SACRAMENTO — Memo to Democrats and independents: Just because an idea emanates from a Republican, doesn’t mean it necessarily stinks. Here are two examples.
Legislators wearing red jerseys have proposed to:
Make the California secretary of state officially nonpartisan. Rip off the seemingly inevitable blue jersey and replace it with a neutral referee’s garb.
Similarly, seize the job of writing official ballot proposition titles and summaries from the partisan attorney general and hand it to the nonpartisan, universally trusted Legislative Analyst‘s Office.
Both ideas, of course, were dead on arrival when introduced in the Democratic-dominated state Legislature, which is about to wrap up a two-year session.
The secretary of state is the chief overseer of California elections. That office holder, regardless of party, has never favored one side over the other in balloting, although many GOP politicians have been parroting Pied Piper Trump’s nonsense about election rigging.
California Republicans pushing to neutralize the office argue that Democratic incumbent Shirley Weber has taken public policy positions that echo her party’s stands. Shock! This is America. She has a right — a democratic duty — to take any position vocally that she desires.
But it’s logical for the secretary of state to officially operate as a political nonpartisan — as does the state superintendent of public instruction and all county voter registrars, who actually administer the elections and count votes.
“The secretary should be calling balls and strikes as opposed to being on the red team or a blue team.”
Realistically, no red team member is likely to win any statewide office in California for the foreseeable future, given that Democratic voters outnumber Republicans by nearly 2 to 1 and Trump is widely detested in this state.
“Sometimes Trump does make it harder in California for Republicans,” Wagner acknowledges.
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The legislation to make the secretary of state nonpartisan was a proposed California constitutional amendment, introduced by Republican Assemblymembers Natasha Johnson of Lake Elsinore and Josh Hoover of Folsom.
But it was submitted so late in the legislative session that there was no chance of it ever receiving a committee hearing. It didn’t really matter anyway. Even if it had been introduced on Jan. 1, Democrats would have instinctively tossed it in the trash.
They’re never going to make it remotely possible for a Republican to win this office any time soon.
The measure’s authors say their proposal would help “restore Californians’ trust in the electoral system.”
Actually, the only Californians who largely distrust the electoral system are Republicans. And the best way to fix that is for Trump to shut up and stop telling lies about stolen elections and hordes of undocumented immigrants voting illegally.
Of the two Republican proposals, the most significant is the one stripping the attorney general of the power to write titles and summaries of ballot measures.
Often, the only thing many voters know about a proposition is what they’re told in the title. They aren’t inclined to wade through neutral details in the official state Voter Information Guide.
The legislative analyst is a political noncombatant appointed by the Legislature and basically agreed to by both sides. The highly respected policy wonk already writes the proposition analyses included in the voter guide. Why not also the measures’ titles?
Increasingly in recent years under Democrats, including projected next governor Xavier Becerra, the attorney general has been dishing out party propaganda in official proposition titles.
State law requires the attorney general to provide an “impartial statement of the purpose of the measure” in language unlikely “to create prejudice for or against” the proposal.
But often on hotly contested measures, the language reads like talking points for the blue side.
The latest example is Proposition 39, a Republican proposal requiring Californians to show identification when voting. Election officials also would have to verify that registered voters are U.S. citizens.
I’m no fan of that measure. It overreaches, is unnecessary, could suppress voting and is merely a tool to drive up the GOP vote. Democratic legislative leaders and the party are fiercely opposed.
But Proposition 39’s title is unfairly negative and loaded against the measure. It reads: “Prohibits citizens from voting unless they present government-issued identification.” All some voters will focus on are the first four words.
Proponents sued, but judges are historically reluctant to interfere in election campaigns. A Sacramento judge OKd Democratic Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s biased wording.
The legislation for nonpartisan labeling of propositions cleared the Senate Elections Committee but later was quietly killed behind closed doors in the Senate Appropriations Committee, a notorious graveyard for measures sentenced to execution by legislative leaders.
“The Democratic leadership doesn’t want it passed,” notes the author, Sen. Roger Niello of Sacramento County, who recently was elected the next Senate minority leader. “If they kill it [in appropriations] nobody has to vote on it and it dies without fingerprints.”
That’s common legislative games-playing: Keep potentially popular but politically undesirable bills off chamber floors so majority party members can avoid shamefully voting “no.”
But these are still excellent Republican ideas.
There are times when politics should be taken out of elections.
Kelvin Washington: Hello, and welcome to this week’s episode of The Envelope. Kelvin Washington, Yvonne Villarreal and Mark Olsen here. We’ve been talking about it now for the last couple of weeks, but we’re less than a month away from the Emmys. Mariska Hargitay is gonna be the host. I’m looking forward to that because who’s living a better life than her? She’s nominated, of course. She’s hosting. And her Knicks won the NBA championship — she’s at this point an honorary Knick. I mean, it’s like she’s on the team.
Yvonne Villarreal: And she went to the Taylor Swift wedding.
Washington: That’s a good point.
Villarreal: Don’t forget that. And starring on Broadway.
Washington: So she is living her best life, yeah.
Villarreal: She’s living a better life than I am.
Washington: So I’m going to answer the question first. I’m gonna ask you, what are you looking forward to [at the Emmys]? Maybe some things you’re excited for. For me, it’s just seeing this culmination of all these things for her and just having a big moment there. I think she’s gonna own that space and I think everybody’s gonna enjoy it as well. What are you looking forward to?
Villarreal: I’m really, really excited to see my beloved Philip and Elizabeth Jennings as nominees — Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell. Not to be parasocial, but I just love that they’re both nominated. I just want a magical night for them both.
Mark Olsen: I don’t want to be a bring-down bummer here, but, you know, I find that the Emmys in particular, even more than the Oscars, kind of play favorites, and the same winners can happen again and again. It’s not as bad as it may once have been, but I’m always rooting for new blood, first-time nominees, people that it’s exciting to see them kind of get this platform. So nothing against your beloved, but I would be excited to see an underdog or somebody kind of an outsider. Say, for example, the rest of the cast of “Widow’s Bay,” which as you’ve said before, really came out of nowhere, [and] it’s become a bit of a favorite this season. And there’s some other performers there, Dale Dickey, Stephen Root, Kate O’Flynn, and I think any of them winning would be really exciting.
Villarreal: I won’t argue with that.
Washington: I was waiting on an argument.
Villarreal: We fight off camera.
Washington: And by the way, Mark, I mean, can good be good? Or great be great? If I’m great 10 years in a row, can I just be great 10 years in a row and win? You’re putting limitations on my victories.
Olsen: Yeah, but at some point, your shelf is full.
Washington: That’s true. Don’t worry about what’s going on in my mantle, all right?
That being said, we got Matthew Rhys, who you had a chance to speak to. Double nominee here, “Widow’s Bay” and “The Beast in Me.” Tell me a little bit more about your conversation.
Olsen: Just a rare double nominee, lead actor in a comedy series with “Widow’s Bay,” and then lead actor in a limited or anthology series or movie with “The Beast in Me.” And I think what’s exciting here is that these are just two very different performances. He’s this manipulative, maybe psychopathic real estate developer in “The Beast in Me,” and then this kind of harried, put-upon single dad and mayor of a small, cursed New England island in “Widow’s Bay,” and I think both of these roles show new sides of Matthew to audiences. But then when you take them together, it just feels like something else entirely.
Washington: All right, well let’s take a look. It’s M&M — Matthew and Mark — here now.
Matthew Rhys.
(Ebru Yildiz / For The Times)
Mark Olsen: For the Los Angeles Times and The Envelope, I’m Mark Olsen. I’m here today with Matthew Rhys, who is nominated for an Emmy for lead actor in a comedy series for “Widow’s Bay” [and] lead actor in a limited or anthology series [or movie] for “The Beast in Me,” and another nomination as executive producer on “Widow’s Bay.”
Matthew Rhys: I forgot about the executive producer part. It’s an exciting time.
Olsen: And now being nominated for these two performances, which are very different performances —
Rhys: [whispers] They’re not really.
Olsen: Now tell me about that. You don’t think they are?
Rhys: Look, I think I was about to speak for a number of actors and I shouldn’t. I can only speak for myself. Sometimes there’s seemingly or feels like there’s very little difference in them. I’m not, I don’t pretend to be an enormously transformative actor, hunting for the “chameleon” praise.
Olsen: But do you consider yourself versatile? It’s so interesting to me to hear you say you don’t see these roles as that different.
Rhys: I wouldn’t say I’m versatile in that chameleon-like way or transformative way, I just try to work from a place… We’re already into it.
Olsen: That’s what we’re here for.
Rhys: I know. It always makes me nauseous. I do try to live in a place that feels real to me and that what we talk about, working from your center. So when I move away from that, things start to feel insincere, so I tend not to.
Olsen: With “Widow’s Bay,” a lot of the coverage around it has been talking about how it’s been a real surprise hit. And I’m just wondering, what is it that you think that audiences are responding to?
Rhys: You know, timing is everything. I do think there was a place that was ready for “Widow’s Bay,” whereby nothing of the sort had been around for a while. You hadn’t had “Twin Peaks,” although we were kind of slightly “The Office,” “Twin Peaks,” sprinkling of “Northern Exposure” maybe, but nothing I think of that sort had been for a while. So I think people were just ready for something different, and then we’re certainly different.
Olsen: Betty Gilpin, your co-star on the show, she is also a nominee, in a recent interview said that she feels like it’s as if audiences are rejecting this idea of a really sort of safe, algorithm-approved show. And do you feel the same?
Rhys: Absolutely, and it’s wildly refreshing to know that people are going, “No, we want something different. And we are intelligent enough to deal with it. So give it to us.” And that I found very, very inspiring, very encouraging — that television and film should be pushing itself continually for that original material and not relying on remakes.
Olsen: When did you realize that the show was connecting in the way that it is? I’ve seen in some other interviews you say that even when you were shooting it, you weren’t totally sure, didn’t totally think that it would connect with people.
Rhys: No, none of us — a lot of us were like, “Are we getting the tone right? Is this right? Is this going to work?” It was a swing. It was an absolute swing. A kind of beautiful one, nonetheless. But we were all concerned — not concerned, maybe just intrigued — as to how it would be received. And it was a little bit more word of mouth. Friends were saying, “Oh, I’ve seen your show.” And then throughout my career, it’s probably the job I’ve been stopped most for. And I’m not saying that happens often. But at least twice I’ve been stopped for it. So that’s been refreshing.
Olsen: And people are really talking a lot about this mix of tones. It’s a horror-comedy that’s both very much funny and scary. What was the challenge of getting that mix right?
Rhys: Making both real, ultimately. I know that sounds very obvious and stupid, but it’s true. And also Katie Dippold spoke to this, the creator and writer, where she said she kind of thought one can almost relieve the other. When there’s incredible tension from horror, when the laugh comes in, it’s almost a big laugh because it’s the relief of being allowed to laugh. So she says sometimes that can pay off in a way. It’s much harder the other way around, but it also works the other way around where you catch an audience off guard because they’re laughing and then you hit them with horror. So I think both bizarrely can help each other.
Olsen: I’m thinking about something like the episode that’s mostly on a boat, that gets very sort of slapstick-y at moments, but then there’s still something very terrifying about what’s happening there.
Rhys: Yes, we’ve hit the nail on the head. That kind of tone I found very hard. There are these borderline farcical moments of wrestling with a man who’s 400 years old and it becoming kind of very comedic physically and yet it has to remain that there’s this element of danger or threat that’s very real and palpable. And so those are the moments you try and ground in a way so that the extreme elements can also live in a real place.
Olsen: Because you mentioned a man who’s 400 years old, the mythology of the show gets more complicated as it goes along, right up until the very last episode. Were there moments where you had to sort of step aside and ask people to explain it to you?
Rhys: No, because I think the chronology is laid out beautifully throughout the series and you’re kind of led in a way where it unfolds very organically. So I was very relieved that to be the case that there’s no kind of, “Wait, where are we? What’s, who’s this?” So that I thought was kind of beautifully executed. And because of that, because of the detail in the backstory, then the story I think pays off far greater.
Olsen: The final episode really lands it so well as far as being both funny and scary and also the way that it sets up a next season, which happily is happening. The finale promises even more murder and mayhem for Season 2. I know the writers room is already hard at work. Do you have any insights on what at least you would like to see happen?
Rhys: No, I’m desperately intrigued as to what she has in mind because I wouldn’t have the first clue as to where to start Season 2. I’m very assured that the warped mind of Katie Dippold will helm us into a giddy storm.
Olsen: One thing I have to ask about “Widow’s Bay” is simply, in preparing to play this small-town mayor who’s very concerned about tourist season, did you refer at all to maybe the most famous other small-town mayor played by Murray Hamilton in “Jaws”?
Rhys: Well, I would like to say yes because “Jaws” is an enormous favorite of mine, but he’s a very different mayor, if you look at his mayor. He’s very assured. He gets a little frustrated with Brody, but he’s not that kind of cortisol-burning, wild-eyed panic that Tom Loftis is. He is far more assured of what he should be doing for the municipality than Tom is. I even said at one point, I said, “Can we get away with the jacket, you know, the anchor jacket?” And they were like, no, because that would be too obvious.
Olsen: I like that you had the impulse.
Rhys: A lot of my performances have some reference to “Jaws,” regardless of the piece, because I’m usually Quint. So I was very upset in the boat scene you referenced when obviously myself, Stephen Root and Hamish Linklater sat around and said, OK, Stephen Root, you are obviously Quint, what does that make Hamish and myself? Who’s [Richard] Dreyfuss and who’s Roy Scheider in this? And Hamish went, “Well, I’m Dreyfuss.” I was like, “I am not Brody.” They’re like, “You’re wearing the life jacket. Of course you’re Brody!” This is the kind of thing actors talk about.
Olsen: But you weren’t happy with that?
Rhys: I’ve always wanted to be Quint. I love Brody, but my heart lies with Quint
Olsen: Now, I came to realize that “Brothers and Sisters,” it goes back 20 years now that you were on that show. And I’m just so curious, working steadily in TV for 20 years now, how has the job of being an actor on TV changed in that time?
Rhys: I don’t think it’s changed, per se. From a personal point of view, it’s been incredible to play the wide variety that I’ve been allowed to. I think the scope of television has changed wildly in 20 years and the length and breadth of the variety there is kind of remarkable at times. And sometimes you wonder if it’s sustainable. If anything, it’s offered more opportunities, I think, for actors, but the kind of core fundamentals I think are still the same.
Olsen: Do you yourself watch a lot of TV?
Rhys: Yes, yes. I never watch myself, but yes. I tend to lean towards more documentaries than anything else. Fiction, I’m always like, “Oh, that’s the day job.”
