Firefighters Battle Blaze Caused by R.V. Explosion

Dear Commons Community,

An explosion shattered the Christmas morning in the heart of downtown tourist district of Nashville.  While several people were injured, it was not known whether or not there were fatalities.  As reported by the New York Times.

“Before dawn on Friday, Nashville police officers rushed to calls of gunfire on Second Avenue, a strip of honky tonks, restaurants and boot shops. Instead of gunfire, they found an R.V., blaring a strange and unsettling message: There was a bomb. It would detonate in 15 minutes.

When the R.V. did explode, it sent plumes of smoke billowing above the city, blew out windows in shops and offices for several blocks, left three people hospitalized — and Nashville shaken.

Police said the explosion was deliberate. It was also deeply unsettling, coming in an area that draws thousands of people nightly. But who set it off and why remained unknown as officials began to make sense of the blast.

“The whole neighborhood shook,” said Lily Hansen, who was sitting on her couch in her second-floor apartment in a loft building a few blocks away. She looked outside. “I just can’t get the image out of my head.”

The police released a photo (see below) of the R.V. on Friday afternoon and said the vehicle had arrived on Second Avenue North at 1:22 a.m. The R.V. was parked outside an AT&T transmission building, a separate building from the landmark 33 story AT&T office tower less than half a mile away.

It is still unclear if a person was inside the R.V. when it exploded, officials said. In a news conference on Friday evening, police officials said there were no indications of fatalities, but possible human tissue had been found amid the debris.

Gas lines were shut off in the area, and AT&T experienced outages, which forced the Federal Aviation Administration to temporarily halt flights out of the Nashville International Airport.

Mayor John Cooper said he saw extensive damage when he surveyed the area, including shattered windows and glass that had showered onto sidewalks, charred trees and water main breaks. At least 41 businesses have been materially damaged by the explosion, he said. Fire officials added that one building across from the explosion collapsed.

Still, he acknowledged a measure of relief: Had the explosion taken place on a workday, he said, the outcome could have been far more perilous. But, he added later in the day, that solace had shifted to resolve to find the perpetrators and rebuild.

“This morning’s attack on our community was intended to create chaos and fear in this season of peace and hope,” Mr. Cooper said.”

Still the motivation behind this explosion seems strange.

Tony

Photo of the R.V. that Caused the Explosion in Nashville

Martin Henry Freeman  on the Rutland Sculpture Trail

Dear Commons Community,

A sculpture of Martin Henry Freeman, the first Black American College president, was put on display in his home city of Rutland, Vermont, where he was born in 1826. Freeman graduated from Middlebury College in 1849, and became president of Allegheny Institute in 1856, which later became Avery College, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The larger-than-life marble bust of Martin Henry Freeman sits on a stack of books in a downtown square as part of the Rutland Sculpture Trail.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“It’s a very soft, gentle portrayal of Martin Freeman,” said Al Wakefield, one of the sponsors of the piece. “I don’t know how many people remember either through historical writings what kind of person he was, but he’s depicted as a very gentle, kind, literary, artsy kind of a guy.”

It’s the eighth sculpture to be added to the city’s sculpture trail aimed at celebrating local history and drawing more people to visit the working-class community. Among the pieces is a marble relief honoring the Vermont volunteers who served in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, made up of African Americans soldiers, during the Civil War.

In 1856, Freeman became president of the all-Black Allegheny Institute and Mission Church in the Pittsburgh area, later named Avery College. He attended Middlebury College in Vermont, graduating at the top of his class in 1849. Freeman’s father fought in the American Revolution, one way for enslaved men to win their freedom.

The sculptures of Freeman and the Black Civil War soldiers were recently added to the Vermont African American Heritage Trail, a guide to various spots around the state that highlights the lives of African Americans in Vermont.

From the start, organizers of the sculpture trail wanted to be inclusive of all kinds of history, events and people, said Steve Costello, who came up with the idea for the trail.

“The country is full of sculptures planned without much consideration of the contributions of women or minorities, so we developed a broad list of ideas, which included Freeman from the get-go,” he said by email.

…

The Freeman sculpture, designed by Mark Burnett, who is Black, and carved by Don Ramey, was installed at a time when some cities are reconsidering and even removing sculptures or monuments related to the Confederacy or to other historical figures, such as Columbus.

Freeman’s academic success took hold at Middlebury College, where he was the only Black student in a state that was the first to abolish adult slavery in 1777. Abolitionists in town had urged Middlebury to enroll Black students as a demonstration that the school really stood against slavery, said William Hart, an emeritus professor of history of Black studies at Middlebury College.

