Mark Zuckerberg

Dear Commons Community,

While Facebook has been facing mounting criticism, Mark Zuckerberg announced new plans yesterday to fight 2020 election interference. It will clearly label news that comes from state-owned media, and will give greater transparency for the origins of Facebook pages. And it has already found interference coming from authoritarian regimes overseas.

In an interview with NBC News, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company has already thwarted new interference campaigns from Russia and Iran that the company regards as the groundwork for future manipulation efforts.

“We continue to see their tactics are evolving,” Zuckerberg said in the interview with Lester Holt, which will air Monday evening on “NBC Nightly News.” “Today, what we’re basically announcing is that we found a set of campaigns. They are highly sophisticated. They signal that these nation-states intend to be active in the upcoming elections.”

Zuckerberg added that China has also been found to have tried to interfere in various elections, but that the company has been able to find and stop them.

“We do see today Russia and Iran and China increasingly with more sophisticated tactics are trying to interfere in elections,” Zuckerberg said. “But part of why I’m confident going into 2020 is that we’ve played a role in defending against interference in every major election around the world since 2016, in France, in Germany, in the E.U. overall, in India, in Mexico, in Brazil.”

“That we’ve been able to proactively identify them and take them down is somewhat of a signal that our systems are much more advanced now than they have been in the past,” Zuckerberg said.

With the 2020 election campaign ramping up, a renewed focus on Facebook and its role as a platform for political campaigns as well as election interference have made Zuckerberg’s decisions a source of ongoing debate — most notably for choosing to allow political campaigns to run ads containing falsehoods.

In response, Zuckerberg has pushed back, arguing that the company is engaged in a variety of projects to address election interference while balancing a commitment to free speech.

In the interview, Zuckerberg said his recent efforts to clarify his position on Facebook’s approach to these comments, which included a speech at Georgetown University, are part of an effort to make sure people understand the company’s decisions.

Those decisions loom large, because people who want to influence the 2020 election — both foreign and domestic — are already working to press their cases.

“Part of growing up for me has just been realizing that it is more important to be understood than it is to be liked,” Zuckerberg said.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Holt, Zuckerberg discussed how the company has embraced automated systems powered by artificial intelligence that can help detect foreign manipulation campaigns on the company’s global platform of 2.4 billion monthly users.

Zuckerberg has stood by the decision not to crack down on false information in political ads, but said there are other ways in which Facebook is looking to counter and anticipate interference in the 2020 election.

The changes announced Monday center on the larger initiatives that Facebook launched in response to the 2016 U.S. election after a Russian manipulation campaign was allowed to operate unchecked. In the aftermath of the election, Zuckerberg said the notion that fake news influenced the election was “crazy.”

Zuckerberg now embraces Facebook’s responsibility to prevent foreign manipulation campaigns on its platform. Zuckerberg told Holt the company now has more than 35,000 people working on security issues.

“That’s going to be studied by academics and historians for a long time to come, what the overall effect is,” Zuckerberg said. “There are a lot of effects. Obviously, one of the bad ones is nation-states trying to interfere in our democracy. And that’s one that we need to push back on.”

To that end, Facebook said Monday it will now label state-controlled media on its platform and on Instagram, which it owns. Facebook will also make fact-checking labels more prominent on news that has been rated as false or mostly false.

In addition, Facebook will bolster its political ads archive, which provides information on the advertisements bought by political candidates on the platform. The archive will now features a tracker of ad spending of each presidential candidate, more details on spending at the state and regional levels, and information on whether an ad ran on both Facebook and Instagram.

The social network sits in a precarious position. After years of meteoric growth and little attention from politicians, Facebook is now poised to be not just a major platform for the 2020 election but also the subject of the campaigns themselves. Democratic candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has called to break up Facebook, while the company has also faced scrutiny from Republicans led by Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri over claims the platform is slanted against conservatives.

Zuckerberg has sought to address those claims publicly and privately, meeting with notable right-leaning figures including Fox News host Tucker Carlson and conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, who has been embraced by some on the far right.

