John Bolton

Dear Commons Community,

President Trump dismissed his national security adviser John Bolton last night amid disagreements over how to handle foreign policy challenges such as North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan and Russia.   As reported by Reuters:

 “I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House. I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday, adding that he would name a replacement next week.

Bolton, a leading foreign policy hawk and Trump’s third national security adviser, was widely known to have pressed the president for a harder line on issues such as North Korea. Bolton, a chief architect of Trump’s strident stance against Iran, had also advocated a tougher approach on Russia and Afghanistan.

The 70-year-old Bolton, who took up the post in April 2018, replacing H.R. McMaster, had sometimes been at odds with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, one of Trump’s main loyalists.

Offering a different version of events than Trump, Bolton tweeted: “I offered to resign last night and President Trump said, “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

Trump had sometimes joked about Bolton’s image as a warmonger, reportedly saying in one Oval Office meeting that “John has never seen a war he doesn’t like.”

A source familiar with Trump’s view said Bolton, an inveterate bureaucratic infighter with an abrasive personality, had ruffled a lot of feathers with other key players in the White House, particularly White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.

“He doesn’t play by the rules,” the source said. “He’s a kind of a rogue operator.”

During his time at the State Department under the administration of Republican former President George W. Bush, Bolton kept a defused hand grenade on his desk. His 2007 memoir is titled: “Surrender Is Not An Option.”

Trump’s North Korea envoy, Stephen Biegun, is among the names floated as possible successors.

“Biegun much more like Pompeo understands that the president is the president, that he makes the decisions,” said a source close to the White House.

Also considered in the running is Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan, who had been expected to be named U.S. ambassador to Russia.

White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said “many, many issues” led to Trump’s decision to ask for Bolton’s resignation. She would not elaborate.

Trump would sometimes chide Bolton about his hawkish ways in meetings, introducing him to visiting foreign leaders by saying, “You all know the great John Bolton. He’ll bomb you. He’ll take out your whole country.”

Officials and a source close to Trump said the president had grown weary of his hawkish tendencies and the bureaucratic battles he got involved with.

Bolton traveled widely in the role and on his travels, for example, he warned Russia against interfering in U.S. elections and promoting strong ties with Israel.

Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and Fox News television commentator, had opposed a recent State Department plan to sign an Afghan peace deal with the Taliban militia, believing the group’s leaders could not be trusted.

Sources familiar with his view said Bolton believed the United States could draw down to 8,600 troops in Afghanistan and maintain a counter-terrorism effort without signing a peace deal with the Taliban.

U.S. officials have said it was Bolton who was responsible for the collapse of a summit in February between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi by recommending the presentation a list of hard-line demands that Kim rejected.

North Korea media in May referred to Bolton as a “war maniac” who “fabricated various provocative policies such as designation of our country as ‘axis of evil’, preemptive strike and regime change.”

During an earlier period of U.S.-North Korea tensions in 2003, North Korea called Bolton “human scum.”

Bolton’s departure – the latest in a series from Trump’s national security team in recent months – comes a day after North Korea signaled a new willingness to resume stalled denuclearization talks with the United States, but then conducted the latest in a recent spate of missile launches.

U.S. oil prices fell more than 1 percent on the news of Bolton’s departure with investors believing it could lead to a softer U.S. policy on Iran.

Bolton had spearheaded Trump’s hard-line policy against Iran, including the U.S. abandonment of an international nuclear deal with Tehran and reimposition of U.S. sanctions.

Bolton was widely believed to have favored a planned U.S. air strike on Iran earlier this year in retaliation for the downing of a U.S. surveillance drone, an action Trump called off at the last minute. Trump has since expressed a willingness to talk to Iranian leaders under the right conditions.

Bolton was an ardent opponent of arms control treaties with Russia. He was instrumental in Trump’s decision to withdraw last month from a 1987 accord that banned intermediate-range missiles because of what Washington charged was Moscow’s deployment of prohibited nuclear-capable cruise missiles, an allegation Russia denied.”

Bolton was too hawkish for me in the style of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld!