Freeman went on to teach mathematics and natural philosophy at Allegheny Institute and Mission Church in the Pittsburgh area, where be became president in 1856. He supported the colonization of Liberia for Black Americans and abruptly resigned in 1863 with a plan to teach at Liberia College.

He went to Liberia, as he often said, to be a man, which he felt he could not be in the United States, Hart said. It was an act of self-determination, he said. But unlike Freeman, many of the Black Americans who went to Liberia were biracial, the sons and daughters of former enslavers, Hart said. Being dark-skinned, Freeman felt discrimination there, too.

He taught at Liberia College and subsequently also became its president. He died in Monrovia in 1889.

“I think that what is important for Vermonters to know is that there has always been a place for persons of African descent in the state of Vermont,” said Curtiss Reed, executive director of the Vermont Partnership for Fairness & Diversity. He would like to see more public works of art like the sculpture of Freeman.

“There are those who would say that we can deny the existence of folks of color as well as their contributions, whether as pastors, or as legislators, or as business people, as abolitionists, as veterans,” he said. “There’s a lot of education to be done.”

A fine expression of respect for someone who achieved a lot at a time when it wasn’t so easy to do so for a Black-American.

Tony

Merry Christmas

Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas, the woman who was told ‘Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus’ in a photo taken in 1966, and as a child. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Dear Commons Community,

Jennifer Raab, the President of Hunter College, has a most appropriate for the season op-ed in The Daily News retelling the story of Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas, who as child wrote to the New York Sun asking about Santa Claus.  The response from Francis Pharcellus Church:  “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”  has become one of the best known sayings in newspaper history.  It is certainly one of the most cherished among those who celebrate Christmas.  It so happens that the Virginia in this case went to our own Hunter College and went on to be a teacher and junior principal in New York City schools.  Raab also comments on the importance of public education in Virginia’s case and for the present.

Below is the entire op-ed.

So yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus and he will be visiting all of us tonight!

Tony

————————————————————————————————————————–

New York Daily News

Yes, Virginia went to CUNY: From little girl letter writer to Hunter grad to lifelong teacher

By Jennifer J. Raab

Dec 23, 2020 at 5:00 AM

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” It may be the most famous sentence in the history of local journalism.

As we approach Christmas — and the traditional re-publication of the iconic 1897 New York Sun editorial featuring that classic line — it may be time to give the old phrase a new spin: Yes, Santa Claus, there was a Virginia. And she went to Hunter College.

Virginia O’Hanlon of 115 W. 95th St. was just 8 years old when she composed a letter to the editor, writing: “Some of my friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in The Sun it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?”

Yes, there is, the paper guaranteed her. “He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.”

Those in the know must have been shocked to learn that the words came from the pen of veteran journalist Francis Pharcellus Church, brother of the Sun’s editor. Known to colleagues as a hard-boiled cynic, Church had never written so sentimentally. Now he tenderly assured young Virginia: “Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders that are unseen and unseeable in the world.”

Soon enough, thanks to free public higher education, Virginia saw those wonders for herself. Many of today’s newspaper readers know about the editorial. It has been widely reprinted, in the Daily News among many other papers, each year since it first appeared. It has inspired musical pageants.

But few know what happened to Virginia — or that her path in life actually followed Church’s advice to imagine the best.

The daughter of an NYPD coroner, young Virginia soon began harboring dreams that stretched beyond St. Nick’s annual visits. She aspired to teach — and motivate — children herself. So 10 years after writing to the Sun, Virginia O’Hanlon enrolled at Hunter College, which then, as now, educated many of the teachers employed by the New York City school system. Crucially, Hunter offered higher education to women of all races and religions — a rarity at the time of the school’s 1870 founding.

Graduating in 1910, Virginia went on to earn a Master’s and Ph.D., lived through the 1918 influenza pandemic, and taught grade school for decades. Eventually, she became junior principal of PS 401 in Brooklyn, a school renowned for providing an early version of “remote learning” to chronically sick children confined to the borough’s hospitals.

In 1949, Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas returned to Hunter to address students at her alma mater (and of course, retell her Santa Claus story). She retired in 1959, and died nearly 50 years ago, in 1971.

Her life — both the storybook version and the equally uplifting reality — serves as a reminder not only of faith questioned and reignited, but of the opportunities New York public education continues to provide, even now, amid the most stressful and prolonged crisis in city history.

In fact, when CollegeNET recently released its annual Social Mobility Index rankings of America’s colleges, it did not look at all like the usual “Best Colleges” lists topped by Ivy League names. The index, which analyzes colleges’ success at graduating low-income students into well-paying jobs, was front-loaded with public universities. Hunter ranked 9th out of 1,449 schools.

