Kassandra Montes lives in a homeless shelter with her son while attending Lehman College in the Bronx.  She budgets $15 per week for food.

Dear Commons Community,

The results of a survey released this week by Temple University’s Hope Center for College, Community and Justice indicated that 45 percent of student respondents from over 100 institutions said they had been food insecure in the past 30 days. In New York, the nonprofit found that among City University of New York (CUNY) students, 48 percent had been food insecure in the past 30 days.

Kassandra Montes, a senior at Lehman College (CUNY), is one of them. She unexpectedly had to take out a $5,000 loan this year in order to graduate, she said. Living in a Harlem homeless shelter as she attends classes, Ms. Montes also works two part-time jobs and budgets only $15 per week for food. She uses the campus food pantry to get most of her groceries and usually skips breakfast in order to make sure that her 4-year-old son is eating regularly.

“I feel like I’m slowly sinking as I’m trying to grow,” she said.  As reported in the New York Times:

Although the college food-pantry movement is well underway, as there are now over 700 members at the College and University Food Bank Alliance, efforts have recently expanded to include redistributing leftover food from dining halls and catered events, making students eligible for food stamps and other benefits, and perhaps most important, changing national and state education funding to cover living expenses, not just tuition.

“The hunger movement has been centered around food banks, but that is now changing as people focus on prevention,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, the founder of the Hope Center and a Temple University professor.

The movement has largely focused on community and state colleges, as there are more low-income students who attend them. Hunger can force students to drop out of school to work more, which inhibits academic success, said Nicholas Freudenberg, a distinguished professor at CUNY’s Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. Another ramification is an increase in student loans to cover living expenses, Dr. Goldrick-Rab said. (National student debt now totals about $1.5 trillion.)

Calvin Ramsay amassed “massive amounts of debt” while attending N.Y.U. Being the first person from his family to go to college, he said he didn’t fully understand how much debt he was going into with his student loans. After two years on campus, Mr. Ramsay said he moved back home to Queens and started to use Share Meals, a digital platform created in 2013 that informs students about free food on campus.

“Food was a major obstacle,” he said, “especially in Manhattan.”

Mr. Ramsay said that he will need to borrow about $40,000 more to graduate, but he is unwilling to take on more debt to do so. “Why do I need to go into debt,” he said, “to eat

CUNY has discovered that signing up students for SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, has helped. In 2009, the school system brought in Single Stop USA, a nonprofit that connects individuals with social services. Since then, the nonprofit and other partners have served over 122,000 CUNY students, each of whom have received about $3,000 worth of benefits each year, said Sarah Crawford, the nonprofit’s national education director…

…Boosting federal education funding should be part of the presidential election discussion, said Dr. Goldrick-Rab, who cited a higher education plan put out by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who is running for president.

If no progress is made, Dr. Goldrick-Rab said, “existing investments in financial aid will be undermined as students drop out simply because they don’t have enough to eat.”

Thank you Hope Center… for bringing this issue to our attention!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Network for Public Education (NPE) recently published a new report entitled, Twenty Years Later: The Jeb Bush A+ Plan Fails Florida’s Students, that looks at education policy in Florida over the past two decades.  The report paints a less than flattering picture of vouchers and charter schools that are leading to a “destruction” of its public education system.  Here is a blurb from NPE.

“This week the Florida legislature added yet another voucher program, bringing the total number of programs to five. Florida spends more than one billion dollars on vouchers already.

As Valerie Strauss wrote in the Washington Post:

An effort has been made in the legislature to require school districts to share with charter schools money that voters chose in a referendum to go to school districts, but it is unclear how that will end. And this week, the state legislature voted to allow teachers to carry guns at school despite opposition from many school districts.

The deliberate and systematic destruction of public education in Florida began a long time ago. With large numbers of students enrolled in an unstable charter sector combined with growing voucher programs, Florida is poised to be the first state in which public education collapses.

How did this unrelenting attack on public education come to pass? It began in 1998 with former governor Jeb Bush’s introduction of the A+ Plan for reforming education. A new report Twenty Years Later: The Jeb Bush A+ Plan Fails Florida’s Students by NPE Action Board member Sue Legg, Ph.D. traces the history of the Jeb Bush A+ reform movement, and documents why a test driven curriculum, supported by school grades and school choice, has failed to raise student achievement while undermining public education at every turn.

