Dear Commons Community,

Last week, UK Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned after 44 days in office.  New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd analyzes Truss and her short reign in a piece entitled,  “Not-So-Great Britain’s Conservative Crackup.”  Dowd gives a stark assessment of Truss, Boris Johnson, and Britain’s Conservative Party.   Here is an excerpt:

“Many consider the third woman (Truss)  to dwell at No. 10 incompetent and hopeless, perhaps the worst P.M. in history.

She was a bad communicator, a poor speaker and weak on camera. She didn’t understand that you couldn’t simply borrow money from the future. She managed to be a radical ideologue and a lightweight at the same time. (Blimey, sounds very Trumpy.) But no one believes Truss blew up on the launchpad because she’s a woman.

She turned out to be a stooge for a reckless, unprincipled Boris Johnson, who was no doubt scheming to see if he could snatch back the reins.

Gavin Barwell, the chief of staff for Theresa May when she was prime minister, predicted that Johnson — who’s been trying to write a book on Shakespeare for years — would haunt Truss like Banquo’s ghost.

“The moment she gets into political difficulty,” Barwell told The Times’s Mark Landler, “there’s going to be a bring-back-Boris movement.”

And here we are at that moment.”

The entire column is below.

Good reading!

Tony

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The New York Times

Not-So-Great Britain’s Conservative Crackup

Oct. 22, 2022

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

WASHINGTON — Never give in, never give in, never, never, never.

That was Winston Churchill’s famous mantra. Liz Truss, another Tory prime minister trying to lead a battered Britain, couldn’t follow that bulldog advice. She wilted faster than The Daily Star head of lettuce gussied up to look like her.

She lasted only 44 days before resigning. The Storm didn’t even have time to Gather. The photo of Queen Elizabeth shaking hands with Truss at Balmoral Castle, as Truss took over as head of the government, is epic in its symbolism.

Liz squared. The longest-reigning monarch meets the shortest-serving prime minister. It was such a swift fall that Truss was anointed by a queen and resigned to a king.

In years of yore, I would have felt sheepish about a woman self-immolating so quickly.

When I covered Geraldine Ferraro’s run for the vice presidency and Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, it felt as though their fates were tied to gender. If they failed, many women told me in interviews, there was an X through the whole X chromosome, a blot on the female copybook. If not those women then, they would say, what woman ever?

Although when Sarah Palin flamed out in 2008, coming across as comically inept, it did not reflect poorly on women in general. That was an important step for women.

Truss took that step for Britain: Many consider the third woman to dwell at No. 10 incompetent and hopeless, perhaps the worst P.M. in history.

She was a bad communicator, a poor speaker and weak on camera. She didn’t understand that you couldn’t simply borrow money from the future. She managed to be a radical ideologue and a lightweight at the same time. (Blimey, sounds very Trumpy.) But no one believes Truss blew up on the launchpad because she’s a woman.

She turned out to be a stooge for a reckless, unprincipled Boris Johnson, who was no doubt scheming to see if he could snatch back the reins.

Gavin Barwell, the chief of staff for Theresa May when she was prime minister, predicted that Johnson — who’s been trying to write a book on Shakespeare for years — would haunt Truss like Banquo’s ghost.

“The moment she gets into political difficulty,” Barwell told The Times’s Mark Landler, “there’s going to be a bring-back-Boris movement.”

And here we are at that moment.

“It’s incredibly funny if you’re not English,” Henry Porter, a British writer, told me. “It’s humiliating if you are. Boris is Boris Karloff, the monster who comes alive again, after you thought he was buried.”

Many think Johnson planned this from the start. By backing Truss, he was able to defeat Rishi Sunak, the ally who stabbed him in the back, “Julius Caesar”-style. Johnson threw his support behind Truss, knowing that she would be so mediocre that he’d look good in comparison.

Just like Donald Trump, Johnson may think if he gets back into office he can squash the investigation into his chicanery. He’s enmeshed in an inquiry into whether he misled Parliament about his Downing Street get-downs during the pandemic.

The outcome was foggy, as Johnson rushed back from a vacation in the Caribbean. In some vote estimates, Sunak was ahead but Johnson was winning support, as well. James Duddridge, an M.P. who backs Johnson, told the British press: “I’ve been in contact with the boss via WhatsApp. He’s going to fly back. He said: ‘I’m flying back, Dudders, we are going to do this. I’m up for it.’”

