Dear Commons Community,

Hundreds came together in anguish in synagogues and at gravesides yesterday in Pittsburgh to attend the services for some of those killed in the Tree of Life synagogue on Saturday.  In the afternoon, they came together again, in shivas to honor the dead and comfort the living, and, later by the thousands, in solemn marches of protest around the Squirrel Hill neighborhood where the attack took place.  The marchers were protesting the violence that took the lives of the innocents but they were also there to let President Trump that he was not welcome in their neighborhood in their hour of grief.   The New York Times reported:

“The presidential visit, welcomed by some in Pittsburgh, unwanted or vigorously opposed by many others, began with a motorcade into the city and a visit to the Tree of Life synagogue. Mr. Trump lit memorial candles in a vestibule near where the shooting unfolded, and placed stones and white roses from the White House outside, in commemoration of those killed in an attack by a gunman full of anti-Semitic rage shouting that Jews must die.

But if Mr. Trump’s visit was intended to bring healing, it instead laid bare the nation’s deep divisions. Many protesters in Pittsburgh had no doubt of what one called “the dotted line” between presidential rhetoric and violence, though some people in the city have pushed back on the idea that Mr. Trump had fomented the atmosphere of anger. As the president moved around Pittsburgh, a largely Democratic city, the signs of discord were apparent.

The protesters, some praying in Hebrew, others singing and chanting, moved around Squirrel Hill. Hoodie-wearing college students and Orthodox Jews with black hats and long beards walked alongside demonstrators carrying militant signs and middle-aged parents pushing strollers. Signs read “Words matter” and “President Hate is not welcome in our state.”  

The Associated Press reported:

“President Donald Trump arrived in Pittsburgh to pay his respects and encountered hundreds of shouting, chanting protesters with signs such as “It’s your fault” and “Words matter,” a reference to allegations his bellicose language has emboldened bigots. Pennsylvania’s governor and the mayor of Pittsburgh declined to join him during the visit.

Earlier in the day, thousands of mourners jammed a synagogue, a Jewish community center and a third, undisclosed site for the first in a weeklong series of funerals for victims of the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.

Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, Daniel Stein and Cecil and David Rosenthal were among 11 people killed in the shooting rampage at the Tree of Life synagogue Saturday. Robert Gregory Bowers, a 46-year-old truck driver who authorities say raged against Jews, was arrested on federal hate-crime charges that could bring the death penalty.

With Tree of Life still cordoned off as a crime scene, more than 1,000 people poured into Rodef Shalom, one of the city’s oldest and largest synagogues, to mourn the Rosenthal brothers, ages 59 and 54.

The two intellectually disabled men were “beautiful souls” who had “not an ounce of hate in them — something we’re terribly missing today,” Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, a survivor of the massacre, said at their funeral.

Myers, his voice quivering, told the Rosenthals’ parents and other family members: “The entire world is sharing its grief with you, so you don’t walk alone.”

The brothers were widely known as “the boys,” the Rosenthals’ sister, Diane Hirt, noted. “They were innocent like boys, not hardened like men,” she said.

She said Cecil — a gregarious man with a booming voice who was lightheartedly known as the mayor of Squirrel Hall and the “town crier” for the gossip he managed to gather — would have especially enjoyed the media attention this week, a thought that brought laughter from the congregation.

Rabinowitz’s funeral was held at the Jewish Community Center in the city’s Squirrel Hill section, the historic Jewish neighborhood where the rampage took place. Two police vehicles were posted at a side door and two at the main entrance.

A line stretched around the block as mourners — some in white medical coats, some wearing yarmulkes, black hats or head scarves — passed beneath the blue Romanesque arches into the brick building.

The 66-year-old Rabinowitz was a go-to doctor for HIV patients in the epidemic’s early and desperate days, a physician who always hugged his patients as they left his office.

“A lot of people are feeling really angry about this. A lot of rage built up inside about this, because of it being a hate crime. Don’t get me wrong; I do. But I’m so overwhelmed with sadness right now that I can’t even be angry right now,” said Robin Faulkner, whose family had seen Rabinowitz for 30 years and counted him as a dear friend. “It’s just such a loss. Just tragic.”

A private funeral was also held for Stein, the 71-year-old men’s club president at Tree of Life.

The other victims’ funerals have been scheduled through Friday.

Trump and first lady Melania Trump landed in Pittsburgh after the day’s services and lit candles at the Tree of Life for the victims. Outside, they laid white roses as well as stones for each of the dead, a Jewish burial tradition. The president and first lady later went to a hospital to visit with survivors.

They were joined by Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, as well as Myers, the Tree of Life rabbi, and Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer.

Hundreds of protesters gathered near the synagogue and the hospital.

