Today, The New York Times published an astonishing article about Putin’s attempt to destabilize NATO and the EU by driving tiny Moldova back into Russia’s orbit.
Moldova shares a border with Ukraine. Putin hopes to thwart the West by persuading Moldova to oust its pro-Western government.
Putin created an elaborate pro-Russian organization inside Moldova, spending millions of dollars to pay collaborators, agitators, and priests.
The Times‘ articleis a gift article with no pay wall. It begins:
It resembled in many ways a summer camp. Barbecues and beach volleyball games were on offer. A wellness spa was called “Relax and Have Fun.”
The men and women who attended the program at a resort complex in a remote part of Serbia also took part in more sinister activities, like learning to break through police cordons and set buildings on fire. They donned flak jackets and trained with assault rifles.
Their counselors, it turned out, were operatives with ties to Russia’s military intelligence service, known as the GRU. Their purpose, according to intelligence officials from three countries who described the activities, was to build a cadre of disciplined shock troops trained in election interference.
The target was tiny Moldova, a country of about three million people that carries outsize importance for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
The Kremlin’s campaign included methods familiar elsewhere in the West, like hacking and disinformation. But in Moldova, its intervention went further than perhaps anywhere else outside Ukraine, and stands as one of the most extensive and audacious plots to date in Mr. Putin’s effort to destabilize the West, the three Western intelligence officials say.
Besides the camp in Serbia, Russian agents ran training programs in Bosnia and Moscow that were designed to turn pro-Russian Moldovans into foot soldiers. Moscow paid hundreds of Orthodox Moldovan priests to recruit voters and to push Russian narratives from the pulpit. And it spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a sophisticated vote-buying scheme financed by a Moldovan billionaire in exile and conceived and operated from Skolkovo, the Kremlin’s knockoff Silicon Valley outside Moscow.
Moscow’s campaign has not stopped. This spring, Russian missiles targeted energy infrastructure that provided service to Moldova, polluting waterways and disrupting electricity flows.
This article is based on interviews with activists who took part in the Russian effort; senior Moldovan law enforcement and security officials; and more than half a dozen European and American intelligence officials. The New York Times also reviewed thousands of documents related to Russia’s attempts to interfere in Moldova’s elections.
Many of those interviewed insisted on speaking anonymously, either to discuss sensitive security operations or because they feared retribution.
Details about Russian efforts in Moldova have emerged in court cases and local reporting, but the scope and extent of the campaign, including the vote-buying scheme and role of Russia’s intelligence services, has not been previously reported.
Publicly, Russian officials have denied interfering in Moldova’s affairs, and have dismissed accusations that Moscow is trying to undermine the West. Last December, Mr. Putin, in an address to military commanders, castigated European leaders for “stoking hysteria” over the threat from Russia.
Soon afterward, though, he gathered the leaders for a secret briefing to deliver the exact opposite message, according to officials from two countries with knowledge of the episode. Their goal for 2026, Mr. Putin told them, is “the collapse of NATO and the E.U. from within,” the people said.
The pro-Western government of President Maia Sandu has set European Union membership as a priority, making it a Kremlin target.Credit…Daniel Mihailescu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Let’s begin by stating a simple fact: Donald Trump is not a doctor. As a matter of fact, he has no credentials as a scientist or a researcher. Neither does Robert F. Kennedy Jr,, who is Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. RFK Jr. is in charge of the nation’s enormous public health agency; states and localities look to HHS for guidance to protect people against risks to their well-being.
It’s hard to imagine a worse choice for Secretary of HHS. For years, he has been a critic of vaccines; he believes that there is a link between vaccines and autism, but mainstream scientists don’t agree with him.
During the pandemic, the number of parents who were resistant to vaccines increased, and they look to RFK Jr. as their leader.
Measles is surging. As of August 2026, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has confirmed 2,465 measles cases across the United States for the year 2026, already surpassing the 2,289 total cases reported for the entirety of 2025. 93% of those who got measles were unvaccinated.
Children will get sick. Some may die because of the bad advice these unqualified men give.
The tsunami of fabricated claims in the order and voiced by Trump and others at the Oval Office announcement Monday is almost overwhelming.