More than a century after Virginia matriculated, Hunter’s student population still offers a springboard to opportunity. Hunter has already served as the launchpad for, among others, Bella Abzug, Martina Arroyo, Ruby Dee, Pauli Murray, Dr. Rosalyn Yalow — and from our high school, such luminaries as Elena Kagan and Lin-Manuel Miranda

Always, we’ve taken particular pride in students, from here and overseas, who are the first in their families to attend college.

Just look what the most recent graduating class is up to. Elliot Natanov, the son of immigrants who fled anti-Semitism in Uzbekistan, is now pursuing a career in sports medicine. Ahmet Doymaz, who immigrated from Turkey as a child, studies cancer and cell regulation. Evelyn Tawil, daughter of Syrian refugees, is pursuing a graduate degree in landscape architecture. Jennifer Dikler, whose parents fled Russia, won a coveted Luce Scholarship to study trade policy in Asia.

Among recent grads, Margarita Labkovich became a Schwartzman Fellow in 2020 and will spend a year at Beijing’s Tsinghua University before returning to medical school and resuming her career as chief operating officer of Retina Technologies (she already holds two patents). And Thamara Jean, daughter of a Haitian-born synagogue superintendent, now attends Oxford University as Hunter’s first-ever Rhodes Scholar. These remarkable young people are soaring above their circumstances, with Hunter’s full support at their backs — and no debt collectors at their front doors.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus: it’s called public education.

Dear Commons Community,

Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt have an article today in the New York Times entitled, A President Unhappy, Unleashed and Unpredictable.  The main thrust of the piece is that President Trump remains the most powerful man in the world, but powerless to achieve what he most wants: to avoid leaving office as a loser.  Yesterday, in an effort to stay relevant, he threatened to blow up the bipartisan stimulus package, he vetoed a defense bill backed by most of his party, and he granted clemency to another group of sleazeball cronies including Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and his son-in-law’s father, Charles Kushner. He is leaving office as the worst president ever in the United States and cements his reputation as a low-life little man with few redeeming qualities.

Below is the entire article by Haberman and Schmidt.

Tony

————————————-

New York Times

A President Unhappy, Unleashed and Unpredictable

By Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt

Dec. 23, 2020

With four weeks left in President Trump’s term, he is at perhaps his most unleashed — and, as events of the past few days have demonstrated, at the most unpredictable point in his presidency.

He remains the most powerful person in the world, yet he is focused on the one area in which he is powerless to get what he wants: a way to avoid leaving office as a loser.

He spends his days flailing for any hope, if not of actually reversing the outcome of the election then at least of building a coherent case that he was robbed of a second term.

When he has emerged from his relative isolation in recent days, it has been to suggest out of the blue that he would try to blow up the bipartisan stimulus package, driving a wedge through his party in the process, and to grant clemency to a raft of allies and supporters, mostly outside the normal Justice Department process. On Wednesday, he vetoed a defense bill backed by most of his party.

He has otherwise sequestered himself in the White House, playing host to a cast of conspiracy theorists and hard-core supporters who traffic in ideas like challenging the election’s outcome in Congress and even invoking martial law, seeking to give some of them government jobs.

He is almost entirely disengaged from leading the nation even as Americans are being felled by the coronavirus at record rates. Faced with an aggressive cyberassault almost surely carried out by Russia, his response, to the degree that he has had one, has been to play down the damage and to contradict his own top officials by suggesting that the culprit might actually have been China. He played almost no role in negotiating the stimulus bill that just passed Congress before working to disrupt it at the last minute.

It is not clear that Mr. Trump’s latest behavior is anything other than a temper tantrum, attention seeking or a form of therapy for the man who controls a nuclear arsenal — though one alternative, if charitable, view is that it is strategic groundwork for a grievance-filled run in 2024.

If nothing else, it will make for an especially anxious next 27 days in Washington.

This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former Trump administration officials, Republicans and allies of the president.

Most of his advisers believe Mr. Trump will depart the White House for a final time by Jan. 20. The pardons he announced Tuesday night suggest he is comfortable using his powers aggressively until then. But how far he will go to subvert the election results, actually refuse to leave the White House or to unleash a wave of unilateral policy decisions in his final weeks is hard to discern.

Still, his erratic behavior and detachment from his duties have even some of his most loyal aides and advisers deeply concerned.

