Elijah Cummings

Dear Commons Community,

Congressman Elijah Cummings, a longtime Maryland Democrat and key figure leading investigations into President Donald Trump, died this morning at age 68.  He passed away from “complications concerning longstanding health challenges,” his office said in a statement.  As reported by CNN.

“The congressman, who had represented Maryland’s 7th Congressional District since 1996, served as the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, one of the panels involved in the impeachment inquiry of Trump.

He oversaw a range of investigations into the Trump administration, from issues relating to the impeachment inquiry to the treatment of migrants at the southern border to the use of personal email for official use by White House officials to how a citizenship question was considered for the US census.

And it was his committee that grilled Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, in a blockbuster hearing this past February.

It was not immediately clear who will succeed Cummings as chairman of the Oversight Committee or how his passing will affect the swirling impeachment investigation into Trump.

Cummings had been in failing health in recent weeks. He had been in and out of the hospital, missing votes and business in his committee. He was spotted several times with a breathing tube in his nose connected to oxygen while sitting on the House floor. When speaking to reporters, he would have to wait for 15 to 20 seconds or so to catch his breath before speaking. He would drive around on a motorized wheelchair through the Capitol and then walk in using a walker.

Although he was chairman of the Oversight Committee, he had not been in command of the investigations on his panel. His staff did a lion’s share of the work and his staff has been helping lead the charge in the impeachment inquiry.

Prominent Trump critic

As he has led the investigative efforts, Cummings also clashed publicly with the President. Over the summer, Trump tweeted disparaging remarks toward Cummings and his Maryland district, which includes much of Baltimore, calling the majority black district a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”

Responding to some of the President’s tweets — in which Trump suggested the congressman needed to spend more time fixing his district — Cummings said on Twitter: “Mr. President, I go home to my district daily. Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors. It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch. But, it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.”

Despite that high-profile feud, Trump and Cummings did not always disagree. More than two years prior, Cummings emerged from a White House meeting with Trump and told reporters that the two men had found common ground on their shared interest in lowering drug prices.

At the time, Cummings also said he urged the President to rethink his language on African American communities after Trump repeatedly painted a grim picture of inner-city life on the campaign trail.

“I want you to realize that all African American communities are not places of depression and where people are being harmed,” Cummings told reporters, recalling his conversation with Trump. “When we hear those words about carnage and we are living in depressed situations, I told him it was very hurtful.”

In another high-profile moment earlier this year, Cummings stood up for Republican Rep. Mark Meadows, one of the President’s closest allies and staunchest defenders in Congress, in the face of accusations of racism. The chairman referred to Meadows as one of his “best friends.” When Meadows learned of Cummings’ passing Thursday, he said he was “truly heartbroken.”

“I have no other words to express the loss,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash.

Leading African American voice on Capitol Hill

Cummings, who grew up during the Civil Rights Movement, had become a leading voice among African American lawmakers on Capitol Hill at the time of his passing, and his death triggered an outpouring of grief from his colleagues.

“He spoke truth to power, defended the disenfranchised and represented West Baltimore with strength and dignity,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, House Democratic caucus chairman and a fellow member of the Congressional Black Caucus, tweeted Thursday morning. “Congress has lost a Champion. Heaven has gained an Angel of Justice. May he forever #RestInPower.”

House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler called Cummings a “giant of public service,” and Sen. Ben Cardin said his fellow Marylander “guaranteed a voice to so many who would otherwise not have one.”

Civil Rights

Earlier this year, Cummings discussed how, even at a young age, he faced racial violence in trying to integrate parts of his neighborhood.

“We were trying to integrate an Olympic-size pool near my house, and we had been constrained to a wading pool in the black community,” Cummings told ABC’s “This Week” in July. “As we tried to march to that pool over six days, I was beaten, all kinds of rocks and bottles thrown at me.”

Cummings said Trump’s racist remarks against four minority members of Congress echoed the same insults he heard as a 12-year-old boy in 1962, which he said were “very painful.”

“The interesting thing is that I heard the same chants. ‘Go home. You don’t belong here,’ ” he told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. “And they called us the N-word over and over again.”

Cummings was born and raised in Baltimore — the city that is home to his district. The son of former sharecroppers, Cummings was born in 1951 and graduated from Baltimore City College High School in 1969.

He practiced law and served for 14 years in the Maryland House of Delegates, where, according to his congressional website, he became the first African American in Maryland history to be named Speaker Pro Tem.

In 1996, he was first elected to the US Congress. Cummings was reelected last year in the 7th Congressional District with 76% of the vote.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz told CNN’s John Berman on “New Day” that Cummings was “a mentor and someone who in every situation would do the right thing, would put his community and the cause above everything else. Including himself.”

The Florida Democrat said watching Cummings continue with his duties despite his health struggles was inspirational.

“We’ll walk in his shadow, in his shoes that will never be filled,” she said.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi walked out of a meeting with Donald Trump yesterday about the crisis in Syria  after she said the president had had a “very serious meltdown” and insulted her in front of other congressional leaders.  As reported by Yahoo News and other media.

