Dear Commons Community,

The major news yesterday in Special Counsel Robert Muelller’s investigation was that Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, shared polling data with a Russian associate.  As reported by the New York Times:

“As a top official in President Trump’s campaign, Paul Manafort shared political polling data with a business associate tied to Russian intelligence, according to a court filing unsealed on Tuesday. The document provided the clearest evidence to date that the Trump campaign may have tried to coordinate with Russians during the 2016 presidential race.

Mr. Manafort’s lawyers made the disclosure by accident, through a formatting error in a document filed to respond to charges that he had lied to prosecutors working for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, after agreeing to cooperate with their investigation into Russian interference in the election.

The document also revealed that during the campaign, Mr. Manafort and his Russian associate, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, discussed a plan for peace in Ukraine. Throughout the campaign and the early days of the Trump administration, Russia and its allies were pushing various plans for Ukraine in the hope of gaining relief from American-led sanctions imposed after it annexed Crimea from Ukraine.

Prosecutors and the news media have already documented a string of encounters between Russian operatives and Trump campaign associates dating from the early months of Mr. Trump’s bid for the presidency, including the now-famous meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer promising damaging information on Hillary Clinton. The accidental disclosure appeared to some experts to be perhaps most damning of all.

“This is the closest thing we have seen to collusion,” Clint Watts, a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said of the data-sharing. “The question now is, did the president know about it?”

The document gave no indication of whether Mr. Trump was aware of the data transfer or how Mr. Kilimnik might have used the information. But from March to August 2016, when Mr. Manafort worked for the Trump campaign, Russia was engaged in a full-fledged operation using social media, stolen emails and other tactics to boost Mr. Trump, attack Mrs. Clinton and play on divisive issues such as race and guns. Polling data could conceivably have helped Russia hone those messages and target audiences to help swing votes to Mr. Trump.”

Mueller is getting closer and closer to collusion!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last night President Trump (see above) addressed the country for nine minutes in an attempt to build support for his position on border security namely building a wall, barrier, or whatever you want to call it between the United States and Mexico.  Resolving this issue would lead  to reopening fully the federal government which has been in partial shutdown for more almost three weeks. Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer (see below) responded and made the case that the wall is not an effective barrier against illegal immigration.  In my opinion, there was nothing new on either side.  

The New York Times commented:

“Mr. Trump devoted the first prime-time Oval Office address of his presidency to his proposed barrier in hopes of enlisting public support in an ideological and political conflict that has shut the doors of many federal agencies for 18 days.

In a nine-minute speech that made no new arguments but included multiple misleading assertions, the president sought to recast the situation at the Mexican border as a “humanitarian crisis” and opted against declaring a national emergency to bypass Congress, which he had threatened to do, at least for now. But he excoriated Democrats for blocking the wall, accusing them of hypocrisy and exposing the country to criminal immigrants.

In their own televised response on Tuesday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, accused the president of stoking fear and mocked him for asking taxpayers to foot the bill for a wall he had long said Mexico would pay for.

“President Trump must stop holding the American people hostage, must stop manufacturing a crisis and must reopen the government,” Ms. Pelosi said.

In taking his argument to a national television audience and on a trip to the Texas border he plans to take on Thursday, Mr. Trump hoped to reframe the debate. After spending much of the first two weeks of the shutdown cloistered in the White House, he has now opted to use the powers of the presidency to focus public attention on his ominous warnings about the border…”

Unfortunately, Trump’s position on this has become personal.  Frank Bruni commented this morning that  “the wall is a symbol of a need to have his ego shored up”, however, “there is not enough concrete in creation to do that job.”  

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

There may be a crack in Fox News land.  On Sunday Chris Wallace skewered  White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders for lying about terrorists pouring into the U.S. across the Mexican border.

Sanders heated exchange with Wallace was on “Fox News Sunday”” as she discussed President Donald Trump’s threat to continue the partial government shutdown if his demand for $5 billion to fund a U.S.-Mexico border wall isn’t met by Democrats.

“Let’s talk about the wall,” Wallace said. “The president talks about terrorists potentially coming across the border.”

He then showed a clip of Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen stating Friday that “over 3,000 special interest aliens” trying to enter the U.S. from the southern border had been stopped by Border Patrol agents.

“But special interest aliens are just people who have come from countries that have ever produced a terrorist, they’re not terrorists themselves,” Wallace said. He also cited State Department reports that found “no credible evidence of any terrorist coming across the border from Mexico.”

