Dear Commons Community

The College of Saint Rose, a Roman Catholic institution in Albany, N.Y., will close its doors at the end of the spring semester, following years of declining enrollment and labor battles. The institution’s board voted on the closure last week. The president, Marcia J. White, called the decision “truly heartbreaking” in her announcement to the campus community on Friday.

Saint Rose, which was founded in 1920 and enrolled nearly 2,800 students in the fall of 2022, according to federal data, has endured years of financial hardship, which came to a head this week when it asked the City of Albany, Albany County, and the State of New York for emergency funding, as the Albany Times Union reported. None of those entities were able to provide an immediate bailout, leading the college’s board to call it quits.

Here are further details as provided by The Daily Gazette and The Albany Times Union.

After news organizations broke the news Thursday afternoon that The College of Saint Rose will close next year, President Marcia White was met Friday with boos, and angry students and staff while explaining why the school will permanently close in May.

The announcement with students and staff was held at the Massry Center for the Arts, but ahead of the speech, some would-be attendees were told they could not enter as the 405-seat hall was at maximum capacity. One staff member said they were not expecting so many people to show up. They scrambled to set up speakers outside in the hall for the leftover people who were not allowed in, as they did, one student commented, “They couldn’t even get this right.”

The College of Saint Rose’s Board of Trustees voted to close the school on Thursday. The college’s Board of Trustees Chair Jeffrey Stone kicked off the announcement on Friday, saying cost-cutting and fundraising efforts by the college were not enough to bridge the financial gap the institution faces.

“As it became more clear that the college would be unable to continue as a standalone institution, we sought financial support from the legislature and other elected officials and, behind the scenes, actively sought to partner with a like-minded institution of higher learning to continue our 103 years. But, those efforts were unsuccessful. The board’s decision to close The College of Saint Rose was not an easy one,” Stone said.

Only a few minutes into his speech, he was met with booing from the crowd. When White interjected to tell students to be more respectful, the crowd both inside and outside the hall only voiced their anger louder.

White spoke after and said she wanted to address what she called factual errors and misinformation in media reports of the closure. Earlier last week, the Albany Times Union reported that the school was facing mounting debt and had lobbied state officials for emergency funds.

“It was reported that we recently reached out to various political leaders for a financial bailout. That is not true. We never asked for a bailout. That was not a request for immediate funding,” White said. “It was a request for bridge funding to support operations through the 2024-2025 academic year to give us time to work towards a continuation of the college’s critical programs to a potential partnership with another institution and to the programs that significantly increase the professional workforce in fields that are facing a shortage of crisis proportion in New York State.”

Speaking to reporters following the community gathering, White criticized reporters for breaking the news of the college’s closing.

“The only reason that I’m not a wreck and in tears is I am so angry at the fact that our students, our faculty, our employees, their parents, the parents of our students had to hear this news in the press, rather than from us today, which is a time we had put aside to do a personal message to them and have a conversation,” she said.

She also reiterated that the request for state funding was not a “bailout,” but a request for “bridge funding.”

White said the college had been in financial trouble for about 10 years and there was a decline in enrollment that was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. She said, during that time, the school cut $9 million in administrative costs and $6 million in academic programs, while also looking for potential partnerships. She said the school signed non-disclosure agreements, so she could not share which institutions were approached. It is also unclear how big a budget gap the school faces.

Another question is what will happen to the college’s 48-acre campus in the city’s Pine Hills neighborhood. In a joint statement, Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan and Albany County Executive Dan McCoy expressed their sadness for the students and staff.

“We are in close communication with City and County stakeholders, state and local government leaders, academia, and developers to ensure that we are all working together to reimagine the CSR campus to minimize the impact of the College’s closure,” the statement read. “In the coming weeks and months, we will also work with the College’s staff to connect them to job opportunities with the City, County, and other local employers through job fairs and other events.”

Sad news for the College’s students, faculty, and staff and the City of Albany!

Tony

Mike Huckabee

Dear Commons Community,

Former Republican Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee last week warned that if Republicans move to impeach President Joe Biden without any Democratic votes, it could spell a “political disaster” for the party.

Huckabee said “there’s no point” impeaching Biden in the House while knowing that the case is not going to go anywhere in the Senate, where Democrats hold a majority.

“All it becomes is a political disaster,” Huckabee told Real America’s Voice’s “Just The News No Noise.”

Huckabee added that the impeachment inquiry into Biden underway in the House should continue but warned that until some Democrats come on board with impeaching him, the GOP should emphasize to Americans that they are worse off with Biden in the White House.

“Until that happens, the best thing Republicans can do is keep dribbling out the information of Joe’s ties to the Communist Chinese Party and business deals but focus on a message that gets us elected and reminding people how much better off they were when Donald Trump was president than they have been since Joe Biden has taken the reins,” he said.

Huckabee, who ran for president in 2008 and 2016, has already thrown his support behind Trump in the 2024 GOP presidential nomination contest.

