MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant Winners for 2019 Announced!

Dear Commons Community,

The MacArthur Fellowships were announced yesterday. They are awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for “extraordinary originality and dedication” and come with a no-strings-attached award of $625,000, distributed over five years. This year’s fellows include artists, writers, scientists, college professors, urban designers, and community activists. Below is a complete list of the 2019 fellows.

Congratulations to all!

Tony

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Elizabeth Anderson, 59

Philosopher

University of Michigan

Ann Arbor, Mich.

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Sujatha Baliga, 48

Attorney and restorative justice practitioner

Restorative Justice Project, Impact Justice

Oakland, Calif.

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Lynda Barry, 63

Graphic novelist, cartoonist and educator

University of Wisconsin

Madison, Wis.

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Mel Chin, 67

Artist

Egypt, N.C.

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Danielle Citron, 50

Legal scholar

Boston University School of Law

Boston

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Lisa Daugaard, 53

Criminal justice reformer

Public Defender Association

Seattle

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Annie Dorsen, 45

Theater artist

New York

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Andrea Dutton, 46

Geochemist and paleoclimatologist

University of Wisconsin

Madison, Wis.

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Jeffrey Gibson, 47

Visual artist

Bard College

Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

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Mary Halvorson, 38

Guitarist and composer

New York

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Saidiya Hartman, 58

Literary scholar and cultural historian

Columbia University

New York

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Walter Hood, 61

Landscape and public artist

Hood Design Studio; University of California, Berkeley

Oakland, Calif.

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Stacy Jupiter, 43

Marine scientist

Wildlife Conservation Society

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Suva, Fiji

Zachary Lippman, 41

Plant biologist

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.

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Valeria Luiselli, 36

Writer

Bard College

Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

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Kelly Lytle Hernandez, 45

Historian

University of California, Los Angeles

Los Angeles

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Sarah Michelson, 55

Choreographer

New York

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Jeffrey Alan Miller, 35

Literary scholar

Montclair State University

Montclair, N.J.

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Jerry X. Mitrovica, 58

Theoretical geophysicist

Harvard University

Cambridge, Mass.

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Emmanuel Pratt, 42

Urban designer

Sweet Water Foundation

Chicago

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Cameron Rowland, 30

Artist

New York

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Vanessa Ruta, 45

Neuroscientist

Rockefeller University

New York

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Joshua Tenenbaum, 47

Cognitive scientist

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, Mass.

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Jenny Tung, 37

Evolutionary anthropologist and geneticist

Duke University

Durham, N.C.

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Ocean Vuong, 30

Poet and fiction writer

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Amherst, Mass.

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Emily Wilson, 47

Classicist and translator

University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia

 

 

New York Times Editorial Sifts Through Congress’s Impeachment Inquiry!

Dear  Commons Community,

Yesterday Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives would begin an impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump because of the Ukraine whistle-blower affair.   The Senate Intelligence Committee opened an investigation into the matter and made clear it wanted to hear from the whistle-blower as soon as possible. Whitehouse representatives seem to indicate that they would cooperate fully by making available transcripts of Trump’s phone call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and the original whistle-blower’s report.  Trying to sort all of this out will not be easy.  A New York Times editorial this morning begins to examine the actors and issues.  Its conclusion: 

“After months — years even — of watching Mr. Trump behave as though he answered to no one, many lawmakers seemed almost relieved that the showdown had arrived. Now that it has, lawmakers of both parties must proceed with care. Rarely have the stakes been so high.”

The full editorial is below.

Tony

 

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New York Times

Congress Steps Up, Trump Blinks!

It’s a start, maybe.

By The Editorial Board

Sept. 24, 2019

It turns out President Trump can push his fellow Republicans too far. Senate Republicans stuck up for themselves, and their institution, on Tuesday by joining unanimously with their Democratic colleagues to call on the president to stop stonewalling. They asked him to release to the relevant congressional committees the complaint from a whistle-blower that an inspector general had said raised an “urgent concern” about the president’s behavior.

On the need for greater transparency from this White House, lawmakers from both parties are in unusual agreement, at least for now. And the White House showed signs of backing down, signaling not that it would release the full complaint but that it might not block the whistle-blower from testifying.

