House January 6th Committee – Rep. Adam Kinzinger and Rep. Liz Cheney are 2nd and 3rd from the right.

Dear Commons Community,

As the House Congressional Committee on the January 6^th  insurrection heats up (there is another televised hearing today), Republican leaders are trying to undermine the integrity of the proceedings by claiming that it is not bipartisan. Donald Trump weighed in on the issue yesterday and said it was a  “Very, very foolish.”

However,  it was his party, influenced by him personally, that stonewalled participation, apparently hoping the probe would die on the vine.  As reported by the Huffington Post.

“A bad decision was made,” Trump said in an interview with conservative radio host Wayne Allyn Root on his program, “Raw & Unfiltered.” It was a “bad decision not to have [Republican] representation on that committee,” he added.

Trump emphasized: “That was a very, very foolish decision.”

Now, he claims, the investigation is a “one-sided witch hunt.”

The House select committee was formed last year after Senate Republicans voted to block creation of a bipartisan 9/11-style commission to probe the Capitol riot.

Trump at the time called such a commission a “Democrat trap.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had claimed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) wasn’t negotiating in “good faith” on commission details. But Pelosi agreed that members be divided evenly between parties, and that unanimous agreement would be required before any subpoenas were issued.

Democrats then sought to form a bipartisan House select committee. But Republicans stonewalled that, too, after Pelosi refused committee slots to two of five lawmakers recommended by McCarthy: Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Jim Banks of Indiana.

Both men had voted to overturn the results of the presidential election based on lies that the vote was rigged, which Pelosi said would undermine the integrity of the panel.

McCarthy then yanked all five of his recommendations and stopped cooperating to create a bipartisan panel.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) are currently the only Republicans participating with seven Democrats on the House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol.

Now a string of Republicans from the Trump administration are testifying against their former boss about his role inciting the violent storming of the Capitol last year.

According to a new ABC New/Ipsos poll, 60% of Americans surveyed believe the panel is conducting a “fair and impartial” investigation, and 58% believe that Trump should be charged for his role in the insurrection.

The GOP and Trump had their chance and blew it.  Don’t cry about it now!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

With several hearings for the House select committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol now complete, 58% of Americans believe former President Donald Trump should be charged with a crime for his role in the incident, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds.

Six in 10 Americans also believe the committee is conducting a fair and impartial investigation, according to the poll.

Attitudes on whether Americans think Trump is responsible for the attack on the U.S. Capitol remain relatively stable. In the new ABC News/Ipsos poll, 58% of Americans think Trump bears a “great deal” or a “good amount” of responsibility for the attack on the Capitol. This is unchanged from an ABC News/Ipsos poll in December 2021 and similar to the findings of an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted just after the attack in January 2021.

The poll divides along party lines, with 91% of Democrats thinking Trump should be charged with a crime compared to 19% of Republicans. On whether Trump bears a “great deal” or a “good amount” of responsibility for the attack, 91% of Democrats and 21% of Republicans say he does.

Among self-described independents, 62% think Trump should be charged and 61% think he bears a “great deal” or a “good amount” of responsibility.

The ABC News/Ipsos poll was conducted after the committee held its third of seven public hearings scheduled for this month, which detail what the committee says was a “sophisticated, seven-part plan” by Trump and his supporters to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden.

On Friday, Trump lambasted the hearing, calling the panel “con artists,” while continuing to air false claims about the 2020 election.

“There’s no clearer example of the menacing spirit that has devoured the American left than the disgraceful performance being staged by the unselect committee,” Trump said at a conference hosted by the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Nashville, Tennessee.

Overall, 60% of Americans think the committee is conducting a fair and impartial investigation while 38% say it is not, the new ABC News/Ipsos poll found. That was evenly divided at 40% in the April ABC News/Washington Post poll, which also found that 20% of Americans had no opinion on the matter just two months ago.

When it comes to the fairness of the committee, Americans are again divided along party lines in the latest poll, with 85% of Democrats finding the investigation fair and impartial, compared to 31% of Republicans. Independents’ views fall in-between at 63%.

Democrats are more likely to be following the hearings. Overall, 34% of Americans are following the hearings very or somewhat closely, with 43% of Democrats and 22% of Republicans saying so. In a reminder of where political attention is, just under one in 10 (9%) Americans say they are following the hearings very closely.

On whether the investigation will have an impact at the polls, just over half (51%) of Americans say that what they’ve read, seen or heard about the hearings has made no difference in who they plan to support in this November’s election. Meanwhile, 29% say they are more likely to support Democratic candidates and 19% say they are more likely to support Republican candidates.

The bipartisan committee, led by chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and vice-chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., is in the midst of summing up its 11-month-long investigation into the attack. So far the hearings have largely focused on how Trump pushed the “big lie” of a stolen 2020 race and the pressure campaign on then-Vice President Mike Pence.