“What’s really sad about it is that I pray for the president all the time and I tell him that, I pray for his safety and that of his family. Now we have to pray for his health, because this was a very serious meltdown on the part of the president,” Pelosi told reporters on Capitol Hill.

She and other members of Congress had gathered at the White House Wednesday afternoon to be briefed by Trump on his decision to pull U.S. troops from a Kurdish enclave in northern Syria, allowing Turkish forces to invade the region. It was the first face-to-face meeting between Trump and Pelosi since House Democrats began their impeachment inquiry of the president in late September, and it came just hours after the House passed a resolution by a bipartisan vote of 354 to 60 rebuking the president for abandoning Kurdish militias that the U.S. had recruited to fight ISIS.

During the meeting, Trump lashed out at Pelosi, according to Democrats who attended, calling her a “third-rate politician.”

House Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump “was insulting, particularly to the speaker.”

“She kept her cool completely, but he called her a third-rate politician,” Schumer said. “He said that there are communists involved and you guys might like that. I mean, this was not a dialogue. It was a diatribe.”

According to the accounts of Democrats who attended the meeting, Pelosi confronted Trump over his change of policy, saying it had allowed Russian President Vladimir Putin to gain a “foothold in the Middle East,” and telling Trump that “all roads with you lead to Putin.”

Trump seems to have been caught off guard by the reaction to his decision, which was taken without consulting his Cabinet or staff after an Oct. 6 phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The next day he threatened to “obliterate” the Turkish economy with sanctions if Erdogan’s forces provoked bloodshed in Syria. And on Wednesday the White House leaked an Oct. 9 letter (see above) from Trump to Erdogan that struck observers as so out of the ordinary for communication between heads of state that for several hours journalists treated it as a possible hoax.

“History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way,” Trump wrote. “It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen. Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!” 

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham placed blame on Pelosi and Schumer for the breakdown of the White House meeting.

“While Democratic leadership chose to storm out and get in front of the cameras to whine, everyone else in the meeting chose to stay in the room and work on behalf of this country,” Grisham said.

Trump has faced fierce pressure from members of both parties, including some within his own administration, for his handling of Turkey’s attacks on Kurdish forces. Earlier in the day, he parroted Russian, Turkish and Syrian talking points when he declared that the Kurdish PKK “is probably worse at terror, more of a terrorist threat in many ways, than ISIS,” and signaled that the dispute between Turkey, Syria and the Kurds was not America’s problem.

Trump is losing it!

Tony

Lori Lightfoot

Dear Commons Community,

Teachers in Chicago announced last night that they would go on strike, forcing the cancellation of classes for more than 300,000 public school students in the nation’s third-largest district starting today.  This was expected as the Chicago Teachers Union and the city were not near agreement on a new contract.  As reported by The New York Times.

“The strike threatened to upend life in the city, as parents raced to make arrangements for child care and as city officials began to activate a contingency plan for supervising and feeding students in school buildings.

The strike in Chicago is the latest in a string of more than a dozen major walkouts by teachers across the country since early last year. It is an important early test for Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who was elected this year after a campaign in which she called for more nurses and social workers in the city’s schools — some of the very changes Chicago’s teachers are seeking now.

The city and the Chicago Teachers Union, which represents more than 20,000 educators, had been in tense contract negotiations for months, although there had been signs of progress in recent days.

The split between the city and the union stretches beyond traditional debates over pay and benefits, though representatives for each side disputed details of what had been offered during negotiations and what the exact points of contention were now.

The city said that it has offered teachers pay raises totaling 16 percent over a five-year contract, while union leaders have called for increases of 15 percent over a shorter three-year term. More pressing, union leaders say, are their calls for a promise — in writing — of smaller class sizes, more paid time to prepare lessons and the hiring of more school nurses, social workers, librarians and counselors. Other issues, including affordable housing provisions and protections for immigrant students, have also been raised.

The strike is the first for Chicago’s school system since 2012, when teachers walked out for seven days as part of a defining battle with the city’s previous administration.

About 7,500 school support employees represented by a different union also rejected a contract offer and planned to go on strike Thursday. Those workers include security officers, bus aides, custodians and special education classroom assistants.

The standoff with the unions represents one of the first significant challenges for Ms. Lightfoot, a Democrat who took office this year after an overwhelming electoral victory in all 50 of the city’s wards. The teachers’ union endorsed Ms. Lightfoot’s opponent, also a Democrat, and suggested Ms. Lightfoot was not progressive enough.

Ms. Lightfoot, who had never before held elective office, ran for mayor promising to undo inequities that have left parts of Chicago behind, including mostly African-American neighborhoods on the city’s South and West Sides where some schools have been closed in recent years. About 47 percent of the system’s students are Hispanic, 37 percent are African-American and 10 percent are white, according to Chicago Public Schools records; some 76 percent are economically disadvantaged.

Complicating matters is the school system’s fiscal situation, which has been dire but has improved enough to make labor negotiations even possible. With an annual budget of $5.98 billion, the system has long faced fiscal struggles, including high unfunded pension liabilities. In recent years, major credit agencies have rated the school system’s bonds below investment grade. But over recent months, its financial outlook has stabilized somewhat, in part because of increased state aid.