The rare display of institutional solidarity in defense of American democracy may prove ephemeral. On the other hand, it can be hard to recognize turning points in the moment, and this week Mr. Trump’s outrages seemed to be stirring lawmakers from their state of political rigidity and passivity.

On Tuesday, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, announced she would open an impeachment inquiry. But when reports surfaced this spring that Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, had been pushing Ukrainian officials to pursue a corruption investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, there was no mass outrage, no collective gasp of horror.

 

But over the past couple of months, and more intensely the past couple of weeks, has come an accelerating accretion of more, and more alarming, information: a whistle-blower complaint had been filed with the inspector general of the intelligence community accusing Mr. Trump of, among other acts, pressing the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, about Mr. Biden; the Department of Justice was blocking the inspector general from passing along the complaint, contra federal law; just days before speaking with Mr. Zelensky, Mr. Trump had directed the White House staff to withhold close to $400 million in military aid from Ukraine.

This episode of extreme politicking by Mr. Trump seems to go straight to questions of national security, and Democratic lawmakers who had been hesitant to call for impeachment began suggesting that it might be inevitable. On Sunday, Ms. Pelosi, a devout impeachment skeptic, gave the administration until Thursday to hand over the whistle-blower complaint or face “a whole new stage of investigation.” Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, felt moved to tweet that it was “critical” for the facts to come out.

Come Monday, and rolling into Tuesday, Washington was buzzing with a nervous energy. Everyone was on high alert, frantically scanning for signs of where things were headed next. Ms. Pelosi was canvassing her members about impeachment. With every House Democrat who stepped forward to speak about Ukraine — Debbie Dingell, Rosa DeLauro, John Lewis — the scramble to analyze the odds of impeachment began anew. In a Monday op-ed in The Washington Post, seven freshman House Democrats, including some from districts Mr. Trump won in 2016, came out in favor of a formal impeachment investigation. Twitter was awash in clichéd metaphors describing the shifting politics — the dam was breaking, the tide was turning, the winds were shifting. (In the real world, it always bears remembering, most people were less transfixed by the news from Washington.)

Republicans remained notably tepid about rushing to the president’s defense. The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Richard Burr of North Carolina, opened an investigation into the matter and made clear it wanted to hear from the whistle-blower as soon as possible. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, publicly asserted that he had pushed for the funding for Ukraine and received no explanation for why it had been held up by the administration.

At some point Tuesday, the rumbling began that Ms. Pelosi would hold an afternoon news conference to announce the opening of a formal impeachment inquiry. Shortly after 2 o’clock, Mr. Trump tweeted that he had authorized the release of the “complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript” of his call with Mr. Zelensky.

If the president was hoping this would ease the rising pressure, he was mistaken.

Democrats are not content to receive a transcript provided by the administration. Nor should they be. The allegations at hand are complicated and serious and call for the whistle-blower complaint in its entirety to be handed over to Congress. (The complaint is said to be about multiple concerning acts.) Ms. Pelosi conveyed this to the president Tuesday morning.

At 5 o’clock, Ms. Pelosi went before the nation and, in a five-minute statement, laid out the basic concerns about the president’s behavior, including his attempt to prevent Congress from learning about that behavior. “The president must be held accountable,” said Ms. Pelosi. “No one is above the law.”

There will be no more push and pull among Democrats about whether to hold an official impeachment inquiry. With apologies to Twitter, the trigger has been pulled, the Rubicon crossed, the die cast.

After months — years even — of watching Mr. Trump behave as though he answered to no one, many lawmakers seemed almost relieved that the showdown had arrived. Now that it has, lawmakers of both parties must proceed with care. Rarely have the stakes been so high.

 

Trump Says He Deserves the Nobel Peace Prize – He Wasn’t Joking!

Dear Commons Community,

President Trump told reporters at the United Nations yesterday that he was deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize.

“I think I would get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things, if they gave it out fairly, which they don’t,” Trump said following a bilateral meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan.

As do many U.S. conservatives, Trump then voiced frustration that former President Barack Obama received the award in 2009.

“Well, they gave one to Obama immediately upon his ascent to the presidency and he had no idea why he got it,” Trump said despite not being asked about his predecessor.

“You know what, that was the only thing I agreed with him on.”

Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize more than a year and a half into his first term of office. In its announcement, the committee said it was giving it to Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” and singled out his “vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.”

