May 11, 2023

Thursday, May 11, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

To read an article excerpted in this Roundup, click on its blue title. Each “blue” article is hyperlinked so you can read the whole article.

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Joe is always busy.

Touch to watch the President answer the press on McCarthy. 👇

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Kamala is always busy.

Harris to become 1st woman to deliver West Point commencement speech.

WEST POINT, N.Y. -- Vice President Kamala Harris will deliver the commencement speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point this month, the first woman to do so, a White House official told ABC News.

Harris's remarks at the May 27 commencement ceremony will mark her first visit to West Point, according to the official.

"We are honored to have the Vice President as our commencement speaker," West Point's superintendent, Lt. Gen. Steven W. Gilland, said in a statement provided by the White House. "As an accomplished leader who has achieved significant milestones throughout her career, we look forward to her inspiring remarks to our cadets."

Harris and vice presidents before her have traditionally delivered commencement addresses at U.S. military academies. Last year, she did so at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, and the year before, she spoke at the U.S. Naval Academy.

President Joe Biden, meanwhile, is scheduled to deliver remarks at this year's U.S. Air Force Academy and Howard University commencement ceremonies.

Biden delivered West Point's commencement speech in 2016, when he was vice president. (ABC News).

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If Government Deficits worry you, here are answers.👇

Three economists offer a novel theory of ‘self-financing’ deficits.

By Peter Coy

Opinion Writer

The conventional wisdom on government budget deficits is that they have to be paid for eventually: To repay the debts incurred because of today’s deficits, some future government will have to either raise taxes or cut spending. You’re hearing a lot of that talk in the fight over the debt ceiling.

But the eat-your-spinach argument isn’t always correct.

Olivier Blanchard, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, pointed out in 2019 that a big debt will shrink as a share of gross domestic product over time if the interest rate the government has to pay on the debt is lower than the growth rate of the economy.

The government could get away with running deficits in perpetuity, as long as they’re not too big, he said.

Now some other economists have demonstrated a second mechanism by which a government could run deficits and never have to pay for them. Unlike Blanchard’s mechanism, it doesn’t depend on the relationship of interest rates to economic growth. Their research came out last month as a working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It’s by George-Marios Angeletos of M.I.T.; Chen Lian of the University of California, Berkeley; and Christian Wolf of M.I.T.

“Can Deficits Finance Themselves?” is the paper’s provocative title — evoking, to me anyway, the Laffer Curve theory that tax cuts can pay for themselves. The economists concluded that “deficits contribute to their own financing via two channels.” First, they can accelerate economic growth, which generates more tax revenue. Second, they can cause inflation to rise, which shrinks the effective cost of debt. (Tax revenues rise with inflation, while interest payments are fixed.)

“A large degree of self-financing is not only theoretically possible but also quantitatively relevant,” they wrote. The longer tax hikes are put off, the longer the deficit-fueled boom can run, the paper said. (New York Times column).

Watch the TED talk of Economist Stephanie Kelton: The Big Myths of Government Deficits. 14 minutes. 👇

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An important essay in The New York Times on the political fate of Trump, the political fate of a political party, and a nation deciding what it is.

A Guilty Ex-President.

By David French.

From the beginning of the #MeToo movement both its advocates and good-faith critics have made a series of powerful, necessary points. The courageous women who blew the whistle on powerful men exposed a culture of impunity that still exists, decades after the development of workplace harassment law and generations after a dramatic increase in female workplace participation.

But they did more than merely blow the whistle — they also educated the public. Abuse is still abuse even if a woman is too terrified in the moment to scream. Abuse is still abuse even if a woman does her best to carry on with her life. The list of lessons is long.

At the same time, good-faith critics raised an important objection: In our zeal to expose abuse we cannot neglect due process. Abuse is evil and can destroy lives. False accusations can destroy lives as well, and the press is a poor place for adjudicating disputes. Whenever possible we should resolve disputes in courtrooms, where rules of evidence control.

And this brings me to E. Jean Carroll. On Tuesday afternoon a Manhattan jury unanimously determinedthat Donald Trump sexually abused Carroll during an encounter at a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. It also found that he defamed her when he called the case a “complete con job” and her claims a “hoax and a lie.” And it finally determined that, despite the finding of sexual abuse, Carroll had not proved her claim that Trump raped her.