Ms. Lightfoot voiced frustration on Wednesday as the strike neared, suggesting that she agreed with much of what the teachers want. During her campaign for mayor, Ms. Lightfoot called for putting full-time nurses, social workers and librarians in all city schools, and promised to expand counseling services, recruit more black and Hispanic teachers and increase after-school programs.

“At every turn, we’ve bent over backwards to meet the union’s needs and deliver a contract that reflects our shared values and vision for our schools and the support of our students,” Ms. Lightfoot told reporters at City Hall on Wednesday.

But Stacy Davis Gates, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said the city had failed to offer more than the status quo on some essential issues.

“Negotiating in good faith means that we get to reach a settlement,” Ms. Davis Gates said. “If she cannot land a deal for teachers for public schools in Chicago, then you have to question her ability to get work done in this city.”

She also suggested that Ms. Lightfoot’s image would depend on how the contract dispute was resolved.

“Our children deserve the best that this city has to offer,” Ms. Davis Gates said. “They do not deserve broken promises. Our South Side communities, our West Side communities are littered with broken promises, unkept commitments. This contract has to represent something different for the city of Chicago — it has got to represent something different. And she ran to do that. Period.”

Chicago was the birthplace of unionization among teachers in the late 19th century, and the heavily Democratic city has remained a hotbed of teacher activism. The Chicago Teachers Union clashed with Rahm Emanuel, Ms. Lightfoot’s predecessor as mayor, during the 2012 strike. In December 2018, Chicago was the site of the first teacher strike at a charter school network.”

Let’s hope this is not a long strike! 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Harold Bloom, called the most notorious literary critic in America, died on Monday.  He was a prodigious writer and a professor at Yale University and New York University.  He was best-known as the defender of the Western Canon, once declaring that Shakespeare is “God.”  His full obituary in the New York Times is below.

Tony

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Harold Bloom, Critic Who Championed Western Canon, Dies at 89!

By Dinitia Smith

Oct. 14, 2019

Harold Bloom, the prodigious literary critic who championed and defended the Western canon in an outpouring of influential books that appeared not only on college syllabuses but also — unusual for an academic — on best-seller lists, died on Monday at a hospital in New Haven. He was 89.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Jeanne Bloom, who said he taught his last class at Yale University on Thursday.

Professor Bloom was frequently called the most notorious literary critic in America. From a vaunted perch at Yale, he flew in the face of almost every trend in the literary criticism of his day. Chiefly he argued for the literary superiority of the Western giants like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kafka — all of them white and male, his own critics pointed out — over writers favored by what he called “the School of Resentment,” by which he meant multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives and others whom he saw as betraying literature’s essential purpose.

“He is, by any reckoning, one of the most stimulating literary presences of the last half-century — and the most protean,” Sam Tanenhaus wrote in 2011 in The New York Times Book Review, of which he was the editor at the time, “a singular breed of scholar-teacher-critic-prose-poet-pamphleteer.”

At the heart of Professor Bloom’s writing was a passionate love of literature and a relish for its heroic figures.

“Shakespeare is God,” he declared, and Shakespeare’s characters, he said, are as real as people and have shaped Western perceptions of what it is to be human — a view he propounded in the acclaimed “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human” (1998).

The analogy to divinity worked both ways: In “The Book of J” (1990), Professor Bloom challenged most existing biblical scholarship by suggesting that even the Judeo-Christian God was a literary character — invented by a woman, no less, who may have lived in the court of King Solomon and who wrote sections of the first five books of the Old Testament. “The Book of J” became a best seller.

Professor Bloom was widely regarded as the most popular literary critic in America (an encomium he might have considered faint praise). Among his other best sellers were his magnum opus “The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages,” published in 1994, and “How to Read and Why” (2000).

That record of commercial success led many in the academy to dismiss him as a populist. “Mention the name of Harold Bloom to academics in literature departments these days and they will roll their eyes,” the British scholar and author Jonathan Bate wrote in The New Republic in 2011.

The Bronx-born son of a garment worker, Professor Bloom might have been a character out of literature himself. With his untidy gray hair and melancholy eyes encircled by shadows, he was known to hold forth from what his students called The Chair, which he, of ample girth, amply filled, surrounded by stacks of books.

He was fond of endearments, like “little child.” He addressed both male and female students as “dear” and would kiss them on the top of the head.

Gorging on Words

Professor Bloom called himself “a monster” of reading; he said he could read, and absorb, a 400-page book in an hour. His friend Richard Bernstein, a professor of philosophy at the New School, told a reporter that watching Professor Bloom read was “scary.”

Armed with a photographic memory, Professor Bloom could recite acres of poetry by heart — by his account, the whole of Shakespeare, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” all of William Blake, the Hebraic Bible and Edmund Spenser’s monumental “The Fairie Queen.” He relished epigraphs, gnomic remarks and unusual words: kenosis (emptying), tessera (completing), askesis (diminishing) and clinamen (swerving).

He quite enjoyed being likened to Samuel Johnson, the great 18th-century critic, essayist, lexicographer and man about London, who, like Professor Bloom (“a Yiddisher Dr. Johnson” was one appellation), was rotund, erudite and often caustic in his opinions. (Professor Bloom even had a vaguely English accent, his Bronx roots notwithstanding.)

