Claudine Gay

Dear Commons Community,

In the past two and half months, Harvard University President Claudine Gay has faced an onslaught of backlash from donors, politicians and business leaders over concerns of antisemitism at the nation’s oldest higher education institution.

Harvard President Claudine Gay is facing intensifying pressure as the drip, drip, drip of plagiarism allegations gradually spills out. Yet Gay still has the backing of a crucial decisionmaker: her employer.

That support has not wavered, at least publicly, even as Harvard revealed yesterday that Gay requested new corrections on her 1997 dissertation. Those corrections are on top of ones Gay already requested on scholarly articles in 2001 and 2017.

Congress is also cranking up the pressure, with a House panel announcing it is probing Harvard’s “handling of credible allegations of plagiarism” by Gay over a 24-year period.

A university spokesperson said that Harvard’s top governing board, and the members of a subcommittee formed to look into the matter, concluded that Gay’s “inadequate citations” are “regrettable” but do not amount to research misconduct that would be punishable under university policies.

All of this has only fueled Harvard’s critics and raised questions about where there’s a double standard at the university, with one set of rules for the students and another for the sitting president. But it’s also a reminder of how complex matters of plagiarism can be and how politicized the entire debate has become, starting with issues of antisemitism and morphing into the intricacies academic citation.

Plagiarism charges against Gay were first circulated by conservative activists and reported two weeks ago by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication. A review by CNN, which published Wednesday, found Gay’s previous requested corrections did not address even clearer examples of plagiarism from her earlier academic work, including her dissertation.

What Harvard considers ‘research misconduct’

Harvard’s policy states that research misconduct includes “fabrication, falsification and plagiarism” and punishment can include suspension, leave without pay or even termination.

However, Harvard’s policy also states that misconduct does not include “honest error.” And the policy says that for misdeeds to be considered misconduct, it must meet three criteria:

1) There must be a “significant departure from accepted practices” within the research community

2) The misdeeds must have been done “intentionally, knowingly or recklessly”

3) The allegations must be “proven by preponderance of the evidence.”

In short, Harvard officials, following their review, have not found that Gay’s mistakes meet the threshold of misconduct.

Harvard’s student handbook also lays out the criteria for plagiarism, stating that quotations “must be placed properly within quotation marks and must be cited fully.”

“Students who, for whatever reason, submit work either not their own or without clear attribution to its sources will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including requirement to withdraw from the College,” the student handbook says.

Additionally, students who break these rules “will not be permitted to submit a course evaluation of the course in which the infraction occurred.”

What is plagiarism?

It’s also worth noting that not all plagiarism is created equally – and Harvard has not used the word “plagiarism” to define Gay’s actions.

Plagiarism typically falls into two broad categories: Copying without attribution and the far more serious allegation of stealing someone’s ideas. The plagiarism uncovered in Gay’s work has solely focused on sloppy citations, not idea theft.

This distinction is not lost on Stephen Voss, one of the scholars whose 1996 paper Gay lifted one paragraph from almost verbatim for her 1997 dissertation.

Voss told CNN’s Em Steck that while Gay technically plagiarized him in two instances, he felt it was “inconsequential in a scholarly sense.”

“If Claudine had, you know, rushed into print or even to a conference, a paper that took an idea from me, then I might not have been able to get my work published ‘cause she scooped me,” Voss told CNN. “That would be quite serious, even though she might not have used a single word the same. Whereas this—where the wording is the same—it’s stuff that I was not relying on in any way.”

To be sure, other experts disagree, arguing the sentiment of the original author of a work that was plagiarized doesn’t matter.

Should Gay be punished?

All of this underscores how complex matters of plagiarism can be and why experts CNN spoke to were divided on what the punishment for Gay should be – or whether there should be one in the first place.

None of the experts called for Gay to be outright fired and they noted it’s very rare for academics or even students to be fired or expelled for plagiarism.

“I stand by the integrity of my scholarship. Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards,” Gay said in a statement earlier this month.

