Dear Commons Community,

Jeffrey Epstein was pronounced dead after being found unresponsive in his New York City prison cell around 6:30 a.m. yesterday, the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office and Justice Department confirmed. He was 66. 

The FBI has opened an investigation into the multimillionaire financier’s “apparent suicide” at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, where he was being held without bail following his July 6 arrest. The Medical Examiner’s office is also investigating his death, a spokeswoman said. 

The Justice Department would not confirm whether Epstein had been on suicide watch, but both the Associated Press and the New York Times, citing unnamed sources, report that he had been taken off suicide watch at some point before his death.

The financier was awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking underage girls. Despite being known for his interest in young girls for years, he long managed to evade charges: Among them was a case filed against him and socialite Ghislaine Maxwell in which a woman alleged that Epstein had held her as a sex slave when she was 17 years old. She said the pair had trafficked her to several influential people, including lawyer Alan Dershowitz, British Prince Andrew, Duke of York, former Senate Minority Leader George Mitchell, and former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson

An incident in which Epstein was found semiconscious in his cell last month with marks on his neck was being investigated as a suicide attempt or possible assault, the New York Times reported. 

In his decision to keep Epstein behind bars, Judge Richard Berman sided with prosecutors who deemed him to be a danger to the community and an “extraordinary flight risk,” considering that Epstein owned several properties and a private plane. 

Epstein pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking underage girls and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. If convicted, he would have faced up to 45 years in prison.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr said in a statement that he was “appalled” to hear of Epstein’s death in federal custody and has asked Inspector General Michael Horowitz to open an investigation into the circumstances.

“Mr. Epstein’s death raises serious questions that must be answered,” Barr said. 

Serious questions indeed!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last year, Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” would feature more than 30 paid ads. In his show on Thursday night, there were only 13. On Friday, there were just 11 ads.  Here is an excerpt of an article written by Jenna Amatulli for The Huffington Post that reviews Carlson’s advertising problems.

“Fox News and its board members may be staying quiet about the recent controversies surrounding Tucker Carlson, but the advertisements airing during his show tell an interesting story.

After Carlson told his “Tucker Carlson Tonight” viewers that white supremacy is “actually not a real problem in America” and that the suggestion it is a problem is “a hoax” spread by the mainstream media, his commercial breaks on Thursday and Friday have featured as few as 13 and 11 paid ads, respectively. As of last year, he had about 36 paid ads per show.

In the last year, the types and volume of advertisements on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” have drastically shifted. Dozens of advertisers abandoned Carlson’s prime-time show beginning in December 2018, when he told America that immigrants were making the country “dirtier.” More advertisers left in March when Media Matters discovered Carlson’s racist and white supremacist rhetoric on a radio show between 2006 and 2011.

While Carlson previously had a wide variety of paid advertisers invested in him specifically, his commercial breaks over the last year have increasingly included “house ads” for Fox News, Fox Nation, Fox television and Fox Sports programming.

The Hollywood Reporter analyzed Carlson’s advertisers after the radio show comments were uncovered and found that in the nine programs that aired after it, “ads for Fox programming have made up 34.8 percent of the show’s advertising spots in that period, compared to just 3.7 percent in the period leading up to his December comment about immigration.”

As of the end of March, Carlson’s ad load per show fell from about 36 to about 18, and it’s remained pretty stagnant since then. A typical show features anywhere from 18 to 21 ads.

However, that number has decreased again in the last two weeks.

The sudden uptick in Fox house ads comes on the heels of Carlson announcing he would be taking some time off for a vacation until Aug. 19.

Despite the planned vacation, advertisers have been releasing statements that they are cutting ties ― marking the third mass exodus of brands in less than a year.

This week, Long John Silver’s said it will no longer advertise on Fox News as a whole, and Nestlé, HelloFresh and Stein Mart confirmed that they are no longer running ads on Carlson’s show.”

