Democrat Politics

Congressional Cowards is a weekly series highlighting the worst Donald Trump defenders on Capitol Hill, who refuse to criticize him—no matter how disgraceful or lawless his actions.

Republicans proved again this week that they’ll go to the ends of the earth to defend President Donald Trump—no matter how disturbing his actions may be.

After a discharge petition finally reached the number of signatures needed to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files, GOP lawmakers desperately covered for Dear Leader.

“I think this is a massive distraction by the Democrats,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, who kept the House out of session in an effort to block the vote, said Wednesday.

House Speaker Mike Johnson

Johnson also dismissed the horrific emails released Wednesday, in which Jeffrey Epstein wrote that Trump knew about the girls he trafficked and even spent time with one of the victims at Epstein’s home.

“Another publicity stunt by the Democrats. They’re trying to mislead people,” Johnson told Punchbowl News reporter Max Cohen.

Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee also dismissed the emails, telling Bloomberg TV that they were merely “little pieces” that were taken “out of context.”

“The Democrats have had this thing for four years, and let’s be honest, if there was something in there detrimental to President Trump, Joe Biden would have released it,” he said. “He’s the anti-Christ to the Democrats. They want to bury him as soon as they could.”

Similarly, Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas pulled the GOP’s favorite excuse: pretending he didn’t see the emails.

“I’ve not gone through all of the documents, he told CNN.

Other Republicans complained about the timing of the emails’ release, rather than addressing the actual—and very damning—contents.

“As a survivor I find it deeply offensive that DEMOCRATS would use Epstein victims to bury headlines about the vote to reopen the government today. Today of all days,” Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina wrote on X. “WTH is wrong with you people. You just keep reminding women and survivors you don’t support us.”

Of course, Democrats released the emails Wednesday because it was the day the discharge petition was set to gain a majority of signatures after Johnson delayed swearing in Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, who was the final signature needed.

A cartoon by Mike Luckovich.

But Republicans still have no good answer for why Trump won’t release the files if there’s nothing in them that’s damaging to him or his allies.

In fact, he’s so scared of the Epstein files getting out that he summoned Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado to the White House in an attempt to convince her to remove her name from the petition. Boebert was one of a handful of GOP lawmakers who joined Democrats in signing it.

And Trump is pissed about it.

“The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap. The Democrats cost our Country $1.5 Trillion Dollars with their recent antics of viciously closing our Country, while at the same time putting many at risk — and they should pay a fair price. There should be no deflections to Epstein or anything else, and any Republicans involved should be focused only on opening up our Country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats!”

But despite his best efforts, Trump couldn’t stop the vote, which Johnson says will happen this week.

It remains to be seen if the Senate will vote on the measure. And even if it does pass, it’s unlikely that Trump would sign it.

Which again begs the question: What is Trump hiding?

A cartoon by Mike Luckovich.

Related | Republican tries to make Epstein files a Biden or Obama problem

Recent election results and evidence from states show misgivings about the growth of AI and the ramifications for energy costs and the environment.

By Dan Gearino for Inside Climate News

It’s not a novel observation to say that supporters of President Donald Trump and supporters of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders find common ground on many issues. They often share a skepticism of entrenched power and a desire to dismantle systems that they think have ceased to serve everyday people.

In Indiana, this agreement includes a distrust of data centers.

“The MAGA crowd and the Bernie bros have both figured out that they’ve been getting duped,” said Kerwin Olson, executive director of Citizens Action Coalition, an Indianapolis-based consumer and environmental advocacy nonprofit. “It was data centers that really brought it all together.”

Olson’s organization is running a campaign to persuade Indiana lawmakers to place a moratorium on new data centers and to redesign electricity rates to protect residential consumers from rate increases related to data center development.

He has received an emphatic response, with groups from the left, right and in-between booking him for speaking engagements and offering their assistance.

Related | Where do people fit into an AI future?

Election results last week confirm a similar dynamic in much of the country. Democrats won races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia and for two open seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission, campaigns in which data centers and rising electricity costs were issues. Media outlets noted this pattern, including in an insightful report from Jael Holzman of Heatmap and a look ahead to next year’s elections from Marc Levy and Jesse Bedayn of the Associated Press.

Much of the discussion is about data centers, which are often large developments used to support cloud computing or artificial intelligence. But the underlying issues are broader, touching on the power of tech companies. For people who live near proposed data centers, there is an additional sense of powerlessness, which Inside Climate News has documented across the country, including the backlash to a plan for a huge data center in Bessemer, Alabama.

“It’s about big tech,” Olson said. “To steal Bernie’s words, [it’s about] these big tech oligarchs that are calling all the shots at every single level of government right now.”

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I also see some similarities with local opposition to large wind and solar projects, a subject I’ve written a lot about over the years. A common theme is that residents feel frustrated when powerful companies want to make changes that would alter local landscapes.

Olson said he agrees that there is some overlap between opposition to data centers and large renewable energy development, but he views the latter as more of a rural phenomenon, while concern about data centers is rising almost everywhere.