Tory lawmakers are split. Half are morally outraged by Boris, and the rest are worried that without the riveting spectacle of Boris, they’ll lose their seats in two years.

Many Tories believe, amid rising electric bills, power shortages and inflation, that Sunak — whose wealthy wife was accused of avoiding paying 20 million pounds in taxes until the press upbraided her — would be wiped out by Labour in two years. So it depends on whether the self-preservation group is bigger than the disgusted-with-BoJo group.

British conservatives are becoming as shameless as American conservatives, willing to put up with any outrage to keep their posh offices and perks. The “good chap” principle in England, the tradition that sometimes you have to leave office for the greater good, seems passé.

“One of the glories of the traditional Conservative Party used to be its readiness to place country before party,” Peter Oborne, a British journalist, wrote in this paper recently.

Winston Churchill set this standard before stepping down as prime minister in 1955: “The first duty of a member of Parliament is to do what he thinks in his faithful and disinterested judgment is right and necessary for the honor and safety of Great Britain.”

Mr. Oborne asserted that “today’s Conservatives, by contrast, cling to power for power’s sake,” and that “their obstinacy is ensuring the ruination of Britain.”

Dear Commons Community,

Hundreds of people applauded — and some wiped away tears — as a Mississippi community unveiled a larger-than-life statue of Emmett Till on Friday, not far from where white men kidnapped and killed the Black teenager over accusations he had flirted with a white woman in a country store. As reported by the Associated Press.

“Change has come, and it will continue to happen,” Madison Harper, a senior at Leflore County High School, told a racially diverse audience at the statue’s dedication. “Decades ago, our parents and grandparents could not envision that a moment like today would transpire.”

The 1955 lynching became a catalyst for the civil rights movement. Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago so the world could see the horrors inflicted on her 14-year-old son. Jet magazine published photos of his mutilated body, which was pulled from the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi.

The 9-foot (2.7-meter) tall bronze statue in Greenwood’s Rail Spike Park is a jaunty depiction of the living Till in slacks, dress shirt and tie with one hand on the brim of a hat.

The rhythm and blues song, “Wake Up, Everybody” played as workers pulled a tarp off the figure. Dozens of people surged forward, shooting photos and video on cellphones.

Anna-Maria Webster of Rochester, New York, had tears running down her face.

“It’s beautiful to be here,” said Webster, attending the ceremony on a sunny afternoon during a visit with Mississippi relatives. Speaking of Till’s mother she said: “Just to imagine the torment she went through — all over a lie.”

Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black residents of any state, now about 38%. Democratic U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, whose district encompasses the Delta, noted that Mississippi had no Black elected officials when Till was killed. He said Till’s death helped spur change.

“But you, know, change has a way of becoming slower and slower,” said Thompson, the only Black member of Mississippi’s current congressional delegation. “What we have to do in dedicating this monument to Emmett Till is recommit ourselves to the spirit of making a difference in our community.”

The statue is a short drive from an elaborate Confederate monument outside the Leflore County Courthouse and about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the crumbling remains of the store, Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, in Money.

The statue’s unveiling coincided with the release this month of “Till,” a movie exploring Till-Mobley’s private trauma over her son’s death and her transformation into a civil rights activist.

The Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., the last living witness to his cousin’s kidnapping, wasn’t able to travel from Illinois for Friday’s dedication. But he told The Associated Press on Wednesday: “We just thank God someone is keeping his name out there.”

He said some wrongly thought Till got what he deserved for breaking the taboo of flirting with a white woman, adding many people didn’t want to talk about the case for decades.

“Now there’s interest in it, and that’s a godsend,” Parker said. “You know what his mother said: ‘I hope he didn’t die in vain.’”

Greenwood and Leflore County are both more than 70% Black and officials have worked for years to bring the Till statue to reality. Democratic state Sen. David Jordan of Greenwood secured $150,000 in state funding and a Utah artist, Matt Glenn, was commissioned to create the statue.

Jordan said he hopes it will draw tourists to learn more about the area’s history. “Hopefully, it will bring all of us together,” he said.

Till and Parker had traveled from Chicago to spend the summer of 1955 with relatives in the deeply segregated Mississippi Delta. On Aug. 24, the two teens took a short trip with other young people to the store in Money. Parker said he heard Till whistle at shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant.

Four days later, Till was abducted in the middle of the night from his uncle’s home. The kidnappers tortured and shot him, weighted his body down with a cotton gin fan and dumped him into the river.