The panel has also shared never-before-seen footage from the riot and interviews with Trump administration and White House officials.

This ABC News/Ipsos poll was conducted using Ipsos Public Affairs‘ KnowledgePanel® June 17-18, 2022, in English and Spanish, among a random national sample of 545 adults. Results have a margin of sampling error of 4.5 points, including the design effect. Partisan divisions are 28-26-40 percent, Democrats-Republicans-independents. See the poll’s topline results and details on the methodology here.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times writer, Emma Goldberg, has an article this morning commenting on the millions of people using Zoom and other videoconferencing software to work at home.  Referring to Claude Taylor who rates backgrounds and rooms people use during video conferences, she comments on the dos and don’ts of what co-workers see.  She also comments on the fact that after two plus years of Zooming, people still are challenged using relatively easy features such as mute buttons.  Below is her entire article.

Interesting read for those of us who rely on videoconferencing these days.

Tony

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The New York Times

You’re Still on Mute

Emma Goldberg

June 20, 2022

It’s been almost 28 months since offices shut down and millions of people started working from home. More than enough time to buy a ring light, hang some art on the walls and figure out the mute button. But as is clear to Claude Taylor, co-creator of the Twitter account Room Rater, which scores video call backgrounds, that is not what has happened.

“You’re not going to do well,” he warned me, spying my spare and dimly lit walls over Zoom. “You have to put up some artwork. Slap a big frame there!”

Mr. Taylor rated my video backdrop a three out of 10, though he softened the blow with a word of caution: “The whole thing is just a schtick,” he said. “We’re not interior decorators. We just pretend to be on Twitter.”

There was a moment in April 2020 when hand sanitizer was scarce, time was plentiful and perhaps to distract from the fear and uncertainty of a raging pandemic, those who were lucky enough to be stuck at home took pleasure in judging the homes of others, who were also stuck. Mr. Taylor and his friend Jessie Bahrey started posting their judgments on Twitter. Celebrities scrambled for better Room Rater scores, outfitting their homes with plants, posters and the obligatory copy of Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker.”

“Within months, people that we were rating as twos and threes were becoming eights, nines and 10s,” said Mr. Taylor, who has written a book with Ms. Bahrey called “How to Zoom Your Room,” set to be released this week. “People have cleaned up their act quite a bit. Of course, we take some degree of credit for that.”

But not everybody got around to doing Zoom room improvement. Though the number of daily Zoom participants jumped from 10 million in December 2019 to 300 million in April 2020, many are still sitting in front of blank walls that create what Mr. Taylor calls “hostage videos.” They are angling the camera up their noses for an accidental “full nostril view.”

At the end of 2021, three million professional roles went permanently remote. Many other workers have been in limbo, going back to the office either part-time or waiting for a return-to-office plan that won’t be postponed. Office occupancy across the country remains under 50 percent. The confusion and ambivalence people feel can make it hard to invest in making a remote work setup feel permanent.

“Investing in a future that’s uncertain is tough,” said Dr. Emily Anhalt, a clinical psychologist and co-founder of the mental health start-up Coa. “If you want to go back to the office, and you don’t want to stay home, there’s less of a chance you’ll drop money on a fancy background.”

Even Dr. Anhalt said she was hesitant to give up on the notion that any day or month she might be returning to her prepandemic routine: “I didn’t really take the time to grieve the life I was living before,” she said. “Getting to see my patients in person, getting to see their body language.”

Some workers have felt acutely the challenges of continuing to work from home. Parents have split their brains between professional obligations and kids. Extroverts have gone stir crazy in tiny apartments. Junior employees have wondered how to find mentors, or work friends.

“People are feeling that they’re at this continuous breaking point,” said Andréa Coutu, a business consultant. “Some are keen to return to the office so they could have that separation between work and home, so they’re not the default caregiver when something goes sideways.”

Many were thrust into the isolation of remote work abruptly, and they still haven’t accepted that their future work arrangements aren’t likely to look exactly like their pre-2020 ones did. The technical mishaps of the pandemic’s earliest weeks keep repeating themselves, like “The Office” meets “Groundhog Day.”

“You still have people that are like, ‘Sorry I was struggling with the mute button, can you hear me now?’” said Rachele Clegg, 28, who worked for a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., throughout most of the pandemic.

Back in March 2020, Ms. Clegg was in a meeting in which her boss’s video chat malfunctioned, and wouldn’t turn off the filter that made her look like a potato.

“When she leaned in she was a potato,” Ms. Clegg recalled. “When she leaned out she was a potato in the dirt.”

Ms. Clegg has been bemused to find that those sort of technological difficulties haven’t abated. Two years in, remote work still feels, sometimes, like an improv show.

Plenty of people have kept working from home with a certain level of flippancy, as though any day might herald a sweeping return back to cubicles and commutes. Last week Sujay Jaswa, a former Dropbox executive, did a video shoot with the camera aimed up toward his ceiling. (“His business philosophy does not include pulling off a decent zoom,” Room Rater wrote.) Managers say they have been surprised by some of the items that appear in the background of professional calls: laundry, bedsheets, takeout containers.