Zuckerberg called the critiques “pretty ridiculous” and stated that the company reaches out to people across political and cultural spectrums.

“We operate in a lot of different places,” Zuckerberg said. “You know, I’m running a company where I’m trying to make sure that we can give everyone a voice.”

Zuckerberg and Facebook would be wise to do everything possible to assist in thwarting any interference in our elections.  It is likely that once the election is over in 2020, there will be renewed scrutiny of its business and security policies on the part of our federal and state governments.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Today I will be traveling to Columbia, South Carolina, to attend the annual Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) Convening at the University of South Carolina.  Hunter College is a member of this organization and Marshall George and I will be representatives.

If you are the CPED, I would love to meet with you.

Tony

Donald Trump and Gordon Sondland

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, New York Times columnist, Michelle Goldberg, tried to analyze Gordon Sondland’s thinking in cozying himself up to the likes of Donald Trump.  Her conclusion was that Sondland paid $1 million for an ambassadorship and bought himself disgrace.  Here is an excerpt.  The entire column is below.

“Ever since Donald Trump began his nightmarish political ascent, some psychologists have been warning us, with increasing urgency, about what it means to have a malignant narcissist in power. In many cases, they’ve been more accurate about the trajectory of the last three years than the Washington hands who assumed Donald Trump would be constrained by our institutions.

But the people whose psychology I really want to understand are those like Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union who is now trying to squirm out of responsibility for his role in the Ukraine scandal. A wealthy hotelier, he seems to want the respect and admiration of the world outside the MAGA bubble, and he knew going into the administration that Trump was trash. Though a lifelong Republican, in 2016 Sondland and a business partner withdrew their support for Trump over the candidate’s attacks on the family of Humayun Khan, a Muslim soldier killed in Iraq, saying that Trump’s “constantly evolving positions diverge from their personal beliefs and values on so many levels.”

Yet once Trump won, Sondland donated $1 million to his inauguration to buy himself an ambassadorship, and then worked slavishly for the president’s approval. “Current and former U.S. officials and foreign diplomats say Sondland seemed to believe that if he delivered for Trump in Ukraine, he could ascend in the ranks of government,” reported The Washington Post. In the process, he may have made himself party to a criminal conspiracy.

Sure, people sell their souls all the time — but why for something as small as a chance to serve a man whose depravity Sondland himself once recognized?”

Tony

——————————————————————————————————-

Ever since Donald Trump began his nightmarish political ascent, some psychologists have been warning us, with increasing urgency, about what it means to have a malignant narcissist in power. In many cases, they’ve been more accurate about the trajectory of the last three years than the Washington hands who assumed Donald Trump would be constrained by our institutions.

But the people whose psychology I really want to understand are those like Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union who is now trying to squirm out of responsibility for his role in the Ukraine scandal. A wealthy hotelier, he seems to want the respect and admiration of the world outside the MAGA bubble, and he knew going into the administration that Trump was trash. Though a lifelong Republican, in 2016 Sondland and a business partner withdrew their support for Trump over the candidate’s attacks on the family of Humayun Khan, a Muslim soldier killed in Iraq, saying that Trump’s “constantly evolving positions diverge from their personal beliefs and values on so many levels.”

Yet once Trump won, Sondland donated $1 million to his inauguration to buy himself an ambassadorship, and then worked slavishly for the president’s approval. “Current and former U.S. officials and foreign diplomats say Sondland seemed to believe that if he delivered for Trump in Ukraine, he could ascend in the ranks of government,” reported The Washington Post. In the process, he may have made himself party to a criminal conspiracy.

Sure, people sell their souls all the time — but why for something as small as a chance to serve a man whose depravity Sondland himself once recognized?

On Thursday, Sondland testified before House impeachment investigators. His opening statement was damning for Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. It also appeared deeply dishonest about his own role in trying to extort Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to pursue investigations that would be of propaganda value to the president. Sondland is desperately spinning to distance himself from this whole debacle, suggesting he knows he’s at the center of something reprehensible. What I can’t comprehend is how anyone could think that working for Trump would end up any other way.

