Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump’s impeachment trial came to an end yesterday with 57 senators finding him convict, falling short of the two-thirds margin required to find him guilty of the charge of “incitement of insurrection” in connection with the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol that resulted in five deaths. Seven GOP senators broke with their party — voting along with all 48 Democrats and both independents in the body.

After the 57-43 vote, the Republicans who defied Trump explained their decision (Courtesy of Yahoo News.)

Richard Burr, North Carolina

“The facts are clear,” Burr said in a statement after the vote. “The President promoted unfounded conspiracy theories to cast doubt on the integrity of a free and fair election because he did not like the results. As Congress met to certify the election results, the President directed his supporters to go to the Capitol to disrupt the lawful proceedings required by the Constitution. When the crowd became violent, the President used his office to first inflame the situation instead of immediately calling for an end to the assault.”

Burr originally voted that the trial was unconstitutional, but said in his statement that “the Senate is an institution based on precedent, and given that the majority of the Senate voted to proceed with this trial, the question of constitutionality is now established precedent.”

He has already announced he will not be running for re-election in 2022.

Bill Cassidy, Louisiana

Cassidy said in a succinct video statement Saturday that he voted to convict Trump “because he is guilty.”

“Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person,” he said.

Susan Collins, Maine

Earlier this week, Collins, who won reelection in November, said she was “perplexed” by the performance of Trump attorney Bruce Castor.

“He did not seem to make any arguments at all, which was an unusual approach to take,” Collins said.

After she voted to acquit Trump last year, Collins said she believed “that the president has learned from this case. The president has been impeached. That’s a pretty big lesson.”

On Saturday, Collins voted to convict and offered a different assessment of the president.

“Instead of preventing a dangerous situation, President Trump created one. Rather than defend the Constitutional transfer of power, he incited an insurrection with the purpose of preventing that transfer of power from occurring,” Collins said.

Lisa Murkowski, Alaska

On Friday, Murkowski and Collins posed a key question to Trump’s counsel: exactly when did Trump learn of the breach at the Capitol and what specific actions did he go to bring the rioting to an end? Trump’s counsel seemed to avoid the question, telling the senators there’s been “no investigation into that.”

Asked about the answer to her question, Murkowski said “that wasn’t very responsive.”

The senator, who is up for re-election in 2022, also said Wednesday that House impeachment managers “made a very strong case” and that the evidence that was presented is “pretty damning,” NBC reported.

Mitt Romney, Utah

Romney was the only Republican to vote to convict Trump following his first impeachment trial last year. After his vote on Saturday, the senator said in a statement that he believed Trump was guilty of inciting the insurrection and added that the former president “attempted to corrupt the election by pressuring the Secretary of State of Georgia to falsify the election results in his state.”

“President Trump also violated his oath of office by failing to protect the Capitol, the Vice President, and others in the Capitol. Each and every one of these conclusions compels me to support conviction,” Romey said in a statement.

Ben Sasse, Nebraska

Sasse, one of the few GOP senators who was not directly opposed to the impeachment trial, said in a statement Saturday that the former president repeated lies about the election, such as the false claim that he won the election by a landslide, and used those lies to summon his supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6.

“Those lies had consequences,” the statement said, “endangering the life of the vice president and bringing us dangerously close to a bloody constitutional crisis.”

Sasse’s support of the former president waned long before the presidential election, and the Omaha World-Herald reported that he faces censure from Nebraska Republicans over Sasse’s lack of support for Trump.

Pat Toomey, Pennsylvania

In a statement released after his vote, Toomey said, “President Trump summoned thousands to Washington, D.C. and inflamed their passion by repeating disproven allegations about widespread fraud. He urged the mob to march on the Capitol for the explicit purpose of preventing Congress and the Vice President from formally certifying the results of the presidential election. All of this to hold on to power despite having legitimately lost.”

“I was one of the 74 million Americans who voted for President Trump, in part because of the many accomplishments of his administration,” Toomey continued. “Unfortunately, his behavior after the election betrayed the confidence millions of us placed in him. His betrayal of the Constitution and his oath of office required conviction.”

Toomey has already announced he will not be running for re-election in 2022.

