Dear Commons Community,

Pope Francis opened a meeting yesterday on the future of the Catholic Church, where major topics and issues will be discussed. The three-week General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops at the Vatican, has drawn bishops from around the world to discuss issues including whether priests should be allowed to get married, if divorced and remarried Catholics should receive communion, whether women should be allowed to become deacons and how the church will handle matters around the LGBTQ community.

Even before it kicked off this year’s synod was already historic: It’s the first time that women and laypeople are being allowed to vote — though 80% of participants are still bishops, and thus men. But the biggest bombshell dropped earlier this week, was when Francis opened the door for the possibility of Catholic priests blessing same-sex unions.

His remarks, published Monday, came with caveats: Francis stressed that blessings shouldn’t be seen as elevating same-sex unions to the sacred place of heterosexual marriage, but until now, the church’s position had been that same-sex unions could not be blessed, because “God cannot bless sin.”

In his statements — issued in reply to cardinals who had requested clarity on the church’s position on the matter — Francis said, “we cannot be judges who only deny, reject, and exclude.”

In his opening homily Wednesday for the synod, the pope said that “everyone, everyone, everyone,” must be allowed in.

LGBTQ organizations welcomed the change in tone, while church conservatives blasted Francis for appearing to dilute Catholic doctrine and sow confusion.

Jaime Manson, a women’s rights activist and devout Catholic, said the change opens the church tent for LGBTQ couples like her and her partner of four years.

“Affirming and embracing everyone only makes the church stronger,” Manson told CBS News. “It is a very slim minority of Catholics who are opposed to same-sex unions.”

Father Gerald Murray, a conservative priest from Manhattan, disagreed.

“For the pope to say that priests and bishops can find a way to do this, it’s wrong,” Murray said. “He shouldn’t do it.”

“The harm is that it contradicts Catholic teaching,” Murray said when asked about the harm in making the tent “bigger for more people.”

Viva il Papa!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

John Kelly, the longest-serving White House chief of staff for Donald Trump, offered his harshest criticism yet of the former president in an exclusive statement to CNN.

Kelly set the record straight with on-the-record confirmation of a number of damning stories about statements Trump made behind closed doors attacking US service members and veterans, listing a number of objectionable comments Kelly witnessed Trump make firsthand.  As reported by CNN.

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”

In the statement, Kelly is confirming, on the record, a number of details in a 2020 story in The Atlantic by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, including Trump turning to Kelly on Memorial Day 2017, as they stood among those killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, and saying, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

Those details also include Trump’s inability to understand why the American public respects former prisoners of war and those shot down in combat. Then-candidate Trump of course said in front of a crowd in 2015 that former Vietnam POW Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, was “not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” But behind closed doors, sources told Goldberg, this lack of understanding went on to cause Trump to repeatedly call McCain a “loser” and to refer to former President George H. W. Bush, who was also shot down as a Navy pilot in World War II, as a “loser.”

CNN reached out to the Trump campaign Monday afternoon, telling officials there that a former administration official had confirmed, on the record, a number of details about the 2020 Atlantic story, without naming Kelly, and seeking comment. The Trump campaign responded by insulting the character and credibility of retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley, who had nothing to do with this story.

The Atlantic article also described Trump’s 2018 visit to France for the centennial anniversary of the end of World War I, where, according to several senior staff members, Trump said he did not want to visit the graves of American soldiers buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris because, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” During that same trip to France, the article reported, Trump said the 1,800 US Marines killed in the Belleau Wood were “suckers” for getting killed.

And Kelly’s statement adds context to a story in the book “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, in which Trump, after a separate trip to France in 2017, tells Kelly he wants no wounded veterans in a military parade he’s trying to have planned in his honor. Inspired by the Bastille Day parade, except for the section of the parade featuring wounded French veterans in wheelchairs, Trump tells Kelly, “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade.”

“Those are the heroes,” Kelly said. “In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are – and they are buried over in Arlington.”

“I don’t want them,” Trump said. “It doesn’t look good for me.”

The story squares with another recent story from Goldberg in The Atlantic, a profile of retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, in which Trump does not react well to seeing severely wounded Army Captain Luis Avila singing “God Bless America” at a welcome event for the new chairman. “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.”

