Here is the Lincoln Project’s latest video: We will vote. We must vote to oust the worst president in American history.
Archives for the month of: July, 2020
Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin writes in The New Yorker that Trump’s pardon of convicted felon Roger Stone proves that Trump is worse than Nixon. Nixon worries about appearances. Trump never does. Trump is shameless. He flaunts his lack of ethics and his complete indifference to norms.
On March 21, 1973, President Richard Nixon and John Dean, the White House counsel, conferred in the Oval Office about ways to keep the Watergate scandal from consuming the Administration. The two men weighed the possibility of a pardon or commutation for E. Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate burglars. “Hunt’s now demanding clemency or he’s going to blow,” Dean said. “And, politically, it’d be impossible for, you know, you to do it.” Nixon agreed: “That’s right.” Dean continued, “I’m not sure that you’ll ever be able to deliver on clemency. It may be just too hot.” Neither Nixon nor Dean had especially refined senses of morality or legal ethics, but even they seemed to understand that a President could not use his pardon power to erase charges against someone who might offer testimony implicating Nixon himself in a crime. To do so, they recognized, would be too unseemly, too transparent, too egregiously corrupt. And, in fact, Nixon never gave a pardon, or commuted a sentence, of anyone implicated in the Watergate scandal.
But, on Friday night, Donald Trump commuted the prison sentence of Roger Stone, his associate and political mentor of more than three decades. Last year, Stone was convicted of obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, and witness tampering in a case brought by Robert Mueller, the special counsel. William Barr, the Attorney General, had already overridden the sentencing recommendation of the prosecutors who tried the case—a nearly unprecedented act—and Stone was ultimately sentenced to forty months in prison. But Barr’s unseemly interference in the case was somehow not enough for the President, so Trump made sure that Stone would serve no time at all. The only trace of shame in Trump’s announcement was that he delivered it on a Friday night—supposedly when the public is least attentive.
A new study by German researchers concludes that dogs can be trained to identify people who are infected with the coronavirus.
Dogs with a few days of training are capable of identifying people infected with the coronavirus, according to a study by a German veterinary university.
Eight dogs from Germany’s armed forces were trained for only a week and were able to accurately identify the virus with a 94% success rate, according to a pilot project led by the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover. Researchers challenged the dogs to sniff out Covid-19 in the saliva of more than 1,000 healthy and infected people…
Dogs, which have a sense of smell around 1,000 times more sensitive than humans, could be deployed to detect infections at places such as airports, border crossings and sporting events with the proper training, according to the researchers. The study was conducted jointly with the German armed forces, the Hannover Medical School and the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.
Von Koeckritz-Blickwede said that the next step will be to train dogs to differentiate Covid samples from other diseases like influenza.
Ron Berler writes about education. This article originally appeared at Medium. He originally wrote the article at the beginning of Trump’s presidency but thinks it resonates today.
It was the Friday before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Kathryn Frey had decided to read Carmen Agra Deedy’s children’s book, “The Yellow Star: The Legend of King Christian X of Denmark,” to her fourth-grade, Greenwich, Conn., class. It tells a tale of how the king and his countrymen protected that nation’s Jews from Nazi persecution during World War II.
Frey teaches at New Lebanon School, one of the town’s three Title I elementary schools. Some know Greenwich as a tony New York suburb. But one corner of it is not. In her class of 18, there are 14 Latinos, two African Americans and two whites. Seventeen are either immigrants or the children of immigrants.
Frey was sick that day, so I was recruited to read to her students. The children, 9 and 10, gathered in front of me on the rug. They had barely heard of Nazi Germany or the war, and couldn’t say when the events in question took place. But they did have a firm sense of right and wrong. They blanched when I told them what the Nazis had done and how they had discriminated.
I opened the book and began to read, pausing after each page to show the children the illustrations that help illuminate the story. Deedy’s picture book is myth inspired by fact. In her telling, the king encouraged all his people to wear on their outer clothing the yellow star meant by the Nazis to identify and isolate Jews, so the invaders wouldn’t know who was Jewish and who was not. History teaches that the king protected Denmark’s Jews by other means. But the students got the point: Jews, non-Jews, all were Danes.
Since President Donald Trump issued his initial immigration executive order, temporarily barring U.S. entry to visa holders from seven predominantly Muslim nations, and banning refugees from all nations and those from Syria indefinitely, I’ve thought quite a bit about Deedy’s book, and why Frey chose it for her students. I sought her out in her classroom.
