Archives for the month of: June, 2024
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Trump vs. Biden: This Is What “Unhinged” Looks Like

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2024 //
9

This is an extraordinary clip that shows Biden and Trump speaking without a teleprompter or notes. Biden was asked a question by a reporter, off the cuff. Trump was speaking at a rally in Las Vegas when his teleprompter went off. First he rants about not paying the company that installed the teleprompter. Then he tells a story about visiting a boat manufacturer in South Carolina, where Trump asks him how dangerous it would be if an electric boat sank. Would he be electrocuted or would he be attacked by a shark? He points out that he is very smart because of his connection to MIT (an uncle taught there).

To see more immortal Trump musings at his Las Vegas rally, watch this clip from the Meidas Touch blog.

Categories Biden, Elections, Trump

Biden Vs. Trump on D-Day, History and the World Order

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2024 //
23

Susan Glasser of The New Yorker wrote about President Biden’s speech commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the invasion that began the end of World War II. Others contrasted Biden’s speech with President Ronald Reagan’s 40th anniversary speech on the same occasion. Conservatives in the usual media outlets (FOX) jeered Biden for trying to sound like Reagan. Both of them spoke as patriots, as defenders of democracy, and of critics of isolationism.

Here is Biden’s speech. Rightwing commentators thought that he was “plagiarizing” Reagan because he talked about the heroism of the Army Rangers and the importance of democracy and freedom, for which the troops fought. Pray tell, what else would an American President talk about on such an occasion?

Biden is not the speaker that Reagan was; after all, Reagan was a professional actor who could read his lines with sincerity and fervor. Biden too is a patriot, and he knows what is at stake if we lose the world order created by so much sacrifice and loss of life. What would Trump have said of the Army Rangers hailed by Biden? Would he have expressed his familiar question “What was in it for them?” Would he have said as he did of John McCain, “I don’t like losers.” To Trump, who never served in the military (nor did his sons), winners don’t get captured or killed. Biden’s son Beau served in Afghanistan and subsequently died from brain cancer, which was attributed to the burn pits.

Glasser writes:

Anniversary speeches are, generally speaking, the trivial bane of an American Presidency. They are, by definition, backward-looking. The obligatory patriotic rhetoric, the flag-drenched backdrops—it is hard for them to read as anything other than tired and trite. Speaking in Normandy on Thursday to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the Allied landings that spelled the beginning of the end of the Second World War, Joe Biden faced all those hurdles, and a few more besides. He is, after all, running for reëlection as America’s oldest-ever President, an octogenarian whose campaign is beset by increasingly pointed questions about whether he is still up to the job. Born in the midst of the war, Biden is all but certain to be the last U.S. President who was alive on June 6, 1944; there will not be another. The solemn D Day commemorations could have easily backfired on him—serving as a reminder that he, like the one hundred and eighty veterans of the Normandy operation able to return for this year’s ceremony, is but a superannuated relic of a bygone era. I have no doubt that in the unkinder, Trumpier precincts of the Internet, this is exactly how his appearance there was received.

It is true that Biden walked slowly during the proceedings and at times stumbled over his words; the White House would do well to stop pretending that, at age eighty-one, the President has not lost a step or two. It is also true that he did not suddenly transform overnight into a spellbinding orator. But, for what may well be his final D Day encore before the great battle passes from living memory, Biden met the moment with a message that was bracing, urgent, and clarifying. In a speech at the Normandy American Cemetery that was anything but generic, he called out both Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and, though he did not use his name, Donald Trump’s isolationism—the dual threats that have animated this last political campaign of Biden’s, in a long life full of them. “The autocrats of the world are watching closely,” he said, and it was not a warning, really, so much as a statement of blunt fact about the stakes in this year’s U.S. election and the foreign-policy consequences that will flow from it. His opponent is an admirer of Putin, and, reportedly, of Hitler even. Trump truly supports neither Ukraine nor nato.

As I write this, it still seems insane, unimaginable, that these are sentences about a once and possibly future American President. But they are real, if unfortunately so familiar by now that Trump often benefits from our failure to be shocked all over again. Just two days before Putin’s attack on his neighbor, Trump called him a strategic “genius.” On the campaign trail, Trump frequently speaks about his great relationships with the world’s current crop of autocrats and tyrants, praising Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un for their strength, while ranting about the weakness of the West. When Trump was President, he told his White House chief of staff, John Kelly, a decorated former Marine general, that he wanted America’s officers to be more like Hitler’s in their unquestioning loyalty to him. He routinely calls his enemies “vermin” and “human scum,” echoing Hitler’s language, and Kelly has said that Trump even told him that “Hitler did some good things.”

While listening to Biden’s speech, I thought about a resignation letter that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff appointed by Trump, wrote but did not send to him in 2020. “It is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945,” Milley said in the letter, a draft of which I obtained in the course of writing a book on the Trump Presidency. “It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against.”

Biden did not have to mention any of this to make it the inescapable context of his remarks on Thursday. “To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable,” Biden told the audience pointedly, adding, “Were we to do that, it means we’d be forgetting what happened here on these hallowed beaches.” And yet so much forgetting has happened, and I am not thinking here about the lessons of the past century as much as I am about the lessons of just one four-year Presidential term ago. Does anyone still remember Trump in Helsinki in 2018, tripping over himself as he took Putin’s word over that of America’s intelligence agencies? Or Trump in France, for another set of world-war commemorations later that year, fresh off midterm-election losses and skipping a cemetery visit because he reportedly did not want to get his hair wet? Or Trump, in 2019, blackmailing Ukraine’s young new President, Volodymyr Zelensky, by holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military assistance needed to fight off Russia as he demanded Zelensky dig up dirt on Biden?

It is thinkable, then, all too thinkable. At the time of Biden’s speech, the polling averages showed Trump slightly ahead of him. What will happen to Ukraine if he should win?

“Their generation, in their hour of trial—the Allied forces of D Day did their duty,” Biden said, concluding his remarks. “Now the question for us is: In our hour of trial, will we do ours?”

Just a week ago, Trump became the only former President to be convicted of a crime. In a round of interviews defiantly rejecting both the verdict and the legal system that produced it, Trump made the following observation about America’s adversaries: “So you have Russia, you have China. But if you have a smart President, you always handle them quite easily, actually,” he told the hosts of the Fox News weekend morning show. “But the enemy within—they are doing damage to this country.”

Could there be a bigger contrast with Biden’s words in Normandy? “The enemy within” is not the language of a democratic President but of a dangerous demagogue who cares more about loyalty tests than geopolitical realities. Their clashing world views are underrated—or not rated at all—as a campaign issue, in a race overwhelmed by questions about Biden’s age and Trump’s sanity, and dominated by concerns over inflation, immigration, and the general sour mood of the country. And yet I cannot think of a starker delineation between the current President and his predecessor. It says something about the politics of 2024, indeed, that rather than seeing foreign policy as Trump’s vulnerability, some now view it as a problem for Biden, who struggled for months to get the Republican House of Representatives to provide billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine, a delay that caused battlefield setbacks and a drop in morale, even as his own Democratic Party grew painfully divided over the President’s strong public support for Israel in its war against Hamas.

On the eve of Biden’s trip to France, Time magazine released a lengthy interview with him, a striking counterpoint to an interview that the magazine conducted with Trump earlier this spring. Biden’s was dominated by his concerns over the unravelling of the postwar order that he warned about again on Thursday; Trump’s was a portrait of a man consumed by grievances, whether against the “very unfair” European allies who Trump thinks should be contributing more to Ukraine’s defense, or the criminal court cases against him that he blames on Biden. When the Time interviewer told him that many Americans found his rhetoric about being a dictator “for a day” and the suspension of the Constitution contrary to “cherished democratic principles,” Trump’s reply was chilling. “I think a lot of people like it,” he said.

Reading back through the interview the other day, I was struck that Trump had said, almost word for word, the language about Russia and China and “the enemy within” that he repeated once again this week: “I think the enemy from within, in many cases, is much more dangerous for our country than the outside enemies of China, Russia, and various others that would be called enemies depending on who the President is, frankly.” This, then, was not an idle observation of Trump’s but a theme of his campaign—the theme of his campaign.

Biden must have read Trump’s interview, too, as preparation for his own. It clearly informed his passionate case for why Trump is a danger to the international order, his focus on the threat posed by Russia—Trump, in his own interview, had bragged about how well he got along with Putin—and his best off-the-cuff line: “All the bad guys are rooting for Trump, man. Not a joke.”

Neither stirring battlefield rhetoric nor snarky one-liners, though, can explain how Biden can extract himself from his current predicament, running dead even at best against a felonious ex-President who diminishes the threats from America’s adversaries abroad because he is consumed by purging disloyal citizens at home. Tell that to the boys of Pointe du Hoc. I don’t think they’d believe it. ♦︎

Categories Biden, Democracy, Elections, Freedom, History, Trump

Alaska: A Teacher Critiques the Harvard Charter School Study

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2024 //
23

Researcher Beth Zirbes, a teacher of advanced mathematics, used her skills to dissect a charter school study produced at Harvard. The study was reported by Paul Peterson in The Journal of School Choice; Peterson, like the Journal, is an outspoken advocate for charters and vouchers. The study claimed that charter schools outperform public schools, and that the charter schools in Alaska were best among all states.

The governor of Alaska cited the study as a reason to increase the number of charter schools.

Zirbes doubted that this was true and decided to do her own analysis. What she found, amazingly, was that the Harvard study ignored vital demographic factors.

She wrote:

When I first saw the results of the Harvard study concerning charter schools I was simultaneously unsurprised and skeptical. I was unsurprised as I have seen many very bright young students in my AP classes come from charter schools. I was skeptical as I suspected much of this performance could be attributed to the type of student who attends Alaska’s charter schools. As a comparative analysis of Alaska’s charter schools and neighborhood schools had not been done, I set out to do one myself.

To determine whether charter schools outperform neighborhood schools I looked at the performance of all schools on the 2018-2019 PEAKS ELA (English Language Arts) assessment from the Alaska Department of Early Childhood Education and Development’s (DEED) report card to the public, as this year was within the same time frame as the data from the Harvard study. The performance of each school is given under the “2018-2019 Performance Evaluation for Alaska’s Schools (PEAKS)” tab. I used the data on this page for every school in the state which allowed me to analyze test scores and demographic characteristics such as the proportion of the school who are economically disadvantaged, English language learners (ELL), and special education (SPED). Demographic characteristics are only given for the set of test-takers and thus all summaries and analyses are for students in grades 3-9 during the 2018-2019 school year. I also removed all correspondence schools from my dataset as these students were not included in the Harvard study, do not take NAEPs tests, and have very low participation rates on state tests. For my analysis on performance, I also restricted my dataset to include schools only in districts where charters are an option to ensure that the student populations were as similar as possible.

At first glance, it appears that charter schools are more successful than neighborhood schools. At charter schools 52.5% (1,866 out of 3,554) of students were proficient on the ELA assessment versus 40.1% (18,655 out of 46,574) of students at neighborhood schools. However, these differences could be explained by the differences in demographics of the student bodies at these schools. To rule this out as a potential issue, statisticians control for these variables in their mathematical models. We can then ask, do the charter schools outperform neighborhood schools that have similar characteristics? Or do charter schools do any better than we would expect, given their student populations? In short, the answer is no, they do not. When I fit a model which controlled for socioeconomic status alone, the type of school (charter versus neighborhood) was not significant. (For anyone who knows statistics, the p-value associated with type of school was 0.57. It wasn’t even close.) In summary, there is no evidence that charter schools outperform neighborhood schools in terms of ELA proficiency once we consider their socioeconomic make-up.

During my data exploration, I discovered that charter schools, on average, have very different student bodies than neighborhood schools. Charter schools have far fewer economically disadvantaged students, far fewer ELL students, and are comparable to neighborhood schools in terms of SPED populations. Here is a summary of how these populations differ for all Alaskan students in the relevant grades in all of Alaska’s brick and mortar schools for the 2018-2019 school year:

  •  Neighborhood schools were 52.2% economically disadvantaged (30,780 out of 58,929 students) compared to 31.3% in charter schools (1,219 out of 3895 students).
  • Neighborhood schools were 15.5% ELL (9,150 out of 58,929 students) compared to 9.3% in charter schools (363 out of 3895 students).
  • Neighborhood schools were 16.3% SPED (9,162 out of 58,929 students) compared to 13.7% in charter schools (532 out of 3895 students).

However, these summaries are highly influenced by a few outliers and obscure some large discrepancies, especially in terms of the economically disadvantaged and ELL students.

  • Of the charter schools, 46.4% (13 out of 28) have economically disadvantaged rates below 20%, compared to just 3.5% of neighborhood schools (15 out of 426).
  • Only 10.7% of charter schools (3 out of 28) have ELL percentages above 10%, compared to 36.9% of neighborhood schools (157 out of 426).

Even if we did a comparison of charter schools and neighborhood schools and found that charter schools did better, we still cannot conclude charter schools are causing the performance difference we observe. A comparative study like this is an example of an observational study and because it is impossible to control for all confounding factors, such as parental involvement, we can’t conclude success is caused by the school type. To definitively conclude that charter schools were causing the observed difference in success compared to neighborhood schools we would have to randomly assign some students to go to a charter school and some students to go to neighborhood schools. After some time, we would then compare the results. Obviously, this is impractical as many charter schools do not have busing, require volunteer hours, can remove students for poor attendance, and some do not even have lunch services.

Before the state uses the results of the Harvard study to change the approval process for charter schools we need to understand if charters are better and, if so, why. So far, I have not seen convincing evidence that charter schools outperform neighborhood schools when we control for various student characteristics. I have an idea for further study which I believe should be completed before any changes to policy are made. We can examine the performance of students who got admitted to charter schools via the lottery to those who applied but did not get in and attended their neighborhood schools instead. The group who was admitted is likely similar to those who applied but were not. This would be as close to a randomized experiment as one could hope to have. From this one could determine whether various factors were causing differences in performance, such as class size and teaching methodology. Additionally, we could use results of such a study to determine which factors correlate with success and apply these strategies in all our schools. As more than 90% of the students at our in-person schools are in neighborhood schools, such reforms will be more wide-reaching than simply adding a few more charter schools.

 2018-2019 PEAKS ELA, Beth Zirbes, economically disadvantaged, ELL, Guest Column, Harvard Charter School Study, NAEP, SPED

Categories Alaska, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Research

“Democracy”: Setting the Record Straight, Part 2: Yes, Putin Did Interfere in 2016 to Help Trump

By dianeravitch
June 9, 2024 //
65

When a commenter belittled Russian interference in the 2016 election, Democracy returned to provide the evidence of Russia’s active and considerable interference in the election of 2016. The election of Trump was a major coup for Putin.

Democracy wrote:

“Whatever meager influence Russian may have had …”

I suppose this is an improvement over “The fact remains that there is no evidence for Russian involvement in the U.S. election at all.”

This, written at a time when there was — IN FACT – LOTS of evidence of Russian involvement in the 2016 election, from virtually every intelligence agency in the United States government:

US Intelligence news release on October 7, 2016:  

“The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/215-press-releases-2016/1423-joint-dhs-odni-election-security-statement

Reuters:  “The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency and Office of Director of National Intelligence agree that Russia was behind hacks into Democratic Party organizations and operatives ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election. There is also agreement, according to U.S. officials, that Russia sought to intervene in the election to help Trump, a Republican, defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-cyber-idUSKBN14H1SR

There are some people who apply the Trumpian tactic on Michael Cohen to this information, suggesting that because, at certain times in the past, some of these agencies have had credibility issues.

Except, here, private cybersecurity experts have confirmed the information. As The Daily Beast reported in 2017,

“it was a respected computer security company called Crowdstrike that examined the servers, and publicly revealed Russian’s involvement in the DNC hacks last year. It backed up the claim with specific technical information far more useful than anything in the DHS report. Crowdstrike competitors, including Symantec and FireEye, have examined the forensic data from the DNC hack themeselves, and endorsed Crowdstrike’s conclusion that two particular hacking groups were the culprits: ‘Fancy Bear’ and ‘The Dukes.’

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/06/how-the-u-s-enabled-russian-hack-truthers.html

Here’s how Thomas Rid, formerly at the Department of War Studies at Kings College London, and now the Director of the Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins, and who studies and writes about technology and cyber warfare, puts it:

“the evidence is so rich that there are only two reasons not to accept it — one, because you don’t understand the technical details, or because you don’t want to understand it for political reasons… It’s really not controversial that we’re looking at a major Russian campaign.”

Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum summarized the whole sordid affair well:

“the outline of the case is no mystery…Democratic and Republican Party servers were hacked by foreign agents, yet the Moscow-friendly folks at Wikileaks somehow only obtained the contents of Democratic servers…Meanwhile, Donald Trump ran a campaign that seemed almost designed to please Russian President Vladimir Putin…The campaign then rewrote the Republican platform in ways sure to please Putin. Trump selected as his principal foreign-policy adviser a retired general previously paid by Russia’s English-language propaganda network, RT…Trump himself publicly urged the Russians to do more hacking of his opponent’s email…Trump endorsed Putin’s war aims in Syria…He suggested he would not honor NATO commitments against Russia…He condoned the invasion and annexation of Crimea…Do Americans really need secret information from the CIA to discern the pattern here?”

Yet there DO appear to be SOME people who still try to play off the Russian ratf*cking as some kind of climate-change-like “hoax.”

Some of them even think that they’re “smart.”

But, hey, I got some news.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Lies, Trump

“Democracy”: Setting the Record Straight, Part 1: Which Presidential Candidate Does Putin Favor?

By dianeravitch
June 9, 2024 //
13

A commenter who uses the nom de plume “Democracy” responded to a discussion on the blog. Someone said that Putin publicly endorsed Biden. Others said that former KGB agent Putin was lying to mislead gullible American voters. Trump’s deference to Putin before and after he was elected was often noted. Trump denied that Putin interfered in the 2016 election, overruling American intelligence agencies. Putin denied it, and that was good enough for Trump.

Democracy wrote:

To clarify this issue — Biden v Trump — a bit, it’s absolutely CRAZY to think that Vladimir Putin would prefer another Biden term to Trump. Given what we know to be true, it’s really just plain stupid.

There’s just TONS of documented evidence that Putin WANTED Trump to be president and he directed Russian intelligence agencies HELP him.

The Senate Intelligence Committee spent a lot of time investigating the 2016 election and produced a set of reports on its findings.

Volume 1 of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s efforts notes this:

“The Russian government directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure’ at the state and local level…Russian activities demand renewed attention to vulnerabilities in U.S. voting infrastructure. In 2016, cybersecurity for electoral infrastructure at the state and local level was sorely lacking; for example, voter registration databases were not as secure as they could have been. Aging voting equipment, particularly voting machines that had no paper record of votes, were vulnerable to exploitation by a committed adversary…Russian government-affiliated cyber actors conducted an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. elections…the Committee found ample evidence to suggest that the Russian government was developing and implementing capabilities to interfere in the 2016 elections, including undermining confidence in U.S. democratic institutions and voting processes.”

Volume 2 of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s gets more specific:

“In 2016, Russian operatives associated with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) used social media to conduct an information warfare campaign designed to spread disinformation and societal division in the United States…The Committee found, that the IRA sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin…The Committee found that the IRA’ s information warfare campaign was broad in scope and entailed objectives beyond the result of the 2016 presidential election…IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump, and to the detriment of Secretary Clinton’s campaign.”

Volume V lays out the “collusion” clearly:

“the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign. Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat…”

“Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process…While the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort. 

Click to access report_volume5.pdf

The New York Times reported on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Volume V conclusions like this:

The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, totaling nearly 1,000 pagesprovided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government disrupted an American election to help Mr. Trump become president, Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and some of Trump’s advisers were eager for the help from an American adversary…the report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom the report identified as a ‘Russian intelligence officer.’…Mr. Manafort’s willingness to share information with Mr. Kilimnik and others affiliated with the Russian intelligence services ‘represented a grave counterintelligence threat,’ the report said…The Senate investigation found that two other Russians who met at Trump Tower in 2016 with senior members of the Trump campaign — including Mr. Manafort; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law; and Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s eldest son — had ‘significant connections to Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services.’…

There is MUCH more to this than what’s here. As Robert Mueller noted, his investigation “established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government. Those links included Russian offers of assistance to the campaign. “

Mueller also reported that multiple Trump campaign officials, “deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long term retention of data or communication records. In such cases the Office was not able to corroborate witness statements through comparison to contemporaneous communications or fully question witnesses about statements that appeared inconsistent with the other known facts.”

And, as we know, Mueller indicted 13 Russians and three Russian “companies,” and Paul Manafort was convicted for financial crimes and Manafort was pardoned by Trump.

To the issue of third-party voting, it makes no good sense. It makes no moral or “principled” sense. It makes no patriotic sense. In this election, a vote given to a third party candidate is – essentially – a vote FOR this:

https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/nation/2021/01/07/front-pages-capture-chaos-riots-us-capitol/6577931002/

There’s just no way around it.

Categories Corruption, Elections, Extremism, History, Trump

Michelle H. Davis: Texas GOP Convention Gets More Deranged, Part 2

By dianeravitch
June 8, 2024 //
8

Blogger Michelle H. Davis watched the Texas GOP convention so others wouldn’t have to. What happens there tends to leech into the national GOP, at least its most extreme elements. This is part 2 of her coverage.

She writes:

We’re on day four of the Republican Party of Texas (RPT) 2024 Convention, and it hasn’t gotten any less deranged. Today, the General Session began and featured speeches from Dan Patrick, Ken Paxton, Sid Miller, and your regular cast of degenerates. If you’re interested in watching, you can find it here. 

Lt. Governor Dan Patrick chose to spend his time on stage licking Trump’s boots. He told the audience how he went to New York to show his allegiance to Mango Mussolini during his criminal trial and complained about how rundown the courthouse was. He shouted on stage that Trump was innocent, and there were no facts or evidence showing otherwise. 

Baltimore-Dan also spoke heavily about the legislative process and how he changed the Senate rules to ensure Democrats had no voice. Then, he claimed that any bills from the House and a majority of Democrats voting on them would wind up in the trash. Because who cares about what’s doing best for Texans? It’s all partisan politics for them. 

One Republican woman is becoming famous for all the wrong reasons.

I posted this same video on Twitter, and it’s currently going viral. The video shows a Republican woman/precinct chair pushing back against the Republican’s “abolish abortion” plank and comparing the Republican Party of Texas to the Taliban. Near the end of the video, she’s confronted by two wombless men who seem to be disgusted with her position.

The GOP is obsessed with preventing abortion, no exceptions. Here is their language:

The legislative priorities committee gave an explanation for each one of their priorities, which you can see here. It’s important to point out what their reason is for the “abolish abortion” priority. 

The Republicans plan on going after abortion pills and websites like Plan C Pills and Hey Jane. They also want the legislature to make laws to go after abortion clinics in other states legally. It’s important to note that their language in this explanation includes “the moment of fertilization.” That’s going to be their excuse to ban IVF and certain forms of birth control, perhaps all forms of birth control.

No exceptions for rape, incest, the life of the mother, or the ago of the female. A 10-year-old who was by her father must deliver the baby! A woman whose life is endangered must prepare to die!

The Republican Party of Texas’ 2024 platform is going to be bat-shit crazy. 

I’m still watching the platform committee videos. The Texas GOP’s platform is just as nuts as it was in 2022, if not more. It’ll give content creators something to talk about for months. They will vote on the final platform tomorrow or Saturday. A political party’s platform is essential because it tells us what a party believes and works toward. 

For example, the RPT’s platform calls for banning all forms of sex education in Texas, and they call for an end to any mental health counseling in public schools.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Republicans, Texas

Michelle H. Davis Watched the Texas GOP Convention to See What’s Ahead, Part 1

By dianeravitch
June 8, 2024 //
2

Michelle H. Davis writes a gutsy blog called LoneStarLeft. She watched the state GOP conventions we didn’t have to. The party is the extreme edge of the white Christian nationalist movement. Thanks, Michelle.

Above all, the Texas GOP is obsessed with abortion. They recognize no circumstances where it should be permitted. This is Part 1 of her coverage of the state GOP convention.

Davis writes:

If you aren’t already following me on Twitter (I’ll never call it X), that’s where I’ve been posting all of the bat-shit crazy video clips I’m seeing at the 2024 Republican Party of Texas (RPT) Convention. For some reason, I thought their convention didn’t start until this weekend, but I forgot it’s an entire week long, and their committees are meeting for 15 hours a day. My week is committed. I’ll listen for all the juicy tidbits and report all the crazy back to you. Get ready because some of this stuff is full-blown bananas….

I’ve been mainly watching their Legislative Priorities Committee and their Platform Committee, but their Rules Committee has also been meeting. I have to catch up on it later. 

Some of you may remember the absolutely deranged Republican platform from 2022, which called Joe Biden an illegitimate president, said gay people were “abnormal,” and opposed critical thinking in schools, and that was all before they booed John Cornyn off stage…

The Legislative Committee will make 15 planks the highest priority of the RPT. These are the 15 items they expect the Republicans in the legislature to pass and vote in favor of. If the GOP officials do not pass these “legislative priorities,” they risk being censured by the Republican Party of Texas, which, personally, I love. They bully their own, and it’s pure entertainment for the rest of us. 

The Legislative Priorities Committee lets their delegates argue about which planks stay and which go. These speeches are giving us little gems like this one, where a woman discusses enacting MORE abortion restrictions on Texas women. (More on that later.)…

Why am I watching the RPT Convention?

I likely have spent more time watching Republican conventions, hearings, debates, and town halls than any other Democrat in Texas. I find them extremely entertaining, but I also watch the Legislature and Congress. Maybe I’m just that type of nerd. …😉

Women have a lot of reasons to be concerned in Texas right now. 

The “abolish abortion” issue seems to be a big topic at this convention, even more so than the 2022 convention. You’re thinking, but hasn’t abortion already been abolished in Texas? It sure has, but when Republicans say “abolish abortions,” they don’t just mean abortions. 

Two months ago, Lone Star Left was the first to break the story of the emerging Abolish Abortion movement in Texas, which we learned about through a leaked video at a True Texas Project meeting.

In March, Michelle wrote this about the “Abolish Abortion” issue.

The abolish abortion movement seeks to ban IVF and certain forms of birth control in Texas; they also are seeking legislation to give the death penalty to women who have abortions, even if they are minors, even if they are a rape victim….

There was also discussion about preventing women from traveling out of state to get an abortion. Some women objected by the men shut them down.

Davis believes that Democrats have an opportunity to capitalize on divisions within the Republican Party in Texas. The big issues in their 2024 debates were centered on “God and Jesus, putting more Christian values in our government, and persecuting the LGBTQ community. Every single one of them was a carbon copy of the other. The RPT is in shatters, and there is no one out there who can fix them.”

Categories Bigotry, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, Privatization, Propaganda, Religion, Republicans, Texas

Thom Hartmann: What Trump Predicted About Hillary Came True for Him

By dianeravitch
June 8, 2024 //
19

There’s an old saying that you should never wish misfortune on others, because it might happen to you. It happened to Trump! Thom Hartmann has an interesting insight about the historic conviction of a former and perhaps future President.

First Prez convicted of a Felony in history… At a Reno, Nevada campaign rally in 2016, Donald Trump said of Hillary Clinton, “We could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and ultimately a criminal trial. It would grind government to a halt.” He elaborated at a campaign rally in Concord, North Carolina, saying: “If she were to win, it would create an unprecedented Constitutional crisis that would cripple the operations of our government. She is likely to be under investigation for many years, and also it will probably end up — in my opinion — in a criminal trial. I mean, you take a look. Who knows? But it certainly looks that way.” He added that, because of the possibility she could become a felon, “She has no right to be running, you know that. No right!” Now Trump has been twice found by juries of his peers to have raped a woman, was convicted of fraud with his phony university, busted for running a fake charity and stealing money intended for kids with cancer, and his company was convicted of tax and insurance fraud. With more to come, should the six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court and Florida’s Aileen Cannon ever let his cases proceed. Karma, as the old saying goes, can be a bitch…

And now Trump is running as a convicted felon!

Categories Accountability, Elections, Hillary Clinton, History, Trump

Newark: Teachers Union Wins Five-Year Contract

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2024 //
4

Remember when reformers were going to make Newark a model district transformed by charter schools and Teach for America? Mark Zuckerberg gave $100 million. Charter leaders arrived. Chris Cerf and Cami Anderson took charge. Senator Corey Booker advocated charters, even vouchers. The reformers gave up.

Newark Teachers Union Members Ratify New Five-Year Contract

NEWARK, N.J.—Newark Teachers Union members ratified a new five-year contract tonight that gives them a voice on classroom and district policies as well as a significant pay raise for each year of the five-year contract.

“NTU members voted to approve the transformational contract that makes them a true partner with the Board of Education on classroom and district policies. The negotiations and the contract itself are an example of labor-management collaboration at its best,” said NTU President John Abeigon. 

The contract provides all NTU members with a significant raise over the course of the five-year contract, depending on the person’s step level, longevity and degrees they have earned. The new starting salary will be $65,000 and in the fifth year of the contract, it will be $74,000. In addition, the contract includes salary increases for non-instructional staff, substitutes and hourly-pay employees.

Teachers will be able to select or even design curriculum, provide professional development that matches the standards-based curriculum, and receive support if their evaluations show they are underperforming. 

# # #

Categories Education Reform, New Jersey, Newark, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Unions

Disgusting! Pennsylvania GOP Legislators Jeer 2 Capitol Police Officers Who Defended Capitol on Jan. 6

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2024 //
21

There is something about the MAGA movement that is corroding the moral and ethical standards of our country. Evidence occurred when two members of the Capitol Police who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, appeared before the Pennsylvania legislature recently. Some members of the GOP booed; some walked out.

What kind of lawmakers are they? Don’t they take an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution? Did they want the mob to seize the Capitol and take hostages? Did they want the mob to hang Mike Pence? Does the oath allow disgruntled people to try to overthrow the government?

No, this is what the Pennsylvania Constiturion says: 

 "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support, obey
     and defend the Constitution of the United States and the
     Constitution of this Commonwealth and that I will discharge the
     duties of my office with fidelity."

The Washington Post reported:

Two former law enforcement officers who defended the U.S. Capitol from rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection were jeered by state GOP lawmakers as they visited Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives on Wednesday, according to several Democratic lawmakers present.


Former U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn and former sergeant Aquilino Gonell were introduced on the floor Wednesday as “heroes” by House Speaker Joanna McClinton (D) for having “bravely defended democracy in the United States Capitol against rioters and insurrection on January 6.”
As the two men — both of whom were injured by rioters on Jan. 6 — were introduced, the House floor descended into chaos. According to Democratic lawmakers, several GOP lawmakers hissed and booed, with a number of Republicans walking out of the chamber in protest.


“I heard some hissing and I saw about eight to 10 of my Republican colleagues walk out angrily as they were announced as police officers from the U.S. Capitol on January 6,” state Rep. Arvind Venkat (D) said in a phone interview Thursday. “I was shocked and appalled,” he added. According to Venkat, the commotion lasted about five minutes. Fewer than 100 lawmakers, evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, were present in the chamber before the chaotic scene unfolded, he said.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Trump
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