Kelly’s statement also refers to a remark Trump made in response to that same article, which describes Milley, in the closing days of the Trump presidency in 2020, receiving intelligence that the Chinese military feared Trump was about to order a military strike on it. Milley, in a call authorized by Trump administration officials, reassured his Chinese counterparts that such a strike was not going to happen.

That call was first reported in 2021 in the book “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, but Trump said this past week on his social media site that the call was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.”

Asked for reaction to the suggestion that he deserves execution, Milley told Norah O’Donnell of “60 Minutes” that he wouldn’t “comment directly on those, those things. But I can tell you that this military, this soldier, me, will never turn our back on that Constitution.”

Kelly’s statement to CNN comes days after former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson sat down with CNN in an interview promoting her new book, “Enough,” and warned the public that “Donald Trump is the most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.”

“Enough,” interestingly, contains a scene in which Hutchinson and then-White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin push back against Goldberg’s 2020 story. Griffin issued a statement to The Atlantic after that story posted denying the report.

Reached for comment over the weekend, Griffin said, “Despite publicly praising the military and claiming to be the most pro-military president, there’s a demonstrable record of Trump bashing the most decorated service members in our country, from Gen. Mattis to Kelly to Milley, to criticizing the wounded or deceased like John McCain. Donald Trump will fundamentally never understand service the way those who have actually served in uniform will, and it’s one of the countless reasons he’s unfit to be commander in chief.”

No other presidential candidate in history has had so many detractors from his inner circle. His former secretary of defense, Mark Esper, told CNN in November 2022, “I think he’s unfit for office. … He puts himself before country. His actions are all about him and not about the country. And then, of course, I believe he has integrity and character issues as well.”

Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, told CBS in June that “he is a consummate narcissist. And he constantly engages in reckless conduct. … He will always put his own interests, and gratifying his own ego, ahead of everything else, including the country’s interests. Our country can’t, you know, can’t be a therapy session for you know, a troubled man like this.”

Trump is indeed a “troubled” despicable character.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading The Egyptian, a novel written by Finnish author, Mika Waltari.  It was recommended to my wife, Elaine, by a colleague and Elaine recommended it to me.  It was written in 1945 and an abridged version translated into English in 1949.  It follows Sinuhe, an orphan who grew up to be a doctor in Ancient Egypt, mostly during the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten of the 18th Dynasty, whom some consider the first monotheistic ruler in the world. The novel is known for its high-level historical descriptions regarding the life and culture of the period depicted. At the same time, it also carries a pessimistic message of the essential sameness of flawed human nature throughout the ages. I found it a fine educational read with extensive  background information on Egypt and surrounding areas (Crete, Babylon, Hatti) in the Middle East.  It is also a fine novel that keeps the reader wanting to know what will happen next to Sinuhe.  Below is a summary of reviews of The Egyptian courtesy of Wikipedia.

In sum, I found The Egyptian a golden oldie!

Tony

————————–

Wikipedia

The Egyptian was first published by the Werner Söderströmin Corporation(WYSOY)  in  1945. Initially knowledge of the novel spread through word of mouth in Finland; WSOY hadn’t advertised it due to concerns over erotic content. It gained some early notoriety through an incident by historical novelist Maila Talvio: after hearing lewd sections read out beforehand in an autumn 1945 literature event, she took offense, marched into WSOY’s office and demanded that the novel’s printing be stopped, even in vain offering to buy the whole edition when told the printing machines were already in full action. The first two editions were sold out by the end of the year, and it became one of the most discussed topics in societal and literary circles.

The few reviews before the end of the year were positive: Huugo Jalkanen of Uusi Suomi and Lauri Viljanen of Helsingin Sanomat said that the novel was no mere colourful retelling of history, but was relevant to the current attitude shaped by the events of recent years.^[2][56] More reviews followed in January, and a common element among the more negative or lukewarm reviews was the scolding of Waltari’s previous work, but many saw it as a turning point for his career. The sexual depictions drew ire. Eino Sormunen of Savon Sanomat recommended discretion due to plenitudes of horrifying decadence at display, and Vaasan Jaakkoo of Ilkka warned about it as unsuitable for children. Yrjö Tönkyrä of Kaiku wrote: “Not wanting to appear in any way as a moralist, I nonetheless cannot ignore the erotic gluttony that dominates the work, as if conceived by a sick imagination – the whole world revolves for the sole purpose that people can enjoy…”

French Egyptologist Pierre Chaumelle read The Egyptian in Finnish and, in a letter featured in a Helsingin Sanomat article in 13. 8. 1946, wrote of his impressions:

“I shall with utmost sincerity attest that I haven’t read anything as remarkable in a long time. The book is indeed a work of art, its language and effects fit splendidly with the French language, it contains not a single tasteless nor crude spot nor archaeological error. Its word order, language, closely resembles the language of Egypt, and it would be a crime to translate it with less care than what it has been written with.”

