Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd yesterday expressed concern about Joe Biden and his staff for the way they are dealing with his growing moments of forgetfulness and stammering during public appearances.  Entitled, “Mr. President, Ditch the Stealth About Health”, she says trying to hide and protect him in our modern, all-day news world will not work.  Here is an excerpt:

“In the days before TV and social media, the White House could suppress the fact that Franklin D. Roosevelt, who contracted polio when he was 39, could barely walk. With the help of a complicit press corps, a censoring Secret Service and a variety of ruses, F.D.R. was even able to campaign giving the impression that he was mobile.

But stealth about health is no longer possible, and the sooner President Biden’s team stops being in denial about that, the better off Democrats will be.

Jill Biden and his other advisers come up with ways to obscure signs of senescence — from shorter news conferences to almost zero print interviews to TV interviews mainly with fawning MSNBC anchors.

But many Americans are quite concerned about the 81-year-old president’s crepuscular mien. It’s the elephant in the room — except that elephants never forget.

Biden is running against a bad man, but that’s not enough. He has to acknowledge to himself that his moments of faltering — which will increase over the next five years — are a big weakness. He and his aides have to figure out how to handle that. Donald Trump, 77, makes his own verbal slips and shows signs of aging, but he conveys more energy.”

….

Dowd concluded:

“But, in a world on fire, with Republicans in Congress spiraling into farce, the Biden crew clearly has no plan for how to deal with the president’s age except to shield him and hide him and browbeat reporters who point out that his mental state — like the delusional Trump’s — is a genuine issue.

Biden is not just in a bubble — he’s in bubble wrap. Cosseting and closeting Uncle Joe all the way to the end — eschewing town halls and the Super Bowl interview — are just not going to work. Going on defense, when Trump is on offense, is not going to work. Counting on Trump’s vileness to secure the win, as Hillary did, is not going to work.

Democrats should grab their smelling salts for a long case of the vapors. It’s going to be a most virulent, violent year.’

So true!

Tony

Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP/Getty

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump said yesterday that, as president, he warned NATO allies that he “would encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to countries that are “delinquent” as he ramped up his attacks on foreign aid and longstanding international alliances.

Speaking at a rally in Conway, South Carolina, Trump recounted a story he has told before about an unidentified NATO member who confronted him over his threat not to defend members who fail to meet the trans-Atlantic alliance’s defense spending targets.

But this time, Trump went further, saying had told the member that he would, in fact, “encouraged” Russia to do as it wishes in that case.

“‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’” Trump recounted saying. “‘No I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.’” As reported by The Associated Press.

NATO allies agreed in 2014, after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, to halt the spending cuts they had made after the Cold War and move toward spending 2% of their GDPs on defense by 2024.

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates responded, saying that: “Encouraging invasions of our closest allies by murderous regimes is appalling and unhinged – and it endangers American national security, global stability, and our economy at home.”

Trump’s comments come as Ukraine remains mired in its efforts to stave off Russia’s 2022 invasion and as Republicans in Congress have become increasingly skeptical of providing additional aid money to the country as it struggles with stalled counteroffensives and weapons shortfalls.

They also come as Trump and his team are increasingly confident he will lock up the nomination in the coming weeks following commanding victories in the first votes of the 2024 Republican nominating calendar.

Earlier Saturday, Trump called for the end of foreign aid “WITHOUT “STRINGS” ATTACHED,” arguing that the U.S. should dramatically curtail the way it provides money.

“FROM THIS POINT FORWARD, ARE YOU LISTENING U.S. SENATE(?), NO MONEY IN THE FORM OF FOREIGN AID SHOULD BE GIVEN TO ANY COUNTRY UNLESS IT IS DONE AS A LOAN, NOT JUST A GIVEAWAY,” Trump wrote on his social media network in all-caps letters.