Olsen: Because I know you’ve talked a lot about your interest in boats, and is there a lot of boats-and-restoration content out there?
Rhys: What, fiction or documentary-wise?
Olsen: I wonder what your algorithm is like.
Rhys: I don’t do much with Instagram but my algorithm is generally older men showing you how to kind of spile a garboard plank next to a keel, things like that.
Olsen: And are there a lot of documentaries about boats and restoration?
Rhys: There’s a lot on YouTube, none of which really hold your attention. What I think is like, where is the kind of “Chef’s Table” of boat restoration? That’s what I’m waiting for.
Olsen: I think you maybe have to be the one to make that show.
Rhys: I might have to, but I worry about the breadth of audience we’d have there. Or how to make boat restoration interesting to the masses. Therein lies the challenge.
Olsen: Well, they say niche markets sometimes …
Rhys: You can capture a zeitgeist moment.
Olsen: With your work on television, you have a really strong track record between “Brothers and Sisters,” “The Americans,” “Perry Mason,” now with “Widow’s Bay,” and also with “The Beast in Me.” For you, what goes into choosing a role?
Rhys: This is the real luxury of having a degree of choice. It’s not always choice, but more often than not, a project comes along that I’ll read and there’ll be a number of things. I’ll be like, “Ooh, I’ve never done it.” Like “Widow’s Bay,” I read it and I went, “The scripts are fantastic and I have never done anything like this in my life.” “Beast in Me,” the same, the writing’s so strong, but also that role is something I’d never done before. And the same, obviously, for “The Americans” and “Brothers and Sisters.” So if there’s an opportunity to try something very new, to me, it’s the ultimate luxury. And so that’s been a real driving force. And strong stories, the want of knowing how it ends, just simple storytelling.
Olsen: Do you find that your instincts have changed over the years? Are you looking for the same things that you feel like you were when you were starting in television 20 years ago?
Rhys: No, not necessarily. I always wanted, if I was fortunate enough, to do something that would challenge me, that would push me, that I hadn’t done, that’d scare me, that’d make me nervous every day on set, which a lot of these projects have done. I thought that would be all that I’d want.
Olsen: Because your character in “The Beast in Me,” again, I have to come back to this idea that you think these two roles are kind of similar, because your character on “The Beast in Me” seems so self-assured, like he has a confidence that Loftis does not have.
Rhys: Yes, that is very true and it was the observation of the wealthy that kind of led me there and especially uber-wealth, where there’s a real assurance of not having to try almost because there’s no need and this innate feeling that you will absolutely get your own way and people will bend to your will purely because of wealth.
Olsen: And now playing that role, getting a little taste of that, like, is that a nice place?
Rhys: What, self-assured?
Olsen: Is that a good position to be in, that people do what you want.
Rhys: Oh, I’m sure it’s great. I’ve never tasted it. It’s something I aspire to by the hour. And being riddled with all the cliched insecurities that every other actor, when you’re playing it, you go, “God, this feels great. To not even have to try with people must be so wonderful.” I’ve no desire to kind of glean the kind of affirmation from the person I’m talking to. Almost quite the opposite.
Olsen: “Widow’s Bay” has such a big ensemble, and then in “The Beast in Me,” really most of your scenes are just you and Claire Danes in this series of escalating conversations. Did you like that distinction? For “The Beast in Me,” did you like the pared-back intimacy of those scenes that the two of you have?
Rhys: Absolutely. I think that was the big draw of the piece, these two people who are kind of, they’re like two magnets in a way, they’re so drawn, they are so repulsed, they’re kind of images of each other’s shadow self, they see so much of each other while [being] polarizingly different. That to me was part of the great draw of that piece, with these two people and how they connected or seemingly didn’t.
Olsen: I don’t think you’ve worked with Claire Danes before?
Rhys: Prior to that, no.
Olsen: Because just in a practical sense, what is it like for two actors when you have so many of your scenes together? Like you sort of have to feel out not only how the characters are, but also how you as performers, as work colleagues, get through the day. What is that process like?
Rhys: I mean, look, with Claire, having known and watched her body of work, [I knew] she’s like a powerhouse and kind of brings that to set. And from day one of rehearsals, I kind of sat up and went, “Oh God, right, come on, let’s focus here,” because she has that laser that is on a switch. And when it’s switched, it’s on. And woe betide you if you haven’t prepared as well as she has. So that was very quick. The ascent of going, “Right, yes, A-game at all times, please.” Which is fantastic. It’s everything you want in a scene partner. It’s someone who kind of scares you and kind of raises your game and demands, you know, a kind of a better tennis game, although I’ve never played tennis. I’m sure it’s great.
Olsen: Do you feel like you’re that kind of actor too?
Rhys: No. I’m the one making fart jokes and then kind of going, “Will you concentrate?” I don’t think I have that kind of prowess, that kind of switch [that] is so alarmingly kind of night and day. I creak into it.
Olsen: Because there’s an intensity to your performance here. I mean, it goes big at times, there’s the “Psycho Killer” dance —
Rhys: The Achilles’ heel. I begged them to remove that scene because anywhere I see the scene direction “He dances” or “[Character] dances,” I can taste the vomit in my own mouth.
Olsen: And now did you choreograph that ahead of time?
Rhys: Nope, I just went for it. In fact a very charming woman came up to me on the street and she goes, “I love ‘The Beast in Me’ and I loved how camp your dancing was.” And I went, “Oh, it wasn’t meant to be necessarily camp.” Well, clearly it was to her. And also playing drunk, drunk and dancing, I was like, “Oh, some vicious planets are aligning.”
Olsen: And do you have a trick to drunk acting?
Rhys: Yes, I get drunk. It’s a very simple trick that most actors overlook. You just drink and then you’re drunk. The only time I venture into Method acting.
Olsen: But then about how many takes do you have in you?
Rhys: Two. No, no, I didn’t get drunk. I got tipsy. No, no it’s very different. It’s hard, it’s hard. That’s always a hard one because also we shot that over the entire day. So it started at like 8 a.m.And to be perfectly honest, sometimes you’ll do a take and it’s like, the drunk acting is too apparent. Let’s bring it back. Claire Danes nailed drunk acting from take one. And I was like, god— it! I mean, she’s done it again.
Olsen: And then also the chicken scene, how many chickens did you have to eat?
Rhys: I come into my own. Eating on screen is not and never has been a problem for me. I will take down any amount of food and I will not ask for a spit bucket. They were like, “Oh, we have a spit bucket.” I think, “No, I’m not spitting up perfectly good chicken” — and it was really good chicken. I think I went through about three chickens. What I loved about that scene, and this is what I love about all good writing, is when a brief element, usually it’s wordless, can say so much about a character or what the character is trying to do to the person in the room through a very simple action. So I loved that from what it did in that moment. He’s doing it overtly to try and intimidate her. It’s something which says so much about him and the way he does it, I thought it was an incredibly beautiful and shrewd piece of writing.
Olsen: Over the course of the series, how did you modulate how crazy to seem?
Rhys: Because it’s kind of present from the get-go. And that was a heavy reliance on the directors. We had some incredible directors on that. Antonio Campos, who kind of began and ended us, we had a little bit of a dial, and he was like, “Bring it back a bit” or “I think it needs a little more.” He was very good at truly kind of conducting in that moment. And we had the luxury of being able to do a few takes where he’s like, “Bring it up a bit” or, “OK, that’s good, let’s take it down a bit.”
Olsen: Were you happy with how that ended up?
Rhys: I don’t watch it. I haven’t watched myself in about 10 years. I get stuck on the wrong things. I become too concerned about the way I use my hands or how strange my walk is or the weird kind of idiosyncrasy of my mouth. So then when I’m doing it next, I’m like, “I am not going to do anything with my hands and I’m going to change my walk.” And then the director is like, “What is wrong with your walk and why are you sitting on your hands?” So I tend not to watch myself.
Olsen: You said 10 years ago. Did something really make you be like, “I’m not doing that anymore?”
Rhys: In fairness, it was more than 10 years ago. It was “Brothers and Sisters.” I started watching that and I was like, “Oh my God. Why has no one said anything? Look at my posture.” And then you become obsessed with sitting with better posture. And then everyone’s like, “Why are you sitting weirdly?” I was never clever enough to take from it a kind of positive critical foundation. I was taking the wrong things, usually physically attributed, that would get in my head when I was acting. And then that’s all I could think about while I was doing it, and I was on a road to ruin.
Olsen: So often you’re doing an American accent or a voice that is not your own and I know for myself I feel like I wouldn’t be able to think about anything but that, that’s all I would be able think about while I was performing.
Rhys: The accent is strange because I think in one way such an enormous part of my head is always working on the next sound to come out of my mouth. I think it stops you in a way from kind of acting, if that makes sense. It takes the self-conscious element out of you because you’re so busy working on something else. My acting teacher from drama school would always say, “Give yourself something to do to stop yourself acting.” It’s like you’re spending so much time thinking about the way you sound, it can relax you in a different way because you’re not thinking about acting.
Olsen: And then is it also a big challenge for you to try to make different American accents? How hard is it for you to do those different American sounds?
Rhys: It depends on the accent. I mean, sometimes the more extreme sounds are easier to hook into, like, you know, the Southern states or Boston or New York. Then you get, you know, California’s kind of softer, so it’s harder. It doesn’t have that extreme hook to find. And then there are just simply words in the American dialect that can take me down, like “murderer” or “world,” sometimes “girl” is tricky. But “murderer.” Which is unfortunate, because I played lawyers, spies who kill people. I’ve had to say it a lot. So I always go, “Can I say ‘killer’?” I just sound like I run out of battery.
Olsen: Do you find that living in America, has it helped you?
Rhys: Oh, without question, because going into a job, a couple of weeks before, I’ll be doing it — not at home, because it drives the kids crazy. They’re like, “He sounds so fake.” And then they’re like “Oh, here he is, he’s doing that again.” I’m like, “I’m not Dick Van Dyke, so I don’t know who you’re impersonating.” So yeah, you can go into the bodega and pretend to be American.
Olsen: On the day that Emmy nominations were announced, you did an interview with my colleague, Yvonne Villarreal, and you told her that you were meeting your partner, Keri Russell, also an Emmy nominee, at a mystery location. Would you mind completing that story? Where did you go?
Rhys: We went to the U.N. No, we didn’t, but I wish I could say that. We went to the Armory in New York with, oh God, I can’t remember the name of the exhibition. It was an incredible exhibition where three enormous tanks of water were filled with water and ceramic bowls and a current was introduced and then these ceramic bowls would clank into each other to make different noises in this incredible space. It was wondrous. Now, if the artist, for some unknown reason, watches this and goes, “I can’t believe he didn’t remember my name or the name of the exhibition,” I apologize profusely. But it was incredible.
Olsen: That sounds like a great way to spend the day.
Rhys: Yeah, it was. It was fantastic. And then we had a great dinner and celebrated and said, you know, “This is the high point, it’s downhill from here on out.”
Olsen: Well, the two of you were recently referred to as television’s first couple.
Rhys: I said that.
Olsen: And I’m wondering, I can only imagine you don’t walk around thinking of yourself —
Rhys: Oh, no, I do. I have a badge and a T-shirt, but no one believes me.
Olsen: But what does that make you think of when you hear yourselves referred to in that way?
Rhys: It kind of makes me laugh. You go, “Oh, God.” And also — and I hate to sound like I’m some bitter old fool, but I am — we’ve done it a long time. We’re of a certain age. You kind of know tomorrow there’s another first couple. So you go, “We’re today’s first couple, and it’s great. And we’ll take it and we’ll enjoy it.”
Olsen: Do you find, especially in the way that your personal and professional lives are intertwined, is it good that you have each other to keep yourselves in check?
Rhys: Yes, it also helps that you have a partner that fully understands what you do, because it’s a mad circus life and sometimes, you know, it’s hard, I think, for partners who don’t quite understand how crazy it is. So it is great in that respect that you fully understand what the other one is doing.
Olsen: And is that also part of where your interest in boats comes from? Is it something that’s totally separate?
Rhys: So she could kick me out of the house is why she bought me the boat.
Olsen: There’s something just totally separate from your work life.
Rhys: Absolutely, absolutely. And it’s something so other. … Opinions can vary so wildly, you know, critics can contradict each other in certain criticisms. The kind of more simple aspect, especially when I was restoring the boat, was that it felt a lot purer and simpler. That you can, at the end of the day, you look back at this piece of wood you’d be working on and go, “There we are, I did that.” And there’s no one saying, “Well, you could have done it this way.” You know what I mean? I always enjoyed the satisfaction it gave me in that sense.
Olsen: Wait, how many boats do you have?
Rhys: I only have one. She’s for sale, if anyone’s interested.
Olsen: Do you want to now find another boat to do this all over again?
Rhys: I don’t, because my wrists have given up. It was much harder than I thought it was going to be. It was an incredible journey, and it was kind of inspired by Hemingway, in a way, it was the same class of boat that he had. So I had all these giddy, kind of rose-tinted romantic notions of what I was doing until I was knee-deep in fiberglass, going, “Why did I think this was a good idea?”
The high desert is not typically a place you look for a wave. But in the vast expanse between the Sierra Nevada and Utah border, a not-exactly-wide-open race for Congress is testing whether a blue wave, should one come November, is ankle-high or something more akin to a political tsunami.
Nevada’s 2nd District has been represented by just four lawmakers since its creation more than 40 years ago. All those representatives have been Republicans.
November’s contest should be another shoo-in for the GOP and its nominee, David Flippo. The district, which takes in northern Nevada, is overwhelmingly white and rural, which makes it solidly conservative. In 2024, Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by a decisive 56% to 42%; only Washoe County, home to Reno, kept things that close. Trump won other portions of the district by 50 percentage points or more.
“It will be an interesting summer and fall,” Mark Amodei, who has represented the district for 15 years, wrote on social media after the June primary. “But I believe it’s fair to say that CD-2, for the first time in its history, isn’t a Republican guarantee.”
That’s just about the kindest thing the congressman has had to say about his would-be successor.
All of which make the sprawling district in Nevada’s rough and rocky Great Basin an improbable political bellwether. A win on such forbidding terrain would almost certainly mean a nationwide Democratic gain of 30 or more seats in November; they need to flip just three to take control of the House.
Flippo, 63, a 25-year Air Force veteran and Trump stalwart, arrived in the district from Las Vegas. He ran for Congress there in 2024, losing in the Republican primary. He was preparing for a second try in the Democratic-leaning 4th District when Amodei unexpectedly announced his retirement in February. So Flippo hightailed it north to run in the far more hospitable 2nd District.