Sanders responded, “We know that roughly nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally, and we know that our most vulnerable point of entry is at our southern border.”

Wallace, ready to pounce, interrupted Sanders with a blistering fact-check.

“Wait wait, ’cause I know the statistic,” he said. “I didn’t know if you were going to use it, but I studied up on this. Do you know where those 4,000 people come or where they’re captured? Airports.”

 “Not always but certainly a large number,” Sanders said as Wallace continued to hammer his point.

“The state department says there hasn’t been any terrorists found coming across the southern border from Mexico,” he added.

Sanders, seemingly ignoring the facts laid out before her, said terrorists enter the U.S. “by air, it’s by land, it’s by sea” and that the southern border is the country’s “most vulnerable point of entry.”

“But they’re not coming across the southern border, Sarah,” Wallace persisted. “They’re coming and they’re being stopped at airports.”

Sanders continued to dance around the facts, saying that terrorists are “coming a number of ways.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you that they’re coming through airports,” she told Wallace. “I’m saying that they come by air by land and by sea, and the more and more that our border becomes vulnerable and the less and less that we spend time and money protecting it, the more that we’re going to have an influx, not just of terrorists, but of human traffickers, drug inflow and people who are coming here to do American citizens harm.”

Trump last month claimed the government had stopped terrorists from entering the U.S. from Mexico, but Reuters reported that no evidence backed up the president’s assertion, according to four government sources.

Trump is scheduled to go on national television tonight at 9:00 pm (EST) to spew the same lies a Huckabee Sanders.

Tony

Nancy Pelosi Swearing In Elizabeth Ocasio-Torres

Dear Commons Community,

In yesterday’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd (see below for excerpt) blew away Donald Trump and the GOP for trying to demonize the trio of Democratic Congresswomen who made the headlines in the past several days.  Trump, the GOP and Fox News have made out Nancy Pelosi as a “she-devil” for years but she has withstood their barbs and is emerging as a  counterbalance to Trump’s insanity who has to be reckoned with.  Pelosi has been outstanding during the current Trump shutdown of the federal government. Representative Elizabeth Ocasio-Cortez was smeared late last week for dancing in college as shown in a video distributed widely in GOP land. Since when is dancing in college a sin.  Ocasio-Torres responded by dancing in the halls of Congress.  And the latest “she-devil” is   Rashida Tlaib, the first of two Muslim women in Congress,  who told a cheering crowd over the weekend that “we’re going to go in there and impeach “the mother-f*****ker” referring to Trump.  When the offended right mocked Tlaib for her language, the media hit the airwaves with video after video of Trump using expletives such as referring to Representative Adam Schiff as “Adam Sch**t” or referring to Africa nations as “sh*thole “ countries.  There were also plenty of “f***bombs” in the Trump vocabulary.

However, Dowd concludes by offering the following advice to the incoming Democratic Congresswomen:

“The spectacle of Republicans as snowflakes is rich. But while the fiery spirit among the new Democrats is refreshing and members of Congress are entitled to say what they want, the brat pack may want to avoid getting too far over their skis while their learning curve is steep.

They should focus on the big picture: Trump is doing such an amazing job as a vulgarian and villain, it would be a shame to get in the way.”

Good advice!

Tony

——————————————————————————————————-

Maureen Dowd

January 6, 2019

“Lucky there’s no Saturday detention at the Capitol.

Republicans — and some Democrats — would certainly make like Mr. Vernon, the “Breakfast Club” disciplinarian, and lock down the irrepressible Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s only been in town a moment and has already, in this city of acronyms, become famous enough to supersede the shorthand for the Architect of the Capitol.

A.O.C. now simply signifies the congresswoman from the Bronx and Queens.

No longer content with Nancy Pelosi, the right craves a new she-devil. Republicans have mocked Ocasio-Cortez’s hardscrabble story, howled at her proposal to soak the rich with a 70 percent tax, scrutinized her clothes and booed her at Pelosi’s swearing-in. A.O.C. saucily tweeted back, “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas.”

The frenzy reached new absurdity when a tweet popped up with a video of her with friends at Boston University doing a dance from “The Breakfast Club,” with this slam: “Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is.” Holy Footloose.

“It is unsurprising to me that Republicans would think having fun should be disqualifying or illegal,” she told The Hill.