“He didn’t pull the trigger, but his verbiage and actions don’t help,” said Squirrel Hill resident Paul Carberry, 55, wearing anti-Trump patches on his hat and jacket.

Democratic Mayor Bill Peduto had asked Trump not to come while the city was burying its dead. He and Gov. Tom Wolf, a fellow Democrat, said they would skip the president’s visit.

“Community leaders expressed to the governor that they did not feel it was appropriate for Trump to come, so the governor made a decision not to join him on his visit out of respect for the families and the community,” said Beth Melena, Wolf’s campaign spokeswoman.”

May the victims rest in peace!  May the Squirrel Hill neighborhood heal!  And may President Trump come to realize the violence and discord he perpetuates in our country!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Trump and his three children, Donald Trump, Jr.,  Ivanka, and Eric have been charged with fraud in a lawsuit brought in New York State by four plaintiffs, who depict the Trump Organization as a racketeering enterprise that defrauded thousands of people for years as the president turned from construction to licensing his name for profit.  Here is an excerpt of the story as reported this morning by the New York Times:

“A new lawsuit accuses President Trump, his company and three of his children of using the Trump name to entice vulnerable people to invest in sham business opportunities.…

…The allegations take aim at the heart of Mr. Trump’s personal narrative that he is a successful deal-maker who built a durable business, charging he and his family lent their name to a series of scams.

The 160-page complaint alleges that Mr. Trump and his family received secret payments from three business entities in exchange for promoting them as legitimate opportunities, when in reality they were get-rich-quick schemes that harmed investors, many of whom were unsophisticated and struggling financially.

Those business entities were ACN, a telecommunications marketing company that paid Mr. Trump millions of dollars to endorse its products; the Trump Network, a vitamin marketing enterprise; and the Trump Institute, which the suit said offered “extravagantly priced multiday training seminars” on Mr. Trump’s real estate “secrets.”

The four plaintiffs, who were identified only with pseudonyms like Jane Doe, depict the Trump Organization as a racketeering enterprise that defrauded thousands of people for years as the president turned from construction to licensing his name for profit. The suit also names Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump as defendants.

A lawyer for the Trump Organization, Alan Garten, said the allegations were completely meritless and relate to events that happened a decade ago. “This is clearly just another effort by opponents of the president to use the court system to advance a political agenda,” the spokesman said. He noted the plaintiffs’ lawyers have longstanding and deep ties to the Democratic Party and waited to file until just before the election. “Their motivations are as plain as day.”

A White House spokeswoman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The suit is not the first to accuse Mr. Trump of fraud. Shortly after his election in November 2016, he agreed to pay $25 million to settle a series of lawsuits, including one by New York State’s attorney general, that alleged unscrupulous practices by Trump University, another venture that claimed to sell access to his real estate secrets. Mr. Trump settled without acknowledging fault or liability, his lawyer said at the time.

And in June, the New York attorney general’s office filed a lawsuit seeking to dissolve the Donald J. Trump Foundation, claiming the charity had engaged in self-dealing and other violations. The foundation’s lawyers called the suit a political attack.

But the new suit alleges “a pattern of racketeering activity” involving three other organizations. Roberta A. Kaplan and Andrew G. Celli Jr., two lawyers for the plaintiffs, said in a statement that they were not aware of “any prior case against the Trumps alleging consumer fraud on this scale.”

“This case connects the dots at the Trump Organization and involves systematic fraud that spanned more than a decade, involved multiple Trump businesses and caused tremendous harm to thousands of hardworking Americans,” the statement said.

Asked about the suit’s timing, Ms. Kaplan and Mr. Celli said their firms — Kaplan, Hecker & Fink and Emery, Celli, Brinckerhoff & Abady — had conducted a lengthy investigation and the plaintiffs were eager to file. “The case is being brought now because it is ready now,” the lawyers said.

The lawyers said a nonprofit organization, the Tesseract Research Center, was funding the lawsuit by paying attorney’s fees and costs.

Morris Pearl, the Democratic donor who is the nonprofit’s chairman, said in a statement that his organization hoped to draw attention to the challenges faced by people who sustain losses but cannot seek redress through the courts “ because of the extreme wealth and power on the other side.”

The lawyers said they were asking the court to allow the plaintiffs to proceed using pseudonyms because of “serious and legitimate security concerns given the heated political environment.” The lawyers also declined to make their clients available for interviews.

The four plaintiffs each invested in ACN after watching promotional videos featuring Mr. Trump.

According to the lawsuit, ACN required investors to pay $499 to sign up to sell its products, like a videophone and other services, with the promise of additional profits if they recruited others to join.

Mr. Trump described the phone in an ACN news release as “amazing” but failed to disclose he was being “paid lavishly for his endorsement,” the suit says.

