Dear Commons Community,

The United States federal government has issued its first passport with an “X” gender designation, marking a milestone in the recognition of the rights of people who do not identify as male or female, and expects to be able to offer the option more broadly next year, the State Department said yesterday.

The department did not identify the passport recipient, but Dana Zzyym (see photo above) of Fort Collins, Colorado, told the Associated Press in a telephone interview it was their passport.  Zzyym, who prefers a gender-neutral pronoun, has been in a legal battle with the government since 2015 over a passport.

Zzyym (pronounced Zimm) said the fight for the passport with an accurate gender designation was a way to help the next generation of intersex people win recognition as full citizens with rights. 

“I’m not a problem. I’m a human being. That’s the point,” Zzyym said.

The U.S. special diplomatic envoy for LGBTQ rights, Jessica Stern, said the decision brings the government documents in line with the “lived reality” that there is a wider spectrum of human sex characteristics than is reflected in the previous two designations.

“When a person obtains identity documents that reflect their true identity, they live with greater dignity and respect,” Stern said.

Zzyym was denied a passport for failing to check male or female on an application. According to court documents, Zzyym wrote “intersex” above the boxes marked “M” and “F” and requested an “X” gender marker instead in a separate letter.

Zzyym was born with ambiguous physical sexual characteristics but was raised as a boy and had several surgeries that failed to make Zzyym appear fully male, according to court filings. Zzyym served in the Navy as a male but later came to identify as intersex while working and studying at Colorado State University. The State Department’s denial of Zzyym’s passport prevented Zzyym from being able to travel to a meeting of Organization Intersex International in Mexico.

The department said in June that it was moving toward adding a third gender marker for nonbinary, intersex and gender-nonconforming people but that would take time because of required updates to its computer systems. In addition, a department official said the passport application and system update with the “X” designation option still awaited approval from the Office of Management and Budget, which signs off on all government forms. 

The department now also allows applicants to self-select their gender as male or female, no longer requiring them to provide medical certification if their gender did not match that listed on their other identification documents. 

The United States joins a handful of countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Nepal and Canada, in allowing its citizens to designate a gender other than male or female on passports.

Stern said her office planned to talk about the U.S. experience with the change in its interactions around the world and hopes that might help inspire other governments to offer the option.

“We see this as a way of affirming and uplifting the human rights of trans and intersex and gender-nonconforming and nonbinary people everywhere,” she said.

This is a long overdue acknowledgment on the part of the US State Department.

Tony

We will see if  Maloney is right on Election Day – this coming Tuesday!

Max Boot

Dear Commons Community,

Conservative columnist Max Boot pinned the blame for the GOP’s “descent into madness and sedition” firmly on its leadership “or lack thereof” in his column yesterday for The Washington Post.

Boot torched prominent Donald Trump-adoring Republicans — including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — as “unprincipled opportunists” who have embraced the “lunatic fringe” of their party and let it “be captured by the crazies.”

“In the past, Republican leaders stood up to the zealots in their midst. Today, they stoke the flames of extremism — and wonder why they keep getting burned,” wrote Boot, who left the GOP in 2016 in protest of Donald Trump.

“Mock the Republican grassroots all you like. But the real problem is the complete abdication of responsibility by Republican leaders,” Boot cautioned.

“Rather than trying to restrain the zeal of their most fanatical followers, they are amplifying it,” he said. “Blame the party’s elites, not its rank and file, for its descent into madness and sedition.”

Boot has it right – no pun intended!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel voted unanimously  yesterday, with one abstention, that the Pfizer vaccine be made available to children ages 5-11.  The FDA isn’t bound by the panel’s recommendation and is expected to make its final decision within days. If the FDA authorizes the kid-size doses,  the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will also have to decide whether to recommend the shots and which youngsters should get them.  Dr. Anthony Fauci believes that the FDA and CDC will follow the advisory panel’s recommendation.As reported by the Associated Press.