Like many other attempts to ding A.O.C., this one boomeranged. The clip was the coolest thing in politics since Barack Obama tangoed in Argentina.

“That’s it, Alexandria you’re in the club,” tweeted Molly Ringwald, one of the actresses from the 1985 movie.

When Obama got to the White House, Republicans trembled at his midichlorian count, but their fear faded as he grew more professorial and remote. A.O.C., despite some stumbles and lacunae in political knowledge, is more adept at using the force, especially on social media.

She claimed the mantle of dancing queen, tweeting out a new boogie in front of her congressional office to Edwin Starr’s antiwar anthem “War,” and taunting: “I hear the GOP thinks women dancing are scandalous. Wait till they find out Congresswomen dance too!”

The tableau at the Capitol Thursday, as Nancy Pelosi reclaimed the gavel, was redolent of that iconic “Breakfast Club” scene, with all its rebellious energy and zeal to fight The Man.

When Ocasio-Cortez, a leader of the brat pack that has put the old guard on notice, voted for Pelosi, it was an electric visual: two fierce women, a controlled 78-year-old capping her career and an uncontrollable 29-year-old starting hers, joining forces to fight the 72-year-old Neanderthal in the Oval Office.

I loved seeing the splotches of bright colors, from Pelosi’s hot pink dress to A.O.C.’s gleaming white suffragette-inspired suit, in a chamber that was once a monochromatic sea of men in gray pinstripes. When I covered an earlier “Year of the Woman,” after disgust over the Hill-Thomas hearings swept a group of women into Congress, it was startling to see the first dapples of gold and pink and red lighting up the House floor in 1993.

Cynthia McKinney, a young black freshman wearing gold sneakers, slacks, braided hair and a Mickey Mouse watch, stepped into an elevator in the Capitol and was rebuffed by the elevator operator, who icily repeated three times, “This elevator is for members only” before finally noticing McKinney’s congressional pin.

On Thursday, 102 women, nearly all Democrats, were sworn in as House members. This influx produced a gratifying inconvenience, reported by The Washington Post: a line for the first time to get into the ladies room off the floor of the House.

Pelosi is the ultimate rebuttal to the 1992 Barbie doll who chirped “Math class is tough.” The new speaker can count, legislate, horse-trade and stroke. But she’s also unapologetically tough. “She’ll cut your head off and you won’t even know you’re bleeding,” Alexandra Pelosi said of her mother the other day.

But Madam Speaker will need a few fancy dance steps of her own to keep her exuberant freshmen and her socialist wing in line, so that the centrist Democrats in the country’s middle are not alienated and President Trump does not become, of all things, a sympathetic figure.

Hours after Rashida Tlaib became one of the first two Muslim women in Congress, Tlaib told a cheering crowd that “we’re going to go in there and impeach” Trump, referring to him with a raunchy word that made many Democrats cringe.

Put on the spot to comment, Pelosi handled it deftly, saying that, being from an older generation, she did not like the coarse language but that she’s “not in the censorship business” and that it wasn’t worse than what Trump has said.

Indeed, Trump used the word publicly a number of times, including at a 2015 rally, and Kanye West spewed it over the Resolute desk recently while Trump laughed.

Liz Cheney, part of the Republican House leadership, complained about “foul language,” ignoring the fact that her father used an epithet during an argument about Halliburton and Iraq on the Senate floor. Trump huffily called Tlaib’s vulgarism “disgraceful” and “highly disrespectful to the United States of America.”

Schools Out-Average monthly quit rate among public education workers.  Source: U.S. Department of Labor.

Dear Commons Community,

Teachers and other public education employees, such as community-college faculty, and school psychologists are leaving the profession at the highest rate ever since the federal government has been keeping these data (2001).

A tight labor market with historically low unemployment has encouraged educators to quit their jobs at elevated rates, with the expectation they can find something better.  The educators may be finding new jobs at other schools, or leaving education altogether: The departures come alongside protests this year in six states where teachers in some cases shut down schools over tight budgets, small raises and poor conditions. As reported in The Wall Street Journal.

“In the first 10 months of 2018, public educators quit at an average rate of 83 per 10,000 a month, according to the Labor Department. While that is still well below the rate for American workers overall—231 voluntary departures per 10,000 workers in 2018—it is the highest rate for public educators since such records began in 2001.