Of course, the way the plagiarism allegations have spilled out in a drip, drip, drip fashion have only intensified the pressure on Gay.

A Harvard spokesperson said Thursday that the university became aware on October 24 that the New York Post was pursuing a story on allegations of plagiarism against Gay. The university said it found out from a reporter who had forwarded “anonymous allegations, with no indication of the source of the allegations.”

Five days later, Gay asked the Harvard Corporation, the school’s top governing board, to look into the matter.

According to the Harvard spokesperson, a four-person subcommittee of the Harvard Corporation was then formed and officials decided the review should not go through the university or the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ research integrity office “due to the potential for the appearance of a conflict of interest.”

Instead, on November 2 an independent panel of three experts was tapped to conduct the review and by December 9 that review’s findings were in the hands of the Harvard Corporation, according to the spokesperson.

However, the independent review did not include Gay’s PhD dissertation – even though that’s now the focus of her forthcoming corrections.

A Harvard spokesperson explained that the review only focused on Gay’s published works because at the time, that was the focus of the allegations.

Assuming all of the reporting above is correct, Gay plagiarized and should be held accountable!

Tony

Sheldon Cooper/Getty Images/Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

Getting a bachelor’s degree at an Ivy League school may not be what helps you get ahead in your career anymore — at least according to Aneesh Raman, a vice president at LinkedIn.

Soft skills like communication, creativity, and flexibility, the Harvard graduate predicts, will instead be what set employees apart in the workforce in the age of AI. As reported by Business Insider.

“Over the past few decades, because of the internet age, when we think about workforce development, so much effort has been, understandably, on technical skills, computer science degrees, coding boot camps, educated and credentialed—technical skills,” Raman said on a recent episode of Microsoft’s podcast WorkLab.

But now, “the shelf life of a degree is shrinking pretty dramatically.”

Today’s key soft skill, according to the LinkedIn exec, is adaptability. As generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT enter the workplace, employees will need to be able to continuously learn how to use such tools as the technology evolves.

“Adaptability is the best way to have agency right now,” he said.

Still, it may take some time for companies to kick the impulse to hire workers based on where they graduated from rather than what skills they can offer.

“It’s not as easy to filter for skills as you filter for degrees.”

Using AI at work won’t just help workers be more productive. It can help also workers communicate across cultures, languages and sectors more effectively — and with greater empathy, he said.

“All of these barriers have existed for some time now that make it really difficult to talk human to human,” Raman commented. AI will help break them down in real time, leading to “higher-quality conversations and more meaningful collaborations.”

LinkedIn didn’t immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment before publication on Raman’s behalf.

Raman’s thoughts on changing priorities in the workforce come as employers face the challenge of how to integrate AI across their businesses. Forty four percent of US executives surveyed by LinkedIn in June reported that they plan to use AI at their organizations more in the next year.

That may be driving companies to hire AI talent. A separate LinkedIn study from August found that the number of job postings mentioning ChatGPT or GPT, the AI’s large language model, on the job site has grown 21-fold since the chatbot was released last year. Tech titans like Meta, Netflix, and Amazon are paying salaries as high as $900,000 to bring in the best generative AI talent. Non-tech companies across law, entertainment, and healthcare are also on the hunt for workers who know how to use AI.

Further education may not be totally obsolete, though. Some college degrees could actually help with the soft skills that may prevent workers from being replaced by AI.

“I think the humanities will have a bit of a renaissance,” Raman said.

Raman might be right.  Then again, I am not sure!

Tony

Uranus is surrounded by rings and moons in the new Webb image. The central bright feature on the planet is Uranus’ seasonal north polar cap. – NASA/ESA/CSA/ STScI

Dear Commons Community,

The James Webb Space Telescope has snapped a glowing new portrait of Uranus that showcases the ice giant’s typically hidden rings, moons, weather and atmosphere — features that were nowhere to be seen in the planet’s first close-up more than three decades ago.

Webb is known for capturing stunning perspectives of distant cosmic objects in great detail, but the space observatory is also capable of revealing new insights in our own celestial backyard.  Here is review from NASA and CNN.

