July 10, 2023

Monday, July 10, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Joe is always busy.

Though sometimes not.

Last night.

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Ocasio-Cortez endorses Biden’s reelection campaign, sending a strong signal of Democratic unity.

NEW YORK (AP) — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed President Joe Biden‘s reelection campaign, sending a strong sign of Democratic unity from one of the party’s most liberal members.

“I think he’s done quite well, given the limitations that we have,” Ocasio-Cortez said on the “Pod Save America” podcast Thursday.

“I do think that there are ebbs and flows.”

Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist from New York, has sometimes bucked Biden and the party’s leaders, including voting against the deal the president negotiated with Republicans in May to raise the nation’s debt ceiling and casting the lone Democratic vote against a spending bill to keep the government operating and avoid a partial government shutdown.

She endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary and demurred in an interview last year when asked if she would support the incumbent president in 2024.

Biden is facing nominal primary challenges for next year’s election in self-help author Marianne Williamson and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Ocasio, when asked about whether she’d support Biden, said: “I believe, given that field, yes.”

The congresswoman said she felt Biden had a strong start in his presidency with the passage of the American Rescue Plan, aimed at relief from the impact of the pandemic, and the Inflation Reduction Act, a major climate and health care law.

“But,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “there are also areas that I think could have gone better.”

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Responding to the Supreme Court on Affirmative Action.

Begins with the incoming class in 2024 👇

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Arizona moves forward.

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A reminder of what the Republicans - following their leader - are made of. Not sugar and spice.

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Maybe this article should have been headlined How Clarence Thomas found his corruption.

Where Clarence Thomas Entered an Elite Circle and Opened a Door to the Court.

On Oct. 15, 1991, Clarence Thomas secured his seat on the Supreme Court, a narrow victory after a bruising confirmation fight that left him isolated and disillusioned.

Within months, the new justice enjoyed a far-warmer acceptance to a second exclusive club: the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, named for the Gilded Age author whose rags-to-riches novels represented an aspirational version of Justice Thomas’s own bootstraps origin story.

If Justice Thomas’s life had unfolded as he had envisioned, his Horatio Alger induction might have been a celebration of his triumphs as a prosperous lawyer instead of a judge. But as he tells it, after graduating from Yale Law School, he was turned down by a series of top law firms, rejections he attributes to a perception that he was a token beneficiary of affirmative action. So began his grudging path to a judicial career that brought him great prestige but only modest material wealth after decades of financial struggle.

When he joined the Horatio Alger Association, Justice Thomas entered a world whose defining ethos of meritocratic success — that anyone can achieve the American dream with hard work, pluck and a little luck — was the embodiment of his own life philosophy, and a foundation of his jurisprudence. As he argued from the bench in his concurrence to the recent decision striking down affirmative action, the court should be “focusing on individuals as individuals,” rather than on the view that Americans are “all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society.”

At Horatio Alger, he moved into the inner circle, a cluster of extraordinarily wealthy, largely conservative members who lionized him and all that he had achieved. While he has never held an official leadership position, in some ways he has become the association’s leading light. He has granted it unusual access to the Supreme Court, where every year he presides over the group’s signature event: a ceremony in the courtroom at which he places Horatio Alger medals around the necks of new lifetime members. One entrepreneur called it “the closest thing to being knighted in the United States.” At the same time, Justice Thomas has served as the group’s best messenger, meeting with and mentoring the recipients of millions of dollars a year in Horatio Alger college scholarships, many of whom come from backgrounds that mirror his own.

“The Horatio Alger Association has been a home to Virginia and me,” Justice Thomas said, referring to his wife, as he received the group’s most prestigious award in 2010. The organization, he added, “has allowed me to see my dreams come true.”

His friendships forged through Horatio Alger have brought him proximity to a lifestyle of unimaginable material privilege. Over the years, his Horatio Alger friends have welcomed him at their vacation retreats, arranged V.I.P. access to sporting events and invited him to their lavish parties. In 2004, he joined celebrities including Oprah Winfrey and Ed McMahon at a three-day 70th birthday bash in Montana for the industrialist Dennis Washington. Several Horatio Alger friends also helped finance the marketing of a hagiographic documentary about the justice in the wake of an HBO film that had resurfaced Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against him during his confirmation.

Prominent among his Horatio Alger friends has been David Sokol, the onetime heir apparent to Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. Mr. Sokol describes the justice and his wife as “close personal friends,” and in 2015, the Sokols hosted the Thomases for a visit to their sprawling Montana ranch. The Sokols have also hosted the Thomases at their waterfront mansion in Florida.

From left Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginni Thomas, David Sokol and Peggy Sokol in September 2015 during a trip to the Sokols’ ranch. Later that year, the Thomases wrote to friends, “David and Peggy Sokol hosted us in Montana for a ranch visit and tour of Yellowstone.”

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In recent months, Justice Thomas has faced scrutiny over new revelations by ProPublica of his relationship to Harlan Crow, the Texas billionaire, whose largess over more than two decades has included vacations on a superyacht, private school tuition for the great-nephew the justice was raising, and the purchase of his mother’s Savannah, Ga., home. None of this was reported by the justice, and the revelations have renewed calls for tighter Supreme Court ethics rules.