The report serves as a valuable resource not only for the Florida public, but as a cautionary tale for all who believe in democratically governed, public schools.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Brent Staples comments on social media’s unintended consequences and specifically on the people such as Mark Zuckerberg who made headlines this week by banning individuals who use Facebook for promoting hatred.  This is a complicated issue because no matter how “despicable” the haters are, there are fundamental issues and values involved such as freedom of speech.  He also comments that the people who own and operate major social media companies “lack the wisdom and humility to use their power responsibly.”  Below is the entire column.  It is well worth a read in helping to understand the influence of those who oversee social media and the dilemma of trying to control it.

Tony

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Facebook’s Unintended Consequence

People who lack the wisdom and humility to use their power responsibly.

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

May 3, 2019

Over the past several years we’ve learned a lot about the unintended consequences of social media. Platforms intended to bring us closer together make us angrier and more isolated. Platforms aimed at democratizing speech empower demagogues. Platforms celebrating community violate our privacy in ways we scarcely realize and serve as conduits for deceptions hiding in plain sight.

Now Facebook has announced that it has permanently banned Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos and a few other despicable people from its social platforms. What could possibly go wrong?

The issue isn’t whether the people in question deserve censure. They do. Or that the forms of speech in which they traffic have redeeming qualities. They don’t.

Nor is the issue that Facebook has a moral duty to protect the free-speech rights of Farrakhan, Jones and their cohorts. It doesn’t. With respect to freedom of speech, the First Amendment says nothing more than that Congress shall make no law abridging it. A public company such as Facebook — like a private university or a family-owned newspaper — has broad latitude to feature or censor, platform or de-platform, whatever and whoever it wants.

Facebook’s house, Facebook’s rules.

The issue is much simpler: Do you trust Mark Zuckerberg and the other young lords of Silicon Valley to be good stewards of the world’s digital speech?

I don’t, but not because conservatives believe (sometimes with good reason) that the Valley is culturally, politically and possibly algorithmically biased against them. As with liberalism in academia, the left-wing tilt in tech may be smug and self-serving, but it doesn’t stop conservatives from getting their messages across. It certainly doesn’t keep Republicans from winning elections.

The deeper problem is the overwhelming concentration of technical, financial and moral power in the hands of people who lack the training, experience, wisdom, trustworthiness, humility and incentives to exercise that power responsibly.

That much should have been clear by the way in which Facebook’s leaders attempted to handle their serial scandals over the past two years. Ordering opposition research on their more prominent critics. Consistently downplaying the extent of Russian meddling on their platform. Berating company employees who tried to do something about that meddling. Selling the personal information of millions of its users to an unscrupulous broker so that the data could be used for political purposes.

Now Facebook wants to refurbish its damaged reputation by promising its users much more privacy via encrypted services as well as more aggressively policing hate speech on the site. Come again? This is what Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief security officer, called “the judo move: In a world where everything is encrypted and doesn’t last long, entire classes of scandal are invisible to the media.”

In other words, it’s a cynical exercise in abdication dressed as an act of responsibility. Knock a few high-profile bigots down. Throw a thick carpet over much of the rest. Then figure out how to extract a profit from your new model.

Assuming that’s Facebook’s deeper calculation — it’s hard to think of another — then it may wind up solving the company’s short-term problems. But it might also produce two equally dismal results.

On the one hand, Facebook will be hosting the worst kinds of online behavior. In a public note in March, Zuckerberg admitted that encryption will help facilitate “truly terrible things like child exploitation, terrorism, and extortion.” (For that, he promised to “work with law enforcement.” Great.)

On the other hand, Facebook is completing its transition from being a simple platform, broadly indifferent to the content it hosts, to being a publisher that curates and is responsible for content. Getting rid of Farrakhan, Jones and the others are the easy calls for now, because they are such manifestly odious figures and they have no real political power.

But what happens with the harder calls, the ones who want to be seen publicly and can’t be swept under: alleged Islamophobes, militant anti-immigration types, the people who call for the elimination of Israel? Facebook has training documents governing hate speech, and is now set to deploy the latest generation of artificial intelligence to detect it.

But the decision to absolutely ban certain individuals will always be a human one. It will inevitably be subjective. And as these things generally go, it will wind up leading to bans on people whose views are hateful mainly in the eyes of those doing the banning. Recall how the Southern Poverty Law Center, until recently an arbiter of moral hygiene in matters of hate speech, wound up smearing Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz, both champions of political moderation, as “anti-Muslim extremists.”

