Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has two articles this morning on AI.  One, written by Matthew Kirschenbaum, distinguished university professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park, is entitled, AI May Ruin the University as We Know It: The existential threat of the newest wave of ed-tech.  The second, written by Marc Watkins, assistant director of academic innovation at the University of Mississippi, is entitled, Make AI Part of the Assignment:  Learning requires friction. Here’s how to get students to disclose and evaluate their own usage of tools like ChatGPT.  The two articles could not be more different in their approach to the use of AI in the academy. Here are two excerpts.

Matthew Kirschenbaum: 

“The vision of the future of education is either dystopian or utopian, depending on one’s sympathies for the idea that the classroom must necessarily once again be disrupted to better serve students, and depending too on the stake one has in the industries that are going to profit from the enterprise. In addition to the obvious red flags — shouldn’t the plan encouraging students to record their professors and classmates be run by the legal department? — such breezy promotions of the next big thing in the AI-powered ed-tech domain point to a significant shift in the higher-education landscape, one that is different in both degree and kind from the previous hype cycles that brought us iClickers, MOOCs, courseware, and Second Life. All of these tools were discrete, online, on separate platforms. But today, AI feature sets are integrated in all of the core educational enterprise systems — Google, Canvas, Zoom, and Office to name a few — and the tools are not only ready to hand, but always on, perhaps even requiring admin privileges to disable. Not surprising, then, is the deluge of higher-education summits, white papers, ad hoc committees and task forces, along with the many new research centers, curricular initiatives, and cluster hires — all suggesting that institutions are rushing to demonstrate that they too are embracing the new way to “do school…

“..In essence, the university itself has become a service. The idea of the University as a Service extends the model of Software as a Service to education. Software as a Service refers to the practice of businesses licensing software and paying to renew the license rather than owning and maintaining the software for themselves. For the University as a Service, traditional academic institutions provide the lecturers, content, and degrees (for now). In return, the technological infrastructure, instructional delivery, and support services are all outsourced to third-party vendors and digital platforms.

Marc Watkins:

“Giving students the opportunity to think critically and openly about their AI usage lays bare some uncomfortable truths for both students and teachers. It can lead both parties to question their assumptions and be surprised by what they find. Faculty members may discover that students actually learned something using AI; conversely, students might realize that their use of these tools meant they didn’t learn much of anything at all. At the very least, asking students to disclose how they used AI on an assignment means you, as their instructor, will spend less time staring into tea leaves trying to discern if they did.

But, you may be wondering, won’t some students just use ChatGPT to write this assessment, too? Sure. But in my experience, most undergraduates are eager for mechanisms to show how they used AI tools. They want to incorporate AI into their assignments yet make it clear they still used their own thoughts. As faculty members, our best bet is to teach ethical usage and set baseline expectations without adopting intrusive and often unreliable surveillance.”

The debate on the use of AI and other related technologies will dominate our discussions in higher education for years to come. And keep in mind that we are only at the beginning of AI development.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Eugene Vindman, a Democrat and the brother of a key figure in the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump in 2019, is projected to win his race for a congressional seat in Virginia against Republican Derrick Anderson.

The contest had been closely watched, as the district extends from south of Washington almost to Richmond, and is currently represented by moderate Democrat Abigail Spanberger, who is running for governor in 2025.

Both Vindman and Anderson played up their respective military records as part of their campaigns. Anderson, a former Army Green Beret, was deployed as part of the “surge” of soldiers to stabilize Iraq under President George W. Bush. He also served in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Jordan, Israel and Lebanon as a special forces officer.

Vindman was a paratrooper, infantry officer and eventually a lawyer for the judge advocate general’s office while in the Army. He later moved to the National Security Council, where, as a senior ethics official, he was informed by his brother Alexander of the phone call that resulted in Trump getting impeached in the House for allegedly attempting to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump, who won his presidential race Wednesday, was acquitted by the Senate.

But both campaigns also saw their emphases on their respective candidates’ biographies come back to haunt them. As reported by The Huffington Post.

Anderson claimed that Vindman had embellished the military rank at which he retired. Vindman did not respond directly to the charge in a television interview, but said he is “entitled to be called ‘colonel.’”