It’s important to note that this was a civil case, not a criminal trial. The burden of proof in civil cases is lower. The jury was charged with determining whether Carroll proved her claims with a preponderance of the evidence, not beyond a reasonable doubt. In other words, it had to decide whether Carroll’s claims were more likely true than false.

But the case was not a simple matter of “he said, she said.” Carroll provided her own testimony, of course. But she also presented evidence that she had told others about the assault at the time, as well as evidence from other women that Trump had assaulted them and touched them without their consent.

Trump declined to testify at the trial, but the jury did see his videotaped deposition, during which he denied Carroll’s claims but also doubled down on his assertions in the infamous “Access Hollywood” video. “I just start kissing them,” he said on the tape, “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” He added: “Grab ‘em by the [genitals]. You can do anything.”

In the deposition, Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, asked Trump specifically about that quote. “Well, historically, that’s true with stars,” he responded. When she pressed him, he doubled down: “Well, that’s what — if you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true,” Mr. Trump said. “Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.”

I spent decades litigating cases, including a number of sexual harassment cases, and as I watched the evidence accumulate, I reached a tipping point — I would have been surprised by any verdict other than the one we received Tuesday. Juries can always surprise you, of course, but what made the verdict truly notable wasn’t the outcome. It was the identity of the defendant. In an important moment for the rule of law, a jury heard evidence against a former president and reached exactly the conclusion that it likely would have reached for anyone else.

Now America faces an all-too-familiar challenge. The court system has once again delivered an outcome supported by the law and by substantial evidence. But will that change Republican hearts and minds?

If past performance can predict future results, I’m skeptical. After all, we watched as even Trump-nominated judges ruled time and again against Trump’s election challenges, yet a majority of Republicans still do not believe that Joe Biden legitimately won enough votes to carry the 2020 election. When the choice is between the law and the evidence or Donald Trump, Republicans have consistently picked Trump.

But is sexual abuse different? Can an actual jury verdict — after a trial featuring all the due process that American law requires — finally break the bond with Trump?

Here is the darkest possible outcome to the case, one that I fear is more likely than not. The Republican public will either shrug at the result or will simply choose to disbelieve the jury, assuming without evidence that it was biased against Trump. Indeed, when asked about the verdict, Senator Marco Rubio told a Bulwark reporter, “That jury’s a joke.” Senator Lindsey Graham said he questioned “the whole process” and told Punchbowl News, “I think you could convict Donald Trump of kidnapping Lindbergh’s baby.”

But would a jury so hopelessly biased against Trump jury reject Carroll’s rape claim? Or is that an indication that the jury actually weighed the evidence supporting each charge?

I hope and pray that Republicans don’t shrug. There are conservative women (including my own wife) who are themselves victims of sexual abuse and have watched, aghast, as Republicans have wrapped their arms around a man who’s faced an avalanche of allegations of sexual misconduct. Yet there was always an explanation, a rationalization for the continued support. They’re all lying, Trump’s defenders would claim. Nothing has been proven. Why didn’t they take him to court?

But E. Jean Carroll did. She did exactly what Trump’s defenders demanded. She went to court, faced cross-examination, looked the jury in the eye and made her claims. She provided witnesses who supported her story, under oath. The court gave Trump a chance to answer, to do the same thing — to look the jury in the eye and state his case. He declined.

The jury’s verdict echoes beyond politics. It implicates our nation’s moral core. Donald Trump had his day in court. He lost. Now the G.O.P. faces a very different kind of trial, one conducted not before a jury, but before a watching nation. It’s a test of decency, integrity and respect, and it is a great tragedy of our time that no one can presume that it’s a test the party will pass.

Mike Pence Defends Donald Trump Over Sexual Abuse Verdict.

In an interview with NBC News’ Dasha Burns, potential 2024 candidate Pence was asked if the verdict changed his own view on whether Trump, who launched his own campaign in November, is fit to serve as president again.

Burns noted that Trump “was found liable by a jury of the people of sexual abuse.”

“For you personally, do you feel comfortable with someone who was found liable in this case serving as president?” she asked.