He took on the favored candidate of Amodei and others in the GOP establishment, James Settelmeyer, a former minority leader of the state Senate. Backed by a constellation of MAGA celebrities, Flippo waged a fiercely negative campaign, accusing “Tampon Jim” of voting to put menstrual products in boys’ bathrooms and coddling undocumented immigrants, among other distortions. With Trump’s endorsement, Flippo handily defeated Settelmeyer and 11 other primary opponents.
“”Absolutely scurrilous campaign against … one of the nicest guys around,” Amodei said afterward, on the program “Nevada Newsmakers.” “The voters are never wrong. But guess what? Mark Amodei’s not endorsing [Flippo.] I wish him all the best. No way. No, thank you.”
Apart from his exceedingly short-term residency in the district, questions have also been raised about Flippo’s opaque finances. He has lent his campaign more than $1.6 million and failed to provide the personal disclosure information required of federal candidates. There is also no record of Flippo filing the required statement during his 2024 campaign, according to the Washington news outlet NOTUS.
In addition, it reported that Flippo was fired from a job in the financial services industry after his company accused him of violating policies and regulations.
So, a carpetbagger with a sketchy history.
Flippo’s main opponent is Teresa Benitez-Thompson, 48, a longtime Reno resident, former member of the state Assembly and a relatively moderate Democrat. Those credentials also buoy Democratic hopes. The party’s congressional campaign committee has, for the first time in decades, added Nevada’s 2nd District to its target list, though it remains to be seen how much time and money national Democrats commit to the race.
To prevail, Benitez-Thompson would have to defy political gravity, which is to say overcome the reflexive partisanship that has typified politics in this age of deep voter polarization.
In the last two midterm elections, according to the Pew Research Center, more than 90% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters supported GOP candidates for the House. In other words, the kind of crossover voters that Benitez-Thompson needs to win have become rare indeed.
““Trump is a huge liability for Republicans; there is no question that the GOP is going to have huge turnout problems, meaning that in a lot of races, Democrats are going to greatly exceed expectations,” the veteran election handicapper Charlie Cook wrote in a recent midterm analysis. “But converting Republican voters to actually back a Democrat — even for a day — is so much harder now.”
“Some of those rural Nevada voters would rather commit hara-kiri than vote for a Democrat,” Ralston said. (No, Japan’s ancient suicide ritual is not particularly associated with honor or custom in the cow counties, as Nevada’s lightly populated stretches are known. But you get the point.)
“I don’t think it’s impossible,” Ralston, founder and chief executive of the Nevada Independent news site, said of a Democratic upset. “But I remain skeptical.”
Here’s the thing, though, about wave elections — and, to be clear, your friendly political columnist is offering no predictions ahead of November. Like a massive ocean swell, which can bear all kinds of flotsam and jetsam ashore, a political wave that is big enough, broad enough and strong enough can carry all manner of unlikely candidates to victory.
That’s not partiality or wish casting on the part of your friendly political columnist. The fact is Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans in California, in both registration and inclination.
The gregarious and media-savvy Hilton has been waging an energetic and effervescent run for governor, with multiple appearances a day and frequent updates to his cheeky social media accounts.
“He’s going to San Francisco” — into the bowels of the liberal beast — “he’s going into schools, talking to labor groups,” said Hector Barajas, a campaign spokesman. “He’ll go everywhere.”
Becerra not so much.
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That said, if Hilton is flat-out running for a job he stands virtually no chance of winning, Becerra is embarked on more of a leisurely stroll toward his all-but-certain perch in Sacramento.
That’s not a terrible thing at this midsummer stage of the race. Once, in the blessed era before the 24/7 news cycle and the omnipresence of social media, there was a lull in the months after the primary, with campaign activities picking back up around Labor Day.
On Tuesday, during a walking tour of Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo neighborhood, Becerra pushed back on the notion he was taking his election — and California voters — for granted. “If I were trying to coast,” he told reporters, “I’d be out on the coast right now instead of here with you all.”
Becerra’s pace aside, the days between now and the Nov. 3 election offer him plenty of time to spell out what, exactly, he has to offer his home state and how, in a broad sense, he plans to tackle one of the highest profile, most vexing jobs in all of American politics.
At least one of those days should include a face-to-face debate between Hilton and Becerra. The two shared a stage multiple times during the primary season. They have not appeared together since.
More than a half-dozen news organizations have offered to host the gubernatorial rivals in a one-on-one session. Several other groups have proposed forums that would allow them to discuss their differences together in person.
Barajas, the spokesman for Hilton’s campaign, said the Republican hopeful has agreed to each and every invitation.
“He’s got absolutely no problem” appearing anytime or anywhere, Barajas said. “He will go to East L.A.. He will go to South-Central. He will go into the heart of the Central Valley. It doesn’t matter to him.”
That’s no surprise.
When a candidate is an underdog, like Hilton, they’ll typically show up at the opening of an envelope if it means appearing before a crowd. Conversely, a candidate on a seeming glide path to election, like Becerra, will often balk at giving their opponent the exposure afforded by a debate, much less risk harming themselves with a bad performance.
There’s a lot of virtue signaling that surrounds the notion of candidate debates.
Far from a high-minded discussion of policy differences, they often devolve into a stale recitation of talking points and pre-scripted zingers. After a while, debates can grow redundant and, frankly, boring as contestants repeat well-worn phrases and replow deeply furrowed ground. Such was the case by the time California’s gubernatorial hopefuls met for their sixth televised debate in the spring.
Most voters — many of whom profess to care oh-so-deeply about issues and matters of great import — don’t even bother tuning in. If they found debates that captivating, shows such as the “PBS NewsHour” would routinely outdraw the latest season of “Love Island USA.”
No matter.
There is an audience, however limited, for debates. Even if they don’t bother watching, many voters read about the encounters afterward, catch snippets online, or glean useful insights from the extensive coverage that follows.
Above all, a willingness to debate is a sign of respect — for voters as well as the political process the candidates are a part of. Minimizing direct confrontation with Hilton may play to Becerra’s inherently cautious nature. It also makes sense from a purely strategic standpoint.
But it doesn’t serve the people of California, or give voters their due. This is a campaign for governor. Not a coronation.
Becerra owes California, and Hilton, the chance to take the candidates’ measure side by side before their contest is over. The sooner Becerra commits to a time and place, the better.
SACRAMENTO — California’s next governor, Xavier Becerra, is a “small ball” player, to borrow a baseball term. He probably won’t be swinging for the fences like Govs. Gavin Newsom and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But he also won’t be striking out a lot trying to hit home runs, like Newsom and Schwarzenegger.
Democrat Newsom has rapped some doubles, most notably streamlining the long-abused California Environmental Quality Act that has slowed housing development for decades and increased the cost of homeownership.
Republican Schwarzenegger slammed a home run when he signed Democratic legislation (AB 32) kicking off California’s nation-leading fight against climate change.
But stars Newsom and Schwarzenegger frequently fanned at the plate while overreaching.
Gov. Jerry Brown? He had the “good eye,” another baseball term referring to a batter adept at spotting a good pitch to swing at and knowing when to lay off. Brown was very choosy and strategic — a solid player in his second tenure as governor.
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We can only surmise based on Becerra’s long record of public service — legislator, congressman, state attorney general and U.S. Health secretary in the Biden administration.
That, and how he’s approaching his election campaign — basically the same way he has performed throughout his career: slow, steady, cautious. A gradual, careful climb to the top in California.
A workhorse, not a show horse, using a tired cliche that’s applicable to Becerra.
Framed by the background of struggling, working class Mexican immigrant parents — roots the candidate never forgets and frequently mentions.
We do know one thing for sure: He’ll be elected governor in November — California’s first elected Latino governor in history.
We’ll go through the motions of watching two candidates “compete.” But there’s no way that a moderate, essentially clean Democrat can lose in California to a Republican former Fox News host whose only previous political gig was as strategist for a British prime minister and — most damning — who is endorsed by the detested, despicable President Trump.
GOP candidate Steve Hilton contends that Trump’s unpopularity in California “doesn’t matter because we’re not talking about national policies here. This is about what we can do in our state to make life better for Californians.”
One thing we can do is continue to fight back against Trump. Becerra vehemently pledges to do that and points to his successful record as attorney general blocking the president’s policies in court.
Trump’s national policies don’t matter in California? Wrong. He shrinks federal healthcare funds, attempts to drill for oil off the pristine coast, invades our cities with the National Guard and poisons protection for salmon and other endangered species.
Californians will be voting against Trump up and down the ballot in November.
Back to Becerra.
Small ball is basically about playing methodically, scoring one run at a time rather than relying on home runs and extra-base hits, moving runners with walks, bunts, stolen bases and bloop singles. Patience and careful incrementalism. That’s Becerra.
“I would prefer not to run on inflated promises that then I can’t deliver on,” Becerra told Politico reporter Melanie Mason last week at a public forum in Sacramento. “I’m not going to promise you 3 million [new housing] units because that’s where I can’t go. That’s an inflated promise. But I will tell you we will build. There will be more Californians who own a home.”
Newsom promised to build 3.5 million new housing units when he ran for election in 2018 — and dramatically struck out.
Becerra told reporters that “realistically” he could double the roughly 100,000 new units annually being built today. A bloop single.
The Democrat made a small ball proposal last week. He pledged two free hours of electricity daily for low-income households. Details will be negotiated with the state Public Utilities Commission and presumably private utilities like Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric.
Becerra envisions, for example, that a family of four earning less than $82,500 annually would get two hours of free electricity mid-day when regional demand is low and solar is generating lots of unused energy.
So, if it’s unused electricity why not make it free for practically everyone regardless of their income? Maybe that could be considered. Probably not.
One thing we can look forward to: A full-time governor who won’t be dividing his time running for president. He’ll be solely focused on the job of governing.
He’ll also fully understand and respect the process of legislating — as a former member of the U.S. House Democratic leadership — and presumably feel comfortable dealing with legislative honchos.
Becerra already has one devoted fan in the Legislature: Powerful Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister).
“This is a person who is always just incredibly focused, someone who is very engaged,” Rivas told Politico’s Jeremy White last week.
“One quality about Xavier is he doesn’t wake up every morning thinking how he can make headlines or be on the front page of our newspapers.
“He’s someone [who] doesn’t ever have to speak the loudest but you can’t mistake that for being passive. … He’s intensely competitive. He’s extremely persistent. … He’s going to have an ambitious plan and an agenda.”
OK, we’re all ears. We’d like to hear about it before election day. But don’t count on it. Small ballers tend to be agonizingly cautious, even when they end up winning.
President Trump’s goal of ending gender-affirming care is not improper and cannot be the basis for quashing a subpoena issued by the Justice Department against a provider of medical treatment for transgender youth, a divided federal appeals court ruled Friday.
The Justice Department announced last year that it had issued more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics that provide gender-affirming care as part of an effort to investigate healthcare fraud. Federal judges have quashed many of the subpoenas as illegitimate efforts to intimidate providers into ending care.
In a 2-1 decision, a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the efficacy and long-term risks of the treatments are “uncertain,” and the president has the power to align the Justice Department’s enforcement priorities with his broader policy goals.
“Every President has law enforcement priorities, just as every President has signature policies (often, the former are components of the latter),” wrote Judge Carlos Bea.
Bea, a nominee of Republican President George W. Bush, was joined in the opinion by Daniel Bress, a Trump nominee. They reversed a ruling that quashed the subpoena against telemedicine provider QueerDoc, sending the case back to the district court to consider other arguments.
The subpoena seeks QueerDoc’s personnel files, billing documents, communications with drug manufacturers and records of patients who were prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy, among other information, according to the 9th Circuit decision.
American Civil Liberties Union attorney Adrien Leavitt, who represented Washington state-based QueerDoc, said the ACLU would continue fighting the subpoena in district court. QueerDoc has also argued the subpoena is overbroad and burdensome. The Justice Department has said it has reason to believe the company may be misleading people about puberty blockers and hormones.
“We’re ready to continue defending one of the most fundamental principles of healthcare: every patient’s right to confidential medical care,” Leavitt said in a statement.
He said the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit was the first appeals court to weigh in on the subpoenas.
Trump has signed one executive order defining sex as only male or female — and as unchangeable — and another that seeks to end federal funding of the care for patients under 19. The latter order also directs the Justice Department to “prioritize investigations” into violations of a drug safety law by “any entity that may be misleading the public about long-term side effects of chemical and surgical mutilation.”
Gender-affirming care includes a range of medical and mental health services to support a person’s gender identity, including when it’s different from the sex they were assigned at birth. It encompasses counseling, medications that block puberty and hormone therapy to produce physical changes as well as surgeries to transform chests and genitals, though those are rare for minors.
Most major medical groups say access to the treatment is important for those with gender dysphoria and see gender as existing along a spectrum.
The 9th Circuit majority called discussion around gender-affirming care “an unsettled scientific debate” and said the Trump administration could also justify its opposition to the treatment on ethical or philosophical grounds.
After, well, the world seemingly fell in line with his long-planned $110-billion merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery in recent weeks, a dozen state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, have stymied the deal with a so-far-successful lawsuit that has put the whole thing on ice.
That has Paramount, and presumably Ellison, big mad-sad. So much so that a company lawyer this week suggested Paramount could move out of California if Bonta doesn’t back down.
For those of us in the cheap seats, the whole plot of the Paramount merger has become so convoluted and nebulous it‘s hard to follow exactly what’s going on, and what it all means.
So let’s pull back, and take a big-picture look at what’s happening and what’s at stake — legally and politically.
Legally pretty good
First, the recap: Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery have been trying to merge since 2024. European regulators, along with those in other countries, cleared the deal, with some conditions in place.
Then, recently, 12 state attorneys general led by Bonta sued to stop the merger on antitrust grounds and won a temporary restraining order.
So why did the states sue?
Trump’s idea of regulation seems to be to OK anything he likes, or that personally benefits him. Therefore, “the states have come in and played a really important role, since the DOJ has basically walked away from a lot of interest enforcement,” said George Hay, a professor of law and economics at Cornell University. “The states take this really seriously.”
While there have been lots of angles on this merger in the media (including concerns over foreign investments), the antitrust lawsuit is really fairly narrow — the main argument is that the merger will “kill off theaters,” Hay said, and hurt consumers and creators.
Bonta has pointed out that after the merger, the new Paramount would control about 27% of films released into theaters in the U.S., along with basic cable distribution.
David Ellison, chairman and chief executive of Paramount Skydance, speaks at a New York event in April.