We thank these Republicans for putting country before party!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump was acquitted yesterday of inciting the horrific attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6^th, concluding an historic impeachment trial that spared him the first-ever conviction of a current or former U.S. president but exposed the fragility of America’s democratic traditions and left a divided nation to come to terms with the violence sparked by his defeated presidency.  Fifty-seven senators found him guilty but short of the (67) two-thirds majority needed,

Seven Republicans voted to convict him, making this by far the most bipartisan impeachment effort in American history. It is worth remembering that until a year ago, when Mr. Romney cast the lone Republican “guilty” vote in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial, no senators had ever voted to convict a president from their own party.

A two-thirds majority to convict Mr. Trump, which would have cleared the way for a simple-majority vote to bar him from holding future office, was always extraordinarily unlikely, and everybody involved knew it. That was why — as The Times’s chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, wrote two days ago — the House impeachment managers often seemed to be speaking less to the Senate than to history. 

Representative Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, an impeachment manager, put it bluntly: “If we don’t set this right and call it what it was, the highest of constitutional crimes by the president of the United States, the past will not be past. The past will become our future,” she said in closing arguments. “Senators, we are in a dialogue with history.” 

In speeches and statements after the vote, several Republicans who had voted to acquit Mr. Trump still declared him responsible for the assault on the Capitol. Among them was Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader.

“The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president,” Mr. McConnell said, “and having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole, which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet earth.”

Mr. McConnell’s stated reason for his “not guilty” vote was that Mr. Trump was no longer in office — even though it was Mr. McConnell who prevented the Senate from beginning the trial while Mr. Trump was in office. 

Speaker Nancy Pelosi took that reasoning to task when she made an unexpected appearance at a Democratic news conference after the vote.

“It is so pathetic that Senator McConnell kept the Senate shut down so that the Senate could not receive the article of impeachment and has used that as his excuse for not voting to convict Donald Trump,” she said.

Yesterday was an historic moment.  Now the country needs to move on!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last week after one of my classes during which I mentioned where education is heading in the not-too-distant future, I mentioned technological developments including artificial intelligence.  One of my students asked me after the class what might be a good introductory book on AI.  I recommended A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence by Michael Wooldridge (Publisher – Flatiron Books).  Wooldridge is a professor and head of the computer science department at the University of Oxford.   A Brief History.. is a clear, calm treatment of AI without all the hype that one often sees from proponents of this technology.  He has concise commentary on complex subjects such as the mind and consciousness and readily admits that we don’t know what they are.  He cites Karl Marx’s concept of worker alienation as the basis for what the world of work might look like for many including those in education in the years to come.

At 231 pages, I strongly recommend it if you want a good lucid overview of AI.

Below is a brief  review that appeared in the  Standaard Boekhandel, a Dutch book distributor.

Tony

———————————————————————————————-

A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence

What It Is, Where We Are, and Where We Are Going

Michael Wooldridge

From Oxford’s leading AI researcher comes a fun and accessible tour through the history and future of one of the most cutting edge and misunderstood field in science: Artificial Intelligence

The somewhat ill-defined long-term aim of AI is to build machines that are conscious, self-aware, and sentient; machines capable of the kind of intelligent autonomous action that currently only people are capable of. As an AI researcher with 25 years of experience, professor Mike Wooldridge has learned to be obsessively cautious about such claims, while still promoting an intense optimism about the future of the field. There have been genuine scientific breakthroughs that have made AI systems possible in the past decade that the founders of the field would have hailed as miraculous. Driverless cars and automated translation tools are just two examples of AI technologies that have become a practical, everyday reality in the past few years, and which will have a huge impact on our world.

While the dream of conscious machines remains, Professor Wooldridge believes, a distant prospect, the floodgates for AI have opened. Wooldridge’s A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence is an exciting romp through the history of this groundbreaking field–a one-stop-shop for AI’s past, present, and world-changing future.

Dear Commons Community,

After the defense presented its case yesterday and followed by a question and answer period, the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump is winding down with a vote likely coming this weekend.  Several major newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal have already rendered their decisions to convict the president.  The New York Times editorial concludes that Trump is guilty as charged and that there’s no doubt that he must be held responsible for attacking the Capitol and trying to overturn the results of the election. Its entire editorial is below.