Facebook probably can’t imagine that its elaborate systems and processes would lead to perverse results. And not everything needs to be a slippery slope.

Then again, a company that once wanted to make the world more open and connected now wants to make it more private. In time it might also become a place where only nice thoughts are allowed. The laws of unintended consequence can’t rule it out.

Dear Commons Community,

Patti Davis, the daughter of former President Ronald Reagan, tore into Republicans who remain silent about President Donald Trump in an open letter published in The Washington Post.

Davis noted in the blistering missive — titled “Dear Republicans: Stop using my father, Ronald Reagan, to justify your silence on Trump” — how Republicans have claimed her father’s legacy and “exalted him as an icon of conservatism and used the quotes of his that serve your purpose at any given moment.”

“Yet at this moment in America’s history when the democracy to which my father pledged himself and the Constitution that he swore to uphold, and did faithfully uphold, are being degraded and chipped away at by a sneering, irreverent man who traffics in bullying and dishonesty, you stay silent,” she added.

Davis listed some of the controversial times when many Republicans have refused to criticize the president, such as when his administration introduced a policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“You stay silent when President Trump speaks of immigrants as if they are trash, rips children from the arms of their parents and puts them in cages,” she wrote.

Davis concluded her letter with a request to “the Republican Party that holds tightly to my father’s legacy.”

“If you are going to stand silent as America is dismantled and dismembered, as democracy is thrown onto the ash heap of yesterday, shame on you,” she wrote. “But don’t use my father’s name on the way down.”

Go get them, Patti!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As if the fallout earlier this year from the college admissions scandal was not bad enough, a Chinese family worth billions of dollars is reportedly behind a $6.5 million payment to ensure that their daughter got accepted into Stanford University. When prosecutors unveiled the case, dubbed Operation Varsity Blues, they did not list the identity of the person who was responsible for payment. The payment was the largest sum of money collected by William Rick Singer, who was the ringleader of the college admissions scandal.

According to the Los Angles Times, the family of Yusi Zhao met with Singer, who devised a plan to ensure she got accepted to the prestigious school. Singer reportedly created a fake athletic profile for Zhao and tried to have her recruited by the school’s sailing team, even though she had no experience in the sport. While there are no indications that Zhao ever joined the sailing team, U.S. prosecutor Eric Rosen said that her acceptance was “partly due to the fact that she had fabricated sailing credentials.”

Zhao was admitted to Stanford in 2017 and was a sophomore when news of the scandal broke. Stanford expelled Zhao not long after they discovered that parts of her application were falsified. Zhao even made a video posted on social media where she claims “I tested into Stanford through my own hard work.”

Yusi’s father, Tao Zhao, is the chairman and co-founder of a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company based in Heze, China. Neither Zhao nor her parents, who both live in Beijing, have been charged by prosecutors in the case.

We need to stop the sanity of putting so-called “elite colleges” on a pedestal!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Felix Matos Rodriguez on his first day as the New CUNY chancellor announced five senior appointments.

Below is the official announcement from his office.

Tony

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May 1, 2019

Newly appointed CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez opened his tenure today by announcing five appointments, each of whom already can claim a strong record of service to the University. The positions include an interim president for Queens College, a post necessitated by Dr. Matos Rodríguez’s departure; and an interim president for the CUNY Graduate Center, a position that will be vacated later this year with the departure of current Interim President Joy Connolly. Chancellor Matos Rodríguez also named an executive vice chancellor and university provost, a senior vice chancellor for institutional affairs, strategic advancement and special counsel, and a vice chancellor to oversee communications and marketing.

All five appointments are pending confirmation by the University’s Board of Trustees in their May and June meetings.

“Just as we ultimately chose our new Chancellor from within the ranks of the University, it comes as no surprise to see that his first appointments involve individuals who also bring a distinguished record of service to CUNY,” said William C. Thompson Jr., Chair of the CUNY Board of Trustees. “Three of these driven, highly qualified individuals will serve in the administration of Chancellor Matos Rodríguez, helping to ensure his success out of the gate, and two will help to maintain strong leadership at Queens College and the Graduate Center.”

