Dear Commons Community,

This is the second posting I will be making in as many months on concerns with peer review.  In this morning’s Science, an editorial entitled, “Australia’s erosion of peer review” rings alarm about the state of peer review down under. Here is an excerpt:

“Between 1992 and 2018, government support for fundamental research decreased by 17%, according to the Australian Academy of Science. Despite frustration in the gross underinvestment in biomedical research, Australian scientists were comforted by a trusted peer review system. For generations, Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), the major funding body for medical research, aspired to fund excellence through a careful process involving peer review grant panels. However, in 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic led to the necessary cancellation of the grant review panels that buttressed Australian science. Unfortunately, since then, there has been a systematic dismantling of high-quality review panels by the NHMRC in the name of efficiency, reduced administrative costs, and peer review flexibility. This has raised concerns across Australia’s scientific community that the peer review system is no longer reliable and thus poses an imminent threat to the future direction of Australian science.

These problems are best highlighted by detailing the farcical process through which the NHMRC has eroded the pillars that should support every credible peer review process. This includes the involvement of qualified experts. Previous grant review panels were carefully considered and assembled. Typically, about 80% of the panel (usually 12 members) were independent laboratory heads with prior grant panel experience. Remaining members were either new laboratory heads or, rarely, senior postdoctoral fellows. For training purposes, some senior postdocs were invited to serve as confidential observers, preparing them for future panels. This formative educational process for emerging leaders has now been scrapped and replaced with a YouTube-style video for junior scientists to educate themselves on peer review. In this new system, each grant is assigned to four or five anonymous reviewers whose qualifications are unknown.

…there has been a systematic dismantling of high-quality review panels… in the name of efficiency…”

Below is the entire editorial.

Tony

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Science

Australia’s erosion of peer review

In Section Editorial

Mark A. Dawson and Massimo A. Hilliard

Throughout the world, peer review serves as the cornerstone of the scientific enterprise, providing rigorous quality control and building the confidence that underpins progress for both science and society. Without such a robust process, scientists and the general public would rapidly lose the ability to distinguish groundbreaking advances from noise, which undermines policy decisions, research translation, and most importantly, public trust in science. Sadly, that is exactly what has been happening in Australia.

Between 1992 and 2018, government support for fundamental research decreased by 17%, according to the Australian Academy of Science. Despite frustration in the gross underinvestment in biomedical research, Australian scientists were comforted by a trusted peer review system. For generations, Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), the major funding body for medical research, aspired to fund excellence through a careful process involving peer review grant panels. However, in 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic led to the necessary cancellation of the grant review panels that buttressed Australian science. Unfortunately, since then, there has been a systematic dismantling of high-quality review panels by the NHMRC in the name of efficiency, reduced administrative costs, and peer review flexibility. This has raised concerns across Australia’s scientific community that the peer review system is no longer reliable and thus poses an imminent threat to the future direction of Australian science.

These problems are best highlighted by detailing the farcical process through which the NHMRC has eroded the pillars that should support every credible peer review process. This includes the involvement of qualified experts. Previous grant review panels were carefully considered and assembled. Typically, about 80% of the panel (usually 12 members) were independent laboratory heads with prior grant panel experience. Remaining members were either new laboratory heads or, rarely, senior postdoctoral fellows. For training purposes, some senior postdocs were invited to serve as confidential observers, preparing them for future panels. This formative educational process for emerging leaders has now been scrapped and replaced with a YouTube-style video for junior scientists to educate themselves on peer review. In this new system, each grant is assigned to four or five anonymous reviewers whose qualifications are unknown.

…there has been a systematic dismantling of high-quality review panels… in the name of efficiency…

Also gone is a stringent process that ensured fairness and accountability. Bias and conflicts of interest were frequently laid bare in prior grant review panels. Furthermore, to account for variation in raw scores, benchmarking and normalization was performed to guarantee that only the top grants from each panel were prioritized for funding. All of these measures have now been abandoned for a process that favors convenience over diligence. Reviewers do not interact, remain anonymous, and are not accountable. Consequently, variations in opinions and scores are simply mathematically averaged rather than scientifically debated, resulting in a 10% increase in funding cut-off scores and a decline of funding from 17.3% (2018) for grants reviewed at panel to 8.1% (2025).

