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Will One Billionaire Own CBS and CNN?

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2025 //
4

Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, has recently been contending with Elon Musk for the title of world’s richest man. Both have wealth in the neighborhood of $350-400 billion. I mean, really, who cares? I can think of so many ways they could do something good for others with all that moola-boola, but no! They are on a power trip. Instead of feeding hungry children or endowing a hospital or funding wells in African villages, they buy self-aggrandizing toys.

Elon Musk wants to build a rocket to Mars and control the world’s satellite communications systems.

Larry Ellison bought CBS. He’s a friend of Donald Trump. CBS cancelled Stephen Colbert’s show. Colbert ridicules Trump. His show will be on the air until May so he has months in which to make jokes about Trump.

But CBS was not enough now Ellison wants to buy CNN and HBO. In its headline, the New York Times calls Ellison “the Billionaire Trump Supporter Who Wants to Own the News.”

William D. Cohan writes:

Larry Ellison is already a major stakeholder in CBS and Paramount. Now CNN, HBO and a major share of TikTok are in his sights. If all goes as anticipated, this tech billionaire, already one of the richest men in the world and a founder of Oracle, is poised, at 81, to become one of the most powerful media and entertainment moguls America has ever seen.

For the rest of us, the effect of Mr. Ellison’s gambit could be every bit as consequential, if not more so, than what happened a generation ago when Rupert Murdoch brought his brand of Down Under snark and cynicism to create what has become Fox News, intensifying our political polarization.

Mr. Ellison’s expected incursion into Hollywood and Big Media, if successful, could also go well beyond what other tech moguls like Jeff Bezos and Marc Benioff have attempted through their acquisitions of The Washington Post and Time magazine, respectively. For those men, the acquisitions were more like expensive hobbies.

Mr. Ellison is up to something very different: transforming himself into a media magnate. Along with his son, David, he could soon end up controlling a powerful social media platform, an iconic Hollywood movie studio and one of the largest content streaming services, as well as two of the country’s largest news organizations. Given Mr. Ellison’s friendship with, and affinity for, Donald Trump, an increasingly emboldened president could be getting an extraordinarily powerful media ally — in other words, the very last thing our country needs right now.

This consolidation of the news media is not good for democracy. What will freedom of the press mean if billionaires control the news?

Open the link to continue reading.

Categories Billionaires, Censorship, Democracy, Ethics, Freedom, Media, Trump

Ta-Nehisi Coates Examines Charlie Kirk’s Bigotry

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2025 //
13

In a bipartisan vote, Congress passed a resolution to honor Charlie Kirk on October 14 as a National Day of Remembrance for him.

At a time when Republicans are canonizing Charlie Kirk, it’s useful to remember what he stood for, what he believed, what he advocated.

Here are some video clips of Charlie Kirk in his own words:

The Guardian.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, himself a controversial figure among some whites for his frank writings about racism, wrote an article in Vanity Fair about Charlie’s oft-expressed views.

Charlie was an unrepentant white supremacist. He was a male chauvinist who believed that a woman’s place was in the home, raising children and deferring to the authority of her husband. He was a proud and unrepentant bigot. He should not have been murdered. Political violence is poison to a democracy, which should rely on persuasion, not repression, censorship, or violence.

Coates reminds us that if Charlie’s views prevailed, we would abandon the rights of everyone who was not a straight white Christian male. That’s a majority of us.

Coates wrote:

Before he was killed last week, Charlie Kirk left a helpful compendium of words—ones that would greatly aid those who sought to understand his legacy and import. It is somewhat difficult to match these words with the manner in which Kirk is presently being memorialized in mainstream discourse. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein dubbed Kirk “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion” and a man who “was practicing politics in exactly the right way.” California governor Gavin Newsom hailed Kirk’s “passion and commitment to debate,” advising us to continue Kirk’s work by engaging “with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.” Atlantic writer Sally Jenkinssaluted Kirk, claiming he “argued with civility” and asserting that his death was “a significant loss for those who believe engagement can help bridge disagreements.”

