Dear Commons Community,

Rick Hess, opinion contributor to Education Week and director of Education Policy Studies at the  American Enterprise Institute, interviewed Lindsey Burke, the lead author of the education section in Project 2025, the controversial, right-wing agenda issued earlier this year by the Heritage Foundation.  Given the attention it has drawn and the questions it raised, it has become an object of interest during this year’s  presidential election. Burke is the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.  The American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation are both right-of-center organizations that promote conservative viewpoints on national issues.

Below is the entire interview.

Tony

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Rick: Lindsey, you were responsible for writing the education section of Project 2025. How did that come about?

Lindsey: I direct the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, where I have been for over 16 years. During that time, we’ve thought extensively about how to restore excellence in education. This requires, in part, winding down overly prescriptive federal intervention in local schools, empowering parents with choice and transparency, and limiting ever-ballooning higher education subsidies.

We have written hundreds of research papers and policy reports on these issues, and I was pleased to apply the Center’s recommendations to the Project 2025 Department of Education chapter. This chapter was a collaborative effort with numerous contributors, both those who work for Heritage and our colleagues at other public-policy organizations in the conservative education movement.

Rick: As you see it, how does Project 2025 seek to reshape education?

Lindsey: At its core, Project 2025 seeks to reshape education by reshaping accountability. As my colleague Jason Bedrick has pointed out, accountability means being “directly answerable to the people most affected by [service providers’] performance.” Tell me: Who is accountable to parents when the federal Head Start program fails, as it has for 60 years, to improve children’s education outcomes, as shown by the only nationally representative, randomized control trial of the program? Who is held accountable for the Bureau of Indian Education Schools’ leaving Native American children two grade levels behind the national average—something the federal government has known about and failed to rectify for years, even if it’s made some halting progress? Who is held accountable for the fact that American taxpayers have had to increasingly subsidize higher education as colleges continue to raise prices while producing graduates who know more about microaggressions than macroeconomics? No one is.

That’s the hallmark of distant federal programs that are far removed from localities. Providers are simply not held accountable to the people they’re supposed to serve. The reforms we outline would recalibrate accountability so that it is directed horizontally to parents and taxpayers rather than vertically to Washington.

Rick: You call for several controversial policies, such as block-granting and then eventually eliminating Title I, abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, and morphing Impact Aid into a school choice program. How do you make the case for these controversial proposals to skeptics?

Lindsey: Let me take the abolition of the Department of Education first. Abolishing the department doesn’t mean getting rid of important civil rights protections in law or protections for children with special needs; both of these safeguards predate the department’s creation. It means the removal of myriad ineffective programs and inflationary spending. It’s important to remember that the agency has only been around since 1980 and that federal programs only account for about 10 percent of K–12 education revenue. I often think about a line from that great Hoekstra report “Education at a Crossroads,” in which the authors implored: “If it cannot be demonstrated that a particular federal program is more effectively spending funds than state and local communities would otherwise spend them, Congress should return the money to the states and the people, without any burdensome strings attached.”

That was written in 1998. And it cannot be demonstrated that the feds are doing a better job than states or local school leaders would do. Local communities know local conditions and students far better than distant federal bureaucrats do. Our recommendation is to cut ineffective programs and spending and block-grant money back to the states for those programs that would be retained. Title I would be block-granted, and revenue-raising responsibility for the program would be restored to states over a 10-year period. Impact Aid funding would be better targeted to children from active-duty military families in the form of education savings accounts.

Rick: Some critics would argue that these measures will decrease accountability, since money would be given to states with no strings attached. How do you respond to such concerns?

Lindsey: The closer we can situate dollars and decisionmaking to families, the stronger accountability will be. For example, filtering Title I funding through a complex labyrinth of funding formulas that have no real connection to poverty and can’t be accessed by families in any meaningful way has not improved outcomes or opportunity for low-income kids. Susan Pendergrass documented this in 2018, writing that “Title I dollars are spent on non-low-income children, and many low-income children receive nothing through the program.” Funding meant to reach children gets diluted by administrative costs on the way back to the classroom—a criticism applicable to almost every federal education program. Better to let states and school districts fully direct that funding in a way that meets the needs of their local families.