Or if not Johnson, then the actor Zero Mostel, whom he resembled.

“I am Zero Mostel!” Professor Bloom once said.

Like Dr. Johnson’s, his output was vast: more than 40 books of his own authorship and hundreds of volumes he edited. And he remained prolific to the end, publishing two books in 2017, two in 2018 and two this year: “Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind” and “Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism.” His final book is to be released on an unspecified date by Yale University Press, his wife said.

Perhaps Professor Bloom’s most influential work was one that discussed literary influence itself. The book, “The Anxiety of Influence,” published in 1973 and eventually in some 45 languages, borrows from Freudian theory in envisioning literary creation as an epochal, and Oedipal, struggle in which the young artist rebels against preceding traditions, seeking that burst of originality that distinguishes greatness.

Professor Bloom argued that a poem was both a response to another poem and a defense against it. Poetry, he wrote, was a dark battleground where poets deliberately “misread” those who came before them and repress their debt to them.

This was a view that ran counter to the New Criticism, the dominant literary theory in midcentury America that put aside matters like historical context and author’s intentions and rather saw literature as a series of texts to be closely analyzed, their meaning to be found in language and structure.

Professor Bloom crossed swords with other critical perspectives in “The Western Canon.” The eminent critic Frank Kermode, identifying those whom Professor Bloom saw as his antagonists, wrote in The London Review of Books, “He has in mind all who profess to regard the canon as an instrument of cultural, hence political, hegemony — as a subtle fraud devised by dead white males to reinforce ethnic and sexist oppression.”

Professor Bloom insisted that a literary work is not a social document — is not to be read for its political or historical content — but is to be enjoyed above all for the aesthetic pleasure it brings. “Bloom isn’t asking us to worship the great books,” the writer Adam Begley wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1994. “He asks instead that we prize the astonishing mystery of creative genius.”

Professor Bloom himself said that “the canonical quality comes out of strangeness, comes out of the idiosyncratic, comes out of originality.” Mr. Begley noted further, “The canon, Bloom believes, answers an unavoidable question: What, in the little time we have, shall we read?”

“You must choose,” Professor Bloom himself wrote in “The Western Canon.” “Either there were aesthetic values or there are only the overdeterminations of race, class and gender.”

His Writing Hall of Fame

Attached to “The Western Canon” is an appendix listing the works of some 850 writers that Professor Bloom thought would endure in posterity. Plato and Shakespeare and Proust are there, of course, but so are lesser-known figures, like Ivo Andric, a Yugoslav who won the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Taha Hussein, an important Egyptian writer and intellectual.

Many in the literary world delighted in trying to decipher the meanings behind Professor Bloom’s sometimes idiosyncratic choices. Some puzzled over his judgment, for example, that of all John Updike’s considerable body of work, only the novel “The Witches of Eastwick” would last. Professor Bloom’s critics noted that Mr. Updike had once referred to Professor Bloom’s writings as “torturous.” Philip Roth, a friend of Professor Bloom’s, garnered six mentions. Alice Walker was ignored altogether, but the poet J.D. McClatchy and the critics David Bromwich and Barbara Packer, all students of Professor Bloom’s, made the cut.

Later, in “The Anatomy of Influence” — a 2011 book he called, prematurely, his “virtual swan song” — Professor Bloom seemed to soften his canonical stance, conceding that a critic of any heritage is obliged to take seriously other traditions, including non-Western.

The spotlight he commanded as a powerful cultural figure did not always flatter him. In 1990, GQ magazine, in an article titled “Bloom in Love,” portrayed him as having had intimate entanglements with female students. (“A disgusting piece of character assassination,” he was quoted as telling Mr. Begley in The Times Magazine.) And in a 2004 article in New York magazine, the writer Naomi Wolf wrote that he had once put his hand on her inner thigh when she was an undergraduate student. “Beautiful, brilliant students surrounded him,” she wrote. “He was a vortex of power and intellectual charisma.”

Professor Bloom vigorously denied her accusation.

The clarity of his prose was also questioned. “Harold is not a particularly good explainer,” his friend the poet John Hollander once told The Times, adding, “He’ll get hold of a word and allow this to generate a concept for him, but he’s not in a position to say very clearly what he means and what he’s doing.”

Still, Professor Bloom won huge book advances — $1.2 million in the case of “Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds” (2002), a popular but erudite work on which great books a person ought to read.

“You must choose,” Professor Bloom wrote in “The Western Canon” (1994). “Either there were aesthetic values or there are only the overdeterminations of race, class and gender.” In “Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds” (2002), he discussed which great books a person should read.

Harold Bloom was born on July 11, 1930, in the East Bronx, into an Orthodox Jewish household. He was the youngest of five children of William and Paula (Lev) Bloom, struggling immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father was a garment worker.

The first book Harold read was an anthology of Yiddish poetry. He soon discovered the New York Public Library’s branch in the Melrose section of the Bronx and worked his way through Hart Crane, W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot. He graduated from the exclusive Bronx High School of Science — “that ghastly place,” he called it — and went to Cornell on a scholarship, where he dazzled his professors.

