https://youtu.be/zMPMe8cYycE

Dear Commons Community,

On Thursday, the National Football League’s preseason started and during the playing of the national anthem, a number of players knelt, raised their fists or decided not to come on the field.  On Sunday, white nationalists and bigots  are expected to take to the streets, this time in front of the White House, marking one year since their hate-filled rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where one white supremacist killed counter-protester Heather Heyer.  During his CNN show yesterday, Jake Tapper slammed the president for failing to condemn the upcoming white supremacist rally in Washington, D.C., while instead bashing NFL players for taking a knee against racism and police violence during the national anthem.

Tapper accused the president of “giving a presidential megaphone to one side in a controversial cultural issue.” 

He continued: “Rather than condemn the bigots or their beliefs today, the president took aim at a different protest: a small group of NFL players calling attention to racial injustice and inequality during the national anthem.”

The president, seeing a “divided nation,” once again did the “opposite of trying to bring us together,” Tapper said.  

Authorities say that Heyer, 32, was killed when a neo-Nazi deliberately drove his vehicle into her and other counter-protesters in Charlottesville. Dozens of people were injured. Trump notoriously insisted at that time that “there were very fine people on both sides” of the confrontation.

The suspect in Heyer’s killing faces 30 charges, including first-degree murder and federal hate offenses.

Charlottesville officials have already declared a state of emergency in the city ahead of this weekend’s anniversary of the violent march.

On “CNN Tonight” on Tuesday, host Don Lemon said Trump “traffics in racism,” pointing to the president’s attacks on the intelligence of African-American public figures and his repeated criticism of the protests involving many black athletes.

Trump resumed blasting the NFL protests after Miami Dolphins Kenny Stills and Albert Wilson knelt during the anthem ahead of their opener against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Thursday.

“Stand proudly for your National Anthem or be suspended without pay!” the president tweeted.

Meanwhile, Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49er who first started kneeling during the national anthem in 2016, offered Stills and Wilson words of encouragement.

Tony

NOTE: On Saturday morning and after Jake Tapper’s commentary, Donald Trump tweeted:

Dear Commons Community,

Robert Ubell, a colleague from NYU, had an article recently focusing on the question:   Does Online Education Help Low-income Students Succeed?  Given that approximatley one-third of all colleges students take at least one fully online course a year, it is an important question for those of us in higher education to consider.   Many online students are low-income, working adults who cannot afford to attend college full-time because of financial, family and other obigations.

After reviewing the research on online education at community colleges, some of which raises alarms for fully online students, Ubell concludes that the blended (combining face-to-face and online instruction) model shows the most promise for helping all students including low-income and academically underprepared students to succeed.  He also makes several comments about the importance of appropriate student services (advisement, counseling, etc.) that sometimes get overlooked in the rush to implement online courses and programs.

His conclusion:

“If virtual education fails to succeed with poor students, then it will merely replicate the severe economic imbalance that is already the shame of the nation’s campuses. Online will merely emerge as yet another luxury product for America’s privileged students.

Better to fix online for underserved students by making sure instructional design is at its best, that online students make reasonable decisions about their course load, and that higher education recognizes its obligation to provide serious, high-touch services for its remote students.

Colleges need to remain as mindful for their online students—if not more supportive—than what it offers its residential students.”

Good advice!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Today marks 44 years since President Richard M. Nixon resigned as president amid the Watergate scandal.   In 2014, David Graham in The Atlantic commented:

“In his immediate wake, Nixon left a shattered and confused nation, a host of spurned aides, and an accidental president. The fallout from Watergate stripped the nation of its political innocence, revolutionized executive power, and bequeathed a range of new reforms. It sent a huge new crop of politicians to Washington. It marked the American vocabulary, producing a range of new expressions and one durable naming scheme for scandals. We’re still grappling with the scandal today: In every debate about executive power or campaign-finance law or White House press management,….”

Some people have been using social media to remind President Donald Trump of the anniversary. 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

While much of the media was focused on special elections in states like Ohio on Tuesday, voters in Missouri by a 2-to-1 margin, delivered a major victory for unions by defeating a right-to-work law.  The measure on the ballot asked voters to pass judgment on a prospective law barring private-sector unions from collecting mandatory fees from workers who choose not to become members.  A New York Times editorial commented on this victory as follows.

