I won’t summarize this story for you.
‘Up Is Down’: Trump’s Unreality Show Echoes His Business Past – The New York Times
https://apple.news/AJdjqug_SQMOEWu6v8InxcA
I urge you to read it.
Archives for the month of: January, 2017
Read this heartwarming story about the synagogue members in Glencoe, Illinois, who welcomed the last Syrian refugee family to arrive at O’Hare Airport before the travel ban was signed.
Colbert King writes about Marco Rubio’s determination to get rid of D.C.’s tough gun control law.
King asks, why not abolish gun control in the Capitol if that’s the way to make everyone safe? The Capitol has a gun control ban that is absolute.
After all, nowhere is the lawful exercise of the Second Amendment, as Rubio and the NRA define it, more infringed upon than at the U.S. Capitol. Congress’s restrictions leave no wiggle room. NO GUNS ALLOWED EXCEPT FOR AUTHORIZED LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENTS.
According to rules of the Architect of the Capitol: “The following items are strictly prohibited in the Capitol, including the Capitol Visitor Center: . . . Guns, replica guns, ammunition and fireworks . . . electric stun guns, martial arts weapons or devices.” That’s right. If you are a law-abiding citizen, have passed a background check, received firearm training, have a permit to carry a concealed weapon, carry a loaded gun and want to visit your senator or representative, or sit in the House or Senate gallery, or eat in the cafeteria, you simply cannot.
How can Rubio and the gun rights movement let that be? Their whole premise is that the power of self-defense rests with the people, and that, as the NRA preaches, “no person is left to depend solely on the state’s good graces for his or her very life.” So why limit the power of self-defense to D.C. residents?
Shouldn’t those powers be bestowed upon our fellow Americans who visit Congress? It’s not as if the Capitol complex is immune from gunplay.
The following article was sent to me by education researchers Russ Bellant and M. Denise Baldwin. Baldwin is a former teacher in Saginaw. Recently, I was on an NPR program hosted by Warren Olney with three other people, one of whom spoke on behalf of Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children. He insisted that not a single public school in Detroit had ever been closed. This article says that the number of public schools closed in Detroit over the past 20 years is nearly 200, with more school closings ahead, all in African American communities. Meanwhile the Detroit Free Press published an article showing that the closure of neighborhood schools–DeVos’s goal–means less choice for black residents, who no longer have a school they can walk to or transportation to schools of “choice.”
DeVos leads push for school closings, only African American schools targeted
By Russ Bellant and M. Denise Baldwin
When Michigan Governor Rick Snyder concluded that a new law that restructured Detroit Public Schools prohibited school closures until 2019, the DeVos network reacted immediately, demanding closures of Detroit schools. They enlisted elected officials who had received campaign contributions from the DeVos apparatus. Now the Governor has backed down, despite considerable legal muscle that agreed with his interpretation.
In a shocking move, the Governor has proposed the closing of 38 schools across the state, including 24 Detroit public schools (and one Detroit charter). But an examination of the list shows a disturbing pattern: all of them serve primarily African American populations.
The DeVos entity that speaks to education issues in the state, Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP), quickly demanded that all 38 be shut down. They ignore the reality that in one part of Detroit, it would close all the area high schools and abandon K-8 education in a large area of the City. More fundamentally, they ignore the fact that they are accelerating separate and unequal education in Michigan.
GLEP, which was set up and has been primarily funded by Dick and Betsy DeVos, has been aggressive in advocating the shutting down of public schools and replacing them with charters. The charters, in turn, have been seen as a base to get electoral support for vouchers, according to plans formulated in the mid-1990s. An amendment to the Michigan Constitution to permit vouchers was put on the ballot by the DeVos family in 2000, but it was soundly defeated.
Undeterred, the DeVos machine continues their plan to charterize Michigan public schools with no caps or accountability mandated. The charters, some placed by DeVos allies, are set up primarily in communities of color. Eighty percent are for-profit corporations, according to a Western Michigan University study. They average a thousand dollars profit off each student, out of a state foundation of just over $7,000 per student.