Sara Jorve, 43 years old, protested alongside other Oklahoma teachers last spring for better pay and classroom conditions. But the fifth-grade math and science instructor in Oklahoma quit in May after a dozen years in the profession. Ms. Jorve, a single mother, said her pay was so meager she was forced to rely on her parents for financial assistance.

In the summer, she returned to school to become a cardiovascular ultrasound technician.

“I had to quit for my sanity,” she said.

The rising number of departures among public education workers is in contrast with 2009, when the economy was first emerging from a deep recession. Then, the rate was just 48 per 10,000 public education workers, a record low.

“During the recession, education was a safe place to be,” said Julia Pollak, labor economist at ZipRecruiter.

That year, the unemployment rate touched 10%, the highest since the 1980s. This year, the jobless rate fell to 3.7%, the lowest reading since 1969. That has created very different incentives for teachers and their public education colleagues.

“It’s a more boring place now, and they see their friends finding exciting opportunities,” Ms. Pollak said.

School districts have reported since at least 2015 having trouble finding enough qualified teachers to fill open slots, leading more states to open up temporary teaching jobs to people with no official training, according to the Learning Policy Institute, a nonpartisan education-policy research group. The rate at which qualified teachers are leaving the profession is likely to exacerbate that trend.

In the 12 months ended in October, one million workers quit public-education positions, according to the most recent Labor Department data. More than 10 million Americans work in the field.

While the private-sector labor market largely shook off the recession years ago, teachers and other school workers are still feeling the effects. Funding for public education in several states hasn’t yet recovered from cuts during the downturn.

In at least 12 states, public education budgets are down 7% or more from 2009 levels, adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis of census data by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Teacher pay across the country, adjusted for inflation, is now 5% lower than it was in 2009, according to data from the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union.

Wages and salaries for public-education workers rose 2.2% in the third quarter from a year earlier, not adjusting for inflation. That matched the largest annual raise in nearly a decade, but was still well below the 3.1% annual increase in pay private-sector workers received in the third quarter, according to the Labor Department.

Tensions over inadequate pay and per-pupil funding levels came to a head in 2018 during statewide protests, in some cases shutting classrooms for as many as nine school days. The strikes produced modest gains in the states where they occurred—teachers in Arizona, West Virginia and Oklahoma all received raises—but they also popularized images of dilapidated textbooks and school rooms and portraits of teachers who took on odd jobs to make ends meet.”

Teacher turnover has been a problem for quite a while in this country as the article alludes.  However, it is reaching a crisis level in many states and especially in large urban areas where employment opportunities are greater. 

Tony

P.S.:   Teachers in Los Angeles are planning to go on strike next week if a new contract is not settled (see video below.)

Senator Susan Collins on the Senate floor during Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court Confirmation Hearing on October 5, 2018

Dear Commons Community,

Lauren Sandler, a journalist and the author of Righteous, One and Only, has an op-ed in The Huffington Post, scorching  Senator Susan Collins (Republican – Maine) for selling out feminism by her performance and ultimate vote in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.  Here is an excerpt:

“The vote was bad enough. Sending a man the majority of Americans believe to have sexually assaulted someone to the court, conferring supreme judicial power to a second fabulist accused of sexual misconduct. Granting this man decisive power over the nation’s current and future female bodies. Swinging open the door for the real backlash against women’s outrage. But she not only sold out women’s bodies to confirm a Supreme Court justice selected explicitly to imprison them in enforced pregnancies: She dressed that vote up as a feminist call to arms.

Sen. Susan Collins could have simply, quietly, disappointingly voted to confirm this man. Instead, she ostentatiously wrapped her confirmation in a false feminine bow, grandstanding on the Senate floor for nearly 45 minutes. She dressed head to toe in taupe, the color of neutrality, and told women that the lesson of Christine Blasey Ford’s lasting trauma is that if Brett Kavanaugh committed such crimes on her 15-year-old body, Ford should have reported it.

Collins, Our Lady of Perpetual Moral Bankruptcy, droned on about how many survivors’ stories she’d heard over the preceding days, aligning herself with the popular rhetoric around believing women. Just not this one, she painstakingly attempted to explain, using debunked junk science, disregarding any credible neuropsychology about how trauma affects memory ― the very science Ford teaches at the university level, and which she explained patiently through her own testimony as her own expert witness.

Collins could have simply, quietly, disappointingly voted to confirm this man. Instead, she ostentatiously wrapped her confirmation in a false feminine bow.