Trump went on to say the money could be loaned “ON EXTRAORDINARILY GOOD TERMS,” with no interest and no date for repayment. But he said that, “IF THE COUNTRY WE ARE HELPING EVER TURNS AGAINST US, OR STRIKES IT RICH SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE, THE LOAN WILL BE PAID OFF AND THE MONEY RETURNED TO THE UNITED STATES.”

During his 2016 campaign, Trump alarmed Western allies by warning that the United States, under his leadership, might abandon its NATO treaty commitments and only come to the defense of countries that meet the alliance’s guidelines by committing 2 percent of their gross domestic products to military spending.

Trump, as president, eventually endorsed NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense clause, which states that an armed attack against one or more of its members shall be considered an attack against all members. But he often depicted NATO allies as leeches on the U.S. military and openly questioned the value of the military alliance that has defined American foreign policy for decades.

As of 2022, NATO reported that seven of what are now 31 NATO member countries were meeting that obligation — up from three in 2014. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has spurred additional military spending by some NATO members.

Tony

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Dear Common Community,

The New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, comments today that Joe Biden should seriously consider bowing out of the Democratic Presidential Nomination.  In a column entitled, “The Question Is Not If Biden Should Step Aside. It’s How”, he reviews Biden’s options and comes to the conclusion that he should step aside during the Democratic National Convention in August. He suggests:

“That would mean not dropping out today or tomorrow or any day when party primaries are still proceeding. Instead Biden would continue accumulating pledged delegates, continue touting the improving economic numbers, continue attacking Donald Trump — until August and the convention, when he would shock the world by announcing his withdrawal from the race, decline to issue any endorsement, and invite the convention delegates to choose his replacement.”

I believe that Douthat’s suggestion is on a lot of Democrats’ minds.

Below is the entire column.

Tony

—————————————————————————————-

The New York Times

The Question Is Not If Biden Should Step Aside. It’s How.

Feb. 10, 2024

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

Joe Biden should not be running for re-election. That much was obvious well before the special prosecutor’s comments on the president’s memory lapses inspired a burst of age-related angst. And Democrats who are furious at the prosecutor have to sense that it will become only more obvious as we move deeper into an actual campaign.

What is less obvious is how Biden should get out of it.

Note that I did not say that Biden should not be the president. You can make a case that as obvious as his decline has been, whatever equilibrium his White House has worked out has thus far delivered results largely indistinguishable from (and sometimes better than) what one would expect from a replacement-level Democratic president.

If there has been a really big age effect in his presidency so far, I suspect it lies in the emboldenment of America’s rivals, a sense that a decrepit American chief executive is less to be feared than a more vigorous one. But suspicion isn’t proof, and when I look at how the Biden administration has actually handled its various foreign crises, I can imagine more disastrous outcomes from a more swaggering sort of president.

Saying that things have worked OK throughout this stage of Biden’s decline, though, is very different from betting that they can continue working out OK for almost five long further years. And saying that Biden is capable of occupying the presidency for the next 11 months is quite different from saying that he’s capable of spending those months effectively campaigning for the right to occupy it again.

The impression the president gives in public is not senility so much as extreme frailty, like a lightbulb that still burns so long as you keep it on a dimmer. But to strain the simile a bit, the entire issue in a re-election campaign is not whether your filaments shed light; it’s whether voters should take this one opportunity to change out the bulb. Every flicker is evidence that a change is necessary, and if you force Biden into a normal campaign-season role, frequent flickering (if not a burning-out) is what you’re going to get.

Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that Biden senses this, that he isn’t just entombed in egomania, but he feels trapped by his own terrible vice-presidential choice. If he drops out and anoints Kamala Harris, she’s even more likely to lose to Donald Trump. But if he drops out and doesn’t endorse his own number two, he’d be opening himself to a narrative of identitarian betrayal — aging white president knifes first woman-of-color veep — and setting his party up for months of bloodletting and betrayal, a constant churn of personal and ideological drama.

There is no easy escape from these dilemmas. But the best approach available to Biden is a distinctively old-fashioned one. He should accept the necessity of drama and bloodletting but also condense it all into the format that was originally designed for handling intraparty competition: the Democratic National Convention.