If there’s a saving grace in this episode, it’s that most states and the vast majority of parents are likely to ignore Trump’s order. But the order will leave its mark by magnifying the confusion many parents already face in making decisions about their children’s immunizations. That’s a public health threat all on its own.
Here’s a look at Monday’s order, which claims to “deliver gold standard childhood vaccine recommendations.”
First, the order pares the list of recommended immunizations to 11 diseases from 17. Six immunizations — for hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, meningococcal disease, flu and COVID-19 — are knocked down from “recommended” to “shared clinical decision-making.” That’s code for expanding the opportunity for parents to refuse the shots for their children.
Trump calls for supplanting the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine by individual vaccines for each disease, administered at separate physician visits.
He calls on the Department of Justice to pursue cases against states and localities whose immunization rules contradict “parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and equal protection under the law, including their obligations to provide religious and medical exemptions from childhood and adolescent immunization requirements.”
He revived the canard about vaccines contributing to a rise in autism, despite the connection having been thoroughly refuted by years of clinical research.
Trump also called on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, under whose imprimatur federal vaccine recommendations are issued, to revise its recommendations to match those of other “peer, developed countries.”
That last item points to Trump’s disregard for the niceties of government procedure. In effect, he has presented his newly installed director of the CDC, Erica Schwartz, with a heaping, steaming platter of policy manure. Schwartz only won Senate confirmation on Wednesday, after a hearing in which she pledged to “never betray the science” on which CDC policies are based. This is her first test.
Schwartz hasn’t commented on the Trump order as of this writing. I asked the CDC for her view on the executive order, but received no reply.
Trump unveiled his executive order at an Oval Office ceremony at which no licensed physician was in attendance. Trump himself issued mouthfuls of balderdash during the event. “I’ve seen proof,” he said, “where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda, poured into a little child’s body, and bad things happen.”
Let’s be crystal clear: There’s no such thing. To quote infectious disease expert Jake Scott of Stanford Medicine, “every vaccine given at a baby’s two-month visit adds up to about half a teaspoon. A 20-ounce soda bottle is more than 200 times that.”
At Monday’s announcement, Trump called the MMR vaccine “quite lethal.” Asked by a reporter what evidence he had for that, he replied, “What I’ve heard is that there are some people that say it is that way.”
Trump’s order cites no scientific research to justify splitting multivalent vaccines such as the MMR into individual parts, even though it’s obvious that doing so and requiring multiple doctor visits will raise the cost and time-wastage for many households and despite research showing that the bundled vaccines don’t present a health threat to children and work as expected.
I asked the White House for the scientific grounds for splitting up the vaccine. “President Trump is one of countless parents who have voiced questions and concerns about the combined MMR vaccine,” said White House spokesperson Kush Desai. “The Administration’s push to develop separate vaccinations for all three diseases … ultimately will increase vaccination rates for all three diseases.”
In fact, experts generally hold that splitting the shots will decrease vaccination rates for all three diseases by erecting an unnecessary obstacle to the shots. That was Japan’s experience when it split off mumps from the MMR vaccine and ended up with a higher incidence of mumps than before.
Physicians oppose a return to monovalent vaccines because that would “unnecessarily delay administration of the three vaccine components, leaving children susceptible for a longer period of time to serious, life-threatening diseases,” according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. “Use of monovalent vaccines also would increase the number of injections a child would need and increase the number of visits required to complete the vaccination series.”
In other words, the bundled vaccines are better for children’s health.
Developing separate measles, mumps and rubella vaccines and bringing them to market could take a decade of R&D including clinical trials. Drugmakers aren’t likely to embark on the process now, knowing that a new administration will take office Jan. 20, 2029, and — assuming it hews to accepted science — likely as not will reverse these recommendations.
Also, vaccine policy is firmly in the hands of the states. None are mandated to follow federal standards. To date, almost all states have maintained their previous mandates or otherwise decoupled their policies from the federal recommendations. According to the healthcare information site KFF, by Jan. 20 this year, 28 states and the District of Columbia — including all states with Democratic governors — had announced that they wouldn’t follow the federal government.
