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Dear Commons Community,

Vice President Kamala Harris slammed former President Donald Trump for repeatedly claiming that he appeals to Black voters because of his felony conviction, saying the Republican candidate’s racist efforts to reach Black Americans are “insulting.”

Harris, the first Black American, South Asian American, and woman to be vice president, made the remarks in an interview with MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski that aired yesterday. During the interview, Brzezinski asked the Democrat her thoughts on the indicted ex-president’s attempt to connect with Black voters via his legal struggles, as well as his oft-repeated claim that he can’t be racist because he has Black friends.  As reported by The Huffington Post and other media.

“Well, on the first point, as connected to the second point, it’s insulting,” Harris answered. “It’s insulting for a number of reasons, including [that] he has reduced the whole population of people down to a sum total of what is, in his mind, who they are. And he’s wrong, and he’s wrong.”

Trump was convicted last month on 34 felony counts related to his hush money trial, one of many cases for which the former president has been indicted, including charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election he lost.

“I got indicted for nothing ― for something that is nothing. … I got indicted a second time and a third time and a fourth time,” Trump said in February at the Black Conservative Federation Gala in South Carolina.

“And a lot of people said that that’s why the Black people like me, because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against. And they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against,” he continued. “It’s been pretty amazing. Possibly ― maybe there’s something there.”

The Republican candidate repeated the claim in an interview with Semafor published earlier this month, alleging that Black voters have told him “very plainly and very clear” that they “feel that similar things have happened to them.”

At the time of Trump’s February comments, the Biden campaign said that the Republican “peddled racist tropes” that mocked Black voters.

“This might come as news to Trump, but pushing tired tropes, wannabe Jordans, and mugshot t-shirts isn’t going to win over Black voters who suffered through record high unemployment and skyrocketing uninsured rates under his leadership,” Biden spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “Trump is showing Black voters exactly what he thinks of them ― and his ideas to win them over are as corny and racist as he is.”

Trump has a long history of racism, having famously called for the Exonerated Five ― the Black and brown teenage boys falsely accused of rape in New York ― to receive the death penalty in the 1980s. He also led the right-wing conspiracy that falsely accused former President Barack Obama of having been born in Kenya and not the U.S., and called white nationalists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, “very fine people.” Just last month, a producer for Trump’s former reality TV show, “The Apprentice,” alleged that there is a recording of the then-businessman using the N-word in reference to a Black contestant.

“I have so many Black friends that if I were a racist, they wouldn’t be friends, they would know better than anybody, and fast. They would not be with me for two minutes if they thought I was racist ― and I’m not racist!” Trump told Semafor this month, a claim he has often repeated despite the reality that having Black friends does not cancel out acts of racism.

Despite repeatedly denouncing the hush money trial that made him the first U.S. president to ever be convicted of a felony, Trump now proudly wears his guilty verdict with his 2024 campaign saying it has since received a massive influx of contributions.

“Every time the radical-left Democrats, Marxists, communists and fascists indict me, I consider it a great, great badge of honor,” Trump told the South Carolina audience in February. “Because I’m being indicted for you, the American people. I’m being indicted for you, the Black population. I’m being indicted for a lot of different groups by sick people.”

In a Pew Research Center poll released last month, 18% of Black respondents said they would vote for Trump ― double what it was during the 2020 election. About 77% said they would vote for Biden, and 65% said they believe Trump broke the law in trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman yesterday acknowledged the unpredictability of former President Donald Trump means “predictions of how he is going to actually be” during his first presidential debate against President Joe Biden, which CNN is hosting on Thursday, “are probably not worth very much.”

While most candidates prepare methodically for the televised head-to-head, Haberman noted how presumptive GOP presidential nominee Trump had instead opted to focus on sessions on policy.

“But whether he is going to absorb what he’s learning there and whether he’s going to come in interrupting President Biden less than he did in 2020 in their first debate is an open question because he does what he wants to do,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. See video below.

