulated this Gerard Baker op-ed from Monday’s Wall Street Journal mocking Tucker Carlson’s fawning, America-hating profile of life in Russia:

Why can’t we be more like Russia?

The minute you see the welcoming smiles on the faces of the kindly immigration guards, all spiffy in their shiny jackboots, at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport you realize that unlike our own morally louche, spiritually decrepit cesspit, run by a corrupt and brutal regime bent on destroying its opponents, Russia is a nation united around a vision of the historic greatness of its civilization.

From state-of-the-art supermarket cart technology to a president who is youthful and vigorous, able to dilate on European history at length, the contrast couldn’t be greater with a technologically backward and collapsing U.S. in the grip of a geriatric autocrat who can’t remember what day it is.

American capitalism is corrupt and exploitative. Russia’s is well-regulated and committed to the common good. In the U.S., tech billionaires and Wall Street fat cats get rich on the surplus value their workers produce. Benevolent Russian oligarchs, cooperating with the state for the benefit of the people, are able to supply all Russians’ needs at a fraction of the exorbitant prices Americans pay. They are so successful that they create demand for hard-pressed sectors of the global economy, such as yachts, luxury London real estate and Swiss casinos.

Unlike America, Russia has firm control over its borders. Millions of migrants flow into the U.S. Russia definitely doesn’t have that problem. The system works so well that in the past two years, almost a million Russians, many of them vigorous young men of fighting age, have left the country, and Russia is pushing its borders onto the territory of grateful neighbors.

Two years after an attacker shot five volunteers before a Black Lives Matter march in Portland, Oregon, killing a 60-year-old woman and leaving one of her young friends paralyzed, a new visual investigation of the attack reveals that the assailant tried to provoke a stand-your-ground situation, daring three women to fight him, before suddenly opening fire when they refused.

Research agency Forensic Architecture collaborated with survivors on a reconstruction of the attack, analyzing helmet-camera video recorded by one of the victims, police radio traffic obtained through public records requests, and the testimony of 11 witnesses – including the volunteer armed guard who stopped the rampage by shooting and disarming the gunman.

The accumulated evidence flatly contradicts what Portland’s police chief told the public and city council staff in the days after the attack: that the gunman, 43-year-old Ben Smith, had opened fire only after he had been confronted by “armed protesters”.

That false characterization of the unarmed victims as aggressors, which was repeated in dozens of local and national news reports, remains uncorrected on the website of the Portland police bureau (PPB) even today, as the survivors mark the second anniversary of Smith murdering their friend, June Knightly.

This is a key reason, too, why Russia is engaged in a war of attrition against Ukraine. It can’t muster the military might to take out Ukraine because its defense department has been riddled with leaks siphoning off the resources needed to build a first world credible military, just as Chaika and his family have bled Russia’s law enforcement and tax revenue structure.

While we can thank this hollowing out for preventing an absolute blow-out against Ukraine, the Russian military as it exists continues to offer the corrupt regime opportunities to vacuum more resources out of the country.

Navalny’s continued existence was a threat to what was yet another of Putin’s war of attrition – the one of organized crime against the Russian people.

It has not helped that the Republican Party has been aiding and abetting Putin’s antidemocratic efforts against Russians by supporting Putin’s useful idiots, most especially Donald Trump.