I don’t agree with much of anything that Huckabee says but on this – he is right.  It reminds me of the House impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky affair in the late 1990s. The public had sympathy for the way Clinton was treated and saw the Republicans as wasting tax-paying money.

Tony

Discobolus Palombara

Dear Commons Community,

Italy’s culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, is refusing a request by the German State Antiquities Collection in Munich to return an ancient Roman statue that embodied Hitler’s Aryan aesthetic, calling it a national treasure.

The Discobolus Palombara is a 2nd-century Roman copy of a long-lost Greek bronze original that was found in 1781. It is a 1st-century AD copy of Myron‘s original bronze. Following its discovery at a Roman property of the Massimo family, the Villa Palombara on the Esquiline Hill, it was initially restored by Giuseppe Angelini; the Massimo installed it in their Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne and then at Palazzo Lancellotti. The Italian archaeologist Giovanni Battista Visconti identified the sculpture as a copy from the original of Myron. It was instantly famous, though the Massimo jealously guarded access to it. Hitler had bought the Roman copy from its private Italian owner in 1938 and was returned to Italy in 1948 as part of works illegally obtained by the Nazis.

The dispute arose when the director of the National Roman Museum requested the statue’s 17th-century marble base be returned from the Antikensammlungen state antiquities collection. The German museum instead asked for the return of the Discobolus Palombara, saying it had been illegally transported to Italy in 1948, the Corriere della Sera newspaper reported Friday.

Sangiuliano, expressed doubts that the German culture minister, Claudia Roth, was aware of the Bavarian request.

“I made a joke — they’ll have to step over my dead body,’’ the minister told Italian Rai state TV on Saturday evening. In his comments, he slammed the German request for its return as “inadmissible.”

“This work was obtained fraudulently by the Nazis, and it’s part of our national heritage,’’ Sangiuliano told Rai. He expressed hope that the base would be returned.

The chance that Discobolus will be returned to Germany is zero!

Tony

Sam Altman

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd has a spot-on column today commenting on the recent debacle at OpenAI that saw the firing and rehiring of the CEO, Sam Altman.  Her column portrays the coming “Apocalypse” that the likes of Altman and the tech elites in Silicon Valley will bring to our world via AI.  Here is an excerpt.

“My favorite “Twilight Zone” episode is the one where aliens land and, in a sign of their peaceful intentions, give world leaders a book. Government cryptographers work to translate the alien language. They decipher the title — “To Serve Man” — and that’s reassuring, so interplanetary shuttles are set up.

But as the cryptographers proceed, they realize — too late — that it’s a cookbook.

That, dear reader, is the story of OpenAI.

It was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit to serve man, to keep an eye on galloping A.I. technology and ensure there were guardrails and kill switches — because when A.I. hits puberty, it will be like aliens landing.

When I interviewed them at their makeshift San Francisco headquarters back in 2016, the OpenAI founders — Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman — presented themselves as our Praetorian guard against the future threat of runaway, evil A.I., against bad actors and bad bots and all the lords of the cloud who had Mary Shelley dreams of creating a new species, humanity be damned.

“We are explicitly not trying to enrich ourselves,” Sutskever told me.

Brockman was equally high-minded: “It’s not enough just to produce this technology and toss it over the fence and say, ‘OK, our job is done. Just let the world figure it out.’”

But OpenAI is tossing a lot of alarming stuff over the fence. Musk is gone, and Altman is no longer casting himself as humanity’s watchdog. He’s running a for-profit outfit, creating an A.I. cookbook. He’s less interested in peril than investors, less concerned about existential danger than finding A.I.’s capabilities. “When you see something that is technically sweet,” Robert Oppenheimer said, “you go ahead and do it.”

The government has nibbled the edges of regulation, but the quicksilver A.I. has already leaped ahead of the snaillike lawmakers and bureaucrats. Nobody, even in Silicon Valley, has any clue how to control it.

OpenAI’s wild ride two weeks ago was farcical — a coup against Altman that collapsed and turned into a restoration. But it was also terrifying because it showed that we are totally at the mercy of Silicon Valley boys with their toys, egos crashing, temperaments colliding, ambition and greed soaring.”

Dowd’s column portends well of what is likely to come.  In sum, nations and governments do not have the wherewithal to control AI.

Read Dowd’s entire column below.

Tony

—————————————————————————————-

The New York Times

Sam Altman, Sugarcoating the Apocalypse

Dec. 2, 2023

Credit…Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Washington

My favorite “Twilight Zone” episode is the one where aliens land and, in a sign of their peaceful intentions, give world leaders a book. Government cryptographers work to translate the alien language. They decipher the title — “To Serve Man” — and that’s reassuring, so interplanetary shuttles are set up.

But as the cryptographers proceed, they realize — too late — that it’s a cookbook.

That, dear reader, is the story of OpenAI.