“My opponent is lying about my record, just like he lied about his fake family,” Vindman said in that interview. The remark was a reference to pictures and video that Anderson had taken of himself with a female supporter and her children, in poses typical of candidates with their own families.

The material was not used in any ads from Anderson’s campaign, according to The New York Times, but did appear on the campaign’s YouTube page and on the site of the House Republicans’ political arm that serves as a clearinghouse for candidate material that can be used by outside political groups. On his campaign website, Anderson said he lives with a Dalmatian dog and is engaged to be married.

The incident spurred one of the more curious spats between campaigns in 2024, as a political action committee supporting Vindman sponsored TV ads using the images of the supporter and her family to call attention to Anderson’s “fake family.”

Anderson’s campaign retaliated by sending cease-and-desist letters to television stations, warning them against running the pro-Vindman ads featuring the supporter and her kids, even though the pictures and video were created to tout Anderson in the first place.

Congratulations to Mr. Vindman!

Tony

Jeopardy Contestant Heather Ryan

Dear Commons Community,

My wife, Elaine, and I are loyal watchers of the game show, Jeopardy.  About a week ago, we were a bit surprised at a clue that appeared sexist.

Heather Ryan, who competed on the Oct. 28 episode of the quiz  show, spoke to Binghamton University’s student-run newspaper Pipe Dreamon Nov. 6 to address the sexist clue that drew attention to the show.

After reading the hint, “Men seldom make passes at…,” to which the answer was, “Girls who wear glasses,” host Ken Jennings realized Ryan was wearing glasses and apologized.

“It is definitely an odd choice,” Ryan told the paper. “I think it made everybody in the audience and on stage, and Ken Jennings too, a little uncomfortable. It was like, ‘Oh, that was unexpected.’”

Ryan’s suggestion? “Maybe we choose better rhyming phrases in 2024,” she said.

“Unfortunately, there are still girls who are [in] middle school and they don’t want to wear their glasses and they’re losing out on their education,” she continued. “So, I think it’s much better to be able to see than anything else.”

As for the rest of her experience participating in the show, Ryan, who lost by just $1,  said “it was very fun” to be a part of.

“I had a great time,” she said. “Everybody there was very welcoming. It’s such a part of American culture that I definitely wanted to go on when I got the call for it.”

“It’s just a very special thing to play a small role in this big part,” she added. “It’s been running for 40 years, and so I got to play my part in it.”

On the episode, Jennings admitted that the line was “a little problematic,” and said, “Sorry, Heather” immediately after reading it. Contestant Will Wallace, who gave the answer, emphasized that was “very” problematic.

My wife, Elaine, wears glasses.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Our Lady of the Lake, a private Catholic university in Texas, may be on the hook for millions of dollars because of a class-action lawsuit over a 2022 data breach that compromised personal information of tens of thousands of students and staff.

Hacked information included names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, passport numbers, credit and debit card information and medical costs.   As reported by the San Antonio Express-News.

Under terms of the deal, class members’ ordinary out-of pocket expenses — including unreimbursed bank fees or losses due to identity theft — are capped at $400 each. Those expenses include up to three hours of lost time at $25 an hour.

Extraordinary out-of-pocket expenses are capped at $2,500 for each person. Class members, though, must provide documentation showing they made reasonable efforts to avoid, or sought reimbursement for, those losses — including exhaustion of all available credit monitoring insurance and identity theft insurance.

Class members also can submit a claim to accept two years of credit monitoring services and identity theft restoration services.
The private Catholic university also agreed to pay all settlement administration costs and attorneys’ fees and costs of about $216,000.

The deal represents a “significant benefit” for the 41,825 class members who are eligible to make a claim, lawyers for the plaintiffs said in a court filing. None of the members objected to the settlement, details of which are posted at OLLUsettlement.com.

A hearing on final approval and certification of the class is set for Nov. 15. State District Court Judge Marialyn Barnard granted preliminary approval in July.

Attorneys for the university and the plaintiffs didn’t respond to requests for comment Monday.

The university first acknowledged the data breach with a public notice on March 31, 2023 — a week after the San Antonio Express-News first reported on it.

Ana Vasquez, a Texas resident who applied for admission to the university in 2019 but never enrolled, sued the university over the hack in April 2023. She filed on behalf of current and former students, employees and those who had applied to the school. Jose Gonzalez filed a similar complaint less than two months later. The suits were later combined.