Humanity’s first good look at Uranus came when Voyager 2 flew by the seventh planet from the sun in 1986. Through the spacecraft’s camera, which viewed the solar system in visible light, Uranus appeared to be a bright blue world.

But Webb, which views the universe through infrared light invisible to the human eye, captured all of the facets often missing in other telescope images, revealing the planet’s dynamic nature.

Sending a dedicated mission to study Uranus has become a priority for astronomers, according to a report released in 2022.

And that means mission planners need as much information about the icy planet as possible — such as this detailed Webb image — before sending a spacecraft to investigate. Released by NASA on Monday, the image includes more detail than a previous version released in April.

The normally faint inner and outer rings of Uranus shine in the latest image, including the planet’s closest yet incredibly dim and diffuse Zeta ring. Nine of Uranus’ 27 known moons can also be seen as blue dots, including some of the smaller ones that exist within the rings.

The “literary moons,” named for Shakespearean characters, include Rosalind, Puck, Belinda, Desdemona, Cressida, Bianca, Portia, Juliet and Perdita.

Uranus’ unusual seasons

One of the brightest features in the new image is Uranus’ seasonal white north polar cap, which takes center stage as the pole points toward the sun during the planet’s approach to solstice, expected to occur in 2028.

Uranus is an unusual world that spins on its side with a 98-degree tilt, which means the icy planet experiences seasons in an extreme way.

One year on Uranus lasts around 84 Earth years, and for about a quarter of the Uranian year, the sun shines directly over one of the planet’s poles, which means the other half of Uranus experiences a dark winter that lasts 21 Earth years.

Storms can also be seen near and beneath the polar cap in Uranus’ atmosphere. Astronomers will eagerly watch how the polar cap and the planet’s weather and atmosphere change as Uranus approaches solstice. Scientists want to determine what seasonal and meteorological forces influence the storms, which could also reveal insights into Uranus’ complex atmosphere.

While a year on Uranus may take decades from our perspective, one day on Uranus passes very quickly, only taking about 17 hours.The planet’s quick spin makes spotting storms and other atmospheric features on Uranus very difficult because they appear to move within minutes.

But Webb was able to take long and short exposures of Uranus that allowed astronomers to see unprecedented details.

Revisiting the ice giants

Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft that has flown near Uranus and Neptune on the edge of our solar system, which means that many mysteries remain about the ice giants. In recent years, researchers have detected X-rays coming from Uranus.

A team of scientists also found a weird “blip” in Voyager 2 data indicating the spacecraft flew through a plasmoid, a giant magnetic bubble that likely pinched off part of the planet’s atmosphere, sending it out into space.

Understanding more about Uranus can also aid astronomers as they study the thousands of ice giant-size exoplanets discovered outside of our solar system to shed light on how those worlds may have formed.

The Webb Telescope is a gift to astronomy!

Tony

Attorney Eric Olson argues for the plaintiffs before the Colorado Supreme Court on Denver, Dec. 6, 2023. 

Dear Commons Community,

The Colorado Supreme Court yesterday declared former President Donald Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot, setting up a likely showdown in the United States Supreme Court to decide whether the front-runner for the GOP nomination can remain in the race.

The decision from the Colorado court marks the first time in history that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate.

“A majority of the court holds that Trump is disqualified from holding the office of president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,” the court wrote in its 4-3 decision.

Colorado’s highest court overturned a ruling from a district court judge who found that Trump incited an insurrection for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but said he could not be barred from the ballot because it was unclear that the provision was intended to cover the presidency.  As reported by various news media.

The court stayed its decision until Jan. 4, or until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the case. Colorado officials say the issue must be settled by Jan. 5, the deadline for the state to print its presidential primary ballots.

“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” wrote the court’s majority. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”

Trump’s attorneys had promised to appeal any disqualification immediately to the nation’s highest court, which has the final say about constitutional matters.