“I am pleased to be able to welcome five highly accomplished professionals to fill key roles in the University, though none of them will need much of an introduction within the CUNY community,” said Chancellor Matos Rodríguez. “Their résumés show the breadth, depth and overall quality of their contributions to their fields, and much of that work has already been to the benefit of CUNY and its students.”

José Luis Cruz has been appointed executive vice chancellor and university provost effective July 1. Vita Rabinowitz will serve as interim university provost until June 30 following her dedicated leadership as CUNY interim chancellor for the last 11 months. Dr. Rabinowitz was previously executive vice chancellor and university provost. Dr. Cruz, an electrical engineer and education policy expert, is the current president of Herbert H. Lehman College in the Bronx. President Cruz has enhanced Lehman’s national reputation as an engine of opportunity and made great strides toward becoming the top contributor to educational attainment in the Bronx. A leading advocate for policies to expand opportunities and improve educational outcomes for all students, Dr. Cruz has served as provost of California State University, Fullerton; vice president of higher education policy and practice at The Education Trust in Washington, D.C., and vice president of student affairs for the University of Puerto Rico system. He began his career as a faculty member in engineering at the UPR-Mayagüez, rising through the ranks and serving as chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and dean of academic affairs. Dr. Cruz serves on the board of directors of The Education Trust, the Institute for Higher Education Policy, the New York Botanical Garden and the Regional Plan Association. President Cruz is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers as well as a National Science Foundation Career Award recipient. He earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering (magna cum laude) from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, and a master’s and doctorate from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Glenda Grace has been appointed senior vice chancellor for institutional affairs, strategic advancement and special counsel, effective May 1. She most recently worked at Queens College, where she served as General Counsel and Chief of Staff. Her office provided legal advice and guidance to the college’s academic and administrative departments, offices and related entities. She was responsible for labor relations with faculty and other instructional and administrative staff under CUNY bylaws, policies and collective bargaining agreements, and she served as chief ethics officer. Previously, Ms. Grace was Executive Counsel to the President and Labor Designee at Hostos Community College; Visiting Assistant Professor at Hofstra University School of Law; Special Counsel to the Office of Capital Defender, and Litigation Associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. She began her career as a clerk for the Honorable U.W. Clemon, U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Alabama. Ms. Grace holds a B.A. and a B.S. from the University of Pennsylvania, and a J.D. from Columbia University School of Law.

Maite Junco has been appointed vice chancellor for communications and marketing, effective May 1. Most recently, she was director of communications for New York City Public Advocate Letitia James’ historic winning campaign for New York State Attorney General. Prior, Ms. Junco worked at the New York City Department of Education as senior advisor to the chancellor and led the Office of Communications and External Affairs, overseeing marketing, digital communications, intergovernmental affairs and translation services for the nation’s largest public school system. Ms. Junco previously worked for more than 20 years as a journalist including a year at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, where she was editor of Voices of NY. She spent 15 years as an editor in the New York Daily News, the last of them as managing editor for Hispanic Publications, a role in which she oversaw Viva, an English-language weekly section on Latin culture, trends and issues. Ms. Junco also covered religion and immigration as a beat reporter at Bloomberg News. She began her career as a TV producer for Channel 24, an all-news station in San Juan, Puerto Rico; after moving to New York in 1989, she was assistant editor at El Diario-La Prensa and later worked in the campaigns of President Bill Clinton, Mayor David Dinkins and Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez. Ms. Junco has a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

William Tramontano has been appointed Interim President of Queens College, effective June 1. He is currently serving as senior advisor to the president for student success and strategic initiatives at Hunter College. In that capacity, he works closely with Academic Affairs on raising retention and graduation rates, and oversees student success initiatives including efforts to improve course availability, strengthen student engagement and bolster postgraduate outcomes. Previously, Dr. Tramontano spent a decade as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Brooklyn College, where he led a successful effort to improve graduation rates and led the establishment of a five-school structure, the expansion of the faculty, the creation of the Feinstein Graduate School of Cinema and the accreditation of the business school. His tenure there was preceded by five years of service at Lehman College, where he was acting provost and dean of natural and social sciences. A cellular biologist, Dr. Tramontano graduated from Manhattan College and earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from New York University. He returned to Manhattan College to teach and spent 22 years on the college’s biology faculty, including 14 years as department chair. Tramontano has served on CUNY’s Conflicts of Interest Committee and chaired the CUNY Council of Provosts’ Academic Policy Committee.