In his statement, Sondland provided a partial timeline of the Ukraine pressure campaign. On May 23, he said, he was part of a group of officials who urged Trump to speak to Zelensky by phone and to arrange a White House visit. Trump, however, had questions about the Ukrainian president’s record on “anti-corruption” — which, in Trumpspeak, means willingness to open spurious investigations — and told the group to talk to Giuliani.

Sondland said that he and his colleagues were “disappointed by the president’s direction that we involve Mr. Giuliani,” but felt compelled to follow it. Still, he said, “I did not understand, until much later, that Mr. Giuliani’s agenda might have also included an effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate Vice President Biden or his son or to involve Ukrainians, directly or indirectly, in the president’s 2020 re-election campaign.”

There are two possibilities here. Either Sondland was wildly, almost inconceivably ignorant about what was going on around him, or in trying to salvage his reputation, he just lied to Congress.

By May 23, everyone knew that Giuliani wanted the Ukrainians to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. On May 9, The New York Times ran an article headlined, “Rudy Giuliani Plans Ukraine Trip to Push for Inquiries That Could Help Trump,” which described his search for dirt on the Bidens. (“There’s nothing illegal about it,” Giuliani told The Times. “Somebody could say it’s improper.”) The next day a CNN piece was headlined, “Giuliani Defends Going to Ukraine to Press for Investigations Connected to Biden.” As the controversy grew, Giuliani canceled the trip.

So while it may be a mistake to overestimate the acuity of Trump appointees, it’s probably safe to say that Sondland knew exactly what he was involved with.

He tried to play the naïf elsewhere in his testimony as well. Toward the end of his statement, he condemned the idea of a president leveraging military aid to get a foreign government to help him politically. “Withholding foreign aid in order to pressure a foreign government to take such steps would be wrong,” he said. “I did not and would not ever participate in such undertakings.”

The record suggests he did. In July, the former national security adviser John Bolton reportedly told his aide Fiona Hill, “I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up.” And as Sondland testified behind closed doors, Mick Mulvaney, the White House acting chief of staff, appeared at a manic, combative news conference and made it clear what said drug deal involved.

One reason military aid to Ukraine was temporarily frozen, Mulvaney said, was that Trump wanted the country to investigate a conspiracy theory that Ukraine intervened in the 2016 election. “The look-back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with that nation,” Mulvaney said. He added, sneering: “Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.”

It’s a common Trumpist strategy to brazenly admit crimes in public, disorienting people through sheer shamelessness. It’s also common for Trumpists to do what Mulvaney did a few hours later, when he issued a statement denying that he’d said what we all heard him say. (“Once again, the media has decided to misconstrue my comments to advance a biased and political witch hunt against President Trump,” Mulvaney wrote.)

But Sondland’s not really a Trumpist. Based on news reports, he mostly just seems like an insecure opportunist. According to The Post, Sondland had envied some of his rich friends who’d been given ambassadorships in the past, and coveted one of his own. I can understand the longing for honor and status. What confounds me is how anyone could think that working for Trump might provide these things, and not see that any title achieved in this crime-syndicate administration will always come with an asterisk after it, or worse.

I’m not a lawyer and have no idea whether Sondland will face criminal liability. But he has obviously disgraced himself and he appears to know it. “Mr. Sondland now fears that he will be blamed for the scandal, while more powerful players will be protected, one person close to him said,” The Times reported. That’s the thing about deals with the devil. You get what you want, and then it ruins you.

Dear Commons Community,

The percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation rose significantly, in tandem with a sharp drop in the percentage that identified as Christians, according to new data from the Pew Research Center.

Based on telephone surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, Pew reported on Thursday (10/17/19) that 65% of American adults now describe themselves as Christian, down from 77% in 2009. Meanwhile, the portion that describes their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.  As reported by Pew: 

“The religious landscape of the United States continues to change at a rapid clip. In Pew Research Center telephone surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.