“In recent decades, conservative activists and lawmakers have turned labor unions into convenient punching bags. In Missouri on Tuesday, however, unions seemed to figure out at least one way to punch back: Voters there resoundingly defeated an anti-union law via ballot proposal.

There’s always a danger in over-interpreting the results of a single election, but the two-to-one margin by which Missouri voters overturned the so-called right-to-work law appears to be the latest sign of resurgent and effective labor activism. The vote comes months after teacher strikes around the country forced Republican-controlled legislatures in states like West Virginia and Oklahoma to hand out big raises to overworked and underpaid workers for the first time in many years.

The Missouri law, which passed in early 2017 but never went into effect, was designed to weaken private-sector unions. It would have allowed workers to claim the benefits of union-negotiated contracts and representation in disputes with management without having to pay dues and fees to cover the cost of those benefits.

Missouri is hardly a bastion of liberalism — President Trump won it by nearly 20 points in 2016. But voters there, as in much of the country, seem to be waking up to the concerted, years-long conservative campaigns to exacerbate income inequality and impoverish working-class families. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. noted that Tuesday was the first time a right-to-work law had been overturned through a ballot measure. With that success, expect unions to use this tactic again in the near future.

Right-to-work laws, which are now in place in 27 states, have been branded as such because Republicans have successfully framed this issue as one of giving workers the right to not belong to a union. Backers of these laws also argue that they help states attract businesses and create jobs. In practice, the measures undercut labor power and have done little to create good-paying jobs. They have contributed to the steady, decades-long decline in union membership — less than 11 percent of workers were union members in 2017, down from about a third of workers in 1945. That decline has played a big part in depressing wages, even in industries and companies that had never had a significant union presence. That’s because union contracts often serve as a benchmark for pay and working conditions. A 2015 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found that annual wages in right-to-work states were about 3 percent, or nearly $1,600, lower than in states that didn’t have such laws.

The attack on unions has been broad-based, with even activist conservative judges getting into the act. This summer, by a 5-to-4 vote, the Supreme Court overturned a unanimous 40-year-old ruling when it decided that states could not require government employees to pay fees that covered the cost of collective bargaining.

The immediate impact of the union victory in Missouri will be limited. Only 8.7 percent of workers in the state are union members, and the vote will merely preserve the legal status quo. It may also be hard for unions to replicate the conditions under which they won — labor groups spent about three times as much on campaigning against the right-to-work law as proponents of the law spent defending it. The labor activists also benefited from the law’s being closely associated with the state’s disgraced former Republican governor, Eric Greitens, who resigned in May amid scandal. Conservative groups will surely regroup and put up more of a fight in the future, and labor will still face an uphill fight in federal courts that Mr. Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, are busily packing with far-right, anti-labor ideologues.

Still, Tuesday’s vote and the popular support for teacher strikes in red states show that unions have the wind at their backs for the first time in a long while. That is welcome news for long-suffering American workers.”

In solidarity!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Green Bay Packer quarterback Aaron Rodgers weighed in on the Lebron James and Donald Trump controversy by calling James’ non-response “absolutely beautiful.”

Donald Trump went after James on Twitter recently, attacking James’ intelligence, and Rodgers loved that James didn’t acknowledge it.  

In an interview with NFL Media’s Michael Silver, Rodgers said he supports James and thinks James’ non-response to Trump was the right way to handle the situation. He called it “absolutely beautiful.” 

“At a time where he’s putting on display his school, which is changing lives, there’s no need,” Rodgers told Silver. “Because you’re just giving attention to that (tweet); that’s what they want. So just don’t respond.”

Rodgers said he didn’t reply to the Trump tweet about James because “LeBron needs no help.”

“He has stood on his own two feet for years, and he has done some incredible things, and he needs no support,” Rodgers told NFL.com. “He knows he has the support of his contemporaries, in his own sport and in other sports, and he’s gonna be fine.’”

Rodgers added that the NFL should ignore Trump also with regard to the national anthem policy.  

Trump told Cowboys owner Jerry Jones once, according to Jones’ sworn deposition via the Wall Street Journal, that the national anthem issue was a “winning, strong issue for me.” He told Jones the NFL can’t win on the issue, because “this one lifts me.”

It’s hard for NFL players to not respond when Trump calls those who are trying to bring awareness to social issues such as racial inequality a “son of a bitch.” But as Trump continues to attack the NFL — NFL owners were the only ones who couldn’t see that coming — Rodgers said the best way to handle it is to not give Trump more publicity.