It was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit to serve man, to keep an eye on galloping A.I. technology and ensure there were guardrails and kill switches — because when A.I. hits puberty, it will be like aliens landing.

When I interviewed them at their makeshift San Francisco headquarters back in 2016, the OpenAI founders — Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman — presented themselves as our Praetorian guard against the future threat of runaway, evil A.I., against bad actors and bad bots and all the lords of the cloud who had Mary Shelley dreams of creating a new species, humanity be damned.

“We are explicitly not trying to enrich ourselves,” Sutskever told me.

Brockman was equally high-minded: “It’s not enough just to produce this technology and toss it over the fence and say, ‘OK, our job is done. Just let the world figure it out.’”

But OpenAI is tossing a lot of alarming stuff over the fence. Musk is gone, and Altman is no longer casting himself as humanity’s watchdog. He’s running a for-profit outfit, creating an A.I. cookbook. He’s less interested in peril than investors, less concerned about existential danger than finding A.I.’s capabilities. “When you see something that is technically sweet,” Robert Oppenheimer said, “you go ahead and do it.”

The government has nibbled the edges of regulation, but the quicksilver A.I. has already leaped ahead of the snaillike lawmakers and bureaucrats. Nobody, even in Silicon Valley, has any clue how to control it.

OpenAI’s wild ride two weeks ago was farcical — a coup against Altman that collapsed and turned into a restoration. But it was also terrifying because it showed that we are totally at the mercy of Silicon Valley boys with their toys, egos crashing, temperaments colliding, ambition and greed soaring.

Whatever you want to say about Musk’s recent unraveling — his manic edge, his offensive tweets, his strange, angular cybertruck — he has been passionate in working against rogue A.I. The perhaps quixotic quest of aligning A.I. progress to protect human values has caused Musk many a sleepless night and many a fractured friendship.

He lured Sutskever, a dazzling Russian engineer, from Google to OpenAI. Larry Page, a co-founder of Google and an A.I. accelerationist, was furious at his good friend Musk for poaching Sutskever and broke with him. Page dismissively told Musk he was “a specist” for siding with the human species in the A.I. argument.

Musk also scrapped with Altman. As Walter Isaacson wrote in “Elon Musk,” the mercurial mogul summoned Altman in February, asking him to bring OpenAI’s founding documents. Not too long after, Musk tweeted: “I’m still confused as to how a nonprofit to which I donated $100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?”

Speaking to Kara Swisher, Altman called Musk a “jerk.”

As with Shakespeare, personality clashes are shaping life-or-death decisions in the battle over A.I. One thing that may have touched off the rebellion against Altman was that he diminished Sutskever’s role at the company.

We still don’t know exactly what happened. Did the board see some progress in the A.I. algorithm that jolted them enough to fire Altman for fear he was pushing products without enough regard for safeguards?

Certainly, the A.I. is getting better at reasoning, making fewer mistakes, hallucinating less — the term for making up stuff — and doing complicated math puzzles.

Musk recently praised Sutskever for having “a good moral compass.” Was the young engineer, who joined the doomers on the board and delivered the bad news to Altman before recanting, influenced by his mentor at Google, Geoffrey Hinton?

Hinton, the so-called godfather of artificial intelligence, was stunned by OpenAI’s miracle baby, ChatGPT, realizing we may be only a few years from A.I. being smarter than we are. Hinton gloomily told “60 Minutes” in October that A.I. could malevolently turn on us, manipulating us with what it has learned from being fed all the books ever written, including works of Machiavelli.

Unlike Musk, who can be awkward and go into “demon mode,” according to Isaacson, Altman is smooth in his dealings with investors, techies and lawmakers, comfy in T-shirt and jeans. One top Silicon Valley scientist described the 38-year-old Altman as “weirdly adorable.” Friendly with many reporters, he has assumed the role of the upbeat face of A.I.’s future.

But do we want someone with a sunny disposition about A.I.? No. Not when, as Musk warned last Thursday, “The apocalypse could come along at any moment.”

Pablo Guzmán in 1970. As a founding member of the Young Lords in New York, he helped stage street actions to highlight the deplorable conditions of certain neighborhoods.  Credit…Robert Walker/The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Pablo Guzman,  a founding member and the voice of the Young Lords in the 1970s, and later an Emmy-winning television reporter died last week of cardiac arrest.  He was 73.  Below is an obituary courtesy of The New York Times that accurately portrays who Pablo was. One paragraph mentions that:

“He grew up straight and narrow. He was an altar boy at Our Lady of Pity, a Roman Catholic church in the Bronx. He graduated from the elite Bronx High School of Science in 1968, then enrolled at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, on Long Island.”

We both went to Our Lady of Pity school.  I was a few years older and had the pleasure of teaching Pablo (although back them we called him Paul)  the Latin prayers and the rituals that all of the altar boys back then had to learn. He learned quickly.  By the early 1960s, most of our neighborhood in the Morrisania section of the South Bronx was razed to make way for urban development, much of which did not happen until decades later. I lost touch with Pablo but saw his rise as a leader of the Young Lords and as a reporter.  As adults we met accidentally at a Grand Union in Westchester where we both lived.  We talked about the old days in the South Bronx and mutual friends.

