Photo:  CPAC

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump appeared to say that Joe Biden should be president during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) 2024.  During his speech, Trump repeated claims that he had a good personal relationship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, saying they “got along well” during his term as president. “He [Putin]  did announce the other day that he’d much rather see Biden as president, and I agree with him” said Trump. It is not clear whether he misspoke, as he went on to make his usual attacks on Joe Biden calling him ‘Crooked Joe’ and accusing the president of being mentally impaired, during the speech on 24 February 2024.

Tony

A Time Crystal Lasted for 40 Minutes.  Credit:  Alex Greilich/TU Dortmund

Dear Commons Community,

Time crystals are one of the most mind-bending concepts in modern physics.  They are bizarre creations of science, first conceptualized in 2012 and first created several years after. They’re a whole new phase of matter made from quantum particles, each of which has what’s called a spin direction. The particles are excited into an energetic state—where they get stuck—and hit with a laser, which starts the process of these particles’ spin directions flipping back and forth.

It’s all very complicated, but here’s the kicker: this never-ending spin-flipping burns no energy. It completely violates the first and second laws of thermodynamics—you get never-ending change for no energy while also not dissolving into chaos. That shouldn’t be possible, so they shouldn’t exist. But they do. It’s one of many places where classical physics falls short of explaining the quantum realm.

While the atoms of normal, everyday crystals are arranged in a repeating pattern in space, time crystals are additionally arranged in a repeating pattern in time—essentially, they are crystals existing in a dimension beyond our typical 3D perception. “It’s a way to kind of have your cake and eat it too” said U.S. Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, who first conceived of time crystals in 2012.  As reported by Popular Mechanics.

Time crystals are created similar to how many things are created in advanced physics—through the use of super-cooled atoms (i.e. a Bose-Einstein condensates) and lasers. Although this fascinating new phase of matter could have game-changing applications in the world of quantum computing, they don’t tend to survive very long. In 2022, for example, scientists from Universität Hamburg observed a continuous time crystal, but it only lasted for a few milliseconds.

Now, researchers from TU Dortmund University in Germany have created a continuous time crystal that lasted 10 million times longer, at around 40 minutes. To use Wilczek’s own words—that’s a lot of cake.

To create this time crystal, TU Dortmund physicist Alex Greilich and his team created a crystal of indium gallium arsenide doped with silicon (a.k.a. a semiconductor). In this crystal, the nuclear spins “act as a reservoir for the time crystal,” according to the university press statement. Once cooled to 6 Kelvin and shot with a laser, a nuclear spin forms as a result of the laser’s interaction with loosely-held electrons.

Then, the polarization of the nuclear spin creates oscillations resembling a time crystal. And amazingly, this repeating oscillation lasted a whole 40 minutes—an order of magnitude far greater than any continuous time crystal that’s come before. The results of this study were published in late January in the journal Nature.

While 40 minutes is quite the achievement, it could also only be the beginning of how long these kinds of time crystals can exist. According to ScienceAlert, this crystal showed no signs of decay in 40 minutes, implying that future time crystals could last for hours, or even longer.

This is all well and good, but… what would we even use these time crystals for? Previous work has suggested that time crystals could find applications in the world of quantum computing, where linked time crystals act as qubits. But as with many amazing breakthroughs and discoveries, scientists don’t really know what uses could be dreamed up in the future.

Tony

Courtesy of The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump won over South Carolina Republicans as the candidate who voters believe can win in November, keep the country safe, and has the mental capability to be president according to the Associated Press VoteCast data (see Note below).

Trump cruised to victory in the South Carolina primary with the support of an almost unwavering base of loyal voters. AP VoteCast found that Republicans in the state are broadly aligned with Trumps’s goals: Many question the value of supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia; and overwhelming majorities see immigrants as hurting the U.S. and suspect that there are nefarious political motives behind Trump’s multiple criminal indictments.

Even in her home state of South Carolina, where she was once governor, Nikki Haley appeared to have little chance against Trump. Just over half of GOP voters had a favorable view of her, whereas about two-thirds had a positive view of Trump.