Trump’s latest order is an attempted end run around a federal judge’s ruling in March that blocked Kennedy’s attempt to cut the vaccine schedule to 11 immunizations. Trump followed that ruling with the executive order citing peer countries May 29.
Vaccine specialists find Trump’s citing “peer nations” to be “nonsensical,” to quote Paul Offit, one of the nation’s leading vaccinologists, of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. When if comes to child immunizations, Offit has observed, there are no “peers” to emulate: “Different developed world countries make different decisions based on demographics, health system capacity, vaccine access, and vaccine cost,” Offit notes.
For example, Denmark, which Kennedy has held up as a model, doesn’t pay for the rotavirus vaccine, “which prevents a virus that causes vomiting, diarrhea, and severe dehydration,” Offit says. But it has been recommended in the U.S. since 2006, eliminating as many as 70,000 hospitalizations every year.
“Denmark should mimic the U.S., not the other way around,” Offit says.
The bottom line is that childhood immunizations save lives. The advent of the measles vaccine reduced the incidence of that disease in the U.S. from an average of 530,000 cases per year to fewer than 50. Cases of whooping cough, polio, smallpox, rubella and diphtheria fell by 99-100% after vaccinations for each became standard.
Trump and Kennedy want to return us to those bad old days by refashioning them fictitiously as the good old days. They would expose millions of children to severe disease and death, which that could be averted by the science at hand. It’s a terrifying turn in American medical policy. In heaven’s name, why would they want to do it?
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, worries that the latest fads will undermine public education and replace teachers with technology. He’s right to worry. Those are the outcomes that the new crop of reformers actively pursue.
He writes:
I’m frustrated by the need to prepare for this year’s legislature, and the dangers that Oklahoma schools will face. But, too many other states will also be targeted by Trumpist right-wingers. So, I believe we all need to connect the dots and address the potentially existential threats regarding urban education.
The Oklahoma City Public Schools survived the loss of tens of thousands of students due to the “White Flight” of the 1970s, which was a tragic response to racial desegregation.
It also survived the No Child Left Behind, and the Race to the Top’s test-driven, competition-driven corporate school reforms. It then survived the Pathways to Greatness’ excessive closures of schools, Covid, and the Ryan Walters administration, as well as attacks on students who are immigrants. These challenges dramatically contributed to OKCPS enrollments dropping from 46,172 in 2016 to 35,652 in 2024.
Our schools have survived decades of underfunding, and they face the threat of SQ 844, which could cut property tax funding, as hundreds of millions of dollars are given to private schools. And like schools across the nation, the OKCPS will have to struggle with social media, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the so-called “end of reading.”
Moreover, the Oklahoma Voice reported, “the number of graduates completing Oklahoma teacher preparation programs, including college degrees in education, has fallen by about 40% since 2013.” And, “Emergency certified educators, once considered a stop-gap measure, were the most common of all first-year teachers in 2025. And, “They represented 38.8% of teachers in their first year.” And, “So far, they represent 45.5% of 2026 first-year teachers, but state data doesn’t yet reflect the full hiring cycle.”
I’m worried that the legacies of these challenges and today’s education policies, will do more than undermine reading, and teaching and learning. I’m worried that the Oklahoma Readers Act could create destructive school cultures that push vulnerable school systems over the tipping point.
Yes, there has been a debate over the benefits and harms of retaining students who do not score high enough on tests. But, it is hoped that Mississippi-style investments in tutoring and student supports will minimize the harms. However, a growing body of evidence explains how the politicization of tutoring, turning it into test prep, which is often being conducted by AI (even for kindergarteners), is hurting kids more than was anticipated.
Moreover, since Mississippi failed to increase 8thgrade test scores, Governor Tate Reeves bragged about expanding policies that raised 4th grade scores to 8th grade. So, what does that look like in middle schools?
A new report in Wired magazine documents the ways that Mississippi’s test-prep drills are degrading teaching and damaging reading. It began with a visit to a class which has:
20 eighth graders enrolled, but only 10 are present; six have been pulled out for remedial work with a consultant the district has hired to boost test scores, and the remaining four are absent for unclear reasons. The students in the room each grab a Chromebook and log in, at speeds ranging from feet-dragging to actively resistant. They open the StudySync software program, which shows them each a series of questions tailored to their weaknesses. Their faces look like they’re being marched to the guillotine.