“I was interviewing someone for a job the other day and behind him on his counter was an open handle of vodka,” said Noah Zandan, who runs the coaching platform Quantified. “I do try to give people the benefit of the doubt about what’s behind them, but there are table-stakes things that need to happen.”

The more image conscious made an effort to elevate their video backgrounds earlier in the pandemic. Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic candidate for governor of Texas, was one of Room Rater’s most improved targets, pushing his score from zero to 10. The presidential historian Michael Beschloss was awarded for having the 2020 “Room of the Year,” apt recognition for a scholar who has studied what the Oval Office’s design can teach about presidential administrations.

Most workers were communicating with their bosses, not the American public. Still, spending on home improvement and maintenance rose, and is 11 percent higher than pre-Covid projections, according to the consulting firm McKinsey. Office furniture sales soared, especially ergonomic chairs.

People even paid to have literary experts curate their bookshelves. Books by the Foot, for example, which sells used books in bulk, spent the first few months of the pandemic catering to customers looking for erudite Zoom backgrounds. Requests poured in for boxes full of books about business, or books with earth tone covers.

“They wouldn’t say, ‘I’m looking for a Zoom background,’” said Chuck Roberts, the company’s owner. “They’d say ‘I want to have 12 feet of classic biographies,’ and usually we read between the lines.”

“By 2021 you did see a little bit less of that,” said Jessica Bowman, who manages the Books by the Foot service, explaining that many of her clients are now focused on filling their homes with books they genuinely want to read.

“The orders are becoming more personalized,” she added. “It’s the home being your own sanctuary, and just making it cozy for you, versus it being a Zoom background.”

Others maintain that a cozy — or even downright messy — Zoom background is a mark of pride, the sign of someone too industrious to bother hanging up art. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey received a score of two on Room Rater in May 2020. This hardly came as a surprise to him, he said, because he was spending that spring working long hours as the country dealt with crisis.

“This was before Rosario had officially moved in and my house was very bachelor, what you would expect for single-guy living,” he reflected in an interview last week, referring to his girlfriend at the time, the actress Rosario Dawson. “The only green things were growing in my refrigerator.”

The senator’s staffers, though, decided that an investment in his video background was worthwhile. His chief of staff asked someone to buy him 10 tiny plants, following an exchange with Room Rater. His score jumped to a 10, with the caption: “Ten plants. Ten tries.”

Tiny plants, it turns out, can have outsize effects. Some remote workers said little touches were all they needed to make their living rooms feel less like place holders for the office, and more like actual work spaces — all the more necessary as return to office plans get shelved.

“You know how a chef has a mise en place?” said Noel Casler, a podcaster and comedian. “I want a reminder of how big the world is, even when we’re all doing everything online.”

Looking into others’ Zoom backgrounds can be a reminder that some people have far more space to work with. Still, Mr. Taylor insists that everyone can brighten their homes: “We don’t want it to be lifestyles of the rich and famous.”

And Mr. Casler’s advice is not to go overboard. He borrows from Coco Chanel, who famously advised that before leaving the house people should “look in the mirror and take one thing off.”

“In cooking, writing, or whatever, less is always more,” Mr. Casler said.

In his case, less is a perfect score. Or, as he put it when asked about his Room Rater status: “Club 10 out of 10.”

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd in her column this morning comments on this week’s revelations during the January 6th Congressional hearings and specifically on the testimony of those who were close to Mike Pence during the insurrection. She describes the horrific situation that Trump tried to put Pence in by asking him to reject state presidential electors.  However, she comes down hard on Pence for the way he did Trump’s bidding for four years.  Here is an excerpt:

“At first, you think that fawning over the boss is a good way to move forward. But when you are dealing with a narcissist — and narcissists are the ones who like to be surrounded by sycophants — you can never be unctuous enough.

Narcissists are Grand Canyons of need. The more they are flattered, the more their appetite for flattery grows.

That is the hard, almost fatal, lesson Pence learned on Jan. 6, when he finally stood up to Donald Trump after Trump asked for one teensy favor: Help destroy American democracy and all we stand for.”

Her conclusion:  “The fate of a sycophant is never a happy one.”

Pence learned his lesson the hard way!

Below is the entire column.

Tony

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The New York Times

Maureen Dowd

Hence, Mike Pence

June 18, 2022

The fate of a sycophant is never a happy one.

At first, you think that fawning over the boss is a good way to move forward. But when you are dealing with a narcissist — and narcissists are the ones who like to be surrounded by sycophants — you can never be unctuous enough.

Narcissists are Grand Canyons of need. The more they are flattered, the more their appetite for flattery grows.

That is the hard, almost fatal, lesson Pence learned on Jan. 6, when he finally stood up to Donald Trump after Trump asked for one teensy favor: Help destroy American democracy and all we stand for.