Trump’s legal spokeswoman Alina Habba said in a statement Tuesday night: “This ruling, issued by the Colorado Supreme Court, attacks the very heart of this nation’s democracy. It will not stand, and we trust that the Supreme Court will reverse this unconstitutional order.”

Trump didn’t mention the decision during a rally Tuesday evening in Waterloo, Iowa, but his campaign sent out a fundraising email citing what it called a “tyrannical ruling.”

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel labeled the decision “Election interference” and said the RNC’s legal team intends to help Trump fight the ruling.

Trump lost Colorado by 13 percentage points in 2020 and doesn’t need the state to win next year’s presidential election. But the danger for the former president is that more courts and election officials will follow Colorado’s lead and exclude Trump from must-win states.

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed nationally to disqualify Trump under Section 3, which was designed to keep former Confederates from returning to government after the Civil War. It bars from office anyone who swore an oath to “support” the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it, and has been used only a handful of times since the decade after the Civil War.

“I think it may embolden other state courts or secretaries to act now that the bandage has been ripped off,” Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor who has closely followed the Section 3 cases, said after Tuesday’s ruling. “This is a major threat to Trump’s candidacy.”

The Colorado case is the first where the plaintiffs succeeded. After a weeklong hearing in November, District Judge Sarah B. Wallace found that Trump indeed had “engaged in insurrection” by inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and her ruling that kept him on the ballot was a fairly technical one.

Trump’s attorneys convinced Wallace that, because the language in Section 3 refers to “officers of the United States” who take an oath to “support” the Constitution, it must not apply to the president, who is not included as an “officer of the United States” elsewhere in the document and whose oath is to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution.

The provision also says offices covered include senator, representative, electors of the president and vice president, and all others “under the United States,” but doesn’t name the presidency.

The state’s highest court didn’t agree, siding with attorneys for six Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters who argued that it was nonsensical to imagine that the framers of the amendment, fearful of former confederates returning to power, would bar them from low-level offices but not the highest one in the land.

“President Trump asks us to hold that Section 3 disqualifies every oath-breaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath-breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land,” the court’s majority opinion said. “Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3.”

The left-leaning group that brought the Colorado case, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, hailed the ruling.

“Our Constitution clearly states that those who violate their oath by attacking our democracy are barred from serving in government,” its president, Noah Bookbinder, said in a statement.

Trump’s attorneys also had urged the Colorado high court to reverse Wallace’s ruling that Trump incited the Jan. 6 attack. His lawyers argued the then-president had simply been using his free speech rights and hadn’t called for violence. Trump attorney Scott Gessler also argued the attack was more of a “riot” than an insurrection.

That met skepticism from several of the justices.

“Why isn’t it enough that a violent mob breached the Capitol when Congress was performing a core constitutional function?” Justice William W. Hood III said during the Dec. 6 arguments. “In some ways, that seems like a poster child for insurrection.”

In the ruling issued Tuesday, the court’s majority dismissed the arguments that Trump wasn’t responsible for his supporters’ violent attack, which was intended to halt Congress’ certification of the presidential vote: “President Trump then gave a speech in which he literally exhorted his supporters to fight at the Capitol,” they wrote.

Colorado Supreme Court Justices Richard L. Gabriel, Melissa Hart, Monica Márquez and Hood ruled for the petitioners. Chief Justice Brian D. Boatright dissented, arguing the constitutional questions were too complex to be solved in a state hearing. Justices Maria E. Berkenkotter and Carlos Samour also dissented.

“Our government cannot deprive someone of the right to hold public office without due process of law,” Samour wrote in his dissent. “Even if we are convinced that a candidate committed horrible acts in the past — dare I say, engaged in insurrection — there must be procedural due process before we can declare that individual disqualified from holding public office.”

The Colorado ruling stands in contrast with the Minnesota Supreme Court, which last month decided that the state party can put anyone it wants on its primary ballot. It dismissed a Section 3 lawsuit but said the plaintiffs could try again during the general election.

In another 14th Amendment case, a Michigan judge ruled that Congress, not the judiciary, should decide whether Trump can stay on the ballot. That ruling is being appealed. The liberal group behind those cases, Free Speech For People, also filed another lawsuit in Oregon seeking to bounce Trump from the ballot there.

