Thomas Webster

Dear Commons Community,

Thomas Webster, a retired New York Police Department officer, was sentenced yesterday to a record-setting 10 years in prison for attacking the U.S. Capitol and using a metal flagpole to assault one of the police officers trying to hold off a mob of Donald Trump supporters.

Webster’s prison sentence is the longest so far among roughly 250 people who have been punished for their conduct during the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. The previous longest was shared by two other rioters, who were sentenced separately to seven years and three months in prison.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Webster, a 20-year NYPD veteran, was the first Capitol riot defendant to be tried on an assault charge and the first to present a self-defense argument. A jury rejected Webster’s claim that he was defending himself when he tackled Metropolitan Police Department officer Noah Rathbun and grabbed his gas mask outside the Capitol on Jan. 6.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Webster, 56, to 10 years in prison plus three years of supervised release. He allowed Webster to report to prison at a date to be determined instead of immediately ordering him into custody.

“Mr. Webster, I don’t think you’re a bad person,” the judge said. “I think you were caught up in a moment. But as you know, even getting caught up in a moment has consequences.”

Webster turned to apologize to Rathbun, who was in the courtroom but didn’t address the judge. Webster said he wishes he had never come to Washington, D.C.

“I wish the horrible events of that day had never happened,” he told the judge.

The judge said Rathbun wasn’t Webster’s only victim on Jan. 6.

“The other victim was democracy, and that is not something that can be taken lightly,” Mehta added.

Federal prosecutors had recommended a prison sentence of 17 years and six months. The court’s probation department had recommended a 10-year prison sentence. Mehta wasn’t bound by the recommendations.

In a court filing, prosecutors accused Webster of “disgracing a democracy that he once fought honorably to protect and serve.” Webster led the charge against police barricades at the Capitol’s Lower West Plaza, prosecutors said. They compared the attack to a medieval battle, with rioters pelting officers with makeshift projectiles and engaging in hand-to-hand combat.

“Nothing can explain or justify Mr. Webster’s rage. Nothing can explain or justify his violence,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Hava Mirell said Thursday.

Defense attorney James Monroe said in a court filing that the mob was “guided by unscrupulous politicians” and others promoting the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from the Republican incumbent. He questioned why prosecutors argued that Webster didn’t deserve leniency for his 25 years of service to his country and New York City.

“That is not how we measure justice. That is revenge,” Monroe said.

In May, jurors deliberated for less than three hours before they convicted Webster of all six counts in his indictment, including a charge that he assaulted Rathbun with a dangerous weapon, the flagpole.

Webster had testified at trial that he was trying to protect himself from a “rogue cop” who punched him in the face. He also accused Rathbun of instigating the confrontation.

Rathbun testified that he didn’t punch or pick a fight with Webster. Rathbun said he was trying to move Webster back from a security perimeter that he and other officers were struggling to maintain.

Rathbun’s body camera captured Webster shouting profanities and insults before they made any physical contact. The video shows that Webster slammed one of the bike racks at Rathbun before the officer reached out with an open left hand and struck the right side of Webster’s face.

After Rathbun struck his face, Webster swung a metal flag pole at the officer in a downward chopping motion, striking a bike rack. Rathbun grabbed the broken pole from Webster, who charged at the officer, tackled him to the ground and grabbed his gas mask, choking him by the chin strap.

Webster drove alone to Washington, D.C., from his home near Goshen, New York, on the eve of the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, where Trump addressed thousands of supporters. Webster was wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a Marine Corps flag on a metal pole when he joined the mob that stormed the Capitol.

Webster said he went to the Capitol to “petition” lawmakers to “relook” at the results of the 2020 presidential election. But he testified that he didn’t intend to interfere with Congress’ joint session to certify President Joe Biden ‘s victory.

Webster retired from the NYPD in 2011 after 20 years of service, which included a stint on then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s private security detail. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1985 to 1989 before joining the NYPD in 1991.

Justice is served! 

Webster has Donald Trump to thank for his misfortune.

Tony

A marker at the United States Military Academy bears the words “Ku Klux Klan.” (Naming Commission Report )

Dear Commons Community,

A congressional commission has discovered. a Ku Klux Klan plaque is affixed to the entrance of the U.S. Military Academy’s science center at West Point, New York.

In a report released this month, the Naming Commission, which is reviewing Defense Department assets to identify and remove Confederate commemorations, included a photo of the bronze plaque. The words “KU KLUX KLAN” are underneath a depiction of a person in a hood, holding a rifle.

The plaque is part of a triptych at the entrance to Bartlett Hall, West Point’s science center, according to the commission. As reported by NBC News.

