Maryanne Trump Barry

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump’s sister was recorded saying that her brother “has no principles” and “you can’t trust him,” The Washington Post reported yesterday (see the entire Washington Post story here with audio clips).

Maryanne Trump Barry, who was serving as a federal judge at the time, made the slashing comments to her niece Mary Trump, who was secretly recording her, the Post reported. At one point, Barry was discussing Trump’s moves in 2018 to separate immigrant children from their parents.

“All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry said. “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean, my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people — not do this.”

She added: “His goddamned tweet[s] and lying, oh my God. I’m talking too freely, but you know, the change of stories, the lack of preparation, the lying — holy shit.” 

Trump had earlier suggested on Fox News that year that he might “put her at the border” and assign his sister to make immigration decisions. She guessed he hadn’t read her decisions or he would know they wouldn’t likely agree on issues.

“What has he read?” Mary Trump asked her aunt. Barry responded: “He doesn’t read.”

At one point, an exasperated Barry said: “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”

Barry also noted: “Donald is out for Donald, period.” When her niece asked Barry what her brother had accomplished on his own, she responded: “Well, he has five bankruptcies,” adding: “You can’t trust him.”

The Post obtained the audio excerpts of the taped conversations after Mary Trump told the newspaper that she learned some of the information in her book — “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man” — from 15 hours of face-to-face talks with her aunt in 2018 and 2019. It was her aunt who told her that the president had paid someone to take the SATs for him, Mary Trump told the Post.

Barry has never spoken publicly about her issues with her brother.

Mary Trump told The Post recently that her uncle is unfit to be president and she aims to do “everything in my power” to elect Joe Biden, the newspaper reported.

Good luck, Ms. Trump!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

For us New York baseball fans that were getting ready to watch the Mets/Yankees three game subway series this weekend, it ain’t going to happen (see video above).  Major League Baseball postponed this weekend’s series to allow time for more testing and contact tracing after two members of the New York Mets tested positive for the coronavirus.

The Mets had their game Thursday night at Miami as well as Friday’s opener against the Yankees postponed on Thursday after the results were reported. MLB postponed the rest of the weekend series between the New York teams yesterday “out of an abundance of caution and to allow for additional testing and contact tracing.”

The Mets flew home Thursday night and are in New York, and the team said in a statement the traveling party was tested at Citi Field on Friday morning before being sent home to quarantine. The team does not plan to work out this weekend.

The team said those who tested positive or were identified as close contacts remained in Miami. It did not specify how many close contacts had been identified.

The league has now postponed 36 games this season because of positive tests with the Miami Marlins, Philadelphia Phillies, St. Louis Cardinals, Cincinnati Reds and the Mets. The Yankees have twice had their schedule interrupted despite reporting no positive tests since opening day.

The positive tests are the first confirmed within the Mets organization since the season began. Right-hander Brad Brach missed preseason camp and confirmed he tested positive for the coronavirus.

MLB said yesterday that seven of 12,485 samples collected over the past week from players and coaches returned positive COVID-19 results, a positive rate of 0.05%.

Three of the positives were players and four were staff members. Of all the samples collected by MLB this season, 0.1% have returned positive, and 19 teams have had a player or staff member test positive.

I guess I will have to watch the Turner Classic Movie Channel this evening in between my reading.  I am behind on three books and classes begin on Thursday.

Tony

“There hasn't been a presidency like this since Watergate, and even in Watergate, you didn't have a scenario like you've had here,” @JeffreyToobin says about 10 associates of Trump being charged with crimes.

“It is an extraordinary record of sleaze.” https://t.co/kikZ0Y1nZb pic.twitter.com/TsMUnGmxZY

— Erin Burnett OutFront (@OutFrontCNN) August 20, 2020

Dear Commons Community,

Last night at the Democratic National Convention (DNC),  Joe Biden and Brayden Harrington captured the national television audience attention with their speeches.  Joe Biden gave a knockout of an acceptance speech to be the nominee of his party and Brayden spoke (see video above) about the special bond he shares with the former vice president: they both stutter.

