The Washington Post noticed that the Trump Organization does not do business in any of the countries on his travel ban list.
It also does not include any of the countries where the 9/11 terrorists came from (e.g., Saudi Arabia).
Archives for the month of: January, 2017
This post from the Daily Kos includes links to two segments of The Rachel Maddow Show.
Maddow says that Russia hacked our presidential election and helped elect Trump.
” Earlier this month they broke a breathtaking story. In December, one of the high ranking official in the Russian security service, in the cyber security department was attending a routine staff meeting when several armed police officers, burst in, threw a hood over his head, and dragged him from the room. That is the last anyone has seen of him, and the State charged him with treason. They then broke the story that another high ranking intelligence official, this time in counter intelligence had been fired. There was sketchy information as to whether or not the official had also been imprisoned and charged.
“Rachel’s point was simple and concise. Russia has denied involvement all along. OK, fine. That’s your story, and you’re sticking with it. But, if you’re innocent, then as a nation, you don’t need to do anything, there is no fire there, you didn’t do anything, and nobody can prove a negative. But when you have police storm into a routine meeting, bag and wrestle out a senior cyber official, and then cashier a senior counter intelligence official in charge of making sure nobody blabs, you have just waved a giant red flag. It means that Putin has looked at the information in the “dossier” that the ex MI6 intelligence officer compiled on information compromising Trump, and has looked at the information in at least the public release of the combined intelligence assessment of Russian interference in the election, and he has realized that there is actually fire behind that smoke. And Putin is taking aggressive steps to stamp out that fire so that it doesn’t occur again.”
Judge Ann Donnelly of the US District Court in Brooklyn granted a request from the ACLU to stay deportations of those detained on entry to the United States following President Trump’s executive order. After a brief hearing in front of a small audience that filtered in from a crowd of hundreds outside, Donnelly determined that the risk of injury to those detained by being returned to their home countries necessitated the decision. She seemed to have little patience for the arguments presented by the government, which focused heavily on the fact that the two defendants named in the lawsuit had already been released. At one point, she visibly lost patience with a government attorney who was participating by phone.
“Donnelly noted that those detained were suffering mostly from the bad fortune of traveling while the ban went into effect.
“Our own government presumably approved their entry to the country,” she said at one point, noting that, had it been two days prior, those detained would have been granted admission without question. In the middle of the hearing ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt informed the court that he’d received word of an imminent deportation to Syria, scheduled within the hour. That prompted Donnelly to ask if the government could assure that the person would not suffer irreparable harm. Receiving no such assurance, she granted the stay to the broad group included in the ACLU’s request.
Reader “Left Coast Teacher” remembered that Kurt Vonnegut is no longer living. Reader Zorba replied that writers live as long as they are still read.
Edna St. Vincent wrote a poem about this, called “The Poet and His Book”:
Down, you mongrel, Death!
Back into your kennel!
I have stolen breath
In a stalk of fennel!
You shall scratch and you shall whine
Many a night, and you shall worry
Many a bone, before you bury
One sweet bone of mine!
When shall I be dead?
When my flesh is withered,
And above my head
Yellow pollen gathered
All the empty afternoon?
When sweet lovers pause and wonder
Who am I that lie thereunder,
Hidden from the moon?
This my personal death?–
That lungs be failing
To inhale the breath
Others are exhaling?
This my subtle spirit’s end?–
Ah, when the thawed winter splashes
Over these chance dust and ashes,
Weep not me, my friend!
Me, by no means dead
In that hour, but surely
When this book, unread,
Rots to earth obscurely,
And no more to any breast,
Close against the clamorous swelling
Of the thing there is no telling,
Are these pages pressed!
When this book is mould,
And a book of many
Waiting to be sold
For a casual penny,
In a little open case,
In a street unclean and cluttered,
Where a heavy mud is spattered
From the passing drays,
Stranger, pause and look;
From the dust of ages
Lift this little book,
Turn the tattered pages,
Read me, do not let me die!
Search the fading letters, finding
Steadfast in the broken binding
All that once was I!
When these veins are weeds,
When these hollowed sockets
Watch the rooty seeds
Bursting down like rockets,
And surmise the spring again,
Or, remote in that black cupboard,
Watch the pink worms writhing upward
At the smell of rain,
Boys and girls that lie
Whispering in the hedges,
Do not let me die,
Mix me with your pledges;
Boys and girls that slowly walk
In the woods, and weep, and quarrel,
Staring past the pink wild laurel,
Mix me with your talk,
Do not let me die!
Farmers at your raking,
When the sun is high,
While the hay is making,
When, along the stubble strewn,
Withering on their stalks uneaten,
Strawberries turn dark and sweeten
In the lapse of noon;
Shepherds on the hills,
In the pastures, drowsing
To the tinkling bells
Of the brown sheep browsing;
Sailors crying through the storm;
Scholars at your study; hunters
Lost amid the whirling winter’s
Whiteness uniform;
Men that long for sleep;
Men that wake and revel;–
If an old song leap
To your senses’ level
At such moments, may it be
Sometimes, though a moment only,
Some forgotten, quaint and homely
Vehicle of me!
Women at your toil,
Women at your leisure
Till the kettle boil,
Snatch of me your pleasure,
Where the broom-straw marks the leaf;
Women quiet with your weeping
Lest you wake a workman sleeping,
Mix me with your grief!