(Noam Galai / Getty Images for Paramount)
On those narrow grounds, “the states have done a good job putting together a credible case, a case that a court’s likely to regard as being plausible,” said William Kovacic, a professor of law at George Washington University.
While the lawsuit is only in preliminary stages, Harry First, a professor of law emeritus at New York University and an expert in antitrust matters, said it has a “decent chance of succeeding.”
That has to worry Paramount, because a long, drawn-out court case is bad for business.
“If you go through appeals, it means that your transaction hangs suspended in the air for a couple of years,” Kovacic said. “It creates all sorts of uncertainty about the future direction of the business.”
The issues that don’t matter, but actually do
Paramount also has PR headaches involved with this deal, though they largely lie outside the scope of the legal action.
Whether or not CNN would retain its editorial independence has been a huge topic of debate. Ellison’s dad, billionaire Larry Ellison, is a huge F.O.T. (friend of Trump) with a hard-right tilt.
The younger Ellison has already been accused of destroying the integrity of “60 Minutes.” Many fear (or hope, depending on their politics) that he will do the same to CNN. But that’s not really an antitrust issue, although Ellison has tried to claim this is political persecution by liberal states.
There’s also been talk from labor unions and some politicians that the merger will hurt workers, which seems like a reasonable fear. In general, First points out, less competition leads to more power for the remaining owners to set the terms of employment.
Again, that’s not what the lawsuit is actually focused on.
Politics front and center
But both of those issues have become popular talking points, more prevalent than the actual issues in the lawsuit.
That reality is creating a political headache for some big political heads, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and governor-in-waiting Xavier Becerra, who are increasingly receiving pressure from Paramount to make this all go away.
That thumbscrew campaign lost all subtlety this week at a Politico event in Sacramento, where Paramount’s chief legal officer Makan Delrahim said the company would consider leaving the state.
“If I was governor, I wouldn’t want to lose Hollywood from the state. I wouldn’t want to lose a major company like Paramount to another state,” Delrahim said.
Both Newsom and Becerra in recent days have indicated they would prefer some sort of settlement, avoiding a long legal battle that could kill the deal entirely.
NYU’s First sees that as “the weakness of Democrats who say they don’t like concentration and they don’t like concentration in the media and they don’t like companies getting bigger and bigger, and then they fold when the companies have political power.”
Let’s look at that power more closely, though, because if you recall, there are 11 other attorneys general in this suit, including from powerful states such as New York and Colorado.
That means “California doesn’t necessarily dictate what will happen to the case,” Hay said. “It may well be Ellison will twist Newsom’s arm to get Newsom to twist the attorney general’s arm to call off the case or take a very favorable settlement, but it doesn’t kick the other states out.”
While Bonta, at the same Politico event, said he’s had private conversations with Newsom on the issue, he also doesn’t seem interested in folding.
“In a span of weeks, Paramount agreed to halt the merger until a court decision or until June 2027, asked for a November trial, and is now back with another attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through. Paramount has lost the plot as it continues to lose in court. It didn’t work the first time — on the eve of our July lawsuit — and it won’t work this time,” Bonta said in a recent social media post.
Don’t forget, Bonta has his own aspirations for governor, and Hay points out that AGs often see antitrust cases as “a political stepping stone” because they are popular with voters.
So what’s next?
As the lawsuit is currently written, First and other legal experts agreed this would be a hard case to settle because it doesn’t leave a lot of room for dealmaking.
That, of course, doesn’t mean a deal couldn’t be done.
But it’s unlikely Ellison will force California to crumble with so many other states in the game, no matter how many threats Paramount drops, and unlikely the merger will escape this lawsuit without concessions that the attorneys general can cite as victories.
SACRAMENTO — Say you want a new pair of running shoes, but you just can’t make up your mind. So you spend a solid week checking them out online, coming back to one pair on a particular site again and again.
When you’re finally ready to check out, you notice something upsetting — the price you saw on day one is now 20% higher. What the heck?
Welcome to the brave new world of surveillance pricing, where some companies are not just tracking your every move online but also purchasing deep-dive data into your life for a single purpose — to figure out the maximum you will pay for an item and jack up the price accordingly to squeeze every possible dollar out of every unwitting consumer.
It’s legal, and whether it’s good or bad “depends on which side of the transaction you’re on,” said Roger White, an economics professor at Whittier College.
For those of you who are really terrible at economics, we, the little people, are on the bad end of that deal.
“It is using your own personal data and your characteristics, your demographics, information about you, to set a different price based on the perceived willingness to pay, and that is causing Californians a potential chance of being gouged,” said state Assemblymember Christopher M. Ward (D-San Diego).
Ward is trying to outlaw surveillance pricing in California with his AB 2564, which seems like a no-brainer if you actually care about affordability and your constituents. But he’s having a hard time getting his bill through the Legislature. In fact, he tried last year and failed.
But if surveillance pricing seems corrupt or unethical, get ready. Because retailers are getting ready — for artificial intelligence.
Right now, most surveillance pricing is relying on established data collection. That is about to get super-charged as AI goes further and further into sweeping up bits of information on every aspect of our lives, on and offline.
Did your car break down and you have to shop at home? Are you injured or have a medical condition that makes you desperate for comfy shoes? Did you just get a raise and maybe are in the mood to spend?
The amount of data that can be definitively known about your life is huge. The amount that can be inferred is even bigger. Imagine if artificial intelligence in real time, using every bit of information it can find, is basically working to squeeze every dime out of you, every day on every purchase — groceries, clothes, plane tickets, maybe even medicines.
“AI gives them powerful tools to do that, and they can basically use information almost instantaneously to set prices,” said Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy think tank.
Which makes regulating surveillance pricing now all the more important.
The big bad picture
White, the Whittier professor, sees an even bigger threat looming with surveillance pricing. He points out that income inequality in the United States has been increasing since the 1970s, and it is mostly rich people who control and own large retail endeavors.
If surveillance pricing is allowed to blossom unfettered, he’s concerned the rich will get richer by selling at higher prices, and everyone else will be paying so much to survive that the poor and middle class will suffer even further.
“This could lead to an acceleration of income inequality,” White said. “This could be a way for, sort of, the rich to benefit more,” leaving “the middle class and the poor potentially being even worse off.”
Immediate gouging, and long-term erosion of the already tenuous ability of the middle class and poorer people to survive. You’d think our state Legislature would be all over fixing this.
Other states have. In fact, about 20 states have some sort of law about “dynamic pricing,” a broader term for how retailers use data to set prices.
Just a few days ago, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed A4085 (the Fair Price Protection Act), which prohibits surveillance pricing for groceries.
New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Maryland also have laws on the issue, though some won’t take effect until next year.
“There are both Republicans and Democrats who are worried about these issues because they’re getting complaints from their own constituents,” West said.
But in California, the winds are blowing in favor of the big guys. While Ward is working through one colleague at a time trying to pass the measure, the lobbying pressure against it has been significant.
Retailers and others argue it could have unintended consequences, like preventing them from offering discounts to certain customers, or having loyalty programs.
C’mon. No one is coming for your coupons.
White, the economist, points out that companies are spending millions to implement surveillance pricing, and they aren’t doing it so they can slash prices and lose money.
“They won’t say this, but you know, the reality is that millions, if not billions, of dollars in inflated profit is on the line,” said Ward. “Unfortunately, that is coming at the expense of everyday Californians who are having that ripped out of their pocketbooks without them even knowing it.”
White put it even more bluntly.
“If you’re opposed to the Assembly bill, it seems that you are siding with the businesses, and if you’re in favor of it, then it seems that you’re siding with consumer protections.”
Ward is fighting an uphill battle, but he isn’t giving up. It’s about trying to “right the universe when it comes to fair pricing for consumers,” he told me.
“We need to go back to a place of a fair marketplace where you have an honest relationship between the consumer and the business and everybody is being treated the same,” he said.
Nick Offerman is more than just his facial hair. For one thing, the actor made viewers weep with his Emmy-winning turn as Bill, a man who found unexpected love in “The Last of Us.”
Then again, Bill did have a great beard.
Fans who celebrated Ron Swanson and his mustache on “Parks and Recreation” have had much to enjoy with the two roles that earned Offerman Emmy nominations this year. As Chester A. Arthur, corrupt politician-turned-surprise president in Netflix’s limited series “Death by Lightning,” and retired professional wrestler and recovering addict Jinx in the Apple TV series “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” he had two powerful redemption arcs to navigate. As well as some mighty coifs.
“I pride myself on that,” he deadpans. “It’s not something you can learn. I literally come by it honestly because it’s what Mother Nature provided me. Benedict Cumberbatch got the cheekbones and the nimble, articulate language tools. I got whiskers, and shoveling, and slow talking. We all get our things.”
Nick Offerman as Chester A. Arthur in “Death By Lightning.”
(Larry Horricks/Netflix)
Speaking by video chat from the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, where he’s playing Eugene O’Neill opposite wife Megan Mullally’s Broadway diva in “Iceboy! The Musical,” Offerman is humble and erudite, poking fun at himself while praising colleagues. He is “sincerely gobsmacked” by the double nod. He is also fresh-faced, because he’s filming the Alex Garland film “Elden Ring” in London during his downtime. “Here is this meager little mustache that someone made me, and I glue it on every night,” he says, holding up two tiny hairy wings.
In contrast, Arthur’s mutton chops just won’t stop. “If a president is not thin and has facial hair, then it’s been suggested that I should play him,” Offerman says. “People send me all of them, you name it: McKinley, Harrison, Teddy Roosevelt.”
Of course, the actor goes beyond whiskers to create his roles. To play Arthur, he read “Destiny of the Republic” by historian Candice Millard, which the show is based on. He also read Scott Greenberger’s biography “The Unexpected President.”
But ultimately he found his character on the pages of creator Mike Makowsky’s scripts. “The incredible advantage of great writing is that they’ve answered a lot of the questions for you,” Offerman says, adding, “Makowsky told me that he had me in mind when he was writing it. Once you learn about Chester, you’re like, ‘That’s a mixed compliment.’”
Nick Offerman.
(Billy Delfs / For The Times)
He says working on “Death” was “exquisite,” likening the shoot to a camp for theater kids, delighting in the depth of talent in the cast, and recalling when he and star Michael Shannon, at the time performing plays together in Chicago, used to get up to youthful drunken shenanigans, “like climbing a building outside the L&L Tavern.”
Jinx would probably have enjoyed that in his early years. When we see him on “Margo,” he’s been brought low by pain, prescription drugs and a lost love (Michelle Pfeiffer), trying to make amends with his daughter Margo (Elle Fanning), who’s struggling with single parenthood.
“Jinx desperately wants to be a good guy, he wants to be a good dad, he wants to be a good lover,” says Offerman. “He wants to be the hero of any circumstance, but unfortunately he has these frailties that I know too well.”
Offerman trained for three months with bodybuilder Grant Roberts “to create the body of, thankfully, a former pro wrestler, so you don’t necessarily need terrific abs,” Offerman says. Then for three weeks during the shoot he worked with pro wrestler Chavo Guerrero Jr. “I’m a former fight choreographer for the stage, and I do my own stunts, so I’ve been waiting this whole time to play a swashbuckler. By the time we were done, I was flying off the top rope.”
The physical preparation helped him find his way into the role. “What I learned about pro wrestlers, who are incredibly generous and loving people, is that they are all hurt, all the time. They’re all performing through pain,” he notes. “So how can I summon everything I have to blow away this audience with superheroic energy, even though I’m just this dumb theater-school kid?”
Offerman with “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” co-stars Elle Fanning, center, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
(Apple TV)
Jinx’s look is also key to the portrayal. For present-day scenes, Offerman sports his own beard, with some color added. But for flashbacks, “they made my spray tan extra dark, gave me this gorgeous mane of hair and put some braids in my beard. I was just over the moon. People complain about three hours in the makeup chair. I don’t complain because someone is putting their masterpiece on my head. I have the tractor and the hay rack that they’re building their float on that’s going to win the Rose Bowl Parade. It’s such a privilege to get to drive their masterpiece around.”
He soon faced Fanning. “She’s such a badass professional. It was so fun because she inspires me to also be more flexible and creative.” He calls Pfeiffer “a cinematic Mt. Rushmore. That was very thrilling because I traditionally have not been cast as people who have heat with glamorous movie stars.” He giggles.
“I understand that I have value as a performer, but I still don’t get how I got this part,” he says, sounding a bit baffled. “This is the best part of my life. I’ve had some wonderful parts that I’m very grateful for, but I’ve never had scenes with such complicated emotional relationships.”
He adds a point that could apply to Chester Arthur as well. “It’s fun to be a protagonist who gets to indulge in human weakness, knowing that we hopefully will bring the audience back around to caring about you.”
Eighty-three lawsuits filed against the Trump administration in 18 months, at a cost of more than $20 million.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta announced those stats this week, part of an annual report to the Legislature on how we’re spending a special fund set aside to combat President Trump’s overreach.
That doesn’t include more than 120 friend of the court briefs the Golden State has written in legal matters brought by others, or the multitude of cases in which the Trump administration has sued California and Bonta’s office is defending us.
That’s a whole lot of litigation. Is it worth it? Are we huffing and puffing for political points, or do all these lawsuits actually do something positive for the average Californian?
You get what you pay for
I’m going to sound like a bus bench ad for the legal profession, but, at this point, “the courts are standing as the only barrier to the president doing anything that the president wants to do,” Hiroshi Motomura, a professor of law at UCLA, told me.
And what the president apparently wants to do is make the poor and vulnerable poorer and more vulnerable. And don’t think there’s a middle-class exemption. In his second term, Trump has attacked healthcare coverage, special education, education in general, reproductive rights, gender rights, the environment, endangered species, immigrants and more.
“The disastrous impact of Trump’s lawlessness isn’t theoretical or hypothetical. It’s not imagined. It is real. It is hurting real people,” Bonta said. “It is hurting Californians, real families, real businesses, real communities every single day.”
You name it, if it’s not rich and connected, it’s probably under attack. President Lyndon B. Johnson launched a very different war on poverty in 1964 with social programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Head Start. This new war on poverty seems intent on increasing it, not eradicating it.
It would be nearly impossible for the people affected by these attacks on government services to fight them on their own, said Richard Abel, a professor emeritus of law at UCLA and the author of multiple books on the Trump presidency.
“They don’t know why it’s happening,” he said. “They don’t have access to lawyers. Many of them are undocumented or afraid to mobilize the legal system.”
That leaves the states, which are often the only other entities that have a legal right to sue, because they too are being harmed by the cuts.
So yeah, our $20 million is well spent. Bonta said his legal work has protected about $207 billion in funding. But I’ll argue the true return on investment is California residents who have been protected in ways they don’t even realize.
