Archives for the month of: September, 2024
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Billy Townsend: Why Do People Vote for an Aging Wannabe Dictator?

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2024 //
55

Billy Townsend writes a blog where he exposes public corruption in Florida. In this post, he tries to understand why his friends and neighbors will vote for Trump.

He begins:

Choosing — yet again — to inflict a deteriorating, revenge-obsessed, 78-year-old Capitol lynch mob inciting felon sex abuser and his horde of MAGA freaks on your friends, loved ones, neighbors, fellow citizens, and communities means inflicting — yet again — a deteriorating, revenge-obsessed, 78-year-old Capitol lynch mob inciting felon sex abuser and his horde of MAGA freaks on your friends, loved ones, neighbors, fellow citizens, and communities. 

I am surrounded in Lakeland, Florida these days by folks who have made this choice multiple times already, who pretend they’re in downcast denial about the self-evident facts of making that choice yet again, especially post January 6th. They’re pretending to believe that choosing to make a MAGA dictatorship and give it the nuclear codes and Department of Justice does not meanmaking a MAGA dictatorship and giving it the nuclear codes and Department of Justice….

What I most value about elections is that they force clear, unambiguous choices. The MAGA Freak dictatorship choice before us is the clearest and most obviously one-sided choice in the history of American self-government. Everyone knows this. The fact that the vote will be close on something so obvious says more about Americans than it does about the choice we face. MAGA doesn’t even have a fake economic or border argument to make. 

I mean, at the most elemental level, I would be proud to call Kamala Harris friend, aunt, wife, mother, boss, co-worker Kiwanis Club president, mayor, minister. I would be disgusted and embarrassed to call the deteriorating 78-year-old MAGA dictator friend, uncle, husband, father, boss, Kiwanis Club president, mayor, minister. 

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Florida, Trump

Harold Meyerson: What Happened to the Teamsters?

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2024 //
42

Both Trump and Harris sought the endorsement of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Its board decided, no endorsement. This surprised many people, because the Biden administration was the most pro-union presidency in decades, and the Trump administration was loudly anti-union.

The Teamsters were set to endorse Biden, but withheld their endorsement from Kamala Harris. Why? Was it racism? One of the readers of the blog pointed to a story in The Guardian about Teamster leader Sean O’Brien paying $2.9 million for racial discrimination.

Teamsters in battleground states are endorsing Harris, ignoring the lead of their national union. The Washington Post reported Kamala endorsements by Teamsters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Nevada, and Wisconsin. And added: “As of Thursday, at least eight regional councils, covering active Teamsters members in some 14 states, as well as 10 union locals, had endorsed Harris. The regional councils alone represent more than 500,000 Teamsters members.

No regional or local Teamsters organizations have endorsed Trump.”

Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect has a different take.

Inside the boardroom, it was no endorsement. Outside, some of the board members endorsed Harris.

Yesterday’s headline, of course, was that the Teamsters had decided to make no endorsement in this year’s presidential race. That depended, however, on which Teamsters you’re talking about, and whether or not they were still in a meeting chaired by union president Sean O’Brien.

To be sure, the international’s general board voted by a 14-to-3 margin to affirm O’Brien’s clear preference for a position that would require the union to avoid having to campaign for Kamala Harris and against Donald Trump. O’Brien had previously given Trump a boost by delivering the prime-time address on the first night of the Republican National Convention.

But almost as soon as the general board adjourned, some of those 14, including New York’s Gregory Floyd and the West Coast region’s Chris Griswold made clear that their own regional bodies were endorsing Harris. Indeed, within 24 hours of the union proclaiming its neutrality, regions and locals representing more than 500,000 of the Teamsters’ 1.3 million members (of whom a little more than 100,000 are in Canada) announced that they were backing Harris.

Before yesterday’s meeting, the Teamsters General Board had met with Harris, Trump, and Robert Kennedy Jr. Commendably, a group of eight Teamster rank-and-filers also were allowed to attend all of those meetings, and asked questions of the candidates. After the last of those meetings, which was with Harris, those eight unanimously stated that they favored her. Their judgment, apparently, didn’t filter up to the General Board members (at least when convened as the General Board, though it was clearly in accord with a number of those members once they’d left the meeting).

In fairness, none of those eight rank-and-filers nor any General Board members save O’Brien attended his one-on-one meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago earlier this year.

What could have prompted the rank-and-filers and so many regional Teamster leaders to support Harris? Herewith, a few plausible reasons.

First, of course, is the general record of the Biden-Harris administration, which has been the most pro-union in American history. Both Biden and Harris have walked picket lines with striking union workers.

Second, Harris voted in favor of the PRO Act, which neither any Republican member of Congress, nor Trump himself, supported. The act would levy actual penalties on employers who illegally violate the National Labor Relations Act by routinely firing workers seeking to organize their workplace. It would also require a mediator to impose a first contract at companies where the workers have won union recognition but the employer refuses to come to terms on a contract—a very frequent occurrence, says John Palmer, one of the three General Board members who voted to endorse Harris rather than join the room’s no-endorsement majority, and has declared that he’ll run against O’Brien in the Teamsters’ next presidential election.