About 6 in 10 South Carolina voters consider themselves supporters of the “Make America Great Again” movement, a Trump slogan that helped catapult him to the White House in 2016. About 9 in 10 Trump voters said they were driven by their support for him, not by objections to his opponent. Haley’s voters were much more divided: About half were motivated by supporting her, but nearly as many turned out to oppose Trump.

HOW TRUMP WON IN SOUTH CAROLINA

Trump’s victory in South Carolina looked remarkably similar to his wins in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. It’s a sign that regional differences that once existed within the GOP have been supplanted by a national movement that largely revolves around the former president.

Trump, 77, won in South Carolina with voters who are white and do not have a college degree, one of his core constituencies. About two-thirds of Trump’s backers in this election fell into that group.

A majority believe Trump is a candidate who can emerge victorious in November’s general election, while only about half say the same of Haley. Voters were also far more likely to view Trump than Haley as someone who would “stand up and fight for people like you” and to say he would keep the country safe. And about 7 in 10 say he has the mental capability to serve effectively as president.

Trump’s voters also backed his more nationalist views — they are more likely than Haley’s supporters to have lukewarm views of the NATO alliance or even consider it bad for the U.S., to say immigrants are hurting the country and to say immigration is the top issue facing the country.

NIKKI HALEY’S POLITICAL FUTURE

At the age of 52, Haley has bet that she can offer a generational change for the GOP. But the future she articulated has little basis in the present-day GOP, even in South Carolina, where she previously won two terms as governor. About 4 in 10 of South Carolina Republicans — including about 6 in 10 of those supporting Trump — say they have an unfavorable opinion of her.

Haley has said she will stay in the race until at least the Super Tuesday primaries, though so far there are no signs that she has disrupted Trump’s momentum. She’s struggled to convince the core of the Republican Party that she’s a better choice than the former president — losing most conservatives and those without a college degree to Trump.

Who is her coalition? Haley dominated among South Carolina voters who said that Democrat Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. Roughly three-quarters of her supporters say Biden was legitimately elected president in 2020, and about 4 in 10 voted for Biden in that election. Her problem is that about 6 in 10 Republican primary voters say they believed Biden was not legitimately elected.

TRUMP’S POTENTIAL WEAKNESSES IN A GENERAL ELECTION

Trump has an iron grip on the Republican base, but that might not be enough of a coalition to guarantee a win in November’s general election.

South Carolina was a chance to show that he can expand his coalition beyond voters who are white, older and without a college degree. But about 9 in 10 of South Carolina’s primary voters were white, making it hard to see if Trump has made inroads with Black voters whom he has attempted to win over.

Haley outpaced Trump among college-educated voters, a relative weakness for him that could matter in November as people with college degrees are a growing share of the overall electorate. Even though South Carolina Republican voters believe that Trump can win in November, some had worries about his viability.

On to the Michigan Primary!

Tony

NOTE:  AP VoteCast is a survey of more than 2,400 voters taking part in Saturday’s Republican primary in South Carolina, conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago.

A sample pacemaker-like device, used for deep brain stimulation therapy, and its electrodes which are implanted into a specific site in the brain are displayed at Mount Sinai West in New York on Dec. 20, 2023. (AP Photo/Mary Conlon)

Dear Commons Community,

Emily Hollenbeck lived with a deep, recurring depression she likened to a black hole, where gravity felt so strong and her limbs so heavy she could barely move. She knew the illness could kill her. Both of her parents had taken their lives.

She was willing to try something extreme: Having electrodes implanted in her brain as part of an experimental therapy.  As reported by The Associated Press.

Researchers say the treatment —- called deep brain stimulation, or DBS — could eventually help many of the nearly 3 million Americans like her with depression that resists other treatments. It’s approved for conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy, and many doctors and patients hope it will become more widely available for depression soon.

The treatment gives patients targeted electrical impulses, much like a pacemaker for the brain. A growing body of recent research is promising, with more underway — although two large studies that showed no advantage to using DBS for depression temporarily halted progress, and some scientists continue to raise concerns.

Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration has agreed to speed up its review of Abbott Laboratories’ request to use its DBS devices for treatment-resistant depression.

“At first I was blown away because the concept of it seems so intense. Like, it’s brain surgery. You have wires embedded in your brain,” said Hollenbeck, who is part of ongoing research at Mount Sinai West. “But I also felt like at that point I tried everything, and I was desperate for an answer.”

“NOTHING ELSE WAS WORKING”

Hollenbeck suffered from depression symptoms as a child growing up in poverty and occasional homelessness. But her first major bout happened in college, after her father’s suicide in 2009. Another hit during a Teach for America stint, leaving her almost immobilized and worried she’d lose her classroom job and sink into poverty again. She landed in the hospital.

“I ended up having sort of an on-and-off pattern,” she said. After responding to medication for a while, she’d relapse.

She managed to earn a doctorate in psychology, even after losing her mom in her last year of grad school. But the black hole always returned to pull her in. At times, she said, she thought about ending her life.

She said she’d exhausted all options, including electroconvulsive therapy, when a doctor told her about DBS three years ago.

“Nothing else was working,” she said.

She became one of only a few hundred treated with DBS for depression.

Hollenbeck had the brain surgery while sedated but awake. Dr. Brian Kopell, who directs Mount Sinai’s Center for Neuromodulation, placed thin metal electrodes in a region of her brain called the subcallosal cingulate cortex, which regulates emotional behavior and is involved in feelings of sadness.

The electrodes are connected by an internal wire to a device placed under the skin in her chest, which controls the amount of electrical stimulation and delivers constant low-voltage pulses. Hollenbeck calls it “continuous Prozac.”

Doctors say the stimulation helps because electricity speaks the brain’s language. Neurons communicate using electrical and chemical signals.

In normal brains, Kopell said, electrical activity reverberates unimpeded in all areas, in a sort of dance. In depression, the dancers get stuck within the brain’s emotional circuitry. DBS seems to “unstick the circuit,” he said, allowing the brain to do what it normally would.

Hollenbeck said the effect was almost immediate.

“The first day after surgery, she started feeling a lifting of that negative mood, of the heaviness,” said her psychiatrist, Dr. Martijn Figee. “I remember her telling me that she was able to enjoy Vietnamese takeout for the first time in years and really taste the food. She started to decorate her home, which had been completely empty since she moved to New York.”

For Hollenbeck, the most profound change was finding pleasure in music again.

“When I was depressed, I couldn’t listen to music. It sounded and felt like I was listening to radio static,” she said. “Then on a sunny day in the summer, I was walking down the street listening to a song. I just felt this buoyancy, this, ‘Oh, I want to walk more, I want to go and do things!’ And I realized I’m getting better.”

She only wishes the therapy had been there for her parents.

THE TREATMENT’S HISTORY

The road to this treatment stretches back two decades, when neurologist Dr. Helen Mayberg led promising early research.

But setbacks followed. Large studies launched more than a dozen years ago showed no significant difference in response rates for treated and untreated groups. Dr. Katherine Scangos, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, also researching DBS and depression, cited a couple of reasons: The treatment wasn’t personalized, and researchers looked at outcomes over a matter of weeks.

Some later research showed depression patients had stable, long-term relief from DBS when observed over years. Overall, across different brain targets, DBS for depression is associated with average response rates of 60%, one 2022 study said.

Treatments being tested by various teams are much more tailored to individuals today. Mount Sinai’s team is one of the most prominent researching DBS for depression in the U.S. There, a neuroimaging expert uses brain images to locate the exact spot for Kopell to place electrodes.

“We have a template, a blueprint of exactly where we’re going to go,” said Mayberg, a pioneer in DBS research and founding director of The Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics at Mount Sinai. “Everybody’s brain is a little different, just like people’s eyes are a little further apart or a nose is a little bigger or smaller.”

Other research teams also tailor treatment to patients, although their methods are slightly different. Scangos and her colleagues are studying various targets in the brain and delivering stimulation only when needed for severe symptoms. She said the best therapy may end up being a combination of approaches.

As teams keep working, Abbott is launching a big clinical trial this year, ahead of a potential FDA decision.

“The field is advancing quite quickly,” Scangos said. “I’m hoping we will have approval within a short time.”

But some doctors are skeptical, pointing to potential complications such as bleeding, stroke or infection after surgery.

Dr. Stanley Caroff, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, said scientists still don’t know the exact pathways or mechanisms in the brain that produce depression, which is why it’s hard to pick a site to stimulate. It’s also tough to select the right patients for DBS, he said, and approved, successful treatments for depression are available.

“I believe from a psychiatric point of view, the science is not there,” he said of DBS for depression.

MOVING FORWARD

Hollenbeck acknowledges DBS hasn’t been a cure-all; she still takes medicines for depression and needs ongoing care.

She recently visited Mayberg in her office and discussed recovery. “It’s not about being happy all the time,” the doctor told her. “It’s about making progress.”

That’s what researchers are studying now — how to track progress.

Recent research by Mayberg and others in the journal Nature showed it’s possible to provide a “readout” of how someone is doing at any given time. Analyzing the brain activity of DBS patients, researchers found a unique pattern that reflects the recovery process. This gives them an objective way to observe how people get better and distinguish between impending depression and typical mood fluctuations.

Scientists are confirming those findings using newer DBS devices in a group of patients that includes Hollenbeck.

She and other participants do their part largely at home. She gives researchers regular brain recordings by logging onto a tablet, putting a remote above the pacemaker-like device in her chest and sending the data. She answers questions that pop up about how she feels. Then she records a video that will be analyzed for things such as facial expression and speech.

Occasionally, she goes into Mount Sinai’s “Q-Lab,” an immersive environment where scientists do quantitative research collecting all sorts of data, including how she moves in a virtual forest or makes circles in the air with her arms. Like many other patients, she moves her arms faster now that she’s doing better.

Data from recordings and visits are combined with other information, such as life events, to chart how she’s doing. This helps guide doctors’ decisions, such as whether to increase her dose of electricity – which they did once.

On a recent morning, Hollenbeck moved her collar and brushed her hair aside to reveal scars on her chest and head from her DBS surgery. To her, they’re signs of how far she’s come.

She makes her way around the city, taking walks in the park and going to libraries, which were a refuge in childhood. She no longer worries that normal life challenges will trigger a crushing depression.

“The stress is pretty extreme at times, but I’m able to see and remember, even on a bodily level, that I’m going to be OK,” she said.

“If I hadn’t had DBS, I’m pretty sure I would not be alive today.”

God  bless science!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

On Thursday in Nashville, Trump gave one of his most out-of-touch speeches to date. He  claimed that “everybody on both sides” agreed with the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.  As reported by Ryan Grenoble of The Huffington Post.

“They want you to say what they want you, what they want to have you say. And we’re not gonna let that happen. You’re going to say as you want and you’re going to believe, and you’re going to believe in God. You’re gonna believe in God because God is here and God is watching.”

Trump also pledged to “do [his] part to keep A.M. radio in our cars,” gave himself kudos for making “Israel” the capital of Israel, and bragged about having “forced” prayer into some schools while promising to shut down the Department of Education if he’s re-elected except for “one desk, one person, just to make sure everyone’s speaking English.”

He then butchered the word “evangelical”:

At one point Trump appeared to confuse FBI special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election with the countless right-wing conspiracies surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop, and also said whatever this is:

“If you think about it, you have men, you have women, and you have religion. If you look at it, you have more than the men, you have more than the women. You have such power.”

Journalist and longtime Trump-watcher Aaron Rupar clipped and shared much of the speech on social media ― and even he seemed to lose the thread.

“I have no idea what Trump is talking about at this point,” he said. “If a guy sitting next to me at the bar sounded like this I would peace out.”

Tony

Trump and LaPierre

Dear Commons Community,

Wayne LaPierre, the longtime head of the National Rifle Association, misspent millions of dollars of the organization’s money, using the funds to pay for an extravagant lifestyle that included exotic getaways and trips on private planes and superyachts.

Yesterday, a jury found that he, must repay almost $4.4 million to the gun rights group that he led for three decades, while the NRA’s retired finance chief, Wilson Phillips, owes $2 million. Jurors also found that the NRA failed to properly manage its assets, omitted or misrepresented information in its tax filings and violated whistleblower protections under New York law.

LaPierre, who announced his resignation from the NRA on the eve of the trial, sat stone-faced in the front row of the courtroom as the verdict was read aloud, and did not speak to reporters on the way out.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat who campaigned on investigating the NRA’s not-for-profit status, declared the verdict a “major victory.”  As reported The Associated Press.

“In New York, you cannot get away with corruption and greed, no matter how powerful or influential you think you may be,” James said in a post on X. “Everyone, even the NRA and Wayne LaPierre, must play by the same rules.”

The group, which has in recent years has been beset by financial troubles and dwindling membership, was portrayed in the case both as a defendant that lacked internal controls to prevent misspending and as a victim of that same misconduct.

The jury found NRA general counsel John Frazer had violated his duties, but not that he owed any money or that there was cause to remove him from the organization.

In a statement, the NRA highlighted that part of the verdict in casting the outcome as proof it was “victimized by certain former vendors and ‘insiders’ who abused the trust placed in them.”

The jury did find that the NRA violated state laws protecting whistleblowers who raised concerns about the organization, a cohort that included the group’s former president, Oliver North.

“To the extent there were control violations, they were acted upon immediately by the NRA Board beginning in summer 2018,” NRA President Charles Cotton said in the statement.

The jury actually found LaPierre liable for $5.4 million, but determined he’d already paid back a little over $1 million.

Another former NRA executive turned whistleblower, Joshua Powell, settled with the state last month, agreeing to testify at the trial, pay the NRA $100,000 and forgo further involvement with nonprofits.

James’ office said Friday it wants an independent monitor to be appointed to oversee the NRA’s administration of charitable assets. It is also seeking to ban LaPierre and Phillips from serving in leadership positions at any charitable organizations that conduct business in New York, and wants the NRA and Frazer barred from collecting funds on behalf of any charitable organization operating in the state.

A judge will decide those questions during the next phase of the state Supreme Court trial.

James sued the NRA and its executives in 2020 under her authority to investigate not-for-profits registered in the state.

She originally sought to have the entire organization dissolved, but Manhattan Judge Joel M. Cohen ruled in 2022 that the allegations did not warrant a “corporate death penalty.”

The trial, which began last month, cast a spotlight on the leadership, organizational culture and finances of the powerful lobbying group, which was founded more than 150 years ago in New York City to promote rifle skills and grew into a political juggernaut that influenced federal law and presidential elections.

Before he stepped down, LaPierre had led the NRA’s day-to-day operations since 1991, acting as its face and becoming one of the country’s most influential figures in shaping gun policy.

During the trial, state lawyers argued that he dodged financial disclosure requirements while treating the NRA as his personal piggy bank, liberally dipping into its coffers for African safaris and other questionable expenditures.

His lawyer cast the trial as a political witch hunt by James.

LaPierre billed the NRA more than $11 million for private jet flights and spent more than $500,000 on eight trips to the Bahamas over a three-year span, state lawyers said.

He also authorized $135 million in NRA contracts for a vendor whose owners showered him with free trips to the Bahamas, Greece, Dubai and India, as well as access to a 108-foot (33-meter) yacht.

On the stand, LaPierre claimed he hadn’t realized the travel tickets, hotel stays, meals, yacht access and other luxury perks counted as gifts, and that the private jet flights were necessary for his safety.

But he conceded that he had wrongly expensed private flights for his family and accepted vacations from vendors doing business with the NRA without disclosing them.

Among those who testified at the trial was North, a one-time NRA president and former National Security Council military aide best known for his central role in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. North, who resigned from the NRA in 2019, said he was pushed out after raising allegations of financial irregularities.

After reporting a $36 million deficit in 2018 fueled largely by misspending, the NRA cut back on longstanding programs that had been core to its mission, including training and education, recreational shooting and law enforcement initiatives. In 2021, it filed for bankruptcy and sought to incorporate in Texas instead of New York, but a judge rejected the move, saying it was an attempt to duck James’ lawsuit.

LaPierre is a dedicated Trump supporter and a leech who took advantage of gullible donors.

$4 million does not seem like enough.

Tony

This image provided by Intuitive Machines shows its Odysseus lunar lander with the Earth in the background on Feb. 16, 2024. The image was captured shortly after separation from SpaceX’s second stage on Intuitive Machines’ first journey to the moon. (Intuitive Machines via AP)

Dear Commons Community,

Odysseus, a U.S. lunar lander, last night made the first U.S. touchdown on the moon in more than 50 years.  During a nail-biting two hours, when one of the landing systems failed, the lander finally touched down at about 6:23 pm (EST).

During a live telecast carried by CNN and other news media, Intuitive Machines, the company that built and managed the craft, confirmed that it had landed upright. But it did not provide additional details, including whether the lander had reached its intended destination near the moon’s south pole. The company ended its live webcast soon after identifying a lone, weak signal from the lander.  As reported by The Associated Press.

“What we can confirm, without a doubt, is our equipment is on the surface of the moon,” mission director Tim Crain reported as tension built in the company’s Houston control center.

Added Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus: “I know this was a nail-biter, but we are on the surface and we are transmitting. Welcome to the moon.”

Data was finally starting to stream in, according to a company announcement two hours after touchdown.

The landing put the U.S. back on the surface for the first time since NASA’s famed Apollo moonwalkers.

Intuitive Machines “aced the landing of a lifetime,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson tweeted.

The final few hours before touchdown were loaded with extra stress when the lander’s laser navigation system failed. The company’s flight control team had to press an experimental NASA laser system into action, with the lander taking an extra lap around the moon to allow time for the last-minute switch.

With this change finally in place, Odysseus descended from a moon-skimming orbit and guided itself toward the surface, aiming for a relatively flat spot among all the cliffs and craters near the south pole.

As the designated touchdown time came and went, controllers at the company’s command center anxiously awaited a signal from the spacecraft some 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) away. After close to 15 minutes, the company announced it had received a weak signal from the lander.

Launched last week, the six-footed carbon fiber and titanium lander — towering 14 feet (4.3 meters) — carried six experiments for NASA. The space agency gave the company $118 million to build and fly the lander, part of its effort to commercialize lunar deliveries ahead of the planned return of astronauts in a few years.

Intuitive Machines’ entry is the latest in a series of landing attempts by countries and private outfits looking to explore the moon and, if possible, capitalize on it. Japan scored a lunar landing last month, joining earlier triumphs by Russia, U.S., China and India.

The U.S. bowed out of the lunar landscape in 1972 after NASA’s Apollo program put 12 astronauts on the surface. Astrobotic of Pittsburgh gave it a shot last month, but was derailed by a fuel leak that resulted in the lander plunging back through Earth’s atmosphere and burning up.

Intuitive Machines’ target was 186 miles (300 kilometers) shy of the south pole, around 80 degrees latitude and closer to the pole than any other spacecraft has come. The site is relatively flat, but surrounded by boulders, hills, cliffs and craters that could hold frozen water, a big part of the allure. The lander was programmed to pick, in real time, the safest spot near the so-called Malapert A crater.

The solar-powered lander was intended to operate for a week, until the long lunar night.

I watched the drama of the landing on CNN last night that carried live coverage without commercial interruption.  It reminded me of July, 1969, when my brothers and I watched Neil Armstrong become the first man to walk on the moon.

Congratulations to all involved!

Tony

President Joe Biden offers condolences to the widow of Alexei Navalny, Yulia Navalnaya. (@POTUS/X)

Dear Commons Community,

President Joe Biden met with the widow of Alexei Navalny, Yulia Navalnaya, and his daughter, Dasha, yesterday during the president’s trip to California.

Navalny, the longtime Russian opposition politician and critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, died in prison last week at 47 years old. After her husband’s death, Yulia Navalnaya accused Putin of being involved in his death and has vowed to continue his work.  As reported by ABC News.

“The President expressed his admiration for Aleksey Navalny’s extraordinary courage and his legacy of fighting against corruption and for a free and democratic Russia in which the rule of law applies equally to everyone,” the White House said in a statement. “The President emphasized that Aleksey’s legacy will carry on through people across Russia and around the world mourning his loss and fighting for freedom, democracy, and human rights.”

Images of the San Francisco meeting posted on the president’s X show him speaking with the two women and hugging Yulia Navalnaya.

Aleksey’s legacy of courage will live on in Yulia and Dasha, and the countless people across Russia fighting for democracy and human rights. pic.twitter.com/aiCcgTrws3

The White House said it is set to announce “major new sanctions” against Russia on Friday in response to Navalny’s death as well as its “repression and aggression, and its brutal and illegal war in Ukraine.”

