Archives for the month of: November, 2020
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ACLU Sues to Block Voter Suppression in Houston

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2020 //
22

Republican activists have been trying to invalidate 127,000 votes cast in Harris County (Houston). Their case failed in the state courts. They are now in federal courts, arguing that votes cast at a drive-in location are invalid, even though the sites were approved by the Secretary of State of Texas.

ACLU Challenges Effort to Invalidate Nearly 127,000 Drive-Thru Votes Cast in Harris County, Texas

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 1, 2020

CONTACT:
Imelda Mejia, ACLU of Texas, 602–510-4534, imejia@aclutx.org
Inga Sarda-Sorensen, ACLU National, 347-514-3984, isarda-sorensen@aclu.org

HOUSTON — The American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of Texas moved to intervene tonight in a lawsuit that seeks to invalidate nearly 127,000 early votes cast via drive-thru voting in Harris County, the state’s largest county and the third largest county in the country. This is the third such attempt to discard these validly-cast ballots.

“The push to toss the ballots of nearly 127,000 Texans in Harris County is unconscionable and illegal,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, deputy director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “It appears to be an attempt to undermine a true and accurate vote count and improperly influence the outcome of the election.”

Tonight’s ACLU challenge was filed on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Texas and several individuals who voted using the drive-thru option, including:

  • Michelle Colvard, a 45-year-old registered voter who lives in Houston. She has both spina bifida and monoclonal gammopathy. Because of these conditions, she uses a wheelchair and is more susceptible to severe illness from COVID-19. She chose to drive-thru vote as the option that would minimize her risk of COVID-19 exposure.
  • Karen “Kim” Vidor, a 64-year-old registered voter living in Houston. She has been a registered voter in Harris County since she was approximately 18. She suffers from hypertension, cardiac issues, asthma, and rheumatoid arthritis, all of which heighten her risk from COVID-19. If her vote is at risk of not being counted, she fears she will be totally disenfranchised. For Vidor, a Republican, this is “not a partisan issue,” but rather an issue of having her vote counted.
  • Joy Davis-Harasemay, a 44-year-old registered voter who lives in Houston. She has both asthma and spondylitis, a degenerative spine disease that makes her unable to stand for long periods of time. She used drive-thru voting, and if her vote is not counted, she will be heartbroken and disenfranchised. As a Black woman, she likely will not vote again in this election for fear of breaking election rules and being accused of voting twice.
  • Diana Untermeyer, a 58-year-old registered voter who lives in Houston. She routinely votes for Republican candidates during general elections, including voting for Sharon Hemphill — a plaintiff in the lawsuit seeking to invalidate the drive-thru votes in Harris County — over her opponent in the 2020 general election. 

“This lawsuit is another desperate and ludicrous attempt by extremists to block the will of the people and disrupt democracy,” said Andre Segura, legal director for the ACLU of Texas. “Throwing out these votes would be patently unlawful and unprecedented. Texans have shown up in record numbers to make their voices heard, and we will fight to ensure that these votes are counted.”

“The attempt to disenfranchise more than 120,000 voters who lawfully cast their ballots during early voting is disgraceful and un-American,” said Grace Chimene, president of League of Women Voters of Texas.“Drive-thru voting was established as a safe early voting option for individuals, including many disabled voters who did not want to enter a polling site during this pandemic. It was tested with great success during the Texas run-off and special election in July. This last-minute attack on voters demonstrates a desire by some to silence Texas voters and we will not stand for it.”

A hearing is slated for Monday morning in Houston in front of U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen.

Prior to the federal court lawsuit seeking to invalidate the nearly 127,000 votes, some of the same plaintiffs filed a similar suit with the Texas Supreme Court. Earlier today, the Texas Supreme Court denied the request without an order or opinion. In late October, the Texas Supreme Court refused litigation attempting to shut down drive-thru voting in Harris County altogether.

Legal filings: https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/motion-intervene-0 and https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/opp-pi

Statement: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-challenges-effort-invalidate-127000-drive-thru-votes-cast-harris-county-texas

Categories Elections, Houston, Texas

“Give People Light, and They Will Find a Way”

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2020 //
9

Watch this wonderful commentary on the election and on the future of our democracy. Share it with your friends and family.