There is no chance that he will be convicted in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Tony

New York Times

Trump Is Guilty

By The Editorial Board

Feb. 12, 2021

If you fail to hold him accountable, it can happen again.

This is the heart of the prosecution’s argument in the ongoing impeachment trial of Donald Trump. It is a plea for the senators charged with rendering a verdict not to limit their concerns solely to the events of Jan. 6, when a mob of Trump supporters sacked the U.S. Capitol, but also to act with an eye toward safeguarding the nation’s future.

To excuse Mr. Trump’s attack on American democracy would invite more such attempts, by him and by other aspiring autocrats. The stakes could not be higher. A vote for impunity is an act of complicity.

It is unfortunate that the country finds itself at this place at this moment, American pitted against American. But there is no more urgent task than recentering the nation’s political life as peaceful and committed to the rule of law.

Mr. Trump stands charged with incitement of insurrection. For three days this week, House managers laid out a devastating case for conviction. Methodically, meticulously they detailed the former president’s effort to undermine and overturn a free and fair election, culminating with his fomenting an attack on Congress that resulted in the deaths of five people, and very nearly more. Mr. Trump spun lies and conspiracy theories to defraud and destabilize his followers. He told them that their votes had been stolen. He made them believe that everyone had betrayed them, from local officials to the media to the Supreme Court. He convinced them that the only way to save their nation was to “fight like hell.” Mr. Trump whipped his loyalists into a rage, summoned them to Washington, pointed them at Congress and then retreated to the safety of the White House to enjoy the show.

The prosecution had a glut of supporting evidence. The nine House managers, led by Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, came armed with a cache of tweets and other social media posts. These included incendiary messages sent by Mr. Trump during the riot, as well as entreaties from other Republican officials for him to call for an end to the violence. Republicans recognized his power over the mob in the moment, even if some of their Senate colleagues are unwilling to acknowledge that reality today.

The managers also presented corroborating news accounts, snippets of Mr. Trump’s speeches and interviews and, of course, video of the siege, some of it posted online by the rioters themselves. Dozens of graphic video clips were woven together in a tapestry of rage and madness. Police officers are seen being shoved, beaten, cursed at and crushed. Members of the mob smash windows and chant their desire to “hang Mike Pence!”

Previously unseen footage revealed just how close some lawmakers came to disaster — including Senator Mitt Romney, the Utah Republican and outspoken Trump critic, who would have run directly into the mob if not for an interception by Eugene Goodman, the Capitol Police officer who also drew a pack of rioters away from the Senate chamber.

Mr. Trump’s attorneys didn’t bother with a coherent defense. Their presentation was a slipshod, meandering, at times incomprehensible exercise in deflection and denial. Time and again, the defense team rejected the idea that Mr. Trump bore any responsibility for inciting his followers to violence. No reasonable person, the team argued, could have taken their client’s call to arms seriously, much less literally. All those rioters who asserted before, during and after the attack that they were following the former president’s will must have been confused. Once again, Mr. Trump has played his most devoted supporters for suckers and insulted the intelligence of the rest of the American people.

This shouldn’t be a close call. Yet nearly no one expects the Senate to convict. To do so would require a supermajority of 67 votes, meaning 17 Republicans would need to join forces with the Democrats and two independents. Only six Republicans voted this week to even recognize the constitutionality of trying a former president.

Many G.O.P. senators made clear heading into this trial that — whether out of fear, fealty or both — they still aren’t prepared to cross Mr. Trump and risk alienating his cultlike following. At moments, some were visibly shaken by the evidence being presented, but a handful were so committed to telegraphing their disdain for the process that they couldn’t be bothered to watch the House managers’ presentation. They doodled or played on their phones or simply averted their eyes as the horror unfolded.

This abdication of duty is heartbreaking for the nation. It isn’t just that these senators are putting the interests of a single man ahead of the interests of the nation; it’s also a tacit admission that the only constituents that many Republicans consider worth representing are their most partisan supporters. These lawmakers see themselves less as public servants committed to the common good than as party functionaries serving tribal interests.