The two named plaintiffs stand to receive service awards of $5,000 each.

Vasquez alleged the university on San Antonio’s West Side failed to protect individuals’ personally identifiable information and “failed to even encrypt or redact this highly sensitive information.”

The data was compromised because of Our Lady of the Lake’s “negligent and/or careless acts and omissions and its utter failure to protect students’ sensitive data,” the complaint added.

Vasquez said she suffered injury, including $295 in fraudulent charges to her credit card, invasion of privacy and loss of time mitigating the risk of identity theft.

The Express-News, citing Boerne-based IT consulting firm BetterCyber Consulting Group LLC and Breachsense, an Ohio-based data breach monitoring platform, reported that the ransomware group AvosLocker claimed it hacked into the university’s network.

AvosLocker has been linked to online attacks at other colleges.

In October 2023, the FBI and the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency issued an advisory on AvosLocker.

“AvosLocker affiliates compromise organizations’ networks by using legitimate software and open-source remote system administration tools,” the agencies said. “AvosLocker affiliates then use exfiltration-based data extortion tactics with threats of leaking and/or publishing stolen data.”

Our Lady of the Lake University said its investigation of the data breach found that a “limited amount of personal information was removed” from its network.

This case is a warning for other colleges and universities which might have insufficient data security systems in place.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Many of us are thankful that the 2024 election is over — even if some states and races remain uncalled. As of this writing, Donald Trump is  positioned to reclaim the White House after his late-night victory in Pennsylvania. Below are five major takeaways from how America voted courtesy of Yahoo News and other media.

Tony

——————————————————————————-

Trump is stronger than four years ago

Trump didn’t lose reelection in 2020 by much. If a few thousand votes in a few key swing states had broken the other way, he would have been president instead of Joe Biden.

So any shift toward Trump in 2024, even a minor one, had the potential to be decisive.

The big takeaway from Tuesday is that America did shift toward Trump in 2024 — and the shift wasn’t minor. In Florida, he defeated Harris by 13 percentage points, roughly quadrupling his 2020 margin. He lost in Virginia — but by 5 points this time instead of 10. In the deep blue states of New York and New Jersey, he performed better (on the presidential level) than any Republican in decades. The list goes on.

Much of this movement — winning red states by more than expected; losing blue states by less — didn’t scramble the electoral math. But it reflected larger demographic and geographic trends that could propel Trump to victory in the all-important battlegrounds once all the votes there are counted.

Trump did especially well in rural areas

Late Tuesday night, the Associated Press called the two Southern swing states, Georgia and North Carolina, for Trump. In both, the former president improved on his 2020 performance in nearly every small, red, rural county — a couple hundred votes here, a few thousand there. Harris did slightly better than Biden in some places, too — including several key suburban and exurban counties around Atlanta and Charlotte. But ultimately, it wasn’t enough to overcome Trump’s relentless rural firewall.

According to the preliminary exit polls (which may change as more of the vote comes in), Trump won 63% of the rural vote nationally — up from 57% four years ago. Meanwhile, Harris didn’t do any better than Biden among urban voters (60%) — and narrowly lost suburban voters, a group Biden won.

Trump also overperformed with Latino voters

Early exit poll data can be a bit fuzzy — but if the initial numbers end up being roughly accurate, Trump may have just secured a bigger share of the Latino vote than any Republican since George W. Bush.

Four years ago, the exit polls showed Trump winning 32% of Latinos. Right now, they show him winning 45%. In Michigan, they show him winning 60% of Latinos. If true, that would be a net shift in Trump’s direction of more than 35 percentage points.

Nationally, Latino men seem to be mostly driving this movement. In 2020, they voted for Biden (59%) over Trump (36%). This year, they voted for Trump (54%) over Harris (44%).

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Again, exit polls can change — and they’ve struggled to precisely quantify the Latino vote in the past. But assuming the basic direction of this year’s Latino numbers are correct, it could represent a major sea change in U.S. politics.

Democrats struggled in down-ballot races

In the current Senate, Democrats have a working majority — 51 to 49.

But 2024 was always going to be an uphill battle. For one thing, they had almost no room for error. (Losing even one seat could mean losing control of the entire chamber.) And for another, they were defending lots of vulnerable seats; Republicans were barely defending any.

