SAY WHAT?

SAY WHAT? - It's an apt day to pay tribute to Native American actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather, who died earlier this month after a lifetime of "keeping my voice and the voices of (our) people alive" - most famously, in a commanding, 60-second speech at the 1973 Academy Awards when she rejected an award on behalf of Marlon Brando to protest "the treatment of American Indians (by) the film industry." A 26-year-old member of the Screen Actors' Guild, she was the first woman of color and the first indigenous woman to use the Awards to make a political statement - now, a common gesture, but at the time a radical act by a gutsy young woman who'd lived a hard life "between two worlds." Her father was a mix of Apache and Yaqui, her mother was white, both were mentally ill and unable to care for her; in her teens, confused about her identity, she'd had a breakdown: "I could not tell the difference between me and my pain." But amidst the birth of a Native American rights movement in the 1960s and early 70s, she began visiting reservations, traveling to activist actions and re-learning Native traditions: "The old people...taught us young people how to be Indian again. It was wonderful."

SAY WHAT? - The shiny, sordid, calamitous political spectacle and immorality tale that is Herschel Walker's Senate campaign is still unspooling after the predictable revelation the hard-core "pro-life" philanderer with (at least) three covert kids paid for a girlfriend's abortion, and likely more than one. Despite his campaign's dubious boast that Walker's messy, violent, fabrication-filled past reflects his "commitment to excellence," his effort to unseat the decorous and competent incumbent Raphael Warnock to flip Georgia - and possibly, scarily the Senate - back to red has been a train wreck of lies, gaffes, dodges and unintelligible word saladabout China's bad air stealing our good air because, no, obviously, as a psycopathic loser he is not fit to serve tea, never mind in Congress, but since when has that stopped Republicans? On Monday, The Daily Beast's meticulously documented bombshell charged that Walker - a rabid fan of forced birth who's repeatedly said he's never abetted an abortion and who's dismissed exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of a mother as “excuses” - paid for a 2009  abortion for a woman he got pregnant. Walker, unmarried at the time, told the woman it wasn't "the right time for him to have a child"; he failed to tell her he'd already fathered a child that year with someone else. The woman told Daily Beast that after months of hearing Walker compare abortion to murder, "I just can't with the hypocrisy anymore."

SAY WHAT? - In resistance both poignant and enraged, thousands of Iranians - largely women but also many men - have thronged the streets for the last two weeks to protest the murder in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old  Kurdish woman reportedly beaten to death after being arrested by Iran's brutal "morality police" for... improperly wearing the hijab. From the northwestern city of Saqez, Amini was visiting Tehran with her family Sept. 13 when she was arrested by the officially named Guidance Patrol, who enforce the Islamic Republic's strict dress code, for  "unsuitable attire." Her family were told she would be released from the police station after a “re-education session.” Instead, eyewitnesses said police beat her in the police van, and again at the station. Amini collapsed a few hours later, was taken to Kasra Hospital, fell into a coma, and died three days later. Police say she suffered sudden heart failure; her family say she had no heart problems, a leaked medical report showed severe head injuries and skull fractures, and seemingly everyone in Iran except those in power believe Amini was murdered by the state agents of “a monster which came out from the deepest and darkest cave of religious fanaticism.”

SAY WHAT? - As always, the competition was stiff. But this week's Head-Spinning Right-Wing Hypocrisy Award goes to former A.G., longtime fan of mass incarceration, and egregious, serial abuser of the prosecutorial power of office as a political weapon Bill Barr, who went on the T.V. - Fox, duh - to whine that New York A.G. Letitia James suing the Trump Mafia was an "abuse of office" and "political hit job" that "grossly overreaches when she tries to drag the children into this." Whew. There are so many layers of irony, fraudulence, hilarity and out-and-out dickishness here - where to begin? James' 220-page lawsuit, the result of years of exhaustive investigation, found that for decades Trump committed even more "staggering" criminal fraud than everyone thought, issuing annual financial statements packed with lies that wildly inflated the worth of almost all his crappy properties - for example, tagging the gaudy Mar-A-Lago as worth $739 million when its actual worth was maybe $75 million - to get loans, while simultaneously deflating them to avoid paying taxes.