It is also politically shortsighted. To reclaim the Republican Party from the MAGAverse, thoughtful, principled conservatives need to make clear that Mr. Trump is no longer in charge. Holding him accountable for his role in the Jan. 6 attack is one of Republican lawmakers’ best opportunities to signal that they, like so much of the country, are ready to break free and move on.

Moving on does not mean downplaying Mr. Trump’s incitements. The former president inspired an attack on a coequal branch of government. His behavior should not be excused simply because he is no longer the president — at least, not if the Republican Party hopes to serve as something more than a vehicle for a toxic cult of personality.

Mr. Trump has made clear that he intends to maintain his grip on the G.O.P. — and that he will work to punish any Republicans who dare to challenge him. If Republican senators do not act now to weaken his hold, they will have him hanging around their necks, clawing at their throats indefinitely. The next time he launches an attack on American democracy, they will have no one but themselves to blame.

When the House considered impeaching Mr. Trump for the second time, this board wrote that “President Trump’s efforts to remain in office in defiance of democracy cannot be allowed to go unanswered, lest they invite more lawlessness from this president or those who follow.”

Nothing presented at his trial refutes that position, and the evidence thus far presented only reinforces the urgent need for accountability.

Dear Commons Community,

Former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley in an interview skewers Trump stating that “we shouldn’t have followed him.”  Her comments came during an interview with Politico published this morning.  

“We need to acknowledge he let us down,” Haley, who served in her ambassador role under Trump, said. “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

Haley’s remarks are her strongest yet against the former president in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which was spurred by Trump’s repeated unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud that altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. 

The former South Carolina governor told Politico that she has not spoken with Trump since the mob attack, further expressing her disappointment with remarks Trump gave at a rally ahead of the riot condemning his own vice president, Mike Pence.

“When I tell you I’m angry, it’s an understatement,” Haley told Politico. “I am so disappointed in the fact that [despite] the loyalty and friendship he had with Mike Pence, that he would do that to him. Like, I’m disgusted by it.”

Haley in the days immediately following the attack said in a speech to Republican National Committee members that Trump was “badly wrong with his words,” at his Jan. 6 rally. 

“And it wasn’t just his words,” she added at the time. “His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history.”

Haley, who many speculate is a possible 2024 presidential contender, announced a new political action committee last month named after her Stand for America advocacy group. Haley spokeswoman Chaney Denton said at the time that the PAC would be focused on helping get conservatives back in the House and Senate in 2022. 

Great Nikki!  Now persuade some of your Republican colleagues in the Senate to vote their conscience at Trump’s impeachment trial.

Tony

Image from video of Donald Trump addressing the insurrectionists of the Capitol on January 6th

Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press has an article this morning describing that for the past week, Donald Trump was once again in the spotlight but “not on his own terms.”  During the impeachment trial,  his rallying cry to supporters has been dissected; his videos, press conferences and calls to Fox News have played on loop;  his Twitter account is once again dominating news coverage; and his missives read aloud in the Senate chamber. While Trump’s voice is again permeating the nation’s capital — he is at a loss to control the narrative.

As reported by Jill Colvin and Jonathan LeMire:

“Stripped of his social media megaphone, the former president has watched the searing opening days of his historic second impeachment trial unfold on television with none of his former tools for fighting back at his disposal. Instead, he will have to rely on a hastily assembled team of lawyers — whose initial appearance he panned — to present his defense against Democrats’ charges Friday.

“I think the only thing I can remember, frankly, where he’s been in such a weak position and unable really to change the story would be the bankruptcies in the early ’90s,” said Sam Nunberg, a former longtime Trump adviser.

Still, he argued that if Trump had access to Twitter, he would likely dig himself deeper into trouble.

In the days before the trial began this week, Trump was relatively disengaged from developments in Washington, spending his time golfing and plotting his future as he adjusts to the rhythms of a far more placid post-presidential life.

But Trump was quickly snapped out of that disengagement Tuesday as he watched the trial’s opening arguments unfold.

Trump exploded at aides about the shoddy performances of his lawyers, complaining that they seem ill-prepared and looked lousy on television. And he worked the phones, demanding a more aggressive defense, according to people familiar with his reaction.

