Dear Commons Community,

My wife, Elaine and I, will be traveling today to spend a few days on Nantucket.

We have tried to observe all of the social distancing guidelines since early March and this will

be our first major venture out of our home in New York.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In 2006, President Donald Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett signed on to an advertisement in an Indiana newspaper that called for overturning Roe v. Wade.

Her participation in the ad published in the South Bend Tribune, first reported by The Guardian, made clear her view on the contentious issue even as Trump seeks to appeal to religious conservatives who make up an important voting bloc for him in the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential election.

Barrett and her husband, a former federal prosecutor, both were among those who lent their names to the ad, which called the Roe v. Wade decision “an exercise of raw judicial power.”

“It’s time to put an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade and restore law that protects the lives of unborn children,” the advertisement, purchased by an anti-abortion organization called St. Joseph County Right to Life, stated.

Barrett, who on Thursday continued with a series of meetings with individual senators ahead of Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings due to start on Oct. 12, declined to answer questions about the ad. Democratic committee members can be expected to press her on the issue.

Trump, who in January addressed an anti-abortion rally in Washington and said “unborn children have never had a stronger defender in the White House,” promised during the 2016 presidential race to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade.

Trump has called on the Senate to confirm Barrett to replace the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a defender of abortion rights, by Election Day. During Tuesday’s debate, Trump objected when his Democratic challenger Joe Biden said the fate of Roe V. Wade was “on the ballot” in the election. Trump told Biden, “You don’t know her view on Roe v. Wade.”

A devout Catholic who earned a law degree and taught at the University of Notre Dame, Barrett is a favorite of religious conservatives. She was a law professor at Notre Dame at the time of the ad.

Overturning the ruling has been a longstanding goal of U.S. religious conservatives. The ruling recognized that a constitutional right to personal privacy protects a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion. The court in 1992 reaffirmed the ruling and prohibited laws that place an “undue burden” on obtaining an abortion. Conservative opponents of the ruling have argued that the case was wrongly decided.

Barrett’s public position on Roe v. Wade is not a surprise!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump announced yesterday that he and first lady Melania Trump have tested positive for the coronavirus.

Trump, who has spent much of the year downplaying the threat of a virus that has killed more than 205,000 Americans, said he and Mrs. Trump were quarantining. The White House physician said the president is expected to continue carrying out his duties “without disruption” while recovering. As reported by several major news media outlets.

Trump’s diagnosis was sure to have a destabilizing effect in Washington, raising questions about how far the virus had spread through the highest levels of the U.S. government. Hours before Trump announced he had contracted the virus, the White House said a top aide who had traveled with him during the week had tested positive.

“Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately,” Trump tweeted just before 1 a.m. “We will get through this TOGETHER!”

Trump was last seen by reporters returning to the White House on Thursday evening and did not appear visibly ill. Trump is 74 years old, putting him at higher risk of serious complications from a virus that has infected more than 7 million people nationwide.

The president’s physician said in a memo that Trump and the first lady, who is 50, “are both well at this time” and “plan to remain at home within the White House during their convalescence.”

The diagnosis marks a devastating blow for a president who has been trying desperately to convince the American public that the worst of the pandemic is behind them. In the best of cases, if he develops no symptoms, which can include fever, cough and breathing trouble, it will force him off the campaign trail just weeks before the election.

Trump’s handling of the pandemic has already been a major flashpoint in his race against Democrat Joe Biden, who spent much of the summer off the campaign trail and at his home in Delaware because of the virus. Biden has since resumed a more active campaign schedule, but with small, socially distanced crowds. He also regularly wears a mask in public, something Trump mocked him for at Tuesday night’s debate.

“I don’t wear masks like him,” Trump said of Biden. “Every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away from me, and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.”

There was no immediate comment from the Biden campaign on whether the former vice president had been tested since appearing at the debate with Trump or whether he was taking any additional safety protocols.

Trump had been scheduled to attend a fundraiser and hold another campaign rally in Sanford, Florida, on Friday evening. But just after 1 a.m., the White House released a revised schedule with only one event: a phone call on “COVID-19 support to vulnerable seniors.”

Trump’s announcement came hours after he confirmed that Hope Hicks, one of his most trusted and longest-serving aides, had been diagnosed with the virus Thursday. Hicks began feeling mild symptoms during the plane ride home from a rally in Minnesota on Wednesday evening, according to an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose private information. She was isolated from other passengers aboard the plane, the person said.