Fox News should dumped Carlson.  He is an embarrassment even for Fox News.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Trump and first lady Melania posed for a photo this week with one of the youngest victims affected by the El Paso mass shooting — a  2-month-old whose parents were killed shielding the child from gunfire.

While visiting the University Medical Center of El Paso (UMC), the president grins and gives a thumbs-up during a photo op with his wife, who was holding baby Paul, the orphaned son of Jordan and Andre Anchondo.

The infant suffered two broken fingers and was grazed by a bullet during the Saturday shooting at a local Walmart shopping center, which left 22 people dead, including his parents.

“I met many incredible people in Dayton, Ohio & El Paso, Texas yesterday,” Trump  wrote alongside the photo on Twitter. “Their communities are strong and unbreakable.”

In the photo, the president is flanked by the infant’s uncle, Tito Anchondo, who told PNR he, as well as the child’s deceased father, were both big Trump supporters.

“My brother was very supportive of Trump,” Anchondo told the outlet. “I think people are misconstruing President Trump’s ideas.”

Still, Melania’s image was met with backlash on Twitter, with some users criticizing the first couple’s expressions during the somber meeting.

“Why is he giving a ‘thumbs up’ in a photo with a baby whose parents were just murdered,” one user questioned.

“Why does he stand with his thumbs up?” asked another. “It’s not a family bbq or a frat party.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

An ad that aired on several news program including Fox News criticizes “Moscow Mitch” McConnell for not getting the Senate to act on bills related to election security.  As reported by The Huffington Post.

“Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is getting hit by members of his own party in a new TV ad that aired yesterday in Washington D.C., and in his home state.

The spot urges voters to call McConnell and demand a vote on the election security bills he blocked last week. It also features a supercut of President Donald Trump dismissing the well-documented threat of election interference from Russia.

The ad will run on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and during “Fox & Friends” on Fox News in D.C. (the latter is known to be one of Trump’s favorite shows).

Former Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol shared the spot, which was created by Republicans for the Rule of Law, an organization in which he is a director:

The bills, which are aimed at helping to protect against Russian meddling and other threats, include a $775 million measure passed by the House to strengthen state election systems. McConnell claimed the bills were unnecessary and said Trump had already taken action to protect elections.

The ad also contains comments by Trump in which he not only claims Russia isn’t a threat, but admits he’d take dirt on a rival if Moscow offered it.

“It’s not an interference,” Trump said in an ABC interview in June. “They have information. I think I’d take it.”

Critics slammed McConnell for blocking the bills.

“He is aiding and abetting [Russian President] Vladimir Putin’s ongoing attempts to subvert American democracy, according to the Republican FBI, CIA, DNI, intel committee,” Joe Scarborough said on his MSNBC show last week. “All Republicans are all saying Russia is subverting American democracy and Moscow Mitch won’t even let the Senate take a vote on it. That is un-American.”

In response, #MoscowMitch began trending on Twitter, provoking an angry reaction from the senator.

“I was called unpatriotic, un-American and essentially treasonous by a couple of left-wing pundits on the basis of bold-faced lies,” he said.

“Our representatives should work to pass bipartisan legislation to deter future election meddling, secure our electoral system and encourage cybersecurity,” Republicans for the Rule of Law legal advisor Chris Truax said in a statement. “This is not a red or blue team issue. We all have a stake in free and fair American elections.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

What if you could map every book and article assigned in college courses around the world and see which authors are making the most impact? A project run out of Columbia University is working to do just that. It’s called the Open Syllabus Project, and this month its leaders released a new version of their tool that analyzes assignment lists from more than six million syllabi.  Above are the top-five texts as per this Project.  I still have a copy of The Elements of Style on my bookshelf that was assigned as required reading in one of my classes in 1967.  EdSurge has a podcast interview (below) with one of the founders of the project that is quite interesting.  Take a listen!!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

U.S. immigration officials raided seven Mississippi chicken processing plants yesterday, arresting 680 mostly Latino workers in the largest workplace sting in at least a decade.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“The raids happened just hours before President Donald Trump visited El Paso, Texas, the majority-Latino border city where a man linked to an online screed about a “Hispanic invasion” was charged in a shooting that left 22 people dead.