On Tuesday, some Senate Democrats and Democratic candidates — Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, Texas’s Colin Allred — ran ahead of Harris in their states. But it wasn’t enough, and they lost anyway.

In West Virginia, Democrats had effectively ceded the seat held by outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin long before Election Day. In Nebraska, independent challenger Dan Osborn failed to unseat GOP Sen. Deb Fischer.

Once Gov. Jim Justice won in West Virginia and businessman Bernie Moreno won in Ohio, that was it — two seats flipped, and the Senate flipped with them.

The polls weren’t wrong

Votes are still being counted, but it looks like “the polls” had a pretty decent night.

This was not a foregone conclusion. In both 2016 and 2020, the polls significantly underestimated Trump’s support in key battleground states. Many political observers wondered if the same thing would happen again in 2024 — or if, by trying not to underestimate Trump a third time, pollsters would tweak their methodologies too much and underestimate Harris instead.

This time around, however, the best nonpartisan polling averages seem to have been fairly accurate.

Again, it’s too early to say what the final margins will be in every battleground, let alone nationally. But the pre-election polls estimated that none of the swing states would be decided by more than a point or two, or three at most. And currently, all of them remain within that range.

In the end, Trump could win most — or even all — of the swing states and earn a comfortable Electoral College victory. But even a swing-state sweep falls well within the possibilities implied by the deadlocked pre-election polling — as long as none of those victories are outside the usual margin of error.

Dear Commons Community,

The article below appeared in Education Week yesterday.  It describes Sarah Said, an English teacher at an alternative high school, who is advocating for using generative AI with English learners.  In a study of graduate teacher education students published earlier this year, I too receive feedback from professional educators indicating that generative AI would be an effective tool for teaching English language learners.

Below is the entire Education Week article.

Tony

———————————————————————————

Education Week

A Teacher Makes the Case for Using AI With English Learners

By Ileana Najarro

October 30, 2024

Sarah Said, an English teacher working with English learners at an alternative high school near Chicago, has seen translation apps evolve over time.

Enough input from users and linguists have made Google Translate a much more useful tool than it might have been a few years back.

Lately, her English learners at Dream Academy in Elgin, Ill., have demonstrated a knack for using and finding a variety of generative artificial intelligence tools and translation apps, prompting Said to learn more about this technology and guide her students in responsible and ethical uses.

With more than 20 years of experience working with English learners, Said encourages other teachers to familiarize themselves with new AI tools. She presented on this topic virtually at the annual WIDA conference in mid-October and spoke with Education Week about how teachers working with English learners should approach AI tools in class.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why should teachers working with English learners not shy away from AI tools?

They’re already using it.

I’ve noticed you will get things that don’t look like your students’ writing, and they have tried to use AI, but they haven’t done it responsibly. It’s really then taking what they’ve done and working with them on saying, “Hey, this is a starting point. Let’s work on expanding the idea that AI gave you so that now it becomes your own idea to where your own feelings and your own emotion is in there.”

I do have students who regularly will use translation apps in class and outside of class. I’m noticing, where is this coming from? Students will tell you, “I used ChatGPT to help translate.” I’m like, “Well, OK, but now we have to grow what you did.”

That’s where it becomes a one-on-one conversation. How can we change the sentence to bring your voice into the sentence rather than AI’s voice into the sentence? Almost like using a calculator in math class, right? You may struggle with certain operations, but you still have to do the algebra, you still have to do the proofs in geometry. AI is your starting point to build on better ideas in learning and understanding language.

I didn’t totally know what was out there. [Students] were showing me things. You do have to teach them that there’s a line that they have to walk with AI, and it’s definitely not going away. My students, when they’re looking for jobs and they’re writing things—applications and resumes—they have to make sure that they are using certain words. Unfortunately, there are employers out there that are using AI to help them sift through resumes because they have thousands of resumes to sift through.

English learners might be the first ones to actually be in the know because they’ve had to adapt to using so many tools in the classroom.

In my building, I feel that way, because they had to learn language for survival. Years ago in another district, I was actually a coordinator, and I worked with moms from Yemen, and it was very interesting. This is when Google Voice first came out. And these moms would just use Google Voice with their phones. I’m like, “Wow, that’s so innovative.”