Both groups are financed by liberal donors who also support President Joe Biden.

It appears to me that this case and several others (insurrection, election interference, classified documents)  involving Trump are all working their way to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Its decisions can have a profound impact on the 2024 presidential election.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Pope Francis formally approved letting Catholic priests bless same-sex couples, the Vatican announced on Monday, a radical shift in policy that aimed at making the church more inclusive while maintaining its strict ban on gay marriage.

Students, faculty and staff, and elected officials rally against cuts to CUNY’s budget outside Tweed Courthouse.

Dear Commons Community,

The City University of New York is slashing tens of millions of dollars from college budgets across its 25 campuses, potentially gutting course offerings and student services from counseling to recordkeeping. As reported by The Daily News.

The CUNY Central administration ordered eight schools — including York, Brooklyn and Queens  colleges — to submit “enhanced deficit reduction plans” that find savings and boost revenue this school year and next, according to one of the college memos obtained by The News.

The directive comes as the city’s public university system was cut by $23 million last month under Mayor Adams’ revised municipal budget, documents show.

“The cuts that we’ve already endured this year have been devastating,” said Carolina Bank Muñoz, sociology professor and CUNY faculty union chapter leader at Brooklyn College. “And these additional cuts are just unconscionable.”

CUNY — which on top of the mayor’s cuts is losing federal COVID-19 aid and tuition revenue from dramatic enrollment declines during the pandemic — has already clawed back $128 million from the campuses over the past couple of years, according to the Professional Staff Congress.

Now, Brooklyn College has been directed to deliver $3.5 million more in savings and find $4.5 million in new savings next school year, Bank Muñoz said.

The chapter leader told The News there’s nowhere left to cut. The campus library has been operating on a reduced schedule. Faculty spend their own money on department graduation parties for students, and the allocations they receive for basics such as paper and chalk are  dwindling as prices soar.

The cafeteria has been closed for at least the full semester, and some oncampus food trucks as a replacement cost at least $15 for a meal, she said. A rat infestation this fall prompted an email, reviewed by The News, asking staff to keep all food brought into the office in the refrigerator, freezer or in airtight containers.

“So you don’t want us to eat in our offices, or in the department, and we don’t have a cafeteria — so where are we supposed to eat?” said Bank Muñoz.

Queens College has been directed to cut $4.3 million this year and another $4.3 million next year, targets that the union says surpass the college’s deficit and are too great to shoulder.

While the college has yet to publicly release plans to meet the savings targets, union chapter Chairwoman Karen Weingarten said they include a hiring freeze, including to backfill positions necessary for operations.

“It feels paralyzing in many ways, not being able to move forward [on hiring] with these cuts,” said Weingarten, an English professor.

A spokesman for CUNY praised the city’s public university system is an “indispensable engine of upward mobility for generations of New Yorkers and proudly prepares our graduates for the city’s ever-changing workforce.

“Over the last years, the university has taken many steps to address budget deficits across the system by implementing cost-saving measures and efficiencies while increasing fundraising and public-private partnerships. That work is ongoing and includes a targeted plan to help some CUNY colleges that are still exhibiting financial warning signs.

“Unfortunately, these actions alone are not enough. To avoid more drastic measures, we look forward to working with our partners in government in the coming months to advocate for resources to help CUNY realize our mission to lift New York.”

Across the campuses, the CUNY faculty union predicted larger class sizes, more canceled courses if too few students enroll and fewer adjunct faculty.

“The impact of that invariably is going to mean students have a harder time filling the requirements for their major, their minor and overall requirements to graduate,” said union President James Davis.

The ramifications are profound. Students could take longer to graduate or give up on a diploma. Faculty and staff who are committed to their students and the mission of the city’s public university system could throw in the towel.

“The intangible piece — and this can’t be overstated — is the relentless cuts year after year,” said Davis. “Since the pandemic, that’s had a tremendous effect on morale.”

