'If God existed, I'd have gotten into Penn': Meet the Trump official working on higher education policy

WASHINGTON — What does it take to get a job working on higher education policy in the White House? Ambition helps. So does, apparently, writing an awkwardly honest book about failing to gain admittance to an Ivy League college. At least that seemed to do the trick for 23-year-old Eli Nachmany, whose self-published memoir “Good Enough” appears to be his sole contribution in the field of higher education before coming to work in the Office of American Innovation, which is overseen by presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, earlier this spring.

In any other administration, the recruitment of Nachmany to work on one of the most pressing and divisive issues in American culture would have been remarkable. Higher education was handled in the Obama administration by Ted Mitchell, who had been the president of Occidental College and the California State Board of Education.

Trump came to Washington vowing to slim down the federal bureaucracy. He would do so without the coterie of longtime political loyalists and policy experts usually attached to a winning presidential candidate. But Trump never lived up to his promise that he would hire “the best people” to work in his administration. Meanwhile, his Presidential Personnel Office, which vets political appointees, has been depicted as a fraternity house run by recent college graduates hosting drinking games in their Eisenhower Executive Office Building suite.

Nachmany’s hiring also underscores the lack of a coherent White House plan on higher education. President Trump has rolled back various Obama-era reforms, including those having to do with college loans, sexual assault and oversight, but he has advanced no new policy of his own.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/if-god-existed-id-have-gotten-into-penn-meet-the-trump-appointee-working-on-higher-education-policy-090000704.html

Former Vice President and 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden said he takes “responsibility” for Anita Hill’s treatment when she testified before the Senate Judiciary committee during Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearing.

“I believed her from the very beginning, but I was chairman. She did not get a fair hearing. She did not get treated well. That's my responsibility,” Biden told “Good Morning America” co-anchor Robin Roberts during an interview on Monday which will fully air on

Biden also said he issued an apology to Hill.

“I apologized for it,” the former vice president said ahead of his first event as a 2020 presidential candidate at a union hall in Pittsburgh on Monday. “I apologize again because, look, here's the deal. She just did not get treated fair across the board. The system did not work.”

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/joe-biden-handling-anita-hill-clarence-thomas-hearings/story?id=62665298&cid=social_twitter_abcn

The Charming Doodles Charles Darwin’s Children Left All Over the Manuscript of ‘On the Origin of Species’

From fish with legs to carrot cavalries, an endearing testament to the human life of science.

In contemplating family, work, and happiness, Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809–April 19, 1882) proclaimed: “Children are one’s greatest happiness, but often & often a still greater misery. A man of science ought to have none.” And yet he and Emma had ten. Adept at weighing the pros and cons of family life with equal parts earnestness and irreverence, he clearly concluded that the happiness far outweighs the misery.

There is no more endearing a testament to how this balance skews — to both the exuberant happiness that children bring and the benign misery of the innocent waywardness — than the doodles Darwin’s children left on the back-leaves and in the margins of his Origin of Species manuscript draft, recently digitized by the American Museum of Natural History in collaboration with the Cambridge University Library.

At age 8, George Howard Darwin, who grew up to be an astronomer and a mathematician, draws an entire visual taxonomy of the British infantry; Francis Darwin, who followed in his father’s footsteps and became a botanist, draws a warring salad; on a dummy envelope, an unidentified child produces a charming caricature of Darwin himself.

From a fish with legs to a fruit-and-vegetable cavalry, these irrepressibly joyful drawings, some inspired by natural history and some by the typical staples of boyhood fantasy, bespeak the inseparability of science and life — here is one of the greatest scientists of all time, who forever changed humanity’s relationship to itself, and here are the inked imprints of his own life’s most human dimension.











https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/06/charles-darwin-children-doodles-origin-of-species/

Kamala Harris has hired Jim Margolis, one of the Democratic Party's most accomplished admakers, as her media adviser, two sources familiar with the move told POLITICO.

Margolis is a veteran of former President Barack Obama’s campaigns in 2008 and 2012, and served in a key role in Hillary Clinton’s White House bid in 2016. A partner at GMMB, the leading advertising and campaign firm, he spent years as a top adviser to Democratic senators, including former Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

Plans to bring on Margolis have been in the works for weeks. He was spotted chatting with members of Harris' team at events with the senator in South Carolina.