Tony

Daniel Markovits

Dear Commons Community,

In The Meritocracy Trap, Yale Law School Professor Daniel Markovits delivers a fierce indictment of a system he says is undermining democracy and making everyone miserable.   He argues  that elites have set their children up to out-achieve everyone else, then justify their rewards as stemming solely from “merit.”  Here is an excerpt from a New York Times article reviewing his book and his position.

“In 2015, the graduating class at Yale Law School, as custom has it, elected one of its professors to give the commencement address. And when the day came, the speaker, Daniel Markovits, got onstage and told the students, more or less, that their lives were ruined.

“For your entire lives, you have studied, worked, practiced, trained and drilled,” he declared.

And that rat race was far from over, at least if graduates wanted to maintain their, and their children’s, place in the “new aristocracy” of merit.

“To promote your eliteness — to secure your caste — you must ruthlessly manage your training and labor,” he said.

“To live this way,” he continued, “is, quite literally, to use oneself up.”

The speech turned the audience at the most elite of elite law schools on its ear (even if it likely knocked few off their post-graduation paths). And now Mr. Markovits is taking his message to the masses, with a big new book arguing that the meritocratic ideal has not only fed rampant inequality and hollowed out the middle class, but also threatens democracy itself.

A revolt against meritocracy has been building in recent years, accompanied by a growing shelf of books from across the ideological spectrum decrying how a system intended to open up opportunity has instead created an entrenched, self-perpetuating, self-satisfied ruling class.

In “The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class and Devours the Elite,” to be published on Tuesday by Penguin Press, Mr. Markovits draws on reporting, history, sociological analysis and a raft of charts and tables to present perhaps the most sweeping and detailed indictment to date.

In “The Meritocracy Trap,” Mr. Markovits argues that a system intended to open up opportunity has instead created an entrenched, self-perpetuating (and thoroughly miserable) ruling class.

It’s also one coming from someone with two Yale degrees, an Oxford doctorate and a tenured job-for-life inside one of the meritocracy’s most rarefied bastions. Which is something more than one enraged reader emailed him to point out after The Atlantic published an excerpt under the provocative title “How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition.”

“Obviously, some people had the perfectly sensible thought ‘Who the hell are you, sitting at Yale Law School?’” Mr. Markovits, 50, said during a recent interview in his office in the school’s hushed neo-Gothic building here.

“But I’m not more virtuous or honorable than anyone else,” he said. “I’m trapped in this system, too.”

One of his key arguments is that today’s wealthy, unlike the aristocracy of old, overwhelmingly work for a living, often in soul-crushing “extreme jobs” that demand 60, 80, even 100 hours a week. By his calculation, about 75 percent of the top 1 percent’s increase in the share of national income from roughly 1970 to the present came from returns on labor, not capital.

The book can been seen as a companion — and riposte — to Thomas Piketty’s surprise best seller “Capital in the 21st Century,” which attributes growing inequality to increased returns on accumulated wealth. But some of Mr. Markovits’s admirers put his book in even grander company.

“I think this as his ‘Kapital,’” said Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale who has known Mr. Markovits since they were graduate students in Britain in the early 1990s, referring to Karl Marx’s magnum opus.

“He’s trying to get political economy and morality lined up with each other in a way that’s surprising and true and useful,” Mr. Snyder continued. “But unlike ‘Kapital,’ he actually finished it. And it’s a much, much better read.”

So far, not everyone is as impressed with how Mr. Markovits tweaks Marxian class analysis. In a sharp critique in The New Republic, Sarah Leonard questioned his downplaying of the power of capital over labor, as well as his faith that demoralized meritocrats might make common cause with the beleaguered middle class in exchange for a saner life.

 “Elite professionals know which side their bread is buttered on, and make huge salaries serving the interests of capital,” she wrote.

Mr. Markovits’s book may be perfectly pitched to the contemporary political moment. But friends and colleagues describe him as both down-to-earth and somewhat otherworldly and out of time, starting with his habit of beginning every email by typing out the date and his location (even while onboard a moving train: “Amtrak 2168”), as if writing a 19th-century letter.

During a nearly three-hour conversation about his book, Mr. Markovits — tall and thin, with an intense gaze and a quasi-British mossiness around some vowels — mostly sat perched on a windowsill, crossing and uncrossing his very long legs like a crane in a too-small nest.