Haberman did note how Trump has been asking supporters during recent campaign rallies whether he should be “tough and nasty” to Biden or “nice and calm and let him speak.”

“I think he will likely interrupt less, because I think that’s the lesson he took from the first debate in 2020,” the journalist said, adding: “I think he will be very mean toward Biden. I would be very surprised if he’s anything other than that.”

We shall see on Thursday!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last evening we experienced here in New York all kinds of weather.  Most of the day was intensely hot and humid with 90 plus temperatures.  By evening, the clouds darkened and we started to see tornado alerts from the U.S. Weather Service  on our TV broadcast. Around 7:00 pm, an intense storm with rain and winds as strong as I have ever seen and comparable to a hurricane barrelled through.  It did not last long but it blacked out the area cutting off electricity and cable service.  The electricity returned later in the evening but the cable service was just returned a little while ago.

The photo above was taken in my next door neighbor’s backyard only about twenty yards from my house.  Below are several other photos of the destruction in and around my town.

Tony

Credit. Media Matters.

Dear Commons Community,

Monica Crowley, a former Fox News personality and Treasury Department official during Donald Trump’s presidential administration, showed love to Cold War-era Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) on Friday as she pushed a bizarre conspiracy theory that seemed straight out of the Red Scare.  As reported by The Huffington Post.

“By the way, Sen. Joe McCarthy was right,” Crowley said in remarks to the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual conference in Washington. “And he was trying to ring the bell in the 1950s about communist infiltration in our government.”

Crowley, who was also Trump’s pick for a National Security Council role before she declined it in early 2017 amid a plagiarism scandal involving her dissertation, added that the deep state “removed Richard Nixon,” “went after Ronald Reagan” and “is now going after Donald Trump.”

“That deep state became very insidious, and in the 1950s smeared and attacked Joe McCarthy for speaking the truth about godless communism in [the] very halls of our government,” said Crowley, who has previously peddled a number of Barack Obama-related conspiracy theories.

Her remarks arrive decades after McCarthy famously claimed there were communists and Soviet spies throughout the U.S. government.

The Senate would later vote to censure him in a 67-22 vote, less than three years prior to his 1957 death.

Speaking in Washington, Crowley said that communists have been “grabbing control over all of the aspects of American life and culture.”

“They called it ‘the long march through the institutions,’” she said. “And now they have succeeded because they’ve been at it for so long.”

Earlier this year, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said he was “sure” that Crowley was on the short list for national security adviser in a second Trump term as he seeks to retake the White House.

God helps us!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Alex Trebek, the longtime host of Jeopardy, who died in 2020 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, is being remembered with a new Forever stamp by the United States Postal Service. The stamp, which officially goes on sale on July 22, coincides with the show’s 60th Diamond Celebration, which honors its remarkable six decades on air.

The sheet of 20 identical stamps features the display of video monitors seen on “Jeopardy!” alongside a photo of Trebek.

Written on each stamp is the clue: “This naturalized U.S. citizen hosted the quiz show ‘Jeopardy!’ for 37 seasons.” Underneath, written upside down, is the response: “Who is Alex Trebek?”

The show’s current host, Ken Jennings, announced the stamps during Friday’s episode.

Trebek, 80, died on Nov. 8 2020 following a long and public battle with pancreatic cancer. He was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer in 2019. Despite the diagnosis, he never missed a day of work.

Trebek told “CBS Sunday Morning” in May 2019 that “it wouldn’t be right” for him to walk away from the show.

“It wouldn’t be right for me to walk away from this if I can possibly do it,” Trebek said. “And I managed to do it. So, what’s the big deal?”

Trebek started on the quiz show in 1984, and hosted more than 8,000 episodes, taking home six Daytime Emmys.

Nice!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Trump’s stake in his social media company is worth about half of what it was before his conviction on charges of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal during the 2016 presidential campaign

Mr. Trump’s roughly 65 percent stake in Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent of Truth Social, was worth roughly $6 billion on May 30, the day a New York jury found him guilty on all 34 charges. Yesterday, the value of his 115 million shares of Trump Media had dropped to about $3.2 billion.