Third, last year, the Biden appointees on the National Labor Relations Board reinstated the “joint employer” rule, under which the major companies that employ contractors to do their core work are liable for those contractors’ labor law violations. Trump’s appointees on the NLRB had struck that rule down in 2020. Just last month, following the reinstated ruling of the Biden NLRB, an administrative judge ruled that Amazon was responsible for inflicting a host of illegal labor practices on its delivery drivers in Palmdale, California, even though those drivers (who were required to wear Amazon uniforms and drive Amazon trucks) were nominally employed by a company that had contracted with Amazon to deliver its goods. Such contractors, called Delivery Service Partners (DSPs), employ 280,000 Amazon drivers, according to a Teamster press release that hailed the administrative judge’s ruling. The release went on to note that the ruling would encourage other such drivers to vote to join the Teamsters, as the Palmdale drivers had.

And in the several weeks since then, hundreds of drivers in the New York area have done just that. Had the Trump appointees to the NLRB still constituted the majority on the Board (i.e., had Trump been re-elected), Amazon would be immune to such pressures. As O’Brien has repeatedly stated, Amazon is the union’s primary target of organizing, which might suggest that having a majority of NLRB members appointed by Harris rather than by Trump would be a matter of considerable concern to Teamsters who wanted their union and workers in their industry to thrive.

Perhaps surprisingly, one group that has not been heard from since the no-endorsement decision is Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a generally progressive group that has been around for nearly half a century. TDU first arose in opposition to the union’s then-mobbed-up leaders and has been a voice for a more democratic union since then. Well over a year before O’Brien ran and won an insurgent campaign for the Teamster presidency in 2022, he secured TDU’s endorsement, even though he had frequently attacked the group in previous years.

Since he took office, however, a number of TDU former leaders, including Tom Leedham, who was TDU’s candidate for the Teamster presidency in 1998, 2001, and 2006, and Dan La Botz, who was one of TDU’s founders in 1976, have expressed concern that TDU has become an O’Brien cheering section in return for having been given staff and secondary leadership positions. As Leedham and La Botz wrote in CounterPunch, they are “disturbed and concerned to see TDU’s recent change over the last few years as it has subordinated itself to Sean O’Brien’s administration.”

“Beyond that,” they added, “O’Brien’s gestures of support for Donald Trump and other MAGA Republicans, suggest a turning away from the democratic, egalitarian, and inclusive values that inspired TDU.”

In fairness, the current leaders of TDU have never claimed that their primary mission requires them to be Teamsters for a (small-d) democratic America.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Categories Elections, Ethics, Harris, Kamala, Trump, Unions

Florida: State Health Officials Try to Derail Abortion Amendment

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2024 //
5

At Governor DeSantis’ insistence, Florida enacted one of the toughest abortion bans in the nation. Abortion is banned in the state at six weeks of pregnancy. Very few, if any, women know they are pregnant at six weeks. Advocates for reproductive rights immediately began mobilizing to fight the abortion ban. They drafted a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would protect a woman’s right to an abortion. Despite DeSantis’ opposition, they gathered signatures, fought legal battles, and got the measure on the November ballot, where it is called Amendment 4.

DeSantis continues to fight passage of the referendum.

The Orlando Sentinel reports on the latest state plot to deceive voters:

Florida health officials reiterated Thursday that state law allows abortions at any point in pregnancy to save the life of the mother, responding to concerns that Florida’s new six-week abortion ban is tying doctors’ hands and putting women in danger.

The state’s “provider alert” said abortions can be performed “to save the pregnant woman’s life or avert a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” Failing to provide that “life-saving treatment” could constitute medical malpractice, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration and the Florida Department of Health warned in a notice to providers distributed by email and social media.The notice was released a day after several doctors supporting Amendment 4 — which would enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution — said in news conference that the exceptions in Florida’s abortion ban aren’t real exceptions.

“These so-called exceptions are a mirage,” said Dr. Jerry Goodman, a Sarasota-based OB-GYN, who spoke at the pro-Amendment 4 event on Wednesday. “Patients face overwhelming legal and procedural and logistical hurdles making accessing care nearly impossible, particularly at three ‘o clock in the morning when these emergencies often arise.”Florida’s abortion ban, which went into effect May 1, has exceptions up to 15 weeks for pregnancies resulting from rape, incest, or human trafficking, or if a “fatal fetal abnormality” is detected, the notice added. The memo included a line in bold that “a miscarriage is not an abortion.”

Abortions are permissible for women who experience premature rupture of membranes, as well as ectopic or molar pregnancies, all of which are serious complications, according to the memo.