He mixed in casual references to Philip Larkin, C.P. Snow, London taxi drivers, a late Arthur Miller play whose title he couldn’t remember and the 19th-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach.

He’s a humanist and also very much a data guy. “The Meritocracy Trap” is full of striking statistics illustrating just how dramatically the meritocratic elite is pulling ahead of the middle class by just about every measure, while the middle class sinks closer to the poor.

Many on the left see the success of the rich is due mainly to fraud or manipulation. But the real problem, Mr. Markovits argues, is that elites have set their children up to out-achieve everyone else, then justify their rewards as stemming solely from “merit.”

“Yes, those things are going on, but they are not the principal part of the problem,” Mr. Markovits said, referring to schemes like the recent college admissions scandal. “They should be shut down, but it’s dangerous to shut them down with a set of ideas that reifies meritocracy. You’re just reaffirming the real evil.”

Mr. Markovits, the son of two law professors, enjoyed what he describes as a version of the kinder, gentler 1980s middle-American meritocratic childhood that has been wiped out by today’s ruthless competition.”

The Meritocracy Trap goes on sale today.  I have put my order in at Amazon.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump told reporters yesterday that he won’t debate the three Republicans looking to run against him for the GOP presidential nomination.

Prior to departing the White House for North Carolina, Trump spoke to the press about the Republican parties in Arizona, Kansas, Nevada and South Carolina canceling the 2020 GOP primaries in their states. 

“I don’t even know who they are,” said Trump of former Reps. Mark Sanford (S.C.), Joe Walsh (Ill.) and former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, who have each announced campaigns against him. 

“I would say this: They’re all at less than 1%. I guess it’s a publicity stunt,” he continued. 

Trump added: “To be honest, I’m not looking to give them any credibility. They have no credibility.”

The New York Times reported on Friday that three people familiar with the GOP’s plans in the aforementioned states would move to cancel the Republican primaries to deprive “Trump’s long-shot challengers of chances to build support.” 

As of yesterday, all four states had canceled their contests.

The president later demonstrated that he did, in fact, know who the candidates are, and also called Sanford, Walsh and Weld a “laughingstock” and said states don’t “want to waste their money” on them. 

Despite the canceled primaries, the three candidates seem undeterred.

Walsh called the news “f***ing un-American,” while Weld addressed Trump directly and said: “You can run but you cannot hide.”

Trump will definitely hide because knows that he would be demolished in any debate in which he would have to defend his presidency.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

James Poniewozik, the chief television critic for the New York Times, had an op-ed yesterday describing Donald Trump as someone who is basically playing a TV character with the American presidency.  To analyze and understand him, you need to approach him as a TV critic.  Here is an excerpt:

“On Sept. 1, with a Category 5 hurricane off the Atlantic coast, an angry wind was issuing from the direction of President Trump’s Twitter account. The apparent emergency: Debra Messing, the co-star of “Will & Grace,” had tweeted that “the public has a right to know” who is attending a Beverly Hills fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s re-election.

“I have not forgotten that when it was announced that I was going to do The Apprentice, and when it then became a big hit, Helping NBC’s failed lineup greatly, @DebraMessing came up to me at an Upfront & profusely thanked me, even calling me ‘Sir,’ ” wrote the 45th president of the United States.

It was a classic Trumpian ragetweet: aggrieved over a minor slight, possibly prompted by a Fox News segment, unverifiable — he has a long history of questionable tales involving someone calling him “Sir” — and nostalgic for his primetime-TV heyday. (By Thursday he was lashing Ms. Messing again, as Hurricane Dorian was lashing the Carolinas.)

This sort of outburst, almost three years into his presidency, has kept people puzzling over who the “real” Mr. Trump is and how he actually thinks. Should we take him, to quote the famous precept of Trumpology, literally or seriously? Are his attacks impulsive tantrums or strategic distractions from his other woes? Is he playing 3-D chess or Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots?

This is a futile effort. Try to understand Donald Trump as a person with psychology and strategy and motivation, and you will inevitably spiral into confusion and covfefe. The key is to remember that Donald Trump is not a person. He’s a TV character.