Critics had been concerned that Waltari might have played fast and loose with historical events, but this article dispelled these doubts and begot a reputation of almost mythical accuracy around the novel. This lack of errors was also confirmed by the egyptological congress of Cairo, and Egyptologist Rostislav Holthoer also has since then noted that later research has confirmed some of Waltari’s speculations.

First translations

The Swedish translation by Ole Torvalds was published in late 1946, abridged with Waltari’s approval. Torvalds was careful not to omit anything essential while streamlining the pacing. Waltari praised the result. In 1948 a complete French version came out, as well as the Danish and Norwegian versions. The novel sold one million copies in Europe within the first five years after its publication.

The Egyptian saw an English release in August 1949. Putnam Publishers had asked a Swedish woman of culture (coincidentally the wife of an editor who’d previously rejected the novel) for input, and she had urged them to publish it.  It was translated by Naomi Walford, not directly from Finnish but rather Swedish, and abridged even further at the behest of the aforementioned Swede, the same also hired to abridge it. About a third of the text was lost: aside from the excision of repetitions, the philosophical content suffered and key facts were omitted.

Edmund Fuller of The Saturday Review described the narrative as “colorful, provocative, completely absorbing”; he compared it to Thomas Mann‘s Joseph and His Brothers, writing: “Again, Mann’s great work is a study of ideas and of personality. The Egypt emergent from his formidable style is shown within a limited social range and is detailed only in isolated scenes. If there are deeps of the personality that Mann plumbs further, Waltari makes an exciting, vivid, and minute re-creation of the society of Thebes and of Egypt and the related world in general, ranging from Pharaoh and his neighbor kings to the outcast corpse-washers in the House of the Dead. We see, feel, smell, and taste Waltari’s Egypt. He writes in a pungent, easy style and it is obvious that he has been wonderfully served by his translator, Naomi Walford.” Gladys Schmitt, writing for The New York Times, commented on the unresolved philosophical dilemma posed between Akhnaton’s generosity for bettering the world and Horemheb’s pragmatic belligerence for stability, and praised the vibrancy and historical research evident in the characterisation of countries and social classes; however, she criticised social struggles surrounding Akhenaton as obscured, and found events oversensational and the characters composed of predictable types. Kirkus Reviews wrote: “He [Sinuhe] observes- and remembers- and in his old age writes it down, – the world as he knew it. It’s a rich book, a bawdy book, a book that carries one to distant shores and makes one feel an onlooker as was Sinuhe. The plot is tenuous, a slender thread never wholly resolved. But the book opens one’s eyes to an ancient world, nearer to ours than we think.”

Soon after its release in the USA, it was selected book of the month in September 1949, and then entered the bestseller lists in October 1949, where it remained the unparalleled two years – 550 000 copies were sold in that time. Marion Saunders, the agent who had arranged its US publication, remarked that she had never seen anything like it during her 15-year career.mIt remained the most sold foreign novel in the US before its place was taken over by The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco. Overall the reception was highly positive and some predicted Waltari as being a Nobel prize candidate.

Dianne Feinstein needed her strength to take on the male power structure. Credit…Kim Komenich/Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd paid  a moving tribute to Dianne Feinstein in her column on Sunday.  Entitled, “DiFi, Breaking Into the Boys’ Club,” Dowd recounts Feinstein’s historic contributions to women’s rights by breaking into one of the most male-dominated bastions in our country – national politics.  Here is an excerpt.

“Several years ago, Senator Feinstein invited me to her house one evening for a drink. I was very excited. I’d watched male columnists play golf with presidents and go drinking with male lawmakers for a long time, and now at last I was going to be ushered into an inner sanctum.