Categories Education Reform

Winston Churchill on the Essence of Democracy

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2020 //
26

The Republican Party and its malign leader Trump are working hard to suppress the vote, calculating that the bigger the turnout, the worse for them. Americans are standing for hours in long lines waiting to exercise their vote. This may be the most consequential election of our lifetimes.

Winston Churchill, addressing the House of Commons on October 31, 1944, said:

The foundation of all democracy is that the people have the right to vote. To deprive them of that right is to make a mockery of all the high-sounding phrases which are so often used. At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper — no amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point.

Categories Elections

North Carolina: Why You Should Vote for Jen Mangrum for State Superintendent

By dianeravitch
November 1, 2020 //
3

I have written in the past about why Jen Mangrum would be a superb State Superintendent in North Carolina. She is an experienced teacher and teacher educator. She knows what teachers need to succeed. She has been endorsed by the state teachers’ association. She is also courageous. In 2018, she ran against the most powerful state legislator, Phil Berger.

Now a few words about her opponent, Catherine Truitt. North Carolina teacher Justin Parmenter reveals that Truitt received the maximum allowable donation from a millionaire who hates public schools and teachers. He has founded a string of charter and private schools. He thinks that public schools are hotbeds of Marxism where teachers “feed poison” to their students.

Follow the money. Vote for Jen Mangrum.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Education Reform, North Carolina, Teachers

Timothy Snyder: This Is Not a Normal Election

By dianeravitch
November 1, 2020 //
42

Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale and author of the best-selling On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, explained in Commonweal why this is not a normal election.

Please read the entire article, of which the following is an excerpt:

In normal times, we might regard any vote as ethical. To participate in an election is to dignify oneself as a citizen with a voice, and to express with others the interests and values that guide the future of our land. But these are not normal times.

This is clear from the perspective of the candidates. During a normal campaign, both candidates take for granted that they will walk free after the election. One will be in the Oval Office; the other will go home. This year is different. One candidate, Donald Trump, knows that, should he not remain in power, he will descend into poverty, go to prison, or both. He can hold the ongoing criminal investigations at bay as long as he is president, but not thereafter. Trump owes hundreds of millions of dollars to his creditors and has no visible means to pay them back. As president, he can expect his creditors to wait; as a private citizen, he cannot.

If someone can maintain wealth and freedom only by holding onto power, that person will fight to hold onto power. Behind the ideologies and the propaganda, this is the core history of tyranny: government becomes the bodyguard of a gangster. Modern authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin have much to say about why they must remain in power, but the real issue is that they wish to die wealthy and in their own beds rather than poor and in prison. In authoritarian countries, the anxiety of the tyrant can be allayed by a promise not to prosecute the leader and his family, and to leave their bank accounts in peace. Because the rule of law still (more or less) prevails in the United States, no one can offer Trump such a deal. He is therefore in a fight for his life; from his point of view, he needs to spend the rest of it in the White House. His predicament might not be obvious to Americans, but people in authoritarian countries see it right away.

It is also unusual, in an American presidential campaign, for one of the candidates to admit defeat. Trump has a fine political mind, and he can read polls and the national mood as well as anyone. For months now, he has been signaling that he cannot beat Joe Biden in an election. When he tried to summon the armed forces to aid him in June, it was the gesture of a man who needed unusual forms of help. When he tweeted in July that elections should be delayed, he revealed that he did not think he could win them. Undermining the United States Postal Service, asking his supporters to vote twice, and saying that he will not accept the results: all of these are ways of saying that he expects to lose. His campaign has ignored swing voters, and the Republican National Convention made no attempt to reach the undecided. In the first presidential debate, Trump tried, as he has done for months, to delegitimize the election as such.The plan is not to win the popular (or even the electoral) vote, but rather to stay in power in some other way.

If we take Trump at his word and begin with the premise that he cannot win the election, then his actions make sense. The plan is not to win the popular (or even the electoral) vote, but rather to stay in power in some other way. We don’t even really have to guess about this, since Trump has spelled it out himself: he will declare victory regardless of what happens, expect state governments to act contrary to vote counts, claim fraud from postal ballots, court chaos from white nationalists (and perhaps the Department of Homeland Security), and expect the Supreme Court to install him. In general, the idea behind these scenarios is to create as much chaos as possible, and then fall back upon personal ruthlessness and an artificial state of emergency to stay in power. If Trump creates a constitutional crisis while his supporters commit acts of violence, the Supreme Court might be intimidated.