Frey has taught for 30 years, the last four at New Lebanon. She invited me to sit at a round, child-size worktable near the center of the room. We were alone; her students were in gym class. The wall in front of us was lined with baskets of books that made up the room’s library. Above them was a partial timeline of U.S. history, from the first British expedition to Roanoke Island, N.C., in 1584, to the civil-rights era, in 1960.
Frey said that the class had just begun a unit on historical fiction — a genre with which few of the students were familiar. She had selected “The Yellow Star” for its simple theme and its schoolchild accessibility. “This is the first time that most of them have been exposed to historical time periods,” she said. “At this age, they know famous people, but they don’t have a sense of what happened. They know Martin Luther King, and when I returned the day after his holiday, we talked about how a person’s actions and words can cause change. They made the connection between Dr. King and King Christian.”
Change and action and the power of words have taken on particular meaning for her students.
“The day after the [presidential] election, several children told me they were very worried about what might happen to them,” Frey said. “They talked about it that morning among themselves when they came into class. They were worried about their families. One boy came to me in tears and said he was leaving the country, that his family was going back to Portugal. He went around the room, saying goodbye to his friends. Later that day I called his dad. The boy was mistaken; the family was staying.”
But the damage was done.
It took 15 minutes to read “The Yellow Star” to the class. Upon finishing, I looked up at the students. From their expressions, I feared I had upset some of them all over again. When I asked their thoughts on those who had threatened Denmark’s Jews, their response was heartfelt, uncomplicated. “That’s wrong,” blurted one boy, to general agreement. “It’s not fair,” seconded another.
The students never mentioned President Trump or his executive order. But they decided they liked King Christian X very much.
You may wonder, What’s a libertarian school? Good question. It’s not Summerhill. Read Mitchell Robinson’s post about Thales Academy in Apex, North Carolina, which is a voucher school.
It’s a low-cost, low-quality Private school that’s designed to standardize students and protect them from creative or critical thinking. It’s yet another entrant in DeVos’ “Cabinet of Horrors.” More of this and we will slip back into primordial slime.
Leonie Haimson writes that charter schools in New York City cleaned up with the Paycheck Protection Program, even none of them lost their secure government funding.
Payday!
Leonie writes:
In NY State there are 144 charter schools and management organizations that received PPP funding, the vast majority of which are in NYC. Fully 108 NYC charters and charter management companies received between $102 million and $236 million in these funds, with an average of between $940,000 and $2.2 million each.
The Charter Management Organization of New Visions and its assorted charters received between $6.7 million and $15 million dollars, despite the fact that they receive public school space free of charge and services from DOE. In 2018, they also received a $14 million grant from the Gates Foundation to “work with” NYC public schools — which to this day have not been identified. Coincidentally or not, the Gates Foundation director of K12 schools Robert Hughes came to the Gates Foundation from New Visions.One of their schools, New Visions Charter HS for the Humanities II, will be receiving an extra amount of between $2,000 and $4,000 per student, based upon their total enrollment last year of 496.
Harlem Children’s Zone was awarded between $4 million and $10 million, with Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy II receiving between $1,800 and $4,500 per student, based on their total enrollment last year of 1,093. The Hebrew Language Academies, heavily subsidized by billionaire Michael Steinhardt, received between $2.8 million and $6 million. One of their schools, Harlem Hebrew Language Academy, is receiving between $1,400 and $2,900 per student, based on their planned enrollment of 696 last year. Harlem Village Academy West Charter School received between $2 million and $5 million, from $2,200 to $5,500 per student based on last year’s enrollment of 902.
Williamsburg Charter High School was given between $2 million and $5 million, a total of $2,000 to $5,000 per student based on their enrollment last year of 963. Brilla College Preparatory Charter Schools received between $1 million and $2 million, $1,400 to $3,000 per student based on their enrollment of 677. Pave Academy Charter School, founded by the son of billionaire Julian Robertson, was awarded between $1 million and $2 million, equaling about $2,000 to $4,000 per student based on their enrollment last year of 490.
KIPP charter and KIPP LLC (which I guess is its Management Organization) is getting between $3 million and $5 million, despite also receiving $86 million from a federal charter school grant in 2019, and many millions more previously. Uncommon Charters, which has been criticized for its abusive disciplinary practices, received between $2 million and $5 million in PPP funds. The full state and city list is below.
So are charter schools public or private? Depends on where the money is.