The very proper senator sat with a small dog on her lap in her elegant living room as we had a glass of wine. She didn’t want to spin me on anything or break news. She just wanted to chat. It turned out that DiFi, as she was known, regularly organized dinners with female journalists and mentored women in Congress; she often said that Washington could be a lonely, hard and mean place, especially for women breaking barriers.

Unlike Hillary Clinton, who got tangled in the gender issue, Feinstein (like Pelosi) played the game without regard for gender. She wasn’t worried about sexist criticism; she was focused on doing what she thought was right, no matter who complained.”

Dowd concluded her piece as follows:

“Back in 2008 when the Sean Penn movie “Milk” came out, a solemn Feinstein told me: “I was the one who found his body. To get a pulse, I put my finger in a bullet hole.”

When she opposed the 2008 proposal to ban gay marriage in California, she told me of the evolution of her thinking: “The longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve seen the happiness of people, the stability that these commitments bring to a life. Many adopted children who would have ended up in foster care now have good solid homes and are brought up learning the difference between right and wrong.”

Yep. A class act, all the way.”

Dowd’s entire column is below.

Tony

—————————————————————-

The New York Times

DiFi, Breaking Into the Boys’ Club

Sept. 30, 2023

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

WASHINGTON — I’ve always said that the Washington Monument is an apt symbol, a Freudian obelisk redolent of all the male egos that have shaped our capital.

To appreciate what Dianne Feinstein accomplished, you need to know how male this city was in 1992, when she was swept into Congress in the “Year of the Woman” as the 18th female senator in history.

That wave was buoyed by women’s anger at the vicious Republicans and inept Democrats on the white male Judiciary Committee overseeing the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. A sexual harasser lied his way onto the Supreme Court, and now he is doing his best to corrupt it.

These women arrived on the Hill, home to historic man caves, as the journalist Jackie Calmes called the hideaways where male pols horse-traded, sipped whisky and played poker. When one new lawmaker stepped into the House elevator, the female operator said icily, “This elevator is for members only.”

“Yes, thank you,” the representative replied, waiting for the operator to spot her blue pin with the congressional seal.

A small sorority worked to penetrate the good ol’ boys club (and not be mistaken for staff). “With so many new women and minorities, everyone’s constrained to be politically correct,” Charles Wilson, the colorful Texas representative, told me that year. He deadpanned that he tried to irritate his colleague Patricia Schroeder of Colorado “by calling her Babycakes, but that’s about it.”

Despite stereotypes — “The word was women could not get along,” the former California senator Barbara Boxer recalled Friday to Katy Tur of MSNBC — women worked together to buck rules about how they couldn’t wear pants on the Senate floor and lobbied for a women’s restroom off the House floor so they wouldn’t have to trek to the women’s reading room. (That wouldn’t happen until 2011.)

Representative Louise Slaughter of New York told Hillary Clinton, the new first lady, of trying to include women’s health issues in the budget, noting: “It’s almost certainly the first time that these guys on the budget committee heard words like ‘cervix,’ ‘ovaries’ and ‘breasts’ spoken out loud.”

Hillary drolly riposted, “At least in that context.”

Nancy Pelosi told us at a lunch for women journalists last December that she never made it into a Democratic speaker’s office until she became the Democratic speaker.

Several years ago, Senator Feinstein invited me to her house one evening for a drink. I was very excited. I’d watched male columnists play golf with presidents and go drinking with male lawmakers for a long time, and now at last I was going to be ushered into an inner sanctum.

The very proper senator sat with a small dog on her lap in her elegant living room as we had a glass of wine. She didn’t want to spin me on anything or break news. She just wanted to chat. It turned out that DiFi, as she was known, regularly organized dinners with female journalists and mentored women in Congress; she often said that Washington could be a lonely, hard and mean place, especially for women breaking barriers.

Unlike Hillary, who got tangled in the gender issue, Feinstein (like Pelosi) played the game without regard for gender. She wasn’t worried about sexist criticism; she was focused on doing what she thought was right, no matter who complained.

In 2019, DiFi went viral when a group of child activists confronted her in her San Francisco office for not supporting the Green New Deal. She engaged with them but then briskly rebuffed them, saying she wasn’t succumbing to any “my way or the highway” demands.

As chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she led the fight in 2014 to release the classified report on U.S. torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo. It took guts to go up against President Barack Obama and his C.I.A. chief John Brennan, who wanted to keep covering up what The Times would call “a portrait of depravity.”