One plaintiff, a hospice worker from California identified as “Jane Doe,” decided to join ACN in 2014 after attending a recruitment meeting at a Los Angeles hotel where she listened to speakers and watched Mr. Trump on video extol the investment opportunity.

For her, the video was the “turning point,” the lawsuit said.

“Doe believed that Trump had her best interests at heart,” the suit said.

Jane Doe then signed up for a larger ACN meeting in Palm Springs, Calif., which cost almost $1,500, and she later spent thousands more traveling to conventions in Cleveland and Detroit, according to the suit.

In the end, she earned $38 — the only income she would ever receive from the company, the suit said.”

A reminder to Trump that there are no presidential pardons in lawsuits adjudicated in state courts!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Daily News is reporting that 11 Jewish leaders from the Pittsburgh Jewish organization, Bend the Arc, have posted a letter on its website asking President Trump not to come to their city.  As reported:

“President Trump is not welcome to visit Pittsburgh unless he denounces white nationalism and “stops targeting and endangering all minorities,” a group of the city’s Jewish leaders said Sunday.

“For the past three years your words and your policies have emboldened a growing white nationalist movement,” said a letter signed by 11 Jewish leaders on the website of Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish organization.

“You yourself called the murderer evil, but yesterday’s violence is the direct culmination of your influence,” the letter said.

Trump said he would visit Pittsburgh following the slaughter of 11 worshipers Saturday inside the Tree of Life synagogue during Sabbath morning services.

Authorities say the suspected gunman, Robert Bowers, yelled anti-Semitic slurs during the rampage.

Hours before the mass killing, Bowers ranted online against HIAS, a Jewish immigration advocacy organization.

“HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in,” he posted on Gab, a social network site.

The letter on Bend the Arc’s site noted that Bowers’ anti-HIAS post came “at the end of a week in which (Trump) spread lies and sowed fear about migrant families in Central America.”

“He killed Jews in order to undermine the efforts of all those who find shared humanity with immigrants and refugees,” the online letter added.

They pointed out that the Torah states each person is made in b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.

“This means all of us,” the group said. “In our neighbors, Americans, and people worldwide who have reached out to give our community strength, there we find the image of God. “

“While we cannot speak for all Pittsburghers, or even all Jewish Pittsburghers, we know we speak for a diverse and unified group when we say: President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you commit yourself to compassionate, democratic policies that recognize the dignity of all of us.”

The letter was signed by: Jamie Forrest, Joshua Friedman, Jamie Harris, Tammy Hepps, Harry Hochheiser, Sasha King, Rachel Kranson, Elinor S. Nathanson, Avigail S. Oren, Kate Rothstein and Yael Silk.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Over the weekend, I finished reading Bob Woodward’s best-seller, Fear: Trump in the White House.  I found it interesting although much of the material has been covered by the media over the past two years.  Woodward  recounts episodes that we have heard about the major players in the Trump White House including Bannon, Kushner, Mattis, Kelly, Tillerson, and Priebus. 

There were several stories that I had not known all the details such as the interactions between Trump and his personal attorney, John Dowd who convinced  the president not to testify in the  Mueller investigation.  Dowd tells Trump:  Mr. President, I cannot, as a lawyer, as an officer of the court, sit next you and have you answer these questions when I full well know that you’re not really capable.”  While Trump thinks he would make a great witness in his defense, Down tells him:  “You have trouble staying on subject.  And that can defeat you.  Then you try to catch yourself and, and you misstate yourself..”  The last two sentences in the book are: “Dowd has seen the tragic flaw.  In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, the crying “Fake News”, the indignation, Trump has one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a f**king liar” only Woodward did not use asterisks.

Jeff Greenfield, a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst, had a good review of Fear …  entitled, “Why Woodward’s ‘Fear’ Flopped in Washington” in Politico that is similar in theme as above.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd comments on violence in America during our week of hate and horror.  Her message is that Donald Trump under the tutelage of Fox News sycophants like Roger Ailes and Bill Shine has riled up the “crazies” to wreak havoc on the innocents.   The full column is below.  Here is an excerpt:

“….[Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt] coined the expression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” But it was Republicans who flipped the sentiment and turned it into a powerful and remorseless campaign ethos: Make voters fear fear itself…

“…President Trump was relieved when the F.B.I. arrested a bomb suspect — a racist, homophobic, roid-raging, strip-club-loving, MAGA-worshiping Florida man who was living in a van that looked like a decoupage of Fox News propaganda.

This season of ghouls is animated by the ghost of Roger Ailes, who — bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch — was the mastermind behind the hate-breeding technique he perfected on Fox News. It bore poison fruit with the Florida bomb suspect, whose Facebook page was littered with Fox News agitprop.

One Fox producer under Ailes said they called it “riling up the crazies.” For Ailes and now for his Frankenstein Trump — who has Ailes’s old lieutenant Bill Shine as his media czar — it’s all about picking and inventing the right battles, finding the lowest common denominator to boost ratings.