Both Protestantism and Catholicism are experiencing losses of population share. Currently, 43% of U.S. adults identify with Protestantism, down from 51% in 2009. And one-in-five adults (20%) are Catholic, down from 23% in 2009. Meanwhile, all subsets of the religiously unaffiliated population – a group also known as religious “nones” – have seen their numbers swell. Self-described atheists now account for 4% of U.S. adults, up modestly but significantly from 2% in 2009; agnostics make up 5% of U.S. adults, up from 3% a decade ago; and 17% of Americans now describe their religion as “nothing in particular,” up from 12% in 2009. Members of non-Christian religions also have grown modestly as a share of the adult population.”

Interesting data that reflects how we are changing as a society.  What is also striking is that in the younger generations (see table below) the percentage of unaffiliated “Nones” increased significantly with 40% of those born between 1981 and 1996 responding that they have no religious affiliation.

T0ny

Dear Commons Community,

A new memorial has been erected in honor of the civil rights martyr, Emmett Till.  And this time, it’s bulletproof.  Below is a photograph of the previous, bullet-ridden memorial that was replaced.  As reported by The Chicago Tribune:

“Members of Till’s family gathered yesterday at Graball Landing, the spot where the 14-year-old’s brutalized body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River after his murder in 1955. Encircled by a vast cotton field and quintessential Mississippi flora, they watched as a new Till memorial was unveiled, this one 10 times heavier than the last, and made of bulletproof steel.

Till’s lynching, which occurred after a white woman accused him of harassing her outside of a Mississippi grocery store, is largely seen as the catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement.

“This marker answers the question as to what we do with our history,” said Reverend Willie Williams, co-director of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission, which advocated for the new marker. “Do we learn from it? Do we use it to help our society have greater respect for humanity? This answers that.”

Members of Till’s family, including his cousins Rev. Wheeler Parker — the last living witness of Till’s kidnapping ― and Ollie Gordon and her daughter Airickca Gordon-Taylor, were in attendance to christen the new marker. Unlike previous markers placed near the location, the new metallic, commemorative sign will be behind a gate and placed under the watch of surveillance cameras, according to the memorial commission.

In July, a photo circulated online showed three Ole Miss students cheerfully posing with rifles beside a bullet-riddled Emmett Till memorial. That sign and others drawing attention to Till’s killing have been frequent, literal targets for vandals wanting to obscure and destroy his legacy.

Jessie Jaynes-Diming, a civil rights tour guide and board member on the Emmett Till Memorial Commission, said the vandalism is an attempt by Mississippians to distance themselves from the state’s wretched, racist history and alleviate themselves of guilt. 

“To desecrate the commemoration ― not only of a Black person, but of a 14-year-old boy ― is heartless,” she said. “And it’s their way of saying, ‘So what? I didn’t have anything to do with it. Why are y’all dredging this up?’”

In 1955, a white shopkeeper, Carolyn Bryant, accused Till of catcalling her and grabbing her outside of Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi. Days later, witnesses say Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till from his uncle’s home, then beat him, shot him in the head and threw his weighted body into the Tallahatchie River. A jury acquitted the two men that year after minutes of deliberation. Carolyn Bryant admitted decades later that her initial claims that Till harassed her were lies. 

After Till’s swollen body was recovered from the river, his mother, Mamie, famously demanded an open-coffin wake at her son’s funeral to publicly show the brutality of racism in the United States.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Responding to criticism, President Donald Trump last night reversed his plan to hold the next Group of Seven (G-7) world leaders’ meeting at his Doral, Florida, golf resort next year.  Trump’s announcement came after facing accusations that he was using the presidency to enrich himself by hosting the international summit at a private resort owned by his family.

“Based on both Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility, we will no longer consider Trump National Doral, Miami, as the Host Site for the G-7 in 2020,” Trump tweeted. He said his administration “will begin the search for another site, including the possibility of Camp David, immediately.”  As reported by the Associated Press.

“The striking reversal raises further doubts about the position of the president’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who held a press conference Thursday announcing the choice of Doral for the summit. He insisted his staff had concluded it was “far and away the best physical facility.” Mulvaney said the White House reached that determination after visiting 10 sites across the country.