“I think that the more that we give credence to stuff like that, the more it’s gonna live on,” Rodgers told Silver. “I think if we can learn to ignore or not respond to stuff like that — if we can — it takes away the power of statements like that.”

It won’t be easy for the NFL and its players to ignore Trump. As we know, Trump is aware the entire issue “lifts” him, and he won’t forget that. And the NFL is full of proud players who don’t take kindly to being called a “son of a bitch.”

But Rodgers makes some good points and it’s easy to follow his logic. And had the NFL ignored Trump from the beginning, we probably wouldn’t still be talking about the entire issue.

Good advice from Rodgers!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In a closely watched special Congressional election in Ohio’s 12th District, it appears that Republican Troy Balderson will edge out Democrat Danny O’Connor by less than one percentage point.  As reported by the New York Times:

“The Republican, Troy Balderson, a state senator who ran a plodding campaign, led his Democratic challenger, Danny O’Connor, by less than 1 percentage point with all precincts reporting. But an unknown number of provisional ballots are yet to be counted, and Ohio law provides for an automatic recount if the two candidates are ultimately separated by less than half a percentage point.

National Republicans declared victory before midnight, but it could be days or weeks before there is a conclusive result in the race. And regardless of the outcome, Mr. Balderson and Mr. O’Connor will face each other again in three months, in the regularly scheduled November election.

But already, Republicans’ brush with catastrophe in Ohio has deepened the party’s gloomy mood, highlighting the massive political mobilization among Democrats and the comparative demoralization of the Republican base. The district that Mr. Balderson may have barely won voted for Mr. Trump by 11 points less than two years ago, and routinely elected Republicans to Congress by landslide margins before that.

And on the Democratic side, the Ohio vote is likely to reignite debate about the cost of keeping Ms. Pelosi as party leader, and whether her declared intention to try to become House speaker again could limit their gains in November — or even cost them a chance to win the majority.

Even as Mr. O’Connor appeared to fall short, however, he significantly improved upon Hillary Clinton’s performance in the district’s suburban precincts, and he overwhelmed Mr. Balderson in the sort of high-income enclaves Republicans must perform better in to hold their 23-seat majority in the House.

As ominous for Republicans was the sizable gap in turnout between the most heavily populated suburban counties and the more rural reaches of the district. A higher percentage of voters from Franklin and Delaware Counties, the two largest jurisdictions, cast ballots than in the other, far smaller five counties.

“We are in a tied ballgame,” Mr. O’Connor said at his election night party, refusing to concede. He then repurposed his speech into an appeal for the general election in November; he and Mr. Balderson have both been nominated to face off again then.

“We’re not stopping now,” he said. “We must keep fighting through November.”

We wish Mr. O’Connor well as he prepares for November.

Tony

Danny ‘Connor

Dear Commons Community,

Democrat Danny O’Connor faces Republican State Sen. Troy Balderson, in a special election in Ohio’s 12th District today to fill a seat that Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-Ohio) vacated in January. Regardless of the outcome, O’Connor and Balderson are due to face off again in November.  This makes the concrete stakes of the race relatively low. But as with the special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th in March, partisans on both sides are watching the outcome closely for still more evidence of a Democratic midterm wave.  As reported by The Huffington Post:

“By all rights, Ohio’s 12th, a vast C-shaped district gerrymandered to include well-off parts of Columbus, its affluent northern suburbs and parts of the industrial towns Mansfield and Zanesville, should be safe GOP territory.

Tiberi was re-elected there by 37 percentage points in 2016; Trump won the district by a more modest 11-point margin.

As a result, the surprising tightness of the race is all the more disquieting for Republicans, who have been forced to spend millions on Balderson’s behalf and deploy their top surrogates to stump for him.

The latest public poll has Balderson up by a single point, a decline from a 10-point lead he held a month ago in the same survey. In the hopes of changing that dynamic, Donald Trump held a rally in the district for Balderson on Saturday night.

“If the GOP were to lose this race, who would they blame or what would they blame? It would have to be a reflection on the Republican brand,” said Herb Asher, a political science professor at the Ohio State University.

Asher, who has donated to O’Connor’s campaign, argued that even a narrow Republican win would be “another indication that Democrats are more competitive in districts that have not been hospitable to them.”

Although he prefers the term “pragmatic,” O’Connor is, by contemporary standards, a moderate. He does not support single-payer health care, emphasizing instead his commitment to protecting the Affordable Care Act. And if elected, he plans to join the business-friendly New Democrat Coalition, whose PAC donated $4,000 to his bid. 