Risks we don’t even realize
Take Massachusetts vs. Department of Agriculture, one of the cases California is involved in. This is Trump’s attempt to put new rules on USDA grants for food programs including emergency food assistance, school lunches and food stamps. It would tie compliance with his right-wing, discriminatory policies on immigration, gender ideology and diversity issues to receiving those funds.
Then there’s New York vs. Administration for Children & Families, in which Trump goes after child welfare funds; Washington vs. Department of Education, which attacks mental health grants that help hire school psychologists and counselors; and Illinois vs. Vought, which targets California and three other states run by Democrats for cuts to transportation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding for no other reason than politics, the states argue.
Food benefits, access to mental health care, lead poisoning prevention. Just a few more things most of us didn’t realize could be at risk for some of us.
In each of those cases, Bonta and the other Democratic attorneys general stopped the federal actions, even if only temporarily. Some of those cases are ongoing, but with restraining orders or injunctions in place.
Then there’s United States vs. Baass, Trump’s attempt to force Michelle Baass, the director of the California Department of Health Care Services, to turn over a bunch of applications for Medi-Cal benefits for the last five years so the federal government can go on a witch hunt for undocumented folks.
Supposedly these applications, which Baass and her agency were subpoenaed for, are needed for an immigration investigation in the Central Valley. California won in court in March, when a judge denied the federal government’s petition to enforce that subpoena.
Now, the feds are appealing to the 9th Circuit — and California continues to fight to protect the privacy and maybe even safety of the residents who just needed medical care, but could see their sensitive information, including addresses, turned over to immigration authorities if Trump had his way.
How could they possibly fight that on their own?
Then there’s a lawsuit in which Trump is trying to prevent California from continuing to give in-state tuition to Dreamers — undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as youngsters.
In battles such as that one, fought because it’s the right thing to do, Motomura sees a benefit greater than just protecting funding.
It forces us to push back against the federal government’s framing that immigration is “about invaders, you know, climbing walls,” Motomura said.
“This is about people who live in our communities,” he said. “And I think that when Bonta claims that space, he’s not just pushing back. He’s saying, ‘Let’s think about this in terms of building stronger communities,’ and I think that’s a significant shift.”
The rule of law may be battered and bruised, and even at times a bit hinky. But so far, it has held — in no small part because of Democratic attorneys general like Bonta who aren’t just filing lawsuits but have built the staffs and networks to do it effectively. It’s a much larger effort than we give it credit for, but one that has fundamentally protected our everyday lives so well that many have barely noticed the wolves at the door.
I’m sure there will be losses, wolves that crawl through windows, and we will all feel the bite of that. But 83 lawsuits will soon likely be 84, 94, whatever it takes to protect Californians.
Each one is a fight worth having, because every Californian is worth fighting for.
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SACRAMENTO — Today we’re talking about California’s Proposition 39, a bid to turn Trump’s election conspiracy fantasies into California law, and a proposal so disingenuous it’s caused Democratic legislators to sue the Democratic secretary of state in an attempt to stop the misinformation surrounding it.
As these lawsuits move forward and the November election rolls closer, we’re going to hear a lot about Proposition 39 — a measure that would require in-person voters to present government-issued identification, among other provisions. I fear most if not all of this debate will revolve around the false claim that large numbers of undocumented people vote illegally in our elections.
“It’s directly a product of all of the rhetoric that Trump has been putting out there regarding election fraud and voting fraud,” said Mindy Romero, founder and director of the nonpartisan Center for Inclusive Democracy.
Romero stresses that there is not and has never been any evidence of widespread voter fraud in California, and the state already has a system that effectively checks voter eligibility.
Proposition 39 is “seeking a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist, and a solution that actually could cause additional problems,” she said. “So in and of itself, it perpetuates this false and dangerous narrative that there has been voter fraud in California.”
That lie is part of the ongoing grievance-fueled Trump campaign against non-white “replacement” Americans, meant to undermine trust in elections — you may recall he’s gone so far as to say immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” It’s a venal and dark vein of partisanship aimed at keeping the far-right in power even at the expense of democracy.
I’ll tell you more about Proposition 39, but I’m starting with a story about an all-American teenager I’ll call “Sofia.” I’ve been helping Sofia,18, attempt to get her first government-issued identification. I stress attempt.
Folks, there’s been hoops, there’s been hurdles, there’s been Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
For people like Sofia that don’t have bills or jobs or even accurate student records (she’s moved a lot), scraping up enough documentation to convince the DMV you are who you say you are is tough. First, you really need a certified birth certificate.
Sofia wasn’t born in the county where she lives (it’s county recorders that keep them), which means she had to either drive hours or go through the state’s third-party online vendor to order one, at a cost of about $30. But here’s the catch — she needed proof of identity to order it.
So to get a birth certificate to get her ID, she needed ID.
Stuck in this circular nightmare, we found, after much effort, a loophole: I could appear in front of a public notary with Sofia, to testify using my ID that she was indeed Sofia. Strange, but whatever. We did it.
That wasn’t enough for the DMV. Sofia also needed two bills or other documents verifying her address. Because they will literally give a credit card to anyone, she applied to an online company, and got her first statement. One document down.
Again, scouring the DMV rules for days, we found another weird loophole: The second document can be a letter from a nonprofit with the person signing it vouching for Sofia’s identity. We got the letter, and Sofia’s Real ID was issued.
But then she had to move before it arrived. She tried to arrange mail forwarding with the postal service, but guess what? They required ID.
So the ID was lost in transit, and we are back to square one.
Who Proposition 39 really targets
That means Sofia is one of thousands of Californians, born and raised in the Golden State, who lack official identification because its not as easy to obtain it as some want you to believe.
And because she lacks it, she could be prevented from voting if Proposition 39 is passed, even though she is a legal citizen with every right to have her ballot counted, and California already has a system in place to ensure only citizens vote.
Sofia is exactly the kind of voter that Proposition 39 is actually aimed at. This is a voter suppression law, plain and simple, and it will harm women with name changes, naturalized citizens, young people, older people and virtually anyone who cares about not returning to Jim Crow-style laws that push people out of voting with subterfuge.
Proponents of the proposition would like you to believe it’s something very different from what I just described. Their fight about how we talk about this proposal has led to two lawsuits so far — one filed by the backers of Proposition 39 because they don’t like the official title the California attorney general put on it, and one filed by the leaders of the state Legislature because they argue the statements written by proponents for official voting materials aren’t truthful.
I’ll give you a taste of both of those arguments. Right now, the state is proposing to title the measure “Prohibits citizens from voting unless they present government-issued identification.”
State Assemblymember Carl DeMaio (R-San Diego), the always-Trumper behind Proposition 39, helped lead a lawsuit claiming that is inaccurate.
DeMaio issued a statement claiming Democrats are “trying to deceive voters by putting a false ballot title on it and are now even distracting voters from their tampering of the ballot title with this frivolous lawsuit.”
That frivolous lawsuit he’s complaining about is the one where the Democratic leaders of the Legislature last week sued the Democratic secretary of state and others over the language included in the state voter guide. The Democrats aren’t really angry at each other, it’s just that Secretary of State Shirley Weber is in charge of voter materials, so she’s one of the folks they’ve got to sue to make their case.
The lawsuit alleges, among other complaints, that proponents are falsely framing Proposition 39 as making it “easier to vote” when in fact it does the opposite.
“Prop. 39 requires no burdens be placed on voters,” the materials at issue read, according to the lawsuit. “No additional documents (birth certificate, marriage license, etc.) are required.”
So I take you back to Sofia. Because while Proposition 39 might not ask her to bring her birth certificate to the polls, it would ask her to bring her ID, which required her birth certificate to get.
A distinction without a difference.
“The fact that Donald Trump has endorsed it tells you everything you need to know,” wrote the lawsuits’ plaintiffs, House speaker Robert Rivas and Senate pro Tempore Monique Limón, in a statement. “As Californians and Latinos, we will not let MAGA cronies take Constitutional rights away from voters.”
That lawsuit will likely have its first hearing in court this week. But whatever a judge decides, the ballot box is where the fate of Proposition 39 rests.
Though it seems like average Californians could see through this sham, there are big bucks backing it, and money always speaks loudly.
The donors in support read like the guest list for a White House dinner. So far, they’ve raised more than $15 million. That includes $4 million from Richard Uihlein, the Illinois billionaire and Trump supporter who often funds organizations and causes that promote election conspiracies and far-right candidates.
The crypto-billionaire Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, have each donated $250,000, along with other Silicon Valley types including former RFK Jr. running mate Nicole Shanahan, who ponied up $370,000 in support of Proposition 39.
Oh, and by the way, L.A. developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso has donated $25,000 to the effort.
That’s a lot of dough being poured into stopping certain Californians from voting. If they succeed, it won’t just be an inconvenience at the polls — but instead a double victory for Trump, both suppressing the vote ahead of the presidential election and legitimizing his election lies through law.
HBO’s emergency medical drama “The Pitt” was the top nominee, with a total of 25. The premium cable network’s intergenerational comedy comeback story “Hacks,” meanwhile, earned 24 nominations. Other top nominees include Apple TV’s freshman offerings “Widow’s Bay” and “Pluribus,” which nabbed 19 and 18 nods a piece, respectively.
With its 24 nominations, “Hacks” set a new record for most nominations in a year by a comedy series. The previous record of 23 nods was set by “The Bear” in 2024 and matched by “The Studio” in 2025.
“[The nominees’] creativity and talent remind us why television remains one of our most powerful art forms,” Television Academy chair Cris Abrego said in his introductory remarks Wednesday morning. “While these nominations recognize individual achievement, they also celebrate the collaborative spirit that defines our industry. Every nomination today is a result of countless people coming together to create work that moves us, entertains us and, above all, inspires us.”
Previous Emmy winners Liza Colón-Zayas, known for her role as no-nonsense chef Tina on FX’s culinary dramedy “The Bear,” and Jeff Hiller, the “Widow’s Bay” actor who also portrayed sweet and lovable best friend Joel on HBO’s tender comfort-watch “Somebody, Somewhere,” were on hand at the Television Academy’s Wolf Theatre to joke about their nerves — and height difference — while presenting the nominations.
The nominees for variety series and reality competition program were announced before the main nominations ceremony on NBC’s “Today” show.
The 78th Emmy Awards will be held Sept. 14 at 5 p.m. at the Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Hosted by “Law & Order: SVU” star Mariska Hargitay, the live telecast will air on NBC and stream on Peacock. The Creative Arts Emmy Awards, which honor artistic and technical achievements as well as some performance categories, will be held on Sept. 5 and 6.
Taylor Dearden, “The Pitt” Fiona Dourif, “The Pitt” Allison Janney, “The Diplomat” Katherine LaNasa, “The Pitt” Sepideh Moafi, “The Pitt” Julianne Nicholson, “Paradise” Karolina Wydra, “Pluribus”
Drama supporting actor
Patrick Ball, “The Pitt” Billy Crudup, “The Morning Show” Shawn Hatosy, “The Pitt” Gerran Howell, “The Pitt” Jack Lowden, “Slow Horses” Tom Pelphrey, “Task” Carlos-Manuel Vesga, “Pluribus”
Colman Domingo, “The Four Seasons” Paul W. Downs, “Hacks” Harrison Ford, “Shrinking” Nick Offerman, “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” Stephen Root, “Widow’s Bay” Michael Urie, “Shrinking” Tyler James Williams, “Abbott Elementary”
“Heads of State” “Miss You, Love You” “People We Meet on Vacation” “Remarkably Bright Creatures” “Jack Ryan: Ghost War”
Limited series / TV movie lead actress
Claire Danes, “The Beast in Me” Sally Field, “Remarkably Bright Creatures” Carey Mulligan, “Beef” Sarah Pidgeon, “Love Story” Sarah Snook, “All Her Fault”
Limited series / TV movie lead actor
Riz Ahmed, “Bait” Jason Bateman, “Black Rabbit” Charlie Hunnam, “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” Oscar Isaac, “Beef” Matthew Rhys, “The Beast in Me”
Limited series / TV movie supporting actress
Linda Cardellini, “DTF St. Louis” Dakota Fanning, “All Her Fault” Laurie Metcalf, “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” Joy Sunday, “DTF St. Louis” Yuh-Jung Youn, “Beef” Constance Zimmer, “Love Story”
Limited series / TV movie supporting actor
Jason Bateman, “DTF St. Louis” Richard Gadd, “Half Man” David Harbour, “DTF St. Louis” Richard Jenkins, “DTF St. Louis” Charles Melton, “Beef” Nick Offerman, “Death by Lightning”
Variety series
“The Daily Show” “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” “Saturday Night Live”
Reality competition program
“Dancing With the Stars” “RuPaul’s Drag Race” “Survivor” “Top Chef” “The Traitors”
Maybe there is something in the fog. Matthew Rhys landed two Emmy nominations in different categories for darkly comedic and darkly chilling turns this TV season.
Rhys is nominated for lead actor in a comedy series for his deft performance as Tom Loftis, a single dad and the mayor of a cursed New England island who is trying to balance the town’s supernatural threats with his efforts to boost tourism, in Apple’s TV’s breakout horror-comedy series “Widow’s Bay.” The word-of-mouth buzz around the series, which premiered in April, intensified each week leading up to its finale last month and prompted chatter around its prospects as a major Emmys contender. The series arrived late in the season, so only its first seven episodes qualify for the 2026 awards cycle, but that was enough for Rhys to nab a nod.
It wasn’t the only performance from Rhys that voters boosted. He is also nominated for lead actor in a limited or anthology series for his role as the sociopath Nile Jarvis, a famed and formidable real estate developer who once was the prime suspect in the killing of his wife, in Netflix’s “The Beast in Me.” Nile finds himself in a cat-and-mouse dynamic with his new neighbor (Claire Danes), an author in search of her next book subject who is suspicious of his innocence.
Prior to this year’s nominations, Rhys received five Emmy nominations over his career, including for his lead roles in “The Americans” and “Perry Mason,” as well as a guest actor nod in “Girls.” He won in 2018 for his role as KGB spy Philip Jennings in “The Americans.”
The Times spoke with Rhys about his nomination; these are edited excerpts.
Matthew Rhys as Mayor Tom Loftis in Apple TV’s “Widow’s Bay.”
(Apple)
Congratulations on your exciting morning — it’s a big day in the Rhys-Russell household [Keri Russell, Rhys’ partner, is nominated for lead actress in a drama for her role in “The Diplomat”]. Let’s start with the most important question: What’s in the fog, Matthew?