Jordan, who is Black, was a college student in 1955 when he drove to the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner to watch the murder trial of two white men charged with killing Till — Carolyn’s husband Roy Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam.

An all-white, all-male jury acquitted the two men, who later confessed to Look magazine that they killed Till.

Nobody has ever been convicted in the lynching. The U.S. Justice Department has opened multiple investigations starting in 2004 after receiving inquiries about whether charges could be brought against anyone still living.

In 2007, a Mississippi prosecutor presented evidence to a grand jury of Black and white Leflore County residents after investigators spent three years re-examining the killing. The grand jury declined to issue indictments.

The Justice Department reopened an investigation in 2018 after a 2017 book quoted Carolyn Bryant — now remarried and named Carolyn Bryant Donham — saying she lied when she claimed Till grabbed her, whistled and made sexual advances. Relatives have publicly denied Donham, who is in her 80s, recanted her allegations. The department closed that investigation in late 2021 without bringing charges.

This year, a group searching the Leflore County Courthouse basement found an unserved 1955 arrest warrant for “Mrs. Roy Bryant.” In August, another Mississippi grand jury found insufficient evidence to indict Donham, causing consternation for Till relatives and activists.

Although Mississippi has dozens of Confederate monuments, some have been moved in recent years, including one relocated in 2020 from the University of Mississippi campus to a cemetery where Confederate soldiers are buried.

The state has a several monuments to Black historical figures, including one honoring civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer in Ruleville.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Steve Bannon, the longtime ally of former President Donald Trump, was sentenced yesterday to serve four months behind bars after defying a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

The judge allowed Bannon to stay free pending appeal and also imposed a fine of $6,500 as part of the sentence. Bannon was convicted in July of two counts of contempt of Congress: one for refusing to sit for a deposition and the other for refusing to provide documents.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols handed down the sentence after saying the law was clear that contempt of Congress is subject to a mandatory minimum sentence of at least one month behind bars. Bannon’s lawyers had argued the judge could’ve sentenced him to probation instead. Prosecutors had asked for Bannon to be sent to jail for six months.

The House panel had sought Bannon’s testimony over his involvement in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Bannon has yet to testify or provide any documents to the committee, prosecutors wrote.

Prosecutors argued Bannon, 68, deserved the longer sentence because he had pursued a “bad faith strategy” and his public statements disparaging the committee itself made it clear he wanted to undermine their effort to get to the bottom of the violent attack and keep anything like it from happening again.

He should have received forty years!

Tony

A community-created artwork from the Stability AI Discord community.Credit…Marlop, Stability AI Discord Community

Dear Commons Community,

A celebration for the start-up company, Stability AI, which developed the  controversial Stable Diffusion image generator, represents the arrival of a new A.I. boom. That became clear Monday night at the San Francisco Exploratorium, where Stability AI, gave a party that felt a lot like a return to prepandemic exuberance.

The event — which lured tech luminaries including the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and the venture capitalist Ron Conway out of their Zoom rooms — was billed as a launch party for Stability AI and a celebration of the company’s recent $101 million fund-raising round, which reportedly valued the company at $1 billion. 

But it doubled as a coming-out bash for the entire field of generative A.I. — the wonky umbrella term for A.I. that doesn’t just analyze existing data but creates new text, images, videos, code snippets and more.  As reported by The New York Times.

It’s been a banner year, in particular, for generative A.I. apps that turn text prompts into images — which, unlike NFTs or virtual reality metaverses, actually have the numbers to justify the hype they’ve received. DALL-E 2, the image generator that OpenAI released this spring, has more than 1.5 million users creating more than two million images every day, according to the company. Midjourney, another popular A.I. image generator released this year, has more than three million users in its official Discord server. (Google and Meta have built their own image generators but have not released them to the public.)

That kind of growth has set off a feeding frenzy among investors hoping to get in early on the next big thing. Jasper, a year-old A.I. copywriting app for marketers, recently raised $125 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. Start-ups have raised millions more to apply generative A.I. to areas like gaming, programming and advertising. Sequoia Capital, the venture capital firm, recently said in a blog post that it thought generative A.I. could create “trillions of dollars of economic value.”

But no generative A.I. project has created as much buzz — or as much controversy — as Stable Diffusion.