“While children are at lower risk of severe COVID-19 than older people, ultimately many panelists decided it’s important to give parents the choice to protect their youngsters — especially those at high risk of illness or who live in places where other precautions, like masks in schools, aren’t being used.

The virus is “not going away. We have to find a way to live with it and I think the vaccines give us a way to do that,” said FDA adviser Jeannette Lee of the University of Arkansas.

“I do think it’s a relatively close call,” said adviser Dr. Eric Rubin of Harvard University. “It’s really going to be a question of what the prevailing conditions are but we’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it.”

Full-strength shots made by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech already are recommended for everyone 12 and older but pediatricians and many parents are clamoring for protection for younger children. The extra-contagious delta variant has caused an alarming rise in pediatric infections — and families are frustrated with school quarantines and having to say no to sleepovers and other rites of childhood to keep the virus at bay.

States are getting ready to roll out shots for little arms — in special orange-capped vials to distinguish them from adult vaccine — as soon as the government gives the OK. More than 25,000 pediatricians and other primary care providers have signed up so far to offer vaccination.

While there is less COVID-19 among 5- to 11-year-olds, they still have faced substantial illness — including over 8,300 hospitalizations reported, about a third requiring intensive care, and nearly 100 deaths.

A study of elementary schoolchildren found the Pfizer shots are nearly 91% effective at preventing symptomatic infection — even though the youngsters received just a third of the dose given to teens and adults.

Pfizer’s study tracked 2,268 children ages 5 to 11 who got two shots three weeks apart of either a placebo or the kid dose. Vaccinated youngsters developed levels of virus-fighting antibodies just as strong as teens and young adults who got the full-strength shots.

The kid dosage also proved safe, with similar or fewer temporary side effects — such as sore arms, fever or achiness — that teens experience. At FDA’s request, Pfizer more recently enrolled another 2,300 youngsters into the study, and preliminary safety data has shown no red flags.

The study isn’t large enough to detect any extremely rare side effects, such as the heart inflammation that occasionally occurs after the second dose, mostly in young men and teen boys.

Statistical models developed by FDA scientists showed that in most scenarios of the continuing pandemic, the vaccine would prevent far more COVID-19 hospitalizations in this age group than would potentially be caused by that very rare side effect, heart inflammation, that’s the big unknown.

Moderna also is studying its vaccine in young children, and Pfizer has additional studies underway in those younger than 5.”

Very good news!

Tony

Ron DeSantis
Dear Commons Community,

Dear Commons Community,

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) is plummeting into “anti-vaxx Crazyville,” the Miami Herald’s editorial board declared in a stinging column yesterday.

“We thought things couldn’t get much worse in DeSantis’ handling of the pandemic, but we were wrong — then we were wrong again,” the newspaper’s board wrote. “Just when you think he’s done enough to undermine our chances of exiting a pandemic that has killed nearly 60,000 Floridians, he has a new trick up his sleeve.”

Of particular concern for the newspaper was DeSantis’ new efforts announced last week to undermine President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

DeSantis now wants to make companies “liable for medical harm that results from mandatory vaccinations, even though millions of vaccines have safely been administered in the United States,” said the Herald.

“DeSantis has for months tried to walk the tight rope between pleasing anti-vaxxers and not undermining the vaccines his own administration has distributed,” it added. “If there was any doubt of which side he favors, Thursday’s announcement put the nail in the coffin.”

DeSantis has made so many wrong decisions for Florida.  I feel for its residents especially all of the vulnerable senior citizens who have retired there.

The entire editorial is below!

Tony

Miami Herald

“As Florida’s DeSantis descends into anti-vaxx Crazyville”

Editorial By the Miami Herald Editorial Board

Updated October 25, 2021 2:27 PM

Nothing can hide Florida’s descent into Crazyville. Not the “Don’t Tread on Florida” alligator signs held by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ supporters at his latest COVID-19 policy proposal announcement. Not the state’s new Ivy League-educated surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who, as reported by FloridaPolitics.com, refused — refused! — to wear a mask when he met with state Sen. Tina Polsky in her office in Tallahassee. The state senator, who represents parts of Broward and Palm Beach counties, has cancer.