“On a day when we seek unifying words and acts to heal the nation’s broken heart, President Trump allows so many families and communities to be torn apart,” said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.

About 600 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents fanned out across the plants operated by five companies, surrounding the perimeters to prevent workers from fleeing.

In Morton, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) east of the capital of Jackson, workers filled three buses — two for men and one for women — at a Koch Foods Inc. plant.

Those arrested were taken to a military hangar to be processed for immigration violations. About 70 family, friends and residents waved goodbye and shouted, “Let them go! Let them go!” Later, two more buses arrived.

A tearful 13-year-old boy whose parents are from Guatemala waved goodbye to his mother, a Koch worker, as he stood beside his father. Some employees tried to flee on foot but were captured in the parking lot.

Workers, including Domingo Candelaria, who could show they were in the country legally were allowed to leave the plant after agents searched the trunks of their vehicles.

“It was a sad situation inside,” Candelaria said.

Mississippi is the nation’s fifth-largest chicken producing state and the plants’ tough processing jobs have mainly been filled by Latino immigrants eager to take whatever work they can get. Chicken plants dominate the economies of Morton and other small towns east of Jackson.

Based in Park Ridge, Illinois, Koch is one of the largest poultry producers in the U.S, with operations in Mississippi and five other states. The company didn’t respond to telephone calls and emails seeking comment.

Matthew Albence, ICE’s acting director, told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday in Pearl, just down the road from the Koch plant, that the raids could be the largest-ever workplace operation in any single state. Asked about their coinciding with Trump’s visit to El Paso, Albence responded, “This is a long-term operation that’s been going on.” He said raids are “racially neutral” and based on evidence of illegal residency.

The companies involved could be charged with knowingly hiring workers who are in the county illegally and will be scrutinized for tax, document and wage fraud, Albence said.

Bill Chandler, executive director of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, called the “terrible” raids “another effort to drive Latinos out of Mississippi,” and he blamed Trump for fanning racism with his past incendiary comments about immigrants.

“This is the same thing that Trump is doing at the border with the Border Patrol,” he said, referring to the increased crackdown on migrants coming into the U.S.

Major immigration raids were common under President George W. Bush, including one at a kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, in 2008 that resulted in about 400 arrests. President Barack Obama avoided them, limiting workplace immigration efforts to low-profile audits.

Trump resumed workplace raids, but the months of preparation and hefty resources they require make them rare. Last year, the administration targeted a landscaping company near Toledo, Ohio, and a meatpacking plant in eastern Tennessee. The former owner of the Tennessee plant was sentenced to 18 months in prison last month.

On Wednesday, a hangar at a Mississippi Air National Guard base in Flowood, adjoining the Jackson airport, was set up to process those who were detained. Employees formed seven lines, one for each workplace raided, with fingerprint scanners and document printers at each interview station.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, former Vice President Joe Biden, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president, directly linked President Trump to the massacre in El Paso, Texas. His speech (full video above) took place just hours before Mr. Trump arrived there.

“We have a problem with this rising tide of supremacy, white supremacy in America and we have a president who encourages and emboldens it,” Biden said.

Biden accused Mr. Trump of inspiring mass shootings in Texas and Pennsylvania. 

“How far is it from Trump’s saying this ‘Is an invasion’ to the shooter in El Paso declaring quote, ‘This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas?'” Biden asked. “How far is it from white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville — Trump’s ‘very fine people’ – chanting ‘you will replace us’ to the shooter at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh saying Jews are ‘committing genocide’ on his people. I don’t think it’s that far at all.”

Biden went on to say that in both “language” and “code,” the president “has fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation.”

Biden, the Democratic party frontrunner, noted that white nationalist and Ku Klux Klan leaders had celebrated Mr. Trump’s 2016 election.

“Our president has more in common with George Wallace than George Washington,” Biden said.