When he graduated from Cornell in 1951, his teachers insisted that he go to another institution for graduate school. “We couldn’t teach him anything more,” said M.H. Abrams, the eminent critic and scholar of Romanticism who was Professor Bloom’s adviser.

A Passion for the Romantics

Professor Bloom was accepted at Yale, a stronghold of the New Criticism in the 1950s. The New Critics, among them T.S. Eliot, favored 17th-century metaphysical and religious poets like John Donne and George Herbert, both clergymen. Professor Bloom found that school of thought arid.

It was “no accident,” the young Professor Bloom wrote, “that the poets brought into favor by the New Criticism were Catholics or High Church Anglicans.” He added that the “academic criticism of literature in our time became almost an affair of church wardens.”

“And I am very Jewish,” he told a reporter, “and lower-class Jewish at that.”

His heroes were Emerson and the English Romantics, but Romanticism was in ill repute at Yale. Nevertheless, he wrote his doctoral thesis on Romanticism and adapted and published it as his first book, “Shelley’s Mythmaking” (1959). He published a more comprehensive study of the Romantics, “The Visionary Company,’’ in 1961. In championing the Romantics he was credited with helping to persuade English departments to teach them again in the 1960s.

At Yale, however, he cast himself in direct opposition to the prevailing ethos, particularly with “The Anxiety of Influence,” positing that great literature is an act of rebellion against the writers who came before. Though he briefly aligned himself with the Yale deconstructionists Paul De Man, J. Hillis Miller, Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Hartman, Professor Bloom broke with the Yale English department completely in 1977. He was appointed De Vane professor of humanities and eventually Sterling professor of the humanities, the highest academic rank at Yale, in effect becoming a department unto himself.

In 1984 Professor Bloom took on a vast project: editing some 600 volumes of criticism for Chelsea House, a publisher of scholarly works. One motive for doing so was to provide for a disabled adult son. The next year he received a so-called genius award grant from the Catherine and John D. MacArthur Foundation.

Professor Bloom took on a greater teaching load in 1988, spending part of each week as the Berg professor of English at New York University.

At his death he lived in the same rambling 19th-century brown-shingled house in New Haven that he and his wife, Jeanne, a retired psychologist in the Branford, Conn., school system, had occupied for more than 50 years and filled with thousands of books, paintings and sculptures. He had married Jeanne Gould in 1958.

In addition to his wife, Professor Bloom is survived by two sons, Daniel and David.

Professor Bloom was ultimately both optimistic, in a narrow sense, and pessimistic, in a much broader one, about the durability of great literature. The books he loved would no doubt always find readers, he wrote, though their numbers might dwindle. But his great concern was that the books would no longer be taught, and thus become irrelevant.

“What are now called ‘Departments of English’ will be renamed departments of ‘Cultural Studies,’” he wrote in “The Western Canon,” “where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens.

“Major, once-elitist universities and colleges,” he continued, “will still offer a few courses in Shakespeare, Milton and their peers, but these will be taught by departments of three or four scholars, equivalent to teachers of ancient Greek and Latin.”

Dear Commons Community,

I was not able to watch the fourth Democratic presidential debate last night although I must admit that a debate among  so many candidates is not appealing to me.  Below are takeaways courtesy of several news media outlets.

Welcome to life as a frontrunner, Sen. Warren

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke and businessman Andrew Yang all took shots at Warren.

Buttigieg and Klobuchar got that bandwagon going early when they criticized Warren not giving a straight answer to a question about whether middle-class taxes would go up under “Medicare for All,” a government-sponsored health care proposal she has backed.

“Your signature is to have a plan for everything, except this,” Buttigieg said. “No plan has been laid out to explain how a multi-trillion-dollar hole in this Medicare for All plan that Sen. Warren is putting forward is supposed to get filled in.”

Klobuchar quickly piled-on: “I’m sorry Elizabeth but … the difference between a plan and a pipe dream is something that you can actually get done.”

Warren responded by repeating her usual answer when challenged on this point, focusing on the bottom-line effect the plan would have on middle-class families and pledging she wouldn’t support a proposal that raised overall costs for them.

Republicans have also attacked Warren over unwillingness to address the question, which she has dismissed as “Republican framing.”

Klobuchar and O’Rourke also went after Warren over her proposal to levy a 2% on the super-rich.

“I want to give a reality check here to Elizabeth; nobody on this stage wants to protect billionaires,” Klobuchar said.

In a nod to Tom Steyer, the wealthy hedge fund manager who just recently entered the presidential race and was participating in his first debate, Klobuchar wryly added, “Not even the billionaire wants to protect the billionaires.”

O’Rourke joined in by accusing Warren of being “more focused on being punitive or pitting one part of the country against the other instead of lifting people up.”

Yang called out Warren for not addressing the threat automation poses to U.S. workers That prompted several other candidates to address his signature universal basic income proposal ― perhaps the biggest coup for his campaign so far.