Crazy.

We thought things couldn’t get much worse in DeSantis’ handling of the pandemic, but we were wrong — then we were wrong again. Just when you think he’s done enough to undermine our chances of exiting a pandemic that has killed nearly 60,000 Floridians, he has a new trick up his sleeve.

DeSantis’ latest move, announced Thursday, is to call a special legislative session to undermine federal requirements announced by President Biden that some workers be vaccinated against the coronavirus. Among the laws he wants lawmakers to pass is making businesses liable for medical harm that results from mandatory vaccinations, even though millions of vaccines have safely been administered in the United States. DeSantis has for months tried to walk the tight rope between pleasing anti-vaxxers and not undermining the vaccines his own administration has distributed. If there was any doubt of which side he favors, Thursday’s announcement put the nail in the coffin.

He has every motivation to ignore the facts and continue to stoke COVID denial and anti-vaxx fervor. His policy proposals are usually followed by a fundraising pitch from his campaign to potential donors, as the USA TODAY Network has reported. That model has worked for DeSantis, who’s outraised his Democratic opponents in next year’s elections. Not that he cares too much about 2022. It’s 2024 he probably has his eyes on, and he will do whatever it takes to appeal to the “Don’t tread on me” crowd, which he hopes to inherit from Donald Trump. That’s if the former president doesn’t crush his protege’s presidential aspirations by running himself.

The state’s death toll is all but a footnote in the governor’s playbook. Contrast that with Miami-Dade County Public Schools, which announced Wednesday it might relax its mask requirement this week, the Herald reported. That decision will be based on data and advice from a task force of doctors.

New state rule adds a twist to school mask battle Gov. Ron DeSantis doubled down on his insistence that parents should decide whether their children wear masks at school and whether they should quarantine or attend school after being exposed to someone who has tested positive for COVID-19. When the mask mandate was announced, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho vowed to reassess pandemic conditions weekly. Seven criteria must be met before restrictions are lifted, including a benchmark of 80% of eligible students who have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine and two consecutive weeks of a seven-day average of COVID-19 cases below 100 per 100,000 people.

Luckily, with coronavirus cases and hospitalizations on the decline in Miami-Dade County and Florida, students might soon be able to attend schools sans masks. If the opposite were true, they would have to wear masks for longer. It sounds so simple, but the governor doesn’t believe in using data.

Instead, DeSantis seems to be getting his scientific advice from the far-right Ladapo, a Harvard-educated physician with no expertise in public health, who questions vaccines and joined a news conference with an ultra-right wing group called America’s Frontline Doctors last year to promote hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID, which the FDA has said isn’t effective. Another member of that group once said a uterine condition is caused by sex with demons that takes place in dreams.

We’re not making this up.

Neither is the governor, who want taxpayers to pay to send lawmakers to Tallahassee for a special session for this nonsense. Florida House and Senate leaders seem ready to jump on the crazy train. They issued a statement Thursday saying they are looking into the governor’s request and might consider legislation to withdraw Florida from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the agency in charge of carrying out Biden’s vaccination mandate. It’s unclear whether they can actually do that, but feasibility is not the point.

This is going to give Fox News and other right-wing misinformation outlets lots of fodder. It will make DeSantis and Republicans seem like heroes in their echo chamber.

Meanwhile, school districts like Miami-Dade’s must actually govern and make decisions that will impact the health of students, faculty and staff. They don’t have the luxury of chest-thumping from a capital almost 500 miles away.

Dear Commons Community,

Rolling Stone has an article this morning claiming that planners of the insurrection on January 6th met several times with members of Congress and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and were assured pardons for their participation.  Here is an excerpt:

“As the House investigation into the Jan. 6 attack heats up, some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent. 