Hicks had been with Trump and other senior staff aboard Marine One and Air Force One en route to that rally and had accompanied the president to Tuesday’s presidential debate in Cleveland, along with members of the Trump family. They did not wear masks during the debate, in violation of the venue rules.

Multiple White House staffers have previously tested positive for the virus, including Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary, Katie Miller, national security adviser Robert O’Brien and one of the president’s personal valets.

But Trump has consistently played down concerns about being personally vulnerable, even after White House staff and allies were exposed and sickened. Since the coronavirus emerged earlier this year, Trump has refused to abide by basic public health guidelines — including those issued by his own administration — such as wearing masks in public and practicing social distancing. Instead, he has continued to hold campaign rallies that draw thousands of supporters.

“I felt no vulnerability whatsoever,” he said told reporters back in May.

The news was sure to rattle an already shaken nation still grappling with how to safely reopen the economy without driving virus transmission. The White House has access to near-unlimited resources, including a constant supply of quick-result tests, and still failed to keep the president safe, raising questions about how the rest of the country will be able to protect its workers, students and the public as businesses and schools reopen.

Questions remain about why it took so long for Trump to be tested and why he and his aides continued to come to work and travel after Hicks fell ill. Trump traveled to New Jersey on Thursday for a fundraiser, exposing attendees to the virus.

Pence’s aides had no immediate comment on whether the vice president had been tested or in contact with Trump.

It is unclear where the Trumps and Hicks may have caught the virus, but in his Fox interview, Trump seemed to suggest it may have been spread by someone in the military or law enforcement.

“It’s very, very hard when you are with people from the military or from law enforcement, and they come over to you, and they want to hug you, and they want to kiss you,” he said, “because we really have done a good job for them. And you get close. And things happen.”

The White House began instituting a daily testing regimen for the president’s senior aides after earlier positive cases close to the president. Anyone in close proximity to the president or vice president is also tested every day, including reporters.

Yet since the early days of the pandemic, experts have questioned the health and safety protocols at the White House and asked why more wasn’t being done to protect the commander in chief. Trump continued to shake hands with visitors long after public health officials were warning against it, and he initially resisted being tested.

Trump is far from the first world leader to test positive for the virus, which previously infected Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who spent a week in the hospital, including three nights in intensive care. Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was hospitalized last month while fighting what he called a “hellish” case of COVID-19.

While there is currently no evidence that Trump is seriously ill, the positive test raises questions about what would happen if he were to become incapacitated due to illness.

The Constitution’s 25th Amendment spells out the procedures under which the president can declare himself “unable to discharge the powers and duties” of the presidency. If he were to make that call, Trump would transmit a written note to the Senate president pro tempore, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Pence would serve as acting president until Trump transmitted “a written declaration to the contrary.”

The vice president and a majority of either the Cabinet or another body established by law can also declare the president unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, in which case Pence would “immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President” until Trump could provide a written declaration to the contrary.

We wish Trump and his wife a full recovery!

Tony

Evaluating Chris Wallace’s Performance during the Debate

Dear Commons Community,

The video above is an evaluation of Chris Wallace’s performance as moderator during the first presidential debate from The Young Turks.

Wallace  conceded he was initially “reluctant” to step in during the Trump-Biden matchup. “I’ve never been through anything like this,” he said.

“I never dreamt that it would go off the tracks the way it did,”  

“I’m just sad with the way last night turned out.”

As reported by the New York Times.

Chris Wallace, the “Fox News Sunday” anchor and moderator of Tuesday’s melee of a debate between President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., was on the phone Wednesday from his home in Annapolis, Md., reflecting on — his words — “a terrible missed opportunity.”

“I never dreamt that it would go off the tracks the way it did,” he said.

In his first interview since the chaotic and often incoherent spectacle — in which a pugilistic Mr. Trump relentlessly interrupted opponent and moderator alike — Mr. Wallace conceded that he had been slow to recognize that the president was not going to cease flouting the debate’s rules.

“I’ve read some of the reviews. I know people think, well, gee, I didn’t jump in soon enough,” Mr. Wallace said, his voice betraying some hoarseness from the previous night’s proceedings. “I guess I didn’t realize — and there was no way you could, hindsight being 20/20 — that this was going to be the president’s strategy, not just for the beginning of the debate but the entire debate.”

Recalling his thoughts as he sat onstage in the Cleveland hall, with tens of millions of Americans watching live, Mr. Wallace said: “I’m a pro. I’ve never been through anything like this.”