Partly, that’s because, unlike the many generative A.I. projects that are carefully guarded by their makers, Stable Diffusion is open-source and free to use, meaning that anyone can view the code or download it and run a modified version on a personal computer. More than 200,000 people have downloaded the code since it was released in August, according to the company, and millions of images have been created using tools built on top of Stable Diffusion’s algorithm.

That hands-off approach extends to the images themselves. In contrast to other A.I. image generators, which have strict rules in place to prevent users from creating violent, pornographic or copyright-infringing images, Stable Diffusion comes with only a basic safety filter, which can be easily disabled by any users creating their own versions of the app.

That freedom has made Stable Diffusion a hit with underground artists and meme makers. But it has also led to widespread concern that the company’s lax rules could lead to a flood of violent imagery, nonconsensual nudity, and A.I.-generated propaganda and misinformation.

Incredible piece of software but why must we have to take the bad with the good!

Tony

David Brooks

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times columnist, David Brooks, has a sobering piece today for Democrats.  Entitled, “Why  Republicans Are Surging,”  he refers to recent polling showing that Republicans are pulling significantly ahead of Democrats in the midterm elections.  He bases much of his analysis on the Democrats squandering the strong position they held in the summer much of which was due to the reversal of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court Decision.  He points to polls that show that independent women are abandoning the Democrats for Republican candidates.  He comments that voters have become most concerned about the economy and crime.  He also indicates that the Democrats are not winning back Hispanic voters, the January 6^th Congressional hearings did not provide much of a bump upward, and that the Republicans have clearer messaging.

His entire column is below.

Tony

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The New York Times

“Why Republicans Are Surging”

October 22nd

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

Democrats had a golden summer. The Dobbs decision led to a surge of voter registrations. Voters handed Democrats a string of sweet victories in unlikely places — Alaska and Kansas, and good news in upstate New York.

The momentum didn’t survive the fall.

Over the past month or so, there’s been a rumbling across the land, and the news is not good for Team Blue. In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll 49 percent of likely voters said they planned to vote for a Republican for Congress, and 45 percent said they planned to vote for a Democrat. Democrats held a one-point lead last month.

The poll contained some eye-popping numbers. Democrats were counting on abortion rights to be a big issue, gaining them broad support among female voters. It doesn’t seem to be working. Over the past month, the gender gap, which used to favor Democrats, has evaporated. In September, women who identified as independent voters favored Democrats by 14 points. Now they favor Republicans by 18 percentage points.

Republicans lead among independents overall by 10 points.

To understand how the parties think the campaign is going, look at where they are spending their money. As Henry Olsen noted in The Washington Post last week, Democrats are pouring money into House districts that should be safe — places that Joe Biden won by double digits in 2020. Politico’s election forecast, for example, now rates the races in California’s 13th District and Oregon’s Sixth District as tossups. Two years ago, according to Politico, he won those areas by 11 and 14 points.

If Republicans are competitive in places like that, we’re probably looking at a red wave election that will enable them to easily take back the House and maybe the Senate.

So how should Democrats interpret these trends? There’s a minimalist interpretation: Midterms are usually hard for the president’s party, and this one was bound to be doubly hard because of global inflation.

I take a more medium to maximalist view. I’d say recent events have exposed some serious weaknesses in the party’s political approach:

It’s hard to win consistently if voters don’t trust you on the top issue. In a recent AP-NORC poll, voters trust Republicans to do a better job handling the economy, by 39 percent to 29 percent. Over the past two years, Democrats have tried to build a compelling economic platform by making massive federal investments in technology, infrastructure and child welfare. But those policies do not seem to be moving voters. As The Times’s Jim Tankersley has reported, Democratic candidates in competitive Senate races are barely talking about the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which included direct payments to citizens.

I thought the child tax credit expansion would be massively popular and could help create a Democratic governing majority. It turned out to be less popular than many anticipated, and there was little hue and cry when it expired. Maybe voters have a built-in uneasiness about income redistribution and federal spending.

Democrats have a crime problem. More than three-quarters of voters say that violent crime is a major problem in the United States, according to a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll. Back in the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden worked hard to give the Democrats credibility on this issue. Many Democrats have walked away from policies the party embraced then, often for good reasons. But they need to find another set of policies that will make the streets safer.

Democrats have not won back Hispanics. In 2016, Donald Trump won 28 percent of the Hispanic vote. In 2020, it was up to 38 percent. This year, as William A. Galston noted in The Wall Street Journal, recent surveys suggest that Republicans will once again win about 34 to 38 percent of the Hispanic vote. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis is leading the Democrat Charlie Crist by 16 points among Hispanics likely to vote.