That would mean not dropping out today or tomorrow or any day when party primaries are still proceeding. Instead Biden would continue accumulating pledged delegates, continue touting the improving economic numbers, continue attacking Donald Trump — until August and the convention, when he would shock the world by announcing his withdrawal from the race, decline to issue any endorsement, and invite the convention delegates to choose his replacement.

Pain would follow. But so would excitement and spectacle, the things that Biden himself seems too old to deliver. Meanwhile any agony would be much briefer than in a long primary battle between Harris and Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer. The proximity of the general election would create stronger incentives for Harris or any other disappointed loser to accept a behind-the-scenes proffer and fall in line if the convention battle doesn’t go their way. And the format would encourage the party-as-institution, not the party-as-mass-electorate, to do a party’s traditional job and choose the ticket with the most national appeal.

Would Trump and Republicans have a field day attacking Democratic insiders for pulling a fast one on the public? Sure, but if the chosen ticket was more popular and competent-seeming, less shadowed by obvious old age, the number of relieved voters would surely outstrip the number of resentful ones.

This plan also has the advantage of being discardable if I’m completely wrong, Biden is actually vigorous on the campaign trail, and he’s ahead of Trump by five points by the time August rolls around. Like my past suggestion that Joe Manchin should run as a third-party candidate provisionally (also still a good idea!) to see how the Trump-Biden race shapes up, contemplating a convention bow-out gives Biden a way to be responsive to events — sticking it out if he really sees no other options, but keeping a path open for his country to escape a choice that right now seems like divine chastisement.

Dear Commons Community,

Philip N. Cohen, a  professor of sociology at the University of Maryland at College Park, had a fine piece yesterday analyzing the current attacks on sociology in Florida. Entitled, “How Sociology Can Save Itself”, he challenges his colleagues to examine where sociology is as a discipline.  Here is an excerpt.

“They are coming for sociology. “They” is the amorphous campaign against what they call “wokeism,” diversity initiatives, and critical race theory, led by a coalition of Republican activists, conservative foundations, and elected officials. Their current strategy is to manipulate political polarization to undermine the essential role of higher education, but conservatives have been beating the same drum against antiracism since they mobilized white backlash to block affirmative action in the 1970s. American sociology, whose annual conference theme this year is “Intersectional Solidarities,” with a promise on its website to “dismantle ongoing legacies of settler colonialism,” clearly makes an appealing target. The Florida Board of Governors has now propelled this effort by removing a general sociology course from the core-curriculum requirements of its massive state university system.

These are not good-faith actors, but they are good at what they do. If they succeed in lumping the label “sociology” into their basket of deplorable dog whistles, along with “CRT” and “gender ideology,” then our discipline may be in for a prolonged period of retrenchment, to the detriment of hundreds of thousands of students who take our courses every year.

Although I join the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) condemnation of the Florida action, in this case I also agree with a conservative critic of sociology, the sociologist Jukka Savolainen, who recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Florida’s action should be a

The Florida situation is a little like wrestling with a pig: We all get dirty, and the pig likes it. These anti-education activists are not interested in reasonable debate. They are culture warriors against the very idea of social progress. But that doesn’t mean our predicament is not real. It is not true, as the Florida commissioner of education Manny Diaz said, that, “Sociology has been hijacked by left-wing activists and no longer serves its intended purpose as a general knowledge course for students.” But we do have work to do if we hope to build and maintain public trust.”

I love Cohen’s analogy of wrestling with a pig.  So true.

Tony

CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez

Dear Commons Community,

Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez on Thursday defended multiple rounds of painful spending cuts and a hiring freeze across the City University of New York as measures that have slashed the cash-strapped university system’s structural deficit by “almost half.”

By the end of this year, CUNY expects to shrink its deficit to $128 million, down from a high of $234 million in fiscal year 2022, the chancellor told state lawmakers at a hearing on the state higher education budget.  As reported by The New York Daily News.