“I would tell you, in my four and a half years serving alongside the president, I never heard or witnessed behavior of that nature,” Pence responded. “And so, again, I have no knowledge of those allegations or the truth or veracity of them and I wouldn’t want to comment on a civil judgment.”

(HuffPost).

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CNN Is Hosting a Town Hall for a Guy Who Tried to Get Me Killed by Michael Fanone.

I WOKE UP last week to a text from my mother. Its contents hit me like a sucker punch. “CNN is hosting a town hall with Trump; Kaitlin Collins is moderating. WTF!!!” Then came confirmation: CNN will in fact host a town hall on Wednesday, May 10, in prime time.

I can already hear the questions: And why shouldn’t they? Donald Trump is the clear Republican frontrunner for the presidency enjoying at least 70 percent of the Republican primary vote. Why wouldn’t it be appropriate for a network to have him on?

My response to those questions is simple: Twice-impeached former President Donald J. Trump lied countless times to the American people, most famously when he told us (and continues to tell us) that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and that he was the winner.

So what, you say? They are just words — and certainly not the first time a politician has lied to constituents.

I’ll tell you why this is different. Those lies persuaded thousands of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, violently attacking uniformed police officers and terrorizing members of Congress and their staff. I witnessed this assault firsthand as an officer with the Metropolitan Police Department, who like hundreds of MPD officers, responded to the U.S. Capitol Police Department’s calls for assistance after their officers were overrun by Trump’s mob. As a result of my efforts that day I was severely beaten, struck numerous times with a taser, and suffered a heart attack as well as a traumatic brain injury. One police officer died, and several others took their own lives in the wake of that barbaric day. 

It is not just that Trump’s lies and political rhetoric sparked an uprising at our nation’s Capitol. Trump, as U.S. president, lied in an effort to defraud the American people and overturn a free and fair election in an attempt to remain in power. (See the January 6th Select Committee’s Report.) In doing so he betrayed every aspect of his oath to represent us as Americans. We no longer need to imagine what Trump is capable of. He has shown us that he is an authoritarian who will use any means at his disposal, including violence, to remain in power.

Putting him onstage, having him answer questions like a normal candidate who didn’t get people killed in the process of trying to end the democracy he’s attempting to once again run, normalizes what Trump did. It sends a message that attempting a coup is just part of the process; that accepting election results is a choice; and that there are no consequences, in the media or in politics or anywhere else, for rejecting them.  

Trump is well aware of all that. Since his announcement that he was seeking the presidency for a third time, he has offered to pardon his insurrectionist supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, calling them “Patriots” and “Great Americans.” He has even incorporated recordings of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Justice for All” as sung by the J6 Prison Choir, a group of inmates imprisoned for their roles in the violent insurrection, into his rallies — giving these violent criminals a place of prominence in his campaign.

Then, this past March, Trump held a campaign event in Waco, Texas, on the 30-year anniversary of the armed siege there that took the lives of four special agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). In this not-so-subtle public display, Trump further embraced the anti-government violent extremist movement now spearheaded by groups like the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and the Oath Keepers. Let’s never forget that Waco was preceded by Ruby Ridge (which took the life of a deputy U.S. marshal) and then followed by the Oklahoma City bombing. Three deadly events involving white supremacists and anti-government extremist groups armed to the teeth attacking law enforcement. Sound familiar? What American presidential candidate would want to be seen aligned with groups like these?

Now, full disclosure: I “work” for CNN. That is, I receive a monthly check from them and have since abruptly quit my job as an MPD officer almost one year to the day after I was injured. In the nearly two years that I have worked for this network, I have had countless conversations with its employees, producers, hosts, journalists, camera operators, etc. They all have stories about the Trump years. When the former president attacked them (many by name), he inspired countless acts of violence, both threatened and overt, from his supporters. Many employees told me they were afraid to wear anything that identified them as CNN employees when out in public. So why lend your network’s platform to someone like that?

In a recent trip to CNN’s Washington, D.C., bureau, I sat silently in the green room as guests, anchors, and employees filtered through and clamored about how outrageous it was that CBS would give Marjorie Taylor Green an interview on its prestigious 60 Minutes series. Good question? I hope my fellow CNN employees have the balls to raise those same questions with the network executives.      