James Muyskens has been appointed interim president of the CUNY Graduate Center, effective July 1. Dr. Muyskens, a philosopher, served as president of Queens College for 12 years and, in 2014, returned to teaching at the Graduate Center and Hunter College. At Queens College, he was credited with raising the school’s stature and reputation as a top-value college that excelled in serving low-income students and promoting interactions between students of different class, racial and ethnic backgrounds. Muyskens undertook an updating of the college’s undergraduate general education curriculum and oversaw a raft of improvements and additions to the physical plant. Dr. Muyskens, a graduate of Central College in Iowa, earned a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan. He began his career at Hunter College, rising from assistant professor to professor of philosophy. He served as chair of Hunter’s Department of Philosophy and as associate provost and acting provost. He spent seven years as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas before serving as senior vice chancellor for academic affairs of the 34-campus University System of Georgia.

The City University of New York is the nation’s leading urban public university. Founded in 1847, CUNY counts 13 Nobel Prize and 24 MacArthur (“Genius”) grant winners among its alumni. CUNY students, alumni and faculty have garnered scores of other prestigious honors over the years in recognition of historic contributions to the advancement of the sciences, business, the arts and myriad other fields.  The University comprises 25 institutions: 11 senior colleges, seven community colleges, William E. Macaulay Honors College at CUNY, CUNY Graduate Center, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, CUNY School of Law, CUNY School of Professional Studies and CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. The University serves more than 275,000 degree-seeking students. CUNY offers online baccalaureate and master’s degrees through the School of Professional Studies.

Dear Commons Community,

Hampshire College has been fighting for its survival for the past year.  Amid bleak financial prospects, the small liberal-arts institution in Massachusetts announced  that it would find a merger partner and accept a much-reduced freshman class but that was before a wave of top leaders stepped down, including President Miriam E. Nelson along with the chair and vice chair of the board.  Now the college is taking a merger off the table and aims to chart a new path for survival.  Here is the road it is taking as reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Reduce Faculty and Staff

There was no getting around it: Hampshire needed to cut expenses. However, initial plans to slash half the faculty were forestalled, providing relief for professors worried about whether the character of the institution could survive mass faculty layoffs.

Twenty-six faculty members took voluntary leaves of absence, and many of them will take positions in local institutions in the Five College Consortium, according to a message to the campus this week from Interim President Ken Rosenthal. Twenty-one faculty members reduced their appointments, for example, from full-time to three-fourths-time. Eleven faculty members will be retiring.

The faculty will go from 110 full-time-equivalent positions this year to 60 next.

“It was really an elaborate community effort from the faculty to ensure there were minimal-to-no layoffs,” said Christoph Cox, a philosophy professor who volunteered to reduce his hours. “Everybody realizes we’re in this together.”

Staff members did not, perhaps, share that realization. Hampshire began informing 24 staff members on Friday that their jobs will be eliminated by June 30.

Invest in High-Demand Areas

Amid the reductions, Hampshire decided to add four visiting faculty positions in high-demand areas, responding to market demands. The areas include game design and animation; film, photo and video; anthropology; and critical dance.

The College Fund-Raising Crunch

“It’s a combination of what we need on campus,” Rosenthal said, “and what our students need and don’t see available on the other consortium campuses.”

Eva Rueschmann, vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty, said Hampshire wanted to maintain the strengths it has been known for nationally, like being ranked fifth in the Princeton Review for animation and game-design programs.

“There was always a commitment to certain areas where we were strong,” Rueschmann said. “We had the data to really make those decisions based on what students are looking for.”

Get More Students

The decision by the previous administration to admit a much smaller freshman class continues to be a sore point for faculty members. It’s viewed as a self-inflicted wound at a place that is largely dependent on student tuition for operating expenses, and as a choice made by leaders who felt a merger or partnership was the only way forward.

That comes after years of declining enrollment. Next year, the campus will be drastically smaller, with about 600 students, far less than the 1,300 Rosenthal says he would like to see at full strength.

Rosenthal must convince potential students that Hampshire is a viable institution despite the last few months. He thinks he can do it. Despite the challenges this year, he said, Hampshire still has a valuable brand.