But while just a few years ago, moderate Democrats often embraced the need for a bipartisan “Grand Bargain” that would combine Social Security and Medicare cuts with tax hikes, O’Connor has made defending the two popular programs from any cuts a key plank of his campaign. He has benefited, in this regard, from Balderson’s explicit openness to raising the eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare for future beneficiaries. 

“Earned benefits are one of the most important things we can take care of,” O’Connor told HuffPost. “We want to encourage people to work, we want to encourage people to be a part of our economy, and when we cut their benefits and we don’t fight for them, we send a message that we don’t value what they do every day.”

And like Conor Lamb, a Democrat who won the March special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th, O’Connor has centered his critique of the tax cuts on their potential effect on social insurance programs.

“Troy Balderson supports a corporate tax giveaway that racks up $2 trillion in debt, forcing massive tax hikes on our kids or deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare,” an O’Connor campaign ad declares.

O’Connor, powered by a surge of small donations ― his campaigns says that more than 97 percent of contributions are under $100 ― has also outraised Balderson, forcing national GOP groups to pump in millions to make up the difference.  

The National Republican Congressional Committee has spent $1.3 million to elect Balderson. And the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC affiliated with House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), has spent nearly $2.5 million to keep the seat in GOP hands. 

Outside GOP-affiliated groups initially focused on touting the Republican tax cuts, but they have since pivoted to putting out ads with base-triggering buzzwords about immigration and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whom O’Connor has said he would not support for House speaker. 

“The liberal resistance is demanding open borders. They want to eliminate the law enforcement agency that enforces our immigration laws, opening America’s doors to more crime and drugs,” a Congressional Leadership Fund ad against O’Connor declares as black-and-white images of “Abolish ICE” protesters, criminals in hoodies and a heroin needle flash across the screen.

“And they want Danny O’Connor’s help,” the ad continues, featuring a photo of O’Connor between Pelosi and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Republicans are also seeking to capitalize on a July 25 interview O’Connor did on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews.” Pressed seven times by Matthews on his support for Pelosi, O’Connor conceded that if the Democratic majority was at stake, he’d back “whoever the Democratic Party puts forward.”

Footage from the interview is featured in a new Congressional Leadership Fund ad against O’Connor ― and in a response ad from O’Connor calling the tape selectively edited.

Terry Casey, a longtime Republican strategist based in Columbus, said the interview might make Matthews “the Republican of the year.”

“It gave Republicans the cement and the glue to show O’Connor was close and tight with Nancy Pelosi,” he said.

All eyes will be on the election results in Ohio’s 12^th District tonight!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Gov. Andrew Cuomo says he’s fine with New York financial regulators putting the squeeze on the National Rifle Association which is claiming it may go bankrupt because New York State is pushing banks and insurers from doing business with it.  The powerful gun-rights group claims it’s facing financial ruin due to a full-frontal assault from the Cuomo administration.  In a recent court filing, the NRA said it suffered tens of millions of dollars in damages as a result of the state’s campaign to dissuade banks and insurance companies from doing business with the gun-loving group.

“If the NRA goes bankrupt because of the state of New York, they’ll be in my thoughts and prayers,” Cuomo said in a statement Saturday

One of the NRA’s worries is the state’s push against its Carry Guard insurance program, which is meant to protect gun owners from lawsuits when they fire their weapons in self-defense.

The state says Carry Guard policies are illegal. “People go to jail for selling illegal products, so I have very little sympathy for them,” Cuomo said at an event in the Bronx.

New York on Friday moved to dismiss the NRA lawsuit.

Cuomo hopes other states take up his anti-NRA fight. “They are political bullies — they control the president and they control most state legislators and most governors,” he said. “They don’t control me and never will.”

Poor, poor NRA.  May it rest in peace!

Tony

Washington Post Graphic of President Trump’s Lying Since Taking Office!

Dear Commons Community,

Several media outlets have noticed that the President who is prone to lying, decided to turn on the spigots of false and misleading claims in the past several weeks.  As reported by The Washington Post, during Day 558 of his presidency, he’s made 4,229 Trumpian claims — an increase of 978 in just two months.  That’s an overall average of nearly 7.6 claims a day.