I think that sometimes our language learners are the most innovative because they’ve had to work to navigate certain situations, that they might be on the cusp of more than some of the gen. ed. students.

What should teachers keep in mind when exploring AI tools?

A teacher has to understand what the tools are and what the language of AI is, because it’s another world. So before even beginning to embark on AI in a classroom, the teacher has to understand it. I know that this is a work in progress with states and districts right now, but districts have to have parameters on how schools and districts can use it.

First, the teacher has to become knowledgeable about what tools are out there. Then, as they’re becoming knowledgeable about the tools, that’s where they become knowledgeable about the parameters, they become knowledgeable about policy. We have to regulate it in a sense, too. You don’t want kids putting their data out there, so you have to regulate that and understand that. If a student is using a tool, you have to show them how to use it responsibly.

I think AI enhances language learning. It’s up to the teacher on how they model the usage of it. The kids need to see an appropriate model in order to develop those skills.

What have been some of the strategic ways AI has helped your instruction?

I’ve used it as a model. I’ll break down a sentence for students, and I’ll show them how the AI helps to find meaning within the sentence. I will use AI in front of them to show them, “Hey, when you ask this question, this is what’s going to come up, and this is what they’re going to tell you. It’s not just the question you ask. It’s how you ask the question.”

Then it teaches this idea of, how do we command language? Because a computer takes everything literally. It’s kind of like Amelia Bedelia, right? And what is the difference, then, between that literal and figurative language?

When you send an email to a person, the person cannot tell what you are like on the other end. If you send an email and you sound mad but you didn’t mean to sound mad, the person on the other end doesn’t see that. So how do we command language when we are not in front of people?

Even designing on Canva [an online graphic design tool], you could use their AI tools to design something.

Dear Commons Community,

Today is Election Day and everyone regardless of political affiliation should go out and vote for the candidates of their choice.  Besides the all-important Presidential election, there are also critical Congressional elections  to be decided. So please take the time to VOTE!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Almost 80 million ballots have already been cast in 47 states and the District of Columbia, according to data gathered by CNN, Edison Research and Catalist, a company that provides data, analytics and other services to Democrats, academics and nonprofit advocacy groups, including insights into who is voting before November.

The data offers a sense of who is choosing to vote ahead of Election Day, but it isn’t predictive of election results. For instance, we don’t know who people are voting for, and the data doesn’t include the millions of Americans who will head to the polls Tuesday.

But with less than 24 hours until Election Day polls start to open across the country, here are three big takeaways from what we know about those who decided to vote ahead of November 5 courtesy of CNN.

Early voting turnout is down from 2020 levels

Across the country, far fewer voters chose to vote ahead of Election Day this year compared with the pandemic-era 2020 election.

Four years ago, more than 110 million Americans voted early in person or by mail – roughly 70% of everyone who voted in that election.

We won’t know the final total number of 2024 voters for weeks, until all results are fully counted, but pre-election voting is expected to make up closer to 50% of all ballots – a split in the electorate that is more similar to the 2022 midterms.

While overall pre-election voting is down, in some states more voters chose to vote in person early than they did in 2020.

The key states of North Carolina and Georgia both saw record numbers of voters participate in early in-person voting, with the totals in Georgia exceeding the numbers from 2020. The total pre-election voting in North Carolina, however, was still lower than four years ago due to significantly fewer people choosing to vote by mail.

Mail voting was an especially popular option during the pandemic as voters chose to avoid crowds at in-person polling places. However, in both states, it’s also harder to vote by mail now than it was four years ago.

Republicans grow their pre-election vote share

Republicans have made up more of the pre-election vote than they did in 2020. The Trump campaign made more of an effort this year to encourage Republicans to vote early and by mail, a major shift from messaging against pre-election voting in 2020.

Across the 27 states for which Catalist has comparable data, registered Democrats have cast 37% of pre-election ballots, while registered Republicans have cast 35%. That’s a significant tightening in the partisan gap since 2020, when, at the same point and in the same states, registered Democrats held a 12-percentage point lead – 42% to 30%.

In four of the seven key states that will likely decide the presidential election, voters register by party, and in every one of them, Republicans have made up a larger share of the pre-election vote than they did at the same time four years ago. Democrats in these states have overall decreased their share compared with 2020.