Rolling Stone separately confirmed a third person involved in the main Jan. 6 rally in D.C. has communicated with the committee. This is the first report that the committee is hearing major new allegations from potential cooperating witnesses. While there have been prior indications that members of Congress were involved, this is also the first account detailing their purported role and its scope. The two sources also claim they interacted with members of Trump’s team, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who they describe as having had an opportunity to prevent the violence. 

The two sources, both of whom have been granted anonymity due to the ongoing investigation, describe participating in “dozens” of planning briefings ahead of that day when Trump supporters broke into the Capitol as his election loss to President Joe Biden was being certified. 

“I remember Marjorie Taylor Greene specifically,” the organizer says. “I remember talking to probably close to a dozen other members at one point or another or their staffs.”

For the sake of clarity, we will refer to one of the sources as a rally organizer and the other as a planner. Rolling Stone has confirmed that both sources were involved in organizing the main event aimed at objecting to the electoral certification, which took place at the White House Ellipse on Jan. 6. Trump spoke at that rally and encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol. Some members of the audience at the Ellipse began walking the mile and a half to the Capitol as Trump gave his speech. The barricades were stormed minutes before the former president concluded his remarks.

These two sources also helped plan a series of demonstrations that took place in multiple states around the country in the weeks between the election and the storming of the Capitol. According to these sources, multiple people associated with the March for Trump and Stop the Steal events that took place during this period communicated with members of Congress throughout this process. 

Along with Greene, the conspiratorial pro-Trump Republican from Georgia who took office earlier this year, the pair both say the members who participated in these conversations or had top staffers join in included Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).

“We would talk to Boebert’s team, Cawthorn’s team, Gosar’s team like back to back to back to back,” says the organizer.  

And Gosar, who has been one of the most prominent defenders of the Jan. 6 rioters, allegedly took things a step further. Both sources say he dangled the possibility of a “blanket pardon” in an unrelated ongoing investigation to encourage them to plan the protests.

“Our impression was that it was a done deal,” the organizer says, “that he’d spoken to the president about it in the Oval … in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support.” 

The organizer claims the pair received “several assurances” about the “blanket pardon” from Gosar.

“I was just going over the list of pardons and we just wanted to tell you guys how much we appreciate all the hard work you’ve been doing,” Gosar said, according to the organizer.

The rally planner describes the pardon as being offered while “encouraging” the staging of protests against the election. While the organizer says they did not get involved in planning the rallies solely due to the pardon, they were upset that it ultimately did not materialize.

“I would have done it either way with or without the pardon,” the organizer says. “I do truly believe in this country, but to use something like that and put that out on the table when someone is so desperate, it’s really not good business.”

Gosar’s office did not respond to requests for comment on this story. Rolling Stone has separately obtained documentary evidence that both sources were in contact with Gosar and Boebert on Jan. 6. We are not describing the nature of that evidence to preserve their anonymity. The House select committee investigating the attack also has interest in Gosar’s office. Gosar’s chief of staff, Thomas Van Flein, was among the people who were named in the committee’s “sweeping” requests to executive-branch agencies seeking documents and communications from within the Trump administration. Both sources claim Van Flein was personally involved in the conversations about the “blanket pardon” and other discussions about pro-Trump efforts to dispute the election. Van Flein did not respond to a request for comment. “

If you are following the House Congressional hearings on the January 6th insurrection, this article provides compelling commentary.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education this morning has an article describing the financial plight of the ACT and the College Board.  The two major standardized testing organizations in the United States are losing substantial revenue due to the pandemic and the decisions of colleges and organizations to forgo admissions test.  Here is an excerpt from the article.

“A new financial filing from the nonprofit that runs one of America’s most prominent standardized tests paints a grim picture of the organization’s finances.

The revenues generated by ACT Inc. from educational assessment and work-force development — a category that includes the ACT exam — declined by nearly $100 million during just the fiscal year that ended on August 31, 2020.