Biden meanders in talking about the Ukraine flap

Biden didn’t directly answer if it was wrong that during his tenure as vice president, his son Hunter served as a board member for the Ukrainian company Burisma Holdings ― which spurred Trump’s controversial phone call to Ukraine’s president, which in turn could lead to Trump’s impeachment.

“I never discussed a single thing with my son about anything to do with Ukraine … we always kept everything separate,” Biden said about his son’s work overseas. “There would be no potential conflict. My son made a judgment. I’m proud of the judgment he made … the fact of the matter is this is about Trump’s corruption.”

Hunter Biden acknowledged in an interview with ABC airing Tuesday that it was “poor judgment” on his part to join the venture, and conceded it was likely that his last name helped him professionally.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker actually gave a more succinct answer in defense of Biden, noting the hypocrisy of Trump and Republicans seeking to attempt to make hay of the matter, given the financial conflicts of interest that cloud the Trump administration. 

“We are literally using Donald Trump’s lies, and the second issue we cover on this stage is elevating a lie and attacking a statesman,” Booker said, referring to Joe Biden.

Buttigieg, Klobuchar make a play for the middle lane

Buttigieg and Klobuchar may have delivered their best debate performances.

Buttigieg, in particular, seemed to put more sustained effort into positioning himself as an alternative for centrists to Biden. He played up his small-town roots by recalling driving past closed factories while growing up in the post-industrial Midwest. The 37-year-old also repeatedly expressed his aversion to Washington elites, calling out “senators” and “congressmen” who have not gotten many things done during his “entire adult life.”

During a segment on foreign policy and Trump’s recent decision to withdraw troops in Syria, Buttigieg drew applause after he called for the U.S. to stand by its allies.

“The slaughter going on in Syria is not a consequence of American presence, it a consequence of a withdrawal and a betrayal by this president of American allies and American values.”

Buttigieg made another nod to more moderate voters when he called out O’Rourke for not giving more details on how the Texan’s proposed mandatory buyback program for assault weapons and a voluntary buyback program for handguns would work.

“I don’t need lessons from you on courage ― political or personal,” Buttigieg, a military veteran, told O’Rourke in one sharp exchange.

Sanders bounces back strong

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders didn’t look or sound like a guy who had a heart attack two weeks ago. He was as animated as ever, landing sharp blows against Trump, as well as other Democrats on stage.

“I’m healthy, I’m feeling great,” the 78-year-old when asked about his health and age.

After Booker jokingly interjected that Sanders supports medical marijuana, Sanders quipped, “I’m not on it tonight.” The line elicited laughter and applause from the audience. 

But Sanders’ best moment may have been a fast-ball at Biden after the former vice president asserted that he knew how to “get stuff done,” and that he didn’t simply offer plans about how to do so.

“You know what else you got done? You got the disastrous war in Iraq done. You got a bankruptcy bill that’s hurting middle-class Americans all over the country,” Sanders retorted, referring to positions Biden took as a senator fro Delaware.

Missed opportunities

Steyer, whose focus is on combating climate, started strong in the debate’s opening act, saying that “every candidate here is more decent, more coherent and more patriotic than the criminal in the White House.” That may have been his only good line of the night, however, as the debate hummed along and he barely made his presence felt.

California Sen. Kamala Harris also needed a breakout moment ― similar to the one she enjoyed in the first debate in June ― to reverse her struggling poll numbers. She won applause and good marks from women’s rights groups when she noted that none of the previous encounters had featured any direct questions about reproductive rights, calling the omission “outrageous.”

Tony

Fiona Hill, President Trump’s former adviser on Russia and Europe

Dear Commons Community,

The effort to pressure Ukraine for political help provoked a heated confrontation inside the White House last summer that so alarmed John R. Bolton, then the national security adviser, that he told an aide to alert White House lawyers, House investigators were told yesterday.  As reported by the New York Times and other media.

“Mr. Bolton got into a tense exchange on July 10 with Gordon D. Sondland, the Trump donor turned ambassador to the European Union, who was working with Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, to press Ukraine to investigate Democrats, according to three people who heard the testimony.

The aide, Fiona Hill, testified that Mr. Bolton told her to notify the chief lawyer for the National Security Council about a rogue effort by Mr. Sondland, Mr. Giuliani and Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, according to the people familiar with the testimony.

“I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up,” Mr. Bolton, a Yale-trained lawyer, told Ms. Hill to tell White House lawyers, according to two people at the deposition. (Another person in the room initially said Mr. Bolton referred to Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Mulvaney, but two others said he cited Mr. Sondland.)

It was not the first time Mr. Bolton expressed grave concerns to Ms. Hill about the campaign being run by Mr. Giuliani. “Giuliani’s a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up,” Ms. Hill quoted Mr. Bolton as saying during an earlier conversation.

The testimony revealed in a powerful way just how divisive Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to extract damaging information about Democrats from Ukraine on President Trump’s behalf were within the White House. Ms. Hill, the senior director for European and Russian affairs, testified that Mr. Giuliani and his allies circumvented the usual national security process to run their own foreign policy efforts, leaving the president’s official advisers aware of the rogue operation yet powerless to stop it.

At one point, she confronted Mr. Sondland, who had inserted himself into dealings with Ukraine even though it was not part of his official portfolio, according to the people informed about Ms. Hill’s testimony.