The Jan. 6 committee and the warnings about MAGA fascism didn’t change minds. That committee’s work has been morally and legally important. But Trump’s favorability rating is pretty much where it was at the committee’s first public hearing. In the Times poll, Trump is roughly tied with Biden in a theoretical 2024 rematch. According to Politico, less than 2 percent of broadcast TV spending in House races has been devoted to Jan. 6 ads.

It could be that voters are overwhelmed by immediate concerns, like food prices. It could be that voters have become so cynical and polarized that scandal and corruption just don’t move people much anymore. This year Herschel Walker set some kind of record for the most scandals in one political season. He is still in a competitive race with Senator Raphael Warnock in Georgia.

The Republicans may just have a clearer narrative. The Trumpified G.O.P. deserves to be a marginalized and disgraced force in American life. But I’ve been watching the campaign speeches by people like Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona. G.O.P. candidates are telling a very clear class/culture/status war narrative in which common-sense Americans are being assaulted by elite progressives who let the homeless take over the streets, teach sex ed to 5-year-olds, manufacture fake news, run woke corporations, open the border and refuse to do anything about fentanyl deaths and the sorts of things that affect regular people.

In other words, candidates like Lake wrap a dozen different issues into one coherent class war story. And it seems to be working. In late July she was trailing her opponent by seven points. Now she’s up by about half a point.

Liz Truss Announcing Her Resignation

Dear Commons Community,

British Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned this morning— bowing to the inevitable after a tumultuous, six-week term in which her policies triggered turmoil in financial markets and a rebellion in her party.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Making a hastily scheduled statement outside her 10 Downing Street office, Truss acknowledged that “I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party.”

Hers is the third resignation by a Conservative prime minister in as many years and leaves a divided party seeking a leader who can unify its warring factions. Truss, who said she will remain in office for a few more days while that process unfolds, has been prime minister for just 45 days.

Just a day earlier she had vowed to stay in power, saying she was “a fighter and not a quitter.” But Truss couldn’t hold on any longer after a senior minister quit her government with a barrage of criticism and a vote in the House of Commons descended into chaos and acrimony just days after she was forced to abandon many of her economic policies.

A growing number of lawmakers had called for Truss to resign after weeks of turmoil sparked by her economic plan. When it was unveiled by the government last month, the plan triggered financial turmoil and a political crisis that has seen the replacement of Truss’ Treasury chief, multiple policy U-turns and a breakdown of discipline in the governing Conservative Party.

Earlier, Conservative lawmaker Simon Hoare said the government was in disarray.

“Nobody has a route plan. It’s all sort of hand-to-hand fighting on a day-to-day basis,” he told the BBC on Thursday.

Truss quit after a meeting with Graham Brady, a senior Conservative lawmaker who oversees leadership challenges. Brady was tasked with assessing whether the prime minister still has the support of Tory members of Parliament — and it seemed she did not.

“It’s time for the prime minister to go,” Conservative lawmaker Miriam Cates said earlier Thursday. Another, Steve Double, said of Truss: “She isn’t up to the job, sadly.” Legislator Ruth Edwards said “it is not responsible for the party to allow her to remain in power.”

Lawmakers’ anger grew after a Wednesday evening vote over fracking for shale gas — a practice that Truss wants to resume despite opposition from many Conservatives — produced chaotic scenes in Parliament.

With Conservatives holding a large parliamentary majority, an opposition call for a fracking ban was easily defeated. But there were displays of anger in the House of Commons, with party whips accused of using heavy-handed tactics to gain votes.

Chris Bryant, a lawmaker from the opposition Labour Party, said he “saw members being physically manhandled … and being bullied.” Conservative officials denied there was manhandling.

Rumors swirled that Conservative Chief Whip Wendy Morton, who is responsible for party discipline, and her deputy had resigned. Hours later, Truss’ office said both remained in their jobs.

Newspapers that usually support the Conservatives were vitriolic. An editorial in the Daily Mail was headlined: “The wheels have come off the Tory clown car.”

International Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan, sent onto the airwaves Thursday morning to defend the government, insisted the administration was providing “stability.” But she was unable to guarantee Truss would lead the party into the next election.

“At the moment, I think that’s the case,” she said.