The move comes as Harris begins delineating senior roles of her campaign, which raised more than $12 million in the first quarter, about half online. Margolis will work closely with Harris’ longtime consulting firm, SCRB, led by partners Averell “Ace” Smith, Sean Clegg, Juan Rodriguez and Laphonza Butler.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/29/kamala-harris-hires-margolis-campaign-1292101

It's time to make our pot laws less restrictive so that patients and doctors can get the information they require to make informed decisions.



Cannabis has been known to humans for thousands of years, and there is nearly universal support for medical cannabis: Over 90 percent of Americans believe that cannabis should be legalized for medical use, according to a Quinnipiac Poll. Currently, 33 states and Washington, D.C., have legalized cannabis for medical purposes, and states such as Georgia have acted to expand medical cannabis laws.

In Georgia, for example, patients can register with the Georgia Department of Health and receive a card allowing them to possess cannabis for medical reasons. However, it is illegal for anyone to grow, buy or sell cannabis in the state, making it difficult for registered patients to actually acquire it. Just recently, though, the Georgia Legislature passed a bill to allow for the growing, manufacturing, testing and distribution of medical cannabis to those who have been approved by their physicians.

However, as the legal status of medical cannabis continues to evolve and its use increases — and after many years of human cultivation — we still don’t have a full understanding of the plant’s medicinal benefits.

With the 2018 Food and Drug Administration approval of an oral cannabidiol (CBD) solution derived from the Cannabis sativa plant called Epidiolex for the treatment of two rare forms of epilepsy — Lennox–Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome — there is conclusive evidence of at least a limited therapeutical nature of cannabis.

There is also some evidence of further benefits of the plant, but the federal government and congressional inaction have made additional research unnecessarily difficult.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/if-marijuana-remains-schedule-i-substance-we-can-never-do-ncna997231?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma

A careful reading of the dense document delivers some urgent insights.



I spent the week after the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report going through it section by section and writing a kind of diary of the endeavor. My goal was less to summarize the report than to force myself to think about each factual, legal, and analytical portion of Mueller’s discussion, which covers a huge amount of ground.

Here are five conclusions I drew from the exercise:

The president committed crimes.

There is no way around it. Attorney General William Barr’s efforts to clear President Donald Trump, both in his original letter and in his press conference the morning of the report’s release, are wholly unconvincing when you actually spend time with the document itself.

Mueller does not accuse the president of crimes. He doesn’t have to. But the facts he recounts describe criminal behavior. They describe criminal behavior even if we allow the president’s—and the attorney general’s—argument that facially valid exercises of presidential authority cannot be obstructions of justice. They do this because they describe obstructive activity that does not involve facially valid exercises of presidential power at all.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/ben-wittes-five-conclusions-mueller-report/588259/

President Trump on Monday blasted union leaders after former Vice President Joe Biden received the endorsement of a major firefighters’ labor group.

“I’ll never get the support of Dues Crazy union leadership, those people who rip-off their membership with ridiculously high dues, medical and other expenses while being paid a fortune. But the members love Trump,” the president said.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1122871319857696768
Trump, who has long claimed support of rank-and-file union members, added that “they look at our record economy, tax & reg cuts, military etc.” and see a “WIN!”

The president’s latest attack came hours after the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) announced it would endorse Biden's 2020 Democratic presidential bid after staying out of the 2016 election, declining to endorse Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton or Trump.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/441132-trump-blasts-union-chiefs-after-biden-gets-key-endorsement

When he was born, my husband at the time and I knew he couldn’t survive. That doesn’t make me a murderer.

On Feb. 5, during the State of the Union address, President Trump implied that women like me executed our babies after birth. On Tuesday, he repeated that same lie on Twitter after the nonsensical Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Act failed to gain enough votes in the Senate to move forward. The bill would have put in place requirements for the care of infants born after failed abortions and might have locked up doctors who failed to comply.

It is unclear how this bill might affect situations where parents decline, for medically appropriate reasons, to have their newborns resuscitated. The threat of criminal prosecution does not enhance anyone’s medical care.

I am an obstetrician and gynecologist who has delivered newborns who could not live, either because they were extremely premature or had birth defects. I have provided abortion care for women after 24 weeks gestation faced with similar outcomes who chose a surgical abortion over a vaginal delivery.

And I also delivered a son who was born to die — my own son.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/opinion/born-alive-abortion.html