Google scrapped its plans for a large data center in Indianapolis in September amid local backlash. In northwest Indiana, residents in the small city of Hobart have organized to oppose two data centers, raising concerns about the projects’ electricity and water consumption.

It’s notable that the opposition tends to highlight concerns about high electricity bills, but doesn’t talk as much about data centers’ negative climate impacts. Indiana can see the ramifications as officials push to delay the retirement of coal-fired power plants so the state can meet an expected surge in electricity demand, driven, in part, by data centers.

Political candidates can harness this mounting opposition and data center companies will need to devote more resources to engaging with the public.

Related | The dark reality of making US the ‘AI capital of the world’

Vivek Shastry, a senior research associate at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told me that it’s important for the AI and data center industries to find ways to provide local benefits to host communities and to minimize any negative effects on household electricity costs.

He touched on these subjects in a recent blog post, co-written with his colleague Diana Hernández. When I read this, my first thought was, “Wait, there are local benefits?”

He explained that there are opportunities in terms of energy and money. He pointed to examples in Denmark and Finland of data centers harnessing their waste heat to contribute to district heating systems for local communities.

Beyond that—which I think would be a challenge to do in the United States—he said AI and data center developers can make community benefits part of their proposals. This could mean working with local leaders to find ways to address local needs through philanthropy.

“To the extent that there is a partnership with communities, and there are these pathways to enable tangible co-benefits,” he said.

The opposite can also be true, with local communities feeling like they are bearing the burden of a data center with few, if any, benefits.

Shastry’s larger point is that government officials and corporate leaders need to make sure that development does not harm the most vulnerable consumers by driving up costs of water and electricity. To do otherwise would feed into consumer unrest.

“It’s important to get those processes and protections right early on, because the pace of this growth is such that once you lock into certain kinds of rates and other pathways, it then becomes harder to reverse,” Shastry said.

Voters are already getting upset about electricity rate increases that they blame on data centers, even though the AI industry is in its infancy. The negative effects, if left to fester, could get much worse.

But there also is evidence that state officials have a sense of the challenge before them. The NC Clean Energy Technology Center at North Carolina State University shows this in its most recent quarterly report, the 50 States of Power Decarbonization.

From July to September, state regulators or legislators took 55 actions in 29 states related to laws or rules for large electricity users, which were usually motivated by the growth of data centers.

Some highlights:

The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio approved a proposal from the utility American Electric Power to create a new rate category for data centers that have electricity demand of at least 25 megawatts. Businesses in this category have special requirements, including that they must sign a 12-year contract. The practical effect is that data centers that close or use much less power than planned will still need to pay, which can help to shield other customers from covering the costs of lines and other infrastructure built to serve these large projects.

Florida Power & Light, a utility, entered into a settlement with other parties in a rate case that includes new rate categories for large power users such as data centers. The rates would cover new projects that need at least 50 megawatts, with provisions requiring companies to pay even if they use less power than planned. The Office of Public Counsel has said the settlement is “disproportionately favorable” to corporate interests.

In Delaware, the Public Service Commission staff and the Division of the Public Advocate jointly requested that the utility, Delmarva Power and Light, institute a new rate category for customers that need at least 25 megawatts. Delmarva responded by saying it would like the commission to hold a hearing on the subject.

As recently as two years ago, there was almost no activity in this policy area. Next year at this time, I expect to see action in nearly every state.

Other stories about the energy transition to take note of this week:

IEA Report Points to Oil Peak and Continuing Renewables Surge, But Trump Has Hurt Progress: The world remains on track to reach peak oil in about 2030 if countries stick to their stated policies, according to the new edition of the World Energy Outlook from the International Energy Agency. But this outlook is worse for the climate than the one issued last year, due in large part to changes in climate policy by President Donald Trump, as my colleague Blanca Begert reports. One key difference is that the drop-off from the peak would be more gradual than the agency had previously indicated. The peak and ensuing decline in fossil fuels would be driven by the rapid growth of carbon-free electricity sources such as wind and solar.

How the Trump Administration Is Seeking to Gut the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations: The Trump administration is proposing a $0 budget for the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, underscoring how far the office has fallen since it was a key part of planning for the country’s energy future, as Maria Gallucci reports for Canary Media. The office, which is part of the Department of Energy, was created by Congress in 2021 and received $27 billion to fund projects to scale up clean energy technologies. The sudden shift in funding priorities is ceding leadership to other countries, especially China, and is baffling to people who were connected to the office.

Sunrun Reports a Quadrupling of Participation in Virtual Power Plants: Sunrun, the rooftop solar and battery company, said 106,000 of its customers are now participating in home-to-grid virtual power plant programs, which is an increase of more than 400 percent from a year ago, as Brian Martucci reports for Utility Dive. Sunrun also said its business model, which encourages solar leasing and monthly subscription fees, positions the company to maintain growth even after an expected sales cliff in the rooftop solar industry when federal tax credits expire at the end of the year.