The previous NHMRC mechanism also provided applicants with detailed reviewer comments and the opportunity to submit a two-page response before adjudication. This process has been replaced by one that provides applicants with little feedback—initially with just raw scores, and more recently with an assessment summary of as few as 100 characters. Because there are often no distinguishing features to the reviews, it is often unclear whether a grant has even been read. When scientists receive these reviews, there is no pride or sense of meritocratic achievement for a successful grant and no solace or guidance for improvement if an application was unsuccessful. On the annual occasion when NHMRC grant outcomes are released, there is only one unifying sensation felt: Australian scientists are left with the stain of embarrassment of belonging to a system that lacks the credibility of rigorous scholarly review.

The prospect of reducing or discarding grant review panels has recently been raised in other countries, including the United States, as a measure to reduce administrative costs. Australia provides a stark example of the consequences of such an action. If left unchecked, Australia will soon have a generation of scientists that has never been adequately trained, supervised, or mentored in upholding the pillars of peer review to provide an equitable adjudication on the scientific merit and value of a grant proposal. The NHMRC needs to reinstate grant review panels to ensure research excellence, restore faith in Australian science, and prevent an exodus of talent to overseas.

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Mark A. Dawson is a professor at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and Sir Peter MacCallum Department of Oncology, University of Melbourne, and a professor at the Collaborative Centre for Genomic Cancer Medicine, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia. [email protected] Massimo A. Hilliard is a professor at the Clem Jones Centre for Aging Dementia Research, Queensland Brain Institute, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Behavioural Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. [email protected]

Professor Hiroschi Ishiguro, on the right, talks to his android counterpart, Geminoid on the left. Photograph. Associated Press.

Dear Commons Community,

Mechanical hands dexterous enough to thread a needle, childlike dancing robots and adult-sized ones to help with deliveries were on display yesterday at the Humanoids Summit that opened in Tokyo. Among the demonstrations was Geminoid (above) who was designed to look just like his developer, Professor Hiroschi Ishiguro.  As reported by The Associated Press.

Among the dozens of companies taking part, including well-known players like Boston Dynamics and Toyota Motor Corp., the big stars now were clearly the Chinese.

Chinese newcomers, like Booster Robotics and LimX Dynamics, took the technology initially developed in Japan and the U.S. and fine-tuned it, often for cheaper mass production. It’s a repeat of what happened in other Japanese industries, from consumer electronics to cellphones and electric vehicles. In humanoids, Japan was initially ahead but then failed to produce major commercial solutions.

Tim Hornyuk, author of “Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots,” who was at the event, categorized it as the so-called “Galapagos syndrome,” referring to how innovative Japanese products evolve in isolation and end up not translating for the international market.

“I really hope that Japan can come up with a Ford Model T-version of humanoid roots. But I think China has already stolen their lunch. It’s a bit too little too late,” he said.

The dancing and wiggling Mini Pi Plus robot from High Torque of China, for instance, still can’t help at an auto plant or do your dishes. But it’s cute. And it doesn’t come with an eye-popping price tag, starting at $5,500.

Chinese robots are dominating

One telling example of Chinese robotics use in Japan was GMO, a Tokyo-based AI and robotics company working on a humanoid with camera eyes that will help with Japan Airlines cargo and other chores at an airport.

The key is to have the robot do the work in the same way as people so they would be interchangeable, an initiative meant to tackle the labor shortage problem that is increasingly serious in Japan.

The inner robotics workings were all courtesy of Unitree, a Chinese outfit, which is also working on a four-legged dog-like “stellar explorer.”

Experts say Japan, with its finesse in manufacturing, proved a good breeding ground for robotics development. The sociological backdrop of a public receptive to robotics also helped.

A recent Pew global survey showed that people in Japan are highly aware of AI but are less anxious about it, at about 28%, than people in the U.S. at 50%.

Japanese automaker Honda Motor Co., a leader in robotics with its walking humanoid Asimo, first shown in 2000, was demonstrating a motorized four-fingered robotic hand that could screw on and off tiny bolts, or thread a needle.

It didn’t seem to bother Keisuke Tsuta, assistant chief engineer, that similar mechanical hands were on display galore near his booth, many of them from Chinese makers.

Japanese robotics show their prowess

The technology Honda had developed is more durable and powerful than rival offerings, and the Japanese have historically shown they can excel at quality mass production, according to Tsuta.

The looming threat of a Chinese robotics domination didn’t seem to phase Osaka University Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, who has worked on humanoids for decades, including one that’s his clone.

“What’s significant is that Japan has a culture that’s receptive to robotics. If we’re going to really start using robots in society, Japan is the ideal place,” he said, stressing that Japanese don’t discriminate against robots.