[laughs] I love how it took me a moment. I was like, “Wait, what?” Oh, yes, the fog! What’s in the fog is an incredible Season 2.
Place me in the moment when you got the news.
I was in Brooklyn Bridge Marina at the time. I just got off a boat, and I thought, “Oh, God, it’s 11:40.” So I thought quite possibly [they] got to our categories. I checked my phone and there were the many texts. That was the exciting moment because if you haven’t been nominated, there’s no text.
Did one text stand out from the others?
The real pinch-me moment — this is going to sound like a real name drop — but it really got me emotional because I thought, if I’d have told my 18-year-old self that Gary Oldman would text me to congratulate me, I wouldn’t have believed it. That’s when it got me in an emotional way because he’s such a true hero.
Let’s start with “Widow’s Bay,” which recently wrapped its first season. There’s something so thrilling about how it broke through the way that it did. What has struck you about how viewers responded to this horror comedy?
There was a great degree of nervousness about how this would land, whether indeed it would land at all, and the fact that it has, and kind of the depth and the complex nature that’s landed or resonated with people in different ways, is what I’ve loved. Some people go, “Oh my God, it’s so funny”; some people say, “Oh my God, it’s terrifying” — some people say both. And some people pick up on the weirdest things, and then some people pick up on the most obvious, great things. But it’s the length and breadth and the variety of its resonances that has really made me very happy, and really made me doff my cap to [creator] Katie Dippold, for what she did.
What should networks and studios take away from the success of “Widow’s Bay” if they are really paying attention?
Take the risk. And challenge audiences. Everyone’s more than ready for it and thirsty for it in a real way. I really hope this does something in the Hollywood psyche, where they go, “Let’s put away the remakes and let’s just get after new challenging, original material.”
What guidance did you get from Katie about who Tom was and how to play him?
She’s dizzyingly collaborative, so she said, “Tom is yours.” It was more me going, “But what about this for Tom?” She would help, but she really said, “Tom is yours to create now. Everything I’ve done is on the page.” And it was. That’s the beauty of her writing. If you’re true to it, and you don’t get in the way of it, it sings.
The way Tom reacts to situations and people is such a master class in facial expressions. Did you recognize that would be your tool for your performance early on?
We had a kind of sliding scale — Hiro [Murai, executive producer and director], myself and Katie — because it was a departure for me. I’d go, “I don’t know where this lives or where reality lives.” And as much as anyone can say, “Play for real” — playing it for real can mean many things. It can mean a very minimal reaction, and it can mean a great reaction, and so there were times when I was like, “I’m gonna hit the sliding scale, and you let me know where it should be landing, or where, in your opinion, it’s landing in a real way.” Sometimes they were like, “Maybe a little less,” and then they were like “Maybe a little more.” That element of collaboration was wonderful too.
The moment on the boat is a GIF I send often. The jolt.
It’s funny, we have a great and incredible stunt coordinator Paul [Marini]. He said, “You have to lead where the momentum of the energy would be; it’d be your hips. So let your hips lead, and then let your body follow.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s smart.” Then if you do that, then it has a degree of comic effect to it. But my pelvis hasn’t quite recovered.
Matthew Rhys as Nile Jarvis opposite Claire Danes as Aggie Wiggs in Netflix’s “The Beast in Me.”
(Netflix)
Sort of like your dance moment in “The Beast in Me” — lead with the hips. This is your thing, Matthew.
Anytime, in the stage direction, it says “dances,” I’m like [mimics vomit sound]. That strikes ice in my veins because I’m always like, “Oh my God.”
That’s your horror comedy.
That is my true horror comedy because my dancing can be horrific and comical when it is to be neither.
Let’s talk about “The Beast in Me.” Nile Jarvis was also quite the departure from you. What was your entry point to understanding him and figuring out how chilling to make him?
It was a lot of YouTube watching, where you just type in “psychopaths” and stuff comes up. I read Jon Ronson’s “The Psychopath Test” and “The Journalist and the Murderer” [by Janet Malcolm]. The writing was so strong in “The Beast in Me,” so much of Nile was preemptively done for me. As [director] Antonio Campos said, “The trick might be not to do too much because enough has been said.” Everyone has this predisposed idea of who he is and, therefore, the idea we came up with was to do not as little as possible, but to be minimal with it because he’s aware of what everyone thinks of him and there’s a degree of enjoyment and relishing in that.
Have you been able to sensibly eat a roast chicken since?
No, not sensibly. It’s become Pavlovian for me now. When I eat roast chicken, I devour it in a slightly psychotic way. I love that scene. It’s an astute piece of writing to say so much about someone without words.
What would you be best suited to achieve: rebranding the town of Widow’s Bay as a tourist destination or charming your neighbors into signing paperwork for the construction of a running path through the backwoods of their properties?
I’m not saying I could charm the neighbors, but I would attempt to charm the neighbors. Playing Tom was exhausting in a way that playing Nile wasn’t. I always spent the end of the day on “Widow’s Bay” going, “My God, I’m exhausted” — because you’re just vibrating on a higher level with Tom. It’s always like, “Listen, please!” The pitch is always higher; you’re always like, “You’ve got to listen to me!” Or if you’re terrified, you’re just hyperventilating.
I know the news of these nominations is still fresh and I don’t want to tell you how to approach the big night, but I just have to say, this could be the moment you take a page from Philip Jennings of “The Americans” and come with a wig and getup so when they pan to you during both categories, you can make them feel distinct.
That’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to Jennings it. I’m going to PJ it. When it pans to me in the second category, I’m gonna look completely different. I’m going to be dressed as Elizabeth [Jennings].
Well, congratulations. How do you think you and Keri are going to celebrate?
Keri, in true “Americans” style, is having me meet her in a clandestine spot that I don’t know anything about, so who knows what. I don’t know what the afternoon is going to unfold, but it’s a big surprise. She might end up killing me, who knows.
WASHINGTON — Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas publicly praised Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and his philosophy of black empowerment eight years ago, but the embattled judge said Friday that he “repudiates” the anti-Semitic views later attributed to Farrakhan.
“I cannot leave standing any suggestion that I am anti-Semitic,” Thomas said in a prepared statement. “I am and have always been unalterably and adamantly opposed to anti-Semitism and bigotry of any kind, including by Louis Farrakhan.”
Disclosures that Farrakhan was praised in two speeches prepared for delivery by Thomas to black organizations in 1983 prompted expressions of concern from leading Jewish organizations and raised new questions about the beliefs of the conservative black jurist. The Farrakhan material was actually delivered in only one speech.
Since President Bush nominated him two weeks ago to replace retiring Justice Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court’s only black and its leading liberal voice, Thomas has come under increasing criticism for his views on civil rights and other issues.
At the time of Thomas’ speeches in 1983, Farrakhan was a relatively unknown Chicago preacher who had yet to attain national notoriety for his militancy and anti-Semitic views.
Thomas, who currently sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, opposes affirmative action and other race-based remedies for discrimination long favored by civil rights organizations and many members of Congress.
On Thursday, the Congressional Black Caucus registered its opposition to Thomas, saying it was concerned about his commitment to civil rights. Although the House members who belong to the caucus will play no direct role in the Senate confirmation process, their opposition could prompt other black organizations to coalesce against Thomas.
The list of groups expressing reservations about Thomas was joined Friday by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the nation’s largest public employee union. It urged the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject Thomas, saying that he “lacks the judicial experience necessary” to serve on the high court and has exhibited a “lack of commitment to equal justice and fundamental rights.”
Thomas has also had to deal with the problem of reports that he had used marijuana as a college student, although President Bush on Friday dismissed the significance of his drug experimentation.
“I think the matter has been put in proper perspective, and I think he handled it very well, and, certainly, in this instance, in these circumstances, in no way is disqualifying,” Bush told reporters in Kennebunkport, Me.
The references to Farrakhan were contained in the prepared texts of two speeches written for Thomas when he was chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the Ronald Reagan Administration.
Farrakhan, who has espoused black separatism as leader of the Nation of Islam, has drawn fire from Jewish rights groups for characterizing their faith as “a dirty religion” in early 1984, several months after Thomas delivered his speeches.
According to the texts of the prepared speeches, which were released by EEOC officials, Thomas concluded his remarks about black self-empowerment with a reference to Farrakhan as “a man I have admired for more than a decade.”
Both speeches went on to quote Farrakhan: “And so, I say to you, whether America overcomes or not, we the poor, we the oppressed, we the blacks, we the Hispanics, we the disinherited, we the rejected and most despised, we will overcome and then together we will be able to say in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King: Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we have united and made freedom a reality at last.”
The speeches were written by Thomas aide Armstrong Williams, who said they were intended to endorse only the self-help philosophy espoused by Farrakhan. In late 1983, he said, there was “no inkling” that Farrakhan later would become associated with anti-Semitism.
“Farrakhan was not controversial at that time,” Williams said. “If he had been the least bit controversial, I would not have included the quote in a speech, and Clarence would never have used it.”
In his statement, Thomas sought to distinguish between Farrakhan’s self-help philosophy and his other views. “I repudiate the anti-Semitism of Louis Farrakhan or anyone else,” he said. “While I support the concept of economic self-help, I have never supported or tolerated bigotry of any kind.”
Despite that assurance, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith said that Thomas “unfortunately did not go far enough” to distance himself from Farrakhan. “It is not possible to separate Farrakhan’s message from Farrakhan, the messenger,” said Abraham H. Foxman, the group’s national director.
However, spokesmen for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles said they were satisfied with Thomas’ explanation. “That put the issue to rest,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the center. “We are satisfied as far as the Farrakhan issue is concerned.”
Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.), who is serving as Thomas’ sponsor during the confirmation process, said the nominee “was adamant” in his opposition to anti-Semitism. “As a victim of prejudice himself, he feels most strongly that it is morally wrong, and he has committed much of his professional life to combating it,” Danforth said in a statement.
One of the 1983 speeches, prepared for delivery to a group of black journalists in Washington, was not delivered as written, Williams said. Because he was speaking to an informal gathering of reporters, Thomas abandoned the prepared text and apparently did not mention Farrakhan in his off-the-cuff remarks, he said.
However, the second speech was a more formal presentation at a convention of the National Assn. of Black MBAs in Atlanta. In that case, Thomas stuck to the prepared text, including the reference to Farrakhan, Williams said.
Thomas received a standing ovation from the MBAs, something that happened only rarely in speeches to black groups, he said.
Williams, now a managing partner in a Washington public relations firm, said he included the Farrakhan quote in the Atlanta speech in an effort to link Thomas’ self-help philosophy with a similar opinion held by a figure familiar to inner-city blacks.
“We always discussed his speeches and interviews,” Williams said. After he drafted the speech and showed it to Thomas, Williams said, his boss told him: “This is one passage of Farrakhan’s I can relate to.”
Staff writer James Gerstenzang in Kennebunkport, Me., contributed to this story.
The friendliest of neighbors, the country has fought alongside the U.S. in conflicts going back to World War I, purchased many trillions of dollars worth of American goods and blessed this country with, among other gifts, ice hockey, Drake, Joni Mitchell and Alex Trebek.
While you can question the nation’s culinary sensibility — the unofficial dish, poutine, is an abomination consisting of French fries, cheese curds and hot gravy — Canada is basically a very large, very pretty country filled with a lot of very nice, extremely polite people.
After more than a year of trading tit-for-tat tariffs, Trump recently escalated the conflict by slapping a new 50% tax on a variety of Canadian exports, including cement, furniture, dairy products and, most iconically, hockey sticks. The added levy, which will further burden inflation-weary U.S. consumers, is set to take effect in mid-August.
The move makes little sense from an economic or foreign policy standpoint. It’s best to regard Trump’s trade moves as a wind gauge charts a blustery storm; his on-again, off-again tariffs are not the result of some carefully thought-out policy but, rather, a measure of the president’s shifting moods and pique toward certain foreign leaders.
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For decades, the industry has been a vital and growing part of California’s agricultural economy. Recent years, however, have seen a number of setbacks.
Costs are rising. Sales are falling, as younger generations favor hard seltzers, canned cocktails or premium beers over crushed grapes. At the same time, climate change and the growing incidence of wildfire threaten the viability of some of California’s premier wine-growing regions.
A Canadian ban on alcohol imports
Then there’s the trade war with Canada, the industry’s largest export market and formerly a major customer of California wines. Until recently, the Canadian market accounted for more than a third of the state’s exports.
But last year, several provinces stopped purchasing U.S. alcohol in response to Trump’s tariffs and his threats — more slapstick than real — to annex the country and make Canada the 51st American state. While two provinces, Saskatchewan and Alberta, soon lifted their bans, the two most populous, Ontario and Quebec, have not.
As a result of this “geopolitical friction,” to use the words of University of California researchers, California wine exports to Canada fell by nearly 80% in 2025 compared with the year before. Unsurprisingly, Canadian sales of homegrown wines have soared.
In response to the dramatic drop in exports, more than a dozen California members of Congress wrote last month to Quebec’s premier, Christine Fréchette, urging her to lift the retaliatory ban on U.S. wine and spirits.
“Reopening the market to American wine would restore consumer choice and signal a commitment to restoring fair and balanced trade for Québecois consumers and American wineries who have no connection to the underlying trade disputes,” the letter read.
Sen. Adam Schiff also wrote Fréchette asking her to resume the sale of California wine and U.S. spirits.
“The restriction on American wine has had damaging consequences for regional consumers, businesses, and producers who have no influence over national policies,” the California Democrat stated. “In fact, I have repeatedly voiced my opposition to and voted against the President’s harmful trade policies, including as they pertain to Canada.”
Fréchette’s response was, in a word: “Non!”
“In the context of the ongoing trade war, the premier continues to defend Quebec’s economic interests,” a spokesperson for Fréchette told CBC Radio. “This measure will remain in place as long as the United States maintains these unjustified tariffs. Our government will re-evaluate its position when the American administration reverses these measures.”
And that statement came before Trump upped the ante, along with the tariffs on Canada, which, presumably, doesn’t help matters.
Red or white?
Mike Thompson has seen the damage of Trump’s economic warfare firsthand. The St. Helena Democrat represents the heart of Wine Country and spearheaded, along with Democratic Rep. Jimmy Panetta of Carmel and Republican Rep. David Valadao of Hanford, the bipartisan overture to Quebec’s premier.
“I talked to a vintner today,” Thompson said during a drive this week through his sprawling Northern California district. “They went from an $11-million annual wine export to a $2-million annual wine export to Canada because of this.”
Thompson has introduced legislation, including a measure to reimburse wine producers for the money they’ve lost due to Trump’s tariffs, but the proposals have stalled in the House despite bipartisan support. His effort, Thompson dryly noted, “has not been warmly embraced by the administration.”