The panel said it doesn’t have the authority to recommend removing the plaque because it isn’t specifically a Confederate monument.

“However, there are clearly ties in the KKK to the Confederacy,” the report said. “The Commission encourages the Secretary of Defense to address DoD assets that highlight the KKK in Defense Memorialization processes and create a standard disposition requirement for such assets.”

In a statement, the U.S. Military Academy said the triptych was dedicated June 3, 1965, to West Point graduates who served in World II and Korea.

The statement noted that the triptych also depicts the Tree of Life to symbolize “how our nation has flourished despite its tragedies.”

“West Point does not accept, condone, or promote racism, sexism, or any other biases,” the statement said. “The Academy continues to graduate its most diverse classes ever with respect to ethnicity, gender, experience, and background.”

The congressional commission was established as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2021.

The report this month by the eight-person panel focused on West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland.

In addition to the KKK plaque, West Point has several monuments and buildings commemorating Confederate soldiers, which the commission recommended be removed or renamed. Five areas of West Point, including a child care center, are named for Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

“No doubts exist that Robert E. Lee fought for the Confederacy: he was its most effective and storied leader, and by the end of the Civil War, Lee had risen to General in Chief of the Armies of the Confederate States,” the report said.

“The consequences of his decisions were wide-ranging and destructive,” it said. “Lee’s armies were responsible for the deaths of more United States Soldiers than practically any other enemy in our nation’s history.”

The costs of renaming parts of West Point and the Naval Academy would be anywhere from $1,000 to $300,000, the report said.

The Defense Department has until 2024 to “remove all names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America,” according to the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act.

The Naming Commission will file its third and final report before October.

Tony

NAEP Scores 2022

Dear Commons Community,

Reading scores for elementary school students plunged to their lowest levels since 1990 during the first two years of the pandemic — and math scores dropped for the first time in the history of a nationally representative test dating back to the 1970s.   Here is a recap courtesy of Axios.

Why it matters: The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) national test results out yesterday lay out the extent to which the pandemic devastated learning outcomes for America’s students, particularly for those that were most vulnerable even before the pandemic.

• “These are some of the largest declines we have observed in a single assessment cycle in 50 years of the NAEP program,” USDOE acting associate commissioner Daniel McGrath said in a statement.
• “Students in 2022 are performing at a level last seen two decades ago.”

Driving the news: The results on the NAEP, showed a seven-point drop in math scores among nine-year-olds, mostly fourth graders, and a five-point drop in reading scores.

• The tests were administered from January to March in 2020 and 2022.
• The decline in learning outcomes were starkest among lower-performing students.
• Top-performing students, those in the 90th percentile, showed a 3 point drop in math scores, compared with lower-performing students, those in the 10th percentile, experiencing a 12 point decline.
• Math scores for Black students fell 13 points, compared to a 5 point decrease among white students.

Between the lines: Of the 70% of test takers who said they learned remotely last school year, higher performers had greater access to resources more often, including a desktop computer or quiet place to work, compared to lower performers, per the results.

The big picture: The test results are considered a reliable snapshot of student learning outcomes due to the assessments being standardized nationwide and because the test has remained consistent, the New York Times notes.

• Students’ scores have generally ticked upward since the 1970s, when the test was first administered, but in recent years the increases have waned slightly, per the Times.

State of play: The pandemic disrupted virtually all aspects of the educational experience — and experts warn that the daunting task of student recovery could take years.

• “Unless we act over the next couple of years to reverse these losses, this will be the first significant widening of the racial achievement gap in 30 years,” Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist who has done extensive research on the pandemic achievement loss, said in a Harvard EdCast interview.

Some of the decline in test scores was to be expected since so many students lost months of school during the pandemic. Even those students who did participate in remote learning were subject to emergency, poorly planned online learning classes that were not the equivalent of in-person instruction.   

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Zhuqing Li’s Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden:  Two Sisters separated by China’s Civil War” which tells the story of a family ripped apart following the Communist Party victory in China in 1949.  It focuses on the lives of two sisters who are separated for decades:  one (Jun) living in Taiwan and then the United States and the other (Hong) in Mainland China. It is written by their niece, Zhuqing Li, a professor of East Asian Studies at Brown University.

The title, Flower Fragrant Garden,  refers to the family compound in Fuzhou, China, overlooking the Min River, where Jun and Hong lived happily with their father, a government commissioner, his two wives and their children. However, the turmoil of the 1949 takeover of China by the Communist Party plunges the family into poverty.  Jun by chance was visiting a friend  in Taiwan on the day that the Communists took over and does not return to see her sister and family again until 1982.  Jun goes on to a most successful career as an entrepreneur in two countries while Hong, a doctor by training, is subject to brutal “re-education” and internal exiles in the 1950s and 1960s.  She eventually becomes one of the most celebrated doctors in China specializing in childbirth and women’s health.