That principle applies to more than just Title I. States such as Florida and Arizona have made phenomenal progress over the past two decades improving student academic outcomes—especially for low-income and minority children—by adopting common-sense reforms like focusing on reading and providing parents with schooling options. They made this progress despite federal intervention in education, not because of it. And again I would ask: Who has been held accountable for Washington’s track record of failure since 1965, Republican and Democratic administrations alike?

Rick: Former President Trump has denounced Project 2025 as “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” and said he hasn’t read it. Were you surprised by that reaction?

Lindsey: Project 2025 has been clear from the beginning: We do not speak for President Trump or his campaign. And what we have done with Project 2025 is not new—the Heritage Foundation has been publishing its Mandate for Leadership since the 1980s, and several Republican presidents have taken and implemented our policy suggestions. We remain true to that mission and will continue to offer policy recommendations to conservative administrations, but it is ultimately up to the president to decide which policies to implement.

Rick: Is it realistic to think a second Trump administration might move to implement any of these proposals? What are the political challenges of doing so?

Lindsey: The Trump administration made some smart and important policy changes during Trump’s first tenure in office, including increasing school choice through an expansion of the allowable uses of 529 accounts to include K–12 private school tuition as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act; signing a Congressional Review Act repeal of Obama-era regulations on the Every Student Succeeds Act that would have established prescriptive school rating systems from Washington; restoring due process on college campuses; and purging DEI training from federal contracting. The next administration should build on these successes, some of which were overturned by the Biden administration, and Project 2025 provides a menu of options for doing so.

Rick: Trump aside, what kind of reception has Project 2025 received from Republicans in Congress and from conservative activists?

Lindsey: Despite the lies and mischaracterizations, it turns out conservative ideas are popular; they are 80-20 issues. We partnered with Echelon Insights to poll swing-state voters on what they thought of Project 2025, and they strongly support our policies on a wide range of issues—the border, inflation, and energy being a few examples. Nearly half of Americans support eliminating the Department of Education, and grassroots conservatives strongly support winding down “Carter’s new bureaucratic boondoggle,” as Ronald Reagan famously labeled the Department of Education. When looking at the issues that matter to Americans, we see standing ovation-level support.

Rick: What do you think critics have gotten wrong about Project 2025?

Lindsey: Critics have completely ignored the fact that the left also recommends policies that Democratic administrations should pursue every four years. Just one example is the Center for American Progress, a far-left group that has prepared policy recommendations for liberal presidents including Obama in 2008. In fact, that same organization is now influencing policy in the Biden-Harris administration, as reported by Fox News just a couple of weeks ago. As a 501(c)3, we’re candidate-agnostic and hope any administration would be interested in the policies we outline in this menu.

Rick: Where do you think the critics have a point or you have found yourself thinking, “I should’ve anticipated that?”

Lindsey: I suppose the lesson here is to never underestimate the lengths the mainstream media and the far left will go to maintain their grip on power. For months now, the media have been lying to the American people about Project 2025. We created a fact-checking page just to counter the false narratives and even got the media to admit that much of what is said about Project 2025 is false. We welcome debating our ideas, but it has to be an honest conversation, and that hasn’t been the case much of the time.

Rick: Can you give some examples of what you’d regard as examples of the media lying about Project 2025?

Lindsey: One example that sticks out is when the pundits on Morning Joe claimed Project 2025 increases student-loan payments. Project 2025 would end the Biden administration’s illegal and regressive student-loan cancellation efforts, so the media are counting a return to the expectation of having to make your existing student-loan payments as an increase. It does phase out income-driven repayment but only for new loans, not existing loans. It also eliminates Public Service Loan Forgiveness. So yes, many government and nonprofit employees would no longer have working Americans paying off their master’s degrees.

Rick: How does an effort like this seek to influence federal policy?

Lindsey: Project 2025 builds on Heritage’s long history and legacy of providing policy recommendations for conservative administrations. The Mandate for Leadership has been published in successive editions since 1980, and Ronald Reagan famously handed out copies of it at his first Cabinet meeting. As one of the nation’s leading conservative think tanks, we at Heritage continue to pursue efforts like Project 2025 in the future, providing policy recommendations to safeguard freedom and opportunity in this country and enable Americans to live the good life.

Rick: Last question: What do you think explains the enormous attention to Project 2025 this cycle?