White school districts have been more resistant to state intervention when school performance is an issue, and it gets more attention. But when Black schools are targeted, there is less statewide concern, so they are seen as a path of least resistance for charterizers.
DeVos has directly used her political muscle to take a highly rated Detroit aeronautics high school and have a state subsidy for that school transferred to a DeVos-created charter high school in west Michigan. They also took the Detroit curriculum as their own. The West Michigan Aviation Academy says that the school was an inspiration of Betsy DeVos.
It remains to be seen how much the Michigan public will tolerate the dismantling of their districts. One school that is in an otherwise majority white district plans a determined resistance to the state closing plan. The East Detroit Public Schools, in a county that voted for Trump, has on its website a statement from its Superintendent that “We have no intention of allowing the SRO (from the Governor’s office-RB) to dictate the future of our students.” A school board member added that “East Detroit Public Schools will not accept the closure of any of the District’s schools by the state and will not allow the SRO to intervene at this point in our plans. School closures hurt children.”
The state is also facing lawsuits over its destruction of public schools and educational quality. They have directly controlled the Detroit schools for the last eight years and 15 of the last 18 years. Their citation of academic shortcomings they created as justification of the closings is really an indictment of state control, a subject they avoid.
The state has also dismantled four school districts across the state. All were African-American communities. Currently three of the proposed schools for closure in Saginaw and in Bridgeport-Spaulding Public Schools serve students who were displaced when their home district, Buena Vista, was dissolved. The proposed closings would subject hundreds of students to two major school dislocations.
Detroit is the model of proving that mass closures only put districts in a downward spiral. In the last 13 years 172 district schools (61%) have been closed, mostly by the state, in response to state-created debt and academic performance. Another 15 were taken and turned into the Governor’s personal school district. Closings have lead to abusive charterization and neighborhood abandonment. If closures were the solution, Detroit would be the Harvard of K-12 education.
There is a likely legal challenge to the DeVos-led dismantling of public education based on impact disparities on African American communities. DeVos has shown no reluctance to exploit this vulnerability in our social fabric as she seeks a world of profit-driven charters and vouchers that undermine over a half-century of educational progress.
The beginning of resistance. The National Park Service tweets. Now there is a twitter account called “AltNPS.”
It all started with those inauguration crowd shots.
President Trump, a man who has never indicated that he is fixated on the size of things, was none too thrilled when the National Park Service retweeted photos that showed the crowds on the National Mall at President Obama’s 2009 inauguration side-by-side with those of his inauguration last Friday.
The NPS followed that post with a tweet pointing out that the pages dedicated to climate change, civil rights, and health care were missing from the new White House website.
By the end of the day on Friday, according to an internal email obtained by Gizmodo, the NPS was ordered by its Washington support office “to immediately cease use of government Twitter accounts until further notice.”
Living up to its name, Badlands National Park defied the order. From its official Twitter account, the park tweeted facts about climate change. The first of these rebellious one-liners — “Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time int he last 650,000 years. #climate.” — went up Tuesday morning. It was retweeted over 9,000 times before it was deleted. Another tweet, about ocean acidification, followed an hour later, and was retweeted over 1,000 times. Within hours, Badlands’ follower count skyrocketed from 7,000 to 69,100.
This bout of defiance lasted only hours. By late afternoon, the tweets disappeared, and the official word on the matter was that a they were sent by a former employee at the park in Interior, S.D., who still had access to the account. An anonymous NPS official told the Washington Post that “the park was not told to remove the tweets but chose to do so when they realized their account had been compromised.”
Here is the petition
Here are articles about growing protests.
The Washington Post.