It explains how the middle school “now begins and ends with screens.” And, “They’re not reading books for the love of books.”
The article ends with the teacher saying that she “can’t think of a single student across her five periods who reads for fun, who considers her class anything beyond an ordeal to be survived.”
And that gets back to the danger that I have long worried about. What will happen if the growing number of experts are right, and the Strong Readers Act undermines schools’ learning cultures from kindergarten to high school? After all, many advocates for the “Miracle” are also calling for a return to the reward-and-punish mindset of NCLB. And it sure sounds like they want to bring back the winners-and-losers, corporate reforms on steroids.
Our urban schools have been beaten down by a range of market-driven mandates, as well as other challenges that are not under their control. What happens when scripted curriculums take more time away from the essential background knowledge that comes from learning history, science, the arts, and critical thinking, and that are essential to reading comprehension.
What is the result when test-prep undermines the joy of reading; and digital technology increasingly replaces human contact? Will our struggling schools cross over a tipping point?
Missouri, the Republican-dominated legislature asked voters to pass two anti-democratic referenda. One was to restrict future referenda on constitutional amendments and limit the voice of the public. To pass, a proposed constitutional amendment would have needed a majority not only statewide, but also in each of Missouri’s eight congressional districts. One district could block an amendment supported by a statewide majority.
The other constitutional amendment would have eliminated property taxes and elevated sales taxes, a highly regressive tax system that favors the richest.
Voters said “NO” to both. By 80%. The two propositions lost in every county. Maybe Missouri voters should not keep voting for the same party every year? Maybe they should oust the scoundrels who control the legislature?
It also includes a link to a startling story by Ray Bradbury, titled August 4, 2026. Bradbury wrote it 70 years ago. It is a story about AI before AI existed.
Here is a country song about Trump’s most avid associate, Stephen Miller. Miller is the chief architect of Trump’s immigrant deportation policies. He has pushed Homeland Security to reach a goal of one million immigrants deported each year.
Those who are arrested and detained are not “the worst of the worst.” They are not “rapistd and killers.” Though it may be that some of those arrested are criminals, many are hard-working people who are raising their children and contributing to their communities.
Why doesn’t ICE focus on the undocumented immigrants who are in prison and leave law-abiding people alone. Congress should create a path for those who entered the country illegally to work towards citizenship.
Deport the worst of the worst. Deport murderers and rapists. Encourage and help good people to participate in our society and to become loyal citizens.
Jan Resseger keeps a steady focus o what matters most in a decent society: the well-being of children. Trump and his minions don’t care. Not about children. Not about the rule of law. Not about democracy. Trump cares about greed and self-enrichment. He seems to care about his children. He cuts them in on the grift. His youngest son Barron is said to be worth $150 million. But he doesn’t care about yours.
The fact that he just issued guidance on childhood vaccinations, which reduces mandated vaccines and puts America’s most vulnerable at risk of serious illness and death, tells you all you need to know about this scientifically ignorant man.
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s important new book, Regime Change, explores how the second Trump administration functions—the cast of characters, their relationships, and their operational style. A reader is also exposed, however, to the President’s and the administration’s big policy concerns—imposing tariffs, ridding the country of immigrants, ending nuclear weapons in Iran, proclaiming that everything is more affordable, and ending the public’s fixation on Jeffrey Epstein. These issues have also been widely covered broadly in the news.
Here are topics that do not appear at all in Regime Change‘s index: children, public education, CHIP, SNAP, Head Start, or Child Care. There is not even a mention of Trump’s tuition tax credit private school vouchers launched in the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The issue of birthright citizenship is mentioned in the index only as a subhead under immigration, and in the book itself birthright citizenship is covered only in one sentence describing its proposed elimination by an early Trump executive order. In the index, there is only one page citation to the U.S. Department of Education itself, but the reference is to brief coverage of the administration’s attempt to eradicate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” at Harvard University.
