Presidential Debate: Trump Was an Angry “Clown”

The Empty Clown Suit – Robert MacNeil Christie, Author

 Presidential Debate – Trump was an angry “clown”

Dear Commons Community,

The presidential debate last night was a debacle mainly because President Trump could not stop interrupting, lying, barking and trying to bully Joe Biden at every opportunity.  It was clear that Trump’s only strategy was to knock Biden off his game.  It didn’t work.  Joe Biden showed up and maintained dignity throughout.  Trump even earned several scoldings from the moderator, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace.  Here is a recap from the Huffington Post and other news media.

The debate in Cleveland, Ohio, was meant to cover the Supreme Court, health care, the coronavirus pandemic, law and order and police brutality. But Trump attempted a high-speed highjacking of the debate by relentlessly disrespecting the debate rules — he frequently talked over both Biden and moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News —  and by telling ostentatious lies in every segment. Trump falsely claimed he had enacted a comprehensive health care plan, launched personal attacks about Biden’s son Hunter, and advanced disinformation about mail-in voting.

Although his performance was typical for Trump, it’s not clear the president did anything to sway the millions of suburban and women voters who say they are turned off by his behavior after nearly four years in office. Throwing a presidential debate into chaos when you are down in the polls might provide a sugar rush on the similarly combative Fox News, but will likely be a poor long-term strategy for the incumbent president. 

It was, however, an apt demonstration of how Trump won the White House and governed as president: by trammeling unwritten political rules about mutual respect for the process and your opponents. An irritated Biden — who in addition to telling Trump to “shut up” also called him a “clown” ― could only stand by as Wallace pleaded with and, when that didn’t work, ultimately shouted at Trump to stand down. 

“Let me ask my question,” Wallace said at one point, and then finally: “Mr. President, I’m the moderator of this debate, I’d like you to let me ask my question and then you can answer. … My question, sir, is what is the Trump health care plan?”

Trump fired back: “Well, first of all, I guess I’m debating you not him. But that’s OK, I’m not surprised.”

At another point in the debate, Wallace tried to rein Trump in after the president refused to allow Biden to respond to a jab about Biden’s son’s past work in Ukraine. The former vice president defended Hunter Biden, saying he did nothing wrong by serving on the board of a Ukranian energy company. 

“Mr. President, let him answer!” Wallace said. “Mr. President, please stop.”

A frustrated Biden responded, “It’s hard to get any word in with this clown.” He added, “Excuse me, this person.”

At an auditorium that just months ago served as an emergency pop-up hospital for COVID-19 patients, some of the biggest issues facing the United States loomed large. To date, the coronavirus pandemic has claimed more than 200,000 American lives, and cases continue to rise, outpacing nations around the world. Meanwhile, millions of Americans remain unemployed and with dwindling federal assistance.

But the exchange between Trump and Biden did not expand on how to address these struggles. Trump repeatedly claimed the American death toll would have been higher under a Biden administration, defended holding massive rallies during the pandemic and downplayed the utility of wearing a mask.

Biden, in some rare moments where he could talk at length, was able to accomplish what his campaign said he would attempt to do: speak directly to the voters. Looking straight into the camera, Biden asked how many Americans have an empty seat at their table after losing a loved one to the pandemic. He asked working-class Americans how they were really doing during the current economic climate. And in a final plea, he called on Americans to vote however they felt comfortable.

Those moments were followed by Trump’s bluster. 

When put on the spot about his record, Trump resorted to denials: He claimed to have paid “millions” in taxes in 2016 and 2017, refuting a New York Times report that he only paid $750 in each of those years. He hung on to pre-coronavirus numbers on the economy, inflating how the manufacturing industry was doing even before the pandemic.

And in one of the most notable moments of the night, Trump refused to condemn white supremacists and militia groups. Instead, he said the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group, should “stand down and stand by.”

Tuesday’s debate comes as Trump trails in national polls and in surveys of key battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Trump won all three Rust Belt states in 2016 over then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to clinch the presidency.

The negative tone between the two campaigns was set early. In advance of the debate, the Trump campaign circulated a series of baseless conspiracies that the Biden campaign had backed out of an inspection for earpiece devices. The claims were part of a continued attack, often pushed through doctored videos, that Biden has cognitive decline. Biden’s campaign denied that it had ever agreed to an earpiece check.

CNN political commentator and former Pennsylvania GOP Sen. Rick Santorum, who often defends Trump, said the president did poorly on Tuesday.

“I think the president overplayed his hand tonight,” Santorum said after the debate. “I don’t think it worked for him. I think he came out way too hot.”