BBC World News: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38781420
The Guardian: Green cards holders included in ban: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2017/jan/28/world-digests-donald-trumps-order-to-ban-refugees-from-muslim-countries?CMP=share_btn_tw&page=with%3Ablock-588c89d3e4b0b3e971af3c71#block-588c89d3e4b0b3e971af3c71
Alan Singer of Hofstra University imagines a coup d’etat in the United States. Is it possible that one man with a talent for demagoguery could capture one of the major parties, could win the election with extreme and divisive promises, could appoint people who were determined to destroy the agencies they lead? No, it can’t happen here, right? By the by, Trump named alt-right leader Steve Bannon to sit as a regular member of the National Security Council.
Trump is not backing down from his immigration ban from seven countries, excluding even those with green cards.
Peter Greene, like Mercedes Schneider, checks into the background of the group called Friends of Betsy DeVos and finds that it apparently has only one member, a hired PR guy. He suggests that she buys friends.
But that may not be true. She has many many friends, as we learn from a press release issued by Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, where DeVos was a board member until recently. Like DeVos, FEE supports school choice of every variety and doesn’t like public schools. It was also a strong supporter of Common Core but doesn’t say much about it these days.
FEE issued this letter endorsing DeVos:
Tallahassee, Fla. – Today, 72 leaders and organizations, including the Foundation for Excellence in Education, joined the following open letter to show their support for Betsy DeVos as U.S. Secretary of Education.
Betsy DeVos is an undisputed champion of families and students. For nearly 30 years she has devoted time and resources to improving education options for our nation’s children. Yet millions still languish in failing schools in an education system more than a century old. It’s time for a new vision.
Betsy DeVos provides that vision. She embraces innovation, endorses accountability and—most especially—trusts parents to choose what is in their unique child’s best interests. She also believes in providing every parent with the resources and choices to pursue those decisions.
On this week, National School Choice Week, we the undersigned endorse this champion of choice and the education reforms needed to improve the future of every child in America. And we strongly advocate for her confirmation as our next U.S. Secretary of Education.
Sincerely,
Jeff Atwater, Chief Financial Officer, State of Florida
State Representative Robert Behning, Indiana
State Representative Michael Bileca, Florida
State Representative Buzz Brockway, Georgia
State Representative Wes Cantrell, Georgia
State Representative David Clark, Georgia
State Representative Kim Coleman, Utah
State Representative Manny Diaz, Jr., Florida
Steve Durham, Member, Colorado State Board of Education
Lt. Governor Dan Forest, North Carolina
State Senator Dolores Gresham, Tennessee
State Senator Don Gustavson, Nevada
State Senator Joe Hardy, Nevada
State Senator Owen Hill, Colorado
State Representative Paul Lundeen, Colorado
Pam Mazanec, Member, Colorado State Board of Education
Adam Putnam, Commissioner of Agriculture, State of Florida
State Senator Michael Roberson, Nevada
State Representative Rebecca Roeber, Missouri
State Representative Ed Setzler, Georgia
State Representative Valencia Stovall, Georgia
Agudath Israel of America-Washington Office
Alabama Federation for Children
American Association of Christian Schools
Arizona Federation for Children
Frederick Hess, Resident Scholar and Director of Education Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute*
American Federation for Children
Americans for Prosperity
Americans for Prosperity-Arizona
Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry
Arizona Charter Schools Association
Black Alliance for Educational Options
Business Council of Alabama
CarolinaCAN
Center for Arizona Policy
Children’s Education Alliance of Missouri (CEAM)
Civitas-North Carolina
EdChoice
Educate Nebraska
Empower Mississippi
Foundation for Excellence in Education
Florida Charter School Alliance
Florida Coalition of School Board Members
Georgia Charter Schools Association
Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP)
Hispanic CREO
Idaho Charter School Network
Independence Institute
Independent Women’s Voice
Institute for Better Education
Institute for Quality Education
Jeffersonian Project
Louisiana Association of Business & Industry
Louisiana Federation for Children
Mackinac Center for Public Policy
Maggie’s List
Missouri Education Reform Council (MERC)
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
Parents for Choice in Education
Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina (PEFNC)
Pennsylvania Coalition for Public Charter Schools
Public School Options
Ready Colorado
Reason Foundation
Rio Grande Foundation
SchoolForward
Tennessee Federation for Children
Texans for Education Opportunity
The Center for Education Reform
The Libre Initiative
Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Wisconsin Federation for Children
*Signing as an individual. AEI as the organization does not take a stance on such matters.