“Divide and Conquer,” an excellent new documentary produced by Alex Gibney and directed by Alexis Bloom, shows the divisive strategy Ailes used to help elect a succession of Republican presidents, even as he turned Fox News into a sexually transgressive cult where he and Bill O’Reilly and others could get away with any predation.”

Predation on the entire country!

Tony

—————————————————————-

‘Riling up the Crazies’

Maureen Down

October 27, 2018

WASHINGTON — As long as I’ve covered politics, Republicans have been trying to scare me.

Sometimes, it has been about gays and transgender people and uppity women looming, but usually it has been about people with darker skin looming.

They’re coming, always coming, to take things and change things and hurt people.

A Democratic president coined the expression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” But it was Republicans who flipped the sentiment and turned it into a powerful and remorseless campaign ethos: Make voters fear fear itself.

President Trump was relieved when the F.B.I. arrested a bomb suspect — a racist, homophobic, roid-raging, strip-club-loving, MAGA-worshiping Florida man who was living in a van that looked like a decoupage of Fox News propaganda.

The real fear that Cesar Sayoc Jr. is accused of spreading was distracting from the fake fear Trump was spreading to spur Republicans to the polls. And the president didn’t like it. Before Sayoc was caught, Trump implied that the terrorism was a Democratic setup to deflect from his midterms roadshow. Pipe bombs getting in the way of pipe dreams.

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Trump tweet-whined that “now this ‘Bomb’ stuff happens and the momentum greatly slows,” using dismissive quote marks around “Bomb.”

The president has, after all, put a tremendous effort into the sulfurous stew of lies, racially charged rhetoric and scaremongering that he has been serving up as an election closer. He has been inspired to new depths of delusion, tweeting that “Republicans will totally protect people with Pre-Existing Conditions, Democrats will not! Vote Republican.”

He has been twinning the words “caravan” and “Kavanaugh” in a mellifluous poem to white male hegemony. Whites should be afraid of the migrant caravan traveling from Central America, especially since “unknown Middle Easterners” were hidden in its midst, an alternative fact that he cheerfully acknowledged was based on nothing.

The word “Kavanaugh” is meant to evoke the fear that aggrieved women will hurtle out of the past to tear down men from their rightful perches of privilege.

Democrats seem blown back by the ferocious — and often fictional — effort.

Naomi Wolf told Bill Clinton, and later Al Gore, they should present themselves as the Good Father, strong enough to protect the home (America) from invaders.

You’d think by now that Democrats would have learned to do that in a compassionate way, and that they would be ready to counteract Republican horror movies. It is always the same shameless playbook, replicated since Richard Nixon launched his racist Southern Strategy, stirring up fears on desegregation and busing. They merely reboot it to suit the times.

The only difference — and it is a shocking one — is that Donald Trump cuts out the middleman. He handles the dirty work himself — and revels in it. In the old days, presidents let their hatchet men stir up the racist skulduggery behind the scenes. So when Republican lawmakers complain about Trump’s white nationalist rhetoric, what they are really saying is that they prefer a more subtle racism.

When I covered the ’88 race, I watched Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes concoct the scheme to bring down Michael Dukakis by making “Willie Horton his running mate,” as Atwater put it. The ads made by the Bush campaign and outside groups centered on Horton, a black criminal who broke into a Maryland house, raped a white woman and stabbed her husband while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison.

“The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it,” Ailes told Time magazine.

During the 2000 South Carolina primary, W.’s backers tried to appeal to racist voters with a whispered lie that John McCain fathered an illegitimate black child.

In 2004, Dick Cheney bluntly warned Americans that if they elected John Kerry, terrorists would hit us with a “devastating” attack (even though the devastating Sept. 11 attack came on Cheney’s watch).

This season of ghouls is animated by the ghost of Roger Ailes, who — bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch — was the mastermind behind the hate-breeding technique he perfected on Fox News. It bore poison fruit with the Florida bomb suspect, whose Facebook page was littered with Fox News agitprop.

One Fox producer under Ailes said they called it “riling up the crazies.” For Ailes and now for his Frankenstein Trump — who has Ailes’s old lieutenant Bill Shine as his media czar — it’s all about picking and inventing the right battles, finding the lowest common denominator to boost ratings.

“Divide and Conquer,” an excellent new documentary produced by Alex Gibney and directed by Alexis Bloom, shows the divisive strategy Ailes used to help elect a succession of Republican presidents, even as he turned Fox News into a sexually transgressive cult where he and Bill O’Reilly and others could get away with any predation.