Lindsey: The Harris-Biden administration has no credible, positive record to run on. So, it’s no surprise that they would mischaracterize Project 2025 to deflect from the poor job that the administration has done with inflation and the economy, securing our border, and out-of-control crime. But the left’s hysteria has led people to read a 900-page think tank white paper; that’s quite an accomplishment!

Dear Commons Community,

Former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin said JD Vance’s vice presidential debate performance on Tuesday likely secured his spot as the “MAGA heir apparent.”

David Dee Delgado/Ronda Churchill/AFP/AP Photo/Louis Lanzano, File

Dear Commons Community,

Caroline Rose Giuliani, the daughter of Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said yesterday that she did not come lightly to her decision to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris.  As reported by CNN and Vanity Fair.

In her first television interview after endorsing Harris, Caroline Rose Giuliani told CNN’s Erin Burnett that she has had to navigate a painful “emotional storm” over the last couple of years, as her father contends with the fallout of his efforts to help Trump try to overturn the 2020 election. She said she had to figure out if she “had the fortitude to share” her thoughts, knowing it could hurt her relationship with her father, who is 80, “in the last years of his life.”

She said that she did not tell her father that she was writing an essay endorsing Harris over Trump, which Vanity Fair published earlier this week, but that she’s always made her opinions clear. Caroline Rose Giuliani previously endorsed Joe Biden and Harris over Trump in the 2020 election.

“I still worry that it will hurt him, and I do hope he knows that I love him. I hope that was clear, but yeah, we haven’t spoken about it yet and probably won’t for a while,” she said on “OutFront”.

In her Vanity Fair piece, entitled “Trump Took My Dad From Me. Please Don’t Let Him Take Our Country Too”, Caroline described being “well-suited to remind Americans of just how calamitous being associated with Trump can be,” detailing how her father’s life has crumbled since “he joined forces” with the former president.

“The last thing I want to do is hurt him, especially when he’s already down. Plus we never know how much time we have left with our parents. The totality of that makes this the most difficult piece I’ve ever written. Yet this moment and this election are so much bigger than any of us,” she wrote.

Giuliani said in the essay that Harris is the country’s “only chance for a better future.”

“Take it from me, Trump destroys everything he touches. I saw it happen to my family. Don’t let it happen to yours, or to our country,” she added. “Kamala Harris will guide us into a brighter future, but only if we unite behind her.”

Since the 2020 election, Trump’s former personal attorney has faced a slew of legal and financial troubles. He has pleaded not guilty to state criminal charges against him related to the election subversion schemes in Georgia and Arizona. Two former Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, have also obtained a $148 million defamation judgment against him for false allegations he made about them after the 2020 election. They are currently in court trying to force the sale of Guiliani’s property, including a penthouse co-op apartment in the Upper East Side of Manhattan and a Florida condo that are worth millions.

When asked on Wednesday if she’s afraid her father will go to prison, Giuliani said, “I mean, of course, that’s a terrible thing to think about, and it is a fear, and I don’t like to think about it.” She added that she preferred to think about the future and reemphasized her support for Harris.

Giuliani, the youngest of Rudy Giuliani’s two children with his ex-wife, Donna Hanover, supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, while her father vociferously backed Trump. During the 2008 election, when her father was seeking the GOP nomination, she joined a Facebook group that supported Barack Obama for president.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump on Monday suggested “transgender” is the principal subject now taught in schools. He had a sympathetic ear in Fox Nation host Kellyanne Conway, his former adviser who introduced the world to the concept of “alternative facts.”  As reported by The Huffington Post.

“We want reading, writing and arithmetic,” Trump said in a conversation about his plans for education reform if he wins the election next month. “Right now, you have mostly transgender. Everything’s transgender.”

“Some of these school programs, I looked at it the other night ― they’re destroying our country,” the former president added.

Trump prefaced his outrageous assertion ― yet another salvo in the culture wars ― by alluding to his plan to close the Department of Education and turn over education completely to the states. “And they’ll do great,” he said.

The Republican nominee noted that the U.S. spends more money per pupil than any other developed nation ― a claim that the data somewhat supports ― and yet is underperforming globally.

“We want school choice, but we have to get out of this Washington thing,” he said. “We’re gonna move it back to the states.”

The president has leaned on transphobia to characterize public schools as a breeding ground for extreme ideology on gender ― and his online plan for education reflects that.

Cutting federal funding “for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children” is the top priority listed on that page.