Adams has already ordered another round of municipal budget cuts, including to CUNY, and warned a third may be on its way unless the federal government helps offset the costs of shelter and services for migrants.

While most city funding goes directly toward community colleges, it affects the financial well-being of the overall system, which can trickle down to four-year colleges.

Davis said  “We understand the fiscal reality, but we need to see a strong educational vision … [and] the resources necessary to support that vision.”

Tony

The Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.

Dear Commons Community,

A Confederate statue in the Arlington National Cemetery will be removed later this week.

The Reconciliation Monument, known as the Confederate Statue, is part of the push to remove military installations named after the Confederacy in the wake of the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

According to a press release from the national cemetery, the statue will be removed from the cemetery by Dec. 22.

The move to remove the statue is in compliance with the Congressional mandate to remove all Confederate memorials by Jan. 1, 2024.

The Congressional mandate, passed in 2020, declared that the Department of Defense must remove all “names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America” by Jan. 1, 2024.

An Arlington National Cemetery spokesperson confirmed to Fox News Digital that safety fencing has been installed around the Confederate Memorial as preparation begins to deconstruct the memorial, which was erected in 1914.

While the work occurs, the surrounding landscape, graves, and headstones will be protected, the cemetery said

The deconstruction of the memorial comes after a group of GOP lawmakers, led by Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., wrote a letter to Secretary Austin and demanded that they keep the Confederate Memorial in place until the end of the fiscal year 2024 appropriations process.

In a letter to Secretary Austin, Clyde argued that the memorial was dedicated to American unity following the Civil War rather than honoring the Confederacy, and that it would desecrate the graves of Confederate troops buried there.

Base of the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

“Despite bipartisan support for this monument, the Naming Commission, established by the Fiscal Year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, clearly overstepped its legislative authority when it recommended that the Department of the Army remove the Reconciliation Monument from Arlington National Cemetery,” the lawmakers wrote.

“The Reconciliation Monument does not honor nor commemorate the Confederacy; the memorial commemorates reconciliation and national unity.

Clyde, a Navy combat veteran, was joined on the letter by 43 other House Republicans.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin said that he also disagrees with the Biden administration’s decision to remove the statue and the grave of Moses Ezekiel, the renowned sculptor of the memorial.

“The governor formally asked Secretary Austin to ensure that the grave of Moses Ezekiel and the accompanying memorial atop his grave remain in its revered location at the Arlington National Cemetery,” Gov. Youngkin’s spokeswoman Macaulay Porter said in a statement to Fox News Digital.

“The governor is disappointed that the Biden administration still sought to remove the memorial but believes that the Newmarket battlefield state park in the Shenandoah Valley will provide a fitting backdrop to Ezekiel’s legacy as a legendary sculptor and Virginian even though he disagrees with the Biden administration’s decision to remove it,” Porter said.

Tony

Savita Halappanavar, who died after being denied an abortion, became a symbol of Ireland’s drive to legalize the procedure in 2018. Credit…Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd had a scathing column yesterday condemning the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.  Entitled, “Supreme Contempt for Women,” she compares the recent case of Kate Cox to the death of an Irishwoman, Savita Halappanavar, who was expecting her first child  and who became seriously ill.  She went to a  hospital, where she was crushed to learn that her fetal membranes were bulging and her 17-week-old fetus would not survive.  Knowing her life was at stake, she begged the medical staff to remove the fetus. A midwife explained to her, “It’s a Catholic thing. We don’t do it here.” Savita developed septic shock and died four days after her baby girl, whom she named Prasa, was stillborn.

Here in the United States, Down goes to comment that:

“Religious fanatics on the Supreme Court have yanked America back to back alleys. American women are punished, branded with Scarlet Letters, forced to flee to get procedures.

And we have our own fraught case of a 31-year-old begging for a termination: Kate Cox, a married Texas mother of two who was thrilled to be pregnant until she was told that her fetus had a deadly chromosomal abnormality. Continuing the pregnancy could also keep Cox from getting pregnant again.