For Ailes, and later Trump, politics was a war to preserve a gauzy John Wayne throwback world, patriotic and traditional, to save it from a sneering, contemptuous elite and from the “Other.” Ailes was a student of Hitler propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Sometimes, as with Trump’s birther campaign, the Other needed to be made to seem even more Other. Michelle Obama segments were designed to scare.

In the documentary, those around Ailes marveled at his relentless talent for pouring gas on a fire, for stoking the paranoia and fear that would keep viewers on the hook.

Trump’s main training for politics was being a sparring star in the House That Roger Built. And Ailes taught Trump well.

Dear Commons Community,

Capping off a week of violence and hate in America, a man shouting anti-Semitic slurs opened fire inside a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday morning, killing 11 congregants and wounding four police officers and two others.  Armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle and three handguns, the assailant identified as Rob Bowers, went on a rampage in the Tree of Life Synagogue where worshipers had gathered to celebrate their faith, and shot indiscriminately into the crowd.

Mr. Bowers, 46, was injured by gunfire, although the authorities said it was unclear whether those wounds were self-inflicted or whether the police had shot him. He was in stable condition Saturday at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Federal officials charged Mr. Bowers with 29 criminal counts. They included obstructing the free exercise of religious beliefs — a hate crime — and using a firearm to commit murder. He also faces state charges, including 11 counts of criminal homicide, six counts of aggravated assault and 13 counts of ethnic intimidation.  According to KDKA, Pittsburgh’s CBS affiliate, Bowers walked into the building and yelled “All Jews must die” before opening fire. Federal officials are investigating the shooting as a hate crime.

Bowers was also an active user of Gab, a Twitter alternative that promotes itself as supporting free speech.

An account appearing to belong to Bowers — now deactivated — was littered with anti-Semitic messages. His bio on the site read “jews are the children of satan.”

The most recent post, published less than two hours before the shooting, criticized the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) for its resettlement of refugees.

“HIAS likes to bring in invaders that kill our people,” he wrote. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughters.”

The assault on the synagogue unfolded on a quiet, drizzly morning, and came amid a bitter, vitriolic midterm election season and against the backdrop of what appears to be a surge in hate-related speech and crimes across America. It also took place in the wake of the arrest Friday morning of a man who the authorities said sent more than a dozen pipe bombs to critics of Mr. Trump, including several high-profile Democrats.

Calling it the “most horrific crime scene” he had seen in 22 years with the F.B.I., Robert Jones, special agent in charge in Pittsburgh, said the synagogue was in the midst of a “peaceful service” when congregants were gunned down and “brutally murdered by a gunman targeting them simply because of their faith.”

“We simply cannot accept this violence as a normal part of American life,” said Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, speaking at a news conference Saturday afternoon in Pittsburgh. “These senseless acts of violence are not who we are as Pennsylvanians and are not who we are as Americans.”

The anguish of Saturday’s massacre heightened a sense of national unease over increasingly hostile political rhetoric. Critics of President Trump have argued that he is partly to blame for recent acts of violence because he has been stirring the pot of nationalism, on Twitter and at his rallies, charges that Mr. Trump has denied.

About Saturday’s attack, Mr. Trump, addressing reporters at Joint Base Andrews, said: “It’s a terrible, terrible thing what’s going on with hate in our country and frankly all over the world, and something has to be done.”

“The results are very devastating,” he said, adding that if the temple “had some kind of protection” then “it could have been a much different situation.”

Later, speaking to reporters as he got off Air Force One in Illinois, Mr. Trump said he planned to visit Pittsburgh but he did not say when.

Leaders in the United States and across the world condemned the attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said he was “heartbroken and appalled” and that the “the entire people of Israel grieve with the families of the dead.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that criminal charges by the Justice Department “could lead to the death penalty.”

“Hatred and violence on the basis of religion can have no place in our society,” Mr. Sessions said. “Every American has the right to attend their house of worship in safety.”

The massacre Saturday was  the third mass shooting in a house of worship in three years. Last November, a gunman killed 26 worshipers at a church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., and in 2015, a white supremacist killed nine black congregants in a church in Charleston, S.C.

There are too many of these sad, tragic days in our country!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured story this morning describing a woman, Elizabeth Coppin, who spent twelve years in Irish industrial schools and laundries where she suffered abuse from the nuns who ran these facilities.  Here is an excerpt.

“For 30 years, she struggled with secret memories of beatings and other abuses, as well as most of the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder: chronic anxiety, social isolation, compulsive behavior, depression, flashbacks, nightmares and suicidal thoughts.

Finally, 20 years ago, convinced the pain would never subside unless she acted, Elizabeth Coppin, now 69, walked into a police station in her native County Kerry, Ireland. She filed a complaint relating to the 12 years she had spent in an Irish “industrial school,” one of a now-defunct network of state-funded orphanages and reformatories run by religious orders on behalf of the state.