Just about all of the pundits and commentators on network and cable news (except Fox News Sean Hannity) were of a similar mind.

Tony

Elon Musk Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Does Not Need to Hate Us To Destroy Us!

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times had a podcast with Elon Musk.  He talks about electric cars, space travel, neural links and more.  One of his most provocative comments concerned artificial intelligence. Here is the exchange between Musk and Kara Swisher the hostess for the podcast.

Kara Swicher:

“So many years ago when we met you said A.I. would treat us like house cats. That they’re too smart to hate us. And you said, we’ll be like house cats. That’s how they think of us. And then later, when I met with you at your office, you switched it to anthills, which was your analogy that when you see an anthill you don’t kick it over unless you’re kind of a jerk. But when you’re making a highway you just roll over it. Can you give a metaphor of where we are with A.I. right now?

Elon Musk:

“I was just pointing out with the anthill analogy that A.I. does not need to hate us to destroy us. In a sense, that if it decides that it needs to go in a particular direction and we’re in the way then it would without no hard feelings it would just roll over us. We would roll over an anthill that’s in the way of a road. You don’t hate ants. You’re just building a road. It’s a risk not a prediction. So, yeah. I think that we really need to think of intelligence as really not being uniquely confined to humans. And that the potential for intelligence in computers is far greater than in biology.

Musk’s last sentence is most telling that the potential for intelligence in computers is far greater than biology. He foresees the world of tomorrow as well as anybody, but as with any speculation about the future, it is rarely the whether but the when!

Tony

 

More than 50 Doctoral Programs Suspend Admissions for at Least a Year!!

Dear Colleagues,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that more than 50 doctoral programs in the humanities and social sciences won’t be admitting new students in the fall of 2021 — a response to the pandemic and ensuing economic turmoil.  It’s a sort of financial triage to help the programs devote funding to their current students, many of whom will be delayed in completing their degrees because of the disruptions. Suspending admissions for a year, some administrators say, will also allow them to reimagine their doctoral curricula to account for the flagging Ph.D. job market.

We needed to take a bold and aggressive action to make sure that we could support our students that we already had matriculated.

Princeton University’s sociology department was among the first to announce its decision, in mid-May, and other programs followed throughout the summer. More dominoes fell this month — and entire graduate divisions opted for universal pauses — as the University of Pennsylvania decided to suspend all school-funded admissions in its School of Arts and Sciences, and most programs in Columbia University’s social-sciences and humanities departments said they’d do the same. Nearly all cited the desire to support existing students.

That decision was a unanimous one for faculty members in Princeton’s sociology department, Dalton Conley, the director of graduate studies, said in May. Not only were many of the department’s students forced to halt in-person research — like ethnographic interviewing — or book a hasty return to the United States from their field-work sites as borders closed, but some, as parents, also confronted immediate child-care needs.

“We did a lot of careful analysis, as a social-science department, about the systemwide effects going forward and came to the conclusion that regular studies might be disrupted for quite some time,” Conley told The Chronicle. “We needed to take a bold and aggressive action to make sure that we could support our students that we already had matriculated.”

The department considered several models for doing so, including admitting fewer students over several years. In the end, Conley said, “we wanted to have a situation where we weren’t continually kind of having to go in and tinker here and there and cancel some admission slots, revisit the question, cancel additional slots. We wanted to have some buffer.” Taking a “one-time hit” and suspending admissions for a year, Conley and his colleagues decided, made it less likely that they’d have to revise enrollment numbers in the future.

I think that this is wise decision on the part of these programs. There is a definite need to think through how they should evolve in a post-pandemic world.

Below is a sample of programs that have been suspended.

Tony

——————————————————————–

Institution School/Department
Brown University Africana Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, History, Political Science, Sociology
Columbia University Anthropology, History, Political Science, Sociology, East Asian Languages and Cultures, English and Comparative Literature, French, Germanic Languages and Literature, Italian, Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, Music, Philosophy, Religion, Slavic Languages and Literature, Classics, Classical Studies, Theatre, Mathematics, Statistics
Cornell University History
Harvard University Graduate School of Education
New York University Anthropology, Comparative Literature, English, French, History, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Spanish and Portugese Language and Literature
Princeton University Sociology
Rice University School of Humanities: Art History, English, History, Philosophy, Religion
University of California at Berkeley Anthropology, Art History, Sociology
University of California at Santa Barbara Sociology
University of Chicago Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, Linguistics, Music, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Philosophy, Romance Languages and Literatures
University of Massachusetts at Amherst Sociology
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill History
University of Pennsylvania School-funded admissions in most programs in the School of Arts and Sciences
University of Pittsburgh Anthropology, Communication, Classics, Critical European Culture Studies, English, Film and Media Studies, French, Hispanic Languages and Literatures, History, History of Art and Architecture, Linguistics, Music, Political Science, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Sociology, Theatre Arts
Yale University American Studies, Art History, Slavic Languages and Literature

Dr. Anthony Fauci Calls Out Fox News and Dr. Scott Atlas for Misleading Reports About Coronavirus!