In one, Karen Pence is protectively pulling a gold-fringed curtain shut in the vice president’s ceremonial office in the Capitol, off the Senate floor, as Pence — sitting beneath a large gilt mirror — stares off into space, probably wondering where it all went wrong.

We learned this week that when the vice president fled down the stairs, followed by an Air Force officer carrying the nuclear launch codes, the marauding mob was a few feet from him.

In a second picture, taken after Pence was brought to a secure location in an underground garage, his daughter Charlotte is anxiously watching him. He is holding a phone to his ear as he stares at another phone showing a video of Trump professing love for the crowd, which included some who carried baseball bats and zip ties and chanted “Hang Mike Pence!”

In the early afternoon, as the crowd tore down barricades and fought police, White House staffers worried things were “getting out of hand,” as Sarah Matthews, a Trump aide, testified.

They thought that the president needed to tweet something immediately. At 2:24 p.m., they got a notification that the president had indeed tweeted. But it was not the calming tweet they had hoped for; it was one designed to drive the rioters into a frenzy.

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify,” Trump tweeted. “USA demands the truth!”

As Matthews recalled in her deposition, “The situation was already bad, and so it felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire by tweeting that.”

Trump was still steaming from the contentious morning phone call when he failed to persuade the vice president to reject some of the states’ electors so they could be replaced with fake electors who supported Trump. He had railed at Pence with emasculating epithets.

As Trump recalled in a speech on Friday in Nashville, “I said to Mike, ‘If you do this, you can be Thomas Jefferson.’ And then, after it all went down, I looked at him one day and said, ‘I hate to say this, but you’re no Thomas Jefferson.’”

In the same speech, Trump had another line that was strikingly delusional, even for him. “For the radical left,” he said, “politics has become their religion. It has warped their sense of right and wrong. They don’t have a sense of right and wrong, true and false, good and evil.”

Trump sparked the mob to seek vengeance against Pence the same way Henry II sparked a crew to murder Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170. According to legend, after Becket defied Henry by excommunicating bishops supportive of the king, Henry muttered something to the effect of, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Four knights immediately rode to Canterbury Cathedral and sliced up Becket.

The line became a famous example of directing loyalists with indirection, cloaking an order as a wish. Who will rid me of this meddlesome vice president?

A Times video, showing how the Proud Boys breached the Capitol, underscored that within the confederacy of dunces, there was an actual organized conspiracy. The group began plotting even before the election to take up arms for Trump. When Trump barked “Stand back and stand by” about the Proud Boys during his debate with Joe Biden, the Proud Boys felt as though they had received a directive, like Henry’s knights.

With each hearing, it becomes clearer that Trump has no plausible deniability. He put the lives of the vice president and his family at risk, as well as the lives of lawmakers, by sending a crowd, stewing in lies, into a frenzy.

Pence did not have the power to do what Trump wanted, and it’s good that he resisted the insane, illegal and unconstitutional plan of the narcissist in the Oval. But Pence still wants it both ways. He has steered clear of the committee. He wants to become president by staying on the good side of Trump supporters, but they’re never going to forgive him.

At the end of the day of infamy, John Eastman, the nutty lawyer trying to help Trump overturn the election, sent an email imploring Pence to adjourn the congressional certification so sympathetic state legislators could help with Trump’s fairy tale of a rigged election.

When Greg Jacob, Pence’s counsel, showed the email to the vice president, Pence said, “That’s rubber room stuff.”

The fate of a sycophant is never a happy one.

Thank you to all of the dads, grandpas, uncles, godfathers, paternal figures, and other men in our lives who do so much for us!

God bless you!

Tony

New Jersey Transit Commuters Scramble to Get Home after Union Member Sickout!

Dear Commons Community,

New Jersey Transit suspended rail service into and out of New York City last night after a day in which dozens of trains were canceled because of a lack of available engineers.

NJ Transit said the problem was the result of an illegal job action by the union representing locomotive engineers, who currently don’t have a collective bargaining agreement. The number of engineers who called out on Friday was triple the average number for a weekday, NJ Transit said.

An email message seeking comment was left with the union’s local chairperson Friday.

“NJ Transit is disappointed that the union would perpetrate such an act on the more than 100,000 commuters who depend on NJ Transit rail service every day,” the state-operated transit corporation said in a statement. “We intend to explore all legal remedies in response to this illegal and irresponsible action.”

In an email Friday evening, New Jersey Transit said the last trains on 11 rail lines leaving New York, which normally operate until after midnight, would depart between about 7:15 p.m. and 8:15 p.m.

Rail tickets were being cross-honored on bus and light rail lines as well as on PATH trains operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and ferries operated by NY Waterway.

New Jersey Transit is the country’s third-largest provider of bus, rail and light rail transit.