ADVERTISEMENT

With opinion polls giving the Labour Party a large and growing lead, the Conservative Party decided its only hope of avoiding electoral oblivion was to replace Truss. But they remain divided over who exactly should do that.

The party is keen to avoid another divisive leadership contest like the race a few months ago that saw Truss defeat ex-Treasury chief Rishi Sunak. Among potential replacements — if only Conservative lawmakers can agree — are Sunak, House of Commons leader Penny Mordaunt and newly appointed Treasury chief Jeremy Hunt.

Whoever it is will be the country’s third prime minister this year alone. A national election doesn’t have to be held until 2024.

Truss’ downfall was hastened by the resignation on Wednesday of Home Secretary Suella Braverman. She quit after breaching rules by sending an official document from her personal email account. She used her resignation letter to lambaste Truss, saying she had “concerns about the direction of this government.”

“The business of government relies upon people accepting responsibility for their mistakes,” she said in a thinly veiled dig at Truss.

Braverman was replaced as home secretary, the minister responsible for immigration and law and order, by former Cabinet minister Grant Shapps, a high-profile supporter of her defeated rival Sunak.

The dramatic developments came days after Truss fired her Treasury chief, Kwasi Kwarteng, on Friday after the economic package the pair unveiled Sept. 23 spooked financial markets and triggered an economic and political crisis.

The plan’s 45 billion pounds ($50 billion) in unfunded tax cuts sparked turmoil on financial markets, hammering the value of the pound and increasing the cost of U.K. government borrowing. The Bank of England was forced to intervene to prevent the crisis from spreading to the wider economy and putting pension funds at risk.

On Monday Kwarteng’s replacement, Hunt, scrapped almost all of Truss’ tax cuts, along with her flagship energy policy and her promise of no public spending cuts. He said the government will need to save billions of pounds and there are “many difficult decisions” to be made before he sets out a medium-term fiscal plan on Oct. 31.

Speaking to lawmakers for the first time since the U-turn, Truss apologized Wednesday and admitted she had made mistakes during her six weeks in office, but insisted that by changing course she had “taken responsibility and made the right decisions in the interest of the country’s economic stability.”

Opposition lawmakers shouted “Resign!” as she spoke in the House of Commons. But Truss said she would not.

Labour Party leader Keir Starmer accused the Conservatives of lacking “the basic patriotic duty to keep the British people out of their own pathetic squabbles.”

He said that amid a worsening a cost-of-living crisis, “Britain cannot afford the chaos of the Conservatives anymore. We need a general election now.”

Best of luck to Ms. Truss in her future endeavors!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Former Vice President Mike Pence yesterday warned against the growing populist tide in the Republican Party as he admonished “Putin apologists” unwilling to stand up to the Russian leader over his assault on Ukraine.

Speaking at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, Pence addressed the growing gulf between traditional conservatives and a new generation of populist candidates inspired, in part, by former President Donald Trump.

“Our movement cannot forsake the foundational commitment that we have to security, to limited government, to liberty and to life. But nor can we allow our movement to be led astray by the siren song of unprincipled populism that’s unmoored from our oldest traditions and most cherished values,” he told the think tank audience. “Let me say: This movement and the party that it animates must remain the movement of a strong national defense, limited government and traditional moral values and life.”

To that end, Pence criticized those in the party who have pushed a more isolationist foreign policy, particularly when it comes to Russian aggression. Earlier Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared martial law for four illegally annexed Ukrainian regions as his forces have suffered stinging battlefield defeats and renewed attacks on Ukrainian cities and vital infrastructure.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“Now, I know there is a rising chorus in our party, including some new voices to our movement, who would have us disengaged with the wider world,” Pence said. “But appeasement has never worked, ever, in history. And now more than ever, we need a conservative movement committed to America’s role as leader of the free world and as a vanguard of American values.”

“As Russia continues its unconscionable war of aggression to Ukraine, I believe that conservatives must make it clear that Putin must stop and Putin will pay,” he added. “There can be no room in the conservative movement for apologists to Putin. There is only room in this movement for champions of freedom.”

Pence has been traveling the country, campaigning on behalf of Republican midterm candidates as he lays the groundwork for a potential 2024 presidential campaign. Some of the candidates he has endorsed have espoused the kinds of populist and isolationist views he seemed to take issue with Wednesday. Arizona’s Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, for instance, has labeled the Russia-Ukraine conflict a “European problem” and has criticized federal spending on Ukraine.