For the moment, Mr. Trump has told advisers he is willing to stop listening to Sidney Powell, the lawyer who has appealed to him by peddling a conspiracy theory about the election, and people like Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com, who was present for a wild, nearly five-hour meeting in the Oval Office and then the presidential residence last Friday.

But current advisers have described a daily struggle to keep Mr. Trump from giving in to his impulse to listen to those who are telling him what he wants to hear. And former advisers say the most worrisome issue is the gradual disappearance of the core group of West Wing aides who, often working in unison, consistently could get him to turn away from risky, legally dubious and dangerous ideas.

“The number of people who are telling him things he doesn’t want to hear has diminished,” said his former national security adviser John R. Bolton, who had a very public parting of ways with Mr. Trump and who has been vocal in objecting to the president’s thrashing against his electoral loss.

On Politics with Lisa Lerer: A guiding hand through the political news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.

Mr. Trump has turned to aides like Peter Navarro, a trade adviser who has been trying to gather evidence of election fraud to bolster his boss’s claims. And he is listening to Republicans who insist that Vice President Mike Pence could help sway the election during the normally routine process of ratifying the election early next month, despite the fact that it is not realistically possible.

Among Republicans on Capitol Hill, there is talk of clamping down on any of his supporters who might try to disrupt that process, a possibility made real by the president’s importuning of Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville of Alabama to gum up the works.

Yet it is not certain that Mr. Tuberville will carry through the president’s desires, and even he if does, there is the possibility that Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, could step in to prevent such a move. Mr. McConnell has already urged his caucus not to raise objections when the results are certified because it would force others to publicly vote against the president.

Even in the best of times, Mr. Trump has searched for — and required — reinforcements from people outside the White House in support of whatever his aides will go along with.

But in the White House, the president is turning on his closest of allies. He has complained to allies that Mr. Pence, who has been mocked for unflinching loyalty over the past four years, should be doing more to defend him. And he is angry that Mr. McConnell has recognized President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the winner of the election.

This week, Mr. Trump had an assistant send a chart featuring the timing of his endorsement of Mr. McConnell overlaid on polling data to claim he was responsible for Mr. McConnell winning re-election this year — a claim political professionals would dispute — and to suggest the majority leader was ungrateful for his help.

And on Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump tweeted a broadside against Senate leadership by attacking Mr. McConnell and the majority whip, Senator John Thune of South Dakota, who had said any challenge to ratification of the election results would go down like a “shot dog.”

At the Justice Department, Attorney General William P. Barr’s public and emphatic rejection on Monday of the need for special counsels to investigate election fraud and Hunter Biden, President-elect Biden’s son, appeared intended in part to insulate Mr. Barr’s short-term successor, Jeffrey A. Rosen, from any further pressure on those fronts by the president.

Privately, allies who have stood by as Mr. Trump has weeded out others through loyalty purges, and who have dismissed criticisms that the president has authoritarian tendencies, are expressing concern about the next four weeks.

Mr. Barr, whose last day in the job is Wednesday, has told associates he had been alarmed by Mr. Trump’s behavior in recent weeks. Other advisers have privately said they feel worn out and are looking forward to the end of the term.

For those who remain, the days have been bleak endeavors during which government workers are forced to spend time either executing the president’s demand that election fraud be proved, or incurring his wrath.

As Axios reported, Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel who has implored Mr. Trump to steer clear of proposed maneuvers like having federal officials seize control of voting machines to inspect them, has become a target of the president’s anger.

Mr. Trump has characterized Mr. Cipollone derisively, invoking his own mentor, the infamously ruthless and unscrupulous lawyer Roy Cohn, as what a White House counsel should aspire to be like.

The White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has objected to some of the president’s desires, like appointing Ms. Powell as special counsel examining voter fraud, but he also made a trip to Georgia on Tuesday to investigate ballot safety measures. Mr. Meadows, a former House member, has also leaned into the effort by his old colleagues to challenge the vote in Congress, something that might keep the president from engaging further with Ms. Powell, but which many Republicans consider destructive to their party.

Other advisers have simply absented themselves at a time when the president is particularly unsteady.

The president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, has been out of the country for significant amounts of time since Election Day, traveling through the Middle East for deals that burnish his own credentials. He has responded to people seeking his help with Mr. Trump by saying that the president is his children’s grandfather, implying there are limits to what he can do to help.

Mr. Trump has spent his days watching television, calling Republicans in search of advice on how to challenge the electoral outcome and urging them to defend him on television. As always, he turns to Twitter for boosts of support and to vent his anger. He has not gone golfing since the weather has turned colder, and is cloistered in the White House, shuffling from the residence to the Oval Office.