As a lifelong union member, I generally support job actions by labor organizations but I do not support what happened yesterday where 100,000 workers were stranded on a Friday night after putting in their day’s effort.

Tony

Dear Commons Community.

Jamelle Bouie, a New York Times opinion columnist, had a piece yesterday entitled “Ginni Thomas Has a Lot of Explaining to Do”.  He calls out Ms. Thomas for her possible involvement in the January 6th insurrection.  Here is an excerpt:

“Democrats in Washington should do something about Ginni Thomas, who has just been asked to testify before the House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. The reason is straightforward. Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, worked with allies of Donald Trump to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Earlier this year, we learned that Thomas exchanged text messages with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in the weeks and days before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. We also learned, last month, that she urged Arizona Republicans to discard the results of the election and choose a “clean slate of Electors” for Trump.

And we’ve learned this week from the Jan. 6 committee that Thomas also sent messages directly to John Eastman, the conservative lawyer (and former law clerk for Justice Thomas) who essentially devised the plan to try to overturn the 2020 presidential results.

Eastman spoke at the “stop the steal” rally before the attack and even requested a pardon by way of Rudy Giuliani for his activities leading up to the insurrection: “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.”

“Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election were more extensive than previously known,” The Washington Post reported on Wednesday. Eastman, for his part, claimed to have known of a “heated” dispute among the Supreme Court justices over whether to hear arguments about the 2020 election. “So the odds are not based on the legal merits but an assessment of the justices’ spines, and I understand that there is a heated fight underway,” he is said to have written in an email to another lawyer. (On Thursday, Eastman posted a rebuttal on Substack asserting that he’d heard about the “heated fight” from news reports and that he could “categorically confirm that at no time did I discuss with Mrs. Thomas or Justice Thomas any matters pending or likely to come before the Court.”)

But if the first revelation, of Thomas’s correspondence with Meadows, was shocking, then these revelations of Thomas’s contact with Eastman are explosive. And it raises key questions, not just about what Ginni Thomas knew, but about what Clarence Thomas knew as well. How, exactly, did Eastman know of tensions on the court? And why did he predict to Greg Jacobs, chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence, that the Supreme Court would rule 7-2 in support of his legal theory about the Electoral College certification process before conceding that in fact that might not be the case?

So while the committee is rightly seeking testimony from Ginni Thomas, Democrats should say something too. They shouldn’t just say something, they should scream something.

Not only did Ginni Thomas try to make herself a part of the effort to overthrow the government, but Justice Thomas was the only member of the court to vote in favor of Donald Trump’s attempt to shield his communications from congressional investigators, communications that would have included the messages between Mark Meadows and Ginni Thomas.

There is something suspect happening with the Supreme Court, and other constitutional officers have every right to criticize it. Democratic leaders in Congress should begin an investigation into Ginni Thomas’s activities and announce that they intend to speak to her husband as well. President Biden should tell the press that he supports that investigation and hopes to see answers. Rank-and-file Democrats should make a stink about potential corruption on the court whenever they have the opportunity. Impeachment should be on the table.

This probably won’t win votes. It could, however, capture the attention of the media and even put Republicans on the defensive. It is true that politics are unpredictable and that there’s no way to say exactly how a given choice will play out in the real world. But if the much maligned (and politically successful) investigations into Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s emails are any indication, real pressure might turn additional revelations into genuine liabilities for the Republican Party.

Not sure if I agree with Bouie on his last point but I look forward to seeing what the House January 6th Committee might say about her involvement.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Craig L. Symonds new book,  Nimitz at War:  Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay.  Symonds is a Professor Emeritus at the United States Naval Academy where he taught naval history. In Nimitz at War, Symonds documents Nimitz’s command of naval operations in the Pacific from the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 until the Japanese surrender in 1945.

There are a number of interesting running themes in this book including Nimitz’s relationship with his superior, Admiral Ernest King, which was not always on the best of terms;  his sharing of command responsibilities with Douglas MacArthur;  Nimitz’s relationships with subordinates such as William “Bull” Halsey; and how the United States overcame Japan’s naval superiority.  Some of the most provocative material is recounting the island hopping strategy of the U.S forces in taking back the Pacific from the Japanese.  There are details about supply lines, the poor quality of American-made torpedoes, and of the expansion of the American fleet.  Symonds also provides the horrific casualty toll of the battles at places such as  Midway, Peleliu, and Iwo Jima.   For instance, at Okinawa, US Army (4,675 killed), Marines (2,928 killed), and due to kamikaze attacks the mortal casualty of Navy personnel (4,907 killed).  These numbers paled in comparison to Japanese losses (more than 90,000 killed) plus the death of 150,000 Okinawa civilians.   

Symonds has done an excellent job with Nimitz at War… and I highly recommend it if you are interested in the Pacific theater of World War II.