“While we have made great strides, there’s still more work to be done,” said Matos Rodríguez.

The Professional Staff Congress (PSC) Thursday continued to blast the most recent cuts ordered by the central CUNY administration.

The PSC slammed what they called “austerity measures,” including larger class sizes and reduced student services from library hours to cafeteria access. At one campus, Queens College in Flushing, more than two dozen full-time substitute lecturers lost their teaching positions within weeks of the spring semester.

“There are resources in the state economy to resist these cuts,” PSC President James Davis said, “and add hundreds of millions more to the CUNY budget.”

Matos Rodriguez attributed the gaping budget shortfalls at CUNY to factors from enrollment declines that accelerated with the pandemic to increased costs. While the school system recently logged a 2% overall enrollment increase, it’s still down about 40,000 students since the fall of 2019.

CUNY’s strategy to address its deficit has included two rounds of across-the-board savings targets and most recently a targeted approach for nine campuses that have “shown signs of more fiscal distress,” he said. On top of the hiring freeze, the university system also created a vacancy review board used when backfilling jobs left empty by attrition.

Matos Rodríguez also credited federal pandemic aid and investments by Gov. Hochul and state lawmakers as helping to close the budgetary gap.

Hochul’s proposal for next school year includes a $36 million increase in operating funds for CUNY’s four-year colleges and a community college funding floor so that no school receives less state aid than it did last year if enrollment drops. The plan also earmarks $441 million to invest in new facilities and repair crumbling campuses.

Just 8% of the university’s 300 buildings are considered to be “in good repair,” according to its strategic plan announced ahead of this school year.

In an effort to boost enrollment and tuition revenue, Hochul last month announced plans for both CUNY and the State University of New York to automatically admit students in the top 10% of their high school classes to their most selective campuses.

The university has also grown its rosters through a city program called CUNY Reconnect, where seven in 10 participants who dropped out but reenrolled are given another chance at finishing their degrees.

Tough economic times for CUNY!

Tony

Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

During a news conference last night, President Joe Biden angrily denied claims in a special counsel’s report that describes the 81-year-old Democrat’s memory as “hazy,” and having “significant limitations.”  

The  special counsel report released yesterday found evidence that President Joe Biden willfully retained and shared highly classified information when he was a private citizen, including about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, but concluded that criminal charges were not warranted.  As reported by The Associated Press.

The report from special counsel Robert Hur resolves a criminal investigation that had shadowed Biden’s presidency for the last year. But its bitingly critical assessment of his handling of sensitive government records and unflattering characterizations of his memory will spark fresh questions about his competency and age that cut at voters’ most deep-seated concerns about his candidacy for re-election.

In remarks at the White House Thursday evening, Biden denied that he improperly shared classified information and angrily lashed out at Hur for questioning his mental acuity, particularly his recollection of the timing of his late son Beau’s death from cancer.

The searing findings will almost certainly blunt his efforts to draw contrast with Donald Trump, Biden’s likely opponent in November’s presidential election, over a criminal indictment charging the former president with illegally hoarding classified records at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and refusing to return them to the government. Despite abundant differences between the cases, Trump immediately seized on the special counsel report to portray himself as a victim of a “two-tiered system of justice.”

Yet even as Hur found evidence that Biden willfully held onto and shared with a ghostwriter highly classified information, the special counsel devoted much of his report to explaining why he did not believe the evidence met the standard for criminal charges, including a high probability that the Justice Department would not be able to prove Biden’s intent beyond a reasonable doubt, citing among other things an advanced age that they said made him forgetful and the possibility of “innocent explanations” for the records that they could not refute.

“I did not share classified information,” Biden insisted. “I did not share it with my ghostwriter.” He added he wasn’t aware how the boxes containing classified documents ended up in his garage.

And in response to Hur’s portrayal of him, Biden insisted to reporters that “My memory is fine,” and said he believes he remains the most qualified person to serve as president.