Boys and girls that steal
From the shocking laughter
Of the old, to kneel
By a dripping rafter
Under the discolored eaves,
Out of trunks with hingeless covers
Lifting tales of saints and lovers,
Travelers, goblins, thieves,
Suns that shine by night,
Mountains made from valleys,–
Bear me to the light,
Flat upon your bellies
By the webby window lie,
Where the little flies are crawling,–
Read me, margin me with scrawling,
Do not let me die!
Sexton, ply your trade!
In a shower of gravel
Stamp upon your spade!
Many a rose shall ravel,
Many a metal wreath shall rust
In the rain, and I go singing
Through the lots where you are flinging
Yellow clay on dust!
Our blog poet writes about Senator Franken’s statement that no Democrat will vote to confirm DeVos, highlighting contradictions:
“No Democrat will vote”
No Democrat would vote
For testing and for VAM
No Democrat would vote
For any other sham
No Democrat would vote
For Gates and Common Core
No Democrat would vote
For David Coleman lore
No Democrat would vote
For closing public schools
No Democrat would vote
For Arne Duncan rules
No Democrat would vote
For voucher and for charter
No Democrat would vote
To focus on the “smarter”
No Democrat will vote
For rule by billionaire
No Democrat will vote
Tautology is there
Americans are very entrepreneurial. Here is a gentleman in Alabama who learned of the grizzly bear problem in American schools, and he has come up with some mighty fine ways to deal with the bear problem. And you don’t need a gun to control the critters.
For nearly a decade, public schools have been under siege by politicians and pundits. The biggest salve before now was the fraudulent propaganda film “Waiting for Superman,” which gathered together all the lies about teachers, unions, “failing” public schools, and charter-schools-to-the rescue. It launched the full frontal attack, funded by Wall Street, the Waltons, Eli Broad, and Bill Gates. They didn’t want to “reform” public schools that needed help, they wanted to privatize as many public schools as possible, starting in the poorest neighborhoods, where there was the least political power to resist the attack.
Now, Betsy DeVos has brought the plan into the open and stripped it of any pretense of being part of the “civil rights movement.”
As Gail Collins of the New York Times wrote, it is “Trump’s War on Public Schools.” Readers of this blog know that Trump is the full-blown version of reform-that-dare-not-speak-its-name (Privatization).
It is wonderful to see Collins blow up Betsy DeVos as Trump’s disastrous cabinet choice for education, despite her lack of qualification. She goes into detail about the damage that DeVos has done to Michigan and Detroit–not with vouchers, but with unregulated, unaccountable charters.
One of the most disturbing things about the Trump administration is its antipathy toward public schools.
Perhaps you remember the president’s mini-rant in his inaugural speech about an “education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge.”
Well, Trump’s choice for secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, is responsible for Michigan’s charter school boom, which currently costs the state about $1.1 billion a year. A 2014 investigation by The Detroit Free Press found myriad examples of “wasteful spending and double-dipping.” Thanks in large part to DeVos’s lobbying in the Legislature, there’s virtually no oversight. So much for the young and beautiful students.
Take that for a rant.
DeVos is stupendously rich, and a longtime crusader for charters, vouchers and using federal funds for religious education. She was once the Michigan Republican state chairwoman, a fact completely unconnected to the $200 million or so her family has donated to the party. She’s used all that clout to make Michigan a model of how not to improve public education.
Readers of this blog know about her embarrassing performance before the Senate HELP committee. Collins sums up:
We have two problems here. One is that DeVos is obviously unqualified. While it was nice to learn that she “mentors students,” that’s not really a great preparation for running a 4,400-employee organization with a $68 billion budget. She has never actually worked in a school system or managed a large institution — she and her husband became billionaires through the old-fashioned strategy of having stupendously rich parents.
DeVos’s big selling point for Republicans is her manic devotion to charter schools. There are, of course, some great charters around the country. But there are also some terrible ones, and she is deeply unenthusiastic about any system that would weed out the losers.
She invested in K-12 Inc., the cybercharter company where students learn less each year. The bottom line is that she was picked to harm public schools. As Trump might tweet, “So sad.”
We should all be reading histories of the 1930s right now.
Such as:
William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”
Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”
Otto Friedrich, “Before the Deluge”
History teachers and buffs, send your suggestions.
In the meanwhile, dystopian novels are seeing a surge in sales. A reader sent this comment:
“According to this past Wednesday’s story in Time, these dystopian classics are enjoying a “Trump bump.” They are:
1984
Animal Farm
It Can’t Happen Here
Brave New World
Fahrenheit 451
Where are the histories?
These programs on the BBC are available for only 2 days more!
Please listen:
Think of Betsy DeVos as the Darth Vader of public schools. Has she ever visited a public school? Why does she think they are all failing?
Mercedes Schneider noticed how many fliers she was receiving in the mail, urging her to take advantage of Louisiana’s voucher program. The fliers came from the Alliance for School Choice. Who do you think leads that anti-public school group? Betsy DeVos.
Schneider noticed that most of the vouchers were targeted for students in New Orleans, where reformers have almost extinguished public schools. They are trying to poach students from charter schools to apply for vouchers!
Of the hundreds of thousands of students eligible for vouchers in Louisiana, only 1% have applied. Not exactly a stampede.
Parents in Louisiana are choosing public schools.
DeVos and Alliance for School Choice: Where the Ultimate “Choice” Means Vouchers to Private Schools
Diane Ravitch's blog 