“Without Joe Biden,” Brayden said, “I wouldn’t be talking to you right now.” Harrington met Biden at a CNN town hall, where Biden talked about his lifelong struggle with stuttering. Biden told Brayden that they are “members of the same club.”

Brayden delivered a moving speech expressing admiration for Biden. “It was really amazing to hear that someone like me,” he said, “became Vice President.”

Biden has been open about his struggle with stuttering, and, in him Brayden found a kindred spirit who shared some of his techniques to overcome it. “He told me about a book of poems by Yeats that he would read out loud to practice,” Brayden said. “He showed me how he marked his addresses to make them easier to say out loud.” Brayden then showed the audience his own address, illustrating just how much Biden has helped him. 

“I’m just a regular kid,” Brayden said with a smile, “and in a short amount of time, Joe Biden has made me feel more comfortable about something that has bothered me my entire life. Joe Biden cared.” 

Brayden believes that Joe Biden cares about the future too. “Kids like me are counting on you to elect someone that we can all look up to, someone who cares. Someone who will make our country and the world feel better.” In a convention filled with moving moments, Brayden delivered one of the more poignant speeches. 

A few minutes later, Biden took the podium to deliver his acceptance address. He did not stutter.

I can relate to Brayden and Joe Biden.  I was a member of the stuttering club as a child.  I could not begin a sentence with “I” or a word that began with the letter “W”.  Miss Cassidy, my first-grade teacher, took me aside one day to discuss my stuttering.   For a couple of months afterwards, I would come to class during lunch hour and she had me say tongue twisters – very slowly at first and eventually at normal speed.  My stutter disappeared although even now in my senior years, every once in a great while, it sneaks in again. 

Thank you, Miss Cassidy, Brayden, and Joe Biden!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Joe Biden captured the moment last night during a twenty-five minute (see video above) acceptance speech to be the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.  He was on message:  he knocked Trump a few times without being nasty;  he proposed policies to fight the pandemic and to get the country back on its feet economically.  The pundits even those at Fox News were most congratulatory of his performance.

For me, Biden’s best line was:  “We are at an inflection point…We need to do away with the burden of hate!”

YES!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Democratic National Convention was in full gear last night.  The graphic above captures some of the highlights.

My favorite presentations were Kamala Harris (see below) especially when she said about Donald Trump:  “I know a predator when I see one!”

And Barack Obama (see below);

“For close to four years now, Trump has shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.

Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t. And the consequences of that failure are severe. 170,000 Americans dead. Millions of jobs gone while those at the top take in more than ever. Our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have posted several times on this blog that colleges have to approach opening their campuses to in-person instruction  very carefully.  Back in June I commented that colleges that do re-open are “only one keg party away from a health catastrophe.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education has been reporting for the past four days how hopes for reopening campuses this fall are “crumbing” at many colleges across the country.  The list includes Notre Dame, UNC Chapel Hill,  Morehouse, Spelman, Clark Atlanta, and Emory.

The decisions to reopen and then close have been  predicted, even as some presidents declared that they planned to bring students back for fall classes. In planning to reopen, colleges have cited the benefits to in-person learning, the disparities in technology access off campus, and detailed safety plans. There is also a clear financial incentive to bring students back; fees for housing and dining are significant portions of operating budgets. 

The University of California at Berkeley’s chancellor, Carol T. Christ, announced at a Chronicle event on Monday that Berkeley — which had planned to have some students on campus and to hold some classes in-person — will begin its fall semester online.

The Bay Area, Christ said, is not “at a phase at which higher education is permitted to open under public-health orders.” And earlier this month, Berkeley announced 47 new student cases in one week, with most connected to Greek parties.

Berkeley typically has 6,000 classes in the fall, but the university was planning to offer only about 300 face-to-face classes in a hybrid model, Christ said. In-person instruction, Christ said, would have been reserved for courses that would be difficult to replicate online, including complex labs, performing arts, and field work. But the prospect of students, faculty, and staff members returning in the fall constituted what Christ and her team began to describe as a “mass migration event.”

“How do you handle a mass migration event in a way that doesn’t provide seeds for outbreaks?” Christ said.

The answer, Berkeley officials concluded, is: You don’t.