His robotic counterpart, dressed all in black like the professor, did as good a job, if not better, of answering a key existentialist question on the meaning of robots.

“I think robots will coexist with people. Robots are the mirror of human beings,” the robot replied in a slightly monotonous but human-like voice.

Earlier, the professor had answered a similar question, but a bit differently.

“No one is interested in me. All everyone cares about is my robot,” he said, sitting next to his twin-like humanoid.

“As long as people identify with what I have produced, I am a success,” he added.

Impressive!

Tony

The Bidens at the conclusion of his debate with Trump on 27 June 2024.Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

Dear Commons Community,

Jill Biden said she had been “frightened” as she watched Joe Biden’s faltering performance during his 2024 presidential debate, and thought her husband might have suffered a stroke.  As reported by The Guardian.

“I was frightened, because I had never, ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” the former first lady said in an interview with CBS set to air on Sunday.

“As I watched it, I thought: ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke,’” she said. “And it scared me to death.”

Biden’s poor debate performance against Donald Trump in June 2024 sparked widespread alarm among Democrats, prompting calls for his withdrawal from the race.

Under immense pressure, Biden ended his re-election bid and endorsed his vice-president, Kamala Harris, leaving her just 107 days to campaign before the November 2024 general election against Trump.

Throughout the 90-minute showdown in Atlanta, a raspy Biden, then 81 years old, repeatedly stumbled over his words, took long pauses and mumbled inaudibly and occasionally incoherently.

At one point, his rambling response prompted Trump to quip: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”

Biden memorably tried to land a blow on Trump’s policies on tax cuts and the national debt, but tangled the line and instead declared: “We finally beat Medicare.” His team later clarified that he had meant to say his administration had “beat big pharma”, but the misspeak crystalized longstanding concerns about the mental acuity and physical condition of the US’s oldest president.

Biden also veered away from a question on reproductive rights, shifting instead to references about women killed by immigrants – a pivot into one of his weaker areas and a point frequently emphasized in Republican talking points.

Jill Biden has remained a stalwart supporter of her husband throughout his decades-long political career. In a rally shortly after the June 2024 debate, Jill Biden praised her husband’s performance, saying: “Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question. You knew all the facts.”

The former first lady will soon publish a memoir, titled View from the East Wing, about her experience in the White House. In it, she is expected to share her account of her husband’s fraught re-election campaign and his monumental – and historic –decision to withdraw.

I am sorry Jill but you and his political handlers never should have allowed your husband to run for a second term. He should have left after one term and would have been viewed as having a successful presidency.  Instead, his decision to run and then to withdraw late in the game put the Democratic Party at a distinct disadvantage going into the election.

Tony

James Talarico. Brenda Bazán/Associated Press

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, Ken Paxton won the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat in the Texas.  He defeated long-time incumbent John Cornyn.  Democrats are seeing this as an opportunity for their candidate, James Talarico, to win the election in November.  Below is an analysis, courtesy of The New York Times, by Jack Herrera, who regularly covers Texas politics.

Tony

The New York Times

What Ken Paxton’s Win Means for James Talarico

May 26, 2026

By Jack Herrera

Mr. Herrera writes about the changing American West. He has covered Texas politics since 2020.

When James Talarico was born in Round Rock, Texas, in 1989, Democrats controlled both chambers of the Texas statehouse. A reformed frat boy named George W. Bush was still a few years away from becoming governor.

Thirty-seven years later, Texas is solidly red, with Republicans holding both U.S. Senate seats, the governor’s mansion and the State Legislature. But after winning the Democratic Senate primary in March, Mr. Talarico has a chance to become the first Democratic U.S. senator elected in Texas in his lifetime. Not because the state’s Democrats suddenly have their act together, but because the party has a perfect candidate to run against: the right-wing warrior Ken Paxton.

Mr. Paxton — who just defeated the incumbent, John Cornyn, in a G.O.P. runoff — is known as a scoundrel. In 2023, he was impeached by the state’s Republican-controlled House on corruption charges (but was acquitted by the State Senate). Last year, his wife — herself a state senator — filed for divorce, accusing him of having an extramarital affair.

Combine that with a midterm election year in which President Trump’s coattails look shorter than they once did, and Mr. Talarico has the best chance a Democratic Senate candidate has had in years.

Over the past decade, the Texas Republican Party deftly navigated the rise of MAGA. It retained the backing of wealthy business interests in the state while expanding its support with middle- and working-class voters. In particular, it has drawn Mexican American voters from the Rio Grande Valley into the Republican coalition. But the party is weaker than it seems.