The plan also lists “Keep men out of women’s sports” as a priority, another sign of the campaign’s embrace of transphobia.

Trump again demonstrates how unhinged his candidacy for president has become.

Tony

Photo credit – The Associated Press.

Dear Commons Community,

I watched last night’s vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz.  It was civil, policy-heavy and a bit boring.  Neither candidate wowed the viewers.  Tim Walz scored a plus when he confronted Vance about whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen.  Vance gave a rambling non-answer.  Vance scored points on the issue of immigration and control of the border.   I also got the feeling that Vance went out of his way to appear calm and even-tempered, possibly setting himself up to run for president in 2028. It is my sense that few viewers would be making their voting decisions based on this debate and in a few days it will be largely forgotten.

Below is a recap courtesy of Bill Barrow, Zeke Miller and Nicholas Riccardi of The Associated Press.

Tony

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It was the first encounter between Minnesota’s Democratic governor and Ohio’s Republican senator, following last month’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. It comes just five weeks before Election Day and as millions of voters are now able to cast early ballots.

Tuesday’s confrontation played out as the stakes of the contest rose again after Iran fired missiles into Israel, while a devastating hurricane and potentially debilitating port strike roiled the country at home. Over and again, Walz and Vance outlined the policy and character differences between their running mates, while trying to introduce themselves to the country.

Here are some takeaways from Tuesday’s debate.

With Mideast in turmoil, Walz promises ‘steady leadership’ and Vance offers ’peace through strength’

Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel on Tuesday elicited a contrast between the Democratic and Republican tickets on foreign policy: Walz promised “steady leadership” under Harris while Vance pledged a return to “peace through strength” if Trump is returned to the White House.

The differing visions of what American leadership should look like overshadowed the sharp policy differences between the two tickets.

The Iranian threat to the region and U.S. interests around the world opened the debate, with Walz pivoting the topic to criticism of Trump.

“What’s fundamental here is that steady leadership is going to matter,” Walz said, then referenced the “nearly 80-year-old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes” and responding to global crises by tweet.

Vance, for his part, promised a return to “effective deterrence” under Trump against Iran, brushing back on Walz’s criticism of Trump by attacking Harris and her role in the Biden administration.

“Who has been the vice president for the last three and a half years and the answer is your running mate, not mine,” he said. He pointedly noted that the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, happened “during the administration of Kamala Harris.”

Vance and Walz punch up rather than at each other

Vance and Walz trained the bulk of their attacks not on their onstage rivals, but on the running mates who weren’t in the room.

Both vice presidential nominees sought to convey a genial mien as they lobbed criticism at Harris and Trump, respectively.

It was a reflection of the fact that most voters don’t cast a ballot based on the vice president, and on a vice presidential nominee’s historic role in serving as the attack dog for their running mates.

Walz pointedly attacked Trump for failing to meet his pledge of building a physical barrier across the entire U.S.-Mexico border at the country’s southern neighbor’s expense.

“Less than 2% of that wall got built and Mexico didn’t pay a dime,” Walz said.

Underscoring the focus on the top of the ticket, during a back-and-forth about immigration, Vance said to his opponent, “I think that you want to solve this problem, but I don’t think that Kamala Harris does.”

It was a wonky policy debate, with talk of risk pools, housing regulations and energy policy

In an age of world-class disses optimized for social media, Tuesday’s debate was a detour into substance. Both candidates took a low-key approach and both enthusiastically delved into the minutiae.

Walz dug into the drafting of the Affordable Care Act when he was in the House in 2009, and pushed Vance on the senator’s claim that Trump, who tried to eliminate the law, actually helped preserve it. Vance, defending his claim that illegal immigration pushes up housing prices, cited a Federal Reserve study to back himself up. Walz talked about how Minneapolis tinkered with local regulations to boost the housing supply. Both men talked about the overlap between energy policy, trade and climate change.

It was a very different style than often seen in presidential debates over the past several election cycles.

Vance stays on the defensive on abortion

Walz pounced on Vance repeatedly over abortion access and reproductive rights as the Ohio senator tried to argue that a state-by-state matrix of abortion laws is the ideal approach for the United States. Walz countered that a “basic right” for a woman should not be determined “by geography.”

“This is a very simple proposition: These are women’s decisions,” Walz said. “We trust women. We trust doctors.”

