(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Dear Commons Community,

President Joe Biden declared climate change has become “everybody’s crisis” yesterday as he toured neighborhoods flooded by the remnants of Hurricane Ida, warning it’s time for America to get serious about the “code red” danger or face ever worse loss of life and property.

Biden spoke after walking streets in New Jersey and then Queens in New York City, meeting people whose homes were destroyed or severely damaged by flooding when Ida barreled through. The storm dumped record amounts of rain onto already saturated ground and was blamed for more than a dozen deaths in the city.

The president said he thinks the damage everyone is seeing, from wildfires in the West to hurricane havoc in the South and Northeast, is turning climate-change skeptics into believers, but years of unheeded warnings from scientists, economists and others mean time for action is short.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“The threat is here. It is not getting any better,” Biden said in New York. “The question is can it get worse. We can stop it from getting worse.”

Biden sounded a similar theme before he toured Manville, New Jersey, also ravaged by severe flooding caused by Ida.

“Every part of the country, every part of the country is getting hit by extreme weather,” Biden said during a briefing with officials in Somerset County, including Gov. Phil Murphy.

He said the threat from wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding and other extreme weather must be dealt with in ways that will lessen devastating effects of climate change.

“We can’t turn it back very much, but we can prevent it from getting worse,” he said. “We don’t have any more time.”

The natural disasters have given Biden an opening to push Congress to approve his plan to spend $1 trillion to fortify infrastructure nationwide, including electrical grids, water and sewer systems, to better defend against extreme weather. The legislation has cleared the Senate and awaits a House vote.

Biden also talked up a side benefit of the plan, the “good-paying jobs” he said it will create.

The White House has asked Congress for an additional $24 billion in disaster aid to cover the costs of Ida and other destructive weather events.

In New Jersey, Biden walked along a street in the Lost Valley neighborhood of Manville, where flooding is common and the cleanup continues after the Raritan River overflowed its banks. Many front lawns were covered with waterlogged couches, broken pianos, crumbled plaster and other debris.

One home displayed a hand-painted sign that said, “Manville will be back better.”

Biden, wearing a mask, spoke to adults and children, including Meagan Dommar, a new mother whose home was destroyed by fire as the flood occurred. She told him that she and her husband, Caesar, had left with the baby before the flooding, then returned to find destruction.

“Thank God you’re safe,” Biden replied. She said afterward she hoped the visit would speed help “along a little bit” and said she was grateful for the visit.

At the briefing, Biden focused on the personal calamities, saying: “The losses that we witnessed today are profound. My thoughts are with all those families affected by the storm and all those families who lost someone they love.”

Before he arrived, Cristel Alvarez said she expected losses at her home to climb as high as $45,000. She has lived in Manville for a decade and the flood was her family’s second.

“Let him see everything that we’re going through and hopefully we can get the help that we need because there’s a lot of loss,” she said.

In all, at least 50 people were killed in six Eastern states as record rainfall last week overwhelmed rivers and sewer systems. Some people were trapped in fast-filling basement apartments and cars, or were swept away as they tried to escape. The storm also spawned several tornadoes.

More than half of the deaths, 27, were recorded in New Jersey. In New York City, 13 people were killed, including 11 in Queens.

Biden’s visit followed his Friday trip to Louisiana, where Hurricane Ida first made landfall on Aug. 29, killing at least 15 people in the state.

Manville, situated along New Jersey’s Raritan River, is almost always hard-hit by major storms. It was the scene of catastrophic flooding in 1998 as the remnants of Tropical Storm Floyd swept over New Jersey. It also sustained serious flooding during the aftermath of Hurricane Irene in 2011 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

Biden has approved major disaster declarations, making federal aid available for people in six New Jersey counties and five New York counties affected by the devastating floods. He is open to applying the declaration to other storm-ravaged New Jersey counties, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said.