George W. Bush’s C.I.A. director Michael Hayden said dismissively that Feinstein couldn’t be objective because she was motivated by “deep emotional feeling.”

“Nonsense,” she snapped back. The senator simply wanted America to face the ugly truth so we would never betray our values in such a grotesque way again.

She believed in government as a force for good. Unfortunately, she died at 90 watching our government coming off the rails.

Despite being surrounded by Republican lawmakers who never met a gun they didn’t like, Feinstein did her best to stop people from getting killed in mass shootings, driven by her traumatic experience with the assassination of Mayor George Moscone of San Francisco and Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California and her colleague on the Board of Supervisors.

Back in 2008 when the Sean Penn movie “Milk” came out, a solemn Feinstein told me: “I was the one who found his body. To get a pulse, I put my finger in a bullet hole.”

When she opposed the 2008 proposal to ban gay marriage in California, she told me of the evolution of her thinking: “The longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve seen the happiness of people, the stability that these commitments bring to a life. Many adopted children who would have ended up in foster care now have good solid homes and are brought up learning the difference between right and wrong.”

Yep. A class act, all the way.

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman

Dear Commons Community,

The  2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly yesterday to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.  Much of their research was conducted at the University of Pennsylvania.

The discoveries by the two Nobel Laureates were critical for developing effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 during the pandemic that began in early 2020. Through their groundbreaking findings, which have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, the laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.  As described at the Nobel Prize website.

Vaccines before the pandemic

Vaccination stimulates the formation of an immune response to a particular pathogen. This gives the body a head start in the fight against disease in the event of a later exposure. Vaccines based on killed or weakened viruses have long been available, exemplified by the vaccines against polio, measles, and yellow fever. In 1951, Max Theiler was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for developing the yellow fever vaccine.

Thanks to the progress in molecular biology in recent decades, vaccines based on individual viral components, rather than whole viruses, have been developed. Parts of the viral genetic code, usually encoding proteins found on the virus surface, are used to make proteins that stimulate the formation of virus-blocking antibodies. Examples are the vaccines against the hepatitis B virus and human papillomavirus. Alternatively, parts of the viral genetic code can be moved to a harmless carrier virus, a “vector.” This method is used in vaccines against the Ebola virus. When vector vaccines are injected, the selected viral protein is produced in our cells, stimulating an immune response against the targeted virus.

Producing whole virus-, protein- and vector-based vaccines requires large-scale cell culture. This resource-intensive process limits the possibilities for rapid vaccine production in response to outbreaks and pandemics. Therefore, researchers have long attempted to develop vaccine technologies independent of cell culture, but this proved challenging.

mRNA vaccines: A promising idea

In our cells, genetic information encoded in DNA is transferred to messenger RNA (mRNA), which is used as a template for protein production. During the 1980s, efficient methods for producing mRNA without cell culture were introduced, called in vitro transcription. This decisive step accelerated the development of molecular biology applications in several fields. Ideas of using mRNA technologies for vaccine and therapeutic purposes also took off, but roadblocks lay ahead. In vitro transcribed mRNA was considered unstable and challenging to deliver, requiring the development of sophisticated carrier lipid systems to encapsulate the mRNA. Moreover, in vitro-produced mRNA gave rise to inflammatory reactions. Enthusiasm for developing the mRNA technology for clinical purposes was, therefore, initially limited.

These obstacles did not discourage the Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó, who was devoted to developing methods to use mRNA for therapy. During the early 1990s, when she was an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, she remained true to her vision of realizing mRNA as a therapeutic despite encountering difficulties in convincing research funders of the significance of her project. A new colleague of Karikó at her university was the immunologist Drew Weissman. He was interested in dendritic cells, which have important functions in immune surveillance and the activation of vaccine-induced immune responses. Spurred by new ideas, a fruitful collaboration between the two soon began, focusing on how different RNA types interact with the immune system.

The breakthrough

Karikó and Weissman noticed that dendritic cells recognize in vitro transcribed mRNA as a foreign substance, which leads to their activation and the release of inflammatory signaling molecules. They wondered why the in vitro transcribed mRNA was recognized as foreign while mRNA from mammalian cells did not give rise to the same reaction. Karikó and Weissman realized that some critical properties must distinguish the different types of mRNA.