“I kept asking more questions, including how much time we might have with her if I continued the pregnancy,” Cox wrote in The Dallas Morning News. “The answer was maybe an hour — or at most, a week. Our baby would be in hospice care from the moment she is born if she were to be born alive.”

Cox, more than 20 weeks pregnant, had to leave Texas to have an abortion because the state’s boorish, mega-MAGA attorney general, Ken Paxton, gleefully threatened to prosecute “hospitals, doctors or anyone else” who helped her, even floating first-degree felony charges. The case has become so politically toxic that even the voluble Ted Cruz, who is running for re-election next year, has clammed up about it. The Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, playing school nurse, warned Republicans on the Hill to talk less about banning abortion and more about the benefits of contraception.

I’m sure even Donald Trump, who was once pro-choice but now panders to evangelicals, has qualms about criminalizing abortion. It’s a political loser and could cost him the election if women are supermobilized. He called Ron DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban in Florida “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” Once Trump bragged about appointing the conservative justices on the court who were pivotal in overturning Roe v. Wade. But that won’t be a great sales pitch in the general election.

It is outrageous that such an important right in America was stripped away by a handful of cloistered, robed zealots, driven by religious doctrine, with no accountability.

But the Savonarola wing of the Supreme Court — all Catholics except Neil Gorsuch, who was raised Catholic and went to the same suburban Washington Catholic prep school as Brett Kavanaugh — could go to even more extreme lengths. The court announced Wednesday that it will consider curtailing the availability of a pill used to terminate first-trimester pregnancies. Soon, it’ll be mandating the rhythm method.

An explosive new Times article by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak revealed that Justice Samuel Alito was even more underhanded than we knew as he plotted to engineer “a titanic shift in the law” by vitiating Roe. Conservative judges who assured the Senate that Roe was settled law in their confirmation hearings could barely wait until Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died to throw it in the constitutional rights rubbish bin.

Dowd concludes:  “The more we learn, the more infuriating it is that our lives and choices about our bodies are determined by conniving radicals. The Supreme Court is way, way out of order.”

Indeed!

Tony

Data: Department of Housing and Urban Development; Chart: Axios Visuals

Dear Commons Community,

Homelessness in America reached a new record earlier this year partly due to a “sharp rise” in the number of people who became homeless for the first time, federal officials said Friday.

More than 650,000 people experienced homelessness on a single night in January, a 12% jump from 2022, the report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found. That’s the highest number since the country began using the yearly point-in-time survey in 2007 to count the homeless population.

Thousands of Americans joined the ranks of the unhoused population in the last year due to the end of pandemic programs such as the eviction moratorium as well as jumps in rental costs, the report found. The end of COVID-era aid such as the expanded Child Tax Credit, stimulus checks and other supports has also led to a spike in poverty last year, an issue that was particularly acute with children, among whom the poverty rate doubled. As reported by CBS News, The Associated Press, and The New York Times.

“Homelessness is solvable and should not exist in the United States,” said Secretary Marcia L. Fudge in a statement. “This data underscores the urgent need for support for proven solutions and strategies that help people quickly exit homelessness and that prevent homelessness in the first place.”

The number of people who became newly homeless between the federal fiscal years 2021 to 2022 jumped 25%, HUD noted in the report. The fiscal 2022 year ended in September 2022. 

The U.S. had been making steady progress until recent years in reducing the homeless population as the government focused particularly on increasing investments to get veterans into housing. The number of homeless people dropped from about 637,000 in 2010 to about 554,000 in 2017.

But the post-pandemic years have delivered a financial double-whammy that has hit vulnerable Americans particularly hard. For one, government supports that helped people weather the economic turmoil of the pandemic drew to an end, cutting off funds and protections. 

Secondly, rents have surged, pushing cost burdens for renters to their highest recorded level, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Almost 9 in 10 low-income households with incomes below $15,000 spent more than 30% of their income on housing in 2021, the analysis found. 

Generally, housing is considered unaffordable if it edges higher than one-third of a household’s income. 

How many are homeless in America?