These communities need Biden’s and the federal government’s help and support!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Over the weekend, I received news that Karen Swan, the James J. Stukel Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership, at the University of Illinois – Springfield, passed away suddenly.  Karen was a major figure in the scholarship and teaching of education technology and made innumerable contributions to this field of research. 

Karen and I first met in 1991 when both of us were asked to present on our work on multimedia models at Syracuse University.  We had received grants from IBM to develop education software using a M-Motion Board enabled PC that allowed micro-channel control of videodisc equipment.  After our presentations, we were asked to demonstrate our work and sat next to each other for a day during which we shared common interests in technology.  It was the beginning of a relationship that would last for thirty years. 

In the mid-1990s, we both delved into the brand-new arena of online learning.  Having received grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop online learning applications, Karen at SUNY Albany and me at CUNY, we again found ourselves presenting at conferences around the country.  We would share our work and would have dinner on a regular basis also sharing stories of our children and grandchildren. We would go on to be founding members of the Board of Directors of the Sloan Consortium of Colleges and Universities (now the Online Learning Consortium).  As part of our work with Sloan-C/OLC, we gave presentations, planned conferences and workshops, and published together with colleagues Chuck Dziuban, Mary Niemiec, Patsy Moskal, Eric Fredericksen, Peter Shea, Tanya Joosten, Liz Ciabocchi,  Frank Mayadas, and Joel Hartman. Karen, our colleagues and I would continue to have dinner every time we met at various Sloan-C events.

When I heard of Karen’s passing, I felt a jolt and an emptiness, and realized I had lost a dear friend and colleague.

May she rest in peace.

Tony

Below is a bio of her work that was published when she was inducted into the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame.

———————————————————————————————————

INTERNATIONAL ADULT AND CONTINUING EDUCATION HALL OF FAME

Dr. Karen Swan

Hall of Fame Class of 2015

Dr. Karen Swan is a premier scholar focused on media and learning and more particularly on the world of online learning. She has taught online for more than 15 years and her experiences have guided her scholarly work on learning effectiveness, interactivity, social presence, learning analytics, and learner support in online environments. Her scholarly publications include 150 published articles and book chapters, three books, and a variety of multimedia programs. and she has made more than 100 presentations since 2010. ; Swan has served on more than 35 dissertation committees, including students from around the world. She argues that adult learning theory and methods apply to all adult students, including teaching professionals. Her national and international teaching, advising, research, publications, workshops, presentations, consultancies, and service on boards of directors are grounded in adult learning theory and practice and have significantly influenced and changed the broad field of education.

Swan received the Sloan-C award for Outstanding Achievement in Online Learning by an Individual and is a member of the Sloan-C Inaugural Class of Fellows. She was named the 2010 Distinguished Alumni from Teachers College, Columbia University and received the 2014 Burks Oakley II Distinguished Online Teaching Award. She has served on the editorial review boards for the Educational Psychologist, International Journal of Instruction, Internet and Higher Education, Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, and Journal of Distance Education.

Swan has made large-scale contributions as an individual scholar to the understanding of what constitutes quality online learning and how adult learners and professionals in higher education, libraries, K-12, and other learning environments can be successful. She helped develop and disseminate the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, a model with social, teaching, and cognitive presence components, and her research shows how the CoI model may be used to inform course design to improve learning outcomes. Longer term, she will be known for her complex and holistic scholarship and for publications and presentations focused on the design of quality online learning environments, including understanding blended learning.

Swan has served as conference, program, track, manuscript review, and workshop chair for organizations such as Sloan-C (now the Online Learning Consortium, OLC), American Educational Research Association, Ed Media, International Society for Technology in Education, Association for Educational Communications and Technology, European Distance and E-Learning Network, and Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.

Swan is an active member of the University of Illinois—Springfield community where she serves on a number of faculty committees and advisory councils. Prior to this, she was a research professor in the Research Center for Educational Technology at Kent State University where she led pioneering work on ubiquitous computing in K-12 classrooms.