In his acceptance speech, Obama noted that it was unusual that he was receiving the prize at the beginning of his presidential term.

“Compared to some of the giants of history who have received this prize — Schweitzer and King, Marshall and Mandela — my accomplishments are slight,” Obama said.

But Obama also noted that “throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement. It’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes, and that’s why I will accept this award as a call to action — a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century.”

Trump sounds like he is losing his sense of reality!

Tony

Viet Thanh Nguyen Op-ED:  Why I Teach?

Image result for Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Dear Commons Community,

Viet Thanh Nguyen, a novelist and professor of English at the University of Southern California, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times explaining why he teaches.  His refers to a good teacher as one who cares about his/her students, who is available to them, who is passionate about a subject and who believes in the importance of scholarship.  He also makes comparisons to other vocations in the military and government.   

His conclusion:  “Higher education, like the rest of American society, from our political and corporate leaders on down, sends a mixed signal. We rhetorically prioritize general education, or a unified country, and yet put obstacles in the way of genuinely serving students or constituents. In this way, higher education is indeed a microcosm of our entire society and its failures, with an elite, well-paid minority and an increasingly suffering majority of the overworked and the underpaid.

If our leaders should be teachers, our teachers should also be leaders, understanding that what we do in our universities is not simply to research or teach but to model what a democracy should be. The most senior of the professors should be teaching to all the undergraduates, and the least senior of our underemployed teachers should be elevated so that they, too, can share in the promise of our general education: to prepare young people for the goals of economic fulfillment and democratic responsibility. One cannot survive without the other.”

Good insight!

The entire op-ed is below.

Tony

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Why I Teach?

By Viet Thanh Nguyen

My employer, the University of Southern California, requires me to teach a general education course every year. Although I sometimes resent the obligation, most of the time I am grateful for it. I have come to think of my general education classroom as both a symptom of our flawed democracy and an attempt to exercise that democracy — an effort that requires work that we oftentimes do not want to put in.

“General education” is the name U.S.C. gives to the requirements that every student has to take, and which elsewhere might be called the “core curriculum.” General education, or the core, is at the heart of any university’s mission. Students may major in dozens of different things, but they are supposed to emerge from a university education with a shared core, a general body of intellectual, ethical and cultural knowledge that will guide them even if they change careers.

To fulfill these general education requirements, students can choose different courses, including mine: the American war in Vietnam. One hundred and fifty students enroll every time I teach it. One of the most basic challenges of any other general education course is to speak to others who are not like us, whether we are professors or students. For many professors, trained to be specialists, having to speak to a broad audience is a reason to dread teaching general education. My approach is to figure out a story that I can tell my students, a narrative — or at least a set of questions — that can unite us all.

My students are representative of the university, meaning that they are mostly in the sciences, health, business, law, and so on. Like the rest of our democracy, a small percentage are veterans returned from war. A few are cadets preparing for war. Only a tiny minority come from my corner of the humanities, where my elaborate appointments are that I am a professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature.

While these titles are as meaningless to most people as the ribbons on a soldier’s breast, what they mean is the same: commitment. Soldiers have ideals, and so do professors. Unfortunately, our ideals are often contaminated by reality, from outrageously bloated Pentagon budgets to outrageously expensive private universities. It’s easy to forget the ideals after a decade or two in the “real world,” when pragmatism becomes natural, youthful idealism seems naïve, “experience” can become a code word for resignation to the way things are, and cynicism may mask itself as “wisdom.”

This is why I love to teach general education. If I do my job right, I learn as much as the students do. With their perpetual youth, innocence, hope and idealism, they instruct me to believe that the world can actually be changed.

Even as these students are conflicted with real anxieties about their futures and their personal problems, their existence reminds me of my most basic function at the university: to teach. Bad teachers waste lives and time, their own and those of their students. Good teachers competently teach their subjects. Great teachers give something from deep inside of themselves.

I expect to be a good teacher. I hope that I can find it within myself to be a great teacher. That requires that I be present for my students. That I believe in the importance of my scholarship. That I convey my passion for my subject to my students. That I know what my story is so I can tell it to my students. In my course, the students learn about a terrible war that killed millions of people over decades: Americans, Cambodians, Laotians and Vietnamese, among others. The story of the course is this: War involves all of us, soldiers and civilians, men and women, young and old, and it emerges from, and reveals, our enduring and inextricably intertwined humanity and inhumanity.