I found the details of the lives of the two sisters illuminating.  Anyone interested in China in the latter part of the 20^th century will enjoy this book

Below is a review that appeared in The New York Times.

Tony

—————————–

The New York Times Review of Books

Sisters Divided by China’s Divisions

By Deirdre Mask

June 20, 2022

阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

DAUGHTERS OF THE FLOWER FRAGRANT GARDEN: Two Sisters Separated by China’s Civil War, by Zhuqing Li

In the summer of 1949, young Chen Wenjun (“Jun”) stepped off a ferry in Jinmen, an island off the coast of southeastern China. She did not know that the Communists’ People’s Liberation Army (P.L.A.) had occupied Fuzhou, her home city, the night after she left. But in Jinmen, the anti-Communist Nationalists held their territory. None of the 9,000 P.L.A. soldiers who fought on Jinmen’s beaches made it back home. Neither did Jun, who now effectively lived in a different country from her family. Jun’s short visit to a friend quickly became a long exile.

“Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden,” written by Jun’s niece, Zhuqing Li, a professor of East Asian studies at Brown, tells the riveting story of Jun’s decades-long struggle to find her way home. Li begins in the Flower Fragrant Garden, a lavish compound in Fuzhou overlooking the Min River, where Jun lived happily with her father, a powerful salt commissioner, his two wives and their children. One of those children was another of Li’s aunts, Hong (a pseudonym), whose story Li skillfully braids with that of Jun. Li does not linger on the Chens’ peaceful “hilltop aerie,” as the turmoil of 20th-century China soon catches up to the family and plunges it into poverty.

While Jun scrambles to survive in Jinmen, it is Hong who suffers the most, and it is her struggle that drives this absorbing book. After their father dies of tuberculosis, Hong, a skilled and passionate doctor, is left to support the large family on her salary alone; she is appalled when her infant brother and nephew are handed over to P.L.A. officers, exchanged for bags of rice. In the book’s most engrossing pages, Li describes in agonizing detail how Hong is forced to stand full time in front of the hospital with a placard (wrongly) labeling her a counterrevolutionary while passers-by spit on her. Soon after, she is “re-educated” in an isolated mountain village where she spends grueling days planting rice and sweet potatoes. (Her husband, China’s best-known cardiologist, becomes a hospital cleaner.) And yet Hong later rises to the highest ranks of medicine, never forgetting the plight of those she met along the way.

Li wisely fades into the background as she unspools these stories, surfacing occasionally to provide personal context. But her love for her aunts warms every page. If this exceptional book has any flaw, it is this: Li presents the sisters as near-saints, often taking pains to justify any seemingly morally ambiguous choice they make.

But what choices! Li unpacks the decisions each made to survive, and explains how those decisions pulled them toward the ideologies of their governments. Jun is lured into the Nationalist cause, helping coordinate the Anti-Communist and Resist Russia Union, marrying a Nationalist officer and eventually building a thriving import-export business in Taiwan. In contrast, Hong labors to clear her name, calls her son Jiyue, or “Continue the Leap,” in recognition of Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign and becomes a party member. In placing her aunts’ stories side by side, Li presents the reader with two equally compelling questions: Will the sisters ever be reunited? And if so, will they even know each other?

On the very day I finished this book, President Biden was asked whether the United States would defend Taiwan if China attacked. His answer? “That’s the commitment we made.” “Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden” is not a history of Taiwan-China relations, but in telling this gripping narrative of one family divided by the “bamboo curtain,” Li sheds light on how Taiwan came to be — and why China might one day risk everything to take it.

Dear Commons Community,

Yeshiva University has asked the US Supreme Court to reverse a New York judge’s decision earlier this summer requiring it to recognize officially an LGBTQ student group. 

Yeshiva, which describes itself in the court filing as a “deeply religious Jewish university,” filed an emergency request with the high court on Monday to stay a lower court’s order to designate YU Pride Alliance as a bonafide campus organization.   As reported by NBC News.

The club has already started planning several Pride events for the fall semester, including LGBTQ “shabbatons,” and it plans to include LGBTQ-themed gift bags for Jewish holidays like Purim and Passover, the filing says. 

In a victory for the student group, New York Supreme Court Judge Lynn Kotler ruled on June 14 that the school is not a religious institution and therefore must comply with New York City Human Rights Law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of “actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender.” Yeshiva then appealed to the next highest court, and that request was denied on Aug. 23. 

In Monday’s filing, addressed to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Yeshiva asks the court to reconsider whether religious protections in the First Amendment can be used to override the city’s human rights law, which Judge Kotler used as a basis for her June decision. 

In the filing, the university calls the LGBTQ club a “government-enforced establishment” that is “irreparably damaging” what the school calls its religious mission. 

The university’s lawyers at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty say in the filing the university is “wholly committed” to Torah values and cannot put its own name or “seal of approval” on undergraduate clubs that appear inconsistent with those values. 

“Yeshiva has thus declined to approve proposed student clubs involving shooting, videogames, and gambling,” the filing states.

In a statement to NBC News, Kate Rosenfeld, one of the lawyers representing the student group, said a previous court had already “correctly ruled” that Yeshiva must grant equal accommodations to all students on campus and called it “disheartening” that Yeshiva will not join other major religiously affiliated universities to allow LGBTQ students to create safe spaces for themselves. 

“While the University is free to hold its own religious beliefs, it can’t provide some students full access to its facilities — meeting spaces, bulletin boards, club fairs — and deny others the same benefits because they are LGBTQ,” Rosenfeld said.

Lawyers for Yeshiva did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The case is just the latest at the intersection of religious freedom and nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people to go before the conservative-majority Supreme Court. In June, the court ruled 6-3 in favor of allowing parents in Maine to use taxpayer-funded tuition assistance to help their kids attend private religious schools, some of which openly discriminate against LGBTQ students and staff. Last year, the court also ruled in favor of a Catholic charity that refused to let same-sex couples use its adoption services.

It will be interesting to see if the US Supreme Court takes on this case.  If it does, it will be even more interesting!

Tony

Mary Peltola.  Credit…Ash Adams for The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Democrat Mary Peltola, a former state representative, will be the first Alaska Native in Congress after she won a special election that included GOP candidates Nick Begich and former Gov. Sarah Palin.

Peltola, who is the executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, served 10 years in the state Legislature and campaigned as “Alaska’s best shot at keeping an extremist from winning.”   As reported by NBC News.

“It is a GOOD DAY,” Peltola tweeted following the election results. “We’ve won tonight, but we’re still going to have to hold this seat in November.”

House Speaker Nance Pelosi, D-Calif., lauded Peltola for “making history as the first Alaska Native ever elected to the Congress.”

“Her valuable and unifying perspective, deep experience in public service and commitment to working families will strengthen the work of our Caucus and the Congress,” Pelosi said in a statement.

Peltola finished fourth in a crowded nonpartisan primary in June, when 48 candidates battled to secure one of the four spots on the Aug. 16 special election ballot. But heading into Wednesday’s final tabulation, Peltola was leading the pack.

The special election was the state’s first test of ranked-choice voting, which was implemented after a 2020 ballot measure. The same system will be used in November.

With 93% of votes counted in the ranked-choice results Wednesday night, Peltola had 51.5% of the vote to Palin’s 48.5%.

Voters cast their ballots more than two weeks ago to determine who will serve out the final four months of Young’s term after he died in March at age 88.

No candidate won more than 50% of the vote in the Aug. 16 election, which triggered runoffs under the new system, in which voters ranked the candidates in order of preference.

Based on the ranked-choice system, the last-place candidate is eliminated, and votes are redistributed to the remaining candidates according to voters’ ranked preferences. The rounds continue until one of two remaining candidates with the most votes wins.

The elimination process didn’t start until Wednesday, the last day elections officials could receive absentee ballots.

Palin, the GOP’s vice presidential candidate in 2008, will have another chance at reviving her political comeback. She will compete against Peltola and Begich again in November to determine who will serve a full two-year term in the House. The three candidates received the most votes in the primary; the fourth qualifying candidate, independent Al Gross, later dropped out of the race.

Following her loss, Palin called ranked-choice voting a “mistake” for Alaska.

“Ranked-choice voting was sold as the way to make elections better reflect the will of the people. As Alaska — and America — now sees, the exact opposite is true,” she said in a statement. “Though we’re disappointed in this outcome, Alaskans know I’m the last one who’ll ever retreat. Instead, I’m going to reload.”

Begich on Wednesday congratulated Peltola and went after Palin, saying she “cannot win a statewide race because her unfavorable rating is so high.”

“The biggest lesson as we move into the 2022 General Election, is that ranked choice voting showed that a vote for Sarah Palin is in reality a vote for Mary Peltola. Palin simply doesn’t have enough support from Alaskans to win an election,” Begich said in a statement. “As we look forward to the November election, I will work hard to earn the vote of Alaskans all across the state.

Congratulations, Ms. Peltola!

Tony