Below is a book review that appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

Tony

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With a soft voice and friendly demeanor, Adm. Chester W. Nimitz did not reach out and grab the public the way many of his Army contemporaries did. Biographers spilled comparatively little ink on the Texan until E.B. Potter’s “Nimitz” (1976), which launched the same year as the film “Midway,” starring Henry Fonda as Nimitz. Since then, Nimitz’s profile has grown with the release of the 2019 version of the movie (with fellow Texan Woody Harrelson as Nimitz), and in works like Walter R. Borneman’s excellent “The Admirals” (2012) and Adm. James Stavridis’s overview of naval leadership, “Sailing True North” (2019).

Humor was another. Whether telling a shaggy-dog story or an off-color joke, “he wielded [humor’s] power to soothe or divert without losing authority.” Unlike his boss, Adm. Ernest J. King, whose full-broadside tirades could leave generals, admirals and cabinet members shaken, Nimitz had a diplomat’s touch when dealing with the egocentric Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the irascible Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, or the Pattonesque Third Fleet commander, Vice Adm. William “Bull” Halsey.

Brush strokes of daily-life details add to Mr. Symonds’s colorful portrait. Three-mile walks before breakfast, blowing off steam at the pistol range or horseshoe pit, and the occasional two-mile swim kept him fit and refreshed. “He preferred simple and uncomplicated meals—meat and potatoes, bread and butter,” Mr. Symonds adds. A connoisseur of classical music, he treasured his record collection. “On some nights when he did not have company he turned off all the lights so he could open the windows to the night air and listen, usually in his pajamas and bathrobe, to whatever musical piece he had selected.”

Narrating war through the eyes of a commander thousands of miles from the guns is a challenge. Mr. Symonds uses that distance to illustrate the faith Nimitz placed in his field commanders. As the Battle of the Coral Sea ground to a close in May 1942 with both fleets badly damaged, Rear Adm. Frank Jack Fletcher radioed Nimitz that he was sending the wounded carrier Lexington to Pearl Harbor for repairs. “Here was Nimitz’s opportunity to assume operational oversight: either to affirm Fletcher’s decision to retire or order him to stay and fight it out,” Mr. Symonds writes. “Consistent with a determination not to second-guess his operational commanders, he sent Fletcher a brief message congratulating him on his ‘glorious achievements.’ No orders, no suggestions, no advice, only praise.”

Adm. King, the Navy’s commander in chief, remained skeptical of the Texan. The hard-charging King privately considered Nimitz a “fixer” and a man too willing to compromise. But the complexities of war made a fixer like Nimitz indispensable. “Nimitz took care to ensure that personnel disputes, inter-service rivalries, or even errors in judgment did not interfere with progress in the war. The important thing was not to find fault or to apportion blame, but to sustain the momentum,” Mr. Symonds concludes.

The Battle of Midway, Nimitz’s signature victory, was one of several examples of the quiet man taking risks the blustering King felt were too dangerous. “King had consistently pressed for more aggressive action, while Nimitz had tried to temper his expectations. Now the roles were reversed,” Mr. Symonds writes. “In the last week of May 1942, Nimitz staked everything on an unequal contest with the enemy’s main battle fleet. It was a bold decision, but it was not reckless.”

From the bloodletting of Guadalcanal in 1942 to the strategic turning point—the capture of the Mariana Islands in November 1944—Mr. Symonds chronicles life at the top of a pyramid of compromises, a pinnacle where Nimitz balanced high expectations in Washington against real shortages of ships, pilots, fuel and equipment. He prodded local commanders, dealt with demands from MacArthur and King, and protected his junior admirals from the slings and arrows of a Navy in which office politics is a blood sport.

Sympathetic to his subject, Mr. Symonds spends little time dwelling on the admiral’s few material mistakes, such as ordering the invasion of Peleliu after it had become strategically irrelevant. Like Lee at Gettysburg, Nimitz’s unwillingness to micromanage his commanders permitted them to make errors he might have corrected, as when Halsey steamed his carriers away from Leyte Gulf to pursue a Japanese decoy fleet.

Mr. Symonds brings decades of research to bear, mining official archives, oral histories, and surviving letters between Nimitz and his wife, Catherine. The prose is efficient, the pacing excellent. The story’s arc rarely breaks, offering a largely uninterrupted view of the Pacific War as Nimitz saw it from the Cement Pot.

“Nimitz at War” ranks as one of the best modern war biographies. It sets a high bar for scholars of the Pacific War’s great operational captain and sheds fresh light on the way cooperation was coaxed out of disparate, sometimes bitterly conflicting personalities through one man’s goodwill, sense of humor and empathy.

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday’s House January 6^th Committee hearing had lots of interesting moments.  As described by one media outlet, it was all about power, pardons, and Pence.  In general, it was a very bad day for John Eastman, the Trump lawyer who helped craft his plan to overturn the election, a scheme that fueled the U.S. Capitol riot.  I thought the testimony of retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig was especially riveting. Here are ten important takeaways as compiled by Lydia O’Connor of The Huffington Post.