By any measure, Mr. Trump’s stake is still worth a tremendous amount of money. But the social media company’s shares have been extremely volatile, as highlighted by the steep decline this month. As reported in The New York Times. 

Trump Media’s stock price traded as high as $66 after its merger with a public shell company in late March, and as low as $23 a few weeks later. The stock, after trading down most of the day Friday, closed at $27.66, up about 3 percent.

The big swing in price is a potential sign of more volatility to come when a provision that bars Mr. Trump from selling his shares expires in September, a few weeks before the presumptive Republican nominee faces President Biden in a presidential election rematch.

Trump Media’s stock has also been weighed down because securities regulators this week allowed early investors in the company to potentially sell tens of millions of shares. Trump Media warned in a filing that the move by the Securities and Exchange Commission “could result in a significant decline in the public trading price of our common stock.”

This week, shares of Trump Media have fallen more than 20 percent on heavier-than-usual trading volumes.

Trump Media went public after completing a long-delayed merger with a cash-rich shell company called Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which had raised money by going public in September 2021, a month before announcing its deal with Trump Media. Early investors in Digital World had stock that became Trump Media as well as warrants that gave them the right to buy more shares at a fixed price after certain regulatory hurdles were cleared.

Another Trump venture on the verge of collapse!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg has a column this morning warning America about a little known law that if enforced could be used to ban the mailing of “devices and substances” for producing abortion. Goldberg gives excellent background on the Comstock Law for those of us not familiar with it.  She quotes Jonathan F. Mitchell, a crusading anti-abortion lawyer who represented Trump before the Supreme Court this year, who said:

 “We don’t need a federal ban [on abortion] when we have Comstock on the books.”

Goldberg goes on to describe the 1873 act as:

“It is similarly difficult to get Americans to appreciate the threat that the 19th-century Comstock Act could be resurrected. Named colloquially for the fanatical postal inspector Anthony Comstock, the 1873 act — which is actually a set of anti-vice laws — bans the mailing of “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile” material, including devices and substances used “for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose.” Though never repealed, it was, until recently, considered a dead letter, made moot by Supreme Court decisions on free speech, birth control and abortion.

But with Roe overturned, some in Donald Trump’s orbit see a chance to reanimate Comstock, using it to ban medication abortion — and maybe surgical abortion as well — without passing new federal legislation.

The 920-page blueprint for a second Trump administration created by Project 2025, a coalition of conservative organizations, calls for enforcing Comstock’s criminal prohibitions against using the mail — widely understood to include common carriers like UPS and FedEx — to provide or distribute abortion pills.

She concludes with a warning that we would likely see Republicans attempting to enforce Comstock if Trump is elected in November.

The entire column is worth a read.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading The Wide Wide Sea:  Imperial  Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides. Sides is an American historian, author and journalist. His earlier book, The Ghost Soldiers won the Pen USA Award for Nonfiction. The Wide Wide Sea… is a gripping story of Captain James Cook’s final voyage to the South Pacific.  Right from the beginning, Sides lets the reader know that Cook will be killed in Hawaii at the end.  Still, the reader wants to know the how and why Cook meets his fate.  On the way, one learns of his remarkable talents as the captain of a sailing ship who charted much of the Pacific Ocean from north to south in the 1700s. On this third voyage, Cook, who has a complex and controversial legacy in dealing with Indigenous people, sets out to discover a Northwest Passage in North America. If you are at all interested in Cook and European exploration of the South Seas in the 1700s, you will not put this book down.

Below is review that appeared in The New York Times.

Tony

The New York Times

THE WIDE WIDE SEA: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides

Reviewed by Doug Bock Clark

In January 1779, when the British explorer James Cook sailed into a volcanic bay known by Hawaiians as “the Pathway of the Gods,” he beheld thousands of people seemingly waiting for him on shore. Once he came on land, people prostrated themselves and chanted “Lono,” the name of a Hawaiian deity. Cook was bewildered.