"With the help of his children and senior executives at the Trump Organization," James said after the lawsuit was filed, "Donald Trump falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself and cheat the system." Of course his "children" - endangered animal-killer Don Jr., 44, fashion grifter and icky daddy's girl Ivanka, 40, doofus Eric who stole money from a kids' cancer charity and took the 5th over 500 times in a deposition for the suit though "only the Mob takes the 5th," 38 - are almost middle-aged executives of a multi-million company they helped manage while raking in millions from it, and oh yeah one was a "senior presidential adviser." Still, Barr argued in laughably patronizing fashion, none had the smarts to understand things like loans or contracts or financial statements: "The children aren't going to know the details of that, nor are they expected in the real world to do their own due diligence." And besides, Hunter Biden.

SAY WHAT? - Whoa. The frenzied, hateful, gonzo base - in thrall to a cheap con man they blindly deemed "a vessel for God" - albeit a smiting, lying, transactional, grifting one - was always bad. Now, it's worse. Like, Leni Riefenstahl worse. With the pressure mounting - lawsuits, prosecutors, a Jan. 6 Committee bearing down - a flailing Trump has veered sharply to the right, threatening mob-style "problems like we've never seen" and posting brazenly QAnon-flavored missives and photos, including one sporting a "Q" lapel pin with, "A storm is coming." Subtle. Aptly, he ended "the week he went QAnon" with a feverish, hate-spewing rally in Youngstown, Ohio. Ostensibly there to endorse cracker Senate candidate J.D. Vance - ever-gracious, he sneered, "J.D. is kissing my ass" - he was really there to rave, literally. Ulysseus? Introduced by an equally demented Klan Mom MTG - he is the GOP's "one true leader" and God help us all - he railed to the less-than-massive crowd about a fictional America in ruins: No border, invasion by "millions of illegal aliens," crashing economy, enemy-of-the-people media, "horrible convicts," spying Obama, an "unhinged persecution." Aaron Rupar - thanks again for sitting through this - summarized the tired jeremiad: “Murders, shootings stabbings, r-r-r-rapes, carjackings are skyrocketing.”

SAY WHAT? - On a good day for duplicitous zealots peculiarly fixated on controlling women's bodies, Lindsey Graham, a childless, partnerless ghoul who's never experienced any pregnancy welcome or not, proposed a nationwide abortion ban backed only by a tiny, rabid minority that four months ago, and many times before, he insisted he opposed in the name of evidently fictional "states' rights," offering up a mountain of lies, dodges, racist taunts and delusional gobbledygook in a hapless attempt to mask his hypocrisy. Graham boasted his "Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children from Late-Term Abortions Act," a title he may have swiped from John Cleese, reflects "a consensus view by the most prominent pro-life groups in America," seemingly unaware that, ideologically, the most prominent pro-life groups in America reside many thousands of self-righteous miles to the right of a majority of Americans, roughly 70% of whom have long supported the right to abortion. (For proof, see even Kansas for God's sake.) The ban is also, in name and intent, a lie. "Pain-capable" fetuses at that stage, according to vast medical evidence, do not exist; and 15 weeks into a 40-week pregnancy - or two months before a fetus is viable - is not "late term," again according to established medical terminology or any pregnant woman who's tried to comfortably sleep in, say, her ninth month.

SAY WHAT? - High-minded, big-hearted, deeply substantive: We love the lofty tenor of our national political discourse. Just kidding. Aristotle's sanguine tenet, "They should rule who are able to rule best," is forcefully refuted by the Senate race in "the perennial battleground state" of Pennsylvania, where ill-equipped, pill-pushing, uber-rich clown and GOP candidate "Doc Oz in his Gucci loafers" has plunged ever deeper into the gutter with multiple debacles in his campaign against the "unapologetically progressive" John Fetterman. To wit: Oz' inflation-themed grocery shopping trip to "Wegner's" to make crudités - Fetterman: "In Pennsylvania, we call this a veggie tray" - got so badly burned it sparked a parody site. Then he mis-counted the houses he owns, claiming two when public records show it's 10; they include a Palm Beach mansion he calls "my 'chi' source" that just earned him a bigly tax exemption after a multi-million-dollar renovation paid for by years on TV hawking fake miracle cures, also hydroxychloroquine. After he crassly mocked Fetterman's May stroke - an "unconscionable" act that "goes against every tenet of medicine" - 100 doctors launched "Real Doctors Against Oz," blasting his slimy history of peddling "dangerous fad diets" and "using his medical degree (as) an ATM for personal gain," and declaring him "a major threat to public health" for his opposition to abortion. The final cringe factor: A re-surfaced interview in which he proclaimed incestuous, possibly under-age, sex between cousins "not a big problem...It's fine."