In Arizona, 41% of pre-election voters have been Republican, a 4-point increase from 2020. Democrats have made up a share that’s 3 points less than it was four years ago, at 33%.

Nevada Republicans have increased their share by only 1 point from 2020 to 37%, while Democrats there have seen their share decrease compared with four years ago, from 38% at this point in 2020 to 34% now.

In North Carolina, where Trump rallied with supporters of the final day of his campaign, Republicans have accounted for 33% of the pre-election vote, compared with 31% in 2020. Democrats have accounted for 32%, down 3 points from their share four years ago.

And in critical Pennsylvania, Republicans have made up 33% of the pre-election vote, a whole 10 points more than in 2020, while Democrats have made up 56% – down 10 points.

Despite Republicans making up a larger share of pre-election voters so far compared with four years ago, recent CNN polling has generally shown Vice President Kamala Harris leading among voters who have already cast their ballots, including in all of the battleground states, besides Nevada.

Wide gender gap remains, but slightly narrowed from 2020

In the seven most competitive states, the gender gap looks similar to the 2020 and 2022 early vote.

Overall, roughly 1.8 million more women than men have voted early in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to Catalist’s data. However, that gap is narrower than it was at the same point four years ago. That’s both because fewer people have voted early overall, but also because the percentage gap is slightly narrower.

Georgia has the most pronounced gender gap – women have cast 56% of the early vote in the Peach State, while 44% has been cast by men. In Arizona, 52% of the early vote was cast by women while 46% was cast by men. And in North Carolina, 56% of the early vote was cast by women to 44% for men.

Nevada had the closest gender gap – 51% of the early vote was cast by women compared with 47% by men.

In Pennsylvania, arguably the state that could decide the race, women have made up 56% of the early voters. At the same in 2022 and 2020, women had made up 57% of pre-election ballots cast.

Today is the day we will see the results of all of these early voters. Maybe?

Tony

Britain’s Member of Parliament Kemi Badenoch is the new leader of the Conservative Party.  (AP.)

Dear Commons Community,

The first Black woman to lead a major U.K. political party, Kemi Badenoch, is an upbeat and outspoken libertarian who thinks the British state is broken — and that she’s the one to fix it with smaller government and radical new ideas.

The new leader of Britain’s right-of-center Conservative Party was born Olukemi Adegoke in London in 1980 to well-off Nigerian parents — a doctor and an academic — and spent much of her childhood in the West African country.

She has said that the experience of Nigeria’s economic and social upheavals shaped her political outlook.  As reported by The Associated Press and the BBC.

“I grew up somewhere where the lights didn’t come on, where we ran out of fuel frequently despite being an oil-producing country,” Badenoch told the BBC last week.

“I don’t take what we have in this country for granted,” she said. “I meet a lot of people who assume that things are good here because things are good here and they always will be. They don’t realize just how much work and sacrifice was required in order to get that.”

Returning to the U.K. aged 16 during a period of turmoil in Nigeria, she worked part-time at McDonalds while completing school, then studied computer systems engineering at the University of Sussex. She later got a law degree and worked in financial services.

In 2012, she married banker Hamish Badenoch, with whom she has three children.

She was elected to the London Assembly in 2015 and to Parliament in 2017. She held a series of government posts in the 2019-22 government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, before becoming part of a mass ministerial exodus in July 2022 over a series of ethics scandals that triggered Johnson’s downfall.

Badenoch ran unsuccessfully to succeed Johnson, boosting her profile in the process. She was appointed trade secretary in the 49-day government of Prime Minister Liz Truss, and business secretary under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

She held onto her seat in Parliament in July’s national election, which saw the Labour Party win a huge majority and the Conservatives reduced to 121 lawmakers in the 650-seat House of Commons.

Like many Conservatives, Badenoch idolizes Margaret Thatcher, the party’s first female leader, who transformed Britain with her free-market policies in the 1980s. Citing her engineering background as evidence she’s a problem-solver, she depicts herself as a disruptor, arguing for a low-tax, free-market economy and pledging to “rewire, reboot and reprogram” the British state.

A critic of multiculturalism and self-proclaimed enemy of wokeness, Badenoch is an opponent of “identity politics,” gender-neutral bathrooms and government plans to reduce U.K. carbon emissions.