“It’s very gratifying to know that when you know us, and when you know us well, then you like what you see and you like what you hear, and you like what you experience,” he says. “I think we can build on that.”

Raise Money

Hampshire also scored a coup: Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker and a Hampshire alumnus, is co-chairing a fund-raising committee, Rosenthal said.

Even with the starpower, however, the challenge will be big. The president said he wants to raise about $20 million within the next 14 months, and about $90 million over the next five years, to put the college on solid footing.

It’s especially challenging because Hampshire is a young college. Most of its alumni — half of whom are younger than 42 — haven’t hit their full earnings potential. And that also means the college tends to get fewer windfalls from alumni wills than older colleges.

“We need to go to the people who know us the best,” Rosenthal says, “and ask them to do more for us than they ever have before.”

Maintain Intellectual Community

Hampshire has been helped by the Five College Consortium, which includes Amherst, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Many of its faculty members will be on those colleges’ payrolls but will still be part of the Hampshire community.

For example, advising is central to Hampshire’s education model, which looks a lot like graduate education at the undergraduate level. Hampshire will still pay its faculty members who will be taking positions at nearby colleges to continue their advising relationships with Hampshire students.

“This will encourage students who are here to come back next year,” Rosenthal said, “because they’ll find that in many cases their advisers are on campus or at a nearby campus able to advise them.”

Cox, the philosophy professor, said he wished the previous administration would have been more forthright about the challenges facing Hampshire earlier on and engaged with the community to try to find a solution. He has advice for other small liberal-arts colleges that are strapped for money.

“Early on in the game, before the financial pressures reach their crisis point,” he said, “make the pressures known to the whole community, and work together as a full community — faculty, staff, alumni, students and parents — to find a solution.”

He’ll know soon enough whether that’s a winning formula.

We wish our colleagues at Hampshire all the best!

Tony

Fox News' Chris Wallace: Some opinion people who appear on this network who might be pushing a political agenda don't think the Mueller letter is a big deal. But we have to deal in facts — the fact is this letter was a clear indication that Mueller was very upset w/ Barr. pic.twitter.com/YSedEZ8NRL

— Lis Power (@LisPower1) May 1, 2019

Dear Commons Community,

Fox News’ Chris Wallace called out his own network’s opinion hosts yesterday (see video above) for “pushing a political agenda” when covering communications between special counsel Robert Mueller and Attorney General William Barr.  As reported in the Huffington Post.

“Correspondence between the special counsel and attorney general came into sharp focus Tuesday night after The Washington Post reported on a letter Mueller sent to Barr in March. Following Barr’s release of a four-page summary to Congress about the conclusions of the special counsel’s investigation, Mueller wrote that Barr’s summary “did not fully capture the context, nature, and the substance” of the investigation. 

“There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results” of the probe, Mueller’s letter read.

Fox News opinion host Laura Ingraham downplayed the letter’s significance during an appearance on the network Wednesday, focusing instead on comments Barr made about a subsequent phone call he said he had with Mueller.

The attorney general said during his opening testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that Mueller had complained in that call about media coverage of Barr’s letter, not the letter’s inaccuracy.

“That’s not what [Mueller] says in the letter,” Wallace pointed out. “What he says in the letter is, ‘You didn’t reflect what we found in the report.’ And there are a lot of people who ― having read the full report, or as much as has been not redacted ― agree that [Barr] didn’t reveal what was fully in the report.”

Wallace seemingly referenced Ingraham when he pointed to Fox News’ opinion hosts for failing to acknowledge the significance of Mueller’s letter to Barr. 

“I know there’s some people who don’t think this March 27th letter is a big deal … and some opinion people who appear on this network, who may be pushing a political agenda, but we have to deal in facts,” Wallace said on Shep Smith’s Fox News program Wednesday. 

Wallace said the “facts” show that Mueller’s letter was “a clear indication” that the special counsel was “very upset the letter that had been sent out by the attorney general and wanted it changed or at least added to.”

“Those aren’t opinions. That’s not a political agenda. Those are the facts,” he added.

Those are the facts indeed!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Senate hearing today with Attorney General William Barr had its ups and downs and political theater. Republicans hammering away at Hillary Clinton and Democrats focusing entirely on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report.  However, Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono exhibited the most thunder and tore into Barr saying several times that “You knew you lied!’

A seven-minute video of Senator Hirono’s comments is above.