SAY WHAT? - Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on Wednesday joined several local New York Democrats in condemning Starbucks' recent firing of two union leaders in the state, part of a string of terminations the company has carried out across the country in recent months as it tries to crush worker organizing.

"We are writing to express our dismay around the firings of Austin Locke and Joselyn Chuquillanqui, two Starbucks partners who were also union leaders at their stores," the New York lawmakers wrote in a letter to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and the rest of the company's management.

"We have heard reports that the company has been targeting pro-union partners and firing union leaders all over the country," they added. "We continue to stand by these workers and would like to remind you that all workers have the right to join a union, and that retaliation based on exercising these workplace rights is unlawful."

"We urge you to respect workers' right to organize and follow the law," the lawmakers continued. "We stand in solidarity with Austin and Joselyn, and other partners in New York, in calling for you to reinstate these two workers."

Starbucks has fired dozens of union leaders across the nation since December, when employees in Buffalo voted to form the company's first union in the U.S.

SAY WHAT? - Oh dear. Even though they've spent the last furious year shrieking "Fuck Joe Biden" at the guy they revile as a decrepit, Nazi, grooming, socialist pedophile, the sleepy old man evidently hurt the poor MAGA cultists' fragile feelings the other night in Philly with his "earthquake of truth" speech correctly labeling them "a threat to this country" and "semi-fascist," but why he bothered with "semi" is beyond us. Standing before a red-lit Independence Hall, Biden noted this was where the Constitution was written, "where we set in motion (this) extraordinary experiment of self-government with three simple words: 'We, the People.'” But now "equality and democracy are under assault," he warned. "Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic." In his truth-telling, Biden noted, "Too much of what's happening in our country today is not normal," like the spectacle of the former Mobster-In-Chief still out here babbling that the Jan. 6 thugs are "very much in my mind" and if he's re-elected he would "look very, very strongly" (he still doesn't know any other adverbs) at pardoning them all from his prison cell.

SAY WHAT? - In our own ongoing "national security Hindenburg," a fed-up FBI just explosively got down to it in their latest filing against the deranged old man who stole state secrets after committing many, many other crimes, brazenly stashed them in his moldy hotel because lookit all the tawdry stuff he already got away with, and then kept/still is lying about it. A review in case you've once again sought solace under your rock: After Trump blithely, illegally took home a stash of classified information, he and his hapless merry-go-round of "lawyers" stonewalled the FBI for 18 months as they tried to get it back; when they issued a subpoena, he tossed them a few in January but kept obfuscating; when the FBI, no longer fucking around, got a search warrant, they found 33 more boxes with over 100 records, or double what he'd begrudgingly given them; he's still fighting/lying/making up gonzo arguments to get them back. Prosecutors' latest 36-page earthquake of a filing came only because Trump, in one more desperate, stupid stall, had filed his own incoherent request for an entirely pointless "special master" to oversee the investigation, thus giving the feds a chance to lay out their most comprehensive, damning, whoah-go-get-him account yet. 

SAY WHAT? - Citing the need to "reflect on the terrible toll of slavery," Joe Biden last weekend observed this country's first Slavery Remembrance Day, marking the "ignominious milestone" of the day in 1619 when the first slave ship, the British White Lion, landed in the American colonies at Virginia's Point Comfort. (Surreal names, all.) "More than 400 years ago, twenty enslaved Africans were forcibly brought to the shores of what would become the United States," Biden said in a statement. "Millions more were stolen and sold in the centuries that followed, part of a system of slavery that is America’s original sin." The official recognition of those "sins worth hiding" came as a result of a bill introduced by Dem Rep. Al Green of Texas and Sen. Elizabeth Warren; it has passed in the House but will likely languish in the Senate. In their statements, Warren and Biden both pointedly reject the right's current white-washing of history. Warren: "The horrors of slavery can never be forgotten." Biden: "Great nations don’t hide from their history. They acknowledge their past, both the triumphs and the tragedies."