Swan has demonstrated how powerful and useful engaged scholarship can be across all learning populations, especially professional adults in the field of education.

Dear Commons Community,

We are celebrating a much happier Labor Day than last year.  Thanks to policies promoted by President Biden and others, both Democrats and Republicans, millions of Americans have gone back to work or have found new jobs and positions.  Working Americans deserve a day of praise now more than ever.  They are the ones whose contributions are helping us get through the coronavirus pandemic and who are putting the economy back on the road to recovery.

We salute and thank them all!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A 30-year teaching veteran was one of 15 Miami-Dade County public school staff members who died of COVID-19 in just 10 days as Florida continues to reel amid the continuing, overwhelming toll of an unfettered pandemic.

“It’s a tremendous loss,” said a school official, referring to the death of long-time teacher Abe Coleman, 55, earlier this week.

“The number of lives that he impacted are countless. So many young men had the benefit of him intervening in their lives and pointing them in the right direction,” Marcus Bright, who works with a local education program 5000 Role Models of Excellence, told NBC-6 TV.

Coleman taught at Holmes Elementary School in Miami’s Liberty City area, which is a primarily Black neighborhood with 42% of the population living below the poverty line.

Local education officials haven’t released the identities of the other teachers or staff members.

“The loss of any of our employees is one that is always profoundly felt as every member of this organization is considered a part of Miami-Dade County Public Schools family,” the district said in a statement. “We extend our hearts and prayers to the loved ones of those whose lives have recently been lost.”

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has dismissed the importance of COVID-19 vaccinations and signed an executive order banning mask mandates at schools, issued no comment on the astounding death rate in the county schools system.

The state Health Department was sued earlier this week by the Florida Center for Government Accountability and Democratic state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith (see tweet above) for not providing detailed, daily statistics about Florida’s surging COVID-19 cases in violation of the state’s open-records laws.

The suit argues that the DeSantis administration is deliberately manipulating COVID-19 data to make it appear the problem was not as dire as it actually is.

“The DeSantis administration has consistently refused to release COVID-related public records, which not only hurts our efforts to contain this deadly virus, it is also unlawful,” Smith said in a statement after the suit was filed.

“That’s why we’re suing them — to obtain the public records our constituents are entitled to under the Florida Constitution and to force the state to resume daily COVID dashboard reporting and avoid future litigation on this matter.”

Florida is in the grip of its deadliest wave of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. As of mid-August, the state was averaging 244 deaths a day, eclipsing the previous peak of 227 a year ago. The state reported 2,345 deaths and over 129,000 cases this week. Hospitals have had to rent refrigerated units to store bodies. 

DeSantis has become a dangerous purveyor of lies and myths in the way he has handled the pandemic in his state and has followed in the footsteps of  his mentor, Donald Trump!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Amia Srinivasan, Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, the University of Oxford, and author of a forthcoming book on  The Right to Sex, has a guest essay examining the issue of sex between professors and students.   Entitled, “What’s Wrong with Sex Between Professors and Students? It’s Not What You Think,” the essay provides a good review of the points of view on the subject.  Her conclusion is to walk away and head home.

Here are several excerpts.

The cultural fascination with professor-student affairs seems to have grown in step with policies restricting them. Policies prohibiting professor-student sex — “consensual relationship policies” as they are usually known — are now common in the United States. A 2014 study found that 84 percent of the American universities surveyed had some prohibitions on professor-student relationships. In 2010, Yale strengthened its restrictions: Previously, it had prohibited relationships between professors and students whom they supervised (or were likely to supervise), but now it imposes a blanket ban on all relationships between faculty and undergraduates. Many other universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Columbia and Duke, followed the move to stricter, all-out bans. U.S. universities only began regulating student-teacher sex in the 1980s. This shift was an outgrowth of the feminist campaign against sexual harassment that began in the 1970s, which sought to establish that unwanted sexual advances in the workplace were a form of discrimination “on the basis of sex,” and were therefore a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. “Unwanted” sexual advances would seem not to include consensual relationships. …

… professors were sexually harassing the students with whom they were (apparently consensually) involved. Students might be agreeing to such relationships out of fear — of a bad grade, lackluster recommendation, or worse. As a result, many universities extended their sexual harassment policies to restrict apparently consensual professor-student relationships.