The fallout was even starker at the College Board, where net program service-fee revenues — including what it earns from overseeing the SAT — in calendar year 2020 fell by $286 million compared to 2019. The organization warned in its financial statements that Covid-19’s effect on its bottom line could run the gamut from “a decline in revenues, an increase in operating costs, and/or potential future liquidity concerns.”

The revenue losses come during a time of upheaval in the standardized-testing industry. The pandemic has prompted hundreds of colleges to suspend, at least temporarily, their ACT and SAT requirements, and many appear unlikely to reinstate them.

In a move that still reverberates throughout higher education, the University of California’s Board of Regents voted unanimously in 2020 to stop using those exams altogether in evaluations of applicants. A UC faculty committee recommended this month that the system should not adopt an alternative exam called Smarter Balanced to replace the ACT and SAT. The committee wrote in a report that the exam would reduce the admission rates for Black, Hispanic, and low-income applicants while providing “modest incremental value” in predicting first-year grades at UC.

Though it would be premature to say that college-entrance tests are fading away, their grip on higher education is weakening, which will continue to affect the bottom line of two testing titans.

In a statement to The Chronicle, Curt D. Yedlik, ACT’s chief financial officer, wrote that prior to the pandemic, ACT completed a series of investments and acquisitions important to the organization’s long-term future. And when the pandemic hit, ACT sought to ensure the safety of students, educators, and personnel, including by canceling test dates.

“These steps were prudent and necessary, despite the effects for ACT’s bottom line,” Yedlik wrote.

Before ACT posted an overall loss of $60 million in fiscal year 2020, it had disclosed a $34-million loss a year before. Between fiscal years 2011-18, ACT never posted an overall loss of greater than $4 million.

In late May of 2020, The Gazette of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, reported ACT Inc. would implement a series of cost-cutting measures at the organization. The suite of publicized actions included voluntary resignations, temporary pay-raise suspensions, and a reduction of certain fringe benefits.

ACT Inc. also agreed in 2020 to pay $16 million to California students with disabilities as part of a class-action settlement.”

I believe that both testing giants will be in trouble beyond the pandemic.  When major public higher education institutions such as those in California start eliminating admissions tests, the future is not rosy for the testing organizations.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Down in her column yesterday, looked at a slice of Colin Powell’s life yesterday and lamented that he did not seek higher office.  Entitled, Colin Powell and ”Guernica” here is an excerpt.

“If we could unlock the puzzle of Colin Powell, maybe we could understand why America cracked up.

General Powell was the best America had to offer. He was the son of Jamaican immigrants in the South Bronx who became a hero in Vietnam and then the first African American secretary of state.

He was smart and charismatic, with an easy laugh and a Corvette Stingray. At Washington parties, even ones where Jack Nicholson dropped in, people gravitated toward Powell.

He could even speak a little Yiddish, from his teenage stint as “a schlepper” at a baby furniture and toy store owned by immigrant Jews and as a Shabbos goy in the neighborhood.

He could have been president. Excitement swirled around him when he published his memoir “My American Journey” on the cusp of the ’96 race.

But like another son of immigrants, Mario Cuomo, Powell shrank from a run at the last minute. It always struck me that Cuomo and Powell seemed to overanalyze whether they were worthy, while the WASPy sons of privilege, like George W. Bush and Dan Quayle, just assumed they were worthy, no matter how little they knew.

Back in 1995, I wrote a column about the needlepoint-pillow rules Powell laid out in his memoir. It is sad to read them now because he broke so many of them when he drove his tank off the cliff known as Iraq. Like Rule No. 7: “You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make yours.”

Rule No. 1 was: “It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.”

But there will be no morning from here to eternity when the decision to invade Iraq will look better.

Powell even failed to follow the Powell doctrine, which shunned attenuated wars in which our national security interests were not at stake.

The Shakespearean tragedy of Powell is that he knew it was a rotten decision. And, unlike the draft dodgers in the Bush White House, he knew the real cost of war. He knew they weren’t playing with toy soldiers.

