We know now that the extreme crazies are determined to create “universal distrust” in public schools, as far-right extremist Chris Rufo said in his infamous Hillsdale speech. We have seen how they insult dedicated, hard-working teachers as greedy, lazy, even implying or saying that some are “grooming” children for sexual perversions.
The gutter snipes of the extreme right never rest, so they quickly leapt on a statement by President Biden praising outstanding teachers. The haters cleverly deleted one important word from his statement to turn his praise into a claim that the state “owns” the children.
Wonder what that one word was? Open Peter Greene’s commentary for a demonstration of how the omission of one word was used to promote demagoguery and deception.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Perhaps the word “like” is more important than the grammar police admit.
I resemble that remark!
Curly Zen.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/may/15/why-do-people-like-say-like-so-much-in-praise-of-an-underappreciated-word
Biden needs better speech writers. He should have said, “When children are in the classroom, teachers treat them as if they are part of their own family”
imagine
And that could and likely would have been turned into a big scandal: “Biden says children belong to teachers, not parents” or “Biden says teachers are the family, not the parents.”
When will we stop helping the far right demonize democrats and progressives who support public schools by completely embracing the pro-right wing narrative that it is the fault of the person who was misquoted or lied about for “not saying something the right way”? It isn’t. It is the fault of those who are trying to intentionally deceive the public and mislead them into believing that saying something totally innocuous was somehow bad, by taking a few words of of context.
This happened in Virginia, where a pro-public education Democrat was defeated by an anti-public education pro-privatizer Republican. That Democrat made a statement that got CHEERS AND APPLAUSE from a huge crowd of parents and teachers when that statement was made. Then the right wing isolated a phrase, amplified that phrase out of context and basically lied and said that phrase meant something it didn’t (which of course the people who actually heard the speech knew because they cheered and applauded.) Then the mainstream media picked up that lie, and then I even saw it repeated on this blog — people who supported public education had been propagandized to believe it was the Democrat’s fault for saying “the wrong way” — a statement that got cheers and applause, but that the right wing took out of context.
We gotta stop falling for this. It happens over and over again because the far right has no integrity or shame. It happens over and over again because the so-called “liberal” media is so obsessed with proving that they aren’t “biased” that they dutifully report and legitimize any false narrative the right wing gives them, with some buried disclaimer that there is “another side”, too.
Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity do this ALL THE TIME. Selective “quotation.”
We shouldn’t be surprised that those on the right would omit the word “like” in Biden’s quote. The right wing are serial propagandists that will lie, cheat and steal to fire up their misinformed base that has been conditioned to believe that the federal government and the so-called public school “groomers” are trying to subvert a good old Christian education. All total lies and nonsense!
I haven’t heard too many parents complain about teachers that literally stop bullets with their own bodies, a job they shouldn’t feel compelled to do, a job the Uvalde police couldn’t or wouldn’t do. They do it because they are committed to functioning as ‘in loco parentis’ when confronted by unimaginable danger to their students. They are heroes in the strongest sense of the word.
Today is Say Something Nice Day. I’m not kidding. So,
One thing you can say about Tucker Carlson, there was that time that he wore a really nice tie.
I thought I would retweet this piece from Ted Cruz
“The destruction of the nuclear family, the deterioration of Faith, and of community— these are some of the things we need to address that have nothing to do with government and policy.”
as
“The destruction of the nuclear family, the deterioration of Faith, and of community— these are some of the things we need.” –Ted Cruz
Cruz is little more than a paid spokesperson for whomever is paying for his tickets to Cancun. I cannot understand why the people of Texas keep voting for him. Based on this quote, I would say the Christian right are paying for his next vacation.
What a sanctimonious hypocrite. Cruz.
Headline in The Onion today:
Left-wing Groups Too Disorganized for FBI to Infiltrate
The expression I recall from my youth was that lefties couldn’t organize a 2-car funeral
Ha! So funny! I’ll be laughing all the way to the voting booth where you guys still think I’m going to vote for your candidate.
For the record, Democrats still have “access” to my vote if they want it. But they don’t own it – they need to work for it. Laughing in my face isn’t going to cut it.
Oh, and if they don’t want it, fine, just don’t blame me for the outcome.
Putin’s daughter won’t need an actual vote, ofc. I do note, however, that DeSantis has been quite mum about Ukraine. Expecting a little something something come 2024?
Dienne, Diane Ravitch was doing leftist politics when she was barely more than a baby. This is, was, a joke about how the left in the U.S. splintered early on into as many denominations as the fundamentalist Christians have, all squabbling scholastically with one another. Which wasn’t surprising, I suppose, given that Marx himself had practically to be tied down to his writing desk by Engels or he never would have finished Kapital because he was too busy arguing about teenie niceties of doctrine with other Socialists and was as a result constantly distracted from The Great Work. So, you misread the joke, Dienne, but Diane got it right away because she had been there, done that.
But thanks, Dienne, for illustrating/exemplifying the point.
Ofc, now the fundie nationalists have grown beyond spending their days arguing about whether one can use a baptismal fount or must haul off to a river and whether this can be done with children or on a Tuesday. Now, they are one rough beast slouching toward the Oval Office in 2024, and the Left will be somewhere arguing about whether it’s OK to be impolite in a public debate.
The other reason Marx was so hard to tie down was for his infamous carbuncles. Imagine how history might have changed if Karl had a standing desk. All flowers, happiness and joy.
Greg: I have often wondered how history might have played out if leaders did not suffer from the itches and pains of life.
Roy: Unlike Androcles, they had no lions around to help out.
This fits here:
Thanks for the laugh, Bob. Too few these days, & I’m too disorganized to look for them.
Haaaa!!!
I’m also so discomBOBulated (bad pun intended) that I’ve posted the same comment twice. (Not blaming WordPress for this one–taking responsibility, unlike aBUTT.)
Totally understandable. Sometimes I get DiscoBobulated
So funny, retired! BTW, have I ever told you how much I LOVE your screen name? I totally relate.
🤗
Rupert Murdoch’s candidate in Australia lost despite the Murdoch media’s ownership of 65% of the nation’s newspapers. Murdoch uses the same strategy in Australia that Fox uses to persuade and to bully in the U.S. Pat Buchanan’s “culture wars,” a strategy to hide authoritarian theocracy’s takeover of democracy, was front and center in the conservative incumbent’s campaign. The new prime minister is a non-practicing member of the church he was raised in. He believes in separation of church and state. Murdoch’s candidate is evangelical and he claims he has a God-given plan. The election was a defeat of the, anything but, “religious freedom” that is promoted by the religious right who take a cut as reward for increasing the wealth of the richest 0.1%.
The new prime minister has appointed a record number of women to cabinet posts.
Btw- when we pull our punches out of loyalty to another person, that person shares in the culpability.
Backfeifengesicht: a face that needs/asks for/deserves punching.
IOW: it cruz
As you all might remember John Bohner called him the most disliked (or even hated) member of Congress.
I think he might even have called him the devil.