He made his mark on New York City!

May he rest in peace!

Tony

Mr. Guzmán in 2007 when he was a senior correspondent for WCBS-TV in New York. He won two Emmys, including one for his coverage of the murder of a New York police officer. Credit…via WCBS-TV

————————————————————-

The New York Times

Pablo Guzmán, Puerto Rican Activist Turned TV Newsman, Dies at 73

He was the voice of the Young Lords in the 1970s, pushing to improve life in poor New York neighborhoods. Later, he won Emmys as a local media celebrity.

Pablo Guzmán in 1970. As a founding member of the Young Lords in New York, he helped stage street actions to highlight the deplorable conditions of certain neighborhoods.Credit…Robert Walker/The New York Times

By Clay Risen

Published Nov. 30, 2023. Updated Dec. 2, 2023

Pablo Guzmán, who gained widespread media attention in the early 1970s as a leader of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican activist group based in East Harlem, then flipped the script to become an Emmy-winning television news reporter, died on Sunday in Westchester County, N.Y. He was 73.

His wife, Debbie Guzmán, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was cardiac arrest.

The Young Lords, which Mr. Guzmán helped found in 1969, grabbed New York’s attention with high-profile street actions intended to highlight the deplorable condition of neighborhoods like the South Bronx and East Harlem.

They built walls of garbage across city streets to protest ineffective sanitation, then set them on fire; they took over a church and used it to offer free breakfast to school children; and they briefly occupied a Bronx hospital, turning it into a free clinic.

Sanford Garelik, the City Council president at the time, derided the Young Lords as “terrorists.” Both the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department spied on the group.

But thanks in large part to the charismatic Mr. Guzmán, the Young Lords’ minister of communication, the news media and large swaths of the public considered them folk heroes.

He developed close relationships with reporters, giving them a heads-up before the next Young Lords action. He gave news conferences full of wit and quotable quips. And he was a wizard on the stump, drawing on influences like Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton to give voice to Puerto Rican identity at a time when the community was either ignored or feared by the city’s white establishment.

“If the Young Lords were considered the darling of the New York press, it was because of how Pablo organized the narrative,” Mickey Melendez, another founding member of the Young Lords, said in a phone interview. “We were good copy.”

Like many street-level organizations of the late 1960s and early ’70s, the Young Lords were short-lived. Undermined by law enforcement and torn by ideological differences, they folded by 1975, but not before leaving an indelible mark on the city.

Not only did their activism force the city to act — improving garbage pickup, banning lead paint in homes and building a new hospital in the Bronx — but they also brought pride and awareness to New York’s Puerto Rican community. They helped drive the Nuyorican renaissance of the 1960s and ’70s and gave legitimacy to the wave of Puerto Ricans who poured into the city’s political and cultural establishment over the next decades.

“The Young Lords gave Puerto Ricans a kind of coming-out party in the city,” said Johanna Fernández, an associate professor of history at Baruch College and the author of “The Young Lords: A Radical History” (2019).

Mr. Guzmán took his media skills and street credibility to his next career, in journalism. He started out writing freelance articles for The Village Voice and hosting and producing a series of radio shows before becoming a reporter for WNEW-TV, a Fox affiliate.

He went on to report for WNBC-TV and, from 1996 to 2013, for WCBS-TV as a senior correspondent. He won two Emmys, including one for his coverage of the murder of a New York police officer.

In these roles Mr. Guzmán became a celebrity of a different kind, for a different generation of New Yorkers. Avuncular, witty and erudite, he was at home interviewing children and mobsters, sanitation men and diplomats.

He was the mob boss John Gotti’s favorite reporter, the one Mr. Gotti called immediately after emerging from court during his trials of the 1980s and ’90s.

“People found him approachable,” Geraldo Rivera, who was a lawyer for the Young Lords before becoming a TV reporter, said in a phone interview. “He could go where a lot of rookie journalists couldn’t go.”

Paul Guzmán was born in Manhattan on Aug. 17, 1950, to Raúl and Sally (Palomino) Guzmán. His father was a department store manager; his mother was an office worker for Citibank. The family moved to the South Bronx when Paul was young.

He grew up straight and narrow. He was an altar boy at Our Lady of Pity, a Roman Catholic church in the Bronx. He graduated from the elite Bronx High School of Science in 1968, then enrolled at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, on Long Island.

He married Debbie Corley in 1990. In addition to her, he is survived by their children, Daniel and Angela; his mother; and his sister, Tanya Guzmán.

During the second semester of his freshman year, Mr. Guzmán studied at a university in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The experience awakened in him an awareness of his Latino identity: He grew an Afro, began going by Pablo (he later legally changed his name) and returned more interested in street activism than in completing his degree.