But Powell embodied the phrase “soldiering on.”

He did not resign in protest, which might have stiffened the spines of Joe Biden, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, who all voted to authorize the war out of political expediency.

He let Dick Cheney goad him into making the phony case for war at the United Nations; Cheney mocked Powell, asking if he was afraid to jeopardize his soaring popularity ratings, treating him like a flower child. And somehow, Powell naïvely thought that he and his pal George Tenet could scrub his speech of all the deceptions shoehorned in by Cheney’s co-conspirators.”

Powell was definitely presidential material but his years in the George W. Bush administration and being manipulated by the likes of Cheney and Rumsfeld soiled his star.

Dowd’s entire column is below!

Tony

The New York Times

Colin Powell and ‘Guernica’

Oct. 23, 2021

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

WASHINGTON — If we could unlock the puzzle of Colin Powell, maybe we could understand why America cracked up.

General Powell was the best America had to offer. He was the son of Jamaican immigrants in the South Bronx who became a hero in Vietnam and then the first African American secretary of state.

He was smart and charismatic, with an easy laugh and a Corvette Stingray. At Washington parties, even ones where Jack Nicholson dropped in, people gravitated toward Powell.

He could even speak a little Yiddish, from his teenage stint as “a schlepper” at a baby furniture and toy store owned by immigrant Jews and as a Shabbos goy in the neighborhood.

He could have been president. Excitement swirled around him when he published his memoir “My American Journey” on the cusp of the ’96 race.

But like another son of immigrants, Mario Cuomo, Powell shrank from a run at the last minute. It always struck me that Cuomo and Powell seemed to overanalyze whether they were worthy, while the WASPy sons of privilege, like George W. Bush and Dan Quayle, just assumed they were worthy, no matter how little they knew.

Back in 1995, I wrote a column about the needlepoint-pillow rules Powell laid out in his memoir. It is sad to read them now because he broke so many of them when he drove his tank off the cliff known as Iraq. Like Rule No. 7: “You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make yours.”

Rule No. 1 was: “It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.”

But there will be no morning from here to eternity when the decision to invade Iraq will look better.

Powell even failed to follow the Powell doctrine, which shunned attenuated wars in which our national security interests were not at stake.

The Shakespearean tragedy of Powell is that he knew it was a rotten decision. And, unlike the draft dodgers in the Bush White House, he knew the real cost of war. He knew they weren’t playing with toy soldiers.

But Powell embodied the phrase “soldiering on.”

He did not resign in protest, which might have stiffened the spines of Joe Biden, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, who all voted to authorize the war out of political expediency.

He let Dick Cheney goad him into making the phony case for war at the United Nations; Cheney mocked Powell, asking if he was afraid to jeopardize his soaring popularity ratings, treating him like a flower child. And somehow, Powell naïvely thought that he and his pal George Tenet could scrub his speech of all the deceptions shoehorned in by Cheney’s co-conspirators.

The demonic Cheney and the war-loving neocons in his posse — the ones in the Pentagon were ridiculed by Powell as a “Gestapo office” — needed an unimpeachable frontman. Once they began leeching Powell’s integrity, there was no way that they weren’t going to drain him dry.

The great man got played, turning sap for a vice president he didn’t even care for. He never trusted Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld’s unhealthy “fever” about deserting Afghanistan to go after Saddam.

Diplomats referred to Iraq as “The House of Broken Toys.” But in the end, it was America that was broken.

I was stunned when Mary McGrory, the liberal lioness of The Washington Post, wrote that Powell “persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince.” She explained that she was “clinging tightly to the toga of Colin Powell” because no one commanded such respect.

Powell later admitted it was wrong to denounce Saddam’s “web of lies” when the Bush administration was spinning its own web of half-truths and fantasies. But you can’t wipe that slate clean. The consequences were too severe.