Because Republican primaries, not general elections, frequently decide who is in power in Texas, politicians like Mr. Paxton often need only the votes of about 3 percent of the population to ultimately win office. That’s made it a lot easier for Republican politicians to drift to the right of Texas’ broader electorate.

Consider, for example, the issue of abortion: The average Texan is conservative when it comes to reproductive health care, but not as conservative as Mr. Paxton, the state’s attorney general. According to a 2025 poll, 83 percent of Texans think abortions should be legal in cases of rape or incest; 82 percent think abortions should be legal to preserve the mother’s physical health; and 84 percent think abortions should be legal if doctors determine that a fetus will die before or not long after birth. By contrast, in 2023, Mr. Paxton went to great lengths to try to prevent Kate Cox from getting legal approval to terminate her pregnancy after she found out that her fetus had a fatal genetic condition.

This kind of ideological gap exists not only between Mr. Paxton and many Texas voters, but also between him and other Republicans. The bitter primary battle between Mr. Paxton and Mr. Cornyn deepened a divide between Texas’ chamber-of-commerce-style Republicans and the harder-right MAGA faithful. Mr. Paxton got Mr. Trump’s endorsement at the 11th hour. Wealthy donors spent tens of millions trying to help Mr. Cornyn, to no avail.

All this leaves an opening for a candidate like Mr. Talarico — a member of the Texas House of Representatives who blends progressive ideas with an overt embrace of his Christian faith. The question now is whether Texas Democrats can take advantage of it.

Millions of Texans have spent decades in a no man’s land between a Republican Party that caters to its primary voters and a Democratic Party that won’t meet them where they are. Mr. Talarico has a chance to offer them a politics that’s both Democratic and Texan.

His most direct path to victory runs through college-educated voters, who are more likely to vote than those without college degrees. If Democrats can turn out these voters, particularly in places like Dallas and Austin, destinations for many prosperous transplants, they’ll increase the chances that he’ll prove recent polling right and eke out a narrow victory.

But there are limits to appealing to those voters: What plays in some precincts won’t always fly in the rest of Texas. Adopting the priorities — and the language — of college-educated suburban voters has alienated some voters in other key constituencies. It’s one of the reasons Texas’ growing Latino electorate hasn’t saved Democrats, as some people in the party once hoped.

Mr. Talarico, to his credit, has taken pride in campaigning in parts of Texas that Democrats previously all but conceded. He acknowledges that he hasn’t always made headway with skeptical voters, but he and other Democrats will need that willingness to take the fight into Republican territory to gain ground in 2026 and beyond.

A version of this approach has already worked for Republicans. In 2016, Mr. Trump lost by wide margins in several majority-Latino counties along the U.S.-Mexico border. No doubt, following that race, there were political consultants who told Republicans that it wasn’t worth their time trying to win new voters there. But a few forward-looking Republicans noticed something: Evangelical churches, long a core component of their coalition, were gaining popularity among traditionally Catholic Tejanos.

With evangelical voters as a focus, local Latina conservatives began building their party the way a pastor builds a church: They knocked on doors. They offered people a sense of belonging. They said Democrats were taking Latino voters for granted. And in 2020 the South Texas borderlands from Laredo to Brownsville moved sharply to the right.

One key to winning those districts was economic populism. The party tailored its message to focus on inflation and other bread-and-butter issues, and then reaped the rewards in 2024.

Mr. Talarico can use a comparable model to expand the Texas Democratic coalition.

Whatever happens, Texas Democrats will need a message that fits their state. Recall that what brought Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate campaign so close to beating Senator Ted Cruz — he lost by just 2.6 percentage points — was that it was authentically Texan despite his popularity with liberals around the country.

Mr. O’Rourke visited all 254 Texas counties. He worked around liberal interest groups and the dysfunction of the state Democratic Party. He took in plenty of out-of-state money without adopting an out-of-state voice. He talked about gun safety without demonizing gun owners.

It was when he ran for president and started sounding like a standard Democrat, telling gun owners, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15,” that he began to struggle.

In 2022, Republicans hung that quote around his neck and he got walloped by double digits. Mr. Talarico, take note.

Dear Commons Community,

Last week, I posted by views on the Democratic National Committee autopsy of what went wrong during the 2024 presidential election. In the New York Times on Sunday, Michelle Goldberg had a column entitled, “The Agony Around the Democrats’ Mysterious, Ridiculous Autopsy”.  It adds significantly to the outrageous positions taken by the Democrats in the autopsy document.  Below is her entire column.  