I mean, O.K., there is an actual person named Donald John Trump, with a human body and a childhood and formative experiences that theoretically a biographer or therapist might usefully delve into someday. (We can only speculate about the latter; Mr. Trump has boasted on Twitter of never having seen a psychiatrist, preferring the therapeutic effects of “hit[ting] ‘sleazebags’ back.”)

But that Donald Trump is of limited significance to America and the world. The “Donald Trump” who got elected president, who has strutted and fretted across the small screen since the 1980s, is a decades-long media performance. To understand him, you need to approach him less like a psychologist and more like a TV critic.”

There is lot of truth in what Poniewozik says but there are other forces driving Trump beyond being a TV star.  He is a ruthless con man who will do anything to make a buck and is using the presidency to line his own and his family’s pockets now and when he leaves office which hopefully will be in 2021.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Cheating is nothing new on college campuses, but the Internet now makes it possible to pay for others to write papers on a global, industrial scale.  It is estimated that millions of papers and essays are being written annually by individuals who get paid to do so by students. The industry is so vast that it provides enough income for some writers to make it a full-time job.  The New York Times had a featured article describing this  “essay-for-hire” scandal over the weekend. Here is an excerpt.

“Sleek websites — with names like Ace-MyHomework and EssayShark — have sprung up that allow people in developing countries to bid on and complete American homework assignments.

Although such businesses have existed for more than a decade, experts say demand has grown in recent years as the sites have become more sophisticated, with customer service hotlines and money-back guarantees. The result? Millions of essays ordered annually in a vast, worldwide industry that provides enough income for some writers to make it a full-time job.

The essay-for-hire industry has expanded significantly in developing countries with many English speakers, fast Iinternet connections and more college graduates than jobs, especially Kenya, India and Ukraine. A Facebook group for academic writers in Kenya has over 50,000 members…

…When such websites first emerged over a decade ago, they featured veiled references to tutoring and editing services, said Dr. Bertram Gallant, who also is a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity, which has worked to highlight the danger of contract cheating. Now the sites are blatant.

“You can relax knowing that our reliable, expert writers will produce you a top quality and 100% plagiarism free essay that is written just for you, while you take care of the more interesting aspects of student life,” reads the pitch from Academized, which charges about $15 a page for a college freshman’s essay due in two weeks and $42 a page for an essay due in three hours.

“No matter what kind of academic paper you need, it is simple and secure to hire an essay writer for a price you can afford,” promises EssayShark.com. “Save more time for yourself.”

In an email, EssayShark’s public relations department said the company did not consider its services to be cheating, and that it warned students the essays are for “research and reference purposes only” and are not to be passed off as a student’s own work.”

And the dog ate my homework!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The downturn in farm belt fortunes amid Trump’s trade war with China isn’t good for the president going into 2020.  As reported in The Huffington Post and other media.

President Donald Trump’s farm belt popularity likely took another hit Friday with news that Wisconsin farmer loan delinquencies hit an 18-year record high in June.

The past-due loans are a serious sign of the financial struggles taking a toll on farmers amid Trump’s trade war with China that he insisted would be easy to win.

The share of farm loans that are long past due rose to 2.9% at community banks in Wisconsin as of June 30, according to a Reuters analysis of loan delinquency data gleaned from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. That’s the highest rate in comparable records that go back to 2001.

Rural support was critical to Trump’s presidential victory, but it’s unlikely to hold if voters lose their farms and livelihoods to the trade war. Wisconsin is a battleground swing state that went for Trump by fewer than 23,000 votes. He won Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes.

Trump has arranged a mammoth $28 billion subsidy from taxpayers for farmers to help them survive the trade war, but many say it won’t be enough to make up for markets they have lost — possibly forever.

Another critical misjudgment by Trump — his decision to grant 31 refineries waivers allowing them to dodge corn-based ethanol requirements — is also alienating farmers.

Aides spelling out farmer anger over the waivers told a stunned Trump last month that he has a “problem” in Iowa, Reuters reports.

Former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, now U.S. ambassador to China, told Trump then that his loyal farmers won’t stand for policies favoring the oil industry at their expense, sources told Reuters. Branstad reportedly showed Trump a map of counties that had flipped in his favor in 2016 but were now considered at risk for the next election.

South Dakota’s Republican Gov. Kristi Noem and Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz fired off a joint letter to Trump earlier this week complaining that the waivers have triggered an increasing number of renewable fuel plants closing or slowing production. “We are extremely concerned about your administration’s actions to continue to grant small refinery hardship waivers,” the letter notes.

Trouble in the heartland indeed.  Thank you President Trump!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times editorial this morning calls on American colleges and universities to stop giving preferential treatment to the children of alumni.  The editorial comments that preferential treatment for legacy admissions is anti-meritocratic, inhibits social mobility and helps perpetuate a de facto class system. In short, it is an engine of inequity. Little wonder that it is unpopular with most Americans, yet supported by the affluent who both oversee the college admissions process and are its primary beneficiaries.  

In sum, a country struggling with deeply rooted inequality need not continue an affirmative action program for successful families. 

AMEN!

The entire editorial is below.

Tony

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

End Legacy College Admissions

By The Editorial Board

Sept. 7, 2019

For nearly a century, many American college and university admissions officers have given preferential treatment to the children of alumni.

The policies originated in the 1920s, coinciding with an influx of Jewish and Catholic applicants to the country’s top schools. They continue today, placing a thumb on the scale in favor of students who already enjoy the benefits of being raised by families with elite educations. Of the country’s top 100 schools (as determined by the editors at U.S. News & World Report), roughly three-quarters have legacy preferences in admissions. These anachronistic policies have been called “affirmative action for the rich” and “affirmative action for whites.”

Preferential treatment for legacy admissions is anti-meritocratic, inhibits social mobility and helps perpetuate a de facto class system. In short, it is an engine of inequity. Little wonder that it is unpopular with most Americans, yet supported by the affluent who both oversee the college admissions process and are its primary beneficiaries.

Legacy admissions are no ordinary leg up. In 2011, a Harvard researcher who studied 30 of the nation’s most selective schools found that all legacy applicants had a 23 percent higher probability of admission, while “primary legacy” students (those with a parent who attended the school as an undergraduate, rather than, say, a grandparent or aunt) had a 45 percent higher probability compared with their peers, all other things being equal.

A federal trial last year over the admission practices at Harvard University focused on’ how the school’s affirmative action policies may have affected Asian-American applicants. That case is still being considered by a judge. But in the course of the trial some eye-popping numbers came to light. Between 2010 and 2015, the admission rate for legacy applicants at Harvard was higher than 33 percent. It was 6 percent for non-legacies. More than 20 percent of the white applicants admitted to the school during that period were legacy students.

Backers of legacy preference point out that at Harvard and other schools across the country, the student body — and with it the pool of alumni — has gotten more diverse over time. That means that the composition of the legacy population is also diversifying. At Harvard, evidence from the trial showed, some 80 percent of legacy admissions for the class of 2014 were white, while only 60 percent of legacies in the class of 2019 were white. Would ending legacy preference equate to pulling up the ladder ahead of a more diverse group of students who could leverage their legacy status?

Not in the least. Consideration of race in admissions can be defended not only as a remedy for past injustices but also as an imperative for schools seeking to represent the population at large. But continuing to give applicants an advantage simply because of where their parents went to school is, as one critic called it, “a form of property transfer from one generation to another.”

Colleges counter that the children of alumni — partly by virtue of the education their parents received — are well qualified for admission into their schools. That raises the question: If the value of a degree is indeed generational (research shows that it very likely is), why do the progeny and grandprogeny of graduates deserve yet another thumb on the scale?

Like many policies of past eras, legacy admissions get uglier the closer you look at them. A few decades ago, the percentage of legacy students at top schools was sometimes higher than it is today. But admission rates at those institutions have fallen much faster than the percentage of legacy students. “If you take a typical Ivy League school, maybe 20 or 30 years ago, they might admit two-thirds of legacy applicants. Now they might admit one-third of legacy applicants. But, at the same time, their overall acceptance rate has probably gone down from between 20 and 25 percent to between 5 and 10 percent. So, proportionally, being a legacy is even more of an advantage,” Dan Golden, an investigative journalist, told The New Yorker.

Many college admissions officers have qualms about legacy preferences. A survey of 499 college and university admissions officers conducted last year by Inside Higher Ed and Gallup found that 42 percent of private institutions consider legacy status. (Only 6 percent of public institutions do so.) Yet only 32 percent of private admissions directors thought that it was right to consider pedigree in granting offers of admission.

Schools make various arguments about the value of legacy preference. Most often, they argue that it helps with donations, which in turn helps fund financial aid programs for needy students and the construction of facilities that help the entire organization.

Research, however, has cast serious doubt on this line of reasoning. A group of researchers studied data from the top 100 schools in the country (again ranked by U.S. News) from 1998 to 2008 and found that “there is no statistically significant evidence of a causal relationship between legacy preference policies and total alumni giving among top universities.”

Another argument that college presidents make is that multigenerational enrollment helps improve the institutional ethos, tightening the bonds of community for those lucky enough to be admitted. That may be so, but it comes at a high cost in unfairness. College admission is a zero-sum proposition — for every legacy admitted, another promising applicant is denied the career and economic opportunity that a top degree can provide.

Little wonder that American universities are a global outlier when it comes to legacy preference. Oxford and Cambridge Universities, for instance, gave up the practice decades ago. In the United States, schools like Texas A&M University and the University of Georgia dropped legacy admissions and continue to thrive, while schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology historically haven’t used them. In a 2012 blog post, Chris Peterson, an assistant director in the M.I.T. admissions office, put the issue in stark terms. “I personally would not work for a college which had legacy admission because I am not interested in simply reproducing a multigenerational lineage of educated elite. And if anyone in our office ever advocated for a mediocre applicant on the basis of their ‘excellent pedigree’ they would be kicked out of the committee room. So to be clear: if you got into M.I.T., it’s because you got into M.I.T. Simple as that.”

Reform of higher education is in the air. After the college admissions cheating scandal this spring revealed a rot at the heart of higher ed admissions, lawmakers pledged to take action to reform the system. A bill introduced in the California State Legislature would bar any school that gives preferential treatment to donors or legacies from participating in the state’s Cal Grants program. In April, Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Wyden, both members of the Senate Finance Committee, called on the Internal Revenue Service to step up enforcement of existing tax laws that may have prohibited the various charitable-giving mechanisms that allowed wealthy parents to buy their kids seats at top schools.

Mr. Wyden went a step further, introducing legislation that would force schools to “establish a policy that bars consideration of family members’ donations or ability to donate as a factor in admissions” in order for donations to the school to be fully tax deductible.

More drastic measures have been proposed. A report on narrowing racial and ethnic gaps in higher education, released early this year by New America, a liberal research organization, outlined a federal remedy. “Congress should withhold Title IV aid to those highly resourced and highly selective institutions that engage in legacy admissions and other preferential admissions treatments that overwhelmingly favor wealthy and white families, including early decision programs.”

Withholding federal funds — a public policy bulldozer that the federal government successfully used against schools that violated civil rights laws — would be a major step, but one that also risks hurting low-income students who earn spots at elite school and need the aid.

Instead, the government could require schools to tally and publish how many of their students are legacy admits, along with their scores and socioeconomic status, as a way to give the issue more publicity and to shame them into ending the practice. Senator Ted Kennedy — a legacy student if ever there was one — introduced legislation to do just that in 2003.

Another approach would be for schools to stop explicitly asking applicants about relatives who may be alumni. Many college applications, including the Common Application, which is used by more than 800 schools, asks students to report where their parents earned degrees, putting applicants in the odd position of having to disclose their legacy status even if they’d rather not.

Yet another idea, put forward by Aaron Klein and Richard Reeves, Brookings Institution researchers who study inequality, would give incentives to schools to drop anti-meritocratic policies, including legacy admissions, in exchange for a reduction in their endowment taxes.

Whatever the mechanism, it makes sense for a group of competitor schools to take the leap together, a mutual stand-down. Doing so would be in the best traditions of American higher education, which for decades has worked to extend opportunity to generations of poor and minority students. Inaction by the academy, on the other hand, risks fueling a growing public sense that higher education is part of the crisis of the American establishment.