We’re still living in a world warped by the fakery of W. and Cheney. We’re still shattered because W. and Condi Rice ignored that intelligence report titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” W. was too busy mountain biking to pay attention.

If our leaders could trick us into the Iraq misadventure, how could we trust government again? And when government is not trusted, it creates fertile ground for charlatans.

Donald Trump fed off — and is still feeding off — those severed ties of trust between Americans and their government. A substantial chunk of the public believes Trump’s lies and conspiracies.

And most of those craven House Republicans are still so frightened of Trump’s power, as he ramps up for another run, that they refused to stand up for their own institution and hold Steve Bannon in contempt.

Powell is a cautionary tale for another reason. He was supposed to be the “grown-up in the room,” a counterweight to W.’s callowness. It didn’t work. Powell folded and hundreds of thousands, and counting, died.

The G.O.P. returned to the same concept with Trump and Jim Mattis and it also failed. And it certainly wouldn’t work if Trump were re-elected. Emboldened, he’d surround himself with a full squad of Mark Meadows clones.

Powell should have paid more attention to his Rule No. 8: “Check small things.”

When U.N. officials covered up a tapestry of Picasso’s antiwar masterpiece, “Guernica,” before his speech, Powell should have checked that small thing. The discordance of the secretary of state selling the bombing of Iraq in front of the shrouded image of shrieking and mutilated women, men, children, bulls and horses spoke volumes.

A sign outside a dining hall at Michigan State University. Dining halls at the school have been affected by a lack of workers. The school is asking professors and others to volunteer to work a few hours. (Nick King/Lansing State Journal via AP)

Dear Commons Community,

Short of staff, Michigan State University is making an urgent plea to all employees including faculty to volunteer in campus dining halls.

MSU’s residential services department has already asked 132 full-time employees to work eight hours a week, the Lansing State Journal reported, but it’s apparently not enough.

“Faculty and staff from around campus are invited to sign up to assist in the dining halls! We have specific needs during evenings and weekends,” Vennie Gore, a senior vice president, said in an email to deans.

Gore provided a link to a criminal background check and tips on how to prepare for the first shift.

Devin Silvia, director of undergraduate studies in MSU’s computational math department, said the request was “astounding.”

“I am all about supporting the MSU student community and making sure they have a positive experience,” said Silvia, who was paid at least $100,000 in 2020-21. “But at the end of the day, I’m doing that in my own career and questioning whether I’m being sufficiently compensated.”

About 4,000 students typically work in dining halls, but only 1,200 were employed at the end of September, the State Journal reported.

Starting pay was recently raised from $12 to $15 an hour. Gore said MSU is competing with local businesses for workers.

While not funny, I am not sure faculty would enjoy serving hamburgers.

Tony

Chris Wallace’s comment about Jen Psake comes at the 12:40 mark

Dear Commons Community,

After four years of Trump press secretaries Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephanie Grisham, and Kayleigh McEnany, Joe Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, has been a breath of fresh air. Democrats have loved Psaki because they see her as having brought back a sense of competence and reliability.  Republicans and conservative have been more critical of her.  So it came as no surprise when Chris Wallace commented that she was “one of the best press secretaries ever,” that the far right and especially his colleagues at Fox News went berserk.

Chris Wallace knows about press secretaries. He began working as a White House press correspondent back in the 1970’s. So it was quite a compliment when he called Psaki one of the best press secretaries ever.

Wallace made the comments while speaking with Sandra Smith (see video above). The host played a clip of Doocy and Psaki discussing Joe Biden’s recent trip to the border. He responded, “Honestly, as somebody who’s spent six years in the White House, my immediate reaction was those are two people at the top of their game.”

Wallace then moved onto Psaki, noting, [she] is one of the best press secretaries ever. I don’t know that anything was particularly accomplished, but they both gave and got pretty good.”

Fox News nation is having fits!

Sebastian Gorka, a pathetic Fox News contributor, tweeted that Wallace was “a clown” for his compliment about Psaki.

Tony