It was as though the European mariner “had stepped into an ancient script for a cosmic pageant he knew nothing about,” Hampton Sides writes in “The Wide Wide Sea,” his propulsive and vivid history of Cook’s third and final voyage across the globe.

As Sides describes the encounter, Cook happened to arrive during a festival honoring Lono, sailing around the island in the same clockwise fashion favored by the god, possibly causing him to be mistaken as the divinity.

Sides, the author of several books on war and exploration, makes a symbolic pageant of his own of Cook’s last voyage, finding in it “a morally complicated tale that has left a lot for modern sensibilities to unravel and critique,” including the “historical seeds” of debates about “Eurocentrism,” “toxic masculinity” and “cultural appropriation.”

Cook’s two earlier global expeditions focused on scientific goals — first to observe the transit of Venus from the Pacific Ocean and then to make sure there was no extra continent in the middle of it. His final voyage, however, was inextricably bound up in colonialism: During the explorer’s second expedition, a young Polynesian man named Mai had persuaded the captain of one of Cook’s ships to bring him to London in the hope of acquiring guns to kill his Pacific islander enemies.

A few years later, George III commissioned Cook to return Mai to Polynesia on the way to searching for an Arctic passage to connect the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Mai brought along a menagerie of plants and livestock given to him by the king, who hoped that Mai would convert his native islands into simulacra of the English countryside.

“The Wide Wide Sea” is not so much a story of “first contact” as one of Cook reckoning with the fallout of what he and others had wrought in expanding the map of Europe’s power. Retracing parts of his previous voyages while chauffeuring Mai, Cook is forced to confront the fact that his influence on groups he helped “discover” has not been universally positive. Sexually transmitted diseases introduced by his sailors on earlier expeditions have spread. Some Indigenous groups that once welcomed him have become hard bargainers, seeming primarily interested in the Europeans for their iron and trinkets.

Sides writes that Cook “saw himself as an explorer-scientist,” who “tried to follow an ethic of impartial observation born of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution” and whose “descriptions of Indigenous peoples were tolerant and often quite sympathetic” by “the standards of his time.”

In Hawaii, he had been circling the island in a vain attempt to keep his crew from disembarking, finding lovers and spreading more gonorrhea. And despite the fact that he was ferrying Mai and his guns back to the Pacific, Cook also thought it generally better to avoid “political squabbles” among the civilizations he encountered.

But Cook’s actions on this final journey raised questions about his adherence to impartial observation. He responded to the theft of a single goat by sending his mariners on a multiday rampage to burn whole villages to force its return. His men worried that their captain’s “judgment — and his legendary equanimity — had begun to falter,” Sides writes. As the voyage progressed, Cook became startlingly free with the disciplinary whip on his crew.

“The Wide Wide Sea” presents Cook’s moral collapse as an enigma. Sides cites other historians’ arguments that lingering physical ailments — one suggests he picked up a parasite from some bad fish — might have darkened Cook’s mood. But his journals and ship logs, which dedicate hundreds of thousands of words to oceanic data, offer little to resolve the mystery. “In all those pages we rarely get a glimpse of Cook’s emotional world,” Sides notes, describing the explorer as “a technician, a cyborg, a navigational machine.”

The gaps in Cook’s interior journey stand out because of the incredible job Sides does in bringing to life Cook’s physical journey. New Zealand, Tahiti, Kamchatka, Hawaii and London come alive with you-are-there descriptions of gales, crushing ice packs and gun smoke, the set pieces of exploration and endurance that made these tales so hypnotizing when they first appeared. The earliest major account of Cook’s first Pacific expedition was one of the most popular publications of the 18th century.