In this transition from democracy to authoritarianism, otherwise known as a coup d’état, the actual number of people who vote for Trump matters less than it would in an ordinary election. In this scenario, it matters more how angry they are, and how willing some of them are to endorse extraordinary actions by Trump, or to take such actions themselves. Because he is treating election day as the occasion for a coup, Trump has good reason not to soften his message to reach more voters. In doing so he would risk losing some of the emotion he needs when he tries to stay in power by non-democratic means. He only has to stay within about ten points of Joe Biden to avoid the demoralization that arises when even core supporters realize they have been deceived by their leader and overwhelmed by their fellow citizens at the polls.

It is unusual for a plan for a coup d’état to be broadcast so clearly. Yet there is a political logic here, one with deep moral implications. By telling Americans in advance that he intends to stay in power regardless of the vote count, Trump is implicating his supporters in the action as it unfolds. He is giving them notice that they are siding with someone who intends to work hard to see that votes are not counted. He is making them understand that they are participants in the unravelling of American democracy. They might not want to face this reality squarely, which would be a normal reaction. This is a lesson of modern tyranny: authoritarianism need not be a conscious project of those embraced by it. They need only sleepwalk through the roles assigned to them. When democracy lies in the dust, they will find rationalizations for what they have done, and will support the authoritarian regime that follows, because they are already involved. No argument from emotions or interests can stop that process. The degradation is ethical, and so the question is about ethics.

What, then, is the moral meaning of a vote for Donald Trump on November 3? 

Keep reading to learn the answer.

Categories Democracy, Education Reform, Fascism, Trump

Betsy DeVos: “Shame”

By dianeravitch
November 1, 2020 //
8

Betsy DeVos spent her time as Secretary of Education attacking and demeaning public schools. Before she was selected as Secretary, she spent millions of dollars promoting privatization of public funds. As Secretary, she carried forward her lifelong goal to divert public funds to vouchers for religious schools.

This is how public parents, grandparents, and graduates will remember her.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, For-Profit, Privatization, Shame, Vouchers

Ohio: ECOT Treasurer Offers to Help State Recover Millions from Charter Operator

By dianeravitch
November 1, 2020 //
2

Bill Phillis, founder of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding reports that an ECOT insider has agreed to help the state in its effort to recoup some of the millions it lost by paying the low-performing virtual charter school for almost 20 years.

He writes:

Former ECOT treasurer willing to help press state claims against the ECOT Man, William Lager


The Attorney General asked the court to approve a settlement with the former treasurer of ECOT according to a memorandum filed by the Attorney General. The settlement would drop charges against the former ECOT treasurer in exchange for her providing evidence for the state’s case against Bill Lager, the ECOT Man. The former treasurer has indicated that ECOT’s board was not apprised of its legal rights and relevant facts when it approved contracts with Lager’s companies.


The claims against Lager pursuant to illegal contracts total $161,602,806. Lager also bilked the taxpayers more than $100 million for funds wrongfully received from the state. Over the nearly two decades of collecting money for phantom students, ECOT’s illegal “take” might have been in the hundreds of millions.


In the charter industry, boards are typically puppets whose strings are pulled by the charter operator. This is a typical scenario: a profit seeking individual or group shops for a sponsor. After being authorized (sponsored), the individual/group sets up a charter school and appoints a board. In most cases, the board is controlled by the operator-just the opposite of what the relationship ought to be.


State officials (governors, legislators, auditors, attorney generals, state superintendents and Ohio Department of Education personnel) should be embarrassed that they didn’t nip this ECOT fraud in the bud. ECOT is the tip of the iceberg in charter fraud. Charter students have been robbed of high quality educational opportunities and the taxpayers have been bilked via the charter industry. State officials have enacted legislation that permits such corruption.

Categories Education Reform, Fraud, Ohio, Virtual Charter Schools

Televangelist Warns That if Biden Wins, People Will Start Having Sex with Cattle

By dianeravitch
November 1, 2020 //
85

A friend who retired from D.C. to Arizona sent me this frightening story.

A televangelist says that if Biden wins, people will start have set with cattle.

My friend says they are locking up the cattle, just to be on the safe side.

Categories Education Reform

Bob Shepherd: Can We Survive Kakistocracy?