From Garrison Keillor’s “The Writers’ Almanac”:
It’s the birthday of the novelist Emily Brontë, born in Thornton, England (1818). Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights (1847), considered one of the greatest love stories of all time, but she never had a lover. She and her sisters Anne and Charlotte and their brother Branwell educated themselves at home by reading their father’s large collection of classic literature. They invented elaborate fantasy kingdoms and filled notebooks with the history and inhabitants of these places. Emily was the most reserved of the children.
Emily is most famous for Wuthering Heights, but she also wrote poetry; and when her sister Charlotte discovered some of Emily’s poems, she said: “Of course, I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse: I looked it over, and something more than surprise seized me — a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, not at all like the poetry women generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear, they had also a peculiar music — wild, melancholy, and elevating.” In 1836, Charlotte — who was the most outgoing and confident of the sisters — decided to publish their poetry, but she figured it wouldn’t sell if they used their real names, so she gave them all male names, and Poems by Currier, Ellis and Acton Bell was published in 1846. Wuthering Heights came out in 1847, and a year later, Emily died of tuberculosis at age 30, standing in the living room of her family’s parsonage.
I’m sorry about Emily, but I can’t get over the image of her dying while standing. Is that possible?
Dana Milbank watched Bill Barr testify before the House Judiciary Committee and wrote this in the Washington Post:
Here comes the caravan!
In 2018, when things were looking grim for Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections, President Trump conjured a crisis. He declared “an invasion of our country” by Central American migrant caravans full of “stone cold criminals,” “unknown Middle Easterners” and “gang members” who were “putting our country in great danger.”
Trump mobilized 2,100 National Guard members and then, days before the election, 5,200 active-duty U.S. troops. He declared a national emergency and told voters to “blame the Democrats.” The voters didn’t fall for the phony crisis, and the caravan menace fizzled.
Now another electoral reckoning approaches, and Trump is following the same script. This time, he proclaims that “sick and deranged Anarchists & Agitators” in Portland, Ore., and Seattle seek to “destroy our American cities, and worse.”
Instead of using the troops again as his political props, Trump is now mobilizing armed federal police from the Justice and Homeland Security departments — and claiming that “cities would burn” if Democrats won the election.
There are two differences this time, though. The military deployment in 2018, though wasteful, did little harm. But the current deployment of federal police to Portland has provoked a dramatic increase both in peaceful protests and in violence — tensions had been subsiding before Trump’s escalation — and rekindled unrest nationwide.
The other difference: In 2018, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis restricted troops to a supporting role on the border to avoid constitutional violations. But the man leading the current provocation, Attorney General Bill Barr, displays no scruples as he whips up violence in service of Trump’s reelection.
Barr defends federal response in Portland
During a House Judiciary Committee hearing, the attorney general described the federal response to the ongoing protests in Portland. (Photo: Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
“What unfolds nightly around the [Portland] courthouse cannot reasonably be called a protest; it is, by any objective measure, an assault on the government of the United States,” Barr testified to the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
Repeatedly blurring the distinction between the masses of peaceful, racial-justice demonstrators and the small band of violent vandals, Barr said peaceful demonstrators in Lafayette Square hit with chemical agents, stun grenades and rubber bullets had been “unruly.” Pressed about the many times force has been used against nonviolent demonstrators, he declared that “protesters” — he made quotation marks with his fingers — “are not following police directions.” He justified the use of weapons against peaceful demonstrators by saying “it’s hard to separate” them from the criminals.
He dismissed the idea that there is systemic racism in policing, alleged that police use deadly force more often against white men than black men (black men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police) and blamed racial-justice protests for a spike in violence: “When a community turns on and pillories its own police, officers naturally become more risk-averse and crime rates soar. Unfortunately, we are seeing that now in many of our major cities.”
He spoke of a “mob” using “slingshots, tasers, sledgehammers, saws, knives, rifles and explosive devices” to attack federal officers serving on a strictly “defensive mission” — omitting mention of federal officers throwing nonviolent demonstrators into unmarked vans for questioning without probable cause. And he repeatedly scolded Democrats for “not coming out and condemning mob violence,” even as Democrats on the panel did just that.
But then, Barr, like his boss, is not a stickler for facts. Last week, he said of the administration’s Operation Legend, which forces federal police into U.S. cities: “The FBI went in very strong into Kansas City, and within two weeks we’ve had 200 arrests.”
The actual number of arrests in that period? One.