The lack of regular news coverage—particularly in the local newspapers—about Trump’s damaging public education policy and the administration’s failure to protect children’s well-being and children’s rights does not, however, mean that these issues have been untouched by Trump administration policy. For those of us who do not need CHIP or SNAP, who can afford quality child care and preschool, whose children attend well-funded public schools, whose families have been citizens for generations, however, there is minimal exposure to the Trump administration’s threats to the institutions on which vulnerable families and children depend.
Just this past week the Trump administration took two steps that, if they do come to pass, will seriously impact some of our society’s most vulnerable children—poor children benefiting today from Head Start, and the children of immigrants from whom the President is once again trying to steal the protection of birthright citizenship. First Focus on Children’s President Bruce Lesley has identified what he calls the Trump administration’s “organized abandonment” of the needs and rights of our society’s most vulnerable children.
The Trump administration attempted to destroy Head Start. At the end of last week, the Trump administration formally proposed new federal administrative guidance to deregulate the quality of Head Start programs that currently serve 700,000 children across the United States. The destruction of Head Start had been predicted early last week but on Thursday in a notice in the Federal Register, the administration formally proposed radically diminishing 133 pages of rules that have shaped Head Start since it was established in 1965 as a centerpiece of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The Center on Law and Social Policy explains that the proposed new rules are being disguised by the administration with language describing “an effort to ‘streamline,’ ‘enhance,’ and ‘modernize’” the program. Politico‘s Mackenzie Wilkes reports: “The Heritage Foundation has long called for the elimination of Head Start, but the conservative group published a report last month saying the program should be deregulated in many of the ways the proposed rule suggests while ‘officials work to end the program.’ ”
The Associated Press‘sMoria Balingit outlines the changes the new rules would prescribe: “Head Start… is currently governed by more than 100 pages of regulations… (which) require centers to have low staff-to-student ratios and a research-backed curriculum, among other things, and they ensure centers are providing wraparound services that are critical to children in poverty, including medical and dental screenings and parent coaching. The proposal would toss out nearly all of that rule book. Education Week”s Elizabeth Heubeck adds: “The new proposal would require (that) all classroom instruction be conducted in English, except for immersion programs operated on Native American tribal lands. An estimated 30-35% of children enrolled in the Head Start program are dual language learners.” The program would also exclude many non-citizen children and children in some immigrant families.
While Congress establishes federal departments and the specific offices within the departments, the legislative branch has no power over the executive branch’s right to establish formal administrative rules and guidance. It is possible that the rules announced in last week’s Federal Register can be challenged in court, and it is also possible, of course, that public outrage might cause the Trump administration to modify the new rules during the 60 day period when the public is invited to submit public comments before the rule becomes final. A future President, of course, could replace the Trump administration’s new rules.
President Trump signed two new executive orders to undermine birthright citizenship. Last Thursday, The Washington Post‘s Isaac Arnsdorf, Justin Jouvenal, and David Nakamura reported: “President Donald Trump took another stab at restricting automatic citizenship for people born in the United States after the Supreme Court rejected his earlier attempt. In two executive orders signed Thursday, Trump reached for different legal maneuvers to test the limits of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. The first order said children would be ineligible if born to ‘alien enemies,’ members of foreign terrorist organizations, or foreign lobbyists. The second order said children of people who fraudulently request tourist visas for the purpose of giving birth in the U.S. would not become citizens… The new orders marked a fresh effort to… deliver on a campaign promise by expanding the categories of people who the administration argues fall outside the constitutional guarantee.”
The reporters quote legal experts who doubt that the first executive order could survive a legal challenge: “An estimated 15 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S., while only a few thousand people are foreign lobbyists registered with the Justice Department. No significant populations of U.S. residents are designated as alien enemies or foreign terrorists, making that provision largely symbolic.”
The reporters attribute the second executive order to White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, who has made stopping “birth tourism” a priority. They provide data to demonstrate that what is called “birth tourism” is relatively infrequent. “In 2024, fewer than 10,000 babies were born in the U.S. to people with foreign addresses, out of 3.6 million total live births.”
