REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Dear Commons Community,

U.S. President Joe Biden broke down in tears on Friday after a chance meeting at an Irish church with the priest who performed the last rites on his son Beau, a priest who accompanied Biden during the visit said.

Father Richard Gibbons, who led Biden on a tour of the Catholic shrine of Knock, said he had not known that one of his colleagues, ex-U.S. Army chaplain Father Frank O’Grady, had performed the sacrament until the president arrived.

Beau Biden, the president’s eldest son, died in the United States in 2015 from brain cancer. Biden has often said that Beau, a former Delaware attorney general, should be president instead of him. As reported by Reuters.

“It just so happened, and this is spontaneous, that we have working at the shrine here the chaplain who gave the last rites, the last anointing, to his son in the United States,” Gibbons told the BBC.

“He (President Biden) wanted to meet him straight away, he dispatched a secret service agent to go and find him. He was crying, it really affected him and then we said a prayer, we said a decade of the rosary for his family, lit a candle and he took a moment or two of private prayer.”

“He laughed, he cried and it just kind of hit the man. You could just see how deeply it all felt and meant to him. It was an extraordinary afternoon.”

O’Grady, an Irish priest who worked at Walter Reed Military Hospital in Washington D.C., described his 10-minute meeting with Biden, his son Hunter and the president’s sister Valerie as a “nice chat.”

“He was delighted to see me and I was delighted to see him. He gave me a big hug. Hunter gave me a big hug. It was like a reunion,” O’Grady told Irish state broadcaster RTE.

“His faith sustained him in the past at that difficult time and still does,” O’Grady said. “I said to him he has challenges coming up and he said he has.”

Biden, who is wrapping up a three-day trip to Ireland, later visited a nearby County Mayo hospice where he broke ground ahead of its construction in 2017. A plaque on the ground at the entrance to the hospice is dedicated to Beau Biden.

The president, a devout Catholic, took a moment to pause and inspect the plaque with his family before entering the hospice to meet the staff.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The State University of New York will no longer require standardized exams for college admissions, as the number of test-takers dwindles across the state.

The SUNY Board of Trustees, consisting of 18 members mostly appointed by the governor, unanimously approved a resolution on Tuesday to “prospectively” make the submission of SAT or ACT exam scores optional, as first reported by POLITICO.

The policy was first implemented as a pandemic emergency measure in June 2020 and extended each year for limited terms — until this week.

The SUNY Board of Trustees, consisting of 18 members mostly appointed by the governor, unanimously approved a resolution on Tuesday afternoon to “prospectively” make the submission of SAT or ACT exam scores optional, as first reported by POLITICO.

While applicants can still submit standardized test scores if they so choose, close to 40,000 fewer high school graduates in New York took the SAT last year than before the pandemic, according to data from the College Board.

“Colleges in New York State and across the country are largely maintaining their test-optional policies and/or implementing them permanently,” SUNY Chancellor John King said in a resolution.

That includes Columbia University, which became the first Ivy League institution to drop the requirement last month. The liberal arts college Vassar College in Poughkeepsie followed suit on Thursday.

Other public universities, such as colleges in the University of California system, have scrapped test scores entirely from consideration for admissions or merit scholarships.

“In addition, fewer New York State high school students are taking the SAT, especially among historically underrepresented groups,” read the SUNY memo.

Fewer than 6 in 10 New York students who graduated high school last year took the SAT, according to College Board data. Before the pandemic and the proliferation of test-optional policies as an emergency measure, nearly 8 in 10 graduates statewide sat for the admissions test during high school.

The report shows 122,170 members of the Class of 2022 took the exam before graduation, 39% of whom were white. One third of them came from families earning more than $110,000 each year.

SUNY will continue to study the use and value of standardized tests through its public policy research arm, the Rockefeller Institute of Government, and tweak the policy if necessary.

But officials so far found that students who did not submit SAT or ACT scores are keeping pace with their peers.

“Importantly,” King said in the memo, “during the period that exam submission has been optional at SUNY, the retention rate gap between test-takers and non-test takers has stayed the same or even shrunk.”

Good move on the part of the SUNY Board of Trustees!

Tony

Liz Cheney and Marjorie Taylor Greene.. NBC News.

Dear Commons Community,

Former Rep. Liz Cheney said Thursday that GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene should not have a security clearance after Greene defended the Air National Guardsman suspected of leaking a trove of classified documents.

Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming who has come out against the Trump-aligned wing of the party, said Greene’s comments made clear that she “cannot be trusted” with national security information.  As reported by NBC News,.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, defended the alleged leaker, Jack Teixeira, 21, in two tweets Thursday night, claiming that the Biden administration was “the real enemy” and had “lied to us from the very beginning.“

Cheney responded in a post on Twitter, saying, “Marjorie Taylor Greene makes clear yet again that she cannot be trusted with America’s national security information and should not have a security clearance of any kind.”

Teixeira was arrested Thursday at a home in North Dighton, Massachusetts. He made his first court appearance Friday, where he was charged with possessing classified documents pertaining to national security and possessing national defense materials. The charges carry a maximum of 10 years behind bars.

Greene, a member of the Homeland Security Committee, said on Twitter that “Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime. And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more. Ask yourself who is the real enemy?”

Teixeira’s arrest ended a weekslong manhunt for the source of the leaks, which exposed potentially hundreds of pages of classified intelligence on the war in Ukraine and America’s spying on its allies.

There is something terribly wrong with the Republican Party when someone like Liz Cheney cannot win a GOP primary while Greene is appointed to a major Congressional committee.

Tony

Elon Musk, left, and Cash App founder Bob Lee. (AP; Twitter)

Dear Commons Community,

The San Francisco district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, blasted comments tweeted by Elon Musk after Cash App founder Bob Lee was stabbed to death in the street earlier this month.  As reported by The New York Daily News.

Lee, 43, was killed in the Rincon Hill neighborhood of San Francisco around 2:30 a.m. on April 4. A day later, Musk took to Twitter to lament how violent repeat offenders continue to get away with crime in San Francisco, one of the biggest tech hubs in the country. He was quickly joined by other high-profile figures and tech executives.

“Many people I know have been severely assaulted. Violent crime in SF is horrific and even if attackers are caught, they are often released immediately. Is the city taking stronger action to incarcerate repeat violent offenders @BrookeJenkinsSF?” Musk wrote, tagging DA Brooke Jenkins.

On Thursday, Nima Momeni, a tech consultant and owner of a company called Expand IT, was taken into custody in the San Francisco suburb of Emeryville. He was charged with murder in connection with Lee’s stabbing.

Authorities said the men knew each other, meaning Lee’s death was not the result of a random violent attack or a repeat offender as Musk suggested.

During a press conference regarding the arrest, Jenkins condemned Musk’s comments as misinformation.

“I must point out that reckless and irresponsible statements like those contained in Mr. Musk’s tweet that assumed incorrect circumstances about Mr. Lee’s death served to mislead the world in their perceptions of San Francisco, and also negatively impact the pursuit of justice for victims of crime as it spreads misinformation at a time when the police are trying to solve a very difficult case,” Jenkins said.

She added: “We all should and must do better about not contributing to the spread of such misinformation without having actual facts to underlie the statements that we make. Victims deserve that and the residents of San Francisco deserve that.”

Police chief Bill Scott said the stabbing was “not about San Francisco” but human nature.

“Just put it in any other city,” he said. “I don’t believe it would have changed the circumstances one bit.”

Musk keeps embarrassing himself ever since he took over Twitter.

Tony

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins. (Noah Berger/AP)

Dear Commons Community,

Mayor Eric Adams bestowed one of the city’s highest civilian honors upon legendary composer Andrew Lloyd Webber yesterday, praising him as the greatest Broadway musical force in history.

“We are looking at really the greatest of all time,” Adams said before handing a ceremonial Key to the City award to Lloyd Webber during a press conference outside the Majestic Theatre in Manhattan. “A true, true contributor to Broadway, and he keeps the lights on in our hearts.”

Lloyd Webber, 75, whose award-winning Broadway productions include “Phantom of the Opera,” “Cats,” “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita,” noted he was born and raised in the United Kingdom, but that he has always in his heart felt like a New Yorker.

“This is the home of musicals, and where I want to be,” he said.

The Key to the City award comes as the cast of Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera” prepare for their final show at the Majestic this Sunday, capping off an extraordinary 35-year run, the longest in Broadway history.

“I hope that Broadway continues to thrive and that new shows come in,” he said.