CNN is a major American cable news outlet whose viewers trust that they are being given accurate reporting of events to the best of the network’s ability. With this trust comes an obligation and commitment to their viewers. In the past, CNN has recognized the dangers of allowing election deniers a public platform and would not allow them on-air. Under new “leadership,” that policy has been discarded as evidenced by CNN’s decision to allow the chief election denier, former President Donald J. Trump, a prominent time slot in its evening lineup. As if Trump were a normal candidate who had not attempted to steal an election by force. In the wake of Jan. 6, Trump’s ability to communicate to the masses was essentially stripped away from him. Twitter banned him for “life.” No major media outlets would have him on. So what has changed? 

I’ve heard the network’s attempts to justify this clear reversal. The “He’s the frontrunner in the Republican primary” argument. Somehow the network’s ”ethical” responsibility changed from preventing election deniers a platform regardless of the topic to giving those same individuals a huge platform to disseminate their lies. I don’t believe for one second that this is about journalistic integrity. It’s about ratings and money. Sometimes things are exactly as they appear, and this appears to be an attempt by a major media outlet struggling with its ratings to attract disenfranchised viewers. To me, allowing Trump an open forum on a major television news network is the moral equivalent of putting an AR-15 in the hands of someone mentally unstable. Whether words or bullets — and I have seen firsthand the effects of both — they are equally dangerous in the mouths or hands of those who have shown us time and time again what their true intentions are. (RollingStone. Michael Fanone served 20 years as a member of the Washington, D.C., police department and is a current CNN contributor. ).

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Trump was given space on CNN last night, to spew his hatred, lies and mockeries including 1) his declaration again that Mike Pence should have stopped the Election, and 2) his continued mockeries and attacks on E. Jean Carroll.

This is not the CNN you used to watch.

Eve and I will no longer watch CNN, just as we don’t watch FOX. You?

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George Santos was arrested yesterday. Finally.

Rep. George Santos (R-NY) surrendered to federal authorities yesterday after being charged with seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives.

Mr. Santos surrendered to the authorities at federal court on Long Island on Wednesday morning, after which the indictment was unsealed. He is expected to appear before a magistrate judge on Wednesday afternoon. (Sources. Wake Up to Politics and New York Times).

Read the Department of Justice indictment.

The Washington Post made clear the charges too. Click here.

Santos pleaded not guilty.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told reporters that he would not support Santos for reelection next year, saying, “I think he has other things to focus on in his life."
But McCarthy suggested he would wait to see if the House Ethics Committee determines whether Santos broke the law before deciding on whether to call on him to resign. (Washington Post).

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Should the IRS weigh in on Gifts?

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Science marches on.

Pancreatic Cancer Vaccine Shows Promise in Small Trial.

A colored scanning electron microscope image of pancreatic cancer cells.

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Using mRNA tailored to each patient’s tumor, the vaccine may have staved off the return of one of the deadliest forms of cancer in half of those who received it.

Five years ago, a small group of cancer scientists meeting at a restaurant in a deconsecrated church hospital in Mainz, Germany, drew up an audacious plan: They would test their novel cancer vaccine against one of the most virulent forms of the disease, a cancer notorious for roaring back even in patients whose tumors had been removed.

The vaccine might not stop those relapses, some of the scientists figured. But patients were desperate. And the speed with which the disease, pancreatic cancer, often recurred could work to the scientists’ advantage: For better or worse, they would find out soon whether the vaccine helped.

On Wednesday, the scientists reported results that defied the long odds. The vaccine provoked an immune response in half of the patients treated, and those people showed no relapse of their cancer during the course of the study, a finding that outside experts described as extremely promising.

The study, published in Nature, was a landmark in the yearslong movement to make cancer vaccines tailored to the tumors of individual patients.

Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, led by Dr. Vinod Balachandran, extracted patients’ tumors and shipped samples of them to Germany. There, scientists at BioNTech, the company that made a highly successful Covid vaccine with Pfizer, analyzed the genetic makeup of certain proteins on the surface of the cancer cells.