Green Steelmaking Advocates Look for Paths Forward Without U.S. Government Support: The Trump administration’s policies are reducing support for green steelmaking, leading companies and advocates to figure out how to maintain momentum in the short run, as my colleague Kiley Bense reports. The Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit that promotes economic growth and clean energy in Appalachia, issued a report summarizing the effects of federal actions, such as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s phaseout of a tax credit for clean hydrogen in 2027 rather than the previous 2032. Despite the setbacks, companies are still moving forward with plans to use hydrogen to produce steel, including a plant in Louisiana being built by Hyundai.

Many of the 24 million working and middle-class Americans insured through the Affordable Care Act may forgo insurance if their bills multiply.

By Mark Kreidler for Capital & Main

With critical federal subsidies set to expire at the end of the year, the cost of health insurance that is purchased through the Affordable Care Act marketplace is about to explode — in many cases, doubling or tripling what people have been paying.

But the folks who’ll get hit with those mammoth increases aren’t living in poverty — at least, not as the federal government defines it. Instead, they are among the millions and millions of Americans who earn “too much” to qualify for Medicaid, yet nowhere near enough to cover the sky-high cost of health care on their own.

They are, in many cases, the struggling working class, and some of them reside firmly in what is usually defined as the middle class. That makes them precisely the group that Obamacare, as many people refer to the ACA enacted in 2010, was designed to reach in the first place.

More than 24 million Americans, including nearly 2 million in California, have health coverage this year through the ACA marketplace. Almost all of them receive enhanced subsidies — the big discounts on health insurance premiums that Democrats voted into place during the pandemic. Without the subsidies, millions of workers likely will no longer be able to afford their policies, experts say.

Related | Every single GOP senator voted to make your health care more expensive

It’s one reason why so many congressional Democrats fought Republicans to a budget-shutdown stalemate for weeks, trying to forge a deal under which the discounts would be extended. This week, a handful of Democrats finally broke ranks, putting the GOP in charge of what happens next. The government will reopen, and the budget process almost certainly will go forward without the enhanced subsidies that have allowed so many U.S. citizens to retain their health care coverage.

After becoming one of eight Senate Democratic Caucus members to vote with the Republicans to open the debate on a House-passed funding bill, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said, “I have long said that to earn my vote [to reopen the government], we need to be on a path toward fixing Republicans’ health care mess and to protect the federal workforce.”

In the end, though, Republicans got Kaine and the others without giving up anything on the Obamacare premiums — nothing but a vague promise to schedule a future vote on them in the House and the Senate, both of which are controlled by the GOP.

The fallout could be vicious. Marketplace shoppers are, for the most part, working people and families who don’t have health care coverage through their employer. That vast list includes small business owners and their employees, independent contractors, farmers, gig economy workers — many of the groups long courted by politicians who see them as innovators and important drivers of the U.S. economy.

* * *

Obamacare was highly ambitious but pretty straightforward. It expanded Medicaid to cover more low-income Americans and created the ACA marketplace for moderate-income workers — often, people who earn $50,000 to $60,000 annually — to be able to buy affordable health insurance.

In many cases, it did so by offering discounts on insurance premiums that are calibrated to how much those workers earn.

The pandemic turbocharged the discounting process. In 2021, as millions of people lost their jobs and the health plans that went with them, the Democrat-controlled Congress dramatically enhanced the ACA premium subsidies to make plans more affordable. The number of marketplace enrollees more than doubled, from 11 million to 24 million, as individuals and families turned to the ACA as a way to help them buy insurance on their own.

People at lower ends of the income spectrum — those above Medicaid poverty levels, but still working poor — could choose a plan and often pay zero in monthly premiums, and even people whose prepandemic income was several times the federal poverty level could still receive enough of a discount to afford a plan.

That’s the part of Obamacare that is about to go away. In fact, it’s part of a triple whammy. Not only does the Trump administration want to kill the enhanced tax credits that function as critical marketplace subsidies, but it also plans to jack up the required contribution from people at most income levels. And all of this is taking place amid huge spikes in the price of premiums from health insurers in the marketplace — more than 25%, on average.

The impact could be crushing for many Americans. According to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation, without the enhanced subsidies, a single person earning $23,000 a year would see their health premiums jump from $0 to $920 annually, or about a quarter of their typical food budget for the entire year.

And a couple with a combined income of $85,000 and a mid-tier health plan would see premium payments soar from $7,225 per year to a mind-numbing $21,339. Adding in the expected rate hike from the insurance companies, KFF reported, the annual total of premium payments could come to $28,561 — nearly $2,400 a month for those two people. That’s about a third of their combined income for the year.

This is why Democrats were willing to fight, even at the risk of being blamed for the government shutdown. This is why they held out for six weeks. And this is what is now on the verge of being lost.

* * *

It’s always possible that the Republican-controlled Congress will relent to some extent on marketplace subsidies. As KFF reporter Drew Altman points out, the end of enhanced credits on the health care exchange could deeply affect some Republican states and traditional voter blocs, including farmers and small business owners.