SAY WHAT? - Reproductive rights advocates on Wednesday warned that pregnant people across Texas are now at risk of facing life-threatening health crises without access to emergency abortion care, following a ruling by a federal judge who rejected guidance from the Biden administration.

U.S. District Judge James Hendrix's ruling Tuesday night rejected guidance issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that—regardless of the state's abortion ban—would require Texas doctors to perform abortions in the case of a medical emergency.

Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court's right-wing majority in June, HHS issued guidance saying the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) requires medical professionals to provide abortion care to a pregnant patient experiencing a medical emergency.

The 1986 law requires anyone who comes to a hospital's emergency department to be "stabilized and treated," and the Biden administration argued that abortion care qualifies as stabilizing treatment for a pregnant person in a medical crisis.

Hendrix, who was appointed by former Republican President Donald Trump, sided with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and two doctors' associations in Texas which support forced pregnancy.

The ruling was handed down a month after the story of Houston resident Elizabeth Weller became public. Weller experienced a premature rupture of membranes at 18 weeks of pregnancy, causing her own health and that of her fetus to decline. Weller was told that under Texas's abortion ban, she would have to wait until the fetal heartbeat stopped before having a medical abortion, even as her condition worsened. An ethics committee at her local hospital eventually determined she could receive care—after an ordeal she described to NPR as a "dystopian nightmare." 

SAY WHAT? - Because girls - also young, progressive, female political leaders - just wanna have fun, video emerged last week of Finland's Prime Minister Sanna Marin on a night out joyously dancing, singing, drinking and getting down with friends, a spectacle of glad normalcy that horrified dour male misogynists who harrumphed this was Just Not Done. Cue the ensuing "absolutely stupid political scandal" known as Partygate, a "very classic 'Finnish scandal,' which is actually not a scandal at all but because Finnish politics tend to be so uptight and slightly boring you have to get creative to stir things up." At 36, Marin is the world's youngest head of state; raised by two women, she is also a fierce supporter of LGBTQ rights, the happily married (straight) mother of a four-year-old, and the  multi-faceted, competent leader of a majority-women government who since being elected two years ago has successfully advocated for Finland to join NATO and navigated growing tensions with neighboring Russia after their invasion of Ukraine - all while periodically taking time out to attend music festivals, looking very cool yet. Still, because misogyny, Marin has been criticized for having a life beyond work; in the recently leaked video, she was filmed rowdily singing and dancing with several friends in the private VIP room of a nightclub in Helsinki.

SAY WHAT? - So....Given his hapless, tone-deaf, kamikaze campaign ads, maybe millionaire carpetbagger, quack huckster of magic-cure-everything pills, and "ridiculous performance artist that is Mehmet Oz" doesn't want to beat Lt. Gov. John Fetterman to become a GOP senator for Pennsylvania after all. Like several other famous but otherwise woefully unqualified GOP candidates, the guy who once ate a $2,000, gold-encrusted steak while playing a tacky doctor on TV carries as much ill-fitting baggage into a key battleground race as the traveling professor transformed, in a terrific MeidasTouch ad, into a slippery Wizard of Lies. Dorothy to the Wizard: "You're a very bad man." A well-known, Trump-endorsed snake-oil salesman - sex-bots! - Oz and his business got hit this summer with the largest ever class-action lawsuit settlement, over $5 million, for lying about a "magic weight loss cure" that wasn't; he later managed to whittle down the payment to $625,000, a pittance compared to an estimated net worth of over $100 million that would make him one of the fattest cats in the Senate. Not only is he a rich crook; he's also a famously longtime New Jersey resident who might actually still live there, despite running for the Senate seat in a hyper-localized Pennsylvania  where residents proudly identify by county, city, even neighborhood.