Dear Commons Community,

On the day that the coronavirus claimed one million deaths worldwide, Dr. Anthony Fauci yesterday singled out Fox News for what he called its sometimes “outlandish” reporting on COVID-19 at a time when the public needs vital facts about the pandemic.

The nation’s top infectious disease expert was interviewed by CNN’s Brian Stelter. In highlights from the conversation aired on “The Situation Room,” Fauci spoke of misinformation in the media and also discussed concerns relating to President Donald Trump’s controversial new coronavirus task force adviser, Dr. Scott Atlas.

“The bad guy is the virus. The bad guy is not the person on the other side of your opinion,” Fauci said.

“There is so much misinformation during this very divisive time that we’re in, and the public really needs to know the facts,” he added. “Some of the media that I deal with really kind of, I wouldn’t say distort things, but certainly give opposing perspectives on what seems to be a pretty obvious fact.”

“If you listen to Fox News, with all due respect to the fact that they do have some good reporters, some of the things that they report there are outlandish, to be honest with you.”

Fauci also expressed unease when asked if he believes Dr. Atlas is providing inaccurate information to the president. Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no background in infectious diseases, has shared information about the virus that has been rebuked by scores of experts in the medical community.

“I’m concerned that sometimes things are said that are really taken either out of context or are actually incorrect,” Fauci said.

He said most members of the White House coronavirus task force were working together, however, referenced Atlas as an “outlier.”

“My difference is with Dr. Atlas. I’m always willing to sit down and talk with him and see if we could resolve those differences,” he said.

Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also expressed concerns about Atlas sharing falsehoods during a phone call overheard by an NBC News reporter. “Everything he says is false,” Redfield said. He later confirmed that he was speaking about Atlas.

Atlas has taken on a leading role in the task force since joining in August. He has made regular appearances on Fox News and embraced a number of outlying views throughout the pandemic, including questioning the use of masks and embracing the controversial “herd immunity” strategy.

His former colleagues at Stanford medical school, where he was a professor, published an open letter warning that “many of his opinions and statements run counter to established science” and undermine public health authorities. He is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution.

When it comes to coronavirus, always listen to Dr. Fauci and be doubly cautious about anything that comes out of the Hoover Institution.

Tony

Former RNC Spokesperson Tim Miller: Trump Played “Populist Fraud” on His Supporters!

Tim Miller, Author at The Bulwark

Tim Miller

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump was a populist fraud wrote the former Republican National Committee (RNC) spokesman, Tim Miller. But his new tax law became a “boon to the wealthy.”

Self-proclaimed billionaire Donald Trump’s astonishingly low federal income tax payments shut down his “economic populism con” that faked out the “rubes” who supported him, declared the former spokesperson for the RNC.

“While he was living a life of luxury that most Americans can only dream of, he was racked with massive debts and paying no income tax thanks to business write-offs on flamboyant haircuts, consulting fees paid to his daughter, and a summer retreat where his large adult sons liked to ride ATVs and laugh at the poor suckers who had to mow the lawn,” Tim Miller, deputy communications director for the RNC in 2012 and 2013, wrote Monday on the conservative news website The Bulwark.

Miller was reacting to a New York Times report on Sunday that said Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and again in 2017. In 10 of the previous 15 years, he paid none at all, according to the Times, which analyzed several years of Trump’s tax returns.

“Trump was not the brilliant businessman skilled at tax write-offs that we had been promised. He was a fraud who was paying nothing at all. Literally,” Miller noted.

Yet, during his last campaign, Trump purported to be a champion of Middle America and vowed to raise taxes on the wealthy because the “middle class is getting clobbered.” Trump said he “wouldn’t mind paying” more taxes, which no one realized at the time would have been right next to nothing.

But there “was no economic populist agenda” after he was elected, Miller pointed out. 

Instead, the tax bill Trump signed into law was a “boon to the wealthy” while he “billed the American people for millions upon millions of their hard-earned tax dollars” for golf holidays at his own resorts, Miller said.

Trump’s campaign promises were nothing more than “a story for the rubes,” added Miller, who is currently the political director of Republican Voters Against Trump.

The only “populist” action of the Trump era has been unleashing “cultural grievance” — using his bully pulpit to take down those “uppity athletes … shutting the door on new immigrants and refugees” and using “racial slurs without getting ‘canceled,’” he wrote.