Her statement, which the on-duty police officer typed up and signed, was accompanied by two letters that Mrs. Coppin had written in support of her case.

“I need answers,” one of them pleads, adding: “The emotional scars I carry with me today are still very real. Please check out everything, please don’t be put off by the nuns. Check everything, dig deep, especially records…

…

 

What a sad story! 

Read the entire article!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Police have arrested a suspect in connection with more than a dozen packages containing pipe bombs mailed in the past week to people critical of President Donald Trump.

Cesar Sayoc, 56, of South Florida was taken into custody yesterday, FBI Director Chris Wray confirmed at a press conference. 

Sayoc has been charged with five federal crimes ― interstate transportation of an explosive, illegal mailing of explosives, making threats against former presidents and certain other persons, threatening interstate communications, and assaulting current and former federal officers ― the Department of Justice said. He faces up to 48 years in prison.

In remarks at the White House before a youth leadership summit, Trump congratulated local and national law enforcement agencies for apprehending the suspect. The president pledged to prosecute those responsible ― “them, him, her, whoever it may be,” he said ― to the fullest extent of the law.

The development came hours after two additional packages were discovered, one addressed to Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and the other to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

It appears that Sayoc was living in his van (see below) which was plastered with stickers praising Donald Trump and Mike Pence while spewing hate for Hillary Clinton, Michael Moore, CNN and others who were critical of Trump.  The New York Times has an article this morning describing Sayoc as proned to making threats, drifting from job to job and having an extensive arrest record.  Here is an excerpt:

“On Twitter, Cesar Sayoc Jr. lashed out at immigrants, gun control advocates, and prominent Democratic politicians. On Facebook, he misspelled a racial epithet, directing it at the likes of Oprah Winfrey and former President Barack Obama.

With fury in his fingers, he shared inflammatory news stories from Breitbart, hard-edge videos from Fox News, and angry posts from pages like “Handcuffs for Hillary.” He tweeted a threat to former Vice President Joe Biden. And he posted photographs of himself wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat at one of President Trump’s campaign rallies…

…Records show he was a registered Republican; friends said he once danced as a male stripper. He also had a lengthy criminal history — he was once accused of threatening to use a bomb against a customer service representative — and led a life filled with failure. Well into middle age, he was living with his mother with no furniture, according to 2012 bankruptcy records, and he appeared to have been living most recently out of his van.

Federal officials said Friday they were still exploring questions of motive. “He appears to be a partisan,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said at an afternoon news conference announcing Mr. Sayoc’s arrest, “but that will be determined by the facts as the case goes forward.”

And so, even as the details of a grim and bitter life began to emerge Friday, a shaken country was left to ponder what could have prompted someone full of political grievances to manufacture a slew of improvised explosive devices.Mr. Sayoc’s posts on various social media accounts in 2015 showed an obsession with workouts and night life promotion, with little to no political content. But his more recent posts are full of political rage. His Facebook account, widely pored over after media reports of his arrest, suddenly disappeared on Friday.

“We have found and immediately removed the suspect’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram,” Facebook said in a statement. “We will also continue to remove content that praises or supports the bombing attempt or the suspect as soon as we’re aware.”

Much remains opaque about Mr. Sayoc. Some of his social media posts seemed to suggest he was part of the Seminole tribe in Florida. But Lenny Altieri, a relative, said that Mr. Sayoc’s father was from the Philippines and his mother was from Brooklyn. He was raised by grandparents after having problems with his mother, Mr. Altieri said. 

Mr. Sayoc had short stints in college as a young man, and had a passion for soccer, reflected in numerous soccer-themed messages on the van. He attended Brevard College, a small, Methodist-affiliated liberal arts college in Western North Carolina, for a year beginning in the fall of 1980 and played on the soccer team but did not graduate, according to a spokeswoman. He also attended University of North Carolina at Charlotte for one year starting in 1983, an official there said.Back in Florida, Mr. Altieri said, Mr. Sayoc was obsessed with bodybuilding and worked as a male stripper. He also worked as a manager for traveling “male revue shows,” said Rachel Humberger, the wife of one of Mr. Sayoc’s business partners.

Ms. Humberger said that Mr. Sayoc seemed like a friendly man, based on the short interactions she had with him, and described the shows as “Magic Mike style,” a reference to a 2012 movie about male strippers, “Magic Mike.”

More recently, she said Mr. Sayoc had been talking to her husband about starting a new business: fish farms.

Mr. Altieri said that Mr. Sayoc at one point had “a lot of money, but lost most of it.” He did not elaborate on how Mr. Sayoc had acquired it.

Mr. Sayoc amassed a lengthy criminal record, dating back to 1991, which includes felony theft, drug charges and fraud, public records show.

In August 2002, Mr. Sayoc, in a dispute with a power company over a bill, was accused of threatening to blow up the company. Mr. Sayoc was on the phone with the customer service representative and “was upset over an amount that he was being billed for,” according to records released by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office. He “then stated that he didn’t deserve it and that he was going to blow up” the utility.

The customer service representative pressed an emergency button, which began recording the conversation. Mr. Sayoc stated that what he planned would be worse “than 9/11” and that he planned to blow the agent’s head off, according to the records.

When the agent said Mr. Sayoc did not want to be making such threats, prosecutors said he had replied “that he doesn’t make threats, he makes promises.” Mr. Sayoc later described his remarks as nothing more than a joke.”

In sum, Sayoc was a deranged individual living on the edge filled with rage and hate.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times, giving a warning that a new nuclear arms race as begun as a result of President Trump’s announcement last week that the United States’ plans to withdraw from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty.  Trump has effectively torn down what Gorbachev, and Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush forged thirty years ago.  Below is the entire op-ed.

Tony

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A New Nuclear Arms Race Has Begun

By Mikhail Gorbachev

Oct. 25, 2018

Over 30 years ago, President Ronald Reagan and I signed in Washington the United States-Soviet Treaty on the elimination of intermediate- and shorter-range missiles. For the first time in history, two classes of nuclear weapons were to be eliminated and destroyed.

This was a first step. It was followed in 1991 by the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which the Soviet Union signed with President George H.W. Bush, our agreement on radical cuts in tactical nuclear arms, and the New Start Treaty, signed by the presidents of Russia and the United States in 2010.

There are still too many nuclear weapons in the world, but the American and Russian arsenals are now a fraction of what they were during the Cold War. At the Nuclear Nonproliferation Review Conference in 2015, Russia and the United States reported to the international community that 85 percent of those arsenals had been decommissioned and, for the most part, destroyed.

Today, this tremendous accomplishment, of which our two nations can be rightfully proud, is in jeopardy. President Trump announced last week the United States’ plan to withdraw from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty and his country’s intention to build up nuclear arms.

I am being asked whether I feel bitter watching the demise of what I worked so hard to achieve. But this is not a personal matter. Much more is at stake.

A new arms race has been announced. The I.N.F. Treaty is not the first victim of the militarization of world affairs. In 2002, the United States withdrew from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty; this year, from the Iran nuclear deal. Military expenditures have soared to astronomical levels and keep rising.

As a pretext for the withdrawal from the I.N.F. Treaty, the United States invoked Russia’s alleged violations of some of the treaty’s provisions. Russia has raised similar concerns regarding American compliance, at the same time proposing to discuss the issues at the negotiating table to find a mutually acceptable solution. But over the past few years, the United States has been avoiding such discussion. I think it is now clear why.

With enough political will, any problems of compliance with the existing treaties could be resolved. But as we have seen during the past two years, the president of the United States has a very different purpose in mind. It is to release the United States from any obligations, any constraints, and not just regarding nuclear missiles.

The United States has in effect taken the initiative in destroying the entire system of international treaties and accords that served as the underlying foundation for peace and security following World War II.

Yet I am convinced that those who hope to benefit from a global free-for-all are deeply mistaken. There will be no winner in a “war of all against all” — particularly if it ends in a nuclear war. And that is a possibility that cannot be ruled out. An unrelenting arms race, international tensions, hostility and universal mistrust will only increase the risk.

Is it too late to return to dialogue and negotiations? I don’t want to lose hope. I hope that Russia will take a firm but balanced stand. I hope that America’s allies will, upon sober reflection, refuse to be launchpads for new American missiles. I hope the United Nations, and particularly members of its Security Council, vested by the United Nations Charter with primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security, will take responsible action.

Faced with this dire threat to peace, we are not helpless. We must not resign, we must not surrender.

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education and local media are reporting that Margaret Spellings is resigning as president of the University of North Carolina system, after three years in which she moved forward with major changes aimed at increasing affordability and accountability, and simultaneously became mired in a series of culture-war controversies.  As reported:

“Spellings, who served as education secretary under George W. Bush, has been negotiating her departure with the system’s governing board and could leave as soon as early next year, according to The News & Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh, N.C. One motivation is a desire to return to Texas, her home state, the paper reported.

Doyle Parrish, a board member, confirmed to the Triangle Business Journal that Spellings would resign and said he believes she’s doing so for two reasons: the “turbulent experience” she has had in a politically charged climate, and a “divisive board.” Marty Kotis, another board member, told The Chronicle that he couldn’t confirm anything about Spellings, but called Parrish’s decision to talk to the newspaper “inappropriate” and said “he should know better.”

The board will meet in an emergency session on Friday to consider an “executive personnel matter,” according to an advisory from the system’s office. A spokesman declined to provide more information.