None of the legal experts the reporters quote believes that either of these executive orders would be upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court or would challenge in any way what Chief Justice John Roberts declared in his June 30, 2026 decision in Trump v. Barbara: “Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.”
First Focus on Children’s Bruce Lesley believes that both of last week’s executive orders are seriously misguided: “The legal question isn’t simply what the government thinks about immigration. It’s whether an innocent child can lose fundamental rights grounded in the Constitution because of something government officials allege about a parent’s conduct and intent… The latest effort to gut a fundamental constitutional operating principle since our nation’s founding has been written clearly in the Constitution since 1868, is being sold to the public with pathetic history and legal arguments the Supreme Court itself rejected 128 years ago and early this year. Every administration has the authority to enforce immigration laws. However, none has the authority to rewrite the Constitution… by redefining which babies they deem are precious and which are pushed into the shadows of our society.”
Although there has obviously been some news coverage of the week’s public policy initiatives impacting our society’s children, the well-being of our children is neither the top policy concern for officials in the Trump administration nor the top story for the reporters who track the administration’s agenda. Because the needs of children are definitely not the primary lens through which the Trump administration views and conceptualizes our society’s important needs, it is especially important to watch for news about children’s welfare, their rights, and the enormous institution of public schools that serves the mass of our children
Indiana once took pride in its public schools. Not any more. Since the Republican Party took charge of state government, public schools have been neglected and underfunded.
Sixteen years ago, Republicans assumed full control of Indiana’s state government, holding the governor’s office and winning majorities in the House and the Senate. Since achieving this trifecta, the Republican supermajority has systematically cut funding and programs that made this state work for the people who live here.
Nowhere has this been more apparent than the state’s complete neglect of public schools for nearly two decades. Since taking power, the Republican supermajority has done everything in its power to undermine public education, and Indiana’s children are worse off for it.
Let me explain where years of Republican education policy have gotten us. Last month, the Network for Public Education released a report revealing Indiana ranks 45th out of 50 states in support of public education. Last year, only 31.2% of students showed proficiency on both the math and ELA sections of the ILEARN test. More than half of fourth graders can’t read proficiently, and nearly seven-in-ten eighth graders aren’t proficient in math.
A record number of school districts across the state — nearly 40 — have turned to ballot referenda to secure the money they need this year because the state won’t properly fund them and has cut their local funding sources. These are the results of Republicans chipping away at Indiana’s public school funding for years.
Consider where their priorities lie. More than 87% of Hoosier children attend traditional public schools. Yet year after year, the supermajority pours its energy and political capital into expanding charter schools and private school vouchers for the children of families who were, in most cases, never going to need the state’s help in the first place. The legislature has made it clear: they have no issue abandoning working-class Hoosiers in favor of giving an extra leg up to the most fortunate among us.
When Indiana first opened the door to charter schools and voucher programs, lawmakers sold it as a lifeline for children of color and children in poverty whose assigned schools were failing them. But once the door was propped open, my Republican colleagues expanded it year after year, extending vouchers to families making well over six figures. If this were truly about rescuing kids who’d been failed by the system, it would have stayed targeted at the kids who needed rescuing. Instead, it grew into a subsidy for everyone but the working-class families the program was designed to serve.
None of this is by accident. The supermajority was warned by Democrats, education professionals and concerned Hoosiers of the consequences that their policies would inflict on our schools. It is the direct, foreseeable and self-inflicted result of almost two decades of choices made by men and women who have mistaken their own supermajority for a mandate to neglect the children they were elected to serve.
Districts across the state are being forced to ask voters to approve referenda to raise their own local property taxes just so schools can keep the lights on and pay their teachers. Let’s not pretend this educational belt-tightening is born of necessity. Indiana has nearly $4 billion in surplus and reserve funds, which is more than enough to return to our previous, robust support of public education. Our schools and the children attending them are being asked to make do with less while the state sits on more money than it knows what to do with.
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I do not say this lightly, and I do not say it out of partisan loyalty. I say it as a man who spent nearly 20 years as a school principal and six years as a teacher before I ever spent a day in the Statehouse. I have seen firsthand what happens when a school has what it needs, and I have seen what happens when it doesn’t.