The questions of the course are universal as well: How does the inequality of nations and cultures determine whose stories are told and heard? What is a just memory? What is a just forgetting? How is a genuine forgiveness possible, one that is a gift that comes without conditions or expectations of reciprocity?

Our mutual obligation as professor and students is to care. I care enough to give engaging lectures and to stimulate discussion, even with 150 students. My students, for the most part, care enough to show up, or at least two-thirds to three-fourths of them do. Their obligation, as is the obligation of all citizens and residents, is to listen and to learn. To question. To participate. To be in a room where they share similarities and differences. These demands are similar to what a democracy requires from its residents and citizens.

We have a president who was elected by less than a majority of the voters. There are many other leaders in our democracy as well, in charge of politics, economics and culture. How many of these leaders can honestly say they reach and serve three-fourths of the people who fall under their sway? How many of these leaders can also claim to be teachers, sometimes in the lessons they might offer, but most of all in the examples that they set?

The spirit of general education — of a common core — should prevail for these leaders, too. And why not for the president as well? General education is not easy, either for the student or the teacher. Sometimes neither one wants to be there. But if the students may be reluctant, the teachers — and the leaders — must be enthusiastic. They must reach deep within themselves to find the passion and the story to bring their audiences together.

Nowadays the spirit of general education is hobbled by inequality, whether we speak of the increasing economic inequality of our country or the inequities of most universities. The unfortunate reality of higher education is that most of the undergraduate teaching is carried out by part-time lecturers with no job security. The full-time professoriate — people like me — are not rewarded for our teaching, but for our research and writing, often carried out in obscure ways for specialized audiences.

Higher education, like the rest of American society, from our political and corporate leaders on down, sends a mixed signal. We rhetorically prioritize general education, or a unified country, and yet put obstacles in the way of genuinely serving students or constituents. In this way, higher education is indeed a microcosm of our entire society and its failures, with an elite, well-paid minority and an increasingly suffering majority of the overworked and the underpaid.

If our leaders should be teachers, our teachers should also be leaders, understanding that what we do in our universities is not simply to research or teach but to model what a democracy should be. The most senior of the professors should be teaching to all the undergraduates, and the least senior of our underemployed teachers should be elevated so that they, too, can share in the promise of our general education: to prepare young people for the goals of economic fulfillment and democratic responsibility. One cannot survive without the other.

 

George Will: ‘No Question’ Trump Should Lose Next Year – “We have to clear the ground and remove his awful presence from our lives”

Image result for George Will

George Will

Dear Commons Community,

Conservative commentator George Will wants President Donald Trump out of the picture, even if that means a Democrat wins next year’s presidential election. 

Asked during an interview with the Daily Beast if conservatives would be better served by a Trump defeat, Will replied: “Yes, yes and yes. There’s no question about that.”

He also said such an outcome would lead to a battle for new ideas on the right. 

“But first, we have to clear the ground and remove this awful presence from our lives,” he said. 

Will left the Republican Party in 2016 rather than support Trump, arguing at the time that the best thing for the conservative movement would’ve been a landslide victory by Hillary Clinton. He has only grown more critical of Trump and the Republican Party since then.

“It’s become a cult ― it’s become a cult because of an absence of ideas,” Will said on MSNBC in June. “Because they’ve jettisoned the ideas.” 

In another interview over the summer, he warned the GOP that young voters now consider Republicans to be “the dumb party.” 

In his latest comments to the Daily Beast, Will offered a compliment to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a potential 2020 Trump rival who is politically the opposite of Will. 

“What makes Elizabeth Warren interesting and admirable is not that she’s right – I think she’s wrong about almost everything – but that she brings gravity to politics,” he said.

This is a true conservative speaking not one of the hacks in the Republican Party.

Tony

 

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin Looks Foolish Stating that Giving Congress Whistleblower Complaint Would Set ‘Terrible Precedent’  –  It is the Law!

Image result for Steve Mnuchin

Steve Mnuchin

Dear  Commons Community,

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said allowing Congress to see a whistleblower complaint that allegedly calls into question President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky would set a “terrible precedent.”  But legal experts say granting Congress access to the complaint is required by law.

Mnuchin, during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, defended Trump against reports that he repeatedly pressured Zelensky during a July phone call to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The House Intelligence Committee has opened an investigation into the complaint, including whether Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine as part of his efforts to get Zelensky to investigate Biden, a front-runner in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.

Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the U.S. intelligence community, deemed the complaint credible and of “urgent concern,” he wrote in a letter earlier this month to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

But acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, whom Trump appointed last month, reportedly said he does not believe the complaint meets the definition of “urgent concern” and has refused to hand it over to Congress.

“There is a whistleblower who wants to bring this information ― his whistleblower complaint ― to Congress, and the White House is preventing that,” CNN’s Jake Tapper told Mnuchin on Sunday. “If there really is nothing there, why shouldn’t the White House just let Congress … look at this whistleblower complaint?”

Mnuchin responded, “I think that would be a terrible precedent.”

“Conversations between world leaders are meant to be confidential,” he continued. “And if every time someone for political reasons raised a question and all of a sudden those conversations were disclosed publicly ― and when you disclose them to Congress, lots of times they leak into the press ― then why would world leaders want to have conversations together?”

There is no evidence to suggest the U.S intelligence official, who has not been publicly identified, filed the complaint due to political motivations. 

Biden has called on Trump to release a transcript of his phone call with Zelensky. Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing, told reporters Sunday that his conversation with the Ukrainian president was “perfect” but he would consider releasing a transcript of the call.

Whether Congress has the legal authority to see the complaint after Maguire refused to hand it over has been the subject of debate among some intelligence officials and legal experts.

Though there are laws in place to protect whistleblowers who come forward, it’s unprecedented for the top national intelligence official to stop Congress from viewing a whistleblower complaint that the inspector general deems of “urgent concern,” reported The Washington Post. 

Maguire’s legal team argues that the complaint did not meet the legal standard of “urgent concern” and he is therefore not required to submit it to Congress. Atkinson disagrees and has said he worries Maguire’s actions will deter future whistleblowers from coming forward.

Democrats say the allegations against Trump, if true, amount to a U.S. president seeking assistance from a foreign government to help his reelection campaign. Though some Republicans, including Sen. Pat Toomey (Pa.), have said such a scenario would be highly inappropriate, other members of the GOP have defended Trump’s actions.

“Is it the position of the administration that it is acceptable for politicians to pressure foreign leaders to look into and investigate their political rivals?” Tapper asked Mnuchin on Sunday.

Mnuchin said he wasn’t on the call in question but said he has “no reason to believe” Trump pressured Zelensky.

But Tapper continued to press Mnuchin, asking him whether he would have found it “inappropriate” if former President Barack Obama pressured a foreign leader to investigate Trump’s eldest sons, Don Jr. and Eric, and their international business dealings.

“I’m not going to speculate on that,” Mnuchin said. “What I do find inappropriate is the fact that Vice President Biden at the time’s son [sic] did very significant business deals in Ukraine. I for one find that to be concerning.”

Trump has claimed Biden called on a notoriously corrupt prosecutor in Ukraine to be removed from office to impede an investigation into a Ukrainian gas company, of which Hunter had been a member of the board. Ukrainian authorities have said they haven’t found any wrongdoing by Biden. 

“I don’t understand,” Tapper continued to grill Mnuchin. “So it’s OK for Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump to do business all over the world, it’s OK for Ivanka Trump to have copyrights approved all over the world while President Trump is president, but while Vice President Biden was vice president, his son shouldn’t have been able to do business dealings?”

“Again, I don’t really want to go into more of these details,” Mnuchin responded, before Tapper interrupted him, stating that his comments were “setting a precedent that the president is violating.”

The Trump Organization, headed by the president’s eldest sons, has come under fire over its deals with foreign investors, which some government watchdog groups say violate the emoluments clause, a section of the Constitution that prohibits gifts to government officials.

Yesterday during an impromptu news conference, Trump admitted he discussed Joe Biden with Zelensky.

Tony

 

Maureen Dowd Asks Whether Trump Has Gone Too Far in the Ukraine Affair and This is the One that Will Bring Him Down!

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd, in her column this morning, speculates whether the Ukraine affair is the big scandal that will bring down Donald Trump.  She comments that “the Democrats haven’t been able to get Trump on paying off a porn star to protect his campaign. They haven’t been able to get him on being a Russian agent. They haven’t been able to get him on obstruction of justice.

But maybe this time. Maybe this was the ‘One’ where all would decide that they wanted impeachment, that the president’s behavior was so outrageous that they couldn’t imagine this sleazy business guy sitting in the Oval Office playing a tinpot dictator in a tinfoil hat for another second.

Maybe this was the ‘One’ that would finally move Republicans to turn on the Grendel who is terrorizing the village and gulping down their party.”

I don’t think so unless the whistle-blower’s identity is revealed and s/he comes forward with the actual account of what happened. Until then, Trump and company will stonewall any inquiry and throw up smoke to confuse the American people.

Dowd’s entire column is below.

Tony

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New York Times

Trump Walks a Crooked Mile

Has he finally gone too far?

By Maureen Dowd

Sept. 21, 2019

 

Everyone here is keyed up for the Big One.

The One that’s going to finally bring Donald Trump down.

As soon as the news broke Wednesday night in The Washington Post that a whistle-blower had accused the president of making some sort of nefarious “promise” during a call to a foreign leader, the hive erupted.

Democrats haven’t been able to get Trump on paying off a porn star to protect his campaign. They haven’t been able to get him on being a Russian agent. They haven’t been able to get him on obstruction of justice.

But maybe this time. Maybe this was the One where all would decide that they wanted impeachment, that the president’s behavior was so outrageous that they couldn’t imagine this sleazy business guy sitting in the Oval Office playing a tinpot dictator in a tinfoil hat for another second.

Maybe this was the One that would finally move Republicans to turn on the Grendel who is terrorizing the village and gulping down their party.

Certainly, Trump himself didn’t think so. As the capital was going into overdrive-freak-out mode Friday night trying to flesh out the whistle-blower story, the president was busy tweeting about a children’s book by a Fox News host: “Buy this Book — great for the kids!”

If House Democrats can ever get their paws on the whistle-blower, maybe they can make up for the Judiciary Committee’s performance with Corey Lewandowski this past week, which left many wondering if these hearings designed to pry Trump out of office are just making Democrats look foolish. They certainly provide an ample platform for Trump loyalists to rail against their favorite deep state foils.

When failed presidential candidate Eric Swalwell tried to get Lewandowski to read a message Trump had dictated to him, the witness nastily referred to the Democrat as “President Swalwell” and told him to read the message himself.

The internecine strains between the impeach-now Nadler crowd and the get-him-out-in-2020 Pelosi crew grew more bitter. Politico reported that in a closed-door meeting, Speaker Nancy Pelosi shocked lawmakers and aides by harshly criticizing the House Judiciary Committee staffers for propelling the impeachment effort far beyond where the Democratic caucus stands.

“And you can feel free to leak this,” Pelosi said acidly.

In an interview with NPR, she said she hadn’t changed her mind on impeachment, but she does think Congress should pass new laws so future presidents can be indicted. She said everyone had now seen what the founding fathers could not imagine: a president blatantly abusing the Constitution he has sworn to protect.

Trump has certainly been working hard to prove Pelosi right that presidents should not ever be above the law.

By Friday night, while Trump was readying for a state dinner with his ultraconservative pal from down under, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, The Wall Street Journal and The Times were reporting that the secret whistle-blower complaint involved this: President Trump repeatedly pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — about eight times, The Journal said — to work with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s loony personal lawyer, to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden.

Giuliani has been pushing a story about the former vice president and his son, who had ties to a Ukrainian oligarch.

After a fair bit of babbling on Chris Cuomo’s CNN show, Giuliani spit out some truth, that he asked the Ukrainians to look into the Bidens. Later he tweeted: “A President telling a Pres-elect of a well known corrupt country he better investigate corruption that affects US is doing his job.”

Crooked Donald thinks he can create a crooked Joe narrative just like he created a Crooked Hillary one. Which is it, Donald: Crooked or Sleepy?

So just consider this: Around the same time that Trump escaped the noose after Robert Mueller’s tepid testimony, sliding away from charges that he colluded with a foreign country to interfere in our election, he began arm-twisting another foreign country to interfere in our election.

“Questions have emerged,” The Times said, “about whether Mr. Trump’s push for an inquiry into the Bidens was behind a weekslong White House hold on military aid for Ukraine. The United States suspended the military aid to Ukraine in early July, according to a former American official.”

So the president is under suspicion of making like Nixon and abusing power to go after his enemies, saying it would be a shame if anything happened to that military aid that you want because you don’t dig up some dirt on the son of my political rival.

The administration kept the whistle-blower’s complaint from Congress, even though Congress has the legal authority to know what this urgent complaint is about.

Pelosi issued an acerbic statement on Friday, noting that Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, was violating the law by refusing to disclose the complaint to Congress.

“If the president has done what has been alleged, then he is stepping into a dangerous minefield with serious repercussions for his administration and our democracy,” she said.

Trump is literally acting like an international mobster. Roy Cohn would be so proud.

So is this the Big One? We don’t know because so much has come before. But if it is? Now that would be Big.

 

Elizabeth Warren’s Appeal Soars in Latest Iowa Poll!

Image result for elizabeth warren

Dear Commons Community,

Senator  Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) closed the gap of support between her and former Vice President Joe Biden as the top contender for the presidential nomination in Iowa’s Democratic caucus according to the latest results of a poll in Iowa released last night.

In the Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll, Warren was the first-choice candidate with support from 22% of likely Democratic caucus attendees ― up 7 percentage points since the last poll in June. Biden, who has maintained a slight edge over his opponents in other polling, fell 3 percentage points, bringing him to second place with 20% of their support.

According to the Des Moines Register, support for Biden has continued to fall in the Iowa polls since his peak last year.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) fell far behind both Warren and Biden in Saturday’s poll, taking third place at 11% ― down 5 percentage points since June.

All the other Democratic 2020 candidates polled at single-digits. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Kamala Harris (Calif.) rounded out the bottom of the top 5 candidates, polling at 9% and 6% respectively.

It should also be mentioned that sixty-three percent of likely caucus goers said in the poll that they hadn’t fully made up their minds yet on their most favored candidates.

Ann Selzer conducted the poll on 602 likely Democratic caucus-goers between Sep. 14 and Sep. 18. The poll has a margin error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

I have minimally posted on this blog about the Democratic candidates mainly because it is too early and and there are too many candidates but this Iowa poll may be a harbinger of a significant change for  the Democratic nomination.

Tony

 

Walmart to Stop Selling E-Cigarette Products!

Dear Commons Community,

Walmart announced yesterday that it will phase out sales of electronic cigarettes in all stores, including Sam’s Club stores.

The retail giant detailed the plan in an internal memo, which reads in part, “Given the growing federal, state and local regulatory complexity and uncertainty regarding e-cigarettes, we plan to discontinue the sale of electronic nicotine delivery products.”

The memo, which Walmart confirmed to NBC News, states that stores will stop selling e-cigarettes after they run out of the existing inventory.

This past summer, Walmart announced it would raise the minimum age to buy tobacco products to 21. It will continue to sell tobacco cigarettes.

One of the nation’s biggest pharmacy chains, Rite Aid, halted sales of e-cigarettes earlier this year, but it too continues to sell traditional tobacco cigarettes.

CVS made headlines five years ago when it stopped all sales of all tobacco products, including regular and electronic cigarettes.

Anti-tobacco groups urged Walmart to follow CVS’s lead.

“Walmart has taken a responsible step given the worsening youth e-cigarette epidemic and the growing number of severe lung disease cases associated with e-cigarette use,” Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said in a statement.

“We urge them to make this policy permanent and to go further by ending sales of all tobacco products, including cigarettes,” Myers said.

“As the third largest pharmacy in the country, we also encourage Walmart to stop selling ALL forms of tobacco, especially cigarettes, which remain the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.,” Robin Koval, president of the Truth Initiative, said in a statement to NBC News.

The announcement from Walmart comes amid a growing national epidemic of severe respiratory illnesses linked to vaping. Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported there are 530 confirmed or probable cases in 38 states, plus the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Eight people have died from the illness.

Investigators have been unable to link the cases to any single product or ingredient.

The Trump administration announced plans to ban flavored e-cigarettes a week ago, but it’s unclear how or when that ban would take effect.

Health officials in San Francisco, Michigan and New York have already enacted such bans.

Congratulations to Walmart and other large retailers who have stop selling e-cigarettes and tobacco products.

Tony