“The fraternity outbreak gave us a glimpse of how congregate living could really seed infections,” Christ said.

An outbreak that stems from a fraternity party is just the sort of thing that many professors say they worry about when assessing the safety of returning to in-person instruction. Regardless of behavior pledges, which colleges have considered as a way of promoting safety amid the pandemic, some people find it difficult to believe that young college students will party together in masks and maintain six feet of physical distance once the alcohol starts flowing.

“Of course it’s a reasonable concern,” Christ said. “It’s what college presidents and chancellors talk about all the time.”

“We’re social animals,” she continued, “and one of the big motivations of going to college is to be with your peers and have this life-transforming experience. The experience we were imagining in the fall isn’t what anyone would imagine a college-going experience to be like.”

But in the face of rising cases nationally, and as faculty and students raise safety concerns, colleges have said they can’t pull it off.

Tony

Source: N.Y.C. Department of Health

Dear Commons Community,

On Tuesday, New York City released more than 1.46 million coronavirus antibody test results, the largest number to date, providing evidence of how the virus penetrated deeply into some lower-income communities while passing more lightly over affluent parts of the city.

Across the city, more than 27 percent of those tested had positive antibody results. The borough with the highest rate was the Bronx, at 33 percent. Manhattan had the lowest rate, at 19 percent.  In one ZIP code in Queens, more than 50 percent of people who had gotten tested were found to have antibodies, a strikingly high rate. But no ZIP code south of 96th Street in Manhattan had a positive rate of more than 20 percent.   As reported by the New York Times.

“The data is likely to renew discussion about whether some neighborhoods or communities in New York City may be nearing herd immunity — the point at which enough people have immunity that the virus is no longer able to spread widely within a community.

Until now, public data for antibody rates in New York City has been limited. CityMD, which plays a key role in the city’s testing program, had shared some data from its network of urgent care clinics.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office had released some details from a survey — which involved testing some 28,419 people across the state — that suggested that roughly 21.6 percent of New York City residents had antibodies.

But the antibody testing data released on Tuesday is on a far larger scale, encompassing more than 15 percent of New York City residents. It included all antibody test results reported to the New York City Department of Health.

“This gives us a sense at a deeper level of the magnitude of the penetration of the infection into the population,” said Wafaa El-Sadr, an epidemiology professor at Columbia University.

Much remains unknown about the degree of protection against Covid-19 that antibodies may offer, or how long that protection may last. But the neighborhoods with more residents who were infected at the height of New York’s outbreak in March and April may be less likely to be among the hardest hit during a second wave.

On the other hand, neighborhoods in which few residents have been infected may find themselves more vulnerable in the event of a resurgence.

Some researchers have expressed hope that herd immunity for the new coronavirus may only require about half of the people in a given community to have immunity — while others have suggested a higher threshold, like 70 percent.

Of course, neighborhoods are not sealed off from one another, and even under the most optimistic predictions, most neighborhoods — and millions of New Yorkers — remain vulnerable to infection in a second wave.

Still, the relatively high prevalence of antibodies may partly explain why New York has not seen a significant uptick in cases over the past several months, even as the city has begun to reopen and some New Yorkers have begun to relax their social distancing.”

We will cautiously hope that an uptick in the coronavirus does not occur.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) continued last night.  There were several good moments but I thought the most powerful and emotional was the tribute paid by John Cain’s widow, Cindy, reflecting on her husband’s friendship with Joe Biden.

Her three-minute tribute can be seen on the video above.

Tony

Source: Howard Chernick, David Copeland and Andrew Reschovsky

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article this morning alerting readers that the pandemic and the resulting recession is about to “slam” city budgets.  The coronavirus recession will erode city budgets in many insidious ways. It will slash the casino revenues that Detroit relies on. It will squeeze the state aid that is a lifeblood to Rochester and Buffalo in upstate New York. It will cut the sales tax revenue in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, where a healthy government depends on people buying things.  As reported.

“The crisis has arrived faster than the damage from the Great Recession ever did. And it will cut deep in the fiscal year ahead, with many communities likely to lose 10 percent or more of the revenue they would have seen without the pandemic, according to a new analysis. That’s enough for residents to experience short-staffed libraries, strained parks departments and fewer road projects. The hardest-hit cities like Rochester and Buffalo could face 20 percent losses.