RNA contains four bases, abbreviated A, U, G, and C, corresponding to A, T, G, and C in DNA, the letters of the genetic code. Karikó and Weissman knew that bases in RNA from mammalian cells are frequently chemically modified, while in vitro transcribed mRNA is not. They wondered if the absence of altered bases in the in vitro transcribed RNA could explain the unwanted inflammatory reaction. To investigate this, they produced different variants of mRNA, each with unique chemical alterations in their bases, which they delivered to dendritic cells. The results were striking: The inflammatory response was almost abolished when base modifications were included in the mRNA. This was a paradigm change in our understanding of how cells recognize and respond to different forms of mRNA. Karikó and Weissman immediately understood that their discovery had profound significance for using mRNA as therapy. These seminal results were published in 2005, fifteen years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Congratulations to Karikó and Weissman!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Americans view college campuses as far friendlier to liberals than to conservatives when it comes to free speech, with adults across the political spectrum seeing less tolerance for those on the right, according to a new poll.

Overall, 47% of adults say liberals have “a lot” of freedom to express their views on college campuses, while just 20% said the same of conservatives, according to polling from the University of Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Republicans perceive a stronger bias on campuses against conservatives, but Democrats see a difference too — about 4 in 10 Democrats say liberals can speak their minds freely on campuses, while about 3 in 10 Democrats say conservatives can do so.

“If you’re a Republican or lean Republican, you’re unabashedly wrong, they shut you down,” said Rhonda Baker, 60, of Goldsboro, North Carolina, who voted for former President Donald Trump and has a son in college. “If they hold a rally, it’s: ‘The MAGA’s coming through.’ It’s: ‘The KKK is coming through.’”

Debates over First Amendment rights have occasionally flared on college campuses in recent years, with conflicts arising over guest speakers who express polarizing views, often from the political right.

Stanford University became a flashpoint this year when students shouted down a conservative judge who was invited to speak. More recently, a conservative Princeton University professor was drowned out while discussing free speech at Washington College, a small school in Maryland.

At the same time, Republican lawmakers in dozens of states have proposed bills aiming to limit public colleges from teaching topics considered divisive or liberal. Just 30% of Americans say states should be able to restrict what professors at state universities teach, the poll found, though support was higher among Republicans.

Overall, Republicans see a clear double standard on college campuses. Just 9% said conservatives can speak their minds, while 58% said liberals have that freedom, according to the polling. They were also slightly less likely than Americans overall to see campuses as respectful and inclusive places for conservatives.

Chris Gauvin, a Republican who has done construction work on campuses, believes conservative voices are stifled. While working at Yale University, he was once stopped by pro-LGBTQ+ activists who asked for his opinion, he said.

“They asked me how I felt, so I figured I’d tell them. I spoke in a normal tone, I didn’t get excited or upset,” said Gauvin, 58, of Manchester, Conn. “But it proceeded with 18 to 20 people who were suddenly very irritated and agitated. It just exploded.”

He took a lesson from the experience: “I learned to be very quiet there.”

Republicans in Congress have raised alarms, with a recent House report warning of “the long-standing and pervasive degradation of First Amendment rights” at U.S. colleges. Some in the GOP have called for federal legislation requiring colleges to protect free speech and punish those who infringe on others’ rights.

Nicholas Fleisher, who chairs an academic freedom committee for the American Association of University Professors, said public perception is skewed by the infrequent cases when protesters go too far.

“The reality is that there’s free speech for everyone on college campuses,” said Fleisher, a linguistics professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. “In conversations within classrooms, people are free to speak their minds. And they do.”

Officials at PEN America, a free speech group, say most students welcome diverse views. But as the nation has become more politically divided, so have college campuses, said Kristen Shahverdian, senior manager for education at PEN.

“There’s this polarization that just continues to grow and build across our country, and colleges and universities are a part of that ecosystem,” she said.

Morgan Ashford, a Democrat in an online graduate program at Troy University in Alabama, said she thinks people can express themselves freely on campus regardless of politics or skin color. Still, she sees a lack of tolerance for the LGBTQ+ community in her Republican state where the governor has passed anti-LGBTQ legislation.

“I think there have to be guidelines” around hate speech, said Ashford. “Because some people can go overboard.”