When The Washington Post first started tallying Trump’s lying, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. But the average number of claims per day keeps climbing the longer Trump stays in office. In fact, in June and July, the president averaged 16 claims a day.

Put another way: In his first year as president, Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims. Now, just six months later, he has almost doubled that total.  The Washington Post is keeping an interactive graphic, that displays a running list of every false or misleading statement made by Trump.

The Huffington Post this morning has a brief article detailing the President’s lies just for the past week. Here are 11 things the president of the United States said this week that are just not true.

There are people watching on giant TVs outside his Tampa rally because it’s so popular!
There were no TVs or large screens stationed outside, the Tampa Bay Times reported, although some people couldn’t get in.

He’s the most popular Republican president ever!
Trump repeated a favorite claim of his in a tweet and again at his Tampa rally, where he said he was “the most popular person in the history of the Republican Party,” including Abraham Lincoln.
According to multiple news outlets, Trump beats only Gerald Ford among modern Republican presidents. Polling didn’t exist in Lincoln’s time; Gallup began polling in 1935.

He arrived 15 minutes early to his meeting with Queen Elizabeth!
The president slammed the “fake, fake, disgusting news” media for accurately reporting the fact that he was more than 10 minutes late to the meeting with Britain’s reigning monarch, as video of the event showed and many news outlets reported. The world even saw the 92-year-old queen look at her watch as she stood waiting for Trump’s car to approach.

He chatted with The New York Times publisher about the paper’s fake news!
The president posted a tweet about the off-the-record meeting that suggested he and Publisher A.G. Sulzberger “spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, ‘Enemy of the People.’”
Sulzberger wrote a statement describing a vastly different meeting, one in which he spent time explaining to the president how his divisive language might cause real harm to journalists around the world.

“I told him that although the phrase ‘fake news’ is untrue and harmful, I am far more concerned about his labeling journalists ‘the enemy of the people.’ I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence,” Sulzberger wrote.

U.S. Steel Corp. is opening seven new plants!
He told his audience Tuesday that six plants were coming and upped that number to seven on Thursday.
The company has made no such announcement. A spokeswoman told The Associated Press that any plans to open new plants would be announced on the company’s website.

The Russia investigation is a hoax!
OK, he says this a lot.
“We’re being hindered by the Russia hoax. It’s a hoax, OK?” Trump said in Pennsylvania.
But just hours earlier, top national security officials told reporters at a news conference that Russia’s U.S. election meddling is indeed real.
“Russia attempted to interfere with the last election,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said Thursday, stressing that it is a threat “we need to take extremely seriously and to tackle and respond to with fierce determination and focus.”

Russia is “very unhappy” that he is president!
The president once again made this untrue assertion at his Thursday rally. Russian President Vladimir Putin explicitly told reporters that he wanted Trump to win the 2016 election at a news conference the two leaders gave after their Helsinki summit last month.

“Savage gangs” are “occupying our country”!
“Every day, the brave men and women of ICE are liberating communities and towns from savage gangs, like MS-13, that are occupying our country like another nation would,” Trump said in defense of Immigration and Customs Enforcement at his Tampa rally.
Although MS-13 is extremely violent and has a presence in some coastal cities, there is no evidence to support that claim, despite how often the president makes it.

Democrats are trying to give illegal immigrants the right to vote!
This does not appear to be happening across the country, although non-citizens were recently approved to vote in San Francisco’s school board elections.
“In this country, the only time you don’t need [I.D], in many cases, is when you want to vote for a president, when you want to vote for a senator, when you want to vote for a governor or a congressman,” the president claimed at his rally in Tampa this week. “It’s crazy. It’s crazy. But we are turning it around.”
It is explicitly illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections.

The terrorist who killed several people in an October attack in Manhattan brought “22 relatives” into the country!
“He came in through chain [migration], and he has 22 relatives here. They came in because he was here,” Trump said Thursday of the truck driver who killed eight people in Lower Manhattan last October.
Trump has made this claim in the past. The New York Times explained it is not possible because, as a green card holder, the Uzbek truck driver would not have been allowed to sponsor any extended relatives ― just spouses and unmarried children. The man has one wife, and his three children were born in the United States.

His administration passed the biggest tax cuts in history!
“We passed the biggest tax cuts and reform in American history. Biggest cuts in history,” Trump said in Tampa. Experts say the bill was not the biggest in U.S. history, although he would be correct if he said it was “the biggest corporate tax cut.”

George Washington, he is not!

Tony