Adam Gentelson was an aide to Senator Harry Reid. He saw how Republicans put up obstacles to Obama’s
governance and were unafraid to employ every tool and strategy to stop what they opposed.
Democrats in the Senate could force Republicans to slow down and compromise if they have spine.
“As a Democratic Senate aide for the past seven years, I had a front-row seat to an impressive show of obstruction. Republicans, under then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, decided they would oppose President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at every turn to limit their power. And it worked: They extorted concessions from Democrats with threats of shutdowns, fiscal cliffs and financial chaos. I know firsthand that Democrats’ passion for responsible governance can be exploited by Republicans who are willing to blow past all norms and standards.
“Now we have a president who exemplifies that willingness in the extreme. Partly, this explains why he faces more questions about his legitimacy than any president in recent history and why he drew three times as many protesters as inauguration attendees last weekend. But in something of a mismatch, Republicans’ unified control of government means that the most effective tool for popular resistance lies in the Senate — the elite, byzantine institution envisioned by the founders as the saucer that cools the teacup of popular opinion.
“Senate Democrats have a powerful tool at their disposal, if they choose to use it, for resisting a president who has no mandate and cannot claim to embody the popular will. That tool lies in the simple but fitting act of withholding consent. An organized effort to do so on the Senate floor can bring the body to its knees and block or severely slow down the agenda of a president who does not represent the majority of Americans.
“ The procedure for withholding consent is straightforward, but deploying it is tricky. For the Senate to move in a timely fashion on any order of business, it must obtain unanimous support from its members. But if a single senator objects to a consent agreement, McConnell, now majority leader, will be forced to resort to time-consuming procedural steps through the cloture process, which takes four days to confirm nominees and seven days to advance any piece of legislation — and that’s without amendment votes, each of which can be subjected to a several-day cloture process as well.
“McConnell can ask for consent at any time, and if no objection is heard, the Senate assumes that consent is granted. So the 48 senators in the Democratic caucus must work together — along with any Republicans who aren’t afraid of being targeted by an angry tweet — to ensure that there is always a senator on the floor to withhold consent. Because every Senate action requires the unanimous consent of members from all parties, everything it does is a leverage point for Democrats.
“For instance, each of the 1,000-plus nominees requiring Senate confirmation — including President Trump’s Cabinet choices — can be delayed for four days each. While the tactic works well, as we’ve seen for the past eight years, there remains the question of strategy. Should Democrats be pragmatic and let Trump have his nominees on a reasonable timetable, so as not to appear obstructionist? So far, this has been their approach to some of Trump’s Cabinet picks.
“ But it’s also fair to say that, by nominating a poorly qualified and ethically challenged Cabinet, Trump forfeited his right to a speedy confirmation process, and Democrats should therefore slow it down to facilitate the adequate vetting that Trump and Senate Republicans are determined to avoid by rushing the process before all the questionnaires and filings are submitted. Four days of scrutiny on the Senate floor per nominee, even after the committee hearings, is a reasonable standard for fulfilling the Senate’s constitutional responsibility of advice and consent.
“ Democrats can also withhold their consent from every piece of objectionable legislation McConnell tries to advance. With 48 senators in their caucus, they have the votes to block most bills. But even when Democrats don’t have the votes, they can force McConnell to spend time jumping through procedural hoops. This is the insight McConnell deployed against Reid to manufacture the appearance of gridlock, forcing him to use the cloture process more than 600 times.”
Will Democrats in the Senate dare to do to Trump what Republicans did to Obama?
Diane Ravitch's blog 