About 653,000 people were experiencing homelessness during the January snapshot.

Within the overall rise, homelessness among individuals rose by nearly 11%, among veterans by 7.4% and among families with children by 15.5%.

People who identify as Black make up just 13% of the U.S. population, but comprised 37% of all people experiencing homelessness. And more than a quarter of adults experiencing homelessness were over age 54.

Below are the 5 states with the biggest increase in their unhoused population over the last year:

• New York: 29,022 rise in people experiencing homelessness, or a 39.1% increase
• Colorado: 4,042, or a 38.9% increase
• Massachusetts: 3,634, or a 23.4% jump
• Florida: 4,797, or a 18.5% jump
• California: 9,878, or a 5.8% increase

The sharp increases in the numbers of homeless veterans (up 7 percent) and chronically homeless people (up 12 percent) suggests multiple forces must be in play, because a recent surge in migration would not affect either group.

“Something else is going on,” said Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, who said inflation may be a factor. “If your income was steady and all your expenses went up, that is the same as a rent increase.”

Kevin Corinth, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he was especially concerned about the 10 percent rise in unsheltered homeless people — those living on the streets — a condition that carries high risk of injury or death. He noted it had risen every year since 2015, with the numbers especially high in western cities, which have fewer laws banning people from living on the streets.

While high rents are part of the problem, he said, the continual rise of people living on the street is “in part an indictment of the homeless services system,” which he called expensive and ineffective.

To the extent the number also reflects the migrants’ presence, he noted, it is likely to rise, since that population has grown since the count was taken nearly a year ago.

Tony

OtherWords cartoon by Khalil Bendib

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump, the Republican presidential frontrunner, said yesterday that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” repeating language that has previously drawn criticism as xenophobic and echoing of Nazi rhetoric.

Trump made the comments during a campaign event in New Hampshire where he railed against the record number of migrants attempting to cross the U.S. border illegally. Trump has promised to crack down on illegal immigration and restrict legal immigration if elected to a second four-year term in office.  As reported by Reuters.

“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump told a rally in the city of Durham attended by several thousand supporters, adding that immigrants were coming to the U.S. from Asia and Africa in addition to South America. “All over the world they are pouring into our country.”

Trump used the same “poisoning the blood” language during an interview with The National Pulse, a right-leaning website, that was published in late September. It prompted a rebuke from the Anti-Defamation League, whose leader, Jonathan Greenblatt, called the language “racist, xenophobic and despicable.”

Jason Stanley, a Yale professor and author of a book on fascism, said Trump’s repeated use of that language was dangerous. He said Trump’s words echoed the rhetoric of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, who warned against German blood being poisoned by Jews in his political treatise “Mein Kampf”.

“He is now employing this vocabulary in repetition in rallies. Repeating dangerous speech increases its normalization and the practices it recommends,” Stanley said. “This is very concerning talk for the safety of immigrants in the U.S.”

In October Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung had dismissed criticism of the former president’s language as “nonsensical,” arguing that similar language was prevalent in books, news articles and on TV.

When asked for comment on Saturday, Cheung did not directly address Trump’s remarks and instead referred to the controversies over how U.S. colleges are handling campus protests since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, saying media and academia had given “safe haven for dangerous anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas rhetoric that is both dangerous and alarming.”

The “poisoning the blood of our country” language was not in Trump’s prepared remarks distributed to media prior to Saturday’s event, and it was not clear whether his use of that rhetoric was planned or adopted on the fly.

Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination and has made border security a major theme of his campaign. He is vowing to restore the hardline policies from his 2017-2021 presidency, and implement new ones that clamp down further on immigration.

President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, has sought to enact more humane and orderly immigration policies but has struggled with record levels of migrants, a problem seen as a vulnerability for his re-election campaign.

On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly used inflammatory language to describe the border issue and slam Biden’s policies. On Saturday he recited the lyrics of a song he has repurposed to liken immigrants to deadly snakes.

If re-elected, Trump promised “to stop the invasion of our southern border and begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

Disgraceful rhetoric!

Tony