Meanwhile, the cross-border hostilities continue. Neither Trump nor Fréchette seems ready to budge, with California vintners still stuck in the middle.
So the question in Montreal and Toronto remains: What pairs best with poutine? Canadian white or red?
SACRAMENTO — Last week, news broke that an artificial intelligence thingamajig broke free from the constraints of its maker, OpenAI, and committed what could be considered a string of white-collar felonies if it were human.
Because the AI thingamajig is in fact not human, the incident raised a big kerfuffle but is largely being treated as a giant oopsie we can learn from, without needing the pesky intervention of new rules or laws to stop it from happening again.
Such is the state of AI regulation in America right now.
California Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Big Bear Lake) would like to change that. Last week, he introduced the bipartisan Frontier Act with Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.). While the bill might not make either safety advocates or big tech companies entirely happy, it offers up the most comprehensive and strongest regulations of this dangerous industry that we’ve yet seen at the federal level.
Roman Yampolskiy, an AI expert and professor at University of Louisville, called the Frontier Act a “positive step because it acknowledges that frontier AI presents risks requiring dedicated oversight.”
Now, the challenge becomes passing it, and passing it in a meaningful, not-watered-down form — no easy task in a dysfunctional Congress driven by money and Donald Trump, and paralyzed by its own sycophancy to both.
If anyone has a shot, though, it’s Obernolte, who is that rarest of birds, a legislator who understands science, and his colleagues.
Obernolte represents Inland Empire areas around San Bernardino, but grew up in Fresno back in the era when the movie “War Games” was just hitting theaters.
Those of a certain age will remember how far-fetched it seemed when Matthew Broderick’s high school genius character accidentally breaks into a military AI system to play chess, but “Joshua,” the computer, takes it too far and tries to blow up the world. Now, of course, that just sounds like a regular Tuesday.
By the time he was in high school himself, Obernolte was giving that Broderick character a run for his money. An apparent computer savant, Obernolte was competing in artificial intelligence contests as a teenager, back when most of us were still playing Pong on Atari. Then he headed off to Caltech and then UCLA for advanced AI degrees. He said AI was his “first calling,” sparked when his father bought him an Apple II computer when he was 8.
He ended up dropping out of UCLA after getting his master’s because his side hustle making video games, including “NFL ’95,” turned out to be more lucrative than being a starving student. He ended up founding his own video game company, FarSight Studios, and building up a personal net worth close to $100 million.
For the past few years, he has pushed hard, if unsuccessfully, to create a framework for regulating AI, combining his deep understanding of the technology with his equal understanding of MAGA distaste for intervening in business.
Now, though, we’re in a moment, thanks to more than one big oopsie by technology companies. Just a few months ago, Anthropic and the Pentagon had their own tense encounter after Anthropic questioned how its AI was being used by the military. Huffy Pete Hegseth is still huffing over that one.
The public is increasingly skeptical of allowing the AI industry to govern itself, which is pushing legislators to rethink their hands-off approach, even as AI money pours like Niagara Falls into elections. Even Trump seems more inclined to consider it, signing an executive order recently that largely called for voluntary restraints on AI companies.
The introduction of the Frontier Act “shows how far the Overton window has shifted just in the past few months,” wrote Charlie Bullock, a senior research fellow with the nonpartisan Institute for Law & AI. “Not too long ago, a bipartisan bill this good and serious would have been a pipe dream. But things change quickly.”
Obernolte said the bill has been “a long time in the making,” but he hopes to package it with other legislation and is “cautiously optimistic” he can get something passed and signed by the end of the year.
As written now, the bill would allow the federal government to set minimum safety requirements and set up a framework for licensed, independent auditors to monitor compliance. That third party verification has been a key push by safety experts.
The bill would also give the government emergency powers to pause an AI model if it has a “present or impending catastrophic risk.”
It also borrows from state laws including California’s Proposition 53 that require some (not enough) transparency on the part of AI companies when things do go wrong.
To the consternation of some, the bill still contains curbs on what states can regulate on their own — basically carving out AI regulation as federal turf. This has been a huge sticking point in the fight over AI regulation because AI companies hate state laws and want them squashed. Their argument is that a patchwork of rules across states is too complicated.
“You don’t want to have 50 different state requirements for every single product that gets sold on a market, and that is particularly true of AI,” Obernolte told me.
To some extent that’s reasonable — but the problem so far has been that states such as California and New York have been the only level of government willing to try at regulation. California in particular has created some of the most comprehensive AI regulations to date and has about 30 pending bills on this issue this legislative season. The Frontier Act threads the needle on this by creating lanes where states can still pass their own laws — such as around consumer safety that would protect children or stop pornography.
But preventing catastrophic risk would largely be dependent on the federal oversight, which is great when the federal government is up to the task. Currently, we can’t even keep measles in check. So that’s a bit worrisome.
And Obernolte’s bill isn’t the only one vying for attention. Another Californian, Rep. Ted Lieu, introduced a bipartisan measure of his own with Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas). Dubbed the AI Kill Switch Act, it would give the Department of Homeland Security the authority to shut down problematic models.
Yampolskiy, the Louisville professor, said that bill had promise as well, because it’s important for companies to have a way to “rapidly disable or contain systems that exhibit dangerous or unexpected behavior.”
But, he warns, that’s just one part of the “complete solution” we need. Regulation is going to require more than one law.
For Obernolte’s part, he’s shown a willingness to work on a practical solution, not just a political one. That alone is worthy of notice. The Frontier Act is a genuine attempt to govern a nascent industry that is too powerful and unpredictable to be left to its own devices.
“I’m hoping that this is we’ve landed somewhere that everyone can understand and be happy with,” Obernolte said. “AI is not something that needs to be a partisan issue, and I don’t think it should be.”
BANGOR, Maine — Former state lawmaker and logger Troy Jackson secured the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Maine on Saturday and will face longtime GOP Sen. Susan Collins in November in a race that could decide which party controls the Senate.
Jackson replaces Graham Platner, who won the Democratic primary in June but withdrew from the race this month following an allegation of sexual assault that Platner has denied. Maine Democrats met Saturday to choose a new nominee to face Collins.
Support coalesced around Jackson, a former Maine Senate president and fifth-generation logger from rural northern Maine who campaigned alongside Platner during a failed bid for governor and was a favorite among progressives to replace him.
“When the people in power refuse to listen, you have to organize, you have to stand in solidarity, together. And you have to make them listen,” Jackson said during a speech at a last-minute nominating convention held Saturday.
The Maine Democratic Party has been scrambling to choose a new nominee after Platner, who sailed to victory in the Democratic primary in June, was accused by a former girlfriend of sexually assaulting her in 2021. Platner denies the allegation, but quit the race after key supporters called on him to withdraw.
Democrats have seen Maine as the party’s best opportunity to flip a Senate seat this year because it is a competitive Senate race in a state that Donald Trump lost in 2024. But defeating Collins won’t be easy. The five-term incumbent holds a fundraising advantage, while the new Democratic nominee will have less than four months to sell himself to voters.
Maine law gave the state party authority to choose a replacement and required a new nominee to be named by Monday — 99 days before the Nov. 3 election.
Maine Democrats’ never-before-used process of voting on a new nominee involved hundreds of Democratic delegates gathering in Bangor, about 130 miles north of Portland. The delegates were elected at county party meetings last weekend. The nominating convention began Saturday morning and wrapped by noon.
Jackson’s victory was largely expected after his campaign touted that more than 480 delegates selected to go to the convention had promised to vote for him, a progressive who supports Medicare for all and dismantling Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He ended up winning 566 of 571 delegates who cast votes.
Jackson first ran for office as a Republican in 2000 when he sought a seat in Maine’s House of Representatives. He lost, but won two years later when he ran as an independent. He switched to the Democratic Party in 2004 and eventually became the Maine Senate president before leaving the statehouse in 2024.
He came in third while running for governor in this year’s Democratic primary election, but had the backing of Platner, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Our Revolution, the political organization founded by the Vermont independent.
Other top candidates dropped out
Once Platner dropped out July 10, Jackson and a flood of other former gubernatorial candidates and others jumped in to try to take Platner’s place. But by July 19, most had abandoned their bids, with Jackson emerging as the clear favorite.
Jackson received early support from progressives who had backed Platner before he dropped out. Our Revolution initially backed Jackson for governor and Platner for Senate. When Platner left the race, the group rallied behind Jackson.
Jackson previously ran Maine operations for Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid. This election cycle, Sanders endorsed Jackson for governor and Platner for Senate, though he withdrew his support for Platner after the sexual assault allegation. He said he didn’t plan to weigh in on which Democrat should replace Platner.
Just one other candidate remained in the race for the Senate nomination — women’s health company Chief Executive Saundra Pelletier. She faced long odds against Jackson, who has been a fixture in Maine politics for more than a decade.
Jackson has supported progressive positions such as Medicare for all. He also has called for the abolition of ICE, whose presence in Maine has been hotly debated since an agent fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian national, near his home in Biddeford, Maine.
Maine key to Democrats’ Senate path
Democrats have a narrow path to take back the Senate in November, and it’s unlikely they can do it without a win in Maine. In addition, they need victories in most other competitive races — including in North Carolina, Alaska, Ohio and Texas — and they need to hang on to the seats they already have. That includes open Senate seats in Michigan and Minnesota, where Democratic incumbents are retiring.
Maine’s Democratic primary was one of the early contests where progressives took on establishment-backed Democrats. While Platner faced several controversies during his campaign, he easily outlasted Gov. Janet Mills, who was backed by Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer of New York but dropped out before the June 9 primary.
Platner had backing from Sanders as well as Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. That support disintegrated after the sexual assault allegation surfaced this month.
Midterm messages
Jackson will need to convince the state’s large independent voting bloc that it’s time to replace Collins. Republicans have called Jackson too extreme for Maine voters, and Collins said this week that she knows Jackson well and that his positions are “clearly” in line with socialism.
She noted that Jackson ran democratic socialist Sanders’ first presidential campaign in Maine, adding, “He’s a Bernie Bro.”
Jackson also needs to scramble to make up a fundraising gulf against Collins, who has been raising money for months.
Federal filings show she has raised more than $16 million so far. Jackson’s campaign this week said he raised more than $1 million since jumping into the Senate race.
Jackson said Saturday he believed his team is up to the task.
“We’re not from the left, we’re not from the right. We’re from the bottom, and we are rising,” he said during a speech.
Whittle and Kruesi write for the Associated Press. AP journalist Nathan Ellgren in Washington contributed to this report.
July 23 (UPI) — A Senate committee delayed a vote on the Trump administration’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director nominee, Erica Schwartz, because enough members were not present.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, was absent from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions meeting on Thursday because of a family emergency, which led committee chair Bill Cassidy, R-La., to postpone the vote, Politico reported.
Cassidy also said Thursday that he decided to vote for Schwartz because of a “good faith action” the CDC reportedly made to its website earlier in the day.
The action included changing language on its website about the lack of an association between vaccines and autism, which had been ordered changed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last year.
Cassidy asked detailed questions during her nomination hearing about vaccines and how the agency, which has had a full-time director for just one month since President Donald Trump re-entered the White House, would restore confidence in its public health mission, The Hill reported.
“I’m confident that she knows what she’s doing and will stand against those who do not,” Cassidy said during the meeting.
“If confirmed, I look forward to working with Dr. Schwartz to protect children’s health and regain trust in the CDC,” he said.
“There’s more to do to repair the damage that has been done to the U.S. public health response, but this is a start,” the Louisiana Republican added.
Even with Cassidy deciding to vote for Schwartz, Republicans on the committee would have needed a Democrat or Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who caucuses with the Democrats, to vote in favor.
Sanders ended that possibility when he expressed respect for Schwartz’s career but said that he was concerned she would not be able to hold off some of the controversial changes Kennedy has either proposed or forced on the agency.
“I will be voting against Dr. Schwartz because we need people in this country who are going to stand up, protect the American people and I don’t think you can see that right now with Secretary Kennedy in his position,” Sanders said.
The HELP committee’s next executive session is scheduled for July 30, which is also the next time it will consider nominations, making it the next opportunity for Schwartz’s nomination to come up for a vote.
The committee also put off a vote on Sean Kaufman, who is nominated to lead the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, because Republicans did not have enough votes to forward the nomination to the full Senate.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on President Donald Trump’s June 24 supplemental funding request at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday. Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo
There are certain truths that are self-evident to all but the willfully blind or stubbornly obtuse.
Heat is hot.
Rain is wet.
Donald Trump is the most brazenly corrupt president in the history of the United States.
The money-grubbing chief executive has raked in at least $2.2 billion during his first year back in office. He’s funneled millions of taxpayer dollars and foreign payments to his businesses. The grift, er, gift of a tricked-out Air Force One from the Qatari government — which Trump plans to keep in retirement — is only the most high-flying example of his avarice.
It’s so blatant and so consistent with Trump’s dodgy corporate background — a career checkered with six bankruptcies — that it’s easy to shrug off his presidential swindling as just more of the same. That’s been Trump’s political superpower: normalizing the outrageous and anesthetizing many Americans to all but the most extreme affronts. Even those have limited shock value these days.
On Thursday, California’s junior U.S. senator, Democrat Adam Schiff, will take to the floor of the chamber to assay the president’s many conflicts of interest, warn against complacency of the seen-it-all variety and offer his prescription for a cleansing once Trump slinks out of the gold-slathered Oval Office.
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“The scope of the corruption we’ve seen in this administration is beyond anything we have imagined in prior years or prior administrations, “ Schiff said in a preview of his speech. “It’s really novel and breathtaking.”
But the purpose of his remarks, Schiff said, goes beyond simply enumerating the abundant examples of presidential profiteering. (It was a struggle, he said, keeping the list to a top 10.) His intent, he said, is “to bring home … the real cost to ordinary people” of Trump’s egregious self-dealing. Explaining why — in a practical, feel-it-in-your-wallet sense — people should care.
“If a president approves a merger not because it’s good for consumers, not because it’s good for the economy, but because participants in the merger paid him millions, what’s the cost to them?” Schiff said, referring to the proposed marriage of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery and the money CBS shelled out for a flimsy lawsuit against “60 Minutes.” The settlement was widely seen as a way to smooth Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media, which is now bidding to swallow Warner Bros.
“The cost is they’re paying more for their streaming services,” Schiff said. “They’re getting laid off if they work in the industry. “
In 2024, Democrats lost the White House at least in part because they spent so much time talking about noble but abstract concepts like defending democracy and the rule of law, rather than highlighting ways they’d work to bring down the price of bacon and eggs.