Webber is surely the greatest of all time.  Thank you, Mr. Webber for all you have given our city.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump’s love for autocrats is on full display in a new video from the Republican Accountability Project, a group of “Never Trump” GOPers.  The video (see below) features Trump’s comments in which he praises Chinese leader Xi Jinping, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump has long had starry eyes for dictators and strongmen, and spent much of his presidency cozying up to such leaders ― while at the same time often keeping traditional U.S. allies at arm’s length.

He sided with Putin when questioned about U.S. intelligence that found Russia interfered on his behalf in the 2016 election, and boasted that he got along so well with Kim that they “fell in love.”

And just last week, he bragged to Sean Hannity about how he “got along great” with various dictators.

On the flipside, he dismissed Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a “far left lunatic” and accused French President Emmanuel Macron of being “very insulting.”

What a sleaze and danger Trump is to democracies including our own!

Tony

Donald Trump Loves Dictators pic.twitter.com/mWtHqdi6y6

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) April 13, 2023

Dear Commons Community,

David Brooks has a column this morning entitled, “Why People Are Fleeing Blue Cities for Red States.”  After establishing that many workers have been leaving Democratic (blue) cities in the Northeast and the Midwest for the South, he examines the trend a little further and comments that many of these migrants are moving to cities like Austin, Raleigh Durham, Miami, Nashville, Tampa and Phoenix, where the Republican (red) hold is not as strong.

His conclusion:

“As the Democratic Party becomes more and more the party of the college-educated voters and as the Republicans become more the party of white working-class voters, Democratic prospects in the upper Midwest get worse. But Democratic prospects in the Southwestern growth areas get better. It would not surprise me if a different kind of Democrat emerged from these areas.

We know the policy mix that creates a dynamic society. We just don’t yet have a party that wants to promote it.’

Brooks’ entire piece is below.

Good analysis!

If you are  interested in this topic you might also want to read,  Blue Metros, Red States: The Shifting Urban-Rural Divide in America’s Swing States  by Damore, Lang and Danielsen, which was released in 2020 by Brookings Institution Press.

Tony

———————————————————————-

The New York Times

Why People Are Fleeing Blue Cities for Red States

April 13, 2023

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

There are a lot of us in the Northeastern media who properly spend a lot of time slamming the Republican Party for what a mess it’s become. I have only one question: If we’re right, why are so many people leaving blue states so they can live in red ones?

Between 2010 and 2020, the fastest-growing states were mostly red — places like Texas, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and South Carolina. During the pandemic that trend accelerated, and once again, most of the big population-gaining states are governed by Republicans.

If you go back further, you see decade after decade of migration toward the more conservative South. The Brookings Institution demographer William Frey has noted that in 1920, the Northeast and the Midwest accounted for 60 percent of America’s population. A century later, the Sunbelt accounts for 62 percent of the nation’s population. These days we are mostly a Sunbelt nation.

Why are these red states growing so rapidly? The short answer is that they are more pro-business. In a study for the American Enterprise Institute, Mark J. Perry compared the top 10 states people were flocking to in 2021 with the top 10 states people were flocking from.

The places they are flocking to have lower taxes. The 10 states that saw the biggest population gains have an average maximum income tax of 3.8 percent. The 10 states with the biggest population loss have an 8 percent average rate.

The growing states also have fewer restrictions on home construction. That contributes to lower housing prices. The median home price in those 10 population-gaining states is an average of 23 percent less than that of the 10 biggest population-losing states.

Perry goes down a range of other factors and concludes that Americans are moving away from blue states with high energy costs, byzantine regulatory regimes and unfriendly business climates. They are moving to economically vibrant red states with lower costs, more conservative fiscal policies and more job opportunities.

Fifty years ago, few would have predicted that the American South would emerge as an economic dynamo — and that people would be flocking to places like South Carolina and Tennessee, but it’s happening.

So can we tell a simple story here: Republican policies work, Democratic policies don’t?

Well, not quite. When you look inside the red states at where the growth is occurring, you notice immediately that the dynamism is not mostly in the red parts of the red states. The growth is in the metro areas — which are often blue cities in red states. A study from the L.B.J. Urban Lab, for example, found that Austin, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth accounted for 71 percent of the jobs created in Texas in 2019.

Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economist who studies cities, provided me with data that showed which cities enjoyed rapid employment growth between 2019 and 2021. They tended to be from warmer parts of the country, an all-star team of Sunbelt blue cities: Austin, Raleigh Durham, Miami, Nashville, Tampa and Phoenix. Republicans may be proud that many of their states are growing, but Austin is not CPAC’s utopia.

If you look at these success stories you see they are actually the product of a red-blue mash-up. Republicans at the state level provide the general business climate, but Democrats at the local level influence the schools, provide many social services and create a civic atmosphere that welcomes diversity and attracts highly educated workers.

Very often the conservative state authorities are at war with the more liberal city authorities over things like minimum wage laws and L.G.B.T.Q. rights. But, at least for right now, the red-blue mash-up seems to work.

So if this is the formula that produces a dynamic and cosmopolitan society, where is the political party that is conservative-leaning on business matters and more liberal-leaning on things like education, immigration and work force development?

Where is the party that stands for the policy blend that manifestly works?

Once upon a time you could squint and imagine the George W. Bush/Mitt Romney Republican Party morphing in that direction. No longer. The G.O.P. is a working-class populist party that has no interest in nurturing highly educated bobo boom towns. The G.O.P. does everything it can to repel those people — and the Tesla they drove in on.

If you look at Democrats on the coasts you don’t see much movement in that direction, either. But Democrats have been growing stronger in exactly these growing Southwestern states. Joe Biden became the first Democrat to win Maricopa County (Phoenix) since 1948. Democrats now hold all six of the Senate seats from Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado. They held both seats in Arizona until Kyrsten Sinema went independent.

As the Democratic Party becomes more and more the party of the college-educated voters and as the Republicans become more the party of white working-class voters, Democratic prospects in the upper Midwest get worse. But Democratic prospects in the Southwestern growth areas get better. It would not surprise me if a different kind of Democrat emerged from these areas.

We know the policy mix that creates a dynamic society. We just don’t yet have a party that wants to promote it.

Dear Commons Community,

Todd Feltman sent this story along to me this morning.

Liam Squires, like many students, usually answers the question “How was school today?” with an evasive answer along the lines of “I don’t know.”

This is why weeks passed before his mother, Megan Squires, learned that he had spotted an error in a science textbook that the publisher, dozens of students and his own teacher had missed.  As reported by the Fauquier Times and The New York Times.

Liam, 10, had noticed that two rocks were misplaced in a diagram of the rock cycle. The significance of his discovery was not clear to his mother until months later in March, when Liam was praised by the school district superintendent and received a letter from the textbook’s publisher.

Liam saw the mistake toward the end of a school day at H.M. Pearson Elementary School in Catlett, Va., about 50 miles southwest of Washington, D.C.

“I was just going through it, and since we had only recently first learned about the rock cycle, I remembered it pretty good,” Liam said. “And I was like, ‘That isn’t right,’ when I saw the error.”

For those who may need a refresher on the rock cycle, it is the process that explains how the three main types of rocks — igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary — form and transform, according to the University of California, Berkeley.

In the review section of the “Exploring Science All Around Us” textbook that Liam’s class used, the sedimentary rock and igneous rock were swapped into the wrong spots in the rock cycle. The Fauquier Times reported on Liam’s discovery.

He immediately told his teacher, Serena Porter, who at first thought that there could not be an error in the textbook and worried that she had been incorrectly teaching the rock cycle.

Then, she looked more closely at the diagram.

“My eyes have been on that page, and other adult eyes, and no one saw that,” Ms. Porter said. “I was just blown away that he had found it.”

God bless how smart our children are!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The abortion pill mifepristone will remain available in the United States for now but with significant restrictions including a requirement for in-person doctor visits to obtain the drug, a federal appeals court ruled late yesterday. 

The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals put on hold part of last Friday’s order by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, Texas, that had suspended the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for the drug while he hears a lawsuit by anti-abortion groups seeking to ban it.  As reported by Reuters.

However, the appeals court declined to block portions of Kacsmaryk’s order, which is set to take effect on Friday, that effectively reinstate restrictions on the pill’s distribution that had been lifted since 2016. In addition to a requirement of three in-person doctor visits, those restrictions include limiting the drug’s use to the first seven weeks of pregnancy, down from the current 10.

The ruling came from a panel of three 5th Circuit judges, two appointed by then-President Donald Trump and one by George W. Bush, both Republicans. The Biden administration, the anti-abortion groups or both could now appeal the U.S. Supreme Court.