Miller concluded: It’s the “same old racist, nativist nonsense wrapped in a phony soak-the-rich package.”

Let’s hope all those gullible Trump supporters realize what a fraud he is come the election in November.

Tony

Trump Needs to Win Re-Election to Stay Out of Jail!

Adam Schiff: Trump faces real prospect of jail time

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post has an article this morning entitled, Trump Needs To Win The Election To Keep His ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ Card.  It speculates how Donald Trump’s tax returns highlight just how much he needs to stay in office to avoid possible prosecution and mountains of debt.

The New York Timesdetailing of two decades of President Donald Trump’s federal tax returns Sunday didn’t just expose how little Trump has paid in taxes. It also further exposed Trump’s personal stakes in November’s election, making it even clearer that the president sees a second term as a way to avoid potential prosecution and the burden of the mountainous debts he has amassed.

Trump’s tax returns and his refusal to release them have been the subject of political scrutiny since he decided to run for president in 2015. But they have caused him legal and financial problems for even longer: For the last decade, he has faced an Internal Revenue Service audit over a $72.9 million tax refund he claimed in 2010. 

The Times report raises questions about whether Trump violated federal law in evading taxes and offers a lens into why Trump has fought so hard to shield the returns from public view, legal and ethics experts said.

“Donald Trump’s financial records are the Rosetta Stone for understanding the depth of his corruption and crimes,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal attorney, said in a Monday interview with Yahoo News. “The more it is unraveled, the more he will unravel. It’s the reason he’s fought so hard to keep it under wraps.”

The Times report also raised the possibility that the IRS audit has been “paused” because Trump is president, suggesting that this case may not be resolved until his time in office concludes. 

The IRS did not respond to requests for comment about whether the audit had been temporarily halted. And there is no evidence that the president himself played any role in slowing it down if it indeed was put on pause. (Trump’s own appointee to head the IRS has disputed the assertion that he cannot release tax records because of the audit.) 

That it may have been paused, however, points to one of the clearest trends of the Trump presidency: his efforts to use his presidency to avoid legal scrutiny and prop himself up financially, as if his residence in the White House is his own personal “get out of jail free” card.

Citing legal opinions from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, Trump and his lawyers have repeatedly asserted that he cannot be prosecuted while he serves as president, a claim they argue shields him from scrutiny in federal, state and even civil litigation. In turn, he has so far escaped consequences for accusations of sexual assault, alleged defamation and questions about his finances.  

All of this gives the president tremendous incentive to remain in office.

The details of the returns the Times published Sunday are “consistent with what we’ve seen throughout the Trump presidency, which is that the president has taken every step possible to bend or break the law to serve his personal and financial interests,” said Donald Sherman, the deputy director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group.

“I think it confirms that he will likely continue to use the government, the tools of the government and his status as president to shield him from legal scrutiny,” he added.

Trump’s attorneys have routinely deployed that defense in cases involving the president’s tax returns, particularly in New York, where Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance has sought records similar to those the Times revealed on Sunday. 

Legal experts regard Trump’s defense as dubious, and in July, the Supreme Court twice rejected arguments that he was immune from congressional and legal subpoenas for financial records that could have forced him to release tax returns that may have revealed evidence of tax evasion and other illegal behavior.

Still, the court’s ruling made it unlikely that the documents would be turned over before the election. Vance’s subpoena, which requests eight years of Trump’s tax records, is still pending, thanks to an appeal from Trump. The ruling also forced congressional Democrats to return to lower courts to argue that their efforts to subpoena Trump’s tax returns met the legal test Chief Justice John Roberts outlined in the case.

Trump and his lawyers have deployed the immunity defense, too, in multiple defamation cases involving sexual assault allegations against the president: In May, the president’s attorneys argued that Summer Zervos, a woman who accused Trump of groping and kissing her, could not proceed with a defamation suit against the president because he is immune from prosecution while in office. 

And in September, Attorney General William Barr sought to intervene to protect Trump from a defamation suit brought by author E. Jean Carroll, who accused the president of raping her in the 1990s. The Justice Department argued it could do so because Trump was “acting within the scope” of the presidency when he called Carroll a liar ― the claim that prompted the defamation suit. The contention that Trump was acting in an official capacity may grant him immunity from a defamation claim.

The Supreme Court’s rejection of the argument that Trump is immune from investigative scrutiny simply because he is president was a setback for his legal team, said Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who served as the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. 