Spellings came to North Carolina in early 2016 after her predecessor, Thomas W. Ross, was pushed out by the board, a decision that many saw as politically motivated. Ross was a Democrat, while most board members, appointed by the Republican-controlled state legislature, were not.

Spellings was attracted to the UNC job in large part because she wanted to spearhead a conversation about higher-education affordability and accountability in a state that, in her view, was eager to have one. As education secretary, she oversaw the creation of a group, known as the Spellings Commission, that issued a landmark report on the future of higher education.

And she believed the opportunity for investment was there. Despite years of state-funding declines, the UNC system continues to receive a higher share of its budget from the legislature than public institutions in many other states. UNC’s board, meanwhile, wanted to hire someone who could repair a fractured relationship with state lawmakers.

Spellings was initially greeted with major protests by angry students and faculty members who disagreed with the board’s decision to push out Ross and who saw her as someone who wasn’t an academic and wouldn’t be sympathetic to their concerns. That activism eventually died down.

But Spellings quickly found herself in the midst of heated debates over the nation’s changing culture and resistance to it, particularly among conservatives, in North Carolina. Weeks after she took office, state legislators enacted a law that forced transgender people to use restrooms and other public facilities consistent with the gender they were assigned at birth. (Parts of the law were later repealed.) The result on UNC campuses was an uproar.

There were debates over undocumented students and free speech on campus. And there was the lightning rod of Silent Sam, the Confederate monument on the Chapel Hill campus that protesters pulled down in August.

Navigating such thorny issues was not a role Spellings relished.

“When I look up three years from now, at the end of my contract,” she said in an interview this year, “I want to be able to put some points on the board with respect to: How many more people have a college education, have that opportunity to have the American dream? Not: How did we deal with a protest at a monument, or whatever, on such and such a day?”

Still, she managed to cut through the noise at times and focus on accountability and affordability. In the spring she traveled across the state, speaking on multiple UNC campuses about her vision for a university that did a better job of educating such underserved groups as first-generation and adult students.

This fall she’s been touting the early successes of a program called NC Promise, which sharply reduced tuition on three campuses to try to increase access and enrollment.

“We obviously do a great job educating elite kids who’ve had every advantage in the world. But that’s not our sole customer any longer,” she said. “Higher education used to be basically of, by, and for elites, and you could make a really good living without a higher education. And that’s just less and less true.”

By increasing degree attainment, Spellings hoped the system’s universities would help propel their local communities — many of them struggling amid broader economic shifts — into the 21st century. She often brought up concerns about the growing economic divide in North Carolina that was leaving the state’s poorest residents in the dust. She also created a commission, called My Future NC, to set goals for statewide educational attainment.

Each UNC campus recently signed performance agreements with the system office that outlined specific goals for improving graduation rates and other gauges of student success. Hard numbers, Spellings said, are key to building trust in higher education. “We need to understand how well we do what we do,” she said. “It’ll help us make our case to an ever-skeptical public.”

Part of what imperiled Ross, her predecessor, was a power struggle with UNC’s board, whose leaders tried on a number of occasions to assert themselves more aggressively and to intervene in campus-specific matters.

Though Spellings agreed more with board members politically than Ross did, she sparred with them, too — over a contentious search for the chancellor of Western Carolina University, and over publicly asking the state’s governor to help decide the fate of Silent Sam without consulting the board first.

Silent Sam, a statue of a Confederate soldier, dominated the main entrance of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for more than a century, despite decades of protests. But suddenly, in August 2018, the statue was yanked down by protesters. Here’s how Silent Sam moved from dominance to disappearance.

Members of the board proposed reorganizing her staff and moving the system’s office out of Chapel Hill. Spellings, meanwhile, stressed on several occasions that the board should stay in its lane. She also talked about the challenges of leading UNC amid the many competing entities involved in the governance of higher education in North Carolina, including multiple boards, lawmakers, and chancellors.

Today the vast majority of the search-committee members who hired her, in 2015, are no longer on the system’s 28-member board. Spellings expressed frustration this year that she’d had to sell the board on her goals over and over again. During her first two years as president, she led a strategic-planning process. “Then a new cast of characters shows up, and they’re like, That’s not my strategic plan,” she said.

David Powers, who serves as chair of the board’s governance committee, acknowledged those tensions in an interview this year. “She is a very strong executive,” Powers said. “That might cause her to butt heads with board members every now and then, who are also very strong-minded.” At times, he said, board members felt as if they weren’t being kept in the loop about her plans.

But Powers had high praise for Spellings. “She’s adept at managing a big board that definitely has its own ideas about how to do some things,” he said, and she secured more state funding from the legislature last year than the university had received in years.

“I know people said, Oh, there are people on the board who want her gone,” he added.

Tony