Barr sounded as if he were channeling Trump’s Twitter account as he denounced “the bogus Russiagate scandal,” defended Trump’s pardon of Roger Stone after Stone refused to incriminate Trump, defended the attempted dismissal of Michael Flynn’s guilty plea, defended the imprisonment of Michael Cohen after he refused to disavow criticism of Trump, defended the dismissal of the prosecutor overseeing investigations of Rudolph W. Giuliani, defended the baseless allegation that voting by mail is fraudulent, and defended armed, right-wing protesters who invaded the Michigan Capitol and called for killing the governor. (They were against “crazy rules.”) He even defended Trump’s handling of the pandemic as “superb,” while blaming the Obama administration.
Barr made no attempt to hide his contempt for the Democratic majority, telling them “I think I speak English” and “I’m going to answer the damn question,” and frequently speaking over, and occasionally laughing at, the lawmakers. The disrespect was mutual: Chairman Jerry Nadler attempted to deny Barr a five-minute bathroom break.
“You’re a real class act,” the attorney general told the chairman.
Barr knows about class. He uses federal police powers to deny peaceful Americans their constitutional rights while fomenting violence among hoodlums — all to revive Trump’s reelection bid.
This time, there really is a caravan “putting our country in great danger” — and Barr leads it.
This piece was published today on the New York Review of Books blog. Readers of this blog will be familiar with its contents. Readers of the NYBR blog will learn about the debate about how and when to reopen schools and will learn about how Trump and Pence strong-armed the CDC and forced it to weaken its guidance to schools on reopening.
Trump cares more about his re-election than about the lives of America’s students and school staff. He proved it. Today he tweeted a suggestion that the November elections should be delayed, a decision that belongs to Congress, not to him. You can bet that if Congress agreed (the Democratic House would never agree), there would never be another election in his lifetime. His good friend Putin should won a referendum to keep him in power until 2026. Trump must be envious.
Sarah Jones is an amazingly perceptive writer who has trained her sights in the real crisis in American education: not low test scores, but underfunding and stark disparities of funding.
Her latest article is brilliant. It begins:
Andrew Worthington’s public school was in trouble even before the coronavirus struck. “We have lead in the pipes,” the Manhattan-based English teacher said. “We have all sorts of rodents. There’s soot in the ventilation system. The bathrooms are constantly out of service.” When school is in session, Worthington said, most classes have over 30 students. About 80 percent of the student body qualifies for free and reduced lunch, and many lack the tech they now need to keep up with classes.
After the pandemic turned classrooms dangerous, Worthington’s students faced widening gaps. The iPads the school handed out could only do so much. “It’s hard for them to write essays on a tablet,” Worthington observed.
Like any natural disaster, the pandemic is a stress test for our systems and institutions. It locates their weak spots, and presses until something snaps. Public education could be its next casualty, advocates and experts told Intelligencer; a victim not just of the virus, but of something older and more deliberate, too. America’s public schools haven’t been properly funded for years. Twenty-nine states spent less on public education in 2015 than they did in 2009, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has reported. Local governments in 19 states cut per-pupil spending over the same time period; elsewhere, small increases couldn’t make up for drastic, state-level reductions. If schools buckle now under the weight of the pandemic, lawmakers bear much of the blame.
With school back in session, administrators and teachers alike must stretch already scarce resources to meet new demands. If school buildings reopen at all, social-distancing demands smaller class sizes and more teachers. If schools keep classes virtual, poor students need tools that their districts might not be able to afford. Because the pandemic helped spawn a recession, schools also face crippling cuts as state and local tax revenue contracts. A new report from the American Federation of Teachers projects a funding gap of $93.5 billion for pre-K–12 education, and an additional $45 billion gap for higher education. Unless Congress and Donald Trump can agree on a rescue package, the union estimates that around one million jobs for pre-K–12 educators will disappear.
Maybe no one could have prevented coronavirus, or something equally drastic, from transforming public life and public schools. But the situation didn’t have to be quite so dire, said Diane Ravitch, an education historian and the founder of the Network for Public Education. “We have been through a long period of devaluing public education, especially the education of children who are poor,” she told Intelligencer by email. “High-wealth communities invest in their schools. In poor neighborhoods, where children have low test scores, politicians have opened charter schools and offered vouchers, which saps funding from schools that need it most.”
Lily Eskelsen Garcia, the president of the National Education Association, put matters in even blunter terms. “I hear the word ‘chronic,’ and that’s a good word,” she said. “But there’s another word that has to be put with it, and that’s ‘intentional.’” Lawmakers, she added, “are intentionally, chronically underfunding our schools.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 