But a look at his tenure at the Horatio Alger Association, based on more than two dozen interviews and a review of public filings and internal documents, shows that Justice Thomas has received benefits — many of them previously unreported — from a broader cohort of wealthy and powerful friends. They have included major donors to conservative causes with broad policy and political interests and much at stake in Supreme Court decisions, even if they were not directly involved in the cases.

Justice Thomas declined to respond to detailed questions from The New York Times.

In his early years on the court, Justice Thomas disclosed about 20 private plane flights and an assortment of other gifts, including cigars, a Daytona 500 jacket, a silver buckle and a rawhide coat. After The Los Angeles Times chronicled his gifts and travel in 2004, he stopped disclosing private flights and has seldom reported gifts or other benefits. After the Crow revelations, the justice said that “colleagues and others in the judiciary” had advised him that he did not need to report the hospitality of good friends.

His decision not to disclose many benefits for nearly two decades — beyond trips related to teaching, speeches and attending legal or academic conferences — has made it difficult to track potential conflicts of interest.

Justices are allowed to accept gifts and free travel, and many other justices have disclosed receiving such benefits. The justices, like all federal judges, are required to complete an annual form listing investments, gifts and other financial ties. Yet in some cases the rules are ambiguous, and the disclosures do not provide a full portrait of gifts or finances.

While the court has no formal ethics system, the federal courts’ policymakers earlier this year announced more stringent disclosure rules, requiring the justices to report travel by private jet, as well as free stays at commercial properties like hotels, resorts and hunting lodges. However, the justices do not have to document the amount of a spouse’s income, and there are a number of other exceptions, including information about the receipt of “personal hospitality” — food, lodging or entertainment of a personal, nonbusiness nature.

Justice Thomas’s acceptance of such hospitality apparently predates his time on the court. A former girlfriend said in an interview that “a buddy” of Justice Thomas had paid for their vacation in the Bahamas in the mid-1980s, when he was chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A longtime friend said he had paid for the justice’s 1987 wedding reception.

At the Horatio Alger Association, the justice’s circle has also included Mr. Washington and Wayne Huizenga, the entrepreneur who built the Blockbuster Video empire and owned the Miami Dolphins. (Mr. Huizenga died in 2018.) In 2001, Mr. Huizenga’s foundation joined Mr. Crow in helping underwrite the restoration and dedication of a library wing in Savannah in the justice’s honor.

Justice Thomas at a 1996 Florida Panthers hockey game with Don Shula, left, former coach of the Miami Dolphins, and Wayne Huizenga, owner of the Panthers and the Dolphins. The justice’s Horatio Alger friends have arranged V.I.P. access for him to sporting events.

It was Mr. Sokol who introduced the justice in 2010 when the Horatio Alger Association awarded him its top honor. In December 2015, the Thomases wrote to friends about their visit to the Sokols’ ranch.

“David and Peggy Sokol hosted us in Montana for a ranch visit and tour of Yellowstone,” the Thomases said in the letter, which was reviewed by The Times. The Thomases brought along their dog, Petey, who played with the Sokols’ dog, Bodie. They wrote: “Bodie showed Petey how to be a ranch dog, without a leash! LIBERTY!”

The trip, they concluded, was “pure heaven for all of us!”

Tasting the Good Life

The Clarence Thomas origin story begins in a dirt-floor shack in Pin Point, a tiny community founded by formerly enslaved people in the salt marsh lands outside Savannah.

When he is 20, after a brief spell in a Roman Catholic seminary, it continues at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., where he is one of a small group of young Black men who integrate the school. There, in the spring of 1971, his senior year, he receives a letter from Yale Law School. He worries that the thin envelope means a rejection. But one of the nation’s most elite law schools wants him.

“My heart raced and my spirits lifted,” Justice Thomas wrote in his autobiography.

At Yale, he was one of only 12 Black students in his law school class, admitted the year the law school introduced an affirmative action plan. His white classmates viewed him as a token, he felt — a belief in the corrosive effects of affirmative action that was only deepened by his failure to win the law firm job he had dreamed of.

“I’d graduated from one of America’s top law schools, but racial preference had robbed my achievement of its true value,” he later wrote. Separately, he described leaving Yale as a new father, with a “swirling combination of frustration, of some disappointments, of some anxiety about the future, and some anxiety about how I would repay my student loans, how I would feed a young child, where I would live.”

By 1979, he had ended up in Washington, first as a legislative aide to Senator John Danforth of Missouri and then later as the Reagan administration’s chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency charged with enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws.

While chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the future Justice Thomas accepted a vacation in the Bahamas paid for by a professional contact, according to his girlfriend at the time.

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In the 1980s, Justice Thomas appeared in a public service announcement for the agency that featured the Dallas Cowboys, his favorite football team. He struck up a friendship with the team’s owner, Jerry Jones, and began to taste the good life that he still hoped would somehow become his own. As a profile from that period in The Legal Times reported, “He says he plans to be rich, says that means more than just a few hundred thousand dollars a year.”

Over the years, he flew in Mr. Jones’s private jet. Mr. Jones gave him a Super Bowl ring. He attended the Cowboys’ training camp, and when the team played in Washington, he sat in the owner’s box. (Mr. Jones later became a member of the Horatio Alger Association.)