Despite the bans’ origins in feminist activism, some feminists at the time denounced these prohibitions as a betrayal of their principles. To deny that women students could consent to sex with their professors, they argued, was infantilizing and moralizing. Were women university students not adults? Were they not entitled to have sex with whom they pleased? Did such policies not play into the hands of the religious right, which was all too keen to control women’s sex lives?

But in the last two decades these arguments have been less prominent, and comprehensive bans on teacher-student relationships have had little pushback from feminists. This is in keeping with a deepening feminist anxiety as to whether true consent is possible when sex is marked by an imbalance of power. The feminists of the #MeToo movement have relied on this notion not only to condemn the predatory actions of Harvey Weinstein, but also to explain what’s wrong with stickier cases: Aziz Ansari and the “date gone bad,” middle-aged men who date 18-year-olds, a U.S. president who has sex with an intern.

In many ways the contemporary focus on consent is a victory. Historically, sexual assault was defined not by the absence of consent but by the presence of force, which meant that the countless women who froze with fear or chose to submit rather than face the alternative were not, legally speaking, raped. But in recent years our interest in consent has become single-minded. The habit of viewing all kinds of exploitative, creepy or troubling sex solely through the lens of consent has left us unable to speak, in many situations, about what is really going wrong.

The problem, I think, with many teacher-student relationships is not that they don’t involve consent — or even real romantic love. …

…As a graduate student, I wanted to explain to the men in my discipline, as I have tried to explain here, that the absence of consent isn’t the only indicator of problematic sex; that a practice that is consensual can also be systemically damaging; that the pedagogical relationship comes with certain responsibilities beyond the ones we owe one another as persons. I wanted to explain to them that it was precisely because pedagogy can be an erotically charged experience that it is harmful to sexualize it. I wanted to explain that refraining from having sex with their students wasn’t the same as treating students as children.

Now that I am a professor, I confess that some of these arguments don’t grip me in the way they once did. Not because I think they are wrong — I still think they are right — but because I no longer feel them to be, in a sense, necessary. As a teacher, I see that my undergraduate students, and in some cases my graduate students, for all their maturity, intelligence and self-directedness, are, in an important sense, still children. I don’t mean this as a claim about their legal or cognitive or moral status. They are perfectly capable of consent, and have the right to determine the course of their lives just as I have the right to determine the course of mine. I simply mean that my students are so very young.

I didn’t know, when I was in their place, how young I was, and how young I must have seemed even to those professors who were kind enough to treat me like the fully fledged intellectual I thought I was. There are plenty of people my students’ age, most of them who are not in university and will never be, who are adults in ways that my students simply aren’t. My students’ youthfulness has much to do with the sort of institutions at which I have taught, filled with the sort of young people who have been allowed, by virtue of their class and race, to remain young, even as many of their peers have been required to grow up too quickly. The youthfulness of my students, undergrad and grad, has a lot to do, too, with the peculiar liminal space in which they, as students, exist. Their lives are intense, chaotic, thrilling: open and largely as yet unformed.

In my very first week as a new professor, I attended a dinner with faculty members and graduate students in my department. I was closer in age to the grad students than I was to most of the faculty members, and I remember feeling relaxed and happy in their company. After dinner, the wine not yet finished, everyone buzzing, a senior professor told me he was calling it a night. Eyeing two graduate students horsing around across the table, he laughed: “When they start sitting on each other, I think it’s time to head home.” He was right, and I followed him out, leaving my students to get on with it.