By dianeravitch
November 1, 2020 //
27

Polymath Bob Shepherd wonders if our society can survive kakistocracy, the rule of the most ignorant among us. He recalls profoundly dumb things said by Sarah Palin when she ran as John McCain’s vice presidential running mate in 2008. Then came Trump, whose ignorance is profound.

He writes:

Can we survive the likes of Trump?

How well I remember Sarah Palin giving a speech, very shortly after she was chosen as McCain’s running mate, in which she laughed and sneered, outraged, that the government had spent some x amount of dollars studying fruit flies. “Fruit flies!” she exclaimed, as though this were the most insane thing one could imagine.

Of course, this profoundly ignorant person had no idea that much of our understanding of genetics and of genetic disease comes from studies using Drosophila melanogaster. I laughed and laughed that she didn’t know the science she might have learned from a third grader’s Scholastic Weekly Reader. Such profound ignorance. But then, horrified, I saw John McCain pick up the same talking point the week following, and I thought: well, here we are. We are on the cusp of the most significant change in the history of life on Earth, when we eliminate genetic disease and then people start taking evolution into their own hands and it becomes, for the first time, TELEOLOGICAL (purposefully engineered/directed by us). The consequences of the latter will be profound beyond any current reckoning. It changes the basic rules that have always held.

And this is happening at a time when our politicians, at the highest levels, don’t know even the most basic science.
All this was prelude to Donald Trump, the stable genius who thinks that we should nuke hurricanes, that climate change is just weather, that we could send astronauts to the sun, that Alabama is in danger from hurricanes skirting the East Coast, that windmills and low-energy light bulbs cause cancer, that stealth planes are actually invisible, that a dementia diagnostic is a test of general intelligence, that we need to return to using asbestos in our buildings, that HIV and HPV are the same thing, that the primary cause of California wildfires is bad forest management, that coal and natural gas are “clean energy,” that “the ice caps” are “at a record level,” that global warming is a hoax invented to reduce U.S. competitiveness with China, that we are better off without federal regulation of pollutants of air and water, that exercise needs to be avoided because it uses up energy, and that injecting disinfectant might be a great way to treat Covid19. But remember that Trump has told us that “nobody knows technology like Donald Trump,” and that he is on top of “the cyber.”

So, this raises a question: Why do Americans elect to high office such ignorant people? the Sarah Palins and Matt Gaetzes and Donald Trumps among us? In dramatic contrast, I read a speech, last year, by Putin in which he talked intelligently, at length, about genetic engineering.

And that raises another question: can we survive this tendency to elect the profoundly ignorant?

Categories Accountability, Ignorance, Stupid, Trump

NBC News Investigates the Hunter Biden Laptop Story

By dianeravitch
November 1, 2020 //
63

NBC News assigned two investigative reporters to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story. What they discovered was worthy of a James Bond movie (farewell to Sean Connery, the best of the Bonds).

NBC investigators Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny pursued the origins of a document that was widely circulated on rightwing media.

One month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, a fake “intelligence” document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son and business in China.

The document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake “intelligence firm” called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents.

The author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also concluded that Aspen’s profile picture was created with an artificial intelligence face generator. The intelligence firm that Aspen lists as his previous employer said that no one by that name had ever worked for the company and that no one by that name lives in Switzerland, according to public records and social media searches.

One of the original posters of the document, a blogger and professor named Christopher Balding, took credit for writing parts of it when asked about it and said Aspen does not exist.

Despite the document’s questionable authorship and anonymous sourcing, its claims that Hunter Biden has a problematic connection to the Communist Party of China have been used by people who oppose the Chinese government, as well as by far-right influencers, to baselessly accuse candidate Joe Biden of being beholden to the Chinese government.

The document and its spread have become part of a wider effort to smear Hunter Biden and weaken Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, which moved from the fringes of the internet to more mainstream conservative news outlets.

An unverified leak of documents — including salacious pictures from what President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and a Delaware Apple repair store owner claimed to be Hunter Biden’s hard drive — were published in the New York Post on Oct. 14. Associates close to Trump, including Giuliani and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, have promised more blockbuster leaks and secrets, which have yet to materialize.

The fake intelligence document, however, preceded the leak by months, and it helped lay the groundwork among right-wing media for what would become a failed October surprise: a viral pile-on of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.