The FDA and lawyers for the groups could not immediately be reached for comment.

Kacsmaryk’s ruling apparently conflicts with a different federal judge’s decision, also issued last Friday, ordering the FDA to maintain access to mifepristone with no new restrictions in 17 states and the District of Columbia. The Biden administration has asked the judge in that case to clarify his order in light of Kacsmaryk’s.

The lawsuit before Kacsmaryk was filed against the FDA in November by four anti-abortion groups led by the recently formed Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and four anti-abortion doctors. They contend the agency used an improper process when it approved mifepristone in 2000 and did not adequately consider the drug’s safety when used by girls under age 18 to terminate a pregnancy.

Both judges’ rulings last week were preliminary injunctions meant to remain in effect while the lawsuits are pending, and are not final.

However, Kacsmaryk said he thought the anti-abortion groups were likely to succeed on the merits, writing that the FDA “acquiesced on its legitimate safety concerns – in violation of its statutory duty – based on plainly unsound reasoning and studies that did not support its conclusions” when it approved mifepristone.

Hundreds of biotech and pharmaceutical company executives on Monday signed an open letter calling for reversal of Kacsmaryk’s ruling, saying it undermines the FDA’s authority and ignores decades of scientific evidence on the drug’s safety.

The other ruling, ensuring access to mifepristone, was issued by U.S. District Judge Thomas Rice in Spokane, Washington. It arises from a lawsuit brought by a group of Democratic-led states challenging federal safety restrictions for mifepristone.

Both the 5th Circuit’s ruling and Rice’s ruling are likely to be subject to further appeals.

Dozens of legal briefs have been filed in the two cases, with mainstream medical associations like the American Medical Association and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, abortion rights groups and Democratic politicians supporting the drug’s approval, and anti-abortion groups and Republican politicians opposing it.

Mifepristone is part of a two-drug regimen, administered in combination with misprostol, for medication abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. The drugs account for more than half of all abortions in the country.

Some abortion providers have said that if mifepristone is unavailable, they would switch to a misoprostol-only regimen for a medication abortion, which is not as effective. It is not yet clear how widely available it would be.

Some Democratic-led states have begun stockpiling the drugs since Kacsmaryk’s ruling.

The Supreme Court last year overturned its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling recognizing a constitutional right to abortion. Since then, 12 of the 50 states now ban abortion outright while many others prohibit it after a certain length of pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights.

There is a lot more to come in this judicial fight!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Nikki Haley’s 2024 campaign is telling donors that former President Trump is “consumed by the grievances of the past and the promise of more drama in the future,” according to a memo obtained by Axios.

Why it matters: The primary dynamics are changing against Trump. Haley has been polling in single digits, but a fundraising haul of $11 million in six weeks gives her campaign an opening against her rivals.  As reported by CBS News.

Haley’s campaign raised more than nearly all the 2016 GOP candidates in their first quarter — and more than Trump in the first quarter of this cycle.

Trump’s campaign hasn’t released its full Q1 fundraising numbers yet, but announced raising over $12 million in the week after his indictment.

“Donald Trump had a pretty good Q1, if you count being indicted as ‘good,'” Haley’s campaign manager Betsy Ankney wrote in the memo.

“Still, it’s increasingly clear that Trump’s candidacy is more consumed by the grievances of the past and the promise of more drama in the future, rather than a forward-looking vision for the American people,” the memo went on.

Haley’s campaign isn’t aiming only at Trump. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is “not ready for prime time,” the memo said.

Most of the GOP has come to Trump’s defense after he was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records.

But the unprecedented, history-making development is changing the contours of the Republican presidential primary, opening a lane for anti-Trump voices.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced his ’24 bid after the indictment and said Trump should drop out of the race altogether.

Haley has so far rejected  “splashy” campaigning and  instead ia sticking to traditional retail politics during an election in which the GOP primary and electorate have been completely refashioned in Trump’s image.

The former UN ambassador has barnstormed Iowa and New Hampshire, holding nearly 20 events with voters in the last six weeks. She’s also held events in South Carolina and talked about immigration at the southern border.

As Republicans will try to distinguish themselves from Trump without perturbing his base, Haley’s campaign will try a “discipline” versus “drama” approach to taking out the party’s leader.

I congratulate Ms. Haley for having the guts to tell it like it is about “drama queen” Trump!

Tony