“Most of us in the United States did not know what we were,” he wrote in The Village Voice in 1984, describing his generation of Puerto Ricans. “We tended to identify, according to our skin color, with ‘being white’ or ‘being Black.’”

Mr. Guzmán joined a small group of like-minded young activists, mostly Puerto Ricans, to form the Sociedad de Albizu Campos, named for a leading figure in the Puerto Rican independence movement.

Early on, the group read an article about a similar organization in Chicago, the Young Lords, which originated as a street gang in the early 1960s. By the end of that decade, under the influence of the Black Panthers, they had reformed themselves as political agitators.

In 1969, Mr. Guzmán and three others drove to Chicago to meet the Young Lords leadership and returned with permission to start a New York chapter. Less than a year later, though, they split from the Chicago branch, convinced that it was not sufficiently revolutionary.

The Young Lords were militant but not militaristic; despite their stated commitment to “armed struggle,” they rarely carried guns or sought confrontation with the authorities. Instead, Mr. Guzmán encouraged them to stage dramatic actions to embarrass the city into action, like the time they “liberated” — some would say stole — a truck full of equipment used to test for lead poisoning and tuberculosis, both scourges of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

The group always claimed inspiration from Communist China, and over time their commitment to Maoism deepened. In 1971, Mr. Guzmán joined a delegation of 70 Black and Latino activists on a monthslong trip to China.

But he also reacted to the increasingly sectarian drive among other Young Lords leaders, and to their growing commitment of resources to Puerto Rican independence — efforts, he felt, that eroded their connections to everyday New Yorkers.

After serving nine months in federal prison in Florida for resisting the draft, Mr. Guzmán returned to New York in 1974 to find the organization utterly transformed. Even its name was different — it was now the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Party. He left at the end of the year, and in 1976 the party collapsed.

Thanks to his long career as a journalist, many New Yorkers who recognized him as a daily presence on the nightly news knew little of his time with the Young Lords. And while Mr. Guzmán never hid his history, he preferred to focus on his adventures in front of the camera.

He liked to tell about covering a visit by Nelson Mandela, then the president of South Africa, to New York in the 1990s. At one point a member of the Mandela delegation told him that Mr. Mandela wanted to speak to Mr. Guzmán privately.

“My ego was jumping,” he recounted in an ad for WCBS. “All the other reporters thought I had the inside track. So I went over to him, and he wanted to ask me about John Gotti.”

Source: Sandra Day O’Connor Institute for American Democracy

Dear Commons Community,

Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court and the justice who held the court’s center for more than a generation, died yesterday.   She was 93.

Her cause of death was complications related to advanced dementia and a respiratory illness. As reported by NBC News.

Chief Justice John Roberts said in a statement that O’Connor “blazed an historic trail as our nation’s first female justice.”

He said the justices “mourn the loss of a beloved colleague, a fiercely independent defender of the rule of law, and an eloquent advocate for civics education.”

From the early 1990s until her retirement in 2006, she was the indisputable swing justice, often casting the deciding vote in the court’s most contentious cases. Her lack of a consistent judicial philosophy rankled some, but others praised her practical bent as a moderating influence.

She sometimes sided with the court’s conservatives, approving taxpayer-funded vouchers for students at religious schools, voting to end the 2000 Florida recount between George W. Bush and Al Gore, and advocating for states’ rights against federal control.

But she joined with the court’s liberals in affirming abortion rights, upholding affirmative action in college admissions, approving the creation of more congressional districts with Black voters in the majority, and keeping a wall of separation between government and religion.

As the court has moved further to the right in recent years, her legacy has been undermined, with the 6-3 conservative majority ending the right to abortion and the consideration of race in college admissions, emphasizing how her modest approach to judging was the hallmark of a different era.

Her reputation as a moderate took a hit when she sided with the conservative justices in the 5-4 Bush. v. Gore ruling, a decision over which she later expressed regrets. The court perhaps should have stayed out of the Florida recount issue altogether, she said in a 2013 interview with the Chicago Tribune editorial board. The ruling, she added, “stirred up the public” and “gave the court a less than perfect reputation.”

O’Connor also faced criticism for announcing her retirement in 2005, allowing Bush to replace her with the more aggressively conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who in 2022 wrote the ruling that overturned the abortion rights landmark Roe v. Wade, a step she had been unwilling to take.

O’Connor grew up on the Lazy B, a 160,000-acre cattle ranch in the high desert country straddling the Arizona-New Mexico border. She graduated from law school at Stanford University, where she met her future husband, John, and struck up a lifelong friendship with William Rehnquist, a classmate who would eventually become the nation’s chief justice.

Following four years of service in the Arizona attorney general’s office, she was appointed to fill a vacancy in the state Senate in 1969. After being re-elected, she became the first woman in the country to be a state Senate majority leader.

She then turned her attention to the courts, running for and winning a position as a Maricopa County Superior Court judge.