When it comes to protesting speakers, most Americans say it should be peaceful. About 8 in 10 say it’s acceptable to engage in peaceful, non-disruptive protest at a campus event, while just 15% say it’s OK to prevent a speaker from communicating with the audience, the poll found.

“If they don’t like it, they can get up and walk out,” said Linda Woodward, 71, a Democrat in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas.

Mike Darlington, a real estate appraiser who votes Republican, said drowning out speakers violates the virtues of a free society.

“It seems to me a very, very selfish attitude that makes students think, ‘If you don’t think the way I do, then your thoughts are unacceptable,’” said Darlington, 58, of Chesterfield County, Virginia.

The protest at Stanford was one of six campus speeches across the U.S. that ended in significant disruption this year, with another 11 last year, according to a database by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech group.

Those cases, while troubling, are one symptom of a broader problem, said Ilya Shapiro, a conservative legal scholar who was shouted down during a speech last year at the University of California’s law school. He says colleges have drifted away from the classic ideal of academia as a place for free inquiry.

An even bigger problem than speakers being disrupted by protesters is “students and faculty feeling that they can’t be open in their views. They can’t even discuss certain subjects,” said Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute think tank.

About three in five Americans (62%) say that a major purpose of higher education is to support the free exchange and debate of different ideas and values. Even more U.S. adults say college’s main purpose is to teach students specific skills (82%), advance knowledge and ideas (78%) or teach students to be critical thinkers (76%). Also, 66% said a major purpose is to create a respectful and inclusive learning environment.

“I believe it should be solely to prepare you to enter the workforce,” said Gene VanZandt, 40, a Republican who works in shipbuilding in Hampton, Virginia. “I think our colleges have gone too far off the path of what their function was.”

The poll finds that majorities of Americans think students and professors, respectively, should not be allowed to express racist, sexist or anti-LGBTQ views on campus, with slightly more Republicans than Democrats saying those types of views should be allowed. There was slightly more tolerance for students expressing those views than for professors.

About 4 in 10 said students should be permitted to invite academic speakers accused of using offensive speech, with 55% saying they should not. There was a similar split when asked whether professors should be allowed to invite those speakers.

Darlington believes students and professors should be able to discuss controversial topics, but there are limits.

“Over-the-top, overtly racist, hateful stuff — no. You shouldn’t be allowed to do that freely,” he said.

The poll of 1,095 adults was conducted Sept. 7-11, 2023, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Tony

Laphonza Butler

Dear Commons Community,

Wasting no time, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced yesterday that he’s appointing EMILY’s List President Laphonza Butler to finish out the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Senate term, making good on his promise to fill the vacancy with a Black woman.  Emily’s List is a political organization that supports Democratic women candidates who favor abortion rights. Butler is also a former labor leader with SEIU 2015, a powerful force in California politics.

The swift appointment (D) was essential for Democrats’ power in the Senate, where they have a slim 50-49 majority following Feinstein’s death at age 90.

Butler’s appointment will last until January 2025, when Feinstein’s sixth term in the chamber was due to end. It’s then up to voters to select a permanent senator for the next six-year term.

The race for Feinstein’s seat was well underway at the time of her death. Three Democrats representing California in the House had launched campaigns: Reps. Barbara Lee, Katie Porter and Adam Schiff. While Newsom made good on his pledge of appointing a Black woman by selecting Butler, he said in September he wouldn’t nominate someone who’s seeking to hold the seat permanently.

“I don’t want to get involved in the primary,” Newsom told NBC News. “It would be completely unfair to the Democrats who’ve worked their tails off.”

That was a big blow to Lee, who’s trailing Porter and Schiff in both polls and fundraising.

There are currently no Black women elected to serve in the Senate. Prior to Newsom’s nomination, Sens. Carol Moseley Braun and Kamala Harris were the only two to have ever sat in the Senate.

Her appointment sets up a potentially tricky political calculus in the crowded 2024 contest to succeed Feinstein, which has been underway since the beginning of the year.

Newsom spokesman Anthony York said the governor did not ask Butler to commit to staying out of the race. The deadline for candidates to submit paperwork to seek the office is Dec. 8. Should Butler enter the contest, she could set up a competition for the relatively small but influential group of Black voters in California and possibly undercut Lee’s chances.