But “because he controls the executive branch, he can use Bill Barr and the attorney general’s office to try to make sure that the federal government is not investigating, and he’s doing that,” Painter said. “As long as he’s in the presidency, he can ― I believe illegally ― keep the federal government from investigating him and his businesses by abusing his power and hoping the courts will back him up.”

Trump’s position also provides him with another entity to protect himself from scrutiny: his campaign arm. He has spent donations to his official campaign committee and the Republican National Committee on legal fees for himself, his adult children and his staff, as detailed by The New York Times

Campaign funds helped pay for lawyers for Trump family members and close associates when special counsel Robert Mueller’s grand jury summoned them for questioning in the Russia investigation. The campaign also paid the legal team that represented Trump during his impeachment trial in the Senate. Donor money has also paid lawyers to countersue former employees like Sam Nunberg, Cliff Sims, Omarosa Manigault Newman and Jessica Denson for allegedly breaching nondisclosure agreements.

Manigault Newman alleged in a 2018 tell-all book that the Trump campaign and RNC also paid former Trump associates to sign NDAs. She provided evidence that Lara Trump offered her $15,000 a month to work for the reelection campaign in exchange for signing an NDA covering her time in the White House. Other former Trump associates and family members paid by the campaign include Trump’s former bodyguard Keith Schiller, who has been paid $500,000 for unspecified consulting work

All of these payments help Trump by keeping him and his family from spending their own money on the legal expenses while silencing critics, both real and potential.

The Times report also revealed that Trump has amassed as much as $300 million in debt that is scheduled to come due over the next four years, suggesting that the president may struggle to meet his financial burdens in the near future unless he can remain in the White House. 

The tax returns obtained by the Times do not specify to whom Trump owes the money. But foreign creditors, in particular, are unlikely to call on a U.S. president who wields significant influence to repay loans immediately. Although Trump lists his creditors on required financial disclosures ― including Deutsche Bank, the large German financial institution ― that doesn’t tell the full story, Painter said: Trump’s debt raises significant concerns about whom he owes money to and what leverage they may have over the president. 

“He’s in a very precarious financial situation,” Painter said. “And we don’t know who the creditors really are. Because if Deutsche Bank makes a loan, you have no idea whether Deutsche Bank has the risk attached to that loan, or whether somebody else has made a commitment to Deutsche Bank to take on a piece of that, or all of it.”

That poses national security and other risks to the United States and also highlights the legal and financial uncertainty Trump and his web of businesses may face if he loses in November.

“When he’s not president anymore, we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Painter said. “And neither does he, so he wants to stay in order to continue to prop those businesses up. The minute he’s out, I think the loans could get called. And there could be a lot of investigations.”

The country needs Joe Biden to win!

Tony

Trump Bars Federal Grants for ‘Divisive and Harmful’ Racial-Sensitivity Training on College Campuses!

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague, David Podell, the President of Massachusetts Bay Community College, alerted me to President Trump’s banning of training programs including those on college campuses that he says promote racial or sexual “stereotyping” and “scapegoating.”

In a Twitter post on Tuesday, Trump said the ban, originally aimed at programs for government employees, was being extended to federal grantees and government contractors.

“Americans should be taught to take PRIDE in our Great Country, and if you don’t, there’s nothing in it for you!” he tweeted.

Diversity leaders say the executive order could have a chilling effect on efforts to improve campus racial climates.

In the executive order, Trump wrote that contracts can be refused or canceled if they don’t include an assurance that the recipients will avoid “workplace training that inculcates in its employees any form of race or sex stereotyping or any form of race or sex scapegoating.”

Experts interviewed by The Chronicle of Higher Education  said it was not clear whether colleges that received federal grants would have to halt programs that violate the executive order’s provisions or whether they would just be prohibited from using federal grants to pay for them.

The order states that “instructors and materials teaching that men and members of certain races, as well as our most venerable institutions, are inherently sexist and racist are appearing in workplace diversity trainings across the country, even in components of the federal government and among federal contractors.”

To obtain federal grants, recipients will have to state that they won’t use federal money to promote, among other things, ideas that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another,” that anyone “by virtue of his or her race or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive,” or that anyone “should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

The executive order singles out higher education for programs that Trump finds objectionable. “Such ideas may be fashionable in the academy, but they have no place in programs and activities supported by federal taxpayer dollars,” it states. It goes on to contend that “research also suggests that blame-focused diversity training reinforces biases and decreases opportunities for minorities.”

Trump told agencies that dole out grants to identify which recipients violate the order, and directed the Department of Labor to set up a hotline to monitor complaints about such trainings.

As reported by The Chronicle, Shaun R. Harper, a professor of education and business at the University of Southern California, accused Trump of trying to create a distraction from the 200,000 lives he said had been lost due to the president’s mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis. Trump, he said, is also “firing up a base and further dividing the nation along racial and ideological lines.”