It’s perhaps the ultimate anti-woman double-sided coin, to simultaneously dismiss both a woman’s expertise and her story. Blithely rejecting both her academic rigor and her sworn testimony ― whose hand was over her mouth, whose face pressed up against hers, whose cruel laughter rang forever in her ears, what she testified she was 100 percent certain about.

These days, such offenses against women must be prettied up in fake feminism. Collins paired her dismissal of Ford’s trauma with a cri de coeur, calling for increased reporting of sexual harassment and assault. “We must listen to survivors, and every day we must seek to stop the criminal behavior that has hurt so many,” she said. “We owe this to ourselves, our children, and generations to come” ― so long as it’s politically expedient.

Watching Ford’s hours of detailed, self-critical testimony, millions of us sat suspended in fear that our elected officials would not believe her. But then a worse fear crept in: that they would believe her, and it wouldn’t matter.

The best argument Collins could find for disbelieving Ford was a theory that one of Kavanaugh’s friends, Ed Whelan, the president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, had floated on Twitter: Sure, she was sexually assaulted, but she must have the wrong guy. Almost immediately, Whelan apologized for this “appalling and inexcusable” lack of judgment in suggesting such a thing, and offered his resignation. But that appalling and inexcusable theory was exactly what Collins cited to tear Ford down and make the case that women must feel empowered to report their own assaults. That’s how incredible her disbelief is. And how cynical her politics.

The brutal truth is that her cynicism paid off. After Collins voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act, her standing among Maine’s Republicans was shaky. After condemning Ford and confirming Kavanaugh, she won back their support. It’s a scourge of our age, and of the ages: women whose politics are dictated by the power of their white skin rather than the power denied to their organs.”

This is an insightful op-ed that tells it like it is.  For all of Collings’ grandstanding during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, when it came time to vote, it was the party first above everything else even her own moral compass.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi was elected  speaker of the House of Representatives. On assuming control of the House, Democrats elected Ms. Pelosi of California speaker, returning her to a historic distinction as the first woman to hold the post. They then moved to defy President Trump and passed bills that would open government agencies shuttered by an impasse over his insistence on funding for a border wall. The measures are almost certain to die in the Senate.  As reported by the New York Times:

On the first day of divided government in a reordered Washington, Ms. Pelosi, now second in line to the presidency, and Mr. Trump clashed from their respective ends of Pennsylvania Avenue almost from dawn until dusk.

The California Democrat began her day by suggesting that a sitting president could be indicted. Late in the day, Mr. Trump made an attention-getting appearance in the White House briefing room with a belligerent demand for a wall on the border with Mexico, drawing a rebuke from the newly installed House speaker, who said she would give no more than a dollar to fund what she branded “an immorality.”

In between, as the start of the new House showcased a younger and more diverse majority in the staid corridors of the Capitol, Ms. Pelosi pledged to run a “unifying” Congress that would bridge partisan divides and heal rifts in a polarized country.

 “Our nation is at a historic moment,” she declared. “I pledge that this Congress will be transparent, bipartisan and unifying, that we will seek to reach across the aisle in this country, and across divisions across our nation.”

In ascending to the speakership, Ms. Pelosi finds herself at the fulcrum of a bitterly divided body politic, poised to do battle with and demand accountability from an increasingly combative Mr. Trump in ways that the Republican Congress of the past two years refused to. With Mr. Trump, his presidential campaign and his businesses all under federal and state investigations, Ms. Pelosi’s approach to confronting him — both through investigation and legislation — will probably define the 116th Congress.

She wasted no time in doing so on Thursday, hours after being sworn in. The late-night, nearly party-line votes on reopening the government began a pattern in an era of divided control, with a Democratic House passing legislation that has no chance of being signed by the Republican president, and the Republican Senate running interference to protect Mr. Trump. The White House had also issued an official statement threatening a veto.

“Let’s not waste the time,” said Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader.

Mr. Trump used his abrupt appearance in the White House briefing room — his first since taking office — to talk about the importance of the wall; he was flanked by border agents who echoed his message.

The president congratulated Ms. Pelosi on her election and said he had high aspirations for the new Congress. But he turned immediately to making the case for a wall that Democrats have uniformly rejected, saying, “Without a wall, you cannot have border security.” Mr. Trump also used social media to press his message, posting on his Instagram account a photograph of his face with the text “The Wall Is Coming,” a take on an advertisement for the cable TV series “Game of Thrones” that bore the ominous slogan “Winter Is Coming.”