But several doctors supporting Amendment 4 said at the news conference that the state’s abortion exceptions could be hard to meet. For instance, the law requires women who are raped to provide legal documentation, such as a police report, a barrier that the doctors said can delay care or block access.

The state’s ban has sparked fear and led to confusion over what constitutes a serious health risk under Florida’s “narrow medical exceptions,” according to a report from Physicians for Human Rights released on Tuesday.

“Several clinicians described cases of being required by their hospitals to wait until patients become ‘sick enough’ to qualify for care,” the report found.

A physician who performs an illegal abortion could face a third-degree felony charge punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.

State officials said they issued the notice in response to “misinformation” about Florida’s abortion laws.

Their guidance comes as voters prepare to take up Amendment 4, which would overturn the state’s six-week ban and protect abortion access up until viability, typically defined as about 24 weeks of pregnancy. If approved by at least 60% of voters in November, it also would guarantee abortion access “when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s health care provider.”

Dr. Chelsea Daniels, a Miami-based provider, also urged voters to support Amendment 4. She said she has seen patients with nonviable pregnancies who have been turned away from care.

“I saw a patient a few weeks ago who came to me with four ultrasounds from four different clinics showing a nonviable pregnancy and she was still carrying this pregnancy when she came to me,” Daniels said.

Opponents argue Amendment 4 is vague and misleads voters by failing to define key terms like “viability” and “healthcare provider.” A group called Physicians Against Amendment 4 denounced the measure at an event earlier this month in Orlando, calling it “overreaching,” “too permissive” and “irresponsible.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis and state officials have been under fire from critics who accuse them of unlawfully using taxpayer resources to try to sway the results of Amendment 4. The agency launched a webpage earlier this month, proclaiming that existing Florida law “protects women” while the initiative enshrining abortion rights into the state constitution “threatens women’s safety.”

It also released a “public service announcement” video that includes information about Florida’s abortion laws and an assurance that “Florida cares about women and families.”

Two lawsuits have been filed challenging the agency’s webpage, and Florida Democrats have pushed for a criminal investigation.

Florida law stipulates that “no employee in the career service” shall “use the authority of his or her position to secure support for, or oppose, any candidate, party, or issue in a partisan election or affect the results thereof.”

State officials, though, say the website is informational and complies with that law.

About the same time, a Florida judge ordered an ob-gyn doctor in Orlando to pay a $10,000 fine for performing 193 abortions after the law passed and was caught up in litigation. The doctor and the clinic where she worked tried to get information from the state about when he law went into effect. Getting no response, the doctor continued to provide abortions. The judge acknowledged that the doctor and the clinic unknowingly violated the law but decided that they broke the law and needed to be punished. The clinic was fined $193,000, a fine of $1,000 for each abortion.

Categories DeSantis, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Florida, Gender, Health, Resistance

Georgia: Pro-Trump State Elections Board Orders Hand Count of 2024 Elections

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2024 //
9

The State Board of Elections in Georgia passed a rule requiring a hand count of all ballots in the November elections. The board was split 3-2. The majority are Trump allies. They passed the rule over strong criticism.

NPR reported:

Republicans advanced the measure over the opposition of Georgia’s Republican secretary of state and attorney general and dozens of local election officials who said the last-minute change could cause delays and confusion on election night and the days that follow.

“If this board votes to implement this rule, I think that we put ourselves in legal jeopardy,” said John Fervier, the board’s nonpartisan chair, who voted against the proposal.

Under the proposed rule change, each voting district would compare the machine vote to a hand count. Local officials complained about lack of time and resources, in a process that could delay certification of the votes by weeks or even months.

Imagine waiting months to know who was elected!

Yet another Trump-inspired blow to the integrity of our electoral system.

Where Trump goes, chaos follows.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Georgia, Trump

Jonathan V. Last: Who Will Republicans in Springfield, Ohio, Vote For?

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2024 //
8

Jonathan V. Last is the lead editor of The Bulwark, the Never Trumper blog and one of the best political blogs.

He wondered whether Republicans in Springfield will vote for Trump after the venom he and Vance have directed at their town.He quotes from a Wall Street Journal article that dashed all of the spurious claims about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield. Yet Trump and Vance continue to spew their hateful lies about Haitians. On Twitter,

Jonathan Last wrote:

1. Cats and Dogs

Springfield, Ohio, is Trump country. In 2020, Clark County—of which Springfield is the major population center—went for Trump 61 percent to 37 percent.

The mayor of Springfield, Rob Rue, is a Republican.

And today the Wall Street Journal has an extraordinary piece of reporting about the town’s interactions with the Trump campaign.

These bits include revelations that:

(1) The Trump campaign contacted the Springfield government on September 10 to ask if the cat/dog eating stories were true. The campaign was told, point blank, that they were not. That night, Donald Trump asserted them on the debate stage anyway.