Walz sought to personalize the issue by referencing the death of Amber Thurman, who waited more than 20 hours at the hospital for a routine medical procedure known as a D&C to clear out remaining tissue after taking abortion pills. She developed sepsis and died.

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Rather than sidestep the reference, Vance at one point agreed with Walz that “Amber Thurman should still be alive.”

Vance steered the conversation to the GOP ticket’s proposals he said would help women and children economically, thus avoiding the need for terminating pregnancies. But Walz retorted that such policies — tax credits, expanded childcare aid, a more even economy — can be pursued while still allowing women to make their own decisions about abortion.

Both candidates put a domestic spin on climate change

In the wake of the devastation of Hurricane Helene, Vance took a question about climate change and gave an answer about jobs and manufacturing, taking a detour around Trump’s past claims that global warming is a “hoax.”

Vance contended that the best way to fight climate change was to move more manufacturing to the United States, because the country has the world’s cleanest energy economy. It was a distinctly domestic spin on a global crisis, especially after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the international Paris climate accords during his administration.

Walz also kept the climate change focus domestic, touting the Biden administration’s renewable energy investments as well as record levels of oil and natural gas production. “You can see us becoming an energy superpower in the future,” Walz said.

It was a decidedly optimistic take on a pervasive and grim global problem.

Walz, Vance each blame opposing presidential candidate for immigration stalemate

The two running mates agreed that the number of migrants in the U.S. illegally is a problem. But each laid the blame on the opposing presidential nominee.

Vance echoed Trump by repeatedly calling Harris the “border czar” and suggested that she, as vice president, single-handedly rolled back the immigration restrictions Trump had imposed as president. The result, in Vance’s telling, is an unchecked flow of fentanyl, strain on state and local resources and increased housing prices around the country.

Harris was never asked to be the “border czar” and she was never specifically given the responsibility for security on the border. She was tasked by Biden in March 2021 with tackling the “root causes” of migration from the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador and pushing leaders there and in Mexico to enforce immigration laws. Harris was not empowered to set U.S. immigration policy — only the president can sign executive orders and Harris was not empowered as Biden’s proxy in negotiations with Congress on immigration law.

Walz advanced Democrats’ arguments that Trump single-handedly killed a bipartisan Senate deal to tighten border security and boost the processing system for immigrants and asylum seekers. Republicans backed off the deal, Walz noted, only after Trump said it wasn’t good enough.

Both candidates leaned on tried-and-true debate tactics — including not answering tough questions

Asked directly whether Trump’s promise to deport millions of illegal immigrants would remove parents of U.S.-born children, Vance never answered the question. Instead, the senator tried to put his best spin on Trump’s plan to use the military to help with deportations and pivot to attacking Harris for a porous border. Asked to respond to Trump’s having called climate change a “hoax,” Vance also avoided a response.

The debate kicked off with Walz being asked if he’d support a preemptive strike by Israel against Iran. Walz praised Harris’ foreign policy leadership but never answered that question, either.

And at the end of the debate, Vance would not answer Walz’s direct question of whether Trump indeed lost the 2020 election.

Walz has stumbles and lands punches in uneven night

Walz had several verbal stumbles on a night in which he admitted to “misspeaking” often. In the debate’s opening moments, he confused Iran and Israel when discussing the Middle East.

At one point he said he had “become friends with school shooters,” and he stumbled through an explanation of inaccurate remarks about whether he was in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. ( He was not.)

But the governor noticeably put Vance on the defensive over abortion and, near the end of the debate, with a pointed question about whether Trump won the 2020 election.

Vance stays on a limb on Jan. 6 insurrection

The candidates went out of their way to be polite to each other until the very end, when Vance refused to back down from his statements that he wouldn’t have certified Trump’s 2020 election loss.

Vance tried to turn the issue to claims that the “much bigger threat to democracy” was Democrats trying to censor people on social media. But Walz wouldn’t let go.

“This one is troubling to me,” said Walz, noting that he’d just been praising some of Vance’s answers. He rattled off the ways Trump tried to overturn his 2020 loss and noted that the candidate still insists he won that contest. Then Walz asked Vance if Trump actually lost the election.

Vance responded by asking if Harris censored people.

“That is a damning non-answer,” said Walz, noting that Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, wasn’t on the debate stage because he stood up to Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, and presided over Congress’ certification of the former president’s loss.