“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden asked, about Hur’s comments regarding his son’s death, saying he didn’t believe it was any of Hur’s business.

When asked about the report earlier Thursday in a private moment with a handful of House Democrats ahead of his speech at their suburban Virginia retreat, Biden responded angrily, according to two people familiar with his comments, saying, “You think I would f—— forget the day my son died?” The people did not want to address the matter publicly and spoke of condition of anonymity.

Biden pointedly noted that he had sat for five hours of in-person interviews in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s October attack on Israel, when “I was in the middle of handling an international crisis.”

“I just believed that’s what I owed the American people so they could know no charges would be brought and the matter closed,” Biden said.

The investigation into Biden is separate from special counsel Jack Smith’s inquiry into the handling of classified documents by Trump after Trump left the White House. Smith’s team has charged Trump with illegally retaining top secret records at his Mar-a-Lago home and then obstructing government efforts to get them back. Trump has said he did nothing wrong.

Hur, in his report, said there were “several material distinctions” between the Trump and Biden cases, noting that Trump refused to return classified documents to the government and allegedly obstructed the investigation, while Biden willfully handed them over.

Isn’t this a big brouhaha!

Tony

U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday in the Colorado/Trump Ballot Case.  Photo:  9News.

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the Colorado/Trump ballot case.  I listened to several hours of it and am of a mind that there is no way the Court will uphold Colorado’s position to keep Trump off the ballot. I think it is only a matter of how many justices will vote to overturn.  Below is an excellent analysis of the hearing written by Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage of The New York Times.

Tony

————————————————————————-

The New York Times

Takeaways From the Trump Ballot Case

The Supreme Court heard arguments on whether former President Donald J. Trump is constitutionally ineligible to hold office again. Here’s what the debate could mean for the case’s outcome.

By Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage

Feb. 8, 2024

The Supreme Court yesterday wrestled with whether former President Donald J. Trump is constitutionally ineligible to hold office again, as the Colorado Supreme Court had ruled in barring him from that state’s ballot.

The issue turns on whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment applies to Mr. Trump because of his efforts to stay in office after losing the 2020 election that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot. The provision bars people who engaged in an insurrection against the Constitution after taking an oath to support it as an “officer of the United States.”

Here are several takeaways.

Colorado’s ruling appeared unlikely to stand.

Enough justices expressed skepticism of the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision that a majority of the court appeared likely to hand Mr. Trump a victory and vote to overturn it.

Most justices seemed generally receptive to various arguments the former president’s lawyer, Jonathan F. Mitchell, advanced in support of reversing the lower court’s ruling. His main contentions were that Section 3 is not “self-executing,” meaning it could only be enforced by a separate act of Congress, and that the provision simply did not apply to a former president like Mr. Trump.

Two of the court’s three liberal justices, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined their conservative colleagues in displaying doubts about allowing a state to decide who can run for a national office.

Justice Kagan expressed concern that by allowing Mr. Trump to be removed from the Colorado ballot, it could set a precedent of giving individual states “extraordinary” power to affect national elections.

Justice Jackson pointed out that the text of the amendment did not explicitly include “president” in the list of offices that could face disqualification for engaging in insurrection. That was because the amendment, she argued, was not initially intended to keep Southern rebels from running for president, but rather to stop them from using their popularity in their home states to seek local offices and get back into power by running for Congress.

Some justices worried about ‘unmanageable consequences.’

Several justices asked questions that signaled concern that upholding the Colorado Supreme Court’s disqualification of Mr. Trump could unleash broader chaos or otherwise harm democracy.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. repeatedly raised the prospect that numerous other states could retaliate by removing a Democratic candidate — he did not specifically name President Biden — from their ballots by saying he, too, had engaged in an insurrection. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. also kept returning to that point, raising the specter of “unmanageable consequences.”

Lawyers for the Colorado voters who challenged Mr. Trump’s eligibility for the ballot and the state of Colorado urged the justices not to see that potential consequence as a reason to overturn their state’s action. Jason Murray, a lawyer for the voter group, said courts could stop an abuse of the process.

“This court can write an opinion that emphasizes how extraordinary ‘insurrection against the Constitution’ is and how rare that is because it requires an assault not just on the application of law, but on constitutionally mandated functions themselves like we saw on Jan. 6,” Mr. Murray said.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Mr. Murray whether the position that Mr. Trump cannot be president again would be harmful for democracy since it would effectively disenfranchise people seeking to vote for him. Mr. Murray replied that the purpose of the constitutional safeguard is to protect democracy not just for the next cycle but for generations to come.

“The reason we’re here is that President Trump tried to disenfranchise 80 million Americans who voted against him, and the Constitution doesn’t require that he be given another chance,” he said.

Several justices wondered whether a statute is necessary.

One potential off-ramp for the Supreme Court to overturn the Colorado ruling would be to say that Section 3 is not “self-executing,” meaning that it has no legal force on its own and needs a statute enacted by Congress to be enforced.

The Supreme Court has previously deemed other parts of the 14th Amendment to be self-executing, meaning they need no such statute. But multiple justices focused on how allowing states to enforce Section 3 would be incongruous with the rest of the amendment since it largely was about taking power away from state governments after the Civil War.

Justice Clarence Thomas, the first member of the court to speak, opened the arguments by encouraging Mr. Mitchell to explain his view that the provision is not self-executing and so Colorado had no authority to enforce it.

Still, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out that numerous states have relied on Section 3 to disqualify candidates for state office, even though there is no congressional statute telling states they can do that.

Some justices asked whether presidents are ‘officers of the United States.’

Justice Jackson was not the only justice who signaled interest in the argument that Section 3 does not cover people who took an oath to support the Constitution only as president — like Mr. Trump — if the phrase in Section 3 “officer of the United States” applies only to appointed officials, not elected ones.

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch noted that another part of the Constitution says that the president shall commission “all” officers of the United States and noted that presidents do not grant commissions to themselves. He also pointed out that the speaker of the House and the Senate president pro tempore are described as officers in the Constitution, but that another clause says members of Congress cannot simultaneously be “officers of the United States.”

But Justice Sotomayor was skeptical of that view, suggesting that it was a “gerrymandered” argument. Among all modern presidents, she added, it would apply only to Mr. Trump, who did not previously take an oath as a member of Congress or a military officer or a lower-ranking civilian executive branch official.

There wasn’t much talk about whether Jan. 6 was an insurrection.

Given how central the issue of engaging in insurrection was to the disqualification process, it was somewhat surprising how little the justices and lawyers talked about whether Mr. Trump’s role in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 was — or was not — an act of insurrection.

Mr. Mitchell barely mentioned the storming of the Capitol during his presentation to the court, preferring to stick to highly technical issues of the law. And while Mr. Murray opened his arguments by blaming Mr. Trump for engaging in insurrection on Jan. 6, the justices largely sidestepped the factual question of whether his characterization was correct as they peppered him with questions.

Justice Kavanaugh, in a rare dip into the insurrection question, asked Mr. Murray why states should be granted the power to disqualify insurrectionists under the 14th Amendment when there was already a different “tool” to disqualify them from holding office: the federal statute making it a crime to incite, assist or engage in insurrection against the United States.

Of course, none of the more than 90 counts Mr. Trump is facing in his four separate criminal cases accuses him of taking part in an insurrection, even though the House select committee that investigated the events of Jan. 6 recommended he be charged with the federal insurrection count.

What happens next?

The justices did not indicate when they would issue a ruling. But what they decide could have consequences far beyond Colorado: There have been challenges to Mr. Trump’s eligibility in at least 35 states. Not just the outcome but also the rationale behind it will reverberate.