(2) This entire conflagration began with neo-Nazis deciding to make Springfield a cause célèbre. Meaning that JD Vance is literally following a playbook put together for him by white supremacists:

On Aug. 10, a group wearing ski masks and carrying swastika flags and rifles marched in Springfield. The ADL identified them as Blood Tribe, which it describes as a growing neo-Nazi group claiming to have chapters across the U.S. and Canada.

On Aug. 27, during the routine public-comment portion of the Springfield City Commission meeting, a man identifying himself as a Blood Tribe member said: “I’ve come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you’re doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.”

(3) Vance produced the name of one person he said had experienced a kidnapped pet cat. The WSJ decided to check the story out:

A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement. 

Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.

(4) The part of Vance’s assertion that “disease” was on the rise in Springfield? Also false:

Information from the county health department, however, shows a decrease in infectious disease cases countywide, with 1,370 reported in 2023—the lowest since 2015. The tuberculosis case numbers in the county are so low (four in 2023, three in 2022, one in 2021) that any little movement can bring a big percentage jump. HIV cases did increase to 31 in 2023, from 17 in 2022 and 12 in 2021. Overall, sexually transmitted infection cases decreased to 965 in 2023, the lowest since 2015.

Read the whole thing.

Springfield’s Republican mayor said this to the Journal:

“We have told those at the national level that they are speaking these things that are untrue,” added Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, a registered Republican. But he said claims have been “repeated and doubled down on.” 

Here’s my question: How is Rue going to vote in November? 

And the same question goes for Ohio Governor Mike DeWine.

These guys are on the ground. They see what’s happening. They know the truth. And they understand that Trump’s and Vance’s lies—which are approaching the status of blood libel—are hurting their constituents. Not in some theoretical, possible-future-case way. But in a real way. Right now. Today.

Are they going to vote for Trump and Vance? I feel like someone should probably ask them. 

Share

I think we know what Anna Kilgore’s answer will be. The WSJ shows a picture of this nice cat lady. In her Trump shirt. And her Trump hat. In front of her Trump flag. It seems not to bother her at all that the Trump campaign used her to lie about the people she felt the need to apologize to.

How does that work? What’s the psychology?

No, really. Give me your most charitable explanation. Because what gets me here is that Ms. Kilgore felt bad enough about have accused her neighbors of stealing her cat that she apologized to them. So she knows the difference between right and wrong. 

Talk about this in the comments, please. And be kind. This is an exercise in understanding, not condemnation.

Leave a comment

2. Immigrants: They Get the Job Done

I keep pointing you to Radley Balko because he’s wonderful and you should subscribe to his newsletter. He has a piece up about what immigration has done to Springfield.

First there’s the Haitian immigrant supply part of the story:

The sole claim Trump and Vance have made about Springfield that’s actually true is that since 2021, about 12,000-15,000 Haitian immigrants have moved to the city. But no one — not the Biden administration, not George Soros, and not Kamala Harris — “sent” them there. . . .

After the devastating Haiti earthquake of 2010, the Obama administration allowed displaced people from that country to come to the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a policy created during the George H.W. Bush administration for refugees from countries in crisis. Thousands of Haitians took advantage of the opportunity.

Donald Trump revoked that status in 2019, infamously calling Haiti one of those “shithole countries” from which the U.S. should never accept immigrants. Trump would later add that all Haitian immigrants “probably have AIDS,” and lament that the U.S. doesn’t get more immigrants from better countries like Norway.

Trump’s TPS revocation threatened the immigration status of tens of thousands of Haitians who came after the earthquake, many of whom by then had children who were U.S. citizens. The Biden administration then reinstated TPS protection in 2021. This is why Trump and Vance blame Biden and Harris for Springfield.

Then there’s the Springfield demand side:

[L]ike much of the Rust Belt, the manufacturing plants began to close in the 1980s and 1990s, and Springfield atrophied. The ornate Victorian homes that lined the city’s main streets fell into disrepair as those with means moved away. The city has lost about 25 percent of its population since 1970.

So in the mid-2010s, city officials embarked on a campaign to lure new businesses to the area, citing Springfield’s low cost of living and ideal geographical position for shipping and manufacturing. The plan worked. Factories started opening up. Other businesses followed.

But there was a problem: The population that remained in Springfield and surrounding Clark County was aging. There weren’t enough workers to fill the available jobs. So the companies looked to immigrants. This happened to be right about the time Haitians were coming to the U.S. under TPS. Word quickly spread in the Haitian immigrant community that there was a town in Ohio with a low cost of living and lots of well-paying jobs. So that’s where they went.

The companies did not turn to undocumented immigrants to pay “slave wages,” as some immigration opponents have claimed. They were documented immigrants with taxpayer ID numbers paid at a market rate (as noted below, wages have increased in Springfield since the Haitians arrived).

Haitians with TPS can live where they like. A large number settled in Springfield because that’s where they found jobs. . . .