Congratulations to Ms. Pelosi and the Democrats.  Let the games begin!

Tony

Chang’e-4 Lands on the Moon

Dear Commons Community,

China reached a milestone in space exploration yesterday, landing a vehicle on the far side of the moon, the country’s space agency announced. The landing of the probe, called Chang’e-4 after the moon goddess in Chinese mythology, is one in a coming series of missions that underscore the country’s ambitions to join  the space race.  As reported by the New York Times, China’s Chang’e-4 became the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the far side of the moon.

China landed another rover on the moon in 2013, joining the United States and the Soviet Union as the only nations to have carried out a “soft landing” there, but the Chang’e-4 is the first to touch down on the side of the moon that perpetually faces away from the Earth.

The mission “has opened a new chapter in humanity’s exploration of the moon,” the China National Space Administration said in an announcement on its website. The agency said the spacecraft landed at 10:26 a.m. Beijing time at its target on the far side of the moon.

The probe sent back to the earth the first close-up image of the moon’s far side using a relay satellite China calls “Queqiao,” or “Magpie Bridge,” the space agency said in a notice that included images it said were taken by the probe.

Although a latecomer by decades to space exploration, China is quickly catching up, experts say, and could challenge the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other fields.

“This space mission shows that China has reached the advanced world-class level in deep space exploration,” said Zhu Menghua, a professor at the Macau University of Science and Technology who has worked closely with the Chinese space agency. “We Chinese people have done something that the Americans have not dared try.”

China now plans to begin fully operating its third space station by 2022, to put astronauts in a lunar base by later in that decade, and to send probes to Mars, including ones that could return samples of the Martian surface back to Earth.

Though the moon is hardly untrodden ground after decades of exploration, a new landing is far more than just a propaganda coup, experts say.

The crater where the Chinese landed is the oldest and deepest on the moon, so the probe’s discoveries may offer insights into the moon’s origins and evolution. And some scientists suspect that the surrounding basin may be rich in minerals. If exploiting the moon’s resources is the next step in space development, a successful mission could leave the Chinese better positioned.

“This is a major achievement technically and symbolically,” said Namrata Goswami, an independent analyst who wrote about space for the Defense Department’s Minerva Research Institute. “China views this landing as just a steppingstone, as it also views its future manned lunar landing, since its long-term goal is to colonize the moon and use it as a vast supply of energy.”

The place the probe is exploring, Dr. Goswami said, could become a future refueling base for missions deeper into space in the way “navies viewed coaling stations, for purposes of refueling and resupply.”

Congratulations to the China National Space Administration!  Wouldn’t it be wonderful for China and the United States to develop joint space exploration projects.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) blistered Donald Trump as “without question the worst president we’ve ever had” in a an interview published yesterday in the New York Times, his first since being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year.  Here are two excerpts.

Reid commented : “Trump is an interesting person. He is not immoral but is amoral. Amoral is when you shoot someone in the head, it doesn’t make a difference. No conscience.” There was a hint of grudging respect in Reid’s tone, which he seemed to catch and correct. “I think he is without question the worst president we’ve ever had,” he said. “We’ve had some bad ones, and there’s not even a close second to him.” He added: “He’ll lie. He’ll cheat. You can’t reason with him.” Once more, a hint of wonder crept into his voice, as if he was describing a rogue beast on the loose in a jungle that Reid knows well…

The former F.B.I. director James Comey, after he was fired by Trump, compared Trump to the head of a mafia family, with its codes of silence and loyalty, its fear-based leadership style and fealty to a single godfather. “It’s not about anything else except the boss,” Comey said in a recent interview at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Others have drawn the same parallel, and I asked Reid if, given his unusually relevant professional experience in this area, it rang true. Reid expelled a quick and dismissive chuckle. “Organized crime is a business,” he told me, “and they are really good with what they do. But they are better off when things are predictable. In my opinion, they do not do well with chaos. And that’s what we have going with Trump.”

Reid was known as someone who did hold back in this criticisms of the people with whom he worked in Washington, D.C.  He surely did not hold back here.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Finally a Republican has denounced Donald Trump as someone who has not risen to the mantle of the office of  the president.  Mitt Romney, the former Republican presidential candidate and incoming U.S. senator from Utah, in a scathing op-ed to the Washington Post (see below for full text) yesterday  sharply criticized Trump.