I am telling you, plainly: Indiana’s Republican supermajority has had 16 years to prove it knows the difference too. It does not. If it did, we would not rank 45th in the nation for public school support. We would not be watching our children fall further behind their peers in other states while the people entrusted with fixing it offer nothing but superficial, special-interest-backed policies that don’t address the underlying issues.
This is where years of unchecked Republican domination have gotten us: two decades of failure and of backs turned on the generation that makes up the future of this state, this nation and the world beyond.
For 16 years, they have stood before us and promised that this would finally be the year public education in Indiana gets fixed. And for 16 years, they have failed to deliver on that promise. The only question left is how much longer Hoosiers are willing to take their word for it and allow more children to fail academically
I will be in Conroe, Texas, just outside Houston, for the convening of the Network for Public Education from September 25-26.
Please join us.
The Network for Public Education (NPE) and NPE Action National Conference will take place from September 26 to September 27, 2026, at the Hyatt Regency Conroe in the Greater Houston area (Conroe, Texas). The theme for this year’s event is “Public Schools Build Democracy”.
Event Details
Dates: Saturday, September 26 (8:00 AM) – Sunday, September 27, 2026 (3:00 PM)
Location: Hyatt Regency Conroe, 1001 Grand Central Pkwy, Conroe, TX 77304
Registration Cost: $199 per ticket (includes meals)
Featured Keynotes & Highlights
Keynote Speakers: Author/journalist Katherine Stewart, Dean Emerita/Professor Leslie Fenwick, and Texas AFT President Zeph Capo.
Core Panels: Discussions covering student-led public school advocacy movements, fighting back against school closures, and union/alternative educator preparation partnerships.
It is no accident that the U.S. Constitution does not mention God or the Bible. It does not mention the Ten Commandments. It says that there will be no religious test to hold public office. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, meaning every person is free to practice their religion or no religion at all. And it assures that Congress will never establish a state religion, that imposes one religion on everyone.
A commentator who uses the nom de plume “Quikwrit” offered this analysis:
AS WE celebrate the 250 anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, it is well to remember that the man who almost single-handedly wrote the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, was a Deist, as was George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and many other of our Founding Fathers who also created and signed our Constitution. The ideas of personal freedom in our Constitution come not from the Bible, but come from the philosophy of The Enlightenment which so many of our Founding Fathers were adherents to.
Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and all the other Deists among our Founding Fathers hated that they were forced to enroll as members of England’s official government Christian Church, and that’s why they wrote the First Amendment that not only gives We the People freedom OF religion but also freedom FROM religion.
The First Amendment forbids government from “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In other words, in America there can’t be any government “respecting” of any religion in any way, and the government can’t prohibit people from practicing whatever religion they want to practice.
Our Founding Fathers also wrote into Article VI of our Constitution that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Our Founding Fathers didn’t want anyone to have to belong to any religion in order to hold public office.
Our Founding Fathers made it unconstitutional for our government and public schools to support or teach any religion or to require any religious affiliation for anyone to hold public office, and THEY CAREFULLY AND DELIBERATELY LEFT ANY MENTION OF GOD ENTIRELY OUT OF OUR CONSTITUTION.
Our Founding Fathers left God entirely out of the Constitution so that Americans could define God in whatever way they wanted, or to hold that there is no God, because, as the history of the world shows time and again, whenever there is an official government religion, there is conflict and suppression of someone’s rights. And such fighting is about to break out in America as states like Texas begin to require teaching “the Bible” in schools — but WHOSE BIBLE? Catholics use the septuagint version of the Bible that includes Old Testament books that were used by the Apostles in their teaching and that are referred to in the New Testament by Jesus and in the Epistles. The Protestant Bible eliminated those OT books. Whose Bible will be taught in public schools? And whose Ten Commandments will be taught? Different Christian religions, as well as the Jewish religion, have different Ten Commandments.
Europe tore itself apart in bloody religious wars of Christian versus Christian that went on so long they are called “The Hundred Year War” in our history textbooks. The ancestral families of our Founding Fathers suffered in those wars, and that kind of bloody and ruinous religious conflict is what our Founding Fathers wanted to avoid by leaving any mention of God entirely out of our Constitution and forbidding any government involvement in any religion.