This is a recurring pattern with immigration in the U.S. Immigrants settle in geographic clusters, close to other immigrants from the same country. This allows them to establish networks, find housing, and open and patronize restaurants and businesses that offer the comforts of home. This is why Patterson, New Jersey, has a “Little Lima.” In the mid-20th century, Peruvian immigrants settled in the city after taking jobs in area textile mills. It’s why Nashville has the country’s largest Kurdish community, and Minneapolis to large Somali and Hmong populations. Terre Heute, Indiana once had a thriving Syrian population; Lowell, Massachusetts has the country’s second largest Cambodian population. Rochester; New York has a large Turkish community; and Russian immigrants settled in places like Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

This is how immigration works.

When you put supply and demand together, good things can happen:

Income has gone up. In 2020, the median annual household income in the city was $39,344. Two years later — and the last year for which the U.S. Census has data — it was at $45,113.

Immigration opponents also claim that immigrants depress wages. But again contra Vance, that hasn’t happened in Springfield. The mean hourly wage jumped 18 percent between 2020 and 2023, from $21.33 to $25.16. That’s well above the 13 percent that wages increased nationally over the same period. . . .

Haitians have grown Springfield’s tax base. Because of TPS, they have Social Security or taxpayer ID numbers, so they pay all the same taxes any other resident pays. Those who have made enough money to buy a home now pay property taxes. Those who don’t own a home pay rent, which their landlords then use to pay property taxes. . . .

In a recent interview with CNBC, Vance said, “If the path to prosperity was flooding your nation with low-wage immigrants then Springfield, Ohio, would be the most prosperous country — the most prosperous city in the world. America would be the most prosperous country in the world, because Kamala Harris has flooded the country with 25 million illegal aliens.”

As with much of what Vance has said since his abrupt MAGA conversion, almost nothing in that quote is correct. There are nowhere near 25 million undocumented people in the U.S. in total. Kamala Harris doesn’t set the Biden administration’s immigration policy. And all the data suggest immigrants have made Springfield more prosperous, not less.

Read the whole thing.

3. One More Springfield

Kevin Williamson went to Springfield and wrote a fantastic piece.

Poor people have been coming to Ohio in search of jobs in its factories and warehouses for centuries: From the original New Englanders who settled in the Northwest Territory to the Scots-Irish to the Irish and Germans in the 19thcentury to the Haitians today, that story has been repeated over and over. At the turn of the 20th century, a majority of Cincinnati’s population consisted of those who either were foreign-born or were the children of foreign-born parents, mostly German. Naghten Street in Columbus, on the other hand, became “Irish Broadway” in the middle of the 19th century. The J.D. Vances of that era didn’t much care for the whiskey-drinking, potato-eating papists invading their cities, but they made good use of the canals and railroads built by those illiterate exotics from distant lands. 

The guy who wrote Hillbilly Elegy understood all that. This asshole who is running for vice president, on the other hand . . .

I fuel up and have the big 6.7L diesel spooled out and growling happily as I speed by the exit for Possum Hollow Road—honest to God, that’s the name of the place; you can’t make up details like that—way out here in the Blue Ridge Mountains where it is 40-odd degrees early in the morning in the last days of summer. The Appalachian Highlands are gorgeous this time of year, with all sunshine and sapphire skies and cool breezes, good green hills and splendid rivers, and pretty good asphalt that is, barring the occasional construction backup, wide open for RPMs. If you like to drive, it doesn’t get much better in the eastern half of these United States. There’s a lot of that gross, weird old leg-tattoo America out there, too, of course, including a guy with a leg tattoo of the Monster Energy logo, along with the inescapable herpetic rash of Dollar General stores and the strip-joint billboards sprinkled like pox along the highways and backroads from the fine vistas of southwestern Virginia to the alpine rivers of West Virginia to the literal amber waves of grain in Ohio’s cornfields.

It makes you wonder why they ever left—the Vances and the rest of those Appalachian folk who followed Steve Earle’s “Hillbilly Highway” up to Detroit or down to Houston or wherever else the Scots-Irish diaspora ended up. And then you remember why: need and desperation. There weren’t a lot of Dairy Queens or Walmarts out here, and even if there had been, there were no jobs to earn money to spend in them. It was a world—and a life—of subsistence agriculture and hustling, with very little in the way of rule of law or decent public administration, where the biggest business was organized crime and where politics vacillated between demagoguery and banditry, beautiful in some parts, hideous in others, and poisonously backward—you know: Haiti, but with white people.

Read the whole thing.

Categories Elections, Hoax, Immigration, Lies, Ohio, Racism, Trump, Vance, J.D.

Brookings: Post-Pandemic Absenteeism Rates Have Soared. Why?

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2024 //
54

The Brookings Institution has published a study of absenteeism rates that shows they have soared. But as of now, the reasons for increased absenteeism are unidentified.