But Sides isn’t just interested in retelling an adventure tale. He also wants to present it from a 21st-century point of view. “The Wide Wide Sea” fits neatly into a growing genre that includes David Grann’s “The Wager” and Candice Millard’s “River of the Gods,” in which famous expeditions, once told as swashbuckling stories of adventure, are recast within the tragic history of colonialism. Sides weaves in oral histories to show how Hawaiians and other Indigenous groups perceived Cook, and strives to bring to life ancient Polynesian cultures just as much as imperial England.

And yet, such modern retellings also force us to ask how different they really are from their predecessors, especially if much of their appeal lies in exactly the same derring-do that enthralled prior audiences. Parts of “The Wide Wide Sea” inevitably echo the storytelling of previous yarns, even if Sides self-consciously critiques them. Just as Cook, in retracing his earlier voyages, became enmeshed in the dubious consequences of his previous expeditions, so, too, does this newest retracing of his story becomes tangled in the historical ironies it seeks to transcend.

In the end, Mai got his guns home and shot his enemies, and the Hawaiians eventually realized that Cook was not a god. After straining their resources to outfit his ships, Cook tried to kidnap the king of Hawaii to force the return of a stolen boat. A confrontation ensued and the explorer was clubbed and stabbed to death, perhaps with a dagger made of a swordfish bill.

The British massacred many Hawaiians with firearms, put heads on poles and burned homes. Once accounts of these exploits reached England, they were multiplied by printing presses and spread across their world-spanning empire. The Hawaiians committed their losses to memory. And though the newest version of Cook’s story includes theirs, it’s still Cook’s story that we are retelling with each new age.

Dear Commons Community,

Declining enrollments. Changing demographics. Tightening budgets. And, above all, an “evolving student marketplace.”

All these elements led Jay O. Rothman, president of the University of Wisconsin system, to announce in Fall 2023 that the system was closing one two-year campus and ending in-person instruction at two others. More closures may be on the horizon, as Rothman ordered university leaders to examine the financial viability of the remaining 10 two-year campuses. As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“It’s time for us to realign our branch campuses to current market realities and prepare for the future,” Rothman said in a statement. “The status quo is not sustainable.”

Nearly half of Wisconsin’s community colleges have been shuttered in the past year.

Most recently, the grim trend came for the Fox Cities campus of the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, which will close in the spring of 2025, officials announced last week.

This wasn’t the plan. In 2017, the University of Wisconsin system announced a bold measure that officials said was meant to preserve the 13 two-year institutions — by merging each of them with one of the system’s universities.

Since the mergers went through, most of the two-year colleges have continued to lose students and tuition dollars. Now, as more campus closures loom in the near future, outraged professors and residents are pointing fingers at university leaders and state lawmakers for the harm they’re causing in local communities.

We will see more closures and mergers in other parts of the country as declining student enrollments plague higher education.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Willie Mays was remembered in his native Birmingham, Alabama, yesterday during a Juneteenth celebration at the Negro Southern League Museum.

The heartbreaking part of the day was Mays – who died Tuesday at 93 – was not around to hear the memories shared by former players or stories told by relatives of Negro Leagues greats who idolized one of baseball’s icons.

Mays, who had said Monday he would not be able to make the trip as planned, gave a statement to friend Dusty Baker to share at the event.

A mural (above) of Willie Mays was unveiled in Birmingham, Alabama, where he played in the Negro Leagues in the 1940s.

Mays, a Hall of Famer who slugged more than 600 home runs and is probably best known for his over-the-shoulder catch in the 1954 World Series, gifted a clock to Birmingham, where a mural was unveiled in the city where he played in the Negro Leagues in the 1940s.

The statement, given to Baker on Monday, reads:

“I wish I could be with you all today. This is where I’m from. I had my first pro hit here at Rickwood as a Baron in 1948. And now this year 76 years later, it finally got counted in the record books. Some things take time, but I always think better late than never. Time changes things. Time heals wounds, and that is a good thing. I had some of the best times of my life and Birmingham so I want you to have this clock to remember those times with me and remember all the other players who were lucky enough to play here at Rickwood Field in Birmingham. Remember, time is on your side.”

Mays was a class act then, now and forever!

Tony