SAY WHAT? - Hoo boy. In the wake of an FBI search (not raid) that apoplectic MAGA-ites are hysterically, simultaneously likening to the KGB, Gestapo, Stasi, unsavory antics of Third-World thugs and "the worst attack on this republic in modern history," the guy who's repeatedly said "only the mob takes the 5th" just took the 5th over 440 times for six hours when asked by prosecutors reportedly armed with "pulverizing" evidence about his (pretty sordid-sounding) business practices. Still, furious if ignorant fans are shrieking that "if they can do that to a former president" - search his trashy McMansion - "imagine what they can do to you," and besides the IRS is coming for you and the FBI will probably plant something so now it's finally - finally! - time to bring out your guns for a shiny new civil war. One typical response among a gazillion came from gonzo Trumpy Arizona nominee for governor Kari Lake who feverishly charged "this illegitimate, corrupt Regime hates America," which is why, that "darkest day," "our Government, originally created by the people, turned against us." "Our Government is rotten to the core," she railed about a law enforcement agency doing its job. "These tyrants will stop at nothing. If we accept it, America is dead." Note to self: If clueless zealots like her gain power, she may have a point.

SAY WHAT? - Improbably, things just keep getting weirder. Even as the FBI raids "my beautiful home Mar-A-Lago," we have the mind-bending spectacle of venal, mendacious, murderous warmonger Dick 'Dr. Doom' Cheney - who lied us into war using junk intelligence, championed torture from "rectal re-hydrating" to waterboarding, and "would do it again" - emerging from the dark side to claim the moral high ground in a campaign ad for his daughter that eviscerates Orange Guy as a liar, loser, coward and greatest threat to the republic ever, except maybe for himself. So: Darth Vader trashing Gollum, Lord Voldemort ripping Elmer Gantry, Hannibal Lector torching The Joker. Yeah, no cognitive dissonance here. "In our nation's 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump," says Dick at the start of a spot for Liz, who's trailing in her Wyoming primary against Harriet 'Big-Lie' Hageman for calling out Trump for the tin-pot, sociopathic buffoon he is. "He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters rejected him. He is a coward. A real man wouldn't lie...He lost his election and he lost big." Oof. Harsh.

To cheesy musak we think is meant to sound patriotic, Cheney adds, “Liz is fearless...There is nothing more important she will ever do than lead the effort to make sure Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office.” Now, the conundrum. God love anyone, even named Cheney, working to make sure Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office. 'Cause, hey, c'mon. This is the guy who, just in this week's disclosures, griped he wished his generals were more like Hitler's; had flunkies giving campaign data to Russian agents; evidently really did flush documents down his toilets; is still out here idiotically babbling; and when the FBI executed a search warrant Monday night, ranted hysterically on his low-rent Truth Social that "these are dark times for our Nation" because Mar-A-Lago is "under siege, raided and occupied" by the FBI in "a weaponization of the Justice System (by) radical left Democrats (that) could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries," also Russia Russia Russia scam, impeachment hoax, and her emails, also antique furniture. So absolutely, take him down by any means necessary and before it's too late, though it may already be.

SAY WHAT? - In our first glimpse at a post-Dobbs political landscape, the reverberations are still flowing from the "thunderclap" of deep-red Kansas voting by a "staggering" margin to protect women's access to abortion as "every woman's choice, and not the government's." The explosive backfire on a key front of the right's culture wars came in a GOP-majority state long pivotal in the abortion fight - see the Summer of Mercy - and one so conservative it once banned Charlotte's Webfor "blasphemous" talking animals; its school libraries continue to ban books - The Handmaid's Tale, The Bluest Eye, The Hate U Give that looks at racist police, a Cats vs. Robots comicbook that mentions the word "nonbinary" - at a ferocious rate. Still, abruptly questioning a longtime, anti-choice narrative in their statehouse, Kansans came out in droves to tell those in power, "Get your hands off our bodies." Dobbs, said one, "woke up a giant."

Thank Alito. In the wake of a SCOTUS decision that "rolled a political grenade into every statehouse across the nation," residents of a heartland state Trump won by 15 points showed up in the biggest turnout for a midterm election, ever. Right-wingers had deliberately timed the vote during an August primary with typically very low, mostly Republican turnout; instead, more than 900,000 Kansans - double the number expected, four times the last primary, and almost what a presidential election draws - turned out for a landslide of 58.8% to 41.2% result. Contributing to the stunning numbers: 70% of newly registered Kansas voters were women. Twitter: "Lmao, GOP," "Thing I never thought I would say: Thank God for Kansas," and in nods to the Wizard of Oz, "Dorothy can go home now" and "We're not in Kansas anymore. Abortion rights: Yes, we are." 