The study was conducted by Tom Swiderski, Sarah Crittenden Fuller, and Kevin C. Bastian.

Here is the key finding:

“Between 2018-19 and 2021-22, the percentage of chronically absent K-12 students nearly doubled from 15% to 28%, with only a marginal decline in 2022-23, remaining well above pre-pandemic levels.”

Why are children and young people not attending school? What are they doing instead? What are the costs to them and their schools?

Categories Students, U.S. education

David Frum: This Is What a Losing Campaign Looks like

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2024 //
40

David Frum wrote a scathing article about the state of the presidential campaign in the current Atlantic magazine. Frum was a speech-writer for President George W. Bush who turned Never Trumper. He’s one of the best writers about American politics. His article asks, “Are these guys even trying to win?” There is Vance on Twitter, firing off angry ripostes. There is Trump, spending a day on the golf course only 50 days before the election. There is Trump, posting on his own social media, I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT. There is Vance, telling Dana Bash on CNN that he didn’t care whether the story about Haitians is true because it gets his anti-immigrant point across to the American people.

He writes:

A first draft of this story opened: “It’s not every day that a candidate for vice president of the United States rage-tweets at you.”

Backspace, backspace, backspace. Although it’s not every day that a candidate for vice president of the United States rage-tweetsat me personally, it is almost every day that Senator J. D. Vance rage-tweets at somebody. (I had tweeted, in part, this: “The difference: The upsetting things said by Trump and Vance are not true. The upsetting things said about Trump and Vance are true.” Vance responded: “I’d say the most important difference is that people on your team tried to kill Donald Trump twice.”)

But then here he was yesterday, for example, quote-tweeting one of the English-speaking world’s premier apologists for the Assad dictatorship in Syria, in order to assail Hillary Clinton. On September 14, he was mixing it up in the X comments with a reporter for The Intercept and the host of an online talk show.

In other words, to have J. D. Vance as your own personal reply guy is not such an accomplishment.

But it raises the question of how a nominee for vice president has so much time on his hands. Can you imagine, say, Dick Cheney, scrolling through his mentions, getting irritated, and firing off a retort? Neither can I.

So here’s my second draft: What we’ve been seeing from Trump-Vance is not the behavior of a winning campaign.

The day before Vance tweeted at me, former President Donald Trump was livestreaming to promote a dubious new cryptocurrency venture. That same day, he gave an interview to the conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root in which Trump reverted to old form to denounce mail-in voting because the U.S. Postal Service could not be trusted to deliver pro-Trump votes fairly…

Trump golfs a lot, and campaigns surprisingly infrequently. When he does campaign events, he makes odd choices of venue: Today, he will appear in New York’s Nassau County. New York State has not voted Republican for president since 1984. In 2020, Trump won 38 percent of the New York vote. Yet Trump has convinced himself, or somebody has convinced him, that this year he might be competitive in New York.

Yesterday, Trump posted a pledge on his Truth Social platform to restore the deductibility of state and local taxes. That’s an important issue for upper-income taxpayers in tax-heavy New York. Trump did not mention that he himself, as president, signed the legislation that capped state and local deductibility at the first $10,000, to help fund the Republican tax cut of 2017…

Rarely, if ever, has a presidential campaign collapsed from seeming assurance into utter chaos as Trump-Vance has. The campaign seems to have stumbled into a strange unintended message: “Let’s go to war with Taylor Swift to stop Haitians from eating dogs.” The VP candidate wants to raise tariffs on toasters and worries that with Roe v. Wade overturned, George Soros may every day fill a 747 airliner with abortion-seeking pregnant Black women.

The stink of impending defeat fills the air—and so much of the defeat would be self-inflicted.

I hope this observation doesn’t upset Vance again. But he’s got 10 fingers, a smartphone, and the time, so he may want to express himself.

Go ahead. @ me.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Failure, Trump, Vance, J.D.

Trump Warns of Dire Consequences for Israel if Jews Don’t Vote for Him

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2024 //
26

Trump spoke tonight at an event in Washington, DC, focused on combatting anti-Semitism. According to The New York Times, Trump complained that he was getting only 40 percent of the Jewish vote. He warned that there would be terrible consequences if he lost, and “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss if I’m at 40 percent.” What would happen? He said, “I believe that Israel will be wiped off the face of the Earth if I don’t win.”

Blaming “the Jews,” a small minority of Americans (about 2.5% of the population), for his possible loss, is a strange way to combat anti-Semitism. It sounds like a threat. We know what MAGA bullies do to people Trump threatens.

Here is a transcript of Trump’s remarks:

A poll just came out. I’m at 40 percent [of Jewish voters]. You can’t let this happen. 40 percent is not acceptable, because we have an election to win. If I don’t win this election – and I’ve been very good. You know, they say Trump’s been right about everything. I’ve been right about a lot of things. In my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss if I’m at 40 percent. I believe that Israel will be wiped off the face of the Earth if I don’t win. And that’s a big statement. That’s a horrible statement to make. And it’s just the way I feel.