Pence’s speech largely focused on the conservative “Freedom Agenda” that he released earlier this year. It serves as both a concrete policy plan for Republicans as well as an implicit criticism of Trump, who has spent much of his time since leaving office obsessing about the 2020 election.

Pence has been a target of Trump’s ire since he refused to go along with the former president’s unconstitutional plot to try to overturn the will of voters in January 2021.

Pence once again stressed the importance of the oath he took when he was sworn in as vice president, adding that, “The American people must know that conservatives will not simply pay lip service to keeping faith with the Constitution, but that we will always keep our oath — that we will keep our oath, as the Bible says, even when it hurts” and “stand for the Constitution … even when it would be politically expedient to do otherwise.”

Pence has spent the last year trying to walk a careful line, distancing himself from his former boss while at the same time touting the accomplishments of the Trump-Pence administration.

Speaking later Wednesday evening before students at Georgetown University, Pence was asked whether he would vote for Trump if Trump becomes the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 2024.

“Well, there might be somebody else I’d prefer more,” he said, drawing applause from the crowd. He said he is currently focused solely on the midterms, but added, “I’ll keep you posted.”

A step in the right direction but Pence could have been a little more definitive about his view of Trump running for president again.

Tony

Undergraduate EnrollmentDear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting this morning that new data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center indicates that enrollment in the nation’s colleges is still on the decline. Institutions lost 1.1 percent of undergraduates this fall, leading to a total two-year decline of 4.2 percent since 2020. Graduate enrollment also declined (-1.0%), perhaps signifying the end of the pandemic-related influxes of post-baccalaureate students.

While the 1.1-percent dip in undergraduate enrollment this fall was less severe than the drops during the same period in 2020 and 2021, the loss of undergraduate students still hit every sector, according to the data, released on Thursday.

“After two straight years of historically large losses in student enrollments, it’s particularly troubling that the numbers are not climbing back at this point, especially among freshmen,” said Doug Shapiro, the center’s executive director, in a call with reporters.

Freshman enrollment declined by 1.5 percent over all this fall, fueled by losses in this group at four-year institutions in every sector. At what the center calls “highly selective colleges,” where at least half of the students who apply are rejected, freshman enrollment was down 5.6 percent after a gain of 10.7 percent in the fall of 2021.

At one point it was hoped that high-school seniors who skipped going to college in 2020 or 2021 — and who thereby drove steep declines in freshman attendance — would enroll in college belatedly. But “there’s not a lot of evidence in these numbers that they’re coming back now,” Shapiro said.

One area of good news was at community colleges, where an uptick of 0.9 percent in the number of first-time students this fall suggests that freshman enrollment seems to have stabilized after pandemic-driven losses that were harshest in this sector.

Colleges where more than 90 percent of students are enrolled online were a bright spot, mainly due to a spike in the number of 18-to-20-year olds. Undergraduate attendance at online colleges was up 3.2 percent from the previous year, among the small number of them that reported data.

The center’s preliminary data, which reflect enrollment as of September 29, are based on 10.3 million students at 62 percent of the institutions that report to the center.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott yesterday donated $84.5 million to the Girl Scouts of the USA.

The gift from Scott, who was previously married to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is the largest single donation in the organization’s history, the group said.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the 500 wealthiest people in the world, estimates Scott’s net worth at $27.6 billion, making her the 41st-richest person in the world. After she split from Bezos in 2019, she pledged to give about half of her more than $35 billion fortune away to charities.

Scott’s gift will go to Girl Scouts of the USA and 29 local councils that Scott selected, the organization said in a news release.

The money will go toward creating “more equitable membership opportunities” in underserved areas; expanding programming in career readiness and mental health and exploring STEM fields; bolstering research, staff and volunteer training; and upgrading Girl Scout facilities to be more accessible and resilient to climate change, among other things, it said.

Sofia Chang, the Girl Scouts’ first Asian American CEO, said Scott’s gift is “a great accelerator for our ongoing efforts to help girls cultivate the skills and connections needed to lead in their own communities and globally.”

Founded in 1912, the Girl Scouts host troops, service projects, camps and other events to cultivate leadership and other skills — including coding, robotics, financial literacy and computer science — for about 2.5 million members, including transgender girls, according to its website.

Ms. Scott is becoming a model for philanthropists around the world. 

Bless her!

Tony