“The appointment of senior persons of lesser experience, the abandonment of allies who fight beside us, and the president’s thoughtless claim that America has long been a ‘sucker’ in world affairs all defined his presidency down,” he wrote.

He added that “Trump’s words and actions have caused dismay around the world.”

Romney suggested that “on balance, (Trump’s) conduct over the past two years … is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office.”

Romney is staking out an independent position two days before he takes office on Thursday. It is unclear whether Trump will face a serious challenge in 2020 to securing the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.

Trump last February endorsed Romney’s run for a Senate seat in Utah.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Romney excoriated Trump as a “fraud” who was “playing the American public for suckers.” Trump responded that Romney had “choked like a dog” in his unsuccessful 2012 campaign against Democratic President Barack Obama.

Despite Romney’s prior criticism, after Trump won the presidency in November 2016, he briefly considered tapping Romney as secretary of state.

In his essay on Tuesday, Romney said he “will speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions.”

Congratulations to Mr. Romney.  Are there any other Republicans in Washington with the courage to call out Trump for what he is?

Tony

—————————————————————————————————————————————–

Washington Post

The president shapes the public character of the nation. Trump’s character falls short.

By Mitt Romney

January 1 at 8:00 PM

Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah and the party’s 2012 nominee for president, will be sworn into the U.S. Senate on Thursday.

The Trump presidency made a deep descent in December. The departures of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, the appointment of senior persons of lesser experience, the abandonment of allies who fight beside us, and the president’s thoughtless claim that America has long been a “sucker” in world affairs all defined his presidency down.

It is well known that Donald Trump was not my choice for the Republican presidential nomination. After he became the nominee, I hoped his campaign would refrain from resentment and name-calling. It did not. When he won the election, I hoped he would rise to the occasion. His early appointments of Rex Tillerson, Jeff Sessions, Nikki Haley, Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster, Kelly and Mattis were encouraging. But, on balance, his conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions this month, is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office.

It is not that all of the president’s policies have been misguided. He was right to align U.S. corporate taxes with those of global competitors, to strip out excessive regulations, to crack down on China’s unfair trade practices, to reform criminal justice and to appoint conservative judges. These are policies mainstream Republicans have promoted for years. But policies and appointments are only a part of a presidency.

To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow “our better angels.” A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit. With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.

The world is also watching. America has long been looked to for leadership. Our economic and military strength was part of that, of course, but our enduring commitment to principled conduct in foreign relations, and to the rights of all people to freedom and equal justice, was even more esteemed. Trump’s words and actions have caused dismay around the world. In a 2016 Pew Research Center poll, 84 percent of people in Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Sweden believed the American president would “do the right thing in world affairs.” One year later, that number had fallen to 16 percent.

This comes at a very unfortunate time. Several allies in Europe are experiencing political upheaval. Several former Soviet satellite states are rethinking their commitment to democracy. Some Asian nations, such as the Philippines, lean increasingly toward China, which advances to rival our economy and our military. The alternative to U.S. world leadership offered by China and Russia is autocratic, corrupt and brutal.

The world needs American leadership, and it is in America’s interest to provide it. A world led by authoritarian regimes is a world — and an America — with less prosperity, less freedom, less peace.

To reassume our leadership in world politics, we must repair failings in our politics at home. That project begins, of course, with the highest office once again acting to inspire and unite us. It includes political parties promoting policies that strengthen us rather than promote tribalism by exploiting fear and resentment. Our leaders must defend our vital institutions despite their inevitable failings: a free press, the rule of law, strong churches, and responsible corporations and unions.

We must repair our fiscal foundation, setting a course to a balanced budget. We must attract the best talent to America’s service and the best innovators to America’s economy.

America is strongest when our arms are linked with other nations. We want a unified and strong Europe, not a disintegrating union. We want stable relationships with the nations of Asia that strengthen our mutual security and prosperity.

I look forward to working on these priorities with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other senators.

Furthermore, I will act as I would with any president, in or out of my party: I will support policies that I believe are in the best interest of the country and my state, and oppose those that are not. I do not intend to comment on every tweet or fault. But I will speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions.

I remain optimistic about our future. In an innovation age, Americans excel. More importantly, noble instincts live in the hearts of Americans. The people of this great land will eschew the politics of anger and fear if they are summoned to the responsibility by leaders in homes, in churches, in schools, in businesses, in government — who raise our sights and respect the dignity of every child of God — the ideal that is the essence of America.