Using that genetic data, BioNTech scientists then produced personalized vaccines designed to teach each patient’s immune system to attack the tumors. Like BioNTech’s Covid shots, the cancer vaccines relied on messenger RNA. In this case, the vaccines instructed patients’ cells to make some of the same proteins found on their excised tumors, potentially provoking an immune response that would come in handy against actual cancer cells.

“This is the first demonstrable success — and I will call it a success, despite the preliminary nature of the study — of an mRNA vaccine in pancreatic cancer,” said Dr. Anirban Maitra, a specialist in the disease at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study. “By that standard, it’s a milestone.”

The study was small: Only 16 patients, all of them white, were given the vaccine, part of a treatment regimen that also included chemotherapy and a drug intended to keep tumors from evading people’s immune responses. And the study could not entirely rule out factors other than the vaccine having contributed to better outcomes in some patients.

It’s relatively early days,” said Dr. Patrick Ott of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Beyond that, “cost is a major barrier for these types of vaccines to be more broadly utilized,” said Dr. Neeha Zaidi, a pancreatic cancer specialist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. That could potentially create disparities in access.

But the simple fact that scientists could create, quality-check and deliver personalized cancer vaccines so quickly — patients began receiving the vaccines intravenously roughly nine weeks after having their tumors removed — was a promising sign, experts said.

Since the beginning of the study, in December 2019, BioNTech has shortened the process to under six weeks, said Dr. Ugur Sahin, a co-founder of the company, who worked on the study. Eventually, the company intends to be able to make cancer vaccines in four weeks.

And since it first began testing the vaccines about a decade ago, BioNTech has lowered the cost from roughly $350,000 per dose to less than $100,000 by automating parts of production, Dr. Sahin said.

A personalized mRNA cancer vaccine developed by Moderna and Merck reduced the risk of relapse in patients who had surgery for melanoma, a type of skin cancer, the companies announced last month. But the latest study set the bar higher by targeting pancreatic cancer, which is thought to have fewer of the genetic changes that would make it ripe for vaccine treatments.

In patients who did not appear to respond to the vaccine, the cancer tended to return around 13 months after surgery. Patients who did respond, though, showed no signs of relapse during the roughly 18 months they were tracked.

Intriguingly, one patient showed evidence of a vaccine-activated immune response in the liver after an unusual growth developed there. The growth later disappeared in imaging tests.

“It’s anecdotal, but it’s nice confirmatory data that the vaccine can get into these other tumor regions,” said Dr. Nina Bhardwaj, who studies cancer vaccines at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Scientists have struggled for decades to create cancer vaccines, in part because they trained the immune system on proteins found on tumors and normal cells alike.

Tailoring vaccines to mutated proteins found only on cancer cells, though, potentially helped provoke stronger immune responses and opened new avenues for treating any cancer patient, said Ira Mellman, vice president of cancer immunology at Genentech, which developed the pancreatic cancer vaccine with BioNTech.

“Just establishing the proof of concept that vaccines in cancer can actually do something after, I don’t know, thirty years of failure is probably not a bad thing,” Dr. Mellman said. “We’ll start with that.”

An answer to genetic problems, will this also 👇 provide an answer for same sex couples wanting their child to share the DNA of each of them?

1st babies born in Britain using DNA from 3 people.

LONDON (AP) — Britain’s fertility regulator on Wednesday confirmed the births of the U.K.’s first babies created using an experimental technique combining DNA from three people, an effort to prevent the children from inheriting rare genetic diseases.

The Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority said fewer than five babies have been born this way in the U.K. but did not provide further details to protect the families’ identities. The news was first reported by the Guardian newspaper.

In 2015, the U.K. became the first country to adopt legislationregulating methods to help prevent women with faulty mitochondria — the energy source in a cell — from passing defects on to their babies. The world’s first baby born using the technique was reported in the U.S. in 2016.

The genetic defects can result in diseases such as muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, heart problems and intellectual disabilities. About one in 200 children in Britain is born with a mitochondrial disorder. To date, 32 patients have been authorized to receive such treatment. (Associated Press).

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Once again. Buddy Holly, Westminster Winner, 2023.

Smile. A PVGV has won. Petit basset griffon Vendéen.

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I am having a procedure this morning so expect I will be away until Saturday. 2 days away. Wow. See you then.

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