Schiff insists it’s not an either/or choice. To prevail in November’s midterm elections, which means winning at least one chamber of Congress, Schiff said Democrats should discuss both affordability and Trump’s venality. He sees the two as being irrevocably entwined.
“The positive message is we are singularly focused on your cost of living,” Schiff said from his office on Capitol Hill. “We want to build more housing and bring down the cost of housing. We want to attack anti-competitive mergers of grocery stores and food companies to bring down the cost of food. We have a whole agenda that is designed to make your life more affordable.
“Why isn’t the administration doing this?” he said. “And the answer is, they’re corrupt. They’re focused on their own economic well-being. They’re doing great for themselves. They could care less about you.”
Schiff plans to introduce a number of proposed remedies. They include legislation to ban corporate executives from serving in the executive branch if they’ve been convicted of corruption or financial crimes, and a requirement that government employees recuse themselves from matters affecting the financial interests of any employer they’d worked for within the previous four years.
Although the measures stand no chance of passing in the current Congress, Schiff said “it’s important to show the American people, ‘Hey, this is what we intend to do if you give us the majority.’”
He acknowledged that the depth of presidential dishonesty, its constancy and deep weave in the fabric of this administration, can have a deadening effect: “When the guy working the teleprompter at the White House, betting on how many times the president will use a certain word in his speech, is a blip in the corruption…”
But Schiff said it’s important not to turn away or shrink from the malodor rising from Trump’s swampy Washington.
“You just have to take the time to break it down for people,” Schiff said. “I think putting things in context, trying to snap people out of the norm-shattering numbness of this administration, is a daily challenge. But it’s one that we have to undertake.”
There’s no certainly no harm in stating the truth. It’s worth trying, over and over.
Among likely voters, 65% oppose the termed-out governor’s edict and just 34% support it. The opposition among infrequent or nonvoters is even stronger.
Negative attitudes are especially stiff in inland California — particularly the Central Valley — and among middle-class people with incomes between $40,000 and $100,000, those over age 55 and Republicans.
Opposition to being denied new gas vehicles has grown substantially since 2021, when Californians were evenly divided over the issue.
But the state’s anticipated next governor, moderate Democrat Xavier Becerra, is more in line with Californians’ thinking on gas cars than is Newsom.
Becerra told me during his primary election campaign that Newsom’s 2035 goal is not realistic.
“We can’t make it by ‘35,” he said. “But we can make it.” Sometime in the future.
The fact is lots of people can’t afford electric vehicles because they tend to cost more than cars fueled by gas.
Besides, there’s an inconvenience of having to pull off the road for a 40-minute recharging stop on a long trip — if you can find a vacant recharger.
And “electricity is not cheap. It often depends on the time of day,” notes PPIC Polling Director Mark Baldassare, who owns an electric vehicle and says he likes it.
Newsom has been hawking electric vehicles since he came into office, like some slick TV pitchman — his goal being to greatly reduce climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
The governor and the Legislature recently appropriated $135 million to motivate Californians to buy new or used electric vehicles.
First-time EV buyers will receive $3,500 rebates on vehicles with manufacturer’s suggested retail prices of $50,000 or less. Used car buyers will get $1,750 off if the sale price is $25,000 or less.
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Automakers will pay for half the incentive costs — obstensibly, at least, if they don’t just secretly add their tab to the vehicle price.
This smacks of a huge taxpayer giveaway to manufacturers if the state isn’t careful. Is it really the state’s job to sell cars? Shouldn’t it be the automakers’ responsibility to offer competitive prices? Whatever.
Newsom’s plan partially replaces a $7,500 federal tax incentive for new EVs that President Trump and the Republican-led Congress allowed to expire last year.
California already leads the nation in EV ownership, with around 1.3 million vehicles registered. That’s more than five times the No. 2 state, Florida. And it’s not just because California’s population is much larger. We also lead in per capita ownership.
There’s plenty of contradiction and hypocrisy in the divided minds of Californians, as highlighted in the lengthy PPIC survey into their views on environmental policies.
People strongly favor fighting climate change — at least in concept — until it adversely affects them directly. That’s just human nature.
Asked what they consider the most important environmental issue facing California, those surveyed placed wildfires first, followed closely by global warming.
Baldassare says what struck him in the poll was “the disconnect between what people support in policies and what they’re prepared to do.”
“Two things are going on in California now,” the pollster continues. “People have their long-standing concerns about the environment. But they also have immediate concerns about affordability.
“When it comes to what people are willing to do, they’re worried about living costs and particularly the cost of energy. It’s something we’ve noticed even more this year. It affects the political and economic landscape.”
Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed support Newsom’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero “as soon as possible, but no later than 2045.”
And there’s overwhelming support for taxing corporations based on the amount of carbon emissions they produce.
Roughly 60% favor requiring all electricity to be generated with renewable energy — such as wind and solar — by 2045, although support for that state edict has dropped by 15 percentage points in the last six years.
Paradoxically, people aren’t willing to pay more for electricity produced by renewable sources. Roughly 60% reject that idea. Ten years ago, almost that many told PPIC pollsters they were willing to pay extra.
And today they’re not nearly ready to surrender their option of buying a new gas-fueled automobile.
For one thing, they’re not convinced there’ll be enough charging stations to handle a lot more EVs. Twice as many people are not confident of that as are confident, the poll found.
The California Energy Commission reported in January that there were more than 200,000 public and private EV charging stations in the state, plus 800,000 chargers in homes. The state is helping to add more along highways.
Becerra has pledged to take a fresh look at several controversial Newsom projects, including the pokey bullet train. There’s much uncertainty about the pending new governor.
But there’s one pretty good bet: In 2035, sales of new gas cars will still be getting a green light.
The tight timeline to replace former Maine Senate nominee Graham Platner has left Democratic hopefuls scrambling to woo his progressive base while trying to turn the focus from the disgraced oysterman to defeating Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November.
It’s a delicate balance for the candidates, who are vying to face Collins in a contest that could decide control of the Senate as Platner’s shadow hangs over the race. In their first debate Thursday night, one of the first questions candidates were asked was: What was Graham Platner’s best idea?
Moving past Platner is just one of the challenges facing Democrats. The never-before-used process to pick a new nominee means candidates have less than three weeks to pull off what typically takes campaigns months or years, from organizing volunteers to raising money and preparing for debates.
The whiplash many of the candidates are facing was on display Thursday.
Asked by debate moderators about President Trump’s decision to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife earlier this year, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows gave inaccurate information about Collins not pushing back against Trump, a Republican. When a moderator called her on it, Bellows said she was on vacation on the Kennebec River last week after previously focusing on her unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign and hadn’t expected to be running for the Senate.
“When I need to know the facts, I will. I’ll do my homework,” said Bellows, who lost to Collins in 2014.
The field of 12 candidates also includes former public health leader Nirav Shah and union-backed logger Troy Jackson, who campaigned alongside Platner in a failed bid for governor.
Platner’s exit means the clock is ticking
Platner quit the Senate race last week after he was accused of rape, which he denies, and his campaign quickly imploded as supporters revoked their endorsements and resources.
Democrats have until July 27 to choose a new nominee, according to state law. The Maine Democratic Party’s succession plan calls for a state party convention at which 601 delegates will meet on July 25 and vote for Platner’s replacement. The majority of the convention delegates will be selected this weekend from each of the state’s 16 counties.
Candidates hoping to replace Platner have been recruiting delegates who will vote for them at the convention. The candidates also must collect 500 voter signatures needed to qualify for the convention vote.
“I don’t think anyone’s happy that we’re in this situation,” said Dan Jenkins, a Maine Democrat who has applied to be a delegate. “We would have preferred that this had broken many, many months ago and then Graham had exited the race when there was a time for a democratic process. But it’s where we are.”
Some candidates might see a boost from prior campaigns
Jackson is among the handful of candidates pivoting to the Senate race after running for other political offices, likely giving them a leg up in not having to launch from scratch.
Our Revolution, a progressive organization founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont that had originally backed Platner, has thrown its support behind Jackson, the former Maine Senate president. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, has not endorsed in the race.
Shah, former director of Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, also unsuccessfully ran in this year’s Maine Democratic governor’s primary. He has been pitching Platner’s supporters that he’s also an outsider who can unify a fractured Democratic Party.
“You have an important place in this campaign, and we welcome your voices,” Shah said earlier this month speaking to Platner’s base.
Bellows also ran for governor. She’s hoping that her previous battles with Trump will bolster her argument that she’ll be an advocate for the working class.
Bellows previously attempted to run against Collins in 2014 as the Senate Democratic nominee and lost in a landslide. She later went on to win a seat as a state senator before becoming Maine’s secretary of state. She’s since downplayed her prior loss to Collins by pointing to the Democratic establishment’s unwillingness to take on the Republican in 2014.
Another candidate, Jordan Wood, initially announced his intent to run in the Maine Democratic Senate primary. He dropped out last fall to run in the state’s 2nd District but lost that race.
Candidates seize on recent ICE shooting
The fatal shooting by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Maine this week has been top of mind among the potential Senate nominees.
The Embassy of Colombia has identified the man killed Monday in Biddeford, roughly 15 miles southwest of Portland, as Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian national. The Department of Homeland Security has since said an ICE officer fired his weapon when the man officers were pursuing attempted to flee the scene, threatening “public safety.”
Many have rushed to connect Collins to the embattled federal agency.
All the candidates who debated Thursday said they agreed with the call to “abolish ICE,” though Wood stopped short of saying the agency should be completely dissolved.
“I believe that when I say we have to abolish it, what I mean is that we need a new law enforcement agency that has the trust of the people,” Wood said.
Jackson disagreed, calling ICE a “rogue agency that goes around doing things that they’re being told to on high.”
Candidates asked about Platner’s best ideas
Platner attracted more than 150,000 votes during the June 9 primary, an eye-opening number that signaled a progressive base eager to support a candidate known for his promise to defend the working class and ability to rally large crowds.
With little more than a week until the state convention to find Platner’s replacement, it still remains unknown just who will be able to capture that same excitement seen among Platner’s base.
When pressed during Thursday’s debate about Platner’s best idea on the campaign trail, Jackson pointed to his commitment to “Medicare for All.” As a gubernatorial candidate, Jackson also voiced support for replacing job-based and individual private health insurance with a government-run plan that guarantees coverage for all with no premiums, no deductibles and only minimal copays for certain services.
Bellows said that she agreed with Platner’s description that democracy in the U.S. has been corrupted by those in power.
Shah said he would take up Platner’s commitment to “abolish ICE,” while Wood said he admired Platner’s decision to say that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, something Israel denies.
“Graham got into this race saying, ‘this is genocide.’ And I learned that it is so important in these moments to draw those moral lines,” Wood said.
Imagine if Sunday’s World Cup final were played under rules that blatantly favored one side over the other. Let’s say Argentina was spotted four goals against Spain.
Spain could, conceivably, overcome that 4-0 deficit. But it would be awfully hard and something of a miracle if the Spanish team prevailed.
Fans the world over would be rightly outraged. Why bother holding the tournament? What’s the point if one team is saddled with near-insurmountable odds?
Increasingly, that’s what elections for the House of Representatives look like.
As recently as the late 1990s, around 4 in 10 congressional districts were considered competitive, meaning Democratic and Republican candidates each had a plausible shot at winning. Today, per the nonpartisan handicappers at the Cook Political Report, only 18 of 435 House districts are considered toss-ups.
Another 20 districts are rated as either leaning Democratic or Republican, meaning candidates from one party or the other enjoy a noteworthy advantage, but aren’t necessarily a lock to win in November.
In sum, that means fewer than a tenth of all House seats are even somewhat competitive.
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That’s hardly an accident, as lawmakers have increasingly manipulated the election process to suit themselves, rejiggering congressional districts to sideline voters and boost their political parties.
It’s undemocratic, and it stinks.
Stifling competition, rewarding extremes
“Every voter has a stake in making sure that these elections are fair and that the process is transparent,” said Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican who represents a large, mostly rural swath of western and southern Colorado. “Gerrymandering undermines representative democracy … by preventing voters and communities from having cohesive representation.
“It unfortunately rewards political extremes,” he went on. “It reduces competition and contributes to the polarization and dysfunction that prevents Congress from effectively addressing the issues that our constituents care about.”
Hurd is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan group of 44 House members dedicated to working through their ideological and political differences to — lordy! — try to get stuff done.
Recently, to mark Independence Day, the caucus announced a framework for legislation aimed at bringing competition back to many congressional races, in part by limiting the redrawing of political maps to once every 10 years, following the census. Among other reforms, the bipartisan group also called for establishing a uniform, national standard requiring that congressional districts be drawn “using clear, objective criteria while rejecting partisan advantage and incumbent protection as legitimate goals.”
The effort is, of course, too late for this election. The hope is Congress will enact the changes in time for the next scheduled round of redistricting, which is due to take place after the 2030 census. The rules would be in place starting in 2032.
The chances of passage are not strong. As Hurd noted: “Any reform that asks politicians to give up political leverage is going to be challenging.” But if ever there was a time for a badly needed systemic fix, it’s now.
A race to the bottom
Gerrymandering has been around for more than 200 years. The term derives from the efforts of Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry to skew state Senate races in the election of 1812. The portmanteau, which appeared in the Boston Gazette, described one politically engineered, misshapen district that resembled a salamander.
The practice reached new heights of creativity (or deviousness, depending on your perspective) in the modern age, when ever-more sophisticated computers allowed for ever-finer slicing and dicing of the electorate.
In 2019, the Supreme Court effectively greenlighted the practice in a 5-4 decision by the conservative majority, decreeing that partisan gerrymandering was beyond the purview of federal courts. In other words, have at it! And lawmakers did.
More than half a dozen other states — most of them Republican-run — have jumped into the fight, gerrymandering their congressional districts to gain a partisan edge. Lawmakers in several Democratic-run states are now looking at the prospect of retaliatory gerrymandering ahead of the 2028 election.
There’s not much upside to all this self-dealing — if, that is, you care about political competition and allowing the electorate a genuine say. But all that manipulation and maneuvering has, at least, made voters much more aware of the once-obscure practice of congressional line drawing. And that offers reformers a flicker of hope.
Mitchell said he has long favored a national redistricting standard that would apply to all 50 states and put the much-abused process on an even footing. “I really believe that redistricting should … serve the public, not serve the politicians,” Mitchell said.
Still looking on that bright side, he suggested perhaps the current redistricting war will prove so odious and have “done so much harm” that combatants will reach a point where they “put down [their] arms and embrace a kind of nonpartisan, non-politicized, public-oriented redistricting.”