SAY WHAT? - Yeah, Mr. White! Yeah, science! And now yeah, art! Encompassing every conceivable queasy contradiction, Albuquerque this weekend unveiled two larger-than-life, suitably menacing bronze statues to honor the city's fictional, iconic, enthralling and much beloved... umm...meth dealers from the masterful Breaking Bad. If you're still (understandably) under that rock: In the singular AMC show that ran from 2008 to 2013 - and is still zealously watched, debated and re-watched - Bryan Cranston plays Walter White, a schlubby, dispirited high school chemistry teacher who, after he's diagnosed with lung cancer, turns to cooking meth as a way to provide for his family once he's gone. In his gonzo new role, he recruits Jesse Pinkman, a hapless drop out, lost boy and two-bit drug dealer played by Aaron Paul, to help him navigate the city's criminal underworld. From this bleak premise sprouts Vince Gilligan's darkly hilarious, improbably moving, ever-blindsiding marvel of consummate writing, acting, directing, cinematography and music that set a twisted, artful, staggeringly high new bar - and begat two of the most epochal characters ever - in American drama. Thus do fans feverishly deem, say, BB's majestic Ozymandias episode, "The greatest achievement of mankind." Full disclosure: Yes, we love it.

SAY WHAT? - A mere month after the medieval anti-abortion ruling by a cabal of right-wing "fanatics and vandals" we still call SCOTUS, its effects are already cataclysmic. At least seven states have passed near-total bans and many more are working on them, some with monstrous features like Indiana's call for abortion-providers to serve up to six years in prison; experts predict a devastating impact on women's education, employment and income; a new study says it could lead to a 21% increase in pregnancy-related deaths. The ruling is viewed as so extreme that even Chief Justice John Roberts reportedly tried to reverse at least parts of it; with his failure, suggests Charlie Pierce, he should just resign: "Your work here is done...You've lost control of your majority (and) it's gone barking mad." With the help, one more time, of unconscionable, ever-complicit Susan Collins.

SAY WHAT? - With apologies to Charles Dickens, last week was the worst of weeks, offering grisly evidence of the cataclysmic injury to the quality of our political life and leaders these past few bleak years, from the shredding of women's rights reflected in gonzo contraception hearings to revelations of the "historic ignominy" of Trump's war on democracy. The ravaged result: Increasingly, rule by brownshirts, nitwits, charlatans and malignant clowns - ie: today's GOP - hungry for power at any cost. The dystopian spectacle of the House debating whether or not women should have access to an IUD was, of course, necessitated by the dystopian spectacle of a hard-right SCOTUS overturning Roe v Wade; it, in turn led to the realization that Clarence Thomas' medieval definition of sinful - possibly including birth control, same-sex romance and marriage equality - is, in the words of Rep. Andy Kim, "not just an opinion of one man - this is their plan." In our new, post-Dobbs world, that means libraries in Oklahoma have been warned not to say the word "abortion" or help anyone find any information on "abortion," and abortion providers in Idaho, with a six-week abortion ban, face the "uniquely evil" risk of being sued by family members of a fetus, including those of a rapist.

SAY WHAT? - Because the world is too much with us, today we choose to celebrate humanitarian, hero, mensch and chef José Andrés, who with his extraordinary World Central Kitchen has now served over 100 million meals to besieged Ukrainians - in bunkers, at the border, in their often remote, rubble-strewn homes. With its mindless, pointed destruction of ports, borders and food supply chains, Andrés charges, Putin's war of hubris has also quickly become "a war on food." In response, WCKhas created the largest humanitarian effort in Ukraine, with an "army of goodness" - thousands of volunteer food-fighters both local and international - producing over 300,000 meals a day at 350 kitchens across Ukraine. The Chefs for Ukraine run a three-pronged operation: feeding refugees in the neighboring countries to which many Ukrainian women and children have fled - Poland,  Hungary, Slovakia - activating hundreds of kitchens in towns inside the war-torn country to feed those who remain, and stockpiling and transporting food so communities can cook for themselves.