Harper, who founded and runs the USC Race and Equity Center, said he had no plans to change what his center does, but others might react differently.

“I’m afraid that institutional leaders and policy makers who didn’t want to do this stuff in the beginning — they were pushed and pressured by activists — will take an extremist view” in interpreting their training programs and assume they won’t pass federal muster, he said.

None of the programs Harper is aware of are “blame focused” or engage in stereotyping, he said. “I am pretty sure the Trump administration has no real idea of what actually happens in most of these programs. It’s reckless to engage in policy making without knowing what their substance and goal might be.”

Earlier this month, Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, notified federal agencies that Trump had learned that millions of taxpayer dollars had been spent “‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda.” He directed all government agencies to ferret out and cancel contracts related to training on “critical race theory” and “white privilege.”

The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, which represents 1,100 members at 750 colleges and universities, released a statement this month decrying that ban. “At this time of racial reckoning with our past, the president deepens the divide and eliminates any possibility that individuals within the federal government can learn the consequences of racism and its deadly effects,” the group wrote. “Worse yet, it is a signal to our citizens and the world that racism does not exist and never existed. Eliminating these critical conversations on race is an erasure of history at a time when we need this understanding more than ever to transform our society into a just one.”

Eliminating these critical conversations on race is an erasure of history at a time when we need this understanding more than ever.

In an interview on Thursday the association’s president, Paulette Granberry Russell, said the vast majority of diversity officers would probably conclude that their programs didn’t violate any of the provisions about stereotyping or scapegoating that the order outlines. Therefore, she said, “it would be difficult to conclude that we should stop our workshops or training.”

She still worries, though, that the order could have a chilling effect on colleges’ diversity training since it will be subject to interpretation by federal agencies that dole out grants.

In an interview with The Chronicle, two top diversity officers said recently that their work had never been more important or exhausting, given the national reckoning on race.

Tuesday’s executive order invoked the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the words of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. to argue that instead of treating everyone as equals, supporters of diversity training are pushing an ideology that says “that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.”

The Association of American Medical Colleges also weighed in on Thursday, saying it was “concerned and alarmed” by the executive order. “While the executive order contains some elements that are universally agreed upon and with which we agree, it also exhibits a misunderstanding of most diversity- and inclusion-training programs and therefore will only further divide an already fragmented nation,” the group said.

The health-care disparities exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and protests against police brutality have demonstrated that the country hasn’t always lived up to its ideals of racial equity, the association said. “Only through better understanding of our conscious and unconscious biases, learning about other cultures in our pluralistic society, reaffirming our commitment to being anti-racist, and challenging long-held beliefs — that we hold ourselves and that we hold about others — will we heal the divisions now shaking our nation to its core.”

Trump is not interested in healing only destroying.

Tony

Remembering Leona Helmsley (The Queen of Mean) “Only the little people pay taxes” – We have Donald Trump (The Don of Con)!

Trump's big government will stick 'the little people' with a huge tax bill - MarketWatch

Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times expose that Donald Trump has avoided paying any federal income tax in 11 of the past 20 years reminds me of another New York real estate magnate, Leona Helmsley whose nickname, “the Queen of Mean” was a reference to her famous quote “only the little people pay taxes.”  In case you are too young to remember her, here is a quick bio.

Leona Helmsley, the “Queen of Mean” whose legendary cruelty towards her employees and disdain for “little people” was  the unacceptable face of New York high society in the 1980s.

Her summer house, Dunnellen Hall, in Connecticut, played a central role in her very public downfall in 1989 when she was found guilty of tax evasion and forced to serve 18 months in jail.

It was a housekeeper at the hall who revealed in the course of the trial the phrase that was to hang over the hotel magnate for the rest of her life: “We don’t pay taxes,” the housekeeper said her employer once told her. “Only the little people pay taxes.”

How Helmsley, alongside her husband, Harry, came to form an empire worth billions – including the Empire State Building, the Park Lane Hotel and a 100-seat private jet with bedroom attached – only to be brought as low as a New York prison cell ranks alongside that of Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko as one of the defining stories of the money-making 80s.

One moment she was being lauded in glossy magazines and New York salons as an unparalleled businesswoman, philanthropist and hostess of exotic Manhattan parties; the next people were lining up to lament her excesses.

Ed Koch, the city’s then mayor, called her the Wicked Witch of the West. A later mayor rose to prominence as one of her prosecutors: Rudy Giuliani. Her own lawyer, defending her during the 1989 trial portrayed her to the jury as a “tough bitch” and when the judge came to hand out sentence he said her conduct had been the “product of naked greed. You persisted in the arrogant belief that you were above the law.”

She earned the hostility of contractors she brought in to work on the $3m refurbishment of Dunnellen Hall that the couple bought in 1983. She refused to pay several, including one builder from whom she withheld $88,000 in fees on the grounds that he owed her $800,000 in “commissions” for work he had carried out on Helmsley hotels.

Several contractors are reputed to have begun the process that would end with Helmsley in jail by sending the New York Post details of how she used them to pass off the refurbishment of her private dwelling as tax-exempt business costs.

Her treatment of individual employees also cost her dear, as formerly terrified men and women queued up around the courthouse to testify against her. The jury heard how employees set up an alarm system that rang whenever she had left her home and was heading for one of her hotels.

Where Leona was “the queen of mean”  – let’s dub Trump the “don of con.” 

Tony

New York Times Discloses Trump Tax Return Information for Past Two Decades – He Paid No Taxes in 11 of 18 Years!

House Committee Sends New Letter to IRS Demanding Trump's Tax Returns |  wnep.com

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has obtained tax-return data for President Trump and his companies that covers more than two decades. Mr. Trump has long refused to release this information, making him the first president in decades to hide basic details about his finances. His refusal has made his tax returns among the most sought-after documents in recent memory.

Among the key findings of The Times’s investigation:

  • Mr. Trump paid no federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years that The Times examined. In 2017, after he became president, his tax bill was only $750.
  • He has reduced his tax bill with questionable measures, including a $72.9 million tax refund that is the subject of an audit by the Internal Revenue Service.
  • Many of his signature businesses, including his golf courses, report losing large amounts of money — losses that have helped him to lower his taxes.
  • The financial pressure on him is increasing as hundreds of millions of dollars in loans he personally guaranteed are soon coming due.
  • Even while declaring losses, he has managed to enjoy a lavish lifestyle by taking tax deductions on what most people would consider personal expenses, including residences, aircraft and $70,000 in hairstyling for television.
  • Ivanka Trump, while working as an employee of the Trump Organization, appears to have received “consulting fees” that also helped reduce the family’s tax bill.
  • As president, he has received more money from foreign sources and U.S. interest groups than previously known. The records do not reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.

It is important to remember that the returns are not an unvarnished look at Mr. Trump’s business activity. They are instead his own portrayal of his companies, compiled for the I.R.S. But they do offer the most detailed picture yet available.

Trump’s income tax information will be as important an issue as the coronavirus pandemic and Supreme Court nominee Amy Comey Barrett going into the presidential election.

Tony

 

Richard A. Friedman Has Advice for Joe Biden on “How to Debate Someone Who Lies?”

Presidential debate: Trump and Biden prepare to face each other in first  match up - CNNPolitics

Dear Commons Community,

Many Americans will be watching the first debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on Tuesday night.  A major challenge for Biden is how to debate someone who habitually lies.  Richard A. Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College, has advice for Biden in an article in the New York Times.

The main takeaways from Friedman are:

  • Don’t waste your time fact-checking the president. If you attempt to counter every falsehood or distortion that Mr. Trump serves up, you will cede control of the debate. And, by trying to correct him, you will paradoxically strengthen the misinformation rather than undermine it. (Research shows that trying to correct a falsehood with truth can backfire by reinforcing the original lie. ) Instead, Mr. Biden should use more powerful weapons that will put Mr. Trump on the defensive — and also tell the audience that the president is a dishonest narrator.
  • The first weapon maybe the most effective: humor and ridicule. A derisive joke can defuse tense and outrageous situations. In 2007, for example, protesters dressed as clowns confronted a “white power” march in Charlotte, N.C., holding signs that read “wife power” and throwing white flour in the air. It made the white nationalists look ridiculous and avoided a violent confrontation, which would have served the interests of the racists.
  • To see why humor could be so effective in dealing with Mr. Trump, you have to understand why he lies. People don’t tell the truth for many reasons, but the president’s lies generally fall into two categories. The first are boastful and self-aggrandizing claims, such as “Only I can fix it. ” This swagger betrays a fragile self-esteem, and while outlandish and amusing, the lies are typically harmless. The second type of lie aims to deceive others in pursuit of a specific goal. For example, we now know, from a taped interview with Bob Woodward, that Mr. Trump knew in February that the coronavirus was deadly and transmissible by air, but he lied to the public, playing down its severity and discouraging the use of masks — a calculated deception that cost untold lives. This kind of lie is emblematic of individuals with antisocial traits who have a deficit in moral conscience. But if they also have strong narcissistic traits, they are exquisitely sensitive to criticism and especially to ridicule. Derisive humor threatens to expose them for the loser they secretly believe they are.

The entire article is below.  It is good advice!

Tony


New York Times

How to Debate Someone Who Lies?

By Richard A. Friedman

Sept. 25, 2020

When Joe Biden debates President Trump on Tuesday, he will have to figure out how to parry with an opponent who habitually lies and doesn’t play by the rules.

As a psychiatrist, I’d like to offer Mr. Biden some advice: Don’t waste your time fact-checking the president. If you attempt to counter every falsehood or distortion that Mr. Trump serves up, you will cede control of the debate. And, by trying to correct him, you will paradoxically strengthen the misinformation rather than undermine it. (Research shows that trying to correct a falsehood with truth can backfire by reinforcing the original lie. )

Instead, Mr. Biden should use more powerful weapons that will put Mr. Trump on the defensive — and also tell the audience that the president is a dishonest narrator.

The first weapon maybe the most effective: humor and ridicule. A derisive joke can defuse tense and outrageous situations. In 2007, for example, protesters dressed as clowns confronted a “white power” march in Charlotte, N.C., holding signs that read “wife power” and throwing white flour in the air. It made the white nationalists look ridiculous and avoided a violent confrontation, which would have served the interests of the racists.

Now, imagine a different kind of high-stakes situation — the presidential debate. Mr. Trump, faced with a pandemic and an economic downturn, tells Americans what a great job he’s done. In response, Mr. Biden should smile and say with a bit of laugh: “And just where have you been living? South Korea? Or Fiji? You cannot be in the United States — except maybe on the golf course. We’ve got about 4 percent of the world’s population and 21 percent of all Covid deaths and the highest unemployment since the Great Depression! You must be living on another planet!”

The retort mocks the president as weak and unaccomplished, which will rattle him. He is apparently so fearful of being the target of a joke that — unlike any president before him — he has skipped the last three roasts at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Ridicule could also neutralize one of Mr. Trump’s favorite racist tropes: that America is being overtaken by violent thugs. So what should Mr. Biden do when the president starts in? He should say something like, “This is like the bad joke about the arsonist who shows up at the bonfire and started posing as a fireman! The guy who calls himself a stable genius seems to have forgotten that he’s been president during all this violence and that he’s been the instigator in chief with his racist rhetoric. The country’s biggest bully thinks he can fool you by playing sheriff.”

To see why humor could be so effective in dealing with Mr. Trump, you have to understand why he lies. People don’t tell the truth for many reasons, but the president’s lies generally fall into two categories. The first are boastful and self-aggrandizing claims, such as “Only I can fix it. ” This swagger betrays a fragile self-esteem, and while outlandish and amusing, the lies are typically harmless.

The second type of lie aims to deceive others in pursuit of a specific goal. For example, we now know, from a taped interview with Bob Woodward, that Mr. Trump knew in February that the coronavirus was deadly and transmissible by air, but he lied to the public, playing down its severity and discouraging the use of masks — a calculated deception that cost untold lives.

This kind of lie is emblematic of individuals with antisocial traits who have a deficit in moral conscience. But if they also have strong narcissistic traits, they are exquisitely sensitive to criticism and especially to ridicule. Derisive humor threatens to expose them for the loser they secretly believe they are.

Some of the president’s lies are not served by humor; Mr. Biden will have to confront them head-on, like the president’s disastrous handling of the pandemic. In this case, the best strategy would be to say: “The fact is that more than 200,000 American have died — even if the president falsely suggests that the number is lower. But let’s focus on the grim truth: More than 200,000 of our loved ones died from coronavirus, many because of the president’s deception.”

The cognitive scientist George Lakoff, who studies propaganda, calls this a “truth sandwich” — a lie gets sandwiched between true statements. Research shows it effectively corrects a falsehood, because people tend to remember the beginning and end of a statement, rather than what’s in the middle.

Mr. Trump’s resistance to masks is also a target for a derisive truth sandwich: “Wearing a mask is one of the most effective ways to prevent the spread of coronavirus. But you sure wouldn’t know it from the president, who has run around in public without one and mocks people like me who wear them. Is it vanity or that he just doesn’t believe in science? I don’t know, but the science is undisputed: wearing masks saves lives.”

Mr. Biden will have another advantage during the debate: President Trump will not have a live audience to excite him and satisfy his insatiable need for approval and attention, which means he will be even more vulnerable to a takedown. True, no one will be there to laugh at Mr. Biden’s jokes, but it doesn’t matter because the goal is serious: to expose the truth and unnerve Mr. Trump by getting under his skin.