In 1981, she came highly recommended when President Ronald Reagan was looking for someone to help him keep a campaign promise to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court. She sounded like a conservative during her Senate confirmation hearing, expressing opposition to the notion that the right to abortion was constitutionally protected.

“My own view in the area of abortion is that I’m opposed to it as a matter of birth control or otherwise,” she said. After she was unanimously confirmed, 99-0, she at first criticized Roe v. Wade, but she later joined the court’s majority in a series of cases upholding abortion rights.

President Ronald Reagan and Sandra Day O’Connor. (AP)

As the first female justice, her every action was scrutinized, attention that she would later say was intimidating. “It’s thrilling, in a way, to be the first to do something, the first woman ever to serve on the court. But it’s dreadful if you’re the last. And if I didn’t do the job well, that’s what would happen.”

Seven years after coming to the court, she underwent surgery for breast cancer. Years later, she said the disease “fostered a desire in me to make each and every day a good day.”

She and John O’Connor were married in 1952 and had three children. The O’Connors were frequent guests at Washington social events. An encounter at formal dinner with NFL star John Riggins made national headlines when he told her at one point, “Loosen up, Sandy baby.”

At age 75, O’Connor abruptly announced her intention to step down from the Supreme Court to attend to her husband, who had Alzheimer’s disease. He died in 2009 at age 79.

She remained active, urging states to do away with elections for judges, which she said made the courts too political. And she was outspoken in saying that the nation’s public schools were shirking their responsibility to provide civics education.

O’Connor’s appointment as the first woman justice not only made history, but it also prodded other states to start putting women on their supreme courts. But she recoiled at the thought that a woman would decide cases differently. She was fond of quoting a letter from a supporter who wrote, “Dear Justice O’Connor: Don’t be intimidated by all those men and especially the chief justice. You put on your robes the same way.”

O’Connor summed up her legacy in a 2012 conversation with Makers: “I think of myself as an old lady who’s had a pretty darn good career.”

A class act!

May she rest in peace!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

George Santos was expelled from Congress yesterday after a scathing House Ethics Committee report found substantial evidence Santos misused campaign funds for his own personal benefit and committed federal crimes.

The House voted to boot Santos, R-N.Y., from the lower chamber by a bipartisan vote of 311-114. An expulsion vote requires a two-thirds vote to pass.

Despite the early momentum for his expulsion, Santos’ removal was still in question the morning of the vote as lawmakers demurred over whether they were certain they had the votes to oust him. All of the top House GOP leadership, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., announced they would vote against his expulsion.

Speaking outside the Capitol steps, members of New York’s GOP delegation, who spearheaded the efforts to expel Santos, took a victory lap but lamented that Santos hadn’t stepped down in the first place.  As reported by USA Today and Bloomberg Reports.

“It’s a sad day,” Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, R-N.Y., said. “We hear about Santos every single day. You go to the barber shop, you go to church, you go to the post office, you go get a slice of good New York pizza and people want to talk about George Santos.”

“Santos should have held himself accountable and he should have resigned when he had the chance,” he added.

Lawmakers who voted against Santos’ expulsion sought not to defend the first-term lawmaker’s alleged misconduct but expressed concerns over setting new precedent in Congress. Only two House members have been expelled in modern times and both were convicted of crimes before their expulsion.

George Santos

Trouble from before Day One

The New York native has been mired in controversy since before he entered Congress, when it was reported Santos had baldly embellished and fabricated parts of his resume and background, including claims that he’d worked at the Goldman Sachs investment bank and that his grandmother was a victim of the Holocaust.

“I’ve been a terrible liar,” he said during a TV interview last February.

During his brief tenure in Congress, the Long Island Republican was slapped with a multitude of federal charges, including money laundering, wire fraud, identity theft, credit card fraud and lying to Congress.

Santos faced calls to resign from both sides of the aisle in the face of those controversies, but he remained defiant up until his expulsion. While he has admitted to lying about his background, he has denied all wrongdoing and has pleaded not guilty to the federal charges.

Congressman George Santos (R-NY) holds a press conference on the House Triangle outside of the United States Capitol on Thursday, Nov. 30, 2023, in Washington, DC.

His opponents have pushed to remove him from Congress twice already, but those efforts ultimately failed while lawmakers awaited the House Ethics Committee to release its report.

“I’ve been very clear. He’s unfit to serve and I’ve been clear from the start that he needed to go,” Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., said Friday. “You cannot allow a sociopath to serve in public office when you know full well that he defrauded voters and donors and the evidence was overwhelming.”

House report: Santos ‘cannot be trusted’

After the damning report was made public last month, momentum to expel Santos once and for all swiftly gained traction, leading to Friday’s vote on an expulsion resolution introduced by Rep. Michael Guest, R-Miss., chair of the Ethics committee.