In the same press conference, Mulvaney acknowledged a quid pro quo was at work when Trump held up U.S. aid to Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine’s investigation of Democrats and the 2016 elections. Mulvaney later claimed his comments had been misconstrued, but not before drawing the ire of the president and frustration from other senior aides.

Trump had been the first administration official to publicly float the selection of his property to host the summit when in August he mentioned it was on the short-list and praised its facilities and proximity to Miami’s international airport. His comments, more than a month before the official announcement, drew instant criticism from good governance groups and Democrats, who said it raised concerns that Trump was using the White House to boost his personal finances

The vociferous criticism did not die down, even as Trump insisted he would host the summit at cost, though he refused to disclose financial details. The annual heads-of-state gathering would at minimum have provided good-will value to his property.

Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said Trump’s reversal Saturday “is a bow to reality, but does not change how astonishing it was that a president ever thought this was appropriate, or that it was something he could get away with.”

An hour before Trump’s announcement, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden condemned the selection of Doral for the summit. “Hosting the G7 at Trump’s hotel? A president should never be able to use the office for personal gain,” the former vice president said.

On Thursday, Mulvaney had discounted Camp David, the government-owned presidential retreat, as the site for the summit, claiming, “I understand the folks who participated in it hated it and thought it was a miserable place to have the G-7.” He added that it was too small and remote for the international summit.

Mulvaney said then that unspecified sites in Hawaii and Utah had also been on the short list. It was unclear if they were still under consideration.”

Tony

Rick Perry

Dear Commons Community,

On Thursday, Rick Perry made it official that he was resigning by the end of the year as Secretary of Energy amid the Ukraine scandal rocking President Trump.  The former Texas governor’s entanglements in the scandal came to the surface earlier this month when sources familiar with the situation told Axios that during a recent conference call with House Republicans, Trump said Perry had arranged his July 25th call with Zelensky.

Perry also told The Wall Street Journal this week that Trump directed him to communicate with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani about alleged corruption in Ukraine, showing how closely Perry is connected to Trump’s dealings with the foreign power.

An assistant to Rick Perry said yesterday that the outgoing Energy Secretary won’t comply with a subpoena from the House of Representatives as part of its impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.  The subpoena had also requested documents that Perry is refusing to provide.

In a letter to the three House Democrats who issued the subpoena last week, Assistant Secretary of Energy Melissa Burnison said the Energy Department is “unable to comply with your request for documents and communications at this time” and argued that items requested “are potentially protected by executive privilege” and thus require careful review before they can be shared.

Secretary Perry is getting out before he becomes completely complicit in the impeachment investigation.  He was trying to work out a lucrative energy deal for several Texas-based corporations when President Trump told him he had to go through Rudy Giuliani to negotiate it  with the Ukraine government.  Giulani screwed the whole deal up for Perry, for Trump and for everyone else involved.

They deserve to be in the same cell block when this is all over!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

On Thursday, thousands of Chicago teachers went on strike to demand lower class sizes, increases in the numbers of support staff, and racial and economic justice for educators and students.

The Chicago strike is the latest in a wave of teacher protests across the country in the last few years, and comes after months of failed negotiations between the Chicago Teachers Union, the city and the school district.

The union has put forth a list of demands that includes things like more special education teachers, nurses and social workers; lower class size caps; and teacher salary increases. The strikers are also fighting to improve conditions outside the classroom by addressing issues like affordable housing, which significantly impacts both educators and their students. 

The city’s new mayor, Lori Lightfoot, campaigned on issues aligned with the union but since her election has pushed back on its demands. Lightfoot has said the teachers’ contract “is not the appropriate place for the city to legislate its affordable housing policy,” according to the Chicago Tribune. She has also suggested the teachers’ demands are simply too expensive.

“I also must be responsible for the taxpayers who pay for everything that goes on,” Lightfoot said.

Since the strike, union members have put many of these issues on full display in the form of biting, playful and heart-wrenching protest signs. 