He told her that he was in charge of Ukraine, a moment she compared to Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr.’s declaration that he was in charge after the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt, according to those who heard the testimony.

According to whom, she asked.

The president, he answered.

Ms. Hill was the first former White House official to testify in the House impeachment inquiry, and her account provided a gripping in-the-room view of the shadow maneuvers that have jeopardized Mr. Trump’s presidency. While she left her post shortly before the now-famous July 25 telephone call in which Mr. Trump pressed Ukraine’s president to investigate Democrats, she helped House investigators understand the early months of the pressure campaign.”

Incredible testimony!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Sunday was a sad day for Fortnite gamers.  Players eager to enter the game’s virtual world to fight one another were instead confronted by a blank screen with a black hole at its center. The game’s 10th season is now over, and its spectacular ending prompted speculation that major changes could be on the way.

Fortnite is enjoyed by millions of people worldwide including my fourteen-year-old grandson, Michael and his friends.

If you are not familiar with it, players enter the game by hang gliding into an island unarmed. Once there, the goal is to survive. Weapons are strewn about and 100 players fight it out, alone or by teaming up with friends.

The game, which is popular among teenagers, has features that encourage players to remain on the move and to confront one another. When they aren’t themselves playing, some fans like to watch others fight it out, often with commentary, on streaming services like Twitch.

Around 2 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, glowing rifts emerged in the game’s darkened sky, an alarm began to sound and a rocket launched from the island, according to videos posted online. More rifts emerged and rockets began pelting the island, wreaking havoc.

The rockets converged at a point on land, and a meteor that had been hovering overhead crashed down. The island sustained further damage and, eventually, players’ avatars were sent skyward, where they could view the destruction as dramatic music played.

A final explosion sparked the formation of a black hole, pulling all light, objects and players into a swirling central point onscreen, which went black before a dark, wispy blue ring materialized. That image is what players and visitors to the game’s website now see.

That Fortnite’s 10th season would end on Sunday was no surprise — its creator, Epic Games, had previously announced as much. But it wasn’t clear what would come next, and when.

As of late yesterday, the official Fortnite Twitter account’s history had been wiped clean, save for a single tweet linking to a live stream of the black hole.

A purportedly leaked video posted on social media early Monday afternoon claimed to show an official trailer for the next installment, identified in the clip as Fortnite Chapter 2, Season 1.

“This looks like a completely different game,” the streamer GhostNinja said of the clip in a live stream to about 75,000 viewers on Monday. “This is what we needed.”

Historically, the transitions between Fortnite seasons have been short, often with just hours between the ending of one and the beginning of the next. Those transitions have been marked by changes to the island’s map, but speculation has been swirling that a more substantial update might be coming — and that it could include a new setting altogether.

I have to confess that when my grandson, Michael, taught me this game, it was quite intriguing.  While there are battles, escapes and provocative avatars, there is no blood or gore to the action just movement and outwitting opponents.  My hand-eye coordination is not fast enough for Fortnite but it is easy to understand its popularity.  I sense that Fortnite Chapter 2, Season 1 will be as popular as its predecessor.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In what appears to be a rebuke of Donald Trump, Presidential candidate Joe Biden said yesterday that no family member of his would have an office in the White House or act as a diplomat under his potential administration.

The Democrat’s comments at a United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) forum in Iowa were in response to an NBC reporter’s question of what kind of ethical guidelines Biden would create if elected president. The reporter referenced the candidate’s son, Hunter Biden, whose business dealings in China and Ukraine have been at the center of President Donald Trump’s attempt to investigate unsubstantiated allegations of corruption against the Bidens.

“No one in my family will have an office in the White House, will sit in meetings as if they are a cabinet member, will in fact have any business relationship with anyone that relates to a foreign corporation or a foreign country,” the former vice president told reporters. “Period. End of story.”

Biden appeared to be drawing a contrast with Trump’s children, some of whom have been involved either as senior advisers in the White House or as diplomats with foreign nations.

The Democrat’s remarks came just hours after his son Hunter Biden announced his planned resignation from the board of a Chinese-backed private equity firm. Hunter Biden’s attorney, George Mesires, released a statement earlier Sunday that said the younger Biden intends to resign from the board of directors of BHR Partners by Oct. 31.

The statement also said Hunter Biden promises to avoid conflicts of interest if his father is elected president, and will continue to keep the former vice president out of his business affairs.

At the forum, Joe Biden continued to stress that he has not discussed his son’s business affairs with him, adding that he was not aware of what was in Mesires’ statement until he read it upon release.

Tony

A scene from a video depicting a fake President Trump massacring the news media and his critics that was shown at a conference for his supporters at Trump National Doral Miami last week.

Dear Commons Community,

A graphic video featuring a fake President Donald Trump stabbing members of the news media and lighting the head of a political rival on fire was played at a conference for his supporters this weekend, according to reports in The New York Times and Reuters.

The event, hosted by the group American Priority, took place at Trump’s resort in Miami, the Trump National Doral, and featured a litany of pro-Trump headliners, including former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr.

The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) condemned the video.