As I said in my posting last week, if the DNC does not get its act together, we will have a Republican elected again in 2028.

Tony

————————————————————————————————–

The New York Times

The Agony Around the Democrats’ Mysterious, Ridiculous Autopsy

May 22, 2026

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

Rarely has a document been at once as mysterious and anticlimactic as the Democratic National Committee’s autopsy of what went wrong in the 2024 election, which, after much drama and angst, was finally published on Thursday.

The committee’s chair, Ken Martin, promised a full audit of party operations when he was running for his seat, and again when he won it. Last July, officials said it would be out in the fall. Fall came and went, and in December, Martin said it wouldn’t be released at all. By hiding it, Martin made the report an object of suspicion and fascination. Some thought he was protecting Kamala Harris ahead of 2028. Many progressives were convinced that the D.N.C. quashed the autopsy because it would show Harris was done in by Gaza. Rob Flaherty, who’d been deputy director of both the Harris and Joe Biden campaigns, speculated that it didn’t even exist: “The members of the ‘autopsy team’ were in over their heads and struggled to put the thing together.”

Flaherty was partly right. On Thursday, in response to reporting by CNN, Martin released an incomplete version of the report, a project he’d assigned, on a part-time, volunteer basis, to the Democratic consultant Paul Rivera. The document, it’s now clear, was kept under wraps not because it was impolitic, but because it’s a disaster.

What’s most striking is its utter lack of substance. The words “Israel” and “Gaza” don’t appear once in its 192 pages. It offers little insight into why the Democratic Party lost large numbers of Black and Latino men, or its failure to speak to disconnected, irregular voters. Much of it is a string of platitudes, like this: “It’s imperative that Democrats meet the moment — by identifying and preparing the leaders and organizers who will deliver positive change for America.” I wondered if it was written by A.I., though A.I. probably would’ve done a better job.

At one point, the autopsy notes that in North Carolina, Josh Stein, the successful Democratic candidate for governor, significantly outperformed Harris. The report acknowledges that Stein had the benefit of a ridiculous opponent, the former lieutenant governor and porn message-board habitué Mark Robinson (“a self-described Nazi most voters would never support”). Still, based on Stein’s victory, the audit asserts, with startling complacency, “The problem wasn’t Democratic policy or party brand” but “Harris as a candidate.”

Elsewhere, the autopsy claims that Harris’s campaign didn’t sufficiently incorporate polling data into its messaging, as if her operation suffered from a surfeit of authenticity and spontaneity. It’s the opposite of the conclusion reached by Flaherty, who published his own much more trenchant version of an autopsy this month in The Bulwark. “We tend to poll-test our way into running a lot of mealy-mouthed ads about prescription drugs or whatever,” he wrote of Democrats, while Republicans are better at driving viral narratives.

Rivera’s report makes a few fair points. It’s correct, for example, that the right has far outdone progressives in building permanent infrastructure like Turning Point, the organization for young conservatives, while Democrats and their allies “make massive investments in media towards the end of an election cycle and then go dark.” But even where the autopsy is right, it’s often so airy as to be almost meaningless. Democrats, it tells us, need to do more year-round organizing, invest more in digital advertising and speak about “kitchen table” concerns rather than “identity politics.” “The losses in the states are the key trend Democrats need to reverse,” it says. Rivera might have added that Democrats need to win more votes.

In a statement, Martin acknowledged that the autopsy was a failure. When he received it, he wrote, he knew “it wasn’t ready for prime time — not even close — and because no source material was provided, it would have meant starting over.” What’s most bizarre and damning, however, is not the shoddiness of the work itself, but the way Martin let his initial screw-up fester until it looked like a cover-up.

Martin might have defused the situation by telling the truth — that the draft he received was a mess — and commissioning a new one. Instead, he let it become a crisis. At a time when the D.N.C., under his leadership, appears to be nearly insolvent, multiple Democratic donors are reportedly withholding contributions because of Martin’s handling of the report. “I talk to donors constantly who refuse to give to the D.N.C.,” said Amanda Litman, head of Run for Something, which recruits young progressives to seek office. “They cannot trust Ken Martin. They cannot trust the institution is doing its job well.” A project that was supposed to restore trust to the party instead undermined it.

Now that the autopsy is out there, it does tell us one important thing about the Democratic Party’s future: Martin should be replaced. I’ve spoken to Democrats, progressives and moderates alike, who say he’s insular and thin-skinned, a man who won his seat by promising perks to voting members rather than articulating a compelling vision. “Ken Martin is in way over his head and doesn’t know how to do politics at the national level,” said Phil Gardner, a founder of the centrist Blue Dog Action. The growing displeasure with Martin’s leadership isn’t ideological. It’s operational.