The 56-page ethics report found evidence Santos sought to “exploit” his House campaign for his financial benefit including “blatantly” stealing from his own campaign and deceiving campaign donors.

“Representative George Santos cannot be trusted. At nearly every opportunity, he placed his desire for private gain above his duty to uphold the Constitution, federal law, and ethical principles,” the Ethics Committee report read.

Disgrace, or a ‘badge of honor’?

In one instance, Santos allegedly used $50,000 in campaign funds to pay off his own personal debt; make a purchase at Hermes, a luxury apparel store; make smaller purchases on OnlyFans, a subscription service for explicit content, at Sephoram and for meals and parking.

On the campaign trail, Santos’ lies were so extravagant, his own campaign staff called him a “fabulist” and encouraged him to “seek treatment,” according to the report.

Despite the clear resounding support among both Democrats and Republicans to expel him in advance of the House’s vote, Santos refused to resign and accepted his fate, saying in a three-hour conversation on X spaces, formerly Twitter spaces, that he would take his removal in stride and “wear it like a badge of honor.”

Trouble for the GOP

Santos has also derided the ethics report as an attempt to “smear me” and “force me out of my seat,” saying it “wasn’t a finding of facts.”

Santos’ expulsion is a rare sight for Congress. Santos is the sixth member ever to be expelled from the House and is the first member in modern times to be expelled without having been convicted of a crime. His absence will shrink the House GOP’s already razor-thin majority to 221 seats over Democrats’ 213 seats.

To make matters worse for Republicans, Santos’ district leans Democratic, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, offering Democrats a pick-up opportunity to narrow the GOP’s majority further. New York law mandates Gov. Kathy Hochul must declare a special election within ten days of a seat’s vacancy, and the state must hold the election between 70-80 days after Hochul’s proclamation.

Good riddance to this leach!

Tony

Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom. (AP Photo)

Dear Commons Community,

As voters continue to express their distaste at the prospect of a 2020 presidential rematch next year, two fresher-faced governors provided the current contest with a sideshow that could preview a future race.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California have been polar opposites since taking office and often use each other as public foils when making their political arguments.

Billed as a red state versus blue state debate, the discussion comes at a time when DeSantis’ 2024 campaign has fallen short of expectations as the chief rival against former President Donald Trump in the GOP primary and Newsom has repeatedly denied that he’s waiting in the wings on the Democratic side.

“The one thing we have in common is neither of us will be our party’s nominee in 2024,” Newsom said Thursday night.

But DeSantis’s struggles seven weeks ahead of the Iowa caucuses cannot fully eclipse troubles on the Democratic side.

Prominent liberals are openly questioning President Joe Biden’s fitness with many progressives saying he should bow out due to lingering questions about his mental and physical capabilities.

“And you know, Gavin Newsom agrees with that,” DeSantis said during Thursday’s debate. “He won’t say that. That’s why he’s running his shadow campaign.”

Below are five takeaways from yesterday’s clash courtesy of USA Today.

Tony

——————————————————————————–

5 takeaways from the DeSantis and Newsom debatePhillip M. Bailey, USA TODAY

November 30, 2023 at 11:23 PM

Gen-X leaders tussle over Biden, Trump

Given the role age is expected to play in the 2024 presidential contest, the two governors — when compared to the 81-year-old Biden and 77-year-old Trump — are young, rising stars in their respective parties.

Almost every question asked by Fox News host Sean Hannity, who moderated the conversation, will be viewed through the lens of the current presidential race as the two jousted over whose state is doing better.

Newsom, 56, regularly defended the Biden administration and stiff armed suggestions that he will run while regularly scoring digs against DeSantis, 45, who has struggled since entering the GOP primary.

“Joe Biden will be our nominee in a matter of weeks,” Newsom said. “And in a matter of weeks… (Ron) will be endorsing Donald Trump as a nominee for the Republican Party.”

But Florida’s leader struck back by regularly calling attention to how voters remain pessimistic about higher costs and many don’t believe the president is up to the job.

“(Gavin) says Joe Biden is 100% up to the job,” DeSantis said. “You know that’s not true. He wants you to believe him over your own lying eyes.”

COVID-19 differences: ‘You even wore a mask’

One area where DeSantis and Newsom arguably couldn’t be more different is their philosophy on how the country handled the coronavirus pandemic, which was a defining issue for many governors in 2020.

DeSantis has hung much of his popularity among conservatives on resisting COVID-19 restrictions. He boasted about that during Thursday’s debate, claiming the California governor hurt the economy and students by refusing to release certain closures.

“I had Disney opened during COVID and we made them a fortune. We saved a lot of jobs,” he said. “You had Disney closed inexplicably for over a year. You are not following science. You were a lockdown governor, you did a lot of damage to your people.”

Advertisement

Newsom fired back, however, by pointing out the negative health consequences and how DeSantis embraced restrictions in the early days of the crisis when Florida declared the pandemic an emergency and imposed closures at beaches, bars and restaurants.