Categories Elections, Trump

CNN: Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Has a Long History of Loving Porn

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2024 //
37

Mark Robinson, currently the Lt. Governor of North Carolina, is running for Governor. He has a long record of making inflammatory, extremist statements. He was endorsed by Trump and is true-MAGA. Recently his personal life has caught up with his extreme rightwing views. North Carolina is a crucial “battleground state” in the Presidential race.

After learning that Lt. Gov. Robinson had a history of frequenting porn stores, CNN discovered his Internet activity on porn sites.

CNN) — Mark Robinson, the controversial and socially conservative Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, made a series of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago, in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” and expressed support for reinstating slavery, a CNN KFile investigation found.

Despite a recent history of anti-transgender rhetoric, Robinson said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography, a review of archived messages found in which he also referred to himself as a “perv.”

The comments, which Robinson denies making, predate his entry into politics and current stint as North Carolina’s lieutenant governor. They were made under a username that CNN was able to identify as Robinson by matching a litany of biographical details and a shared email address between the two.

Many of Robinson’s comments were gratuitously sexual and lewd in nature. They were made between 2008 and 2012 on “Nude Africa,” a pornographic website that includes a message board. The comments were made under the username minisoldr, a moniker Robinson used frequently online.

Robinson listed his full name on his profile for Nude Africa, as well as an email address he used on numerous websites across the internet for decades.

CNN is reporting only a small portion of Robinson’s comments on the website given their graphic nature.

Many of Robinson’s comments on Nude Africa stand in contrast to his public stances on issues such as abortion and transgender rights.

Publicly, Robinson has fiercely argued that people should use bathrooms only that correspond to the gender they were assigned at birth. He’s also said transgender women should be arrested for using women’s restrooms.

“If you’re a man on Friday night, and all the sudden Saturday, you feel like a woman, and you want to go in the women’s bathroom in the mall, you will be arrested, or whatever we gotta do to you,” Robinson said at a campaign rally in February 2024. “We’re going to protect our women.”

Yet privately under the username minisoldr on Nude Africa, Robinson graphically described his own sexual arousal as an adult from the memory of secretly “peeping” on women in public gym showers as a 14-year-old. Robinson recounted the story as a memory he said he still fantasized about.

“I came to a spot that was a dead end but had two big vent covers over it! It just so happened it overlooked the showers! I sat there for about an hour and watched as several girls came in and showered,” Robinson wrote on Nude Africa.

CNN is not publishing the graphic sexual details of Robinson’s story.

“I went peeping again the next morning,” Robinson wrote. “but after that I went back the ladder was locked! So those two times where [sic] the only times I got to do it! Ahhhhh memories!!!!”

In other comments on Nude Africa, Robinson discussed his affinity for transgender pornography.

“I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s f*cking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!” Robinson wrote. “And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!”

In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Robinson repeatedly denied that he made the comments on Nude Africa.

“This is not us. These are not our words. And this is not anything that is characteristic of me,” Robinson said. Presented with the litany of evidence connecting him with the minisoldr user name on Nude Africa, Robinson said, “I’m not going to get into the minutia of how somebody manufactured this, these salacious tabloid lies…”

A history of controversial statements

Campaigning for lieutenant governor in 2020, Robinson advocated for a complete abortion ban without exceptions. He later expressed regret in 2022 for paying for his now-wife to have an abortion in the 1980s.

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson speaks on stage on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee.

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson speaks on stage on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee. Leon Neal/Getty Images

Now campaigning for governor, he says he supports a so-called “heartbeat” bill that would ban abortion when a heartbeat is detected – approximately six weeks – with exceptions for rape, incest and health of the mother…

In another thread, commenters considered whether to believe the story of a woman who said she was raped by her taxi driver while intoxicated. In response, Robinson wrote, “and the moral of this story….. Don’t f**k a white b*tch!”

Robinson, who would become North Carolina’s first Black governor if elected, also repeatedly maligned civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., attacking him in such intense terms that a user accused him of being a white supremacist.

“Get that f*cking commie bastard off the National Mall!,” Robinson wrote about the dedication of the memorial to King in Washington, DC, by then-President Barack Obama.

“I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join. If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!” Robinson responded.

CNN’s reporting on Robinson’s comments comes a few weeks after The Assembly, a North Carolina digital publication, reported that Robinson frequented local video pornography shops in the 1990s and 2000s. The story cited six people who interacted and saw him frequent the stores in Greensboro, North Carolina. A spokesperson for Robinson called the story false and a “complete fiction.”