Trump’s team and allies have assured him that he has more than enough Republican votes to acquit him of the Democrats’ charge that he incited the insurrection on Jan. 6. And they have convinced him that it is better he stay quiet to avoid the risk of saying something explosive that might alienate Senate jurors, including making his unfounded allegations of mass voter fraud a central argument of his defense. That means no media interviews, no blow-by-blow commentary, no call-ins to Fox News.

Trump’s inner circle acknowledged the two days of searing video had been damaging, but thought the Democrats’ case lost momentum on Thursday. Indeed, Trump was spotted back on the golf course by a CNN camera crew. What remained unclear: how and when Trump would respond to the verdict.

Trump’s inner circle remains confident of acquittal, but there are concerns among allies about the lasting damage the trial could do to his already battered reputation, potentially diminishing his future standing and ability to exert influence over a party he has controlled with an iron fist.

Aides know that the powerful images being shown at the trial — and carried live on broadcast networks — are bound to reach beyond cable news-watching political junkies and reach low-information voters, which could further collapse Trump’s standing. In the end, more Republicans may be willing to break from him, and some of his supporters may desert him, his aides fear.

“If he doesn’t make a mid-course correction here, he’s going to lose this Super Bowl,” said Peter Navarro, a former White House economic adviser who remains close with Trump and has been urging him to ditch his current legal team and focus his case on the voter fraud allegations that have been dismissed by dozens of judges and state election officials, as well as Trump’s former attorney general.

Trump is not expected to make any changes to his team, though David Schoen is expected to take the central role. Senior adviser Jason Miller said the legal team is expected to begin and conclude their argument Friday, using far less than their 16 hours of allotted time.

Even Trump loyalists have been surprised at how tight his grip has remained on the party since leaving office, with those who had rebuffed his attempts to overturn the election being met with fierce anger from the former president’s still-loyal base.

But Wednesday’s presentation, in particular, was a damning indictment, filled with searing, never-before-seen video and audio of the riot as Trump’s supporters violently clashed with police, smashed their way into the Capitol building and roamed the hallowed halls of Congress, menacingly hunting for lawmakers and successfully halting the final tally of electoral votes.

That footage was interspliced with Trump’s tweets and excerpts from his speeches as the House Democratic prosecutors methodically traced his monthslong effort to undermine his supporters’ faith in the election results, convince them the election had been stolen and push them to fight.

Through it all, Trump — who for decades described himself as the ultimate counterpuncher and his own best spokesperson — has been cut off from his former platforms. He has been banned from Twitter and Facebook. He no longer has a White House press corps on standby to chronicle his every utterance.

Even his post-presidential team’s effort to communicate via traditional press releases has been hampered by technical difficulties that have resulted in frequent delays in emails landing in reporters’ inboxes.

“It changes the dynamics so much, the fact that the president doesn’t have that platform,” said Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin Republican governor who ran against Trump in 2016, referring to his social media bullhorns.

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close ally of the president’s, said he had stressed to Trump that, while his team “will do better, can do better,” what matters is the outcome.

“I reinforced to the president: The case is over. It’s just a matter of getting the final verdict now,” he said.

Walker said that, in the end, he hoped the trial would help reunite Republicans currently engaged in a fierce debate over the future of the party and the extent to which Trump should be embraced.”

Today’s defense presentation by Trump’s attorneys should provide more political theater!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Science has an article in this week’s edition highlighting evidence that female academics and scientists were hit especially hard by the pandemic.  For the past year, many researchers worked fewer hours per day but parents and especially mothers lost the most time. The article (see below) comments that there has been a larger drop (33%) in manuscripts and published papers submitted by mothers as by fathers. The article goes on to say that professional journals and grant-funding agencies should consider allowing academics to submit COVID-19 impact statements going forward that describe how the  pandemic impeded their work.

Important consideration for our profession!

Tony

A security camera shows Vice President Mike Pence being evacuated as rioters breach the U.S. Capitol (Photo: Courtesy of the Associated Press)

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump posted a tweet attacking his own vice president for lacking “the courage” to overturn the election for him ― enraging his Jan. 6 mob even further ― just minutes after learning that Mike Pence had been removed from the Senate chamber for his own safety.  As reported by the Associated Press and the Huffington Post.