News of the video was first reported by the New York Times after someone who attended the gathering leaked a cell-phone video of it to the newspaper.

“The WHCA is horrified by a video reportedly shown over the weekend at a political conference organized by the president’s supporters,” Jonathan Karl, president of the association, said in a statement.

“All Americans should condemn this depiction of violence directed toward journalists and the president’s political opponents,” he said.

“We have previously told the president his rhetoric could incite violence. Now we call on him and everybody associated with this conference to denounce this video and affirm that violence has no place in our society.”

The video shows Trump’s head superimposed on the body of a man wearing a pinstriped suit opening fire at a “Church of Fake News” with some parishioners faces with logos of various news organizations, the Times reported.

But the political action group hosting the event, American Priority, said in a statement on Twitter that it had not been aware of the video and did not approve it.

“It has come to our attention that an unauthorized video was shown,” the group said, adding that the video had been shown in a “side room.”

“This video was not approved, seen or sanctioned by the … organizers.”

American Priority states on its website it supports free speech as protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

A spokesman for Trump’s campaign said he knew nothing about the video, the Times reported.

“That video was not produced by the campaign, and we do not condone violence,” said spokesman Tim Murtaugh.

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, and a former spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, were scheduled to speak at the three-day conference in Miami but the Times reported that neither had seen the video.

“I wasn’t aware of any video, nor do I support violence of any kind against anyone,” Sanders told the Times.

The Times reported that the video appeared to include edited scenes from the 2014 dark comedy “Kingsman: The Secret Service”.

Event organizers, speaking to the Times, denounced the violence in the video and are investigating as to how it was shown.

“American Priority rejects all political violence and aims to promote a healthy dialogue about the preservation of free speech. This matter is under review,” organizer Alex Phillips told the Times.

Trump, during his campaign for re-election for 2020 has repeatedly called the media “the enemy of the people.”

A gunman killed five people in a Maryland newspaper office in 2018 in one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in U.S. history.

The video in question can be seen below.  Beware it is quite graphic.

Tony

At Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in 2011, from left: James E. Staley, at the time a senior JPMorgan executive; former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers; Mr. Epstein; Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder; and Boris Nikolic, who was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s science adviser.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article today that documents an on-going relationship that Microsoft’s Bill Gates had with the sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.  At first, I thought this was the type of story one would see in a tabloid but no this is a serious piece of journalism that raises questions about Gates’s judgment especially since it appears that the relationship started after Epstein was convicted of sex crimes. Here is an excerpt from the article.

“Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who committed suicide in prison, managed to lure an astonishing array of rich, powerful and famous men into his orbit.

There were billionaires (Leslie Wexner and Leon Black), politicians (Bill Clinton and Bill Richardson), Nobel laureates (Murray Gell-Mann and Frank Wilczek) and even royals (Prince Andrew).

Few, though, compared in prestige and power to the world’s second-richest person, a brilliant and intensely private luminary: Bill Gates. And unlike many others, Mr. Gates started the relationship after Mr. Epstein was convicted of sex crimes.

Mr. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, whose $100 billion-plus fortune has endowed the world’s largest charitable organization, has done his best to minimize his connections to Mr. Epstein. “I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him,” he told The Wall Street Journal last month.

In fact, beginning in 2011, Mr. Gates met with Mr. Epstein on numerous occasions — including at least three times at Mr. Epstein’s palatial Manhattan townhouse, and at least once staying late into the night, according to interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the relationship, as well as documents reviewed by The New York Times.

Employees of Mr. Gates’s foundation also paid multiple visits to Mr. Epstein’s mansion. And Mr. Epstein spoke with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and JPMorgan Chase about a proposed multibillion-dollar charitable fund — an arrangement that had the potential to generate enormous fees for Mr. Epstein.

“His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me,” Mr. Gates emailed colleagues in 2011, after his first get-together with Mr. Epstein.

Bridgitt Arnold, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gates, said he “was referring only to the unique décor of the Epstein residence — and Epstein’s habit of spontaneously bringing acquaintances in to meet Mr. Gates.”

“It was in no way meant to convey a sense of interest or approval,” she said.

Over and over, Mr. Epstein managed to cultivate close relationships with some of the world’s most powerful men. He lured them with the whiff of money and the proximity to other powerful, famous or wealthy people — so much so that many looked past his reputation for sexual misconduct. And the more people he drew into his circle, the easier it was for him to attract others.

Mr. Gates and the $51 billion Gates Foundation have championed the well-being of young girls. By the time Mr. Gates and Mr. Epstein first met, Mr. Epstein had served jail time for soliciting prostitution from a minor and was required to register as a sex offender.

Ms. Arnold said that “high-profile people” had introduced Mr. Gates and Mr. Epstein and that they had met multiple times to discuss philanthropy.

“Bill Gates regrets ever meeting with Epstein and recognizes it was an error in judgment to do so,” Ms. Arnold said. “Gates recognizes that entertaining Epstein’s ideas related to philanthropy gave Epstein an undeserved platform that was at odds with Gates’s personal values and the values of his foundation.”

How and why does a person like Gates get involved with such a slimy predator.?

Tony