Dear Commons Community,

The Trump administration announced yesterday that it will allow a Michigan trophy hunter to import the remains of a rare black rhinoceros he shot in Africa.  As reported by the Associated Press. 

“Last year, Chris D. Peyerk, of Shelby Township, applied for a permit required by the Fish and Wildlife Service to import animals protected under the Endangered Species Act, documents reveal. Peyerk, the president of a large construction contracting company, had paid $400,000 to an anti-poaching program to hunt a male, south-western black rhino inside a Namibian national park in May 2018. 

Records show that Peyerk hired John J. Jackson III — a Louisiana attorney who advises the Fish and Wildlife Service and was appointed to the International Wildlife Conservation Council last year — to represent him in his effort to get a permit. The latter agency was established under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, at the behest of then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, “to increase awareness of the conservation and economic benefits of United States citizens traveling to foreign nations to engage in hunting.”

“We establish and support programs on the ground that enhance the survival of the particular specie,” Peyerk told the Associated Press, when asked whether there was a conflict of interest between his roles at the two federal agencies. “Our mission is the recovery of the species population, not the private interest of the hunter.”

The fee that Peyerk paid reportedly went to a trust fund that the Namibian government set up to promote the coexistence of humans and wildlife. Still, the Humane Society criticized the Trump  

“We urge our federal government to end this pay-to-slay scheme that delivers critically endangered rhino trophies to wealthy Americans while dealing a devastating blow to rhino conservation,” said Kitty Block, the head of the Humane Society of the United States and Humane Society International. “While we cannot turn back the clock to save this animal, the administration can stop the U.S. from further contributing to the demise of this species by refusing future import permits of black rhino trophies.”

Black rhinos number approximately 5,500 and are considered a critically endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. About half of the plant-eating mammals live in Namibia, which allows only five male rhinos a year to be legally killed by hunters, the Associated Press notes. 

In recent years, the black rhino population has steadily increased, thanks in part to stringent conservation management. In light of that growth, both the Obama and Trump administrations issued import permits for black rhinos. During Obama’s term, three permits were granted. Trump’s administration has issued two. “

Why can’t we leave these endangered species alone!

Tony

On Trump’s map, someone appears to have used a Sharpie marker to crudely extend Dorian’s “cone of uncertainty” to indicate the hurricane could hit Alabama.

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump’s use of an outdated and crudely altered weather map in an attempt to avoid responsibility for making false claims about Hurricane Dorian’s path is “literally pathetic.”

So says South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who’s running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Yesterday, Buttigieg told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota that he feels sorry for the president, given that he, or someone in his office, would feel compelled to go so far to protect Trump’s ego.

“I feel sorry for the president,” Buttigieg said Thursday, reflecting on the matter. “And that is not the way we should feel about the most powerful figure in this country, somebody on whose wisdom and judgment our lives literally depend.”

On Wednesday, Trump presented an outdated, week-old weather map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that predicted Dorian would likely make landfall on Florida’s east coast. On Trump’s map, someone appears to have used a Sharpie marker to crudely extend Dorian’s “cone of uncertainty” to indicate the hurricane could hit Alabama:

The alteration appears to be an attempt to defend a statement the president made Sunday, in which he warned via a tweet that Alabama was among the states that would “most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.”

It’s a puzzling claim since NOAA models had by Friday begun to indicate Dorian could take a more northerly path. (The National Weather Service corrected Trump’s erroneous prediction Sunday with a tweet of its own.)

Instead of admitting the mistake, the president grew more adamant about his falsehood Thursday morning and tweeted:

“Alabama was going to be hit or grazed, and then Hurricane Dorian took a different path (up along the East Coast). The Fake News knows this very well. That’s why they’re the Fake News.”

“What we’re seeing there is literally pathetic,” Buttigieg said later. “It makes you feel a kind of pity for everybody involved. And that’s not how I want to feel about the president, whether it’s from my party ― or another one.”

“This is humiliating,” he added. “This is an embarrassing moment for our country, and we seem to see a new national embarrassment every day.”

The president is indeed an embarrassment everyday.  Call it like it is, Pete!

Tony