Newly elected Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) told reporters last night, following the second day of the former president’s impeachment trial, that Trump had called for his help in delaying election certification the afternoon of the U.S. Capitol attack but he had told Trump that Pence had just been taken from the Senate and he couldn’t talk just then.

“He didn’t get a chance to say a whole lot because I said, ‘Mr. President, they just took the vice president out. I’ve got to go,’” Tuberville said.

According to video footage from that day, Pence was removed from the Senate at 2:14 p.m. after rioters had broken into the Capitol, meaning that when Trump lashed out at Pence at 2:24 p.m., he already knew Pence’s life was in danger.

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” Trump wrote in his tweet.

Videos shown by Democratic House members presenting their impeachment case document that rioters were aware of Trump’s tweet. Some had erected a gallows outside the Capitol. Others roamed the halls, chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.”

The exact time Pence was taken from the Senate following the breach of the Capitol by the mob Trump had incited to try to overturn the presidential election was known the day of the attack, as was the time of Trump’s tweet. What was not known until Tuberville’s statement was whether Trump was aware of the danger Pence was in at the time he posted his tweet.

Miller and other Trump boosters have been arguing that the former president did not incite the mob that attacked the Capitol and that he could not have known that they would resort to violence.

Democrats presenting the impeachment case spent hours Wednesday showing that Trump began claiming he could only lose reelection if the other side cheated many months before Nov. 3 and that he began ramping up his language encouraging supporters “to fight” starting just days after losing by 7 million votes.

All but six Republican senators voted Tuesday to dismiss the impeachment case as “unconstitutional” because Trump is no longer in office. Should Trump be convicted with a two-thirds supermajority, a simple majority vote would prevent him from ever seeking federal office again.

Trump’s behavior becomes more and more despicable.  Pence was a loyal vice president for four years, yet Trump would purposely put him in harm’s way because he would not do the ex-president”s shameless bidding to overthrow the election.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

NBC News is reporting that Twitter will uphold its ban on former President Donald Trump, even if he were to run for office again, according to the company’s chief financial officer, Ned Segal.

“When you’re removed from the platform, you’re removed from the platform,” Twitter Segal told CNBC in an interview yesterday (see video above).

“Our policies are designed to make sure that people are not inciting violence,” Segal said. “He was removed when he was president and there’d be no difference for anybody who’s a public official once they’ve been removed from the service.”

Segal also pushed back against claims that users may have fled to other social media platforms in response to Trump’s removal.

“We added 40 million people to our DAU [daily active user count] last year, and 5 million last quarter,” Segal said. “In January, we added more DAU than the average of the last four Januarys, so hopefully that gives people a sense for the momentum we’ve got from all the hard work we’ve done on the service.”

Twitter was the first social media platform to take permanent action against Trump following the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, after applying an initial 12-hour suspension (see video below.)

“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” the company announced in a blog post on Jan. 8.

Snapchat has also permanently banned Trump.

Facebook continues to uphold its temporary suspension on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts until further notice. The Facebook Oversight Board, an independent digital supreme court for the company, is in the midst of reviewing the case and is expected to announce whether the decision stands in the coming months.

I agree with Twitter’s position!

Tony

Mark Cuban

Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press is reporting Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has decided not to play the national anthem before the team’s home games.

The Mavericks played their first 10 regular-season home games without fans. The club had fans for the first time in Monday’s 127-122 win over Minnesota. Dallas is allowing 1,500 vaccinated essential workers to attend games for free.

Cuban didn’t elaborate on his decision not to play the anthem, saying nobody had noticed.  The Athletic first reported that Dallas had dropped the anthem.

NBA spokesman Tim Frank said, “Under the unique circumstances of this season, teams are permitted to run their pregame operations as they see fit.”

Cuban was outspoken against critics of NBA players and coaches kneeling during “The Star-Spangled Banner” when the 2019-20 season resumed in the bubble in Florida last summer.

The pregame national anthem is a staple of American sports at both the professional and collegiate level, but is far less commonplace at pro sporting events in other countries.

Cuban’s decision!

Tony