“You even wore a mask,” Newsom said. “He did all of that until he decided to fall prey to the fringe of his party, and as a consequence of that, Ron, tens of thousands of people lost their lives.”

Mispronouncing the VP’s name

During one tiny exchange during the COVID-19 portion of the debate, Newsom called out DeSantis over the pronunciation of Vice President Kamala Harris’ name.

Newsom interrupted DeSantis, saying the Florida Republican was insulting her on purpose.

“It’s Madame vice president to you,” Newsom said. “Stop insulting.”

California vs. Florida: Crime, gun safety and homelessness

Much of the debate also touched on how differently red and blue states address problems from taxes to violent crime.

At the outset, DeSantis and Newsom battled over why Americans are leaving more liberal-leaning states for more conservatives ones, according to Census data.

DeSantis, who at one point held up a map documenting human feces in San Fransisco, noted how even Newsom’s father-in-law moved to the Sunshine State in recent years.

New population data has shown roughly 29,000 Floridians moved to California in 2022, compared to about 51,000 Californians flocking to Florida.

“He’s the first governor to ever lose population,” DeSantis said. “They actually, at one point, ran out of U-Hauls in the state of California because so many people were leaving.”

At various points when Hannity contrasted the two states, Newsom defended the Golden State’s achievements and huge population, saying his state “has no peers.”

Abortion marks deep contrast

A sharp disagreement was predictably on abortion, an issue where Democrats have scored consecutive wins in various statewide ballot initiatives.

Newsom was pressed by DeSantis and Hannity on what restrictions, if any, he would support in the final months of pregnancy. He declined to engage with the question of at what stage the procedure should be prohibited, however.

“I trust the mother and her doctor to make that decision,” Newsom said.

Abortion-rights protesters rally at the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery on June 26, 2022.

Newsom returned fire by pressing DeSantis to explain if he would sign a 6-week national abortion ban similar to the legislation he signed into law in Florida, which he said, “even Donald Trump said it was too extreme.”

DeSantis dodged Newsom’s question, however., instead telling Hannity he supports the “culture of life” and pivoted to how Democrats won’t say if they support any regulation on abortion.

An anthrobot, in green, grows across a scratch through neuronal tissue, in red. (Advanced Science.)

Dear Commons Community,

Scientists have created tiny living robots from human cells that can move around in a lab dish and may one day be able to help heal wounds or damaged tissue. A team at Tufts University and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute have dubbed these creations anthrobots. The research builds on earlier work from some of the same scientists, who made the first living robots, or xenobots, from stem cells sourced from embryos of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis).  As reported by CNN.

“Some people thought that the features of the xenobots relied a lot on the fact that they are embryonic and amphibian”  Michael Levin, Vannevar Bush professor of biology at Tufts’ School of Arts & Sciences.

“I don’t think this has anything to do with being an embryo. This has nothing to do with being a frog. I think this is a much more general property of living things,” he said.

“We don’t realize all the competencies that our own body cells have.”

While alive, the anthrobots were not full-fledged organisms because they didn’t have a full life cycle, Levin said. 

“It reminds us that these harsh binary categories that we’ve operated with: Is that a robot, is that an animal, is that a machine? These kinds of things don’t serve us very well. We need to get beyond that.”

The study describing this research was published yesterday and is available in the journal Advanced Science. 

Below is an abstract from the study.

Tony

———————————————————————————————————————–

Advanced Science

Motile Living Biobots Self-Construct from Adult Human Somatic Progenitor Seed Cells

Gizem Gumuskaya, Pranjal Srivastava, Ben G. Cooper, Hannah Lesser, Ben Semegran, Simon Garnier, Michael Levin

First published: 30 November 2023

https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202303575

Abstract

Fundamental knowledge gaps exist about the plasticity of cells from adult soma and the potential diversity of body shape and behavior in living constructs derived from genetically wild-type cells. Here anthrobots are introduced, a spheroid-shaped multicellular biological robot (biobot) platform with diameters ranging from 30 to 500 microns and cilia-powered locomotive abilities. Each Anthrobot begins as a single cell, derived from the adult human lung, and self-constructs into a multicellular motile biobot after being cultured in extra cellular matrix for 2 weeks and transferred into a minimally viscous habitat. Anthrobots exhibit diverse behaviors with motility patterns ranging from tight loops to straight lines and speeds ranging from 5–50 microns s⁻¹. The anatomical investigations reveal that this behavioral diversity is significantly correlated with their morphological diversity. Anthrobots can assume morphologies with fully polarized or wholly ciliated bodies and spherical or ellipsoidal shapes, each related to a distinct movement type. Anthrobots are found to be capable of traversing, and inducing rapid repair of scratches in, cultured human neural cell sheets in vitro. By controlling microenvironmental cues in bulk, novel structures, with new and unexpected behavior and biomedically-relevant capabilities, can be discovered in morphogenetic processes without direct genetic editing or manual sculpting.