Democrats know they have a problem. As The Associated Press reported this month, operatives have already approached Litman to gauge her interest in replacing Martin. She said no — she likes the job she has — but still believes he needs to go. “We can’t tolerate mediocrity,” she told me. Every step of this autopsy process shows Democrats doing exactly that.

Dear Commons Community,

Pope Leo XIV yesterday presented his vision for how to preserve human dignity in the era of artificial intelligence.

​He offered his ideas by issuing a document known as an encyclical, a nearly 400-year-old papal tradition of teaching the Roman Catholic faithful. The document issued on Monday, is Leo’s first encyclical since he became pope last year.

Written by the pope and generally addressed to the whole church, encyclicals impart authoritative teachings about moral or social challenges. They lack the legal status of a papal bull, which is a formal declaration of an article of faith or moral law. But Catholics are still encouraged to use encyclicals to guide their lifestyles and choices.

Popes do not usually attend the presentation of their encyclicals, but Leo presented his in person at the Vatican alongside Christopher Olah, a founder of Anthropic, a major A.I. developer, and several Catholic prelates and theologians.

His encyclical, entitled, Magnificat Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (has 245 sections). The title says it all. His message voices concerns that the human race has to be protected from untethered AI.  Here are two paragraphs:

“It is not my intention here to offer a comprehensive treatment of artificial intelligence, nor to give an overview of the extensive relevant literature, since authoritative contributions already exist, including within the ecclesial context. I limit myself to recalling a few essential elements for a moral and social discernment that safeguards the primacy of the human person, in order to ensure that it will always be human intelligence, with its conscience and freedom, that guides technical innovations and responsibly determines their use and limits.

It is appropriate to preface this discussion with two considerations. First, any statement regarding AI risks becoming quickly outdated, given the remarkable pace at which these systems are developing. Second, all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.” As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown. There thus emerges an urgent need for a twofold commitment: on the one hand, a deepening of scientific research; on the other, the exercise of moral and spiritual discernment.”

The entire encyclical is worth a read!

Tony

Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as people try to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC.

Brent Stirton/Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

Two police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol in 2021 during the Jan. 6 attack are suing to stop the creation of Trump’s $1.7 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” calling it the “most brazen act of presidential corruption this century.”   As reported by ABC News.

Former Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn and Metropolitan Police Department Officer Daniel Hodges alleged that the compensation fund, which was announced by the Justice Department on Monday, would not only encourage those who committed violence in the name of President Trump but that it would directly finance their operations. 

“To prevent the public financing of paramilitary organizations in the United States, and to protect Plaintiffs from further violence, the fund must be dissolved,” the lawsuit said. 

The fund, which was part of a settlement agreement in Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, was established by the Trump administration to compensate those who allege they were wrongly targeted under the Biden administration.

The lawsuit came as a former Trump administration official said he was planning to seek a $2.7 million reimbursement from the fund.

Michael Caputo — who served as a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services during Trump’s first term — claimed he was targeted by the FBI probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and was again investigated under the Biden administration for a documentary he made with One America News about former President Joe Biden’s purported connections in Ukraine. 

“As survivors of the illegal Russiagate investigations, our family was encouraged by news of the Anti-Weaponization Fund. I write with profound gratitude to you and President Donald J. Trump for creating a process to right these wrongs,” Caputo wrote in a letter he posted on X. 

Officers Dunn and Hodges allege that the creation of the fund is arbitrary and capricious — and therefore a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act — and runs afoul of a prohibition in the Fourteenth Amendment barring the government from funding insurrections. 

“No statute authorizes its creation, the settlement on which it is premised is a corrupt sham, and its design violates the Constitution and federal law,” their lawsuit said. 

Filed in D.C. federal court, the lawsuit asked a judge to block the creation and funding of the compensation fund. The settlement agreement that initiated the fund gave the acting attorney general 30 days to create the entity and appoint five commissioners to run it. 

Dunn and Hodges are some of the most high-profile members of law enforcement who defended the Capitol that day. Hodges was pinned against a door frame, attacked, and crushed by rioters. Dunn was inside the Capitol and directly engaged the rioters. He ran for Congress unsuccessfully in 2024 and is currently running for Maryland’s 5th Congressional District.

Trump’s disgraceful acts just keep coming!

Tony