Some have pointed to the economic struggle many teachers experience and referenced the casual ways educators are often condescended to and undermined.

“Bake sales won’t cut it!” one sign read.

One teacher’s sign proclaimed he was present as an infant during Chicago’s historic teacher’s strike in 1987 ― a 19-day protest that is, to this day, the longest in the city’s history.

See more photos below.

In solidarity!

Tony

Mitt Romney

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday,  Senator Mitt Romney, R-Utah, blasted President Trump’s decision to pull troops from defensive positions in Syria, and brought up the possibility that “Turkey may have called America’s bluff” in an exchange between Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As reported in Yahoo News and other media.

“Are we so weak and inept diplomatically that Turkey forced the hand of the United States of America? Turkey?” Romney said. “I believe that it’s imperative that public hearings are held to answer these questions, and I hope the Senate is able to conduct those hearings next week.”

The transcript of the Oct. 6 phone call between Trump and Erdogan has not been made public. Shortly afterward, Trump, without notifying his national security staff or State Department, unilaterally ordered the small American contingent in northern Syria to abandon their positions, and Turkey began its assault three days later.

Romney said redeploying the troops that protected Kurdish allies from the Turkish military left “a bloodstain” on American history.

“We know the truth about our Kurd allies. They lost 11,000 combatants in our joint effort to defeat ISIS. We dropped bombs from the air and provided intelligence and logistics behind the lines. The Kurds lost thousands of lives. Eighty-six brave Americans also lost their lives so tragically,” Romney said. “It’s argued that the Kurds were fighting for themselves. Of course they were. That’s the nature of an alliance. We fight together, each pursuing our own vital interest.”

A day earlier, Trump fought off criticism of his decision to clear the way for Turkish forces to enter northern Syria and battle Kurdish forces stationed there, calling the move “strategically brilliant.”

“I’m not going to get involved in a war between Turkey and Syria, especially when, if you look at the Kurds, and again I say this with great respect, they’re no angels,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday as his own vice president and secretary of state headed to Turkey to try to persuade Erdogan to halt his military offensive.

Perhaps the most outspoken Republican critic of the president, Romney saw Trump’s erratic foreign policy moves as antithetical to American values and a boon to U.S. foes.

“This is a matter of American honor and promise. So too is the principle that we stand by our allies, that we do not abandon our friends. The decision to abandon the Kurds violates one of our most sacred duties. It strikes at American honor. What we have done to the Kurds will stand as a bloodstain in the annals of American history,” Romney said. “There are broad strategic implications of our decision as well. Iranian and Russian interests in the Middle East have been advanced as well. At a time when we are applying maximum pressure on Iran, by giving them a stronger hand in Syria, we have actually weakened that pressure. Russia’s objective to play a greater role in the Middle East has also been greatly enhanced. The Kurds, out of desperation, have aligned with Assad. So America is diminished; Russia, Iran and Assad are strengthened.”

Earlier in the day, Vice President Mike Pence announced that Erdogan had agreed to a five-day “ceasefire” with the Kurds on terms favorable to Turkey, and Trump celebrated that news as he departed for a campaign rally in Dallas.

“This is an amazing outcome. This is an outcome, regardless of how the press would like to damp it down, this was something that they’ve been trying to get for 10 years,” Trump said. “You would have lost millions and millions of lives. They couldn’t get it without a little rough love, as I called it.”

Before Pence announced the short-term ceasefire that would spare Turkey from further U.S. sanctions, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., introduced a bill that would increase sanctions on Erdogan’s government well beyond those the Trump administration put in place this week.

“Mr. President, as much as I like you and want to work with you, I am going to be consistent and I will hold you accountable,” Graham said.

On Wednesday, two-thirds of Republican House members voted in favor of a resolution that rebuked Trump over his handling of the Kurdish situation. But yesterday, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., blocked a vote on the same nonbinding resolution in the Senate.”

Could be some breaking in the Republican ranks?

Tony

Mick Mulvaney

Dear Commons Community,