For example, one focus of the arguments is that if the court were to overturn the Colorado ruling on procedural grounds, rather than pronouncing on the merits whether Mr. Trump is constitutionally ineligible to be president again, it could lead to a later constitutional crisis.

Were he to then win the election, the question would return, including for members of Congress who would be asked to certify the Electoral College results on Jan. 6, 2025.

Dear Commons Community,

In December and early January, I read a book  by Christopher de Hamel about illuminated manuscripts (see my blog posting). Having read several other books on the subject, I found it intriguing how individuals, mostly monks, working by themselves for months painstakingly produced magnificent copies of historic material that included colorful images to accompany the text.  Some are short pieces dealing with a single religious theme while others are quite lengthy.  The vast majority of illuminated manuscripts were produced between the fifth and sixteenth centuries. There are still a few “limners” who practice the art today in the traditional fashion. However, de Hamel’s book got me thinking what it would be like in our modern world to produce such work,  specifically, how digital technology would be used.  Hence, the birth of my “technuscript.”

An illuminated manuscript  is by definition produced by hand.  A technuscript (if you look in a dictionary or on Google, there is no such word) would use many of the same design elements that characterized the medieval illuminated manuscripts but would employ digital technology to produce the finished product.  On a whim, I set out to try and emulate in an all-digital document, the design features employed by the manuscript copiers.   

I decided to create my technuscript from  an article I published in the Online Learning Journal in 2017, entitled “Theories and frameworks for online education:  Seeking an integrated model.”   I selected this article because it has a number of colorful images with which to work.  However, I enhanced the article substantially by adding images produced by generative AI software.  The design features I took from traditional illuminated manuscripts included:

1. Using bright,  jewel-toned colors (reds, blues, yellows, greens) in the images;
2. Employing a variety of image sizes from small thumbnail to full pages;
3. Placing borders on images;
4. Using an antique block font on a vellum-style page background for the text;
5. Colorizing the first word of each paragraph.
   

Below are some sample pages to illustrate the style I used.  The entire technuscript is available at: Article Matted Matura Script PDF

I would love to receive feedback from any of you reading this posting as to what you think about my efforts.  As an aside, this project became a labor of love and a six-week diversion with my wife, Elaine, encouraging and critiquing me along the way.

Tony

Republican Speaker Mike Johnson’s Face Show His Dejection.  Courtesy of The Huffington Post.

Dear Commons Community,

The Republicans in the House of Representatives lost two key votes yesterday on the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkis and on aid to Israel.

Impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkis

In a stunning blow to Republican leaders, the House rejected an effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas  after a number of Republicans joined Democrats in opposing it.

The final vote was 214 to 216.

The vote was incredibly dramatic. It was tied 215 to 215 for several minutes, with every Democrat voting no along with three Republicans: Reps. Ken Buck (Colo.), Tom McClintock (Calif.) and Mike Gallagher (Wis.). A tied vote meant the effort would fail, so Democrats began shouting “Order!” at Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to drop the gavel and end it.

Republicans were furiously prodding Gallagher to change his vote, but he wouldn’t. At the last minute, Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah) voted no, not because he opposed the measure but because it would allow the House to bring it back up again another day. That bumped the final tally to 214-216.

Aid to Israel

A bill to provide Israel with more military aid went down to defeat yesterday in the House, spoiling Speaker Mike Johnson’s attempt to separate Israel from other national security priorities, including helping Ukraine defend itself from Russia’s military invasion and deterring crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The vote gave individual lawmakers another chance to show voters their support for Israel and could be used on the campaign trail to criticize those who voted against it. But it did little to generate momentum toward passage of a final emergency spending package.

The House had already gone on the record in support of an Israel aid package. Johnson brought that package up in November on one of his first days as the new House speaker. The vote was in response to Hamas and other militants killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking captive some 240 men, women and children in an Oct. 7 attack.

Regardless of the party, the House leadership generally only brings items to a vote when they are sure of the outcome. It is obvious that Speaker Mikc Johnson has a problem with controlling his Republican delegation.

Tony