“America,” Walz concluded, “I think you’ve got a really clear choice on this election of who’s going to honor that democracy and who’s going to honor Donald Trump.”

Mets Celebrate.  AP Photo – Jason Allen.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Mets scrapped, struggled and finally clinched a major league baseball playoff berth yesterday.

On the final day of the season, overcoming deficits of 3-0 in the eighth inning and 7-6 in the ninth, they clinched the berth when Francisco Lindor’s two-run homer capped a thrilling 8-7 win over the Atlanta Braves in the opener of a makeup doubleheader.

That was only fitting for a team that started 0-5 and hardly looked like postseason material when it slipped 11 games under .500 in late May.  As reported by several news media.

“Everybody had us out, even before the year started, and here we are, man,” rookie manager Carlos Mendoza said.

New York lost the nightcap 3-0, but it hardly mattered. Pete Alonso and the Mets had already locked up the 11th postseason appearance in team history, advancing to a best-of-three NL Wild Card Series starting Tuesday at Milwaukee.

“We’re a franchise that hasn’t had enough of these moments,” first-year president of baseball operations David Stearns said during the champagne party in the clubhouse following the twin bill. “We’ve got more work to do. I don’t think anyone in here is satisfied with just one celebration.”

Lindor, who returned Friday from a back injury that had sidelined him since Sept. 15, came through with the big hit, launching a drive into the Braves bullpen off Pierce Johnson.

“In slow motion it felt like,” Lindor said. “Emotion. Emotion. It felt like I got the pitch that I wanted. And you never know if the ball is going to go out or not but I feel like I got it 100%. We’re one step closer. Now we’ve got to finish it. Finish, finish, finish.”

Asked what he was thinking when he rounded the bases, Lindor said: “My back hurts. I’m tired. I know how good Atlanta is.”

New York had lost 77 straight games when trailing by three runs in the eighth inning or later since May 17, 2023.

“I’ve never seen a game like that. It was just a total rollercoaster,” owner Steve Cohen said. “I had tears in my eyes when we went ahead and then I was in shock when we fell behind. And then Francisco, just a big-boy moment, rises to the occasion. I mean, he must have dreamt of that as a kid.”

It was a throwback to 1973, when the Mets also clinched a playoff spot on the day after the season was supposed to finish. Back then, they beat the Chicago Cubs 6-4 to secure the NL East title.

“These are special moments. You’ve got to enjoy these moments,” said Stearns, who grew up a Mets fan in New York City. “This is the standard of where we should be.”

This year, a 10-3 loss to the Dodgers on May 29 completed a three-game Los Angeles sweep at Citi Field by a combined 18-5. New York dropped to 22-33 in its first season under Mendoza and was six games out of the last wild-card slot, needing to overcome seven teams.

Lindor called a players-only meeting. As players explained it, the Mets aired some issues in the clubhouse that day and committed themselves to positivity, effective preparation and a team-first approach dedicated to helping each other and winning games.

“We just opened the floor and talked about ways we can turn it around,” outfielder Brandon Nimmo said then. “Just felt like a boiling-over point.”

Since then, with Lindor leading the charge, they have the best record in the majors at 67-40 while outscoring opponents 541-433.

“It’s been an uphill fight,” Lindor said. “We put ourselves in a big hole and we kept climbing and kept climbing. We kept our shoulders above water. After the All-Star break, you know, we never believed that we were drowning.”

One of New York’s biggest concerns going into the Wild Card Series is the availability of star closer Edwin Díaz, who recovered from a blown save to get the win in the doubleheader opener. The right-hander has thrown 66 pitches over the past two days.

But the Mets haven’t been deterred all season.

“Nobody thought back in April outside of this clubhouse that we were going to make the playoffs, that we had any shot,” Nimmo said. “We were able to go out and go through really, really tough times and find ourselves on the other side and pull ourselves up and really rally together and have each other’s backs and be able to culminate in this.”

Baseball’s biggest spenders since Cohen bought the team ahead of the 2021 season, the Mets won 101 games in 2022 and reached the playoffs only to lose a three-game Wild Card Series at home to San Diego. The Mets sank to 75-87 last year, when they had a record $319.5 million payroll and were assessed a record $100.8 million luxury tax.

They began this year as the top spender again at a projected $321 million, including $70 million in payments to teams covering salaries of traded players Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander and James McCann. Their projected luxury tax was $83 million.

After the win in the doubleheader opener, Cohen posted on X: “Have you ever seen a game like that? I am so proud of this team. Met fans, go out and celebrate.”

“This was such a massive group effort,” Alonso said. “We earned it.”

Congratulations to the Mets!

Tony

Courtesy of Yahoo News

Dear Commons Community,

California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a landmark bill aimed at establishing first-in-the-nation safety measures for large artificial intelligence models on Sunday.

The decision is a major blow to efforts attempting to rein in the homegrown industry that is rapidly evolving with little oversight. The bill would have established some of the first regulations on large-scale AI models in the nation and paved the way for AI safety regulations across the country, supporters said. As reported by The Associated Press and The Huffington Post.

Earlier this month, the Democratic governor told an audience that California must lead in regulating AI in the face of federal inaction but that the proposal “can have a chilling effect on the industry.”

The proposal, which drew fierce opposition from startups, tech giants and several Democratic House members, could have hurt the homegrown industry by establishing rigid requirements, Newsom said.

“While well-intentioned, SB 1047 does not take into account whether an AI system is deployed in high-risk environments, involves critical decision-making or the use of sensitive data,” Newsom said in a statement. “Instead, the bill applies stringent standards to even the most basic functions — so long as a large system deploys it. I do not believe this is the best approach to protecting the public from real threats posed by the technology.”

Newsom on Sunday instead announced that the state will partner with several industry experts, including AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, to develop guardrails around powerful AI models. Li opposed the AI safety proposal.

The measure, aimed at reducing potential risks created by AI, would have required companies to test their models and publicly disclose their safety protocols to prevent the models from being manipulated to, for example, wipe out the state’s electric grid or help build chemical weapons. Experts say those scenarios could be possible in the future as the industry continues to rapidly advance. It also would have provided whistleblower protections to workers.

The bill’s author, Democratic state Sen. Scott Weiner, called the veto “a setback for everyone who believes in oversight of massive corporations that are making critical decisions that affect the safety and the welfare of the public and the future of the planet.”

“The companies developing advanced AI systems acknowledge that the risks these models present to the public are real and rapidly increasing. While the large AI labs have made admirable commitments to monitor and mitigate these risks, the truth is that voluntary commitments from industry are not enforceable and rarely work out well for the public,” Wiener said in a statement Sunday afternoon.

Wiener said the debate around the bill has dramatically advanced the issue of AI safety, and that he would continue pressing that point.

The legislation is among a host of bills passed by the Legislature this year to regulate AI, fight deepfakes and protect workers. State lawmakers said California must take actions this year, citing hard lessons they learned from failing to rein in social media companies when they might have had a chance.

Proponents of the measure, including Elon Musk and Anthropic, said the proposal could have injected some levels of transparency and accountability around large-scale AI models, as developers and experts say they still don’t have a full understanding of how AI models behave and why.

The bill targeted systems that require a high level of computing power and more than $100 million to build. No current AI models have hit that threshold, but some experts said that could change within the next year.

“This is because of the massive investment scale-up within the industry,” said Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher who resigned in April over what he saw as the company’s disregard for AI risks. “This is a crazy amount of power to have any private company control unaccountably, and it’s also incredibly risky.”

The United States is already behind Europe in regulating AI to limit risks. The California proposal wasn’t as comprehensive as regulations in Europe, but it would have been a good first step to set guardrails around the rapidly growing technology that is raising concerns about job loss, misinformation, invasions of privacy and automation bias, supporters said.

A number of leading AI companies last year voluntarily agreed to follow safeguards set by the White House, such as testing and sharing information about their models. The California bill would have mandated AI developers to follow requirements similar to those commitments, said the measure’s supporters.

But critics, including former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, argued that the bill would “kill California tech” and stifle innovation. It would have discouraged AI developers from investing in large models or sharing open-source software, they said.

Newsom’s decision to veto the bill marks another win in California for big tech companies and AI developers, many of whom spent the past year lobbying alongside the California Chamber of Commerce to sway the governor and lawmakers from advancing AI regulations.

Legislation to regulate AI will become common as AI integrates into all aspects of our society.  Unfortunately, the major tech companies have the knowledge and financial resources to influence any such legislation as was the case in California.

Tony