Earlier this week, White House national security spokesman John Kirby did not go into detail about what the new sanctions package would include.

Navalny’s cause of death has been listed as “natural” on his medical report, according to Navalny’s spokesperson Kira Yarmysh, who was relayed the information on the death certificate by Navalny’s mother. His mother also said the Russian government is blackmailing her and trying to force her to have a secret funeral for her son.

Kirby hammered Russia on the reporting that they were making demands of Navalny’s mother in order for her to receive his body.

Kirby said he could not confirm that she was being “blackmailed,” but “nevertheless, this is the man’s mother. It’s not enough that she gets to see the body of her son. She should be able to collect the body of her son so that she can properly memorialize her son and her son’s bravery and courage and service and do all the things that any mother would want to do for a son lost in such a tragic way.”

“The Russians need to give her back her son and they need to answer for … specifically what befell Mr. Navalny and … acknowledge that they in fact, are responsible for his demise,” Kirby said.

What a tragedy for Russia to have a vicious, heartless autocrat like Putin running the country.

Tony

Meghan McCain and Kari Lake (The Gazette)

Dear Commons Community,

Meghan McCain had a succinct reply after Kari Lake reached out to try to reconcile their feud over Lake’s comments on McCain’s father, late Arizona Sen. John McCain.  As reported by The Huffington Post.

“I value you,” Lake, a GOP Senate candidate in Arizona, wrote on X on yesterday morning. “I value your family and I value the passion you have for our state. I’d love nothing more than to buy you a beer, a coffee or lunch and pick your brain about how we can work together to strengthen our state. My team is sending you my contact info — if you’re willing to meet, it would mean a lot to me.”

Meghan McCain shot back, writing, “NO PEACE, BITCH!”

“Kari Lake is trying to walk back her continued attacks on my Dad (& family) and all of his loyal supporters after telling them to ‘get the hell out,’” Meghan McCain wrote on X the day prior. “Guess she realized she can’t become a Senator without us. No peace, bitch. We see you for who you are – and are repulsed by it.”

In 2022, when Lake was running for Arizona governor, she called late Arizona Sen. John McCain a “loser” and asked the crowd if there were any McCain Republicans in attendance, saying that if there were, to “get the hell out.”

At a conference in Texas in 2022, Lake again took a jab at John McCain after winning the Republican gubernatorial nomination, saying she “drove a stake through the McCain Machine.”

Lake did not immediately return a request for comment.

Don’t hold back, Meghan!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times columnist, Tom Friedman, had a piece yesterday blasting the Republican Party and especially its leaders who have become enablers of Donald Trump by supporting his lies and self-serving recklessness. Entitled,  Trump’s G.O.P. Is a Confederacy of Fakers, Friedman calls out Lindsay Graham and others for kowtowing to Trump.  Here is an excerpt.

“Trump’s G.O.P. manifests an infinite willingness to engage in any form of crow eating, bootlicking, backtracking and backstabbing to stay in his good graces, no matter how crackpot, selfish or un-American his demand. Trump decides to just dump Ukraine? Bye-bye, Zelensky. Trump decides to toss aside months of bipartisan work to forge a grand bargain on immigration reform? Gone — no questions asked!

I’ve never seen so many people in one party behave with so little respect for themselves or the nation’s interests at one time.

Let’s take a look at Ukraine. I’m not for an endless war in Ukraine. We should always be probing for the possibility of a negotiated settlement between Kyiv and Moscow. This year has shown America and Europe two things: The West cannot and will not just keep pouring money into Ukraine to fund a stalemate, and an outright victory by Ukraine or Russia seems more remote than ever.

…

I am afraid of what this future holds…because Trump is a fake, Lindsey Graham is a fake and the G.O.P. has become a cult with no coherent platform other than what side of the bed Trump woke up on, meaning it’s a fake. None of them will fight for anything any longer — other than staying in Trump’s good graces by saying whatever he tells them to say.

They are all trapped in a performative doom loop that has nothing to do with acting on our real interests. It’s only about performing for Trump and for his base to get more clicks, to get more donations, to get more votes, to get elected and then perform again for more clicks. Rinse and repeat — the actual world be damned.

It is all fake. Only our enemies are not fake.”

Read the entire piece!

Tony