Tony

Jacob Chansley –  the QAnon Shaman

Dear Commons Community,

Jacob Chansley, a former actor and Navy sailor widely known as the QAnon Shaman, who stormed the Capitol in January in stars-and-stripes face paint and a horned fur hat, pleaded guilty yesterday to a single felony count of obstructing an official proceeding before Congress.

 Under the deal deal, federal prosecutors reportedly will recommend a sentence of 41 to 51 months in prison.

Mr. Chansley, 34, became one of the best-known figures in the Capitol breach after images of him standing shirtless on the Senate floor brandishing a spear made from a flagpole shot around the globe, vividly representing the role played in the riot by adherents of QAnon, the cultlike conspiracy theory embraced by some backers of former President Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Chansley, who says he has now lost faith in Mr. Trump, remained in the spotlight even after his arrest.

In February, his lawyer, Albert Watkins, persuaded a federal judge to order the jail where Mr. Chansley was being detained to provide him with a strict diet of organic meals. The next month, Mr. Chansley gave a widely watched interview to “60 Minutes,” saying that his actions on Jan. 6 were not an attack on the nation, but rather a way to “bring God back into the Senate.”

His plea hearing in Federal District Court in Washington on Friday departed from the circuslike atmosphere that has surrounded the case from the start. He did not speak other than to answer yes-or-no procedural questions. Under the terms of his deal, Mr. Chansley agreed to accept a recommended 41 to 51 months in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 17.

Another defendant who pleaded guilty to the same charge this year was given eight months at a sentencing hearing in July.

Among the first rioters to break into the Capitol, Mr. Chansley was arrested three days later and charged with civil disorder, obstruction, disorderly conduct in a restricted building and demonstrating in a Capitol building. Prosecutors say that while he was in the Senate chamber, he left a note on the desk of Vice President Mike Pence saying, “It’s only a matter of time, justice is coming.”

“Does our president bear responsibility?” Mr. Watkins told The New York Times at the time. “Hell, yes, he does.”

More recently, however, Mr. Watkins has said that Mr. Chansley — like other rioters — felt betrayed by Mr. Trump. He also said that Mr. Chansley has repudiated the QAnon cult and would like to be known merely as a shaman, not the QAnon shaman.

“The path charted by Mr. Chansley since Jan. 6 has been a process, one which has involved pain, depression, solitary confinement, introspection, recognition of mental health vulnerabilities and a coming to grips with the need for more self-work,” Mr. Watkins said in a statement on Thursday.

At a news conference after the hearing, Mr. Watkins told reporters that Mr. Chansley had been under pressure from his family not to plead guilty. His family, Mr. Watkins said, believed that Mr. Trump was going to be reinstated as president and could issue Mr. Chansley a pardon — a baseless theory of the sort once promoted by QAnon that continues to circulate among some Trump supporters.

“It took a lot of courage for a young man who was raised by his mother to say, ‘No,’” Mr. Watkins said.

With Mr. Chansley’s plea, 51 of the roughly 600 people who have been charged in connection with the riot have entered guilty pleas, most for misdemeanor offenses like disorderly conduct. At least another 11 defendants are scheduled to plead guilty by the end of October.

51 down and 549 to go!

Tony

The September 11th Memorial in New York

Dear Commons Community,

Making good on a campaign promise, President Biden directed Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, the Justice Department and other federal agencies on Friday to oversee the review and declassification of documents related to the F.B.I.’s investigation into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. As reported by The New York Times.

“When I ran for president, I made a commitment to ensuring transparency regarding the declassification of documents on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America,” Mr. Biden said in a statement released yesterday. “We must never forget the enduring pain of the families and loved ones of the 2,977 innocent people who were killed during the worst terrorist attack on America in our history.”

For years, families of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks have pushed the federal government to reveal more information about any Saudi involvement in financing the attacks.

In 2019, William P. Barr, then the attorney general under President Donald J. Trump, declared in a statement to a federal court that documents related to the attacks should stay classified to protect national security. The move stunned the families.