In the mid-1980s, divorced and with custody of his son, Justice Thomas dated a woman named Lillian McEwen. In an interview, she remembered the Bahamas vacation, at a house with a caretaker and a car. She never knew the identity of the “buddy” footing the bill but understood it to be a professional contact because that was how the justice referred to such people, she said.

Not long after Ms. McEwen and Justice Thomas broke up, he met Virginia Lamp, known as Ginni. They married in 1987; Armstrong Williams, a close friend from Justice Thomas’s earliest days in Washington who is now a conservative commentator, said in an interview that he paid for their wedding reception.

At first the couple lived in a modest house on a busy street in Alexandria, Va. But in November 1992, wanting more privacy after the confirmation fight, they bought a home on a five-acre wooded lot, shielded from view, in Fairfax Station. They took out a 95 percent loan to buy the $522,000 house, property records show. (Since then, the Thomases have refinanced several times and taken out lines of credit, and while the home is worth more now, property records indicate that they owe as much as they did when they bought it.)

A Washington Post article from that time noted that while other justices cultivated public profiles through speeches or teaching, Justice Thomas rarely appeared outside the court. He was “the homebody of the bunch.”

“After the hearings, the Anita Hill hearings, there’s no way a human being could not have been changed,” Juan Williams, a journalist who extensively covered the justice’s early days in Washington and became friendly with him, said in a recent interview. “The human being I knew was just a different guy.”

‘He Opened Up the Supreme Court’

Soon after Justice Thomas joined the court, Armstrong Williams came to his chambers with a plan to restore his spirits.

Mr. Williams was not a member of the Horatio Alger Association, but he knew one. He pitched a skeptical Justice Thomas on the idea of joining as a chance to mentor a generation of promising Black students and “to be around a community of people that could help him heal.”

“I just knew he would find real relationships in that society,” Mr. Williams said.

Eventually, Mr. Williams said, he connected the justice with his acquaintance, Robert J. Brown, the owner of an international consulting firm. Mr. Brown confirmed that he was one of a few people who helped bring the justice into the organization.

The Horatio Alger Association was founded in 1947, according to its website, “to dispel the mounting belief among our nation’s youth that the American dream was no longer attainable.” To that end, the group has awarded more than $245 million in college scholarships to roughly 35,000 students. Its members have included a wide spectrum of people whose life stories limn the Horatio Alger credo, although they have trended conservative. Justice Thurgood Marshall and Fred Trump, former President Donald Trump’s father, were members. So was Harlan Crow’s father, Trammell Crow. Justice Thomas’s class of inductees included the poet Maya Angelou.

In a statement, a Horatio Alger spokeswoman noted that “the association is not privy to the relationships that individual members have with one another.” Of Justice Thomas she wrote, “We are grateful to him for the many hours he has spent speaking directly with scholars, providing them with mentorship and advice and welcoming them to the Supreme Court during our annual conference, affording them the opportunity to experience one of the most important institutions in the country.”

That statement was supported by former staff and scholarship winners, who in interviews said Justice Thomas often connected individually with students and took an ongoing interest in their lives.

Three decades ago, when Justice Thomas joined Horatio Alger, “We tried to get above the controversy and take a measure of his success,” the group’s awards chairman, James R. Moffett, said at the time.

The organization, according to Armstrong Williams, made Justice Thomas “realize that not everyone judges him by the confirmation process, particularly among people of that class and wealth group. They really treated him like a brother, like he mattered and, in return, he opened up the Supreme Court.”

An excerpt from the schedule for the April 2018 new-members induction. The Horatio Alger Association has been afforded rare access to the courtroom for such events.

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The association has used access to the court ceremony and related events in the annual gathering to raise money for scholarships and other programming, according to fund-raising records reviewed by The Times.

The court discourages using its facilities, or the justices, to help raise money. In 2014, a court official emailed Horatio Alger staff members a reminder that photographs of the courtroom ceremony were “for internal use only by the association” and “may not be used for any promotional or fund-raising purpose.”

Justice Thomas’s use of the courtroom for the Horatio Alger Association, while hardly unprecedented, is quite rare. That special access and affiliation with Justice Thomas have become central to the identities of the organization and its members. Several have said they counted among their proudest achievements having Justice Thomas bestow their Horatio Alger medallions at the Supreme Court.

“He really seemed to like the fact that everyone else enjoys being in the courtroom,” said Mr. Hutcherson. Among people of almost inexhaustible wealth, “he could give them that, and nobody else could.”

A document excerpt reads: “I assure you that nothing comes close to this experience … having been one of the 212 Members who have been presented their Horatio Alger medallion by Justice Thomas over two decades here in the United States Supreme Court.”

An excerpt from Mr. Sokol’s draft remarks for the April 2012 induction ceremony at the court.

Armstrong Williams came to have ambivalent feelings about the justice’s involvement in Horatio Alger. He loved to see the joy his old friend took in it, especially when working with young people.

“I don’t know anything that has brought him more delight,” Mr. Williams said. “Let me tell you, Horatio Alger has been one of the best things that has ever happened to him.”

But it also introduced the justice to a “whole different ecosystem” from the Black conservatives with whom he had come up in Washington.

“This is also about power and prestige,” Mr. Williams said. “I mean, Thomas is on the Supreme Court. Even though they provide for these kids, this is the true aristocracy of America.”

The Horatio Alger Association has repeatedly celebrated Justice Thomas. It has made him an honorary board member and twice created scholarships named after his son, Jamal. Both scholarships were unusual in that they directed money to two Virginia prep schools, instead of paying for college or graduate school. One, established at Fork Union Military Academy in 2002, overlapped with the attendance there of a young man whom Justice Thomas mentored. The other, begun at Randolph-Macon Academy in 2007, coincided with Justice Thomas’s great-nephew’s time there.

“Recipients were selected by the individual schools and, to our knowledge, scholarships were not awarded to” the students connected to Justice Thomas, a spokeswoman for the Horatio Alger Association said, adding that, overall, about 30 students have received the scholarships. Both schools declined to comment.

Reputation Defenders

Justice Thomas has never been among the wealthier members of the Supreme Court, according to his financial disclosures. In addition to his judicial salary — now $285,400 — his disclosures show $1.5 million he received for his autobiography, as well as income from teaching, which has been capped at roughly $30,000 a year for every justice. Without disclosing the amount, he also lists income from his wife, a political consultant whose ventures have been underwritten by ideological allies like the Heritage Foundation and Mr. Crow.

But he is hardly alone among his colleagues in accepting benefits from rich friends and sympathetic organizations.

Justice Antonin G. Scalia’s disclosures, for example, show that he took 258 subsidized trips from 2004 to 2014, to destinations that included Switzerland, Ireland and Hawaii. He died, in 2016, while staying for free at the West Texas hunting lodge of a business executive whose company had recently had a case before the Supreme Court. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg disclosed more trips than any other justice in 2018. During a trip to Israel to accept a lifetime achievement award, she was a guest of the Israeli billionaire Morris Kahn; the year before, the court had given his company a victory by declining to take up a case. In a ranked list of privately paid travel by justices from 2004 to 2014, Justice Thomas came in second to last, but that covered a period when Justice Thomas had stopped disclosing gifts and trips beyond those related to teaching, speeches and conferences.

As Justice Thomas became a fixture at the Horatio Alger Association, he gained entree to the lives of some of the wealthy members at its core.

In January 2002, the justice and his wife attended a Horatio Alger board meeting at a resort developed on a former sugar plantation in Jamaica. Before a performance by Johnny and June Carter Cash, the Thomases conducted a “special session” for members, records show. It is unclear how they traveled to Jamaica or who paid for their stay.

In 2005, when Horatio Alger held a board meeting in Vancouver, Canada, Justice Thomas R.S.V.P.’d for an excursion to Mr. Washington’s property on Stuart Island, off the coast of British Columbia. The justice did not end up attending because he was at the funeral of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, said a spokeswoman for the Horatio Alger Association. Mr. Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

In the 2000s, Justice Thomas made annual visits to South Florida to help Mr. Huizenga, the Dolphins owner, pass out scholarships, sometimes also meeting with the team. At least once, Justice Thomas flew in a private jet emblazoned with the Dolphins logo. Another time, a helicopter whisked him off the Dolphins’ practice field, according to Mr. Hutcherson, who attended the Florida trips.

“I love the Dolphins,” the justice said one year, before explaining his dual allegiance to Mr. Jones’s Dallas Cowboys. “I’m a Dolphins fan. Primarily a Cowboys fan, but a Dolphins fan also.”

In 2001, Mr. Huizenga’s foundation donated $25,000 to help restore, expand and name a wing of Savannah’s Carnegie Library in honor of Justice Thomas, records show. (Mr. Crow donated $175,000.) The library had been open to Black people during segregation, and Justice Thomas had spent many hours there in his youth.

In 2017, the year before Mr. Huizenga died, he held a “quiet, private meeting” with the justice at a Florida home of Mr. Sokol, according to a Horatio Alger publication. Mr. Sokol was out of town at the time, but he, too, had developed a bond with Justice Thomas.

Their friendship has extended beyond Horatio Alger, especially to University of Nebraska sports fandom, as their families share roots in the state. (Mrs. Thomas is from Omaha, as is Mr. Sokol, who spent more than a decade at the Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway before resigning in 2011.)

Mr. Sokol and Justice Thomas at a 2018 football game at the University of Nebraska, where they have enjoyed all-access passes and other V.I.P. treatment.

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Together, Justice Thomas and Mr. Sokol, a major donor to the school, have enjoyed royal treatment at Cornhuskers football games, sitting in a suite with all-access passes, according to emails obtained through a public records request. After one stay in Nebraska, Mr. Sokol and Justice Thomas wrote to a contact at the university to express their thanks. “I echo what David Sokol said in his email. We LOVED our visit,” the justice wrote, adding, “There IS no place like Nebraska!”

The Thomases and the Sokols have also vacationed together in recent years. One 2020 photo shows the justice and Mr. Sokol standing behind a barbecue grill, wearing matching white chef’s toques. Another from the same year shows them on the deck of a boat. In a third, from 2022, they are wearing tie-dyed shirts; the caption reads, “Fishermen in tie-dye (good luck).”

In response to questions from The Times, Mr. Sokol described Justice Thomas as “a national treasure and a genuine example of the existence of the American dream,” and added, “I am a much better person because of our friendship.”

Mr. Sokol became one of the justice’s most vocal defenders when a 2016 HBO film resurfaced Anita Hill’s allegations. He published an opinion essay in The Washington Times, appeared on Lou Dobbs’s Fox News show and gave a speech at a Connecticut library in which he said the justice had faced “lies, innuendo, distortions and outright personal attacks.”

The HBO film prompted a response, a slickly produced documentary titled “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.”

As the credits roll, a list of its funders appears: among them Mr. Crow and friends from Horatio Alger, including Mr. Sokol and Mr. Washington. (New York Times).

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Frightening. We should be concerned. Hitler began in this German state.

A German county elected a far-right candidate for the first time since the Nazi era, raising concern.

SONNEBERG, Germany (AP) — Mike Knoth is more than thrilled that a far-right populist party’s candidate recently won the county administration in his hometown in rural eastern Germany for the first time since the Nazi era.

The gardener despises the country’s established parties, he doesn’t trust the media and he feels there are too many migrants in the country. The far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, he hopes, will improve everything that’s not going well in his eyes in Sonneberg, which is in the southeastern state of Thuringia.

“I think the fact that so many people voted for Alternative for Germany has already given it legitimacy,” Knoth, 50, said during an interview this week as he walked his dog down the town’s deserted main shopping street.

But some in Sonneberg haven’t been won over by the AfD’s nationalist and antidemocratic rhetoric.

Margret Sturm, an optometrist whose family has been selling glasses in Sonneberg for almost 60 years, voiced her concern in an interview with a public television station.

“I told them that I don’t think it’s good to vote for the AfD. And whoever votes for the AfD must know that they have the Nazis in tow,” Sturm told The Associated Press in an interview in her store.

Sturm can barely fathom what happened after the interview was aired last week.

“We got hate mail, threatening phone calls, every minute. We were insulted by people we don’t even know, who don’t know us, who don’t know the business.”

The threats were so relentless that Sturm’s husband installed surveillance cameras inside the store.

But Sturm, 60, said she wouldn’t let anybody silence her.

“People here are afraid to take a stand against the AfD and that makes us even more worried than anything else.”

She said that other residents who oppose the AfD no longer want to voice their criticism openly.

“That’s exactly the kind of intimidation that basically results from the machinery of hatred and incitement and then sadly spreads. And that really worries me,” said Stephan Kramer, the head of Thuringia’s state domestic intelligence agency, told the AP at his office in the state capital, Erfurt.

Kramer has warned for years that the AfD’s Thuringia branch is particularly radical and put it under official surveillance more than two years ago as a “proven right-wing extremist” group.

It doesn’t bother Knoth that the AfD is under surveillance for its ties to far-right extremists.

It was elected democratically, and I don’t find anything offensive about it,” he said.

Knoth expects the AfD to take a law-and-order approach, curb immigration and make Germany safe.

Tackling migration and fighting crime are hardly topics that belong to the job description of a local county administrator, but the AfD’s Robert Sesselmann campaigned successfully on these themes.

The runoff election in Sonneberg county last month pitted Sesselmann against center-right rival Jürgen Köpper. Official figures showed that Sesselmann won by 52.8% to 47.2%.

Sonneberg has a relatively small population of 56,800, but the win was a symbolic milestone for the AfD.

The unemployed Radoslaw Schneider, 39, also expects things to improve now that Sesselmann is in charge. He said that AfD “believes that something needs to be done also for the Germans,” and foreigners should no longer get preferential treatment — which will happen now with AfD in power, he thinks.

Alternative for Germany first entered the national parliament in 2017 following an anti-migrant campaign in response to a mass arrival of refugees in Europe.

Now a decade old, the party has been polling at record levels nationally with between 18% and 20% of support.

Center-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition with the environmentalist Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats, meanwhile, faces strong headwinds over high immigration, a plan to replace millions of home heating systems, and a reputation for infighting, while inflation remains high.

AfD’s Thuringia leader, Björn Höcke, has espoused revisionist views of Germany’s Nazi past. In 2018, he called the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a “monument of shame” and called for Germany to perform a “180-degree turn” when it comes to the way it remembers its past.

In the early 1930s, Thuringia was one of the first power bases of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party.

Nowadays, the AfD appeals especially to people in the formerly communist and less prosperous eastern states, such as Thuringia.

The coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s war in Ukraine and the influx of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees to Germany have also contributed to AfD’s success, Katharina König-Preuss, a state lawmaker with The Left party in Thuringia, said during an interview in the state parliament in Erfurt.

The AfD has been putting the blame for many problems squarely on immigrants or the national government, she said.

“I would say that a great deal of these racist narratives, which don’t match reality at all, have now caught on with a larger part of the East German population,” said König-Preuss, who is one of the most outspoken critics of the AfD and has received several death threats.

Scholz tried to play down the recent rise of the far-right populists.

“Germany has been a strong democracy for a long time now, since World War II,” Scholz told reporters in Berlin last week after being asked what he’s doing to prevent a resurgence of fascism 77 years since Hitler’s demise.

It was Germany’s Nazi rule, which led to the murder of 6 million European Jews and others, and more than 60 million dead in World War II, that gives Kramer sleepless nights.

“When I look at this development in Germany, the country where industrial mass murder was driven to perfection, then this is different from all other countries,” he said.

In autumn 2024, there will be state elections in Thuringia. The AfD leads in the polls with more than 30%.

If the AfD, which is currently still shunned by all other mainstream parties in Germany, becomes part of the state government, then Kramer, who is Jewish, will leave the country with his family.

“We’ve seen before in history where that can lead,” he said. “And I must honestly confess, I have no desire to wait for it to occur again.” (Associated Press)

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For fans of “Great British Baking Show” - and anyone who enjoys watching Brits of a certain age touring America.

Prue Leith’s Great American Road Trip.

The “Great British Baking Show” judge steps out of the tent to sample the flavors of the U.S. on a 2,200-mile drive.

Last fall, my husband and I set our hearts on renting an R.V. for a road trip from Los Angeles to Florida. We imagined picnicking on mountaintops in New Mexico, sleeping under the stars in Texas and barbecuing prawns (the R.V. would come with a grill, of course) on a Mississippi levee. In the end, our 2,200-mile American journey ended up being memorable, but for none of those reasons.

“We can’t accept anyone over 70 with a British driver’s license,” insisted the woman on the phone. I’m 83, but in my head I’m a sprightly 60, and my husband, John, is 76. Nobody had warned us about this potential obstacle. If they had the same age cutoff for Americans, I thought, the R.V. business would collapse.

We called another company. Their rep said he’d never heard of any age restriction. “No problem,” he said. “We’ve got the perfect R.V. for you.” Except it was 45 feet long. The thought of parking something the size of a London bus was too much, even for my gung-ho husband.

Common sense prevailed, and we rented a Ford Explorer.

NEW MEXICO

Salsa and sticker shock

We were overdue for a break. Aside from my usual job eating cake as a judge on “The Great British Baking Show,” I’d been doing trial runs of my one-woman stage show in Britain and the United States, and it had been exhausting.

So, before we set off on our great adventure, we rented a mobility scooter for two and hit the boardwalk at Venice Beach, in Los Angeles. But our crawl through the deafeningly loud music, junk food and stands selling shorts emblazoned with vulgar words and messages like “Beat Me” did little to re-energize our spirits.

On the day we left California, torrents of rain were falling. By the time we crossed into Arizona, the sun had exploded over the hills in a glorious display of opera lighting.

We made it as far as Santa Fe, N.M., where our hotel, the Vanessie, a charming collection of wooden buildings around a courtyard was, like everywhere, suffering from a lack of staff. The single employee handed us a laminated notice: “Our restaurant, room service and bar are currently closed. A $30 service charge will be added to your bill.”

Happily, Vara Vinoteca, across the street, was open. We ate tiny padrón peppers stuffed with cream cheese and cumin, tuna ceviche and pineapple salsa, and a small bowl of warm, slightly curried mussels in the shell, all served with a flight of four glasses of different California cabernet sauvignons.

I’d have been happy to have all our meals in that simple little room. But Santa Fe brims with good restaurants, quirky architecture, art museums and shops stuffed with desirable things, so we set off to explore. John fell in love with a hatter’s shop, where he bought two authentic Stetsons. He also spent eye-watering amounts of money on two baseball caps for his grandsons. Is there a difference between a $41 and a $5 baseball cap? Apparently.

John was equally dumbfounded at my lusting after an irresistible $150 necklace made from cut-up plastic water bottles and sprayed with red, black and gold paint. Vibrant, bouncy, light as a feather — it was a work of art. But apparently it was a piece that, at least for us, money couldn’t buy: The shop’s credit card system required a U.S. ZIP code, and cash was not accepted. We gave up.

Prices constantly amazed us. The exchange rate has made the U.S. shockingly expensive for Brits, and taxes and tip on top of that? I’m already vaguely offended to be expected to tip when buying a coffee at a counter. And now with the touch screens suggesting tips of 15 percent and up, a latte feels like a major purchase. Only petrol seemed cheap, at half the U.K. price.

TEXAS

Where astronauts dare to dine

“Boring, flat, brown, goes on forever”: Everyone said we’d hate Texas. But we loved it. Maybe because I grew up in the wide-open spaces of South Africa, the little towns with not much more than a windmill and a church touched my heart.

We stopped for lunch at Dirk’s, a Lubbock diner packed with locals eating chicken tenders, sticky ribs and burgers, all flooded with gloopy barbecue sauce and followed by doughnuts or pancakes in a lake of syrup.

The waiter seemed puzzled when I asked, “Do you have any green vegetables?” Then he smiled and said, “Oh, yes, we have green beans.” They turned out to be canned beans in a cloying juice.

We were also puzzled by the way American waiters routinely congratulate you on your menu choice, rewarding you with “Good choice,” “Excellent” or even “Awesome.” You want fries with that? “Awesome!”

By the time we got to San Antonio, we were ready for a drink. A waterside cafe among the raised flower beds, paved walks and roving mariachi bands of the River Walk delivered first-class margaritas (freezing, salt on only one edge of the glass, not too sweet) and still-warm tortilla chips. Watching the young waiter make guacamole at a riverside table was a joy: knife razor-sharp, chile fresh, avocado and tomato perfectly ripe. And his judgment was fine — a smidge of chopped raw red onion, a decent squeeze of lime, and a generous grind of pepper and salt, all turned together gently rather than crudely mashed. I found myself eating very slowly, just to hold on to that flavor as long as possible.

We had the worst meal of our whole trip not far away in the Texas Hill Country tourist town of Fredericksburg, which prides itself on its German heritage. We’d spent a happy morning touring the shops, museums and galleries of the town’s north end, and enjoyed a lunch of fried chicken sandwiches and banana walnut pancakes.

So we had high hopes for the south side. But sadly its historic houses were full of tourist junk like plastic stein mugs and Barbie dolls squeezed into lederhosen. We retreated to a restaurant whose menu boasted of authentic German dishes. We were served pork chops ruined by oversweet gravy, tasteless sauerkraut, sweet and vinegary red cabbage, and potato mash obviously made with powdered mix that had not been brought to a boil. We abandoned our plates and went back to our motel to microwave emergency rations of Campbell’s tomato soup.

The next day, on our way to Houston, we passed a roadside church whose huge hoarding exhorted us to “Give Up Lust — Take Up Jesus.” I thought that sign might be my most abiding memory, until I’d spent a few hours at the Space Center Houston. I never guessed I’d be so riveted by topics like the geology of the moon and how NASA astronauts train underwater.

But the cafeteria! It is astonishing, the best I’ve ever seen anywhere in a public building: brioche or sourdough sandwiches, homemade soups, hot roasts and grills, fresh tortillas, a salad bar to tempt the most die-hard carnivore, and no junk food in sight. It was a long way from the usual NASA fare of freeze-dried food in pouches and tubes.

LOUISIANA

How to nurse a hangover

Louisiana is famous for gumbos and étouffées, so I was expecting gastronomy as we crossed the state line and drove toward Louisiana State University’s Rural Life Museum, a Cajun heritage village in Baton Rouge. I guess I was overly optimistic. The jambalaya and blackened fish in the cafe were tasteless and dried out. I’ve had better Cajun food in London.

Plantation Alley, along the Great Mississippi Road, with its half a dozen “Gone With the Wind”-style estates, now open to the public, swept me away. The most beautiful of them was Oak Alley, with its avenue of 250-year-old Southern live oaks, their branches creating a vast green tunnel. But I couldn’t understand how the magnificent trees were obviously much older than the house. It turns out that these oaks are native to the area, and had once grown all over the estate. When the house was built in 1836, enslaved workers were made to dig up 28 of the huge 60- to 70-year-old trees, with root systems equal to the size of their canopies, and replant them in an avenue down to the Mississippi levee.

The Great Mississippi Road eventually leads to New Orleans and the famous French Quarter, with its balconies of elaborate wrought iron — a daytime picture of Victorian good taste. We, ignorant Brits, had no idea that at night on Bourbon Street, that “good taste” became the flavor of daiquiris, pizza and hot dogs against a backdrop of bands belting out rock ’n’ roll, small children beating dustbins, grown-ups playing jazz, and the raucous din of drunken tourists until 3 a.m.

But I liked the party atmosphere, and I’m mighty partial to a daiquiri, so we set off on a pub crawl. I now know that the secret to a good mango daiquiri is fresh mango, and not bottled mango syrup. And the next morning, after one too many mango delights and little sleep, I learned that shrimp and grits, with a good grating of cheese, is the perfect hangover cure.

FLORIDA

Turkey, sweet potatoes and slice of modern Eden

Our road trip ended, as it had started, at a beach. Only this one was a mercifully far cry from the Venice boardwalk.

We had rented a house for the week in the small Florida Panhandle community of Seacrest Beach, on the Emerald Coast along Highway 30A. This eight-mile strip — a kind of manufactured, perfectly designed modern Eden — consists of 16 neighborhoods on white-sand beaches between Pensacola and Panama City. Developments with names like Rosemary Beach, Seagrove Beach, Alys Beach, Grayton Beach and WaterColor share the perfect sands and the desired 30A address.

Everyone rides around on bikes, and perfectly tanned mothers gossip over kombucha and wheatgrass at sidewalk cafes. Even the children look straight out of an upmarket catalog.

Friends of friends, on holiday, invited us to their Thanksgiving dinner — turkey with all the trimmings, sweet potatoes, pecan pie and ice cream. In thanking them, I said something about the pleasure of such generosity, family closeness and their children’s politeness. Our host laughed. It’s because we’re from the South, she said. It wouldn’t be the same in Chicago. Perhaps for the next road trip, I’ll take a northern route to see if that’s true.

I’m glad we failed to rent my dream Winnebago back in Los Angeles. If we’d succeeded, we’d never have experienced a traditional American family Thanksgiving. We’d have been in a trailer park, eating takeout. Thank you, Lady Luck. (New York Times).

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Her last World Cup.

Megan Rapinoe’s retirement announcement stirs emotions with a World Cup to come.

Megan Rapinoe texted her USWNT teammates in their shared group chat to warn them: the moment was finally here. And on a brisk Saturday morning in a tent behind PayPal Park in San Jose, Ca., with the drone of incoming and outgoing airplanes overhead, Rapinoe announced that this would be her final World Cup and her final season with OL Reign. 

The announcement that her 17-year career as a professional player would soon come to a close was one that she said she could make with “a really deep sense of peace and gratitude and excitement.”

Rapinoe, eyes shining at times but never spilling over, spoke only for about two minutes on Saturday, thanking head coach Vlatko Andonovski for the platform — her surprise appearance came ahead of one of his final pressers ahead of the team’s departure for the World Cup, and  USWNT press officer Aaron Heifetz joked he was unlikely to get many questions thereafter (he didn’t). Rapinoe also thanked the rest of her coaches and teammates for their role in her long and illustrious career.