Mr. Trump’s bullying behavior had no obvious precedent in presidential debates, even the one that Mr. Wallace previously moderated, to acclaim, in 2016. In the interview, the anchor said that when Mr. Trump initially engaged directly with Mr. Biden, “I thought this was great — this is a debate!”

But as the president gave no sign of backing off, Mr. Wallace said, he grew more alarmed. “If I didn’t try to seize control of the debate — which I don’t know that I ever really did — then it was going to just go completely off the tracks,” he said.

Asked what he was feeling when he called the debate to a temporary halt — instructing the candidates that “the country would be better served if we allowed both people to speak with fewer interruptions” — Mr. Wallace said, “The answer to that question is easy: Desperation.”

Asked directly if Mr. Trump had derailed the debate, Mr. Wallace replied, “Well, he certainly didn’t help.”

Care to elaborate? “No,” Mr. Wallace said. “To quote the president, ‘It is what it is.’”

In the spotlight, Mr. Wallace was keenly aware of the complexity of his task: ensuring an evenhanded debate, avoiding taking sides, allowing candidates to express themselves while keeping the discussion substantive.

“You’re reluctant — as somebody who has said from the very beginning that I wanted to be as invisible as possible, and to enable them to talk — to rise to the point at which you begin to interject more and more,” Mr. Wallace said. “First to say, ‘Please don’t interrupt,’ then ‘Please obey the rules,’ and third, ‘This isn’t serving the country well.’ Those are all tough steps at real time, at that moment, on that stage.”

The Commission on Presidential Debates said on Wednesday that it would examine changes to the format of this year’s remaining encounters between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, a clear sign of its frustration with the results of Tuesday evening. The commission also took pains to praise Mr. Wallace for his “professionalism and skill.”

The suggestion that moderators be given the power to mute the candidates’ microphones — popular on social media in the hours after the event — did not sit well with Mr. Wallace.

“As a practical matter, even if the president’s microphone had been shut, he still could have continued to interrupt, and it might well have been picked up on Biden’s microphone, and it still would have disrupted the proceedings in the hall,” he said.

And he noted that cutting off the audio feed of a presidential candidate is a more consequential act than some pundits give it credit for. “People have to remember, and too many people forget, both of these candidates have the support of tens of millions of Americans,” he said.

Steve Scully of C-SPAN is set to moderate the next debate, in a town-hall format where Florida voters will ask many of the questions. Kristen Welker of NBC News is the moderator for the final debate. Mr. Wallace’s advice: “If either man goes down this road, I hope you’ll be quicker to realize what’s going on than I was. I didn’t have that advance warning.”

Back in Annapolis, “I’ve been involved in a certain amount of soul-searching.”

“Generally speaking, I did as well as I could, so I don’t have any second thoughts there,” Mr. Wallace said, in conclusion. “I’m just disappointed with the results. For me, but much more importantly, I’m disappointed for the country, because it could have been a much more useful evening than it turned out to be.”

It is interesting to hear Wallace’s perspective on the debate or maybe “debacle” is a better word.

Tony

McKinsey & Co.

Dear Commons Community,

In its latest report, McKinsey & Co. finds that executives are more hopeful about the economy than they have been at any time so far during the COVID-19 crisis.   Here is an excerpt.

“Six months after WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, the responses to the  latest McKinsey Global Survey suggest a positive shift in economic sentiment. More than half of all executives surveyed say economic conditions in their own countries will be better six months from now, while 30 percent say they will worsen (see above figure). That’s the smallest percentage of pessimists we’ve seen since the survey in April 2020.

Taking a cue from those executives, our researchers delved deep into the US situation, emerging with an understanding of what it will take to deliver an optimistic outcome. The case depends on the progress made to date—and the potential for more. We’ve learned much about the natural history and epidemiology of COVID-19. We’re developing better diagnostics, including rapid point-of-care tests, a few of which can be completed in about 15 minutes. Case management has improved. And pharmaceutical companies have turned out a remarkably robust pipeline of vaccine and therapeutic candidates. Put it all together, and an end to the pandemic is potentially within range.

Another new survey reveals the extent of the COVID-19 crisis’s disruption in working practices and behaviors. One-third of surveyed companies have accelerated the digitization of their supply chains, half have sped up the digitization of their customer channels, and two-thirds have moved faster to adopt artificial intelligence and automation. Many other workforce changes are also in progress.

Managers need to process these changes and many others, and come to grips with the long-term strategic-planning agenda. The essential question: what is the right way to think about 2021 and beyond? Should companies unbatten the hatches, or is it too soon?”

There is hope at the end of the coronavirus tunnel!

Tony

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

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

——————————————————————–

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

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