As a candidate, Mr. Biden pledged last year to “err on the side of disclosure in cases where, as here, the events in question occurred two decades or longer ago.”

It is not clear what documents the Justice Department will release when its review is complete. But the announcement was immediately hailed by some family members who have escalated pressure on Mr. Biden to act.

Last month, a group of close to 1,800 people affected by the attack, including survivors, emergency medical workers and family members of victims, told the president to skip the memorial event this year at ground zero if he did not start the process of reviewing the documents for possible declassification and release.

“We are thrilled to see the president forcing the release of more evidence about Saudi connections to the 9/11 attacks,” Terry Strada, whose husband, Tom Strada, was killed in the World Trade Center, said in a statement on Friday. “We have been fighting the F.B.I. and intelligence community for too long, but this looks like a true turning point.”

Some family members think that the documents could detail connections between the Saudi government and the hijackers who carried out the attacks.

The 9/11 Commission, which released its final report in 2004, found “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded” Al Qaeda, which carried out the attacks. But that phrasing left some to speculate that there might be evidence of involvement by other, lower-ranking officials.

Good move by President Biden!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The death toll from flooding after the remnants of Hurricane Ida pummeled cities in the East rose to 46 yesterday after New Jersey announced at least 23 people had died there.

Governor Phil Murphy said the majority of the deaths were people caught in their vehicles by flooding and were “overtaken by the water.” Officials said many people were still unaccounted for.  As reported by NBC News.

“We’re going to withhold a complete rundown of the blessed losses of life. They are spread across a handful of counties, largely concentrated — not entirely — but largely concentrated in central Jersey and a few in the north,” Murphy said in an evening update.

Dozens have died (see video above) in six Eastern states — Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia — after the storm brought unprecedented rainfall to some areas.

The death toll included a state trooper in Connecticut who was swept away as he responded to a missing person’s call.

Water rescues were continuing in many areas, and in New York City a new task force was going to homes to make sure there weren’t more victims in basements.

In the Philadelphia area, some streets were swamped, delaying the city’s rail and bus services, closing city buildings and prompting leaders to urge people to work from home.

Rescuers navigated boats through flooded streets in and around Philadelphia, northern Delaware and parts of New York state, ferrying people from flooded homes.

In Pennsylvania alone, thousands of rescues are believed to have happened so far, state emergency management Director Randy Padfield said.

“There’s a lot of damage, and I made clear to the governors that my team at … FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) is on the ground and ready to provide all the assistance that is needed,” President Joe Biden said.

In New York City, first responders rescued commuters from halted subway trains Wednesday night, while other travelers were stranded overnight in subway stations, some sleeping on benches with service suspended and no way to get to their destinations.

NYPD Chief of Department Rodney Harrison said that 835 people were rescued from the subway system.

Beverly Pryce, a nurse from Queens, was among those who stayed overnight in a Manhattan subway station, having left her home Wednesday night to go to work, only for the flooding to bring everything to a standstill.

“(I’ve seen) nothing like this,” she told CNN on Thursday morning. “I didn’t expect it to be this severe; I would not have left my house.”

“I can’t think any more about how I feel at this point because of the chaos outside, my neighbors, there’s loss of life,” she told CNN. “I’ve lost everything in here and mostly the lives out there… we need some support … this is too much for us. There is no end in sight.”

Harrison said there were 18 water rescues at the US Open tennis site in Flushing.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul told CNN that the state is used to disasters but this would be a massive cleanup.

“I would urge people to stay home, check on your neighbors, make sure they’re OK,” she said.

Murphy called the flooding that impacted New Jersey “historic by any measure.”

“It’s never flooded like this, it’s never rained like this,” Murphy said, adding that state officials will do an investigation into the storm and their response.

Murphy said storms like Ida reflect climate change realities and the need to address it. “These storms are coming more frequently and with more intensity, so there’s no denying it,” Murphy said.