As Biden spoke, the president tweeted from Air Force One, calling Biden’s speech “so boring.” Told later about the tweet, Biden replied, “he should get a life.”

Truth be told!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Jill Lepore’s These Truths:  A History of the United States, a gift from my colleague, Chet Jordan.  At nine hundred pages, it is a deep dive into a broad subject.   However, I found it a good read especially since she covers issues related to equity, race, and gender well.  It starts with Christopher Columbus and ends with Donald Trump.  Here are some pearls:

• John Quincy Adams on Andrew Jackson:  “The man is a barbarian who could not write a sentence and hardly could spell his own name.”
  
• Maria Stuart (1831) commenting on the country’s expansionism and treatment of native Americans:  “Oh America, America, foul and indelible is thy stain.”
• Henry Luce  on scientific management:  “Show me a man who thinks he is objective, and I will show you a man who is deceiving himself.”
• W.E.B Du Bois on the lynching of Sam Hose:  “One could not be a calm, cool  and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved.”
• Mary Grace Hopper (1958) on computer technology:  “It is the current aim to replace, as far as possible, the human brain.”
• Earl Warren (hours before his death) on Richard Nixon:  “If Nixon is not forced to turn over the tapes of his conversations with the ring of men who were conversing on their violations of the law then liberty will soon be dead in this country”.
• Pat Buchanan on the Iraq War:  “In 2003, the United States invaded a country that did not threaten us, did not attack us, and did not want war with us, to disarm it of weapons we have since discovered it did not have.”

If you want to revisit our country’s history or maybe read about it for the first time, try Lepore!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Toni Morrison, the Nobel laureate in literature whose books explored black identity and experiences in America died on Monday in the Bronx. She was 88.  Her death, at Montefiore Medical Center, was announced by her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. A spokeswoman said the cause was complications of pneumonia. Ms. Morrison lived in Grand View-on-Hudson, N.Y.  Here is an excerpt from her New York Times obituary.

“Morrison was the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1993, Ms. Morrison was the author of 11 novels as well as children’s books and essay collections. Among them were celebrated works like “Song of Solomon,” which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, and “Beloved,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

Ms. Morrison was one of the rare American authors whose books were both critical and commercial successes. Her novels appeared regularly on the New York Times best-seller list, were featured multiple times on Oprah Winfrey’s television book club and were the subject of myriad critical studies. A longtime faculty member at Princeton, Ms. Morrison lectured widely and was seen often on television.

In awarding her the Nobel, the Swedish Academy cited her “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import,” through which she “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

Ms. Morrison animated that reality in prose that rings with the cadences of black oral tradition. Her plots are dreamlike and nonlinear, spooling backward and forward in time as though characters bring the entire weight of history to bear on their every act.

Her narratives mingle the voices of men, women, children and even ghosts in layered polyphony. Myth, magic and superstition are inextricably intertwined with everyday verities, a technique that caused Ms. Morrison’s novels to be likened often to those of Latin American magic realist writers like Gabriel García Márquez.

In “Sula,” a woman blithely lets a train run over her leg for the insurance money it will give her family. In “Song of Solomon,” a baby girl is named Pilate by her father, who “had thumbed through the Bible, and since he could not read a word, chose a group of letters that seemed to him strong and handsome.” In “Beloved,” the specter of a murdered child takes up residence in the house of her murderer.

Throughout Ms. Morrison’s work, elements like these coalesce around her abiding concern with slavery and its legacy. In her fiction, the past is often manifest in a harrowing present — a world of alcoholism, rape, incest and murder, recounted in unflinching detail.

It is a world, Ms. Morrison writes in “Beloved” (the novel is set in the 19th century but stands as a metaphor for the 20th), in which “anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind.”

“Not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty you,” she goes on. “Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up.”

She gave the world a lot. 

May she rest in peace!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Bill Bramhall’s editorial cartoon above in today’s New York Daily News appropriately describes Donald Trump’s relationship with the bigots, haters and racists that defile our country.

Tony