This is the second time Newsom has gotten to nominate a senator. When then-California Sen. Harris won the vice presidency in 2020, the governor nominated now-Sen. Alex Padilla to replace her. Newsom caught some flak for selecting Padilla, who is a first-generation Mexican American, to replace the only Black woman in Congress.

It appears Newsom made a good move here!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It’s hard to know which was the bigger act in Las Vegas Friday night: U2 or the Sphere, the gargantuan light-shifting orb they performed inside of.

The rock band’s first performance of their Las Vegas residency was also the christening of the $2.3 billion globe-shaped entertainment venue, which has dazzled onlookers after construction was completed at the Venetian Resort this summer. Coated inside and out with more than a million programmable LED lights, the Sphere has already wowed the Vegas skyline by morphing into a 33-story Christmas snow globe and a giant eyeball.

The U2 concert gave audiences inside and online on TikTok and Youtube their first chance to peek inside the jaw-dropping venue.  By Saturday afternoon, millions of people had watched a  video (see below) showing the band performing .

The Sphere is considered the world’s largest building with such a shape. To get a sense of its scale: The entire surface of its inside screen measures 3.7 acres — about three football fields of digital real estate. The outside surface is substantially larger.

Wow!

Tony

Final Vote in the House on Keeping the Government Funded (House Television via AP)

Dear Commons Community,

With hours left to go on the eve of a government shutdown, Congress passed a stopgap bill to keep federal agencies funded and workers at their desks through mid-November.  As reported by The Associated Press and the Huffington Post.

The price? About $6 billion in aid to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian invaders and new worries Russian dictator Vladimir Putin will be encouraged to continue the full-scale invasion he started in February 2022.

On yesterday afternoon, the House voted 335 to 91 (see graphic above) for a temporary funding bill to keep the government operating through Nov. 16 and also fund disaster assistance. Two hundred and nine Democrats joined 126 Republicans in voting for the package.

Later that night, the Senate passed it 88 to 9, though only after some last-minute public misgivings by a few Democratic senators, including a brief hold on floor action by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) over the Ukraine aid.

The bill went to the White House where it will be signed by President Joe Biden.

The deal will avoid the worst case politically that both parties feared ― being blamed for the first government shutdown since 2019 ― but leaves several issues unaddressed, like the future of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

Putting the bill on the floor was a stark turnaround for McCarthy, who has spent all year trying to placate far-right members of his conference — something that has proved almost impossible. On Friday, he moved a bill that would have kept the government open with severe spending cuts and 21 hard-line Republicans still voted no, dooming it.

Republicans such as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) have said they would force a no-confidence vote in McCarthy if the House passed a funding bill with Democratic support.

But pulling his party back from the brink of a shutdown may have boosted his stock with the more moderate wing of his party. “If we have folks in the conference that don’t like his leadership, that want to put a motion to vacate forward, that’s on them to do that and explain to the American people why,” said Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.).

And McCarthy remained defiant.

“If somebody wants to make a motion against me, bring it. There has to be an adult in the room,” he said.

Another open question is what happens when the stopgap bill expires. While lawmakers have a few more weeks to work on spending bills, it’s unclear that they will get them finished by then. And the near-shutdown this time could merely be a dress rehearsal for an actual one later in the year.

Democrats initially balked at the bill, saying they had not been given enough time to read its 71 pages. But faced with the political reality that they could be blamed for a shutdown by insisting on aid to war-torn Ukraine, many decided to embrace the bill.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, however, read a letter from Mike McCord, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for defense, who warned that European allies would be unlikely to keep up their support for Ukraine without U.S. leadership.

“From the very beginning of the war, Putin has bet that America is weak, unreliable, and that his desire to rebuild the Soviet Empire was greater than our will to oppose him,” said Scott Cullinane, director of government affairs at Razom for Ukraine, a pro-Ukraine advocacy group. “Our unwillingness to give Ukraine the weapons it needs to win and Congress’ delay in funding threaten to prove Putin right.”

McCarthy has said there is enough Ukraine aid still in the pipeline for another 45 days. Aid could be attached to another bill later on, but would probably have to be more than the $6 billion that was at issue here and it’s unclear what bill it would have to be attached to in order to pass.

“We have to deal with these issues again in 45 days but, for today, I’ve got a little bounce in my step.”

A delay is better than shutting down the government!

Tony