I’m a life-long practicing Christian, but I don’t want my religion unconstitutionally imposed on anyone.
Thom Hartmann is a diligent journalist who digs deep into the corruption of this regime.
On the deregulation of public lands: Trump is allowing destruction of parts of Big Bend National Park, to make way for its exploitation. No complaints from Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
— Trump has figured out a way to grift off the plight of immigrant kids. A Texas law firm with virtually no immigration experience, but multiple people close to Trump or accused of being open racists, just got a $150 million sole-source contract to replace the public defenders defending kids being held in Trump’s concentration camps for brown-skinned people. Meanwhile, ICE says that, sure, they’ll wear body cameras when they beat up and murder people, but they’ll only share those videos when they make them look good. Don’t expect to see any released that actually show criminal activity by armed, masked ICE thugs. Sounds over the top? Here’s their exact language: they’ll only release body camera footage when “it is in the best interests of the agency.” Trump has built his SA/SS force of violent, unaccountable modern-day Klan members to intimidate and even kill anybody who dares defy this regime, and it’s not about to start following the law or even behaving morally any time soon.
— Trumponomics is even worse than Hoovernomics or Reaganomics. Since he fired his statistics person at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replaced her with a hand-picked toady, the numbers have been looking weird. For example, the regime reported 57,000 new jobs in May, then later quietly revised that down to 20,000 (although the headlines of 57,000 are still out there); they reported 129,000 new jobs for June, then quietly revised that down to 63,000 (ditto on the headlines). And this week we found that instead of the anticipated creation of 80,000 new jobs, the American economy actually lost 23,000 jobs last month (and expect that number to get worse when they “revise” it in 2 months). No matter how hard they try, they can’t keep Americans from noticing that housing, groceries, gas, transportation, drugs, medicine, and pretty much everything else are more expensive while billionaires and the Trump Crime Family get richer and Republicans continue to refuse to allow an increase in the minimum wage or the right to unionize. Eventually, reality catches up with politics, no matter how fast and furious Trump and his lickspittles try to keep us distracted or hating on each other, and hopefully it’s going to catch up in a big way this November.
— Over at Montana Dispatch, Ryan Busse lays out the five Big Lies Republicans are using to steal our public lands. Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee, for example, recently lied to his constituents that the Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments President Obama designated were brought into being no public comment or input when, in fact, over 2.7 million people weighed in during the comment period. Another Big Lie is that we must let drilling companies exploit our public lands to become “energy independent,” a designation we reached during the Obama years. They’re also trying to tell us that the way to prevent forest fires isn’t to cut back on climate-change-causing CO2 from burning fossil fuels but, instead, to log those trees and leave behind nude wastelands (which actually catch on fire even more easily, because all the wood debris there is dead). Trump — who’s probably never walked through an old-growth forest in his life — tried pitching the lie that people can’t and don’t use our public lands for recreation like camping and fishing. And they try to tell us that we’re not subsidizing the oil and cattle industries with our public lands when in fact we’re handing them the equivalent of billions of dollars every year. Hopefully one of these days there’ll be a cost to these Republicans for the continuous streams of lies they keep pouring out on dozens of topics.
— Trump has figured out a new grift to let his oil company donors profit from his drawing down the National Oil Reserve. Here’s how it works. Normally, when we release oil from the strategic reserve we sell it on the open market at market prices. That would mean that the oil Trump’s releasing would go for around $100 a barrel, paid by the oil companies. When the oil shortage is over, the government would go onto the public market and buy the oil back for, say, $50 a barrel and refill the reserve. It actually makes a profit for the government. But what Trump’s doing is “loaning” our oil to the oil companies at no charge. They then sell it for $100 barrel and when it’s time to “return” the oil to the reserve they’ll buy it on the market at $50 a barrel (or however low it goes when the crisis is over). The entire profit — quite literally hundreds of millions of dollars — instead of going to us taxpayers, goes to the oil companies who funded Trump’s campaign for president. Lever News has the entire sordid story broken down on their site in an article by Freddy Brewster.
Diane Ravitch's blog 