Congratulations to Donald Trump for ruining the professional reputation of another of his appointees.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer met and agreed on a $2 trillion infrastructure plan.  It was a great photo-op to see how the leaders of our two parties can come to together to solve the country’s problems.    Below is a New York Times editorial reviewing this meeting.  The last paragraph is critical in that while the three agreed on a plan, nobody has figured out how to pay for it yet.

Tony

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It’s Infrastructure Week!

On Tuesday, a dozen Democratic lawmakers, including the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, headed to the White House for a frank talk with President Trump about the “I” word: infrastructure.

This was Democratic leaders’ first huddle with Mr. Trump since December, a testament to both sides’ desire to address the shabby state of America’s public works. Most everyone recognizes the critical need for an overhaul. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the system a dismal grade of D-plus, and there is broad public support for more federal investment. Since Mr. Trump’s election, Democrats have repeatedly cited infrastructure as one policy issue in which they see potential for working with him to get something done.

Lawmakers emerged from Tuesday’s talks in an atypically upbeat mood, full of praise for the president. Ms. Pelosi proclaimed her team “very excited about the conversation” and cheered Mr. Trump for agreeing that a “big and bold” plan was needed. Mr. Schumer called the meeting “constructive” and noted approvingly that the president had been “eager” to push funding up to $2 trillion. “This was a very, very good start,” Mr. Schumer told reporters.

Indeed, infrastructure is the rare issue where the public interest aligns with both the Democrats’ and the president’s political instincts. Better still, the prospect of rebuilding the nation appeals to the president’s fondness for constructing large, tangible monuments to his eminence.

All of which lays the foundation for progress on a sorely neglected issue. But only if Mr. Trump gets serious enough to buck members of his own party in both Congress and the White House — many of whom favor the Republican tradition of paying lip service to the need for public works projects while refusing to pay for them.

As part of branding himself an economic populist, Mr. Trump campaigned in 2016 with a vow to spend $1 trillion to make America’s roads, airports and transit systems the envy of the world. He blew into office with grand visions of launching development projects across the nation. “They say Eisenhower was the greatest infrastructure president. They named the highway system after him,” he told one of his billionaire real estate friends during a meeting in early 2017, according to Axios. “But we’re going to do double, triple, quadruple, what Eisenhower did.”

In March of last year, in a speech promoting his administration’s new $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan, Mr. Trump boasted that building was in his blood. “That’s what I do,” he declared. “I build. I was always very good at building. It was always my best thing. I think better than being president, I was maybe good at building.”

But, thus far, Mr. Trump has proved very bad at building. Highways, bridges, pipelines, water systems, even beautiful steel border walls — all have turned out to be more complicated than he anticipated. Infrastructure policy was repeatedly pushed to the side during his first year in office, turning the phrase “Infrastructure Week” into a sad joke. And his administration’s 2018 plan fell flat. The $1.5 trillion package provided a paltry $200 billion in federal funding, relying heavily on public-private partnerships and state spending. No one in Congress was interested in championing it. Even the president publicly questioned its feasibility.

With Democrats now in charge of the House and the 2020 campaign well underway, Mr. Trump is looking to give it another try. But the odds for success remain long, and no one is looking to make this easy for him.

In addition to dealing with skeptics in his own party, the president is facing a Democratic Party emboldened by the midterms and looking to play hardball. Democrats went into Tuesday’s meeting with an aggressive set of “priorities” ranging from labor protections to green-energy investment — a bold bid guaranteed to prompt pushback.

While the details of any plan are open to negotiation, the basic issue of how to pay for one remains. Democrats want funding upfront, without the kind of private-public gimmickry that defined the previous plan. And, for now, they are demanding that a chunk of the money come from rolling back pieces of Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts. When this idea was floated last year, Republicans scoffed, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, dismissed it as a “nonstarter.”

The president is facing resistance even from his own aides. Even as he was meeting with Democrats, his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney — a fierce budget hawk — was at a conference in Beverly Hills, talking down the prospects of a deal. As Mr. Mulvaney sees it, the cure for crumbling bridges is deregulation.

The next move is up to Mr. Trump. Tuesday’s group agreed to reconvene in three weeks, at which time the president will discuss how he intends to pay the $2 trillion bill. Then everyone will get a clearer sense of his commitment to this crucial issue, and how willing he is to take on his own party to make it happen.