Beyond that, neither the first nor second Trump administrations ever advanced a plan to replace Obamacare, despite the president’s deep antipathy toward the program and repeated promises to come up with something better.

Even now, in the wake of the Democratic rollover on the budget process, the specter of runaway health care costs dogs the Republican Party in advance of the 2026 midterms, and the Affordable Care Act overall remains very popular among U.S. adults.

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“We want a health care system where we pay the money to the people instead of the insurance companies,” Trump told reporters this week. “We’re going to be working on that very hard over the next short period of time.”

Working people have heard many versions of that sentiment from Trump through the years. They also know what they see: With Congress poised to gut Medicaid and, now, the middle-income marketplace subsidies that brought affordable health care premiums to millions, it’s a more elusive goal than ever — and they’ll be the ones suffering for it.

Sourdough bread that’s made from scratch. Milkmaid dresses. “Feminine energy.” 

Those who are serially online may have already caught wind of the slow infestation of antiquated, anti-feminist tropes seeping into mainstream culture.

It seemingly started with a COVID-19 era of female influencers glorifying a stay-at-home lifestyle as they found solace in concocting new, fun ways to feed their husbands and armies of children.

Hannah Neeleman, known as Ballerinafarm online, gained popularity for her homemade sourdough bread and Instagrammable farmstead life with blond-haired little ones running around as her husband worked to provide. She now has 10.4 million followers on Instagram and 10.6 million on TikTok.

Thanks to Neeleman and other “trad wife” influencers like Nara Smith, a dreamlike gender-role stereotype steeped in Christian culture was soon neatly packaged in digestible, vertically shot videos featuring aesthetically pleasing decor and dream kitchens. With it came a growing call for women to shrink back from the workforce and live in motherly, service-based bliss while depending on a single income. 

But these appealing dreams of a “soft life” come with darker undertones.

Related | Who’s questioning women’s right to vote?

This idyllic version of a past that, to many women’s disappointment, never truly existed, is just one part of a growing message that conservative culture is pushing. 

According to a growing number of right-wing thinkers, the smaller a woman’s role in the workplace, the better for her—and for the country. 

Disturbingly, major media outlets are spotlighting some aspects of this movement. 

Helen Andrews, a conservative commentator and former editor at The American Conservative, penned a controversial piece titled “The Great Feminization.” To save you a rage-filled few minutes of reading, Andrews essentially argues that “wokeness” is an inherently feminine creation that has caused vast damage to American culture. Since women began taking on more prominent roles in the workforce, she writes, the U.S. has been in decline. 

Because women are less confrontational and driven by emotion, Andrews argues, so-called cancel culture ran rampant. She claims a male-led culture is quicker to address issues head-on instead of casting people away, or “canceling” them, altogether. 

Another drawback of mainstream feminism, she said, is that DEI initiatives became less of a stepping stone for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and more of a killer of meritocracy. 

If this sounds familiar, it might be because President Donald Trump has echoed similar sentiments in his public war on DEI. 

“This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life,” he said in January ahead of signing an executive order attacking DEI.

And Andrews, like Trump and Vice President JD Vance, has also expressed a desire for women to return to more traditional gender roles—for the sake of the country.

“I want more babies in the United States of America,” Vance said in his first address as VP.

But this concept of women retreating from the workplace as a means to, yes, “make America great again,” isn’t confined to the extremist wing of the Republican Party anymore. 

On Nov. 6, The New York Times gave Andrews’ anti-feminist ideas the ultimate pedestal—a segment with Times columnist Ross Douthat to flesh out all of her thoughts. 

At one point in the 60-minute conversation that I also watched so you wouldn’t have to, Andrews even argues that both the #MeToo movement and anti-discrimination lawsuits have hindered male-driven progress due to fear of prosecution.

“The #MeToo movement was a change in the rules of how sex scandals work,” she argued. “It suddenly became mandatory for us to believe all women, no matter how credible or not credible their testimony might be.”

Andrews also took a swipe at gender discrimination laws.

“The real problem with these laws is that most masculine behavior falls into the gray area of ‘not clearly illegal’ but could be cited by somebody if they filed a gender discrimination lawsuit,” she said. “So I think managers take that information, and they think: I can get in trouble for having a toxically masculine workplace, but I’m not really ever going to get in trouble for having a toxically feminine workplace. So if there is ever, in the balance, I’m always going to err on this side — that’s probably bad.”

For Andrews, an office with fewer pushup contests and more thoughtful insight somehow translates to the demise of the workplace.

“Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” was the headline The New York Times went with. Naturally, this set the internet ablaze. But even as pundits argued over the ridiculous premise, a change was taking place. 

Anti-feminist rhetoric wasn’t just being debated in Facebook comments: It was being given a platform by one of the country’s largest left-leaning media outlets. And in turn, anti-feminist ideas inched closer to normalization. 

Valerie M. Hudson, a distinguished professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, was one voice that emerged to quickly shut down Andrews’ take.

“Andrews’ essay is simply miming male dissatisfaction that women must now be dealt with as peers and not as supplicants in the halls of power,” she told Daily Kos in a written statement.

“One look at human history easily rebuts that view: in historical fact, it is men who are the original back-stabbers; men who are the original authors of nepotism; men who are the original Big Brothers of cancel culture. There is no practice condemned by these ‘great feminization’ pundits of which men are not the first masters.”

The Trump administration is fully onboard the anti-feminism train. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, stood in front of military generals in September as he yelled about kicking out fat generals and banning “dudes in dresses” to bring a manly man ethos back to the military. Hegseth’s approach boils down to ignoring female soldiers’ needs and instead emphasizing a “warrior ethos” that doesn’t see gender or skin color.

Related | Women have served in combat roles for a decade. The Pentagon is reopening the debate.

Hegseth also reposted a Christian pastor’s screed about dwindling voting down to one vote per household. So much for the 19th Amendment.

Of course, these head-of-household dreams come with the assumption that these adoring families can actually survive on a single income. And historically, they haven’t. 

Social programs including the ones that Republicans denounce at every opportunity were there along the way to help families stay afloat as daddy dearest did the breadwinning. 

Now, as the gap between the wealthy and the middle class grows ever bigger, designating a single breadwinner seems less possible than ever.

Placing women back in the household full time isn’t just about child-rearing, as Andrews points out. It’s about reestablishing a male-dominated culture where female traits are pushed back into exclusively female circles while men do all of the “hard work.”

The upshot is that anti-feminism debates are becoming a mainstream topic of discussion—and support for this antiquated take seems to be growing among GOP lawmakers in thrall to the Trump administration. 

But Hudson said there’s no going back. 

“Men must brave their discomfort for the sake of a greater good: that there might be a future for humankind,” she wrote. “Those urging the re-exclusion of women are, in my view, demonstrating cowardice in the face of looming catastrophe.”

And to those “peddling the ‘great feminization’ narrative, she writes, “shame on you.”

Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 285 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.

Sunday is the anniversary of the birth of W.C. Handy, 152 years ago. Iva Sipal at Musician’s Guide details W.C. Handy’s beginnings:

W. C. Handy’s remarkable life started eight years after the conclusion of the American Civil War. Born in a log cabin in Florence, Alabama, on November 16, 1873, William Christopher Handy entered into a new era for black people–an era that he himself would help define by introducing his people’s music to the world. He thereby became the “Father of the Blues.” […]

As a trained musician Handy would come to recognize what he once regarded “primitive” as a viable form of music. He sought a way to translate the blues into compositional form. … It is generally regarded as a music that is deceivingly simple and too easily unappreciated by the untrained ear.

Handy’s parents and grandparents were among the four million slaves freed by President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. One in a sea of liberated souls, his paternal grandfather, William Wise Handy, became a well-respected citizen of Florence and the Methodist minister of his own church. … It was the boy’s maternal grandmother who hit upon his destiny by suggesting that her grandson’s big ears symbolized a talent for music.

The words thrilled him. At the age of 12, he fell in love with a guitar in a shop window, and one day, after counting out the salvaged earnings from his string of odd jobs, he was finally able to take his prize home. … His outraged father apparently demanded that he return the “devil’s plaything” and exchange it for “something that’ll do you some good.” The bewildered boy traded it in for a new Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary–and his father paid for organ lessons.

Handy received his education in the rudiments of music during his 11 years at the Florence District School for Negroes. His teacher was a lover of vocal music and took time to give his students voice and music instructions that would enable them to sing religious material–without the accompaniment of instruments. … But Handy longed to play instruments, so on the sly he bought an old cornet and took lessons from its former owner.

Handy also wrote his own story: “Father of the Blues: An Autobiography.”

The Alabama Music Hall of Fame continues his story:

Handy joined Mahara’s Minstrels in 1896, embarking on a three-year tour that took them throughout the Southeast and eventually to Cuba. … In 1903, he received an offer to direct the Knights of Pythias Band in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he heard the folk songs of rural blues musicians in the Mississippi Delta.

In 1909, Handy and his band moved to Memphis, Tennessee, establishing a new home in the vibrant musical surroundings of Beale Street. Combining his own musical style with the sounds he had heard in Clarksdale, Handy began shaping the music he would call “the blues” into an identifiable form he later defined as “the sound of a sinner on revival day.” Handy’s first official “blues” composition – “Mr. Crump,” a campaign song written for Memphis mayoral candidate E.H. Crump – was published in 1912 as the popular favorite “Memphis Blues.”

Two years later, at the age of 40, Handy published his most famous composition, “St. Louis Blues,” followed by the popular “Beale Street Blues.” As his fame and reputation soared, Handy moved his publishing company to New York City, where it still flourishes today. “St. Louis Blues” has been recorded by artists ranging from Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway and Rudy Vallee to Ruth Brown, Harry James, Hank Williams Jr. and Natalie Cole.

Handy compiled the blues tunes of his day into a 1926 book, Blues: An Anthology, and published Negro Authors And Composers of the United States in 1935. As his vision began to deteriorate, Handy penned and published his autobiography, Father of the Blues, in 1941. […]

Handy died of bronchial pneumonia in New York at the age of 84. Fellow Alabama native Nat King Cole portrayed him in the 1958 biographical film St. Louis Blues, with young Billy Preston cast as Handy in his childhood. The film was released just after Handy’s death.

Although he did not invent the blues, Handy became the first to identity and name the blues, then transcribe, publish and popularize the music for the general public. Memphis honors his memory with the annual W.C. Handy Awards, presented for outstanding achievement in traditional and modern blues. Handy’s beloved hometown of Florence holds an annual weeklong music festival in his honor each summer. 

Give him a listen:

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I’ve posted the full Saint Louis Blues film, however you might have second thoughts about watching it if you read this detailed (and scathing) review by Jean-François Pitet, on his The Hi De Ho Blog.

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Here are several short documentaries on Handy. This one from 1967 is narrated by Steve Allen:

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This is a Black History Mini Doc:

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This one, “Mr. Handy’s Blues: A Musical Documentary,” is a part of a longer doc:

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Handy tells his own story on this one:

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Here’s Handy performing “Saint Louis Blues” on “The Ed Sullivan Show:”

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Louis Armstrong recorded this Handy tribute in 1954:

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Scott Yarnow at All Music wrote in his review of the tribute:

This recording was not only Louis Armstrong’s finest record of the 1950s but one of the truly classic jazz sets. Armstrong and his All-Stars (trombonist Trummy Young, clarinetist Barney Bigard, pianist Billy Kyle, bassist Arvell Shaw, drummer Barrett Deems, and singer Velma Middleton) were clearly inspired by the fresh repertoire, 11 songs written by W.C. Handy. Their nearly nine-minute version of “St. Louis Blues” with witty vocals, roaring Young trombone, and a couple of long majestic trumpet solos — is arguably the greatest version of the oft-recorded song.

I’ll close with this interesting Harlem Walking Tour video celebrating Handy:

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As the video notes, “Handy’s contributions continue into the present day. He is an inductee in the Songwriters Hall of Fame (1970), Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame (1985), and the recipient of a Grammys Trustees Award for lifetime achievement (1993). In 2002 the United States Senate passed a resolution declaring 2003 as the “Year of the Blues” being that it was the centennial anniversary of W.C. Handy’s first encounter with blues music – the moment that led to him becoming the ‘Father of the Blues.’”

Join me in the comments section below for more Handy and more blues.  

A cartoon by David Horsey.

Related | Why Senate Democrats caved on shutdown—and why their excuses are BS

Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know.

This past week, the seemingly never-ending Jeffrey Epstein scandal that has dogged President Donald Trump resurfaced with the release of damning emails, hinting at more extensive connections between the two, including a claim that Trump “knew about the girls.”

Ironically, after years of campaigning against LGBTQ+ people and inventing nonexistent connections been transgender people and child abuse, the right has been pushing excuses for Trump’s connections to Epstein—and it’s been down a similarly hypocritical road before.

President Donald Trump is seen with Jeffrey Epstein at Mar-a-Lago in 1992.

In the 1990s, conservatives attempted to make political hay out of former President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The right portrayed itself as the party of “family values,” purportedly in contrast to Democratic debauchery.

But at the same time he was pounding the table about Clinton, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich cheating on his wife as she fought cancer—and he eventually married his mistress.

A few decades later, many of the same right-wing figures lined up behind Trump—who infamously and publicly cheated on multiple wives—while railing against figures like former President Barack Obama as anti-family. Obama has been married to his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, since 1992.

GOP leaders like Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina have induced whiplash. At one point, she spoke up for victims of sexual abuse but then quickly turned on a dime, saying that she supported Trump in the 2020 election despite his history of sexual assault.

The right has embraced hypocrisy and now thrives on it. But how did that happen?

For years, conservatives have made the concept of “owning the libs” central to their political ideology. The idea is to engage in behavior and use rhetoric that supposedly makes liberals angry, driving them to exhibit this anger, which conservatives then mock.

Even if their behavior doesn’t provoke a tantrum, conservatives have elevated this brand of mockery above nearly everything else, including policy and ideology. This has resulted in the right, including right-wing media like Fox News, becoming fixated on “culture war” issues.

Newt Gingrich is seen with his third wife Callista Gingrich, who once was his mistress.

Gingrich’s hypocrisy thus became more or less acceptable on the right because he spent his time as speaker trolling Democrats, pushing offensive rhetoric about the party or insisting that Republicans were morally superior. It didn’t matter what he did behind closed doors—as long as he “owned” the liberals.

A figure like Trump has taken this ethos and turned it up to eleven. Everything about him is orchestrated to incite liberal ire, from his racism and embrace of crackpot conspiracies, to his childish insults and overt corruption. And his underlings like White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and aide Stephen Miller constantly insult the left to win over their boss.

This creates a permission structure on the right where Republicans are allowed to be contradictory, as long as a liberal somewhere is purportedly mad about it.

But this kind of posture has a limit.

Trump can “own the libs” and embrace hypocrisy all he wants—he is a significantly unpopular leader. The public has also made clear that, on the Epstein issue, Trump is the true outlier. The public has repeatedly called for transparency and justice for the victims, survivors, and their families. This shaky ground for Trump has led to Republican defections, which is a departure from the norm.

Shameless hypocrisy might work at the core of the GOP base, but voters outside of the conservative bubble are more than willing to throw Republicans out of office.

A cartoon by Drew Sheneman.

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The company is run by the husband of Noem’s chief DHS spokesperson and has personal and business ties to Noem and her aides. DHS invoked the “emergency” at the border to skirt competitive bidding rules for the taxpayer-funded campaign.

By Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski, for ProPublica

On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.”

Noem has hailed the more than $200 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign as a crucial tool to stem illegal immigration. Her agency invoked the “national emergency” at the border as it awarded contracts for the campaign, bypassing the normal competitive bidding process designed to prevent waste and corruption.

The Department of Homeland Security has kept at least one beneficiary of the nine-figure ad deal a secret, records and interviews show: a Republican consulting firm with long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. The company running the Mount Rushmore shoot, called the Strategy Group, does not appear on public documents about the contract. The main recipient listed on the contracts is a mysterious Delaware company, which was created days before the deal was finalized.

Kristi Noem is recognized as President Donald Trump speaks during an event in the Rose Garden at the White House on April 2.

No firm has closer ties to Noem’s political operation than the Strategy Group. It played a central role in her 2022 South Dakota gubernatorial campaign. Corey Lewandowski, her top adviser at DHS, has worked extensively with the firm. And the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin.

The Strategy Group’s ad work is the first known example of money flowing from Noem’s agency to businesses controlled by her allies and friends.

Government contracting experts said the depth of the ties between DHS leadership and the Strategy Group suggested major potential violations of ethics rules.

“It’s corrupt, is the word,” said Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on federal contract law and former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that the Strategy Group’s role should prompt investigations by both the DHS inspector general and the House Oversight Committee.

“Hiding your friends as subcontractors is like playing hide the salami with the taxpayer,” Tiefer added.

Federal regulations forbid conflicts of interest in contracting and require that the process be conducted “with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none.”

“It’s worthy of an investigation to ferret out how these decisions were made, and whether they were made legally and without bias,” said Scott Amey, a contracting expert and general counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.

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The revelations come as the amount of money at Noem’s disposal has skyrocketed. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill granted DHS more than $150 billion, and Noem has given herself an unusual degree of control over how that money is spent. This summer, she began requiring that she personally approve any payment over $100,000.

Asked about the Strategy Group’s work for DHS, McLaughlin, the agency spokesperson, said in an interview, “We don’t have visibility into why they were chosen.”

“I don’t know who they’re a subcontractor with, but I don’t work with them because I have a conflict of interest and I fully recused myself,” she said. “My marriage is one thing and work is another. I don’t combine them.” Her husband, Strategy Group CEO Ben Yoho, didn’t respond to questions.

In a written statement, DHS said, “DHS has no involvement with the selection of subcontractors.” They added that the Strategy Group does not have a direct contract with the agency, saying “DHS cannot and does not determine, control, or weigh in on who contractors hire.”

“My marriage is one thing and work is another. I don’t combine them,” said DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin, who is married to Strategy Group CEO Ben Yoho

Contracting experts said that agencies can and do sometimes require that subcontractors be approved by officials. It’s not clear how much the Strategy Group has been paid.

This is not the first time that the Strategy Group has gotten public money through a Noem contract. As governor of South Dakota in 2023, her administration set off a scandal by hiring the Ohio-based company to do a different ad campaign, paying it $8.5 million in state funds. While the state said the contract was done by the book, a former Noem administration official told ProPublica that Noem quietly intervened to ensure the Strategy Group got the deal. ProPublica granted some people anonymity to discuss the deals because of their sensitivity.

The firm also paid up to $25,000 to one of Noem’s closest advisers in South Dakota, previously unreported records show. (The adviser, 28-year-old Madison Sheahan, now serves at DHS as the second-in-command of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Sheahan didn’t respond to questions about why she was paid.)

The DHS ad that the company filmed at Mount Rushmore has aired during “Fox & Friends” in recent days. Executives from the Strategy Group traveled to the shoot and hired subcontractors to fill out the film crew, according to records and a person involved in the campaign. The ad’s aesthetic sits somewhere between a political campaign ad and a Jeep commercial as Noem tells would-be immigrants to “come here the right way.”

“From the cowboys who tamed the West to the titans who built our cities,” Noem says, as images of Trump Tower in Chicago and Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt last year flash on the screen, “America has always rewarded vision and grit.” Noem continues: “You cross the border illegally, we’ll find you.”

Watch the DHS Ad Filmed at Mount Rushmore

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Video obtained by ProPublica

The ad is the latest in a campaign that Noem debuted in February, just a few weeks after she took charge of DHS. “Any delay in providing these critical communications to the public will increase the spread of misinformation, especially misinformation by smugglers,” the agency wrote, explaining why it was skipping the competitive bidding process normally required for government contracts. The initial ads featured Noem thanking Trump for securing the border.

The contracts total $220 million so far, leading the DHS ad budget to triple in the most recent fiscal year, according to Bloomberg. The lion’s share of ad contracts is typically used to buy TV airtime or spots on social media. Advertising firms make money by taking an often-hefty commission. Federal records show the contracts have gone to two firms. One is a Republican ad company in Louisiana called People Who Think, which has been awarded $77 million.

But the majority of the money — $143 million — has gone to a mysterious LLC in Delaware. The company was created just days before it was awarded the deal.

Little is known about the Delaware company, which is called Safe America Media and lists its address as the Virginia home of a veteran Republican operative, Michael McElwain. McElwain has long had his own advertising company (separate from the Delaware one), but there’s little evidence that firm could handle a nine-figure federal contract on its own: It reported just five employees when it received COVID-19 relief money a few years ago.

How, where and to whom Safe America Media doled out the $143 million is unknown. Any subcontractors hired to do work on the DHS ads are not disclosed in federal contracting databases.

The office funding the ad contracts is listed as the DHS Office of Public Affairs, which is run by McLaughlin, contract records show. McLaughlin married Yoho, the Strategy Group CEO, earlier this year.

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In its statement, DHS said the agency does its contracting “by the book” and the process is run by career officials. “It is very sad that Pro Publica would seek to defame these public servants,” DHS added.

Asked about why the agency chose Safe America Media, DHS said, “The results speak for themselves: the most secure border in American history and over 2 million illegal aliens exiting the United States.” McElwain and People Who Think didn’t respond to questions.

Yoho was still in college when he first served as campaign manager for a U.S. congressman. Now, at 38 years old, he’s a national player in the cutthroat industry of political advertising. Federal election records show tens of millions in payments to his firm during the 2024 election cycle, coming from dozens of Republican congressional candidates. And Noem has proved a particularly lucrative client.

Lewandowski brought Yoho into Noem’s inner circle back in South Dakota, according to two people familiar with the matter, putting the young consultant in charge of the ad side of her 2022 gubernatorial reelection campaign. Noem had a more than $5 million advertising budget for the race, records show. After she won in a landslide, Yoho, who has called Noem a friend, came to South Dakota to attend her inauguration ceremony. He sat off to the side of the stage, next to Lewandowski. (Lewandowski didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Yoho shared a photo of himself with Noem and her husband, Bryon, at Noem’s 2023 inauguration in South Dakota.

By then, Yoho’s next big project with Noem was already in the works. In late 2022, Noem was quietly preparing to launch another sprawling ad campaign — only this time, the money would come from state coffers. The stated goal was to encourage workers to move to South Dakota. The upcoming contract opportunity wasn’t public yet, but Yoho was already involved in planning the campaign, according to records first reported by Sioux Falls Live.

Then on Jan. 12, 2023, Yoho’s company registered to do business in South Dakota under the name Go West Media. The next day, the contract opportunity went live.

Seven companies submitted proposals for the project. Then the pressure from above set in, according to a former Noem administration official involved in the process.

The former official said a top Noem aide told them the governor would be angry if Yoho’s company didn’t win the contract. “He was very direct: ‘She wants to do it,’” they said. Contemporaneous text messages reviewed by ProPublica corroborate that senior Noem administration officials pushed for Yoho to get the contract. Eventually, he did. (In its statement, DHS denied that Noem influenced the process.)

Noem starred in Yoho’s ads herself, dressing up as a dentist, a plumber and a state trooper as she touted her state’s growing economy. Exactly how much Yoho and the Strategy Group made off the $8.5 million deal is unclear. Some of the money was used to purchase spots on Fox News, including one during a Republican presidential debate. Some of the money appears to have gone back to South Dakota — into the bank account of another of Noem’s top advisers.

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Sheahan, now the second-in-command at ICE, was paid up to $25,000 by Go West in 2023 for “consulting,” according to a financial disclosure document Sheahan later filed. At the time, Sheahan was serving as both the operations director for Noem as governor and the political director for Noem’s campaign work, according to a copy of her 2023 resume obtained by ProPublica. Her responsibilities included coordinating “daily logistics and operations” for Noem and her team, the resume said. She also managed the “relationship with high level donors” to American Resolve, Noem’s network of outside political groups.

As his firm received millions from the South Dakota state government, Yoho separately continued to work for Noem in other capacities. He worked under Lewandowski on the publicity campaign for Noem’s 2024 memoir, according to a person familiar with the matter. (The book became famous for including an anecdote about Noem shooting her dog.)

The Strategy Group also received a stream of payments for social media consulting and media production work over the last few years from Noem’s American Resolve PAC. Federal election records show the PAC made its last payment to Yoho’s company this February, a couple weeks after Noem took her post as the head of DHS.

Jeff Ernsthausen contributed research.