Tony

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Eastman told Trump their plan was illegal, a Pence aide said.

Greg Jacob, who was Pence’s legal counsel at the time of the Capitol riot, told the committee Thursday that Eastman made it very clear to Trump that the plan they’d crafted to overturn the election was illegal.

“I believe he did on the 4th,” two days before the riot, Jacob said of Eastman’s conversation with Trump about rejecting the official slates of state electors in order to stop the election’s certification by Congress on Jan. 6.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), vice chair of the select committee, said of Eastman: “He knew the outcome he wanted, and he saw a way to go forward if he simply pretended that fake electors were real.” A memo he wrote asserting that Pence could declare Trump the winner “was false, and Dr. Eastman knew it was false. In other words, it was a lie,” she said.

Eastman knew the other legislative branches would dismantle their scheme.

In a December 2020 email the committee presented, Eastman acknowledged that his and Trump’s plan to use alternative electors in the certification would be “dead on arrival” if presented before Congress.

Jacob said Thursday that Eastman privately acknowledged to him that if Pence did what he was asking him to do and the matter went before the U.S. Supreme Court, they would “lose 9-0.” However, Jacob said Eastman didn’t think the matter would end up before the highest court.

Jacob said he asked Eastman to consider the absurdity of what he was suggesting, reminding him that Al Gore was vice president when he lost the presidential election to Gorge W. Bush in 2000: “If you were right, don’t you think Al Gore might have liked to have known in 2000 that he had authority to just declare himself president of the United States?”

Jacob summarized Eastman’s response as: “Al Gore did not have the basis to do it in 2000. Kamala Harris shouldn’t be able to do it in 2024. But I think you should to it today.”

Eastman reportedly shrugged off the possibility of inciting a riot.

The committee played testimony from Eric Herschmann, a lawyer and former senior adviser to Trump, who said Eastman cared little about the barbarity his plan could unleash.

“You’re going to cause riots in the streets,” Herschmann recalled telling Eastman, who allegedly replied: “There’s been violence in our history to protect the republic.”

Eastman asked for a pardon after the attack.

After all hell broke loose, Eastman sought a way out.

Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), who led Thursday’s hearing, said Eastman wrote an email to Rudy Giuliani, another one of Trump’s lawyers, “a few days after” Jan. 6 asking for help avoiding legal repercussions.

“I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works,” wrote Eastman. He also invoked his Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate himself 100 times during his testimony, the committee said.

Despite Trump’s claims otherwise, Pence allegedly told him “many times” he disagreed with him.

Pence’s onetime chief of staff, Marc Short, told the committee that Pence informed the president “many times” that he didn’t have the power to overturn the election and that it would be illegal for him to try to do so.

That contradicts statements made by Trump, who said before the insurrection that he and Pence were in “total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act.” Pence has never indicated that to be true.

Jacob also said Thursday that Trump’s claims were false.

“We were shocked and disappointed because whoever had written and put that statement out, it was categorically untrue,” Jacob said.

Weeks before the riot, Pence thought he didn’t have the power to overturn the vote, his aide said.

Jacob shared that in early December, he and Pence discussed whether the 12th Amendment gave him the power to overturn the election and that Pence’s first instinct was that it did not.

Jacob said he agreed and put together a memo stating that, adding at Thursday’s hearing that it’s “just common sense” that the Constitution’s framers would never “have put in the hands of one person the authority to determine who was going to be the president.”

Trump snapped at Pence in the heat of their Jan. 6 disagreement, according to Ivanka Trump.

In video testimony from Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, who served as one of the president’s advisers, she said her father had a profanity-laden call with Pence as the events unfolded on Jan. 6

“The conversation was … was pretty heated. It was a different tone than I’d heard him take with the vice president before,” she recalled in the testimony aired Thursday, adding that he used “the p-word.”

Nicholas Luna, a former assistant to Trump, said in his testimony: “I remember hearing the word ‘wimp.’ Either he called him a wimp — I don’t remember if he said, ‘You are a wimp, you’ll be a wimp.’ Wimp is the word I remember.”

The mob got dangerously close to Pence.

Aguilar said that the committee’s investigation found that the crowd of rioters were within 40 feet of Pence inside the Capitol at one point.

“Approximately 40 feet. That’s all there was. Forty feet between the vice president and the mob,” he said. “Make no mistake about the fact that the vice president’s life was in danger.”

The committee also played videos of the mob chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.”

The crowd surged when Trump tweeted his anger at Pence.

Aguilar also said they found evidence that the mob got more out of control when Trump tweeted mid-riot: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done,” referring to his refusal to throw out the election results.

“Our investigation found that immediately after the president’s 2:24 p.m. tweet, the crowds both outside the Capitol and inside the Capitol surged,” Aguilar said, adding that Pence then had to be moved to a secure location.

The committee aired testimony from White House staffers who said that was exactly what they feared might happen. Deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews said that after staff urged Trump to tweet something that would calm the crowd, he instead tweeted his attack on Pence.