Supporters think her charismatic, outspoken style is just what the Conservative Party needs to come back from its worst-ever election defeat. During her leadership campaign, her backers wore T-shirts urging: “Be more Kemi.”

Critics say Badenoch has clashed with colleagues and civil servants and has a tendency to make rash statements and provoke unnecessary fights. During the leadership campaign she drew criticism for saying that “not all cultures are equally valid,” and for suggesting that maternity pay was excessive — though she later backtracked on that claim.

“I do speak my mind,” she told the BBC. “And I tell the truth.”

Conservative politics in the U.K. should be interesting with Badenoch at the helm!

Tony

Bill Clinton speaks at a campaign rally in Durham, North Carolina, on October 17, 2024. – Steve Helber/AP

Dear Commons Community,

CNN had an exclusive interview  with former President Bill Clinton about his concerns for the future of American democracy regardless of who is elected president tomorrow. Here is an excerpt.

“Rumbling down the road between small towns in western Michigan, Bill Clinton was considering mortality – potentially American democracy’s or the Democratic Party’s, but also his own.

The nation’s 42nd president believes Kamala Harris will win and that the economy will “explode” over the next few years, thanks to decisions that Joe Biden made, which Clinton says people will finally start to feel after an inevitable lag. He calls Harris a problem-solver, goes in deep on how her price gouging plan could bring down the cost of groceries and how the intricacies of her proposal to have the federal government build more housing is an idea he’d never thought of.

He still throws in Arkansas-spun laugh lines, like Donald Trump “spreads blame like a John Deere spreads manure” or a favorite bit he has about how the Republican nominee would take credit for this unseasonably sunny weather in the final campaign stretch but would blame Biden if it rained.

But speaking to CNN exclusively on his campaign bus – his only interview since starting what has become a marathon schedule that still has last-minute stops being added – Clinton said he also worries about what Trump’s impact on politics means for what comes next, no matter who wins.

“What has surprised so many people – although I’m sure this happened in the ‘30s throughout Europe, when they were considering things with fascism – a lot of people just can’t believe how many voters in America agree that he doesn’t make sense, agree that he’s advocating things that would be bad, but somehow think that if the experience was good for them back then, it was magically his doing and everything was fine,” Clinton said. “So, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Clinton campaigned 30 years ago on being a bridge to the 21st century. He knows that viciousness, division and the feeling of being constantly pummeled from every direction by politics were not what America had been expecting on the other side.

He was the one who tapped into the White working-class vote back then to break through the political establishment, and then signed trade agreements and banking laws that created the job losses and resentment that has transformed American politics. His wife was the one whose loss put Trump in the White House, in a way that burns him still.

Now after spending the past few years celebrating 25th anniversaries of achievements such as the Good Friday agreement, as he’s seen his own time in office bear out, the second youngest elected president ever is talking about securing his grandkids’ future and holding up his big hands to show the joint problems and essential tremor that he says will keep him from hitting a 300-yard drive again.

Over nearly three weeks straight of 10-hour days – which means he’s had a much more active schedule than Harris, Trump, Tim Walz, JD Vance, Joe Biden or Barack Obama – Clinton is adamant in his speeches about his unique perspective as the only person on the planet who’s done the job and personally knows both candidates on the ballot Tuesday.

“You did pretty well when I was president, and I think I’m entitled to my opinion about who would be better,” he often says, his soft Southern accent now with a permanent rasp.

Standing in a church gym in Muskegon Heights, Michigan, he recounted a bit that he had read a few years ago about Dwight Eisenhower saying he worried how much longer the oldest continuous democracy could survive with all the effort it takes.

“I think we ought to say to President Eisenhower, ‘We don’t know how long we’re going to make it either, but we’re fixing to lengthen our stay in the land of the free and the home of the brave,” Clinton said.

Hours later, relaxed in a chair on a bright blue Harris-Walz bus, he considered what Obama, Biden, Walz and others have meant when they say that America might not survive another four years of Trump.

“I think you have to look at what the definition of ‘survive’ is,” Clinton said. “You can put me on a breathing tube tonight, but it wouldn’t be surviving like I’m surviving now. And the same thing’s true in politics. I don’t know if we can survive or not – I think it would be a travesty if he became president again.”

Amen!

Tony