The Nobel Prize committee couldn’t reach Paul Milgrom to share the news that he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, so his fellow winner and neighbor Robert Wilson knocked on his door in the middle of the night.
The moment was caught on his video door bell.
“Top White House officials pressured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this summer to downplay the risk of sending children back to school, a strikingly political intervention in one of the most sensitive public health debates of the pandemic,” the New York Times reports.
“As part of their behind-the-scenes effort, White House officials also tried to circumvent the CDC in a search for alternate data showing that the pandemic was weakening and posed little danger to children.”
The husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) inappropriately influenced a University of California admissions decision as a longtime UC regent, the California State Auditor’s office said, according to Politico.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is under investigation for potentially violating the Hatch Act, a federal law that prohibits civil servants from engaging in political activity while on duty, Politico reports.
DeVos slammed Joe Biden in a Fox News interview and her agency promoted it through official channels.
“President Trump pressed his case that U.S. schools are indoctrinating children with a left-wing agenda hostile to the nation’s Founding Fathers, describing efforts to educate students about racism and slavery as an insult to the nation’s lofty founding principles,” the Washington Post reports.
“Trump, speaking before original copies of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence at the National Archives, characterized demonstrations against racial injustice as ‘left-wing rioting and mayhem’ that ‘are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. It’s gone on far too long.'”
Trump also said he would create a national commission to promote “pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio “once again delayed the start of most in-person classes in the New York City public schools, acknowledging that the system had still not fully surmounted the many obstacles that it faced in bringing children back during the pandemic,” the New York Times reports.
“The abrupt announcement was a blow to the mayor’s effort to make New York one of the few major cities in the nation to hold in-person classes. And it threatened to deepen concerns and confusion over whether the mayor and his administration had mishandled the reopening by announcing deadlines and then pushing them back.”
“Florida’s school districts are defying Gov. Ron DeSantis and publicly reporting new Covid-19 cases among students and staff that the state government considers confidential,” Politico reports.
“The state Department of Health has tried to directly quash reporting on the virus in some instances, after DeSantis said K-12 testing data ‘needs to be put in the right context.’”
“A fight over Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s plan to subsidize private school tuition is threatening to derail a Senate GOP effort to write a slimmed-down coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said this week,” the Washington Post reports.
“The $5 billion tax credit proposal has long been championed by DeVos, and President Trump has offered his support for school choice as part of his reelection campaign. Now the measure is being pushed behind the scenes by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) who wants the proposal included in an emerging Senate GOP bill that aims to address economic fallout from the coronavirus.”
Joe Biden declared the closure of schools due to the pandemic to be a “national emergency,” ABC News reports.
Said Biden: “If President Trump and his administration had done their jobs early on with this crisis, American schools would be open, and they’d be open safely.”
“We are in Donald Trump’s America. And there’s just so much chaos… Educators don’t know what to do, students don’t know what to do.”
— Jill Biden, discussing reopening schools safely on CNN.
Joe Biden, pressing his argument that President Trump is failing the country with his handling of the coronavirus, plans on Wednesday to make the case that Mr. Trump is hurting the nation’s parents, teachers and schoolchildren with his push for schools to reopen, the New York Times reports.
Washington Post: “The return to a focus on the pandemic’s effect on education is another in Biden’s repeated efforts to connect with Americans whose lives the virus has upended in myriad ways.”
“New York City is delaying the start of its school year by 10 days, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Tuesday, as part of a deal to avert a teachers’ strike and calm principals and parents anxious about the start of in-person classes,” the New York Times reports.
Liberty University said in a statement that it has hired an outside firm to investigate “all facets of Liberty University operations” under former president Jerry Falwell Jr.
The school said it wants to learn “the consequences that have flowed from a lack of spiritual stewardship.”
A professor at the University of Pennsylvania has renewed a request to investigate how President Trump was admitted to the school in 1966, citing what he called “new evidence” on secretly recorded tapes in which Trump’s sister says a friend took his entrance exam, the Washington Post reports.
“School choice is finally getting prime-time attention as President Donald Trump makes the issue a focal point of his reelection bid, appealing to parents clamoring for an alternative to neighborhood public schools during the pandemic,” Politico reports.
“But the policy issue’s biggest cheerleader, his Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, has been kept out of that spotlight.”
“Liberty University owes Jerry Falwell Jr. a total of about $10.5 million over the next two years after he resigned as president of the nation’s largest evangelical college following several scandals, according to a person close to Mr. Falwell with knowledge of his employment contract,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Mr. Falwell is due his $1.25 million salary for two years, followed by a lump-sum payment of about $8 million, because of a clause in his contract that allowed him to resign with full pay if his responsibilities were curtailed, which they were when he was put on an indefinite leave of absence two weeks ago.”
“It’s a relief. The quote that keeps going through my mind this morning is Martin Luther Ling Jr: ‘free at last, free at last, thank God almighty I’m free at last’… I see a role in other areas, I don’t know what it is yet but I’m not done. This happened for a reason.”
— Jerry Falwell Jr., quoted by the Lynchburg News & Advance, on formally resigning as president of Liberty University amid a sex scandal.
A judge ruled that Florida’s school reopening order is unconstitutional, striking down the controversial provision requiring “brick and mortar” campuses to open this month for five-day-a-week lessons, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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