“The situation was already bad, so it felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire by tweeting that,” she said.

A Pence adviser said he believes Trump remains a threat to democracy.

Retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, who served as a legal adviser to Pence before the Capitol riot, said at the hearing Thursday that he was still very worried about Trump’s influence, calling him, his allies and supporters “a clear and present danger to American democracy” because of their stated plans to overturn the 2024 presidential elections if Trump runs and loses again.

“Our democracy today is on a knife’s edge,” he said.

Had Pence done that Trump wanted of him, Luttig also said, “it would’ve been the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the republic.”

Happy

Dear Commons Community,

Happy the elephant will remain in the Bronx Zoo after New York’s highest court ruled in a divided decision on Tuesday that she isn’t entitled to legal personhood and a right to bodily liberty.

The ruling was a loss for the Nonhuman Rights Project, which first filed a petition for common law writ of habeas corpus (Matter of Nonhuman Rights Project) demanding a court recognize Happy’s legal personhood in 2018.  As reported by Bloomberg Law:

Happy is an “extraordinarily intelligent and autonomous being who possesses advanced analytic abilities akin to human beings,” the group told New York Court of Appeals, and she has been living on a “solitary and lonely Bronx Zoo acre for more than four decades.”

The writ of habeas corpus “is intended to protect the liberty right of human beings to be free of unlawful confinement,” the court said, so “it has no applicability to Happy, a nonhuman animal who is not a ‘person’ subjected to illegal detention.”

“Thus, while no one disputes that elephants are intelligent beings deserving of proper care and compassion, the courts below properly granted the motion to dismiss the petition for a writ of habeas corpus, and we therefore affirm,” Chief Judge Janet DiFiore wrote for the 5-2 majority.

Judge Jenny Rivera wrote in dissent that Happy’s captivity is “inherently unjust and inhumane.”

“It is an affront to a civilized society, and every day she remains a captive — a spectacle for humans — we, too, are diminished,” Rivera wrote.

Defining Personhood

The trial court said precedent bound it to a finding that nonhuman animals are not persons because “they cannot bear duties, they are not human, and according rights to nonhuman animals is an issue better left to the legislature.”

But “personhood is not synonymous with being human,” the group argued, and it doesn’t “require the capacity to bear duties.”

The group received backing from a group of 27 law professors who told the court that “many legal persons lack legal duties.”

Animals “are already legal persons because they have legal rights,” the attorneys argued, citing anti-cruelty laws and the consideration of animals during divorce proceedings. In the alternative, animals should be considered legal persons because they have interests in liberty and equality that the common law protects, the attorneys said.

The Bronx Zoo and Wildlife Conservation Society told the court that Happy is well cared for, and that the Nonhuman Rights Project is using Happy to “impose its own world view that certain, or perhaps all animals should not be cared for in zoos.”

‘Deleterious Effects’

Whether habeas corpus applies to nonhuman animals is an issue “that merits careful consideration of all concerns by the elected officials of the state,” the zoo and society argued.

The Association of Zoos & Aquariums and individual zoos wrote in support that expanding habeas relief to animals “would have extraordinarily deleterious effects.” The writ could be used not only against zoos and aquariums in the state, but also against “any pet owner, beekeeper, dairy farmer, or myriad others,” according to the filing.

Still, no court has held the writ applicable to a nonhuman animal, DiFiore wrote, and nothing in precedent supports the suggestion it should be applicable to nonhuman animals.

The writ “protects the right to liberty of humans because they are humans with certain fundamental liberty rights recognized by law,” according to the chief judge. She was joined by Judges Michael J. Garcia, Madeline Singas, Anthony Cannataro, and Shirley Troutman.

It’s irrelevant that there’s no precedent for recognizing a nonhuman animal’s right to habeas relief because “novel questions merely present opportunities to develop the law,” Judge Rowan D. Wilson wrote in dissent.

Wilson wrote that he does not “place nonhuman animals like Happy on equal footing with humans.” But if courts recognize that corporations can have constitutional rights, then the law can recognize “an autonomous animal’s right to judicial consideration of their claim to be released from an unjust captivity.”

The Nonhuman Rights Project said in a statement Tuesday that the majority “appears to be out of touch with the times and has demonstrated a deep misunderstanding of what Happy’s case is about.”

The group will continue its campaign for her release while it considers its legal options and next steps, it said. The dissents and the fact that the court considered the case gives “tremendous hope for a future where elephants no longer suffer as Happy has and where nonhuman rights are protected alongside human rights,” the group said.

Phillips Lytle LLP represented the Bronx Zoo and Wildlife Conservation Society. Elizabeth Stein of New Hyde Park, NY, and Monica Miller of the American Humanist Association represented the Nonhuman Rights Project Inc.

Too bad for Happy.  At least she has an acre of land to walk about and is not confined to a small pen or cage.

Tony