Many Trump advisers hope that his trip to his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., Mar-a-Lago, will give him a change of scenery and a change of perspective. He left on Wednesday and is scheduled to stay through the New Year holiday.

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, Donald Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of twenty individuals including convicted murders, frauds and political hacks. As reported by the Associated Press.

Trump’s actions in his final weeks in office show a president who is wielding his executive power to reward loyalists and others who he believes have been wronged by a legal system he sees as biased against him and his allies. Yesterday, Trump issued the pardons — not an unusual act for an outgoing president — even as he refused to publicly acknowledge his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, who will be sworn in on Jan. 20.

Trump is likely to issue more pardons before then. He and his allies have discussed a range of other possibilities, including members of Trump’s family and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Those pardoned on Tuesday included former Republican Reps. Duncan Hunter of California and Chris Collins of New York, two of the earliest GOP lawmakers to back Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Trump also commuted the sentences of five other people, including former Rep. Steve Stockman of Texas.

Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump to be president, was sentenced to two years and two months in federal prison after admitting he helped his son and others dodge $800,000 in stock market losses when he learned that a drug trial by a small pharmaceutical company had failed.

Hunter was sentenced to 11 months in prison after pleading guilty to stealing campaign funds and spending the money on everything from outings with friends to his daughter’s birthday party.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the pardons for Hunter and Collins were granted after “the request of many members of Congress.” She noted that Hunter served the nation in the U.S. Marines and saw combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the group announced Tuesday night were four former government contractors convicted in a 2007 massacre in Baghdad that left more a dozen Iraqi civilians dead and caused an international uproar over the use of private security guards in a war zone.

Supporters of Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard, the former contractors at Blackwater Worldwide, had lobbied for pardons, arguing that the men had been excessively punished in an investigation and prosecution they said was tainted by problems and withheld exculpatory evidence. All four were serving lengthy prison sentences.

The pardons reflected Trump’s apparent willingness to give the benefit of doubt to American servicemembers and contractors when it comes to acts of violence in war zones against civilians. Last November, for instance, he pardoned a former U.S. Army commando who was set to stand trial next year in the killing of a suspected Afghan bomb-maker and a former Army lieutenant convicted of murder for ordering his men to fire upon three Afghans.

Trump also announced pardons for two people entangled in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. One was for 2016 campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about a conversation in which he learned that Russia had dirt on Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The president also pardoned Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer who was sentenced to 30 days in prison for lying to investigators during the Mueller probe.

Van der Zwaan and Papadopoulos are the third and fourth Russia investigation defendants granted clemency. By pardoning them, Trump once again took aim at Mueller’s inquiry and advanced a broader effort to undo the results of the investigation that yielded criminal charges against a half-dozen associates.

The pardons drew criticism from top Democrats. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said the president was abusing his power.

“Trump is doling out pardons, not on the basis of repentance, restitution or the interests of justice, but to reward his friends and political allies, to protect those who lie to cover up him, to shelter those guilty of killing civilians, and to undermine an investigation that uncovered massive wrongdoing,” Schiff said.

Last month, Trump pardoned former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and months earlier commuted the sentence of another associate, Roger Stone, days before he was to report to prison.

Trump has granted about 2% of requested pardons in his single term in office — just 27 before Tuesday’s announcement. By comparison, Barack Obama granted 212 or 6%, and George W. Bush granted about 7%, or 189. George H.W. Bush, another one-term president, granted 10% of requests.

Also among those pardoned by Trump was Phil Lyman, a Utah state representative who led an ATV protest through restricted federal lands.

Lyman was serving as a Utah county commissioner in 2014 when he led about 50 ATV riders in a canyon home to Native American cliff dwellings that officials closed to motorized traffic. The ride occurred amid a sputtering movement in the West pushing back against federal control of large swaths of land and came in the wake of an armed confrontation Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy had with Bureau of Land Management over grazing fees.

Lyman spent 10 days in prison and was ordered to pay nearly $96,000 in restitution. The Trump administration in 2017 lifted a ban on motorized vehicles in parts of the canyon but left restrictions in place through other areas where Lyman led his ride.

Two former U.S. Border Patrol agents were also pardoned, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, convicted of shooting and wounding a Mexican drug smuggler near El Paso, Texas, in 2005.

What a menagerie of the dregs of society!

Tony

Dr. Miguel Cardona

Dear Commons Community,

President-elect Joe Biden announced yesterday his plans to nominate Dr. Miguel Cardona, currently the top schools official in Connecticut, to serve as the next secretary of education.  

Cardona’s reported selection comes after a process in which Biden’s team had to manage competing interests in the education world, weighing the perspectives of labor officials and education reform interest groups. Cardona is not closely aligned with either side.

Cardona was tapped to serve as Connecticut’s education commissioner in 2019. He started his career as an elementary school teacher ― consistent with Biden’s requirement that the next secretary of education have teaching experience ― before becoming a school principal and district administrator. In 2012, he was named Connecticut’s principal of the year.

His nomination comes at a moment of crisis in education, as schools grapple with challenges related to COVID-19 and the resulting, potentially devastating loss of learning this year. Biden has said that he would like to see a vast majority of schools reopen within the first 100 days of his presidency.

In Connecticut, Cardona has remained strident in his desire for schools to provide in-person options this year, though the state has ultimately left such decisions in the hands of districts. He has resisted calls from the state’s teachers union to shut down schools until mid-January. The union, though, is supportive of his nomination.

“He has been tested by the unprecedented upheaval caused by the pandemic. While this challenge has been a rocky road — and many issues remain unresolved — teachers and school support staff have appreciated his openness and collaboration. If selected as Secretary of Education, Dr. Cardona would be a positive force for public education — light years ahead of the dismal Betsy DeVos track record,” said a recent statement from the Connecticut Education Association, before Cardona’s nomination was officially announced.

In the past, Cardona has expressed moderate support for charter schools. He told the Connecticut Post in 2019 that “as a parent myself I want to make sure I have options for my children,” though he said he wants all public schools ― charters included ― to be held to the same accountability standards.

During his confirmation hearing for his current position, he said, “Charter schools provide choice for parents that are seeking choice, so I think it’s a viable option,” though he said he would primarily pour his energy into traditional public schools, according to the Connecticut Mirror.

He also told the Connecticut Post that when he was an educator, he sometimes thought kids received too much testing, a topic that could play an important role in the initial months of his tenure as education secretary. He will be tasked with deciding whether or not states should administer standardized tests during the pandemic this year. (States received waivers from the federal government to forgo testing last year.)

“Testing for the sake of testing prevents educators from getting to the core work of teaching students the skills that [students] need to be successful,” he said in 2019.

Earlier this year, the Connecticut State Department of Education told superintendents that they should anticipate testing for the purpose of determining the impact of the pandemic on student achievement, and that results would not be used to penalize districts.

Cardona was put on the Biden administration’s radar through Linda Darling-Hammond, according to the Connecticut Mirror. Darling-Hammond, president of the California State Board of Education, is leading the education transition team, and was initially seen as a frontrunner for the education secretary job, before announcing that she wasn’t interested. He’ll come into the job at a moment of unprecedented upheaval in schools.

Cardona also received support from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who wrote a letter to the Biden team pushing his nomination, Politico reported. The group also pushed the nomination of Lily Eskelsen García, former president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union. Eskelsen García and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, were initially seen as strong contenders for the job, as were several big city superintendents, and, later, Leslie Fenwick, dean emeritus of the School of Education at Howard University.

Education reform groups — which lobbied fiercely against the selection of labor leaders like Eskelsen García and Weingarten — have praised the selection of Cardona, saying that he represents a fresh start and a departure from entrenched political interests that have characterized education debates in recent years.

“Had the president-elect appointed a Lily or a Randi or someone like that, it would have been akin to declaring an act of war on the progress we’ve made over the last three decades. This seems like a very intentional Biden-esque tip to moderation,” said Jeanne Allen, founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform, a group that fights for school choice and is often at odds with teachers unions.

“I called some friends in Connecticut, teachers and principals, and there’s no ‘Oh my god, [Cardona’s] awful,’ or ‘Oh my god, [he’s] great.’ There’s not a lot of strong opinions either way it seems,” she said. “I think having freshness tends to lead to openness and understanding.”

Weingarten also offered her support for his nomination in a statement, noting that he is a former member of her union and that he worked closely with labor during his time as a principal to improve student achievement.

“Miguel Cardona is not just a proud product of public schools — he’s made strengthening public education and fighting for equity his life’s work,” she said. “With his experience as a student, fourth-grade teacher, principal, assistant superintendent and commissioner in Connecticut, Dr. Cardona — a former AFT member — will transform the Education Department to help students thrive, a reversal of the DeVos disaster of the last four years.”

On the ground in Connecticut, he’s been able to retain the support of stakeholders, even when he’s at odds with their views, by taking pains to understand the perspectives of others and placing an emphasis on collaboration. He’s remained calm and deliberate during debates on school reopenings, though the issue is fraught with tension, treating all parties with sensitivity and centering the experiences of students, said Amy Selib Dowell, Connecticut state director of the group Democrats for Education Reform. Overall, he’s known as an “extremely nice” guy, she added.

If confirmed, Cardona’s background would be a stark departure from that of his predecessor, Betsy DeVos, an heiress and billionaire who is dedicated to pushing private school choice and alternatives to the traditional public school system. Cardona, who has a doctorate, has spent his career championing public schools. He is Puerto Rican, he grew up in public housing, and English is his second language. He often discusses the harm of racial stereotyping and his dedication to closing achievement gaps between groups of students.

“We need to do more,” he told the Connecticut Post in 2019. “I am passionate about ensuring that students can achieve equitable outcomes throughout the state regardless of ZIP code or skin color, which unfortunately often today still serve as a predictor of outcomes.”

We wish Mr. Cardona the best in his new position!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, David Leonhardt, has a piece today criticizing the new stimulus bill the U.S. Congress passed yesterday as flawed and unfocused.  Here are excerpts of  what he has to say.

“For many Americans, the coronavirus recession has done almost no damage to their finances. They still have their jobs, and their expenses have gone down while they’ve been stuck mostly at home. Their homes have not lost value, unlike during the financial crisis of 2007-9. If they are fortunate enough to own stocks, their portfolio is probably worth more than a year ago.

Of course, millions of other Americans are struggling mightily. Nine million fewer people are employed than a year ago. Others are coping with big medical bills. Many small businesses have closed or may soon. State and local governments are planning deep cuts.

The $900 billion stimulus bill that Congress passed last night will provide a lot of help to the economy. But many economists believe that it also has major flaws. Among them: It isn’t especially targeted at the parts of the economy that need help.

A central part of the stimulus are one-time checks that the government will mail to people. Any household with income below $150,000 will likely receive at least $1,200. Families with children will receive more.

Much of that money will go to Americans who are doing just fine and who will save the money they receive, which in turn will do nothing to keep struggling businesses afloat or keep workers employed. Already, the personal savings rate had risen to about 14 percent this fall, from 8 percent at the start of the year.

At the same time, the bill provides only 11 weeks of expanded unemployment insurance. “That’s not enough to bridge us to when a vaccine is widely distributed,” Ernie Tedeschi, a former Treasury Department economist, wrote yesterday. In all, the bill spends less on the expanded jobless benefits than on the stimulus checks.

An even bigger issue is the lack of help for state and local governments. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, insisted on excluding such aid, saying it would be a bailout for fiscally irresponsible states. Many economists disagree and point to the pandemic’s toll on state budgets.

“Economists are especially concerned that the final deal stripped out new funding for state and local governments, which is likely to lead to more job cuts and higher taxes in parts of the country,” The Washington Post’s Heather Long wrote. Larry Johnson, a county commissioner in the Atlanta area, said, “Congress leaving out local aid is like the Grinch that stole Christmas.”

And Tracy Gordon of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center told Bloomberg CityLab, “I’m incredulous that they’re not providing state and local aid.” Among the likely areas for the cuts that state and local government will have to make: public transportation, police and fire departments, schools and health care programs.

The bottom line: The stimulus plan seems big enough to keep the economy from falling into a new recession early next year. But a different plan could have prevented more economic hardship than this one will.”

Here in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio felt let down especially by the Democrats in Congress for not providing assistance to state and local governments.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump’s motives for fighting the results of the election come down to ego and money, according to Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer.

“He knows he lost the election. He knows it. But the problem is he has an incredibly fragile ego and his fragile ego will not allow him to acknowledge that he is a loser, that he lost the election to Joe Biden,” Cohen said in a Vanity Fair interview published Monday.

“This is a cash grab. When you finish a job, you’re always thinking about how to reinvent yourself. That’s what Donald Trump is doing right now,” he said.

With less than a month before Biden’s inauguration, Trump still publicly maintains that he actually won the election and was the victim of a widespread conspiracy to rig it against him. Anyone who disputes those baseless allegations ― including Republican election officials, the Supreme Court and even some conservative Fox News personalities ― has become the target of his ire.

“He knows that his next saga of his story is really going to be predicated around a Trump news network. It’s why he’s fighting with Fox every day,” Cohen said.

“He’s looking to steal their base. Because with his social media platform of 90 million followers, he knows that of that 90 million, 20 million are die-hard Trump fans.”

Cohen noted that many of Trump’s most devout supporters have indicated they would support him no matter what.

“From them, he just wants $4.99 a month. And for that $4.99 a month, you get to listen to all the bullshit and all the far-right-wing conspiracies that Donald Trump can dream up,” Cohen said. “That’s what he’s going to sell you. That’s $100 million a month, $1.2 billion a year. That’s going to pay for the gas in his 757.”

Asked about his own 2019 prophecy that Trump would not transition peacefully at the end of his presidential term, Cohen said that knowing Trump as well as he did, he was certain of his forecast.

Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to criminal charges that included lying to Congress and campaign finance violations related to hush-money payments made during the 2016 campaign to silence two women ― Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal ― who alleged they had extramarital affairs with Trump. 

Now serving the remainder of his three-year prison sentence in home confinement, Cohen has written a deeply critical book about Trump entitled,  Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump.  I thought it was a good read.

Tony

William Barr

Dear Commons Community,

William Barr used his final public appearance as the U.S. Attorney General to undercut President Donald Trump on multiple fronts yesterday, saying he saw no reason to appoint a special counsel to look into the president’s claims about the 2020 election or to name one for the tax investigation of President-elect Joe Biden’s son.

In the course of breaking with Trump on matters that have been consuming the president, Barr also reinforced the belief of federal officials that Russia was behind a massive hack of U.S. government agencies, not China as Trump had suggested.

Barr made the comments at a press conference to announce additional criminal charges in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 190 Americans, an issue he had worked on in his previous stint as attorney general in the early 1990s. He chose the announcement, in a case very personal and important to him, for his last public appearance, then took questions.

Barr said the Justice Department’s existing investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial dealings was “being handled responsibly and professionally.”

“I have not seen a reason to appoint a special counsel and I have no plan to do so before I leave,” he said. “Nor for election fraud” he said.

Barr had been in lockstep with the president during much of his tenure as Trump’s attorney general. But Trump, as he has done with many others in his inner circle, started criticizing Barr publicly. He was particularly angry that Barr didn’t announce the existence of a two-year-old investigation of Hunter Biden.

And shortly before he announced his resignation, Barr told The Associated Press that he had seen no evidence of widespread voting fraud, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary. Trump has continued to push baseless claims even after the Electoral College made Biden’s victory formal Dec. 14.

A special counsel would make it more difficult for the incoming attorney general and president to close investigations begun under Trump. Doing so could lend a false legitimacy to baseless claims, particularly to the throngs of Trump supporters who believe the election was stolen because he keeps wrongly claiming it was.

Barr’s statements yesterday may make it easier for the acting attorney general who takes over, Jeffrey Rosen, to resist pressure from the White House to make such appointments.

In his 2019 confirmation hearing for deputy attorney general, Rosen said he was willing to rebuff political pressure from the White House if necessary. He told legislators that criminal investigations should “proceed on the facts and the law” and prosecutions should be “free of improper political influences.”

“If the appropriate answer is to say no to somebody, then I will say no,” he said at the time.

Trump and his allies have filed roughly 50 lawsuits challenging election results and nearly all have been dismissed or dropped. He’s also lost twice at the U.S. Supreme Court.

With no further tenable legal recourse, Trump has been fuming and peppering allies for options as he refuses to accept his loss.

Among those allies is Rudy Giuliani, who during a meeting Friday pushed Trump to seize voting machines in his hunt for evidence of fraud. The Homeland Security Department made clear, however, that it had no authority to do so. It is also unclear what that would accomplish.

For his part, Barr said he saw no reason to seize them. Earlier this month, Barr also told the AP that the Justice Department and Homeland Security had looked into the claims “that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results” and ultimately concluded that “so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”

Trump has consulted on special counsels with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, White House counsel Pat Cipollone and outside allies, according to several Trump administration officials and Republicans close to the White House who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Trump was interested both in a counsel to investigate the younger Biden’s tax dealings and a second to look into election fraud. He even floated the idea of naming attorney Sidney Powell as the counsel — though Powell was booted from Trump’s legal team after she made a series of increasingly wild conspiratorial claims about the election.

Federal law requires that an attorney general appoint any special counsels.

Barr also said Monday the hack of U.S. government agencies “certainly appears to be the Russians.”

In implicating the Russians, Barr was siding with the widely held belief within the U.S. government and the cybersecurity community that Russian hackers were responsible for breaches at multiple government agencies, including the Treasury and Commerce departments.

Hours after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a radio interview that Russia was “pretty clearly” behind the hacks, Trump sought to undercut that message and play down the severity of the attack.

He tweeted that the “Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality.” He also said China could be responsible even though no credible evidence has emerged to suggest anyone other than Russia might be to blame.

Too bad Barr did not take such independent positions earlier in his tenure as Attorney General!

Tony