“I could have just never imagined where this beautiful game would have taken me,” she said. “I feel so honored to be able to have represented this country and this federation for so many years. It’s truly been the greatest thing that I’ve ever done, and something that I’m so grateful for.”

She had watched her fiancée Sue Bird, go through this same decision only a year before, another player so deeply tied to women’s professional sports in Seattle, for the United States. Rapinoe noted on Saturday that with all the questions she was already receiving, it felt strange — unsettling even — to know that she had made the call, knew the timeline, but that she had to “lie by omission” up to this point. 

There’s no denying that Rapinoe, 38, had struggled with injuries for a few years, even going back to the 2019 World Cup. The question of when has been on her mind since the final whistle of U.S. victory in World Cup final in Lyon, she admitted. But, she said, her body has held up to allow her to be in this moment. She has the trust of the team for a major tournament. Her role has changed, undoubtedly, but there’s never been any doubt about what Rapinoe has brought to this team as a leader, a locker room presence, a fighter, sometimes even a bit of a trickster god on the field, doing things simply out of joy or curiosity or sheer humor.

As Rapinoe said, this has been a long time brewing, but there’s a difference between knowing it’s coming in the theoretical sense and seeing her up on a podium, in a setting as surreal as the one here in San Jose. As someone who’s spent plenty of time watching her play, interviewing her, writing about her (including plenty of times for this very site over the past four years), thinking about Megan Rapinoe the player, the activist, the one who’s transcended the sport, the human, there was a part of me that knew as soon as she ducked under the flap in the tent out back of the stadium, on her way to the dais, sunglasses on, a set in her jaw that meant she was here to Say Something. 

After her statement, Heifetz called on me for the first question. I had raised my hand out of habit — I certainly knew I wanted to ask a question, but my brain (and heart) were still stuck in processing mode. “I don’t even know where to begin,” I said. Part honest admission, part stall. In the end, I settled for asking about the emotions of the moment, balancing them with the game and trip ahead. She answered, as always, honestly though not without humor. “I would have liked an extra day,” she said with a wry smile.

It’s not every day a press conference closes with a round of applause. I can’t really remember another time it’s happened in my decade-plus of being in them. At times, it makes sense, it wouldn’t happen because there simply were not enough reporters there to start one, but for Rapinoe? The day before the send-off match? Even she looked a touch surprised when the clapping started.

Before disappearing back to the locker room, she paused for hugs with former USWNT players Shannon Boxx and Julie Foudy on broadcast duty, even as she joked with Foudy about how had never actually overlapped on the team. Even then, with the press conference done and everyone heading out for player interviews, every step she took was being filmed, photographed. Every moment now, in the after, feels different. Everyone tried to capture a sense of that feeling, how something had changed.

Emotions were running high among Rapinoe’s current USWNT teammates when they spoke with reporters afterward, too. Every player passing through was asked about their teammate, from Alex Morgan (also of the four-timers club for the World Cup) to the young guns like Naomi Girma.

Every relationship between teammates is different and special, but the one between Crystal Dunn and Megan Rapinoe has been one of the most amazing to watch, even from a distance. If they’re in a USWNT camp together, it’s guaranteed I have photos of the two of them cracking each other up in training, or dancing. Always dancing.

“P is an incredible person, human being, friend, teammate,” Dunn began, before giving way to the emotions of the moment.

“I love her so much. She’s been so key for me and my career,” she continued while trying to not break fully into tears. After a breath, she joked that Rapinoe copied her blue hair for the World Cup, allowing the humor to help her through her answer.

She said that Rapinoe had reached out after Dunn had been left off the 2015 World Cup roster, but tore up the NWSL that summer, that Rapinoe had had expressed her admiration and appreciation. The 2019 World Cup cemented their friendship. Left unsaid, though, was how Rapinoe choosing to kneel through the national anthem back in 2016 was a risk Dunn felt at the time she couldn’t take. “I also remember telling her that I had to stand because I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m scared for my job. I’m scared that it’s going to look differently if a black girl on the team kneels,” Dunn said during a roundtable three years ago.

If there was a common thread amongst her teammates reactions, it was that they all had a new shared reason to win the World Cup this summer.

“One thing I did tell her in the beginning of this year was, ‘You know, I have no idea if this is your last one, but I’m going to do whatever it takes to get myself into a place where I can help this team win,’” Dunn said. “Obviously send her off the way that she deserves, which is the queen that she is. So that’s what I’m going to try to do.”

Morgan told reporters that when Rapinoe texted the group, she had only one response.

“Well, now we just have to win the whole damn thing.”

It’s not yet the time for the career retrospectives, the told and untold stories from teammates, the emotional video packages from U.S. Soccer, Nike, you name it. #ThankYouMegan’s time will come. There’s work ahead, yet, both in Australia/New Zealand and back at home with OL Reign at Lumen Field later this year too. 

But first, it was just business as usual, training out on the surface at PayPal under the bright California sun, her teammates drifting in and out of conversation, Dunn heading over for their usual chat. Blue hair, pink boots, tank top and tucked shorts, an easy smile. Tomorrow afternoon, the stands will be filled to the brim; Rapinoe’s name will bring the house down. Then: a plane ride down under, and the real work begins. (The Athletic).

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