“The Great Recession was a story of long, drawn-out fiscal pain — this is sharper,” said Howard Chernick, a professor emeritus of economics at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, who worked on the new analysis estimating revenue shortfalls for 150 major cities across the nation.

These numbers give a sense of the possible economic pain for cities if Congress and the White House fail to agree on a new relief package that includes aid to state and local governments. It also rebuts some of the prevailing, largely Republican arguments that have stalled those negotiations: that federal help will bail out only blue cities and those that have mismanaged their finances.

Many cities facing steep losses are in states represented by Republican senators, like Florida or Louisiana. And the analysis found little relationship between whether a place was fiscally healthy before the pandemic and the most dire projections of revenue shortfalls.

What matters more in this pandemic moment is how a city generates money: Those highly dependent on tourism, on direct state aid or on volatile sales taxes will hurt the most. Cities like Boston, which rely heavily on the most stable revenue, property taxes, are in the strongest position — for now.

The estimates, to be published in the National Tax Journal by Mr. Chernick, David Copeland at Georgia State University and Andrew Reschovsky at the University of Wisconsin, are based on the mix of local revenue sources, the importance of state aid and the composition of jobs and wages in each city. The researchers predict average revenue shortfalls in the 2021 fiscal year of about 5.5 percent in a less severe scenario, or 9 percent in a more severe one.

These projections cover not just municipal budgets but also every local government entity that spends money on services to residents in a given city, including counties and sewer or school districts (those budgets are adjusted for the share of residents who live within city borders). As the pandemic has worsened in many parts of the country this summer, the researchers now believe their severe forecasts are more likely.

Some of the most vulnerable cities are those like Rochester that rely heavily on state aid, which is also likely to shrink, as it did in the Great Recession.

Rochester already has deferred millions of dollars of nonessential expenses like new uniforms or fire trucks. It furloughed or reduced the hours of about one in 10 city workers, many of whom will return as the city reopens further. Officials delayed an incoming class of new police recruits and canceled the next class of firefighters.

“We can’t produce money, we can’t borrow our way out of this, we can’t tax our way out of this,” Mayor Lovely Warren said. “But our residents expect that the trash will be picked up on trash day. They expect that the snow will be plowed when it snows. They expect that when they call 911 that a police officer will show up.

Coronavirus Schools Briefing: The pandemic is upending education. Get the latest news and tips as students go back to school.

“For Washington to ignore that reality — “it hurts.”

“It’s wrong to punish the victim,” she added. “The city here is the victim.”

Other city officials around the country say they have tried to plan prudently for down times. But the pandemic has brought added costs, while state laws have limited their ability to raise revenue.

“This is really what the federal government was built to do: to handle these events that are bigger than the borders of a city and bigger than the borders of a state,” said Dave Massaron, the chief financial officer for the city of Detroit.

In Detroit, one-fifth of the municipal budget typically comes from casino revenue. And casinos have only just reopened, at reduced capacity. The city managed to save money when its recreation centers closed, and it hasn’t spent as much as usual managing downtown traffic. This coming year, the city will also mow the grass less often on vacant properties it owns.

With such moves, officials believe they will be able to get through fiscal year 2021 with a balanced budget. But after that the decisions will get harder, especially without federal help.

“The city needs only to look back into its past to understand what happens when you have a structural imbalance and you don’t have a way of addressing it,” Mr. Massaron said. Before Detroit exited bankruptcy in 2015, emergency response times averaged 18 minutes. All 65,000 streetlights needed replacing.

Other cities heavily dependent on sales taxes felt the implosion of the economy more immediately than cities that count on income or property taxes. Revenue from income taxes will lag behind unemployment; property taxes are set a year or two in advance. Consumer spending, particularly by the biggest spenders, dropped sharply early in the pandemic. And it is expected to fall now for millions of workers whose added $600 federal unemployment benefits expired at the end of July.”

Here in New York City, there is great concern as to losses in sales tax revenue, the collapse of tourism, and the plunge in the real estate market.

Tony