The story about Hunter Biden’s laptop first appeared in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post in mid-October. The gist of the story is that Hunter Biden allegedly dropped off computers at a repair shop in Delaware in 2019, telling the shop owner that they had suffered water damage and needed to be fixed. He never returned to pick them up.

The shop owner decided to examine the contents of the hard drive and discovered emails that showed that Hunter had introduced his father to officials in Ukraine, that he had persuaded his father to get involved in a business deal in China in 2017 (when Joe Biden was a private citizen), and salacious videos of Hunter Biden. The shop owner says he turned over the hard drive to Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, and to the FBI. Giuliani then distributed the contents of the hard drive to the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal.

The story was supposed to be the Trump campaign’s October surprise, an expose that would destroy Biden. But the mainstream media was wary and treated the story skeptically. The reporter for the New York Post who wrote it refused to put his name on it. Some wondered why Hunter Biden, who lives in Los Angeles, would fly to Philadelphia and take a train to Wilmington to have his computer repaired, then forget to retrieve it.

As soon as the New York Post published the expose about Hunter’s emails, Devin Coldewey of TechCrunch wrote that the provenance of the laptop was extremely fishy. Some suspected that Russian disinformation was involved. Coldewey wrote, “But even supposing no global influence effort existed, the provenance of this so-called leak would be difficult to swallow. So much so that major news organizations have held off coverage, and Facebook and Twitter have both limited the distribution of the NY Post article.” As a techie, he finds the whole story not credible. He gives several reasons why it defies common sense. He writes:

It is beyond the worst operational security in the world to give an unencrypted device with confidential data on it to a third party. It is, however, very much a valid way for someone to make a device appear to be from a person or organization without providing any verification that it is so...

The repair shop supposedly could not identify Hunter Biden, who lives in Los Angeles, as the customer. But the invoice (for $85 — remarkably cheap for diagnosis, recovery, and backup of three damaged Macs) has “Hunter Biden” written right on it, with a phone number and one of the email addresses he reportedly used. It seems unlikely that Hunter Biden’s personal laptop — again, loaded with personal and confidential information, and possibly communications with the VP — would be given to a small repair shop (rather than an Apple Store or vetted dealer) and that shop would be given his personal details for contact...

The idea that Biden or his assistant or whoever would not return to pick up the laptop or pay for the services is extremely suspicious. Again, these are supposedly the personal devices of someone who communicated regularly with the VP, and whose work had come under intense scrutiny long before they were dropped off. They would not be treated lightly or forgotten. On the other hand, someone who wanted this data to be inspected would do exactly this…

That the laptops themselves were open and unencrypted is ridiculous. The serial number of the laptop suggests it was a 2017 MacBook Pro, probably running Mojave. Every Mac running Lion or later has easily enabled built-in encryption. It would be unusual for anyone to provide a laptop for repair that had no password or protection whatsoever on its files, let alone a person like Hunter Biden — again, years into efforts to uncover personal data relating to his work in Ukraine. ..

That this information would be inspected by the repair shop at all is very suspect indeed. Recovery of an ostensibly damaged Mac would likely take the form of cloning the drive and checking its integrity against the original. There is no reason the files or apps themselves would need to be looked at in the course of the work in the first place. Some shops have software that checks file hashes, if they can see them, against a database of known child sex abuse material. And there have been notable breaches of trust where repair staff illicitly accessed the contents of a laptop to get personal data. But there’s really no legitimate reason for this business to inspect the contents of the devices they are working on, let alone share that information with anyone, let alone a partisan operative. The owner, an avid Trump supporter, gave an interview this morning giving inconsistent information on what had happened and suggested he investigated the laptops of his own volition and retained copies for personal protection.

The data itself is not convincing. The Post has published screenshots of emails instead of the full text with metadata — something you would want to do if you wanted to show they were authentic. For stories with potential political implications, it’s wise to verify.

Since Trump can’t explain his inability or unwillingness to control the pandemic, since he refuses to admit that his administration is trying to have the Affordable Care Act thrown out by the Supreme Court, since he can’t produce the health insurance plan that he claims will be better than the Affordable Care Act, since he has no policies that he can defend, all he has left is throwing mud at Joe Biden. Let’s hope the American people are not fooled.


Categories Biden, Education Reform, Hoax, Trump
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