Open the link to see CNN’s extensive documentation.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, North Carolina

The New Republic: Where Trump Goes, Chaos Follows

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2024 //
9

Alex Shepherd of The New Republic wrote an outstanding article about the linkage between Trump and violence. He threatens it, he encourages it, he revels in his threats. He likes to play the role of the tough guy. I recall a clip from one of his campaigns where he was portrayed at a wrestling match beating up a cartoon figure labeled CNN. I recall him at one of his rallies encouraging the crowd to beat up any infiltrators and he would pay the court costs. I remember the cruel taunts that he directed at others, including Paul Pelosi. He is a bully and he wants to be feared.

Yet when yet another gunman was captured before shooting at him, Trump was quick to blame Harris and Walz, who have repeatedly called for unity.

Shepherd writes:

Three hours before a would-be assassin was spotted hiding in the bushes of his golf course in West Palm Beach, Donald Trump posted, in all caps, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” on Truth Social, his wildly unprofitable social network. At roughly the same time, his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, was touring the Sunday shows to proudly admit that he and Trump were knowingly spreading racist lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets, in service of an even bigger lie—that immigrants pose an existential threat to the country itself.

It was a banner day for the Trump campaign: a feud with the country’s most popular pop star, a vile lie about a vulnerable population, yet another close call with an attempted assassin. But it also felt oddly familiar, bordering on routine—especially given how the former president and his allies reacted to the golf course scare. There were no fleeting calls for “unity” or hollow promises to turn down the temperature; instead, they were quick to blame their political opponents.

In a speech on Monday, Vance noted that the two attempts on Trump’s life were “pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric or somebody is going to get hurt.” He further argued on X that the captured suspect, Ryan Routh, was inspired by the Harris campaign’s insistence that Trump is a threat to democracy. Trump, meanwhile, said his opponents’ inflammatory rhetoric was endangering him, and that “these are people who want to destroy this country.”

“It is called the enemy from within,” Trump continued. “They are the real threat.” If that wasn’t subtle enough, his campaign then released a lengthy list of people it blamed, without evidence, for inspiring Routh, including Harris and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, as well as Representative Nancy Pelosi, Representative Adam Schiff, and even Walz’s wife, Gwen.

It would be foolish to blame any politician for either assassination attempt; both Routh and Thomas Crooks, the deceased Pennsylvania shooter, were mentally troubled and politically confused. But it’s important to acknowledge a simple and obvious truth: No one in this country has done more to sow division, create chaos, and, yes, encourage violence over the past decade than Trump. It was only a matter of time before that boomeranged on him.

Criticisms of Trump that rightfully note that he is a threat to the future of American democracy are hardly incitement to violence. They are recognition of the fact that Trump has used and will continue to use any means at his disposal to gain and hold onto power. His own paranoia and deluded ravings about his political enemies, meanwhile, have created a combustible climate—one made more dangerous by the lax gun laws that Trump and his allies have embraced.

These are people who egg on violence against their enemies at every turn. As The New York Times’ Peter Baker put it on Monday, Trump has “long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed.” Let’s not forget that he also directed his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol and allegedly expressed support for hanging his vice president, Mike Pence.

And then, Trump cries victim when he finds himself in the crosshairs. But increasingly, it seems, Americans aren’t buying it. For the last two months, the Trump campaign has whined incessantly about the fact that the country quickly moved on following the first attempt on his life, in mid-July. They’re right about that; his near-death experience was out of the news within a few days, and Trump received no noticeable bump in the polls. The incident is now an afterthought in the election—it’s almost as if it never happened at all. The second assassination plot, meanwhile, barely registered on NFL Sunday.

The country has moved on because it has grown accustomed to the chaos that Trump effortlessly generates. It has moved on because Trump himself moved on almost immediately. The Trump that stood onstage at the Republican National Convention, rambling about his grievances for almost two hours, was not changed by his recent brush with death in the slightest. He was, if anything, even morederanged and vengeful. And since then, he has said that Kamala Harris is a “fascist,” Walz wants to force young children to have gender reassignment surgeries, and that Haitian immigrants who are in the country legally are pet-eating criminals intent on murdering downtrodden Rust Belt whites.

Years before Trump’s political career began, the British photographer Platon found himself shooting Trump in the boardroom where he fired people on The Apprentice, the show where he played an idealized version of himself—wealthy, important, competent. Platon tried to connect with his subject. “Let’s be human together,” he said to Trump. “There’s always an air of tension and controversy about the things you say and do in public. I’m sure it’s intentional on your part but it feels to me like you’re in the middle of an emotional storm. I can’t live with that anxiety all the time. As a fellow human being, I’d like to know how you weather the storm.”

Trump calmly looked back at him and responded: “I am the storm.”

Trump is one of the least self-aware people in American political history—maybe in history, period. But this was an eerily prophetic statement. For eight years, Trump has been the storm. He unleashed dark forces in our society—making America more violent, more menacing, more chaotic—and rode them to the height of power. Now, he’s trying to do it all over again. But that’s the thing about storms, no matter their origin. Sometimes there’s no escaping them.

Categories Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Lies, Trump
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »