"Today, the National Space Council released the National Strategy for Planetary Protection. This Strategy will advance the Nation's role in the sustainable exploration of space by appropriately protecting other planetary bodies and the Earth from potentially harmful biological contamination from space exploration activities."
Senator Josh Hawley’s objection will force Republicans to go on the record about Trump’s bogus voter fraud claims.Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri announced on Wednesday that he plants to object during Congress’s meeting to count Electoral College votes next week in order to highlight unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud and the role of “Big Tech monopolies” in the election. The move will delay the final confirmation of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory by forcing lawmakers in both chambers of Congress to debate and then vote on the objection. “At the very least, Congress should investigate allegations of voter fraud and adopt measures to secure the integrity of our elections,” the senator said in a statement. “But Congress has so far failed to act.”
In order to raise an objection to the results, a senator and a member of the House must both submit their complaints in writing. While Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks has already indicated that he will object, Hawley is the first Senator to do so. Alabama Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville has said he’s open to objecting as well. It’s virtually impossible for this objection to affect the outcome of the election, but it will require lawmakers to retire to the House and Senate and hold separate debates that will run for no more than two hours. For the objection to succeed, both chambers must approve it with a simple majority vote. Given that Democrats control the House, there’s virtually no chance of that happening.
Nevertheless, President Donald Trump has been publicly and privately pushing Republicans in Congress to lodge objections. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence hosted Brooks and other conservative members of Congress at the White House last week to lay out a strategy for this far-fetched gambit. Since losing the election, Trump has refused to concede and repeatedly spread conspiracy theories that voting machines were rigged and that loads of invalid ballots inexplicably materialized in key swing states to hand Biden a victory. He’s pressured state-level officials to interfere in the electoral process and had his attorney Rudy Giuliani file legal challenges in dozens of courts, which have nearly all been unsuccessful.
Not everyone in Trump’s party is on board. Voting on Hawley’s objection will put many Republican lawmakers, particularly those in the Senate, in a tight spot. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell advised his colleagues in a mid-December conference call not to raise objections, describing it as a “terrible move,” since it would require Republicans to go on the record in rebuffing Trump’s specious claims of pervasive voter fraud. Hawley, however, is widely expected to be a presidential candidate in 2024, and this move is likely to endear him to Trump’s base.
In order to justify his plans, Hawley cited instances from the 2004 and 2016 elections in which Democrats also objected during the Electoral College vote certification. Following the 2016 election, Democratic Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas and Barbara Lee of California led an effort in the House to object to Trump’s victory. The effort died when no senators would sign on. The last time there was an actual vote on an objection was after the 2004 election, when former Ohio Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones and former California Sen. Barbara Boxer jointly objected to President George W. Bush’s win in Ohio.
Boxer, in an interview with CNN last month, drew a distinction between her motion and the campaign to reverse the 2020 election that Trump and his allies have waged since November. “Our intent was not to overturn the election in any way. Our intent was to focus on voter suppression in Ohio,” she said. “They’re talking about the vote that the presidency was stolen from Donald Trump. It’s not even a close comparison.” During the House session in 2005 to debate her objection, Tubbs Jones similarly said, “This objection does not have at its root, the hope or even the hint of overturning the victory of the president, but it is a necessary timely and appropriate opportunity to review and remedy the most precious process in our democracy.”
Still, it’s evidently enough of a precedent for Hawley. “Democrats in Congress objected during the certification of electoral votes in order to raise concerns about election integrity,” the senator’s statement read. “And they were entitled to do so. But now those of us concerned about the integrity of this election are entitled to do the same.”
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A demonstrator holds a sign condemning Officer Adam Coy at a press conference and candlelight vigil for Andre Hill outside the Brentnell Community Recreation Center in Columbus, Ohio on December 26, 2020.STEPHEN ZENNER/Getty Images
On Monday evening, the Columbus Department of Public Safety announced it has fired the police officer who killed Andre Hill, an unarmed Black man, last week. The white Ohio officer, Adam Coy, was found to have used unreasonable force, failed to turn on his body camera, and declined to administer first aid after he shot Hill.
Coy was responding to a non-emergency call about a man sitting in his car, yet he showed up with his gun drawn. Hill, 47, was visiting a friend’s house and had stopped in the garage. Coy ordered him to come out of the garage, so Hill turned around and walked toward Coy with his phone in his hand. Though Coy didn’t turn on his camera until after the shooting, a 60-second playback feature captured the shooting without audio. That footage showed Coy shooting Hill within 10 seconds of approaching him. The other officer on the scene told investigators that she did not think Hill posed a threat.
It was the city’s second police killing of a Black man in the span of a few weeks. A sheriff’s deputy who once said his job was to “hunt people”killed Casey Goodson Jr. outside his own home on Dec. 4, triggering nationwide protests. While Goodson’s death wasn’t captured on camera, the footage of Hill’s death was so transparently damning that within days, the mayor, city council members, and the police chief had all called for Coy’s firing. “Officer Coy’s handling of this run is not a ‘rookie’ mistake as a result of negligence or inadvertence, but the decisions … and actions taken were reckless and deliberate,” Police Chief Tom Quinlan wrote in his recommendation last week.
Coy racked up a number of complaints alleging abuse over his years on the force. But he went largely unpunished until now. In one case in 2012, cruiser footage showed him slamming a man’s head repeatedly into the hood during a drunk driving arrest. The city paid out $45,000 in a civil rights settlement for that assault, according to the Columbus Dispatch, while Coy was suspended for 160 hours as a result.
But Coy is hardly the only officer in Columbus with a history of violence. There are many officers who have netted dozens of excessive force complaints while keeping their jobs; some have been promoted. Bureau of Justice statistics show Columbus police officers killed about three times more people than any other department in Ohio between 2013 and 2019. More than two-thirds of those people were Black in a city that’s only 29 percent Black overall.
This status quo has persisted despite evidence of pervasive misconduct and abuse within the city police force. Large protests erupted in 2016 after Officer Bryan Mason killed Tyre King, a 13-year-old Black boy who, according to an autopsy report requested by his family, was “more likely than not” running away when he was shot. Mason had already been implicated in 47 reports involving excessive force, the Appeal reported. He was never fired nor indicted for the shooting; the department’s initial response was to tweet a photo of a replica of a BB gun King was allegedly carrying at the time. More recently, one Columbus officer on the vice squad was indicted for forcing women to have sex with him under threat of arrest (he is separately facing charges for shooting and killing a woman while on the job). Several Black police officers have also blown the whistle on the agency’s culture of racism, retaliation, and bullying.
It’s a culture that has deep roots. Back in 1999, the Department of Justice found the department had a pattern and practice of racial profiling, wrongful arrests, lying about civil rights violations, and excessive force. “The officers involved in misconduct many times have a history of complaints against them, and fail to report accurately to their superiors what transpired in the incident (changing the facts to portray the victim as responsible for the arrest, the use of force, and/or the search),” the DOJ report noted. The city responded to the DOJ lawsuit in 2002 by giving police officers more training on racial profiling and expanding the internal affairs bureau’s ability to investigate misconduct. But the nature of the complaints—allegations of racial discrimination and false arrests—have remained remarkably similar.
Part of the problem is that the police union has historically stood in the way of even modest reforms; under the collective bargaining agreement, the city can’t even suspend an officer unless they clear a high bar. But the city is now trying again. Over the protests of the police union, Columbus voters overwhelmingly approved a measure in November to create a civilian review board and inspector general to investigate the police. The independent watchdog agency is modeled after similar boards in cities like Baltimore and New York, which have had mixed results. Mayor Andrew Ginther shut the police union out of the working group that structured the civilian review board, but the city will likely still need to negotiate the scope of the board’s power with the union.
“I think law enforcement’s perspective is very important, but the FOP is not running this process,” Ginther said in July. “They’re not in charge; they’re not calling the shots anymore about how we police.”
The mayor has also proposed cutting funding for the police, which makes up one-third of the city’s entire budget, and allocating funds to hire mental health and social workers instead.
But even just keeping Coy off the force might prove difficult in the long run. He has the right to appeal the decision through union arbitration, and no criminal charges have been filed against him yet. According to an investigation by WOSU, the Columbus public radio station, several other Columbus police officers have been re-hired in recent years after appealing their firing. It’s a problem that’s plagued police departments across the country.
We’re likely to see more high-profile firings as politicians respond to this year’s sustained Black Lives Matter protests. President-elect Joe Biden has called for modest policing reforms targeting the “bad apples” in departments. Purging officers like Coy from the force is a commonsense first step. But it won’t fix American policing. Even when local leaders and police chiefs call for reform, they face entrenched roadblocks, if not open revolt. Columbus is among the many American cities that have been tinkering around the edges of their police forces for decades with little to show for their efforts. Real change can’t happen until we move from simply punishing officers like Coy for shooting an unarmed Black man, to keeping them from being there in the first place.
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I am deeply saddened to hear of Gil's passing. I first met him in 1978 when I was a student. He went out of his way many times to help me. The first time that he saw me with a @NASA badge on he told me how proud he was. Gil Moore was the archetype of all space mentors. #AdAstrahttps://t.co/iwx05CAtoK
"Gil Moore has been active with numerous organizations such as the American Rocket Society and its successor the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Utah's Advisory Council on Science and Technology, the Hansen Planetarium, the Utah Science Center Authority, and the Utah State University Research Foundation board of trustees. He is a life member of the Air Force Association and has been a member of the American Meteorological Society, the Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society of the Sigma Xi, the U.S. Space Foundation, the National Space Foundation, the Aerospace States Association, and the Space Business Roundtable. Additionally, he has served as an unofficial advisor on space issues for two U.S. Congressman, two U.S. senators, and three state governors."
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by @flannelkimono via @nonstandardmcd/Twitter and @nonstandardmcd/Twitter.
Rabbit Holes is a recurringseriesin which writers pay homage to the diversity and ingenuity of the ways we procrastinate now. To pitch your personal rabbit hole, emailhumaninterest@slate.com.
This year, while I rarely leave my apartment, I can still travel the globe with the help of the internet. But not by means so pedestrian as Google Earth. No, my preferred method of armchair tourism is the Nonstandard McDonald’s Twitter account. On a balmy summer day, I flash a Vulcan salute at the England UFO McDonald’s. During a brisk evening in Sweden, I take off my McSki gloves to unwrap a McDouble, no pickles. And on a wild and windy night, I am the ghost who haunts the McBarge.
The Nonstandard McDonald’s account’s mission is, admirably, “preserving the only architectural heritage of the western world.” The tweets span decades and continents, providing an archive of offbeat McDonald’s—many now lost to time. The photos read as kitschy, surreal, and occasionally haunting. The interiors are an Escher-esque intersection of nostalgia culture, capitalism, design, and fast food.
Some highlights: the ornate interior of the Riverboat McDonald’s in St. Louis, Missouri. The Blade Runner–esque neon of the A&S Plaza McDonald’s in New York City. The McDonald’s built over a Roman road in Italy—with actual human skeletons on display in the floor. What a thrilling conclusion, to curl into your eternal sleep while tourists stand on top of your bones to order McGriddles.
I grew up in a McDonald’s family. I know more about McDonald’s characters than I do about U.S. presidents. The crafty, baby-faced Hamburglar. Ronald’s dumb purple best friend, Grimace. Birdie, an anthropomorphic bird who loves McDonald’s breakfast. These names seem to have always existed in my brain, like Mickey Mouse or my cousins on my mom’s side.
McDonald’s culture is surprisingly easy to lose yourself in. From the Nonstandard McDonald’s account, you can jump to the McDonald’s wiki, a fan-run encyclopedia with facts like “Grimace was last seen at Dodger Stadium on July 18th, 2012 […] dancing to Ram Jam’s 1977 classic, Black Betty.” From there, it’s a simple sidestep to YouTubing old McDonaldland commercials. The McNugget puppets strike a chord deep in your memory—it’s a quick hop over to Etsy to search “90S MCNUGGET HALLOWEEN TOY.” When you’re on a Zoom call the next day, you look down to see you’ve doodled Grimace in the margin of your notes. He looks so happy there.
That said, happiness is not always guaranteed in the land of Happy Meals. Scrolling Nonstandard McDonald’s can sometimes feel like strolling a graveyard. Tweets mark locations as “active,” “deceased,” or “deceased (remodeled).” But the photographic evidence remains compelling: This place was here, and now it is gone. You can never revisit the Sacramento Undersea Surf Rock Dinosaur McDonald’s, where you once sat under a ceiling fresco of fish and whales, facing a statue of a velociraptor with an electric guitar and real swagger. You can’t go back, but you can tweet your eulogy to @nonstandardmcdonalds. And maybe someone will chime in and remember, too, how it felt to drink a Diet Coke beneath the sculpture of a shark bursting from the wall, chomping on a surfboard.
McDonald’s began dialing back its interior design during the Starbucks boom of 2006. A decade later, this affected my city in a dramatic way. In 2017, McDonald’s tore down Chicago’s Rock ’n’ Roll McDonald’s—inspiration behind the iconic Wesley Willis song—and replaced it with a two-story behemoth of glass and chrome. The new design is as sleek and sterile as an Apple Store. As the years pass by, it’s hard to imagine this location inspiring any nostalgia, let alone any legendary keyboard tunes.
It’s easy to forget, as I scroll through endless images of the golden arches, that a fiberglass Fry Guy and a self-service kiosk have the same goal: to sell as many Big Macs as possible. My treasured memories are the successful marketing attempts of a corporation that built an empire on fast food and all the problems that come with it. Nonstandard McDonald’s recently added a line to its bio: “tweets not endorsements.”
Sometimes I think I can only really love a place if it’s gone. I look around my favorite dive bar, or my studio apartment, and I think of how intensely I will miss these places when they are separated from me. That premature nostalgia shades everything I do. I’m not always confident that’s the best way to move through the world.
Chicago loves to memorialize the Rock ’n’ Roll McDonald’s, but the one that sticks in my mind is the McDonald’s The Future they built at Navy Pier in 1995. A product of new millennium futurism, it boasted Corinthian pillars and glass orbs of blue lightning. I remember visiting as a kid, pressing my McNugget-greased fingerprints to those orbs, watching the electricity rush to meet my point of contact. When I revisited later, as a teenager, the scrolls of the columns were dusty, and the orbs were just dead circles of glass. They remodeled the restaurant in 2017. Now, it’s strange to look back and feel nostalgic for both the beginning and the end of things. I’m glad I got to see it.
Of course, the real pull of nostalgia isn’t the places themselves. It’s the person you were when you visited them. And that’s the real lynchpin of the Nonstandard McDonald’s account. You’re no longer the kid with a Happy Meal. You’re not the stoned teen ordering a Shamrock Shake. But you can recall those past selves, the same way you can recall an animatronic tree that sings about hamburgers, the memory vivid with absurdity.
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Photo illustration by Slate. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. /20th Century Studios.
In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—this year, Justin Chang, Odie Henderson, and Alison Willmore—about the year in cinema.Read the previous dispatch here.
Dear funky bunch,
I feel lucky to have been served up Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland to write on for our last round. This was maybe my single favorite film of the year, or at least tied for that honor with First Cow (and I don’t say that just to butter up Evie, the ruminative guest star of Odie’s last post). No other movie better crystallized the anxieties and injustices of our current moment while also seeming to emerge fully formed from both its creator’s brain and some entirely different (past or future?) era of film history. Nomadland, based loosely on a 2017 nonfiction book by Jessica Bruder, follows a working-class widow in her 60s, Fern (Frances McDormand), who takes to the road to become a seasonal migrant worker when a mine closure turns her longtime Nevada home into a ghost town. A philosophical quest narrative with long dialogue-free stretches, Nomadland is a spare, roomy, and blessedly message-free movie that gives its characters as well as the audience space to breathe. Again and again, Zhao places her resourceful and prickly heroine in some situation that seems familiar from another, less idiosyncratic, more predictable movie—then subverts our expectations by letting Fern respond to that setup in her own stubborn and sometimes maddening way.
Some reviews have compared Zhao’s method—mixing seasoned actors like McDormand and David Strathairn with real-life van-dwelling “nomads” playing versions of themselves—to the quasi-documentary feel of some Italian neorealist classics. But the movie also offers exhilarating flights into lyricism, from the wistful score by Ludovico Einaudi to a Shakespeare sonnet unexpectedly recited from memory by the usually far-from-poetic Fern. It’s a movie that makes you reserve judgment and pay attention minute to minute, just as Fern’s new life forces her to discard what’s superfluous and jury-rig something new.
It’s a movie that makes you reserve judgment and pay attention minute tominute.
For me, Nomadland’s power lay in its refusal to violate its main character’s fiercely guarded autonomy—its refusal to tell us how to feel about her choice to remain independent, isolated, and permanently transient. (And it is a choice; while Fern is hard-pressed by economic circumstances, she also passes up two offers at a more settled and far from unappealing-seeming life.) Nomadland’s blend of road movie, verité slice-of-life, and enigmatic character study put me in mind of another movie about a woman who, for reasons never fully explained to the viewer, couldn’t or wouldn’t stop moving: Agnès Varda’s 1985 feature Vagabond, about a homeless young backpacker played by Sandrine Bonnaire. Nomadland is a less alienating and, in the end, more affirming exploration of female solitude on the margins than the profoundly sad Vagabond. But the two movies are alike in the delicacy with which they treat their subjects, women whose lives have been shaped and sometimes damaged—but never fully determined—by their social and economic circumstances.
Rewatching parts of Nomadland for this post, I found myself remembering all the other 2020 movies that brought together documentary and fiction elements in bold or funny or unsettling ways. There was the Ross brothers’ sort-of-but-then-not-documentary Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, the record of a Las Vegas dive bar’s final day in business—except that the film was actually shot at a still-operational bar in New Orleans, using a group of regulars at that establishment to tell versions of their own real-life stories in this semi-fictionalized context. It was impossible to know for sure which situations were scripted and which were discovered by the Rosses’ fly-on-the-wall camera, but by the time this portrait of a ragtag community weaved its way to a boozy, Percy Sledge–scored finale, it didn’t seem to matter. Remember the moment late in this film when someone presents the barflies with a cake bearing the message “This Place Sucked Anyway,” then everyone heads outside to the parking lot with sparklers? That sounds like the ideal celebration plan for New Year’s Eve 2020.
And Alison, I’m in agreement about Kirsten Johnson’s brilliant Dick Johnson Is Dead, the veteran documentary filmmaker’s playful thought experiment about the impending death of her beloved Alzheimer’s-afflicted father. The movie progresses from whimsical to shattering in a masterfully paced series of staged patricidal vignettes—and then, in perhaps my favorite last shot of the year, swings impossibly back to whimsical again.
And of course, chief among this year’s many fiction/documentary mashups is one of the few films this year everyone talked about at the same time, if only for a couple of feverish days: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. (How do I feel about typing out in full that once and always glorious subtitle? Very nice!) Borat 2 was the only widely seen movie this year that dealt with the pandemic in real time, as Sacha Baron Cohen’s cheerfully uninhibited Kazakh reporter and his cage-reared daughter (the astoundingly fearless Maria Bakalova) found themselves fumbling their way across an America newly riven by idiotic yet impossibly high-stakes battles over face masks and deep-state conspiracies.
Baron Cohen’s guerrilla shock tactics and ability to infiltrate the previously closed spaces where racism, sexism, and other pernicious ideologies are reproduced and celebrated were thrillingly novel when the first Borat movie came out in 2006. Fourteen years later, the stupidity and cruelty of powerful people—mainly straight white men—is hardly in need of a comic muckraking, given how eager and even proud those in power appear to be to display their own ample reserves of muck. I seldom laughed out loud over the course of this new Borat, though I never stopped being gobsmacked by Baron Cohen’s and Bakalova’s deranged commitment to their maximally offensive schtick. But the moment when fiction, prank, and exposé collided in that hotel room encounter between Bakalova and Rudolph Giuliani—the moment we all thought, in our sweet late-October innocence, would be the most embarrassing thing to happen to America’s mayor in 2020—is one of the indelible memories of my cinematic year. It was a dizzying convergence of the kind of grim political news dump we’ve all come to regard with a sense of hopeless inevitability—breaking: Unethical man is unethical—and the new, antic idea that there might be a way of coming at that news sideways, making its discovery a game we could set our own rules for, laugh about together, and even, someday, win. And in answer to your question, Alison, yes, in that moment—which we couldn’t know yet was only a rehearsal for Rudy’s unsolicited audition for Borat 3 in front of the corrugated metal door of Four Seasons Total Landscaping—I viscerally longed for the lost communal space of the movie theater, a place we could all shriek in unison at the moment we saw the president’s lawyer’s right hand begin that ambiguous but terrifying journey past the waistband of his pants. Justin, I beg of you, please take us somewhere far away from the deeply unpleasant location that is Rudy Giuliani’s nethers.
Wawaweewa,
Dana
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