Emergencies were declared for New York state, New York City and New Jersey. In New York City alone, firefighters rescued hundreds of people from vehicles on flooded roads and hundreds more from the subway system, the city fire department said Thursday.

Of the 46 killed, 16 died in New York state. Thirteen of those were in New York City, and three people died in Westchester County after getting out of their vehicles in flash flooding, officials said.

Of those who died in New York City, at least eight died in flooded basements of homes in Queens, city police Commissioner Dermot Shea said.

The Connecticut state trooper who died was a sergeant who had been with the agency for 26 years. He was carried away by the rising waters when he arrived at 4 a.m. to investigate a report of someone missing in Woodbury due to the flooding.

Six of the 23 New Jersey deaths were announced by local officials.

In Elizabeth, four residents drowned in an apartment complex along the Elizabeth River, Mayor Chris Bollwage said.

In Passaic, a man in his 70s was found dead after floodwaters overtook the vehicle he was in, Mayor Hector Lora told CNN’s Don Lemon.

A man in his 50s was swept away by floodwaters in Maplewood and later found dead in Millburn, a few miles to the west, according to Maplewood police.

In Pennsylvania, three storm-related deaths were reported in Montgomery County, said Dr. Val Arkoosh, chair of the county board of commissioners.

And Bridgeport manager Keith S. Truman told CNN that one person has died in the town due to floodwaters.

In Maryland’s Montgomery County, a 19-year-old was found dead Wednesday in a flooded apartment complex, and his death is preliminarily attributed to the storm, police said.

In Virginia, searchers found one body in the Guesses Fork area of Hurley, according to the Buchanan County Sheriff’s Office.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

White House press secretary Jen Psaki had a powerful response (see video above) to a male reporter who inquired why President Joe Biden supports the right to an abortion, telling him “you have never faced those choices, nor have you ever been pregnant.”

Yesterday, Psaki was asked about the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this week that allowed a restrictive abortion law to go into effect in Texas. The law effectively bans abortion at six weeks, which is earlier than when many people realize they’re pregnant, and puts citizens at the forefront of enforcement by offering a financial incentive to sue those who have helped someone seeking an abortion. The court denied a request by abortion providers in the state to prevent the law from going into effect.

Upon a male reporter inquiring why Biden supports abortion “when his own Catholic faith teaches abortion as morally wrong?”, Psaki responded forcefully: “He believes that it’s a woman’s right. It’s a woman’s body, and it’s her choice.”

The reporter pressed Psaki further and asked, “Who does he believe, then, should look out for the unborn child?”

In response, Psaki emphasized that Biden “believes that it is up to a woman to make those decisions, and up to a woman to make those decisions with her doctor.”

“I know you have never faced those choices, nor have you ever been pregnant, but for women out there who have faced those choices, this is an incredibly difficult thing. The president believes that right should be respected,” she fired back. 

Earlier yesterday, Biden issued a statement on the court’s ruling and lambasted the Texas law as “an unprecedented assault on a woman’s constitutional rights,” insisting that it “unleashes constitutional chaos.”

The statement criticized how the law deputizes citizens, noting that people will “now be empowered to inject themselves in the most private and personal health decisions faced by women” and added that the court is allowing “millions of women in Texas in need of critical reproductive care to suffer while courts sift through procedural complexities.”

Biden said he would direct the Gender Policy Council and the Office of the White House Counsel to launch “a whole-of-government effort” to respond to the court’s decision and ensure that those seeking abortions in Texas can safely access them.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, the remnants of Hurricane Ida ripped through the New York City metropolitan area and other parts of the Northeast after causing havoc in Louisiana, Mississippi, and other parts of the South.  Tornadoes were reported in New Jersey.  New York City declared its first flood emergency in its entire history.  Hundreds of cars were abandoned on parkways.  And the Metropolitan Subway System, the commuter lifeline of the City, shut down a number of services due to flooding.  The videos above tell the story better than words can.

Hopefully, our Big Apple will recover soon!

Tony