The mentions of “debate” and “engagement” are references to Kirk’s campus tours, during which he visited various colleges to take on whoever come may. That this aspect of Kirk’s work would be so attractive to writers and politicians is understandable. There is, after all, a pervasive worry, among the political class, that college students, ensconced in their own bubbles, could use a bit of shock therapy from a man unconcerned with preferred pronouns, trigger warnings, and the humanity of Palestinians. But it also shows how the political class’s obsession with universities blinds it to everything else. And the everything-else of Kirk’s politics amounted to little more than a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire.

It is not just, for instance, that Kirk held disagreeable views—that he was pro-life, that he believed in public executions, or that he rejected the separation of church and state. It’s that Kirk reveled in open bigotry. Indeed, claims of Kirk’s “civility” are tough to square with his penchant for demeaning members of the LGBTQ+ community as “freaks” and referring to trans peoplewith the slur “tranny.” Faced with the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency, Kirk told his audience that the threat had to be averted because Harris wanted to “kidnap your child via the trans agenda.” Garden-variety transphobia is sadly unremarkable. But Kirk was a master of folding seemingly discordant bigotries into each other, as when he defined “the American way of life” as marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing free of “the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school,” adding that he did not want kids to “have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.” The American way of life was “Christendom,” Kirk claimed, and Islam—“the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”—was antithetical to that. Large “dedicated” Islamic areas were “a threat to America,” Kirk asserted, and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was a “Mohammedan,” with Kirk supposing that anyone trying to see “Mohammedism take over the West” would love to have New York—a “prior Anglo center”—“under Mohammedan rule.”

Kirk habitually railed against “Black crime,” claiming that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” He repeated the rape accusations against Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated Central Park Five who is now a New York City councilman, calling him a “disgusting pig” who had gotten away with “gang rape.” Whatever distaste Kirk held for Blacks was multiplied when he turned to those from Haiti. Haiti was, by Kirk’s lights, a country “infested with demonic voodoo,” whose migrants were “raping your women and hunting you down at night.” These Haitians, as well as undocumented immigrants from other countries, were “having a field day,” per Kirk, and “coming for your daughter next.” The only hope was Donald Trump, who had to prevail, lest Haitians “become your masters.”

The point of this so-called mastery was as familiar as it was conspiratorial—“great replacement.” There was an “anti-white agenda,” Kirk howled. One that sought to “make the country more like the Third World.” The southern border was “the dumping ground of the planet,” he claimed, and a magnet for “the rapists, the thugs, the murderers, fighting-age males.” “They’re coming from across the world, from China, from Russia, from Middle Eastern countries,” he said, “and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in…”

You can probably imagine where this line of thinking eventually went.

“Jewish donors,” Kirk claimed, were “the number one funding mechanism of radical open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits.” Indeed, “the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.”

Kirk’s bigotry was not personal, but extended to the institution he founded, Turning Point USA. Crystal Clanton, the group’s former national field director, once texted a fellow Turning Point employee, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all … I hate blacks. End of story.” One of the group’s advisers, Rip McIntosh, once published a newsletter featuring an essay from a pseudonymous writer that said Blacks had “become socially incompatible with other races” and that Black culture was an “un-fixable and crime-ridden mess.” In 2022, after three Black football players were killed at another college, Meg Miller, president of Turning Point’s chapter at the University of Missouri, joked (“joked”) in a social media message, “If they would have killed 4 more n-ggers we would have had the whole week off.”

Kirk subscribed to some of the most disreputable and harmful beliefs that this country has ever known. But it is still chilling to think that those beliefs would be silenced by a gunshot. The tragedy is personal—Kirk was robbed of his life, and his children and family will forever live with the knowledge that a visual record of that robbery is just an internet search away. And the tragedy is national. Political violence ends conversation and invites war; its rejection is paramount to a functioning democracy and a free society. “Political violence is a virus,” Klein noted. This assertion is true. It is also at odds with Kirk’s own words. It’s not that Kirk merely, as Klein put it, “defended the Second Amendment”—it’s that Kirk endorsed hurting people to advance his preferred policy outcomes…

Mere weeks before his death, Kirk reveled in Trump’s deployment of federal troops to DC. “Shock and awe. Force,” he wrote. “We’re taking our country back from these cockroaches.” And in 2023, Kirk told his audience that then president Joe Biden was a “corrupt tyrant” who should be “put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.”

What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to “End Racism,” and, on the other, urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Gender, Immigration, Racism

Idaho: Parents Sue to Block Vouchers. Leading Newspaper Agrees

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2025 //
3

The Idaho state legislature passed a $50 million plan to subsidize vouchers. The usual arguments for vouchers–choice and competition–don’t apply in a largely rural state. The primary beneficiaries will be wealthy families whose children are already enrolled in private schools. The biggest losers will be rural schools, which desperately need upgrades.

Parents in Idaho are taking their challenge to the state courts, based on the explicit language of the State Constitution. The editorial board of the Idaho Statesman agrees with the parents.

Here is its editorial on the subject:

“(I)t shall be the duty of the legislature of Idaho, to establish and maintain a general, uniform and thorough system of public, free common schools.” — Article IX, Section 1, Idaho Constitution

A coalition of public school advocates announced Wednesday that it is asking the Idaho Supreme Court to rule that a refundable tax credit for families who send their kids to private schools is a violation of the Idaho constitution’s education clause.

We say it’s about time.

And just in time, since House Bill 93, which was passed last legislative session, allows families to start applying for the credits in January.

The law set aside up to $50 million for the tax credits.

We would much rather see that $50 million go toward the public education system, hiring more teachers, more counselors, repairing derelict school buildings and properly funding special education, which has an $80 million shortfall, according to the Office of Performance Evaluations.null

We have enumerated many times before the reasons vouchers for private schools is a terrible idea.

Most voucher schemes in other states started out like Idaho’s — small, limited and targeted. But state after state, the vouchers grew and are blowing holes in state budgets everywhere.

Many of these vouchers go to wealthy families who already have the means to pay for private school, and the vouchers merely subsidize part of the cost of a private school tuition.

The vouchers are open to fraud, waste and abuse.

There’s no accountability built into Idaho’s voucher system.

The Idaho Supreme Court won’t be interested in such policy discussions, but justices will be interested in hearing what we think is a valid constitutional argument.

One word, in particular, provides their best legal challenge: “uniform.”

In essence, by providing a refundable tax credit to families to send their children to a private school, the Legislature is establishing a second school system that isn’t the same as the public education system. It’s not uniform.https://f0fd809050f339b050a5948ada000ea9.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-45/html/container.html?n=0

We are compelled by the testimony Wednesday of one mother who said her children were denied entry to a public school based on their religion. A public school can’t do that.

The argument is not without precedent.

A district court judge in Salt Lake City halted Utah’s education savings account programearlier this year, according to Idaho Education News. The state’s teachers’ union argued that the Utah Constitution bars state dollars from funding an education system that’s not free or open to all students.

The same could be said for Idaho’s voucher scheme.https://f0fd809050f339b050a5948ada000ea9.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-45/html/container.html?n=0

In June, an Ohio state judge struck down that state’s voucher program, ruling that the program created a separate, unfunded, nonpublic system and funneled public money to private religious institutions. That, the judge ruled, violated constitutional mandates to fund a single public school system.

In 2024, the South Carolina Supreme Court struck down a 2023 law that created a private school voucher system. The court said the law illegally funneled state public funds to private schools, which is prohibited by the state constitution. The decision said vouchers undermine the state’s mandate to support public schools for all students.

We find it particularly appropriate that Idaho’s organizers announced this legal challenge on Constitution Day. Yes, it’s referring to the U.S. Constitution, but Idaho legislators should hold Idaho’s Constitution in equally high regard.

How we wish Idaho legislators would honor it all the time, not just when it’s convenient or when they want to change the constitution’s clear meaning to fit their agenda.https://f0fd809050f339b050a5948ada000ea9.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-45/html/container.html?n=0

Where are all of Idaho’s “original meaning,” “not a living document” conservatives in this state when it comes to the state constitution’s education clause?

Because, if you read the Idaho Constitution plainly, vouchers just don’t pass muster.

Let’s hope the Idaho Supreme Court sees it the same way.

Statesman editorials are the opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe, newsroom editors Dana Oland and Jim Keyser and community members John Hess, Debbie McCormick and Julie Yamamoto

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Idaho, Parents, Privatization, Resistance, Rural Schools, School Choice, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson: Is the Tide Turning? Could Be.

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2025 //
12

Heather Cox Richardson gives us some hopeful signs and auguries in her latest column. She is so very good at synthesizing the events that matter. No wonder she has 2.6 million subscribers. Wow!

She writes:

Today U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday threw out the $15 billion lawsuit President Donald J. Trump filed on September 15 against the New York Times for defamation. The judge, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, called the complaint “decidedly improper and impermissible” and took Trump’s lawyers to task for using a legal complaint as a public forum for abusive language.

Noting that the two defamation counts followed eighty pages of praise for Trump and allegations against the “hopelessly compromised and tarnished ‘Gray Lady,'”—an old nickname for the New York Times—he set a forty-page limit on any amended complaint.

The administration’s pressure on ABC to fire comedian Jimmy Kimmel is very unpopular, as G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers notes, with people polled by YouGov on September 18 seeing it as an attack on free speech.

That unpopularity showed today when podcaster and senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) celebrated Kimmel’s firing but called the threat of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr to retaliate against ABC “unbelievably dangerous.” Cruz called Carr’s threats “right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

He explained: “I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying, ‘We’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying.’”

Democratic political strategist Simon Rosenberg noted that three new polls out this week show Trump’s approval rating dropping and commented that voters don’t like “[t]his dictator sh*t.” AP-NORC observed that Republicans are growing pessimistic about the direction of the country. While the share of all American adults who say the country is off track has increased 13 percentage points since June, from 62% to 75%, the biggest change has been among Republicans. In June, 29% of Republicans were concerned about the direction of the country; now that number is 51%.

Most American adults think Trump has gone too far with his tariffs, his use of presidential power, and sending troops into U.S. cities.

Democratic lawmakers this week have reflected the growing opposition to Trump and his administration. Today in The Contrarian, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker wrote that Trump’s attacks on Chicago aren’t really about stopping crime. Instead, Trump is creating chaos and destabilizing the country in order to erode our democratic institutions and cement his power.

Pritzker warned that Trump “has become increasingly brazen and deranged in his rhetoric and his actions” and that the things he “is doing and saying are un-American.” In contrast, Pritzker held up as a model “our collective Midwestern values of hard work, kindness, honesty and caring for our neighbors,” and urged people to “be loud—for America.”

Yesterday Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) spoke at the Center for American Progress. He, too, outlined the administration’s attacks on the rule of law and blamed “billionaires padding their stock portfolios and buying up politicians,” “self-interested CEOs cynically dialing up the outrage and disinformation on their social media platforms,” and “politicians who saw more value in stoking grievance than solving problems” for creating the conditions that ushered Trump into the presidency.

Schiff called for restoring American democracy through legislation, litigation, and mobilization. He noted that Democrats have just introduced a package of reforms to put into law the norms Trump has violated. Democrats have also introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision permitting unlimited corporate money to flow into elections. While this legislation almost certainly won’t pass in a Republican-dominated Congress, he noted, it would force a debate.

He also noted that Democrats are conducting oversight, demanding accountability for wrongdoing and attacks on the rule of law, and are creating a record. Their victories, he noted, have been “modest,” but they have, for example, managed to force the administration to rehire employees at the National Weather Service and succeeded in preserving U.S. Department of Agriculture field offices in California.

Litigation has been more successful, Schiff said. Since January, plaintiffs have brought more than 400 suits against the administration, and courts have halted the administration’s policies in more than 100 of them. Wrongly fired civil servants have been reinstated, funding has been restored to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, deportation flights have been grounded, Trump’s tariffs have been struck down.

“Ultimately, though,” Schiff said, “the most powerful check on Trump’s authoritarianism is not Congress. It is not the courts. It is the American people.”

And that was the rallying cry of Representative Jason Crow (D-CO) in Congress yesterday.

Crow, who entered Congress in 2019, is a former Army Ranger who completed three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was with the 82nd Airborne Division and the 75th Ranger Regiment.

In his speech, Crow warned that Trump is tearing down the walls of our democracy and called out “some of our most elite and powerful individuals and institutions” for “failing to defend our democracy.” He noted that “[s]ome of our nation’s most powerful law firms have bent the knee. Some of our finest universities are buckling. Some of the most powerful CEOs have capitulated. And some of the largest media companies are simply surrendering.”

“If those with power and influence want to sell off our rights and freedoms to enrich themselves, then Americans should make it clear that cowardice and greed will fail them,” he said.

“We will not shop at your stores. We will not tune into your TV and radio stations. We will not send our kids and our money to your universities, or use your services if you are going to enable our slide to authoritarianism.”

Crow contrasted those elite failures with “the courage we’ve seen from everyday citizens”:

Coach Youman Wilder, who stood up to ICE agents when they started interrogating kids on a baseball diamond in Harlem. A schoolteacher in Twisp, Washington, who joins protests against cuts to Medicaid and SNAP every Saturday because, she says, “Democracy only works if we work it.” Massive demonstrations across the nation in April. Parents in Washington, D.C., patrolling schoolyards to protect the rights of students and other parents as ICE agents are raiding and the National Guard is on the streets. Journalists around the country “reporting the truth, despite threats to them and their family.”

“There is courage everywhere we look,” Crow said. “We have not yet lost our power.

“He continued: “Now is the time…for us to stand with all those defending democracy.

“Defending free speech.

“Defending freedom of religion.

“Defending due process.

“Defending the rule of law.

“Defending the right of schoolchildren to learn without fear of being shot.

“Defending government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

“As a young paratrooper, leading an infantry platoon in the invasion of Iraq,” he said, he was responsible for young men: “Black, White, Asian, Hispanic. From the North, from the South, East, and West. From farms and from cities. Rich and poor.

“When I think of America, I still think of those young paratroopers. How we came together, despite our differences, we served together, we fought together, we found great strength in one another.

“That is America.”

“There’s a tradition in the paratroopers,” he said, “that the leader of the unit jumps out of the plane first and then the others follow.”

He concluded: “I’m ready to jump.”

To read the footnotes, open the link. You may have to subscribe. Help her reach three million subscribers.

—

Categories Democracy, Ethics, Freedom of Speech, Hope, Politics, Trump

Trump Justice Department Killed Investigation of Border Czar Tom Homan for Taking $50,000 Cash Bribe

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2025 //
20

MSNBC broke the bombshell story: before the 2024 election, undercover FBI agents handed a paper bag with $50,000 cash to Tom Homan. They heard that Homan was soliciting bribes. The meeting was filmed.

The investigation of Homan for corrupt activities was quashed by Trump’s Department of Justice, presumably with the full knowledge of Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.

Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian of MSNBC reported:

In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration, according to multiple people familiar with the probe and internal documents reviewed by MSNBC.

The FBI and the Justice Department planned to wait to see whether Homan would deliver on his alleged promise once he became the nation’s top immigration official. But the case indefinitely stalled soon after Donald Trump became president again in January, according to six sources familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, Trump appointees officially closed the investigation, after FBI Director Kash Patel requested a status update on the case, two of the people said. 

It’s unclear what reasons FBI and Justice Department officials gave for shutting down the investigation. But a Trump Justice Department appointee called the case a “deep state” probe in early 2025 and no further investigative steps were taken, the sources say. 

On Sept. 20, 2024, with hidden cameras recording the scene at a meeting spot in Texas, Homan accepted $50,000 in bills, according to an internal summary of the case and sources. 

The federal investigation was launched in western Texas in the summer of 2024 after a subject in a separate investigation claimed Homan was soliciting payments in exchange for awarding contracts should Trump win the presidential election, according to an internal Justice Department summary of the probe reviewed by MSNBC and people familiar with the case. The U.S. Attorney’s office in the Western District of Texas, working with the FBI, asked the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section to join its ongoing probe “into the Border Czar and former Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan and others based on evidence of payment from FBI undercover agents in exchange for facilitating future contracts related to border enforcement.”

Homan, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement early in Trump’s first term, openly claimed during the 2024 campaign that he would play a prominent role in carrying out Trump’s promised mass deportations.

Asked for comment about MSNBC’s exclusive reporting, the White House, the Justice Department and the FBI dismissed the investigation as politically motivated and baseless.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Evil, Fraud, Trump

Trump Fires US Attorney for Eastern Virginia for Failing to Prosecute Letitia James

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2025 //
7

The New Republic tells the shameful story of Trump’s decision to fire Eric Siebert, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia for his failure to find evidence to indict New York State Attorney General Letitia James.

Trump has said repeatedly that he wants to bring retribution on his enemies. His Attorney General Pam Bondi has protected and obliged him, not only by not releasing the unredacted Epstein files, but by firing any lawyers who worked on Trump investigations while he was out of office.

Trump is determined to prosecute Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, James Comey, and Adam Schiff.

He assigned Erik Siebert, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, the job of prosecuting Letitia James. Trump hoped to get her criminally prosecuted for mortgage fraud, for having obtained a mortgage on a vacation home, getting a favorable rate by claiming it as her home. Unfortunately, the case fell apart when evidence emerged that she had not claimed her second home as her primary residence.

Trump was furious at Siebert.

Siebert announced that he had resigned since the President didn’t want him. Trump quickly contradicted him and said Siebert had not resigned, he was fired. Trump promptly announced a replacement, a conservative Republican, Mary “Maggie” Cleary.

Just last night, Trump expressed his frustration that there had not yet been indictments of his enemies.

The New Republic wrote before Siebert’s ouster:

Trump is set to remove Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, for being faithful to facts, evidence, and guidelines governing good prosecutorial conduct, rather than fully corrupting his office to target Trump’s enemies.

That’s not a rhetorical cheap shot. It’s what Trump is actually doing, per ABC:

President Donald Trump is expected to fire the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after his office was unable to find incriminating evidence of mortgage fraud against New York Attorney General Letitia James, according to sources.

Federal prosecutors in Virginia had uncovered no clear evidence to prove that James had knowingly committed mortgage fraud when she purchased a home in the state in 2023, ABC News first reported earlier this week, but Trump officials pushed U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert to nevertheless bring criminal charges against her, according to sources.

Nixon tried to hide his plots against his enemies. Trump says the quiet parts out loud.

What are they guilty of? Criticizing Trump and–in the case of Schiff and James– trying to hold him accountable.

Categories Accountability, Citizenship, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Lies

Trump Cancels Annual Hunger Survey

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2025 //
10

The Trump administration is canceling the federal government’s annual report on hunger, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Why? The administration says the data gets “politicized.” I think that means that lobbyists for the poor use the data to seek more funding for programs to feed people who are hungry.

The data, which is collected each December and analyzed by the U.S. Agriculture Department, measures food insecurity across states and demographic groups. 

The data has been collected every year since the mid-1990s, and is widely used by federal, state and local policymakers to make funding decisions for food-assistance programs, and to evaluate how well those programs work.  

The decision to discontinue the survey for 2025 was announced in meetings with USDA employees this past week by an administrator for the Economic Research Service, an arm of the Agriculture Department, according to people present at the meetings….

“This nonstatutory report became overly politicized and upon subsequent review, was unnecessary to carry out the work of the Department,” USDA spokesman Alec Varsamis said. 

He added that the 2024 report will be released on Oct. 22, but the 2025 report has been discontinued…

Employees inside the USDA as well as economists outside the agency who work closely with the data reacted with shock and anger as word spread about the cancellation. 

“For the past 30 years, the USDA food insecurity measure has provided insight into the extent that American families have been able to cover their food needs,” said Colleen Heflin, a professor at Syracuse University, who has been studying the data since its inception, and learned of the study’s cancellation from contacts inside USDA. “Not having this measure for 2025 is particularly troubling given the current rise in inflation and deterioration of labor market conditions, two conditions known to increase food insecurity.”

The administration has criticized government data related to the job market, saying it had been used as a political weapon. President Trump recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a particularly poor jobs report. He accused her of manipulating the numbers to make him look bad, which economists have refuted…

The decision to end the USDA data collection comes at a time when more Americans are struggling to get enough to eat. Food banks have seen requests for assistance from households rise over the past few years, driven by the end of pandemic aid programs and the impact of inflation on grocery prices. 

In 2023, the USDA reported that an estimated 13.8 million children lived in households that struggled to get enough food at times, the highest number in nearly a decade, according to the most recent USDA survey. Data from 2024 is set to be released next month. 

Ignorance is bliss.

Categories Data, Poverty, Trump

Stephen Colbert Responds to Kimmel Affair with Hilarious Video

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2025 //
27

Please watch.

It’s brilliant.

And very funny!!

And don’t miss his opening comments, where he defines his “core values”: Free speech.

Categories Freedom of Speech, Humor, Media

Trump Family Cashes in on Two Big Deals, Involving United Arab Emirates

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2025 //
11

The New York Times published a shocking story about the enrichment of the Trump family by two big deals that were supposed to be unrelated but probably were not.

Trump selected his close friend Steve Witkoff as his Middle East envoy, although Witkoff has no prior experience as a diplomat. Witkoff is a real estate lawyer and a developer, also a billionaire. Witkoff is also Trump’s special envoy to Putin. Witkoff’s son Zach is a partner in the crypto business with Eric Trump and Don Trump Jr. They are partners in World Liberty Financial.

This summer, Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, paid a visit to the coast of Sardinia, a stretch of the Mediterranean Sea crowded with super yachts.

On one of those extravagant vessels, Mr. Witkoff sat down with a member of the ultrarich ruling family of the United Arab Emirates. He was meeting Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a trim figure in dark glasses who controls $1.5 trillion of the Emiratis’ sovereign wealth.

It was the latest engagement in a consequential alliance.

Over the past few months, Mr. Witkoff and Sheikh Tahnoon had become both diplomatic allies and business partners, testing the limits of ethics rules while enriching the president, his family and his inner circle, according to an investigation by The New York Times.

At the heart of their relationship are two multibillion-dollar deals. One involved a crypto company founded by the Witkoff and the Trump families that benefited both financially. The other involved a sale of valuable computer chips that benefited the Emirates economically.

While there is no evidence that one deal was explicitly offered in return for the other, the confluence of the two agreements is itself extraordinary. Taken together, they blurred the lines between personal and government business and raised questions about whether U.S. interests were served.

In May, Mr. Witkoff’s son Zach announced the first of the deals at a conference in Dubai. One of Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment firms would deposit $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps.

Two weeks later, the White House agreed to allow the U.A.E. access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips, a crucial tool in the high-stakes race to dominate artificial intelligence. Many of the chips would go to G42, a sprawling technology firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, despite national security concerns that the chips could be shared with China.

Those negotiations involved another key White House official with ties to the tech industry and to the Middle East: David Sacks. A longtime venture capitalist, Mr. Sacks serves as the administration’s A.I. and crypto czar, a newly created position that has allowed him to shape tech policy even as he continues to work in Silicon Valley.

This story must have rattled Trump because a few days after it appeared, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, for defamation.

Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC commented that this may be the most ridiculous lawsuit ever filed and explains the dubious mega deals that enriched the Trump and the Witkoffs.

O’Donnell naturally wonders what Republicans would say if Biden were involved in a deal like that. Yet they are silent about Jared Kushner getting a $2 billion investment from the Saudis and the Trump sons getting another $2 billion.

Categories Ethics, For-Profit, International, Trump

RFK Jr. Vaccine Committee Revises Schedule, in Chaotic Meeting

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2025 //
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Pediatricians, parents, and public health professionals have been anxiously awaiting the first meeting of RFK Jr.’s newly reconstituted vaccine panel. He fired every member of the pre-existing panel. The outcome wasn’t as bad as they feared, nor was it satisfying.

Apoorva Mandavilli of The New York Times reported:

In a meeting that devolved into confusion and near chaos, federal advisers on Thursday voted 8 to 3 against vaccinating children under four years old with a combination shot that protects against measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox.

The meeting ended without a planned vote on whether newborns should receive the vaccine against hepatitis B, a highly infectious disease that damages the liver, as is currently the standard. That vote was postponed until Friday.

About half of the panel’s members were appointed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this week. In a sign of how hastily the committee was put together, many of the members needed explanations of the usual protocol for these meetings, the design of scientific studies, and critical flaws in the data they suggested including.

Many of the panelists also seemed unsure about the purpose of the Vaccines for Children program, which provides free shots to roughly half of all American children. Approving which vaccines the program should cover is a key function of the committee.

The decision to rescind the M.M.R.V. recommendation is unlikely to have widespread consequences. The recommendations for other vaccines given separately to protect against those diseases — the more common practice — remain unchanged.

In a bizarre twist, the members also voted 8 to 1 to have the Vaccines for Children program continue to cover the M.M.R.V. vaccine for children under 4. It was unclear whether the members all understood what they were voting for. Three members abstained altogether, one of them explicitly citing his confusion as the reason.

Still, the vote is likely to have yielded the first of many changes to the official recommendations for routine immunizations. 

In an hourslong discussion, the committee members seemed inclined to restrict the hepatitis B vaccine to newborns whose mothers are known to be infected, and to other babies only after they are at least one month old.

But experts said that doing so would increase the risk to newborns. Many hepatitis B infections in pregnant women are missed, despite a longstanding recommendation to test them routinely. Infected women may also not be identified because of inaccurate results or because of problems reporting or interpreting the results.

“It will be challenging to identify all positive moms, and ensure that a birth dose is available to those infants in hospitals, especially for those who do not receive prenatal care,” said Chari Cohen, president of the Hepatitis B Foundation.

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WHY CHANGING THE HEPATITIS B VACCINE SCHEDULE MATTERS!

Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times explained why medical experts are opposed to postponing the vaccination for hepatitis B.

Hiltzik wrote a column praising Senator Bill Cassidy for stepping up to the plate and criticizing RFK because it was his one vote that enabled RFK to be confirmed. Senator Cassidy agreed to vote for him after RFK pledged not to change the vaccine schedule, a promise he reneged on.

Hiltzik wrote:

Cassidy closed the hearing by expressing concern that Kennedy’s handpicked vaccine advisory committee, stocked with anti-vaccine activists, was scheduled to meet Thursday, at which it seemed poised to alter the CDC’s recommendations on childhood vaccinations by removing several from the recommended list — a step that horrifies the pediatric and epidemiological communities.

Cassidy’s specific concern was about the hepatitis B vaccine, which the CDC has recommended be given at birth. Republicans on the committee ridiculed that recommendation, because hep B is commonly transmitted sexually, and what baby is having sex? The response from physicians is that babies can contract the disease from their mothers, even if their mothers might not even know they’re carriers.

Cassidy, as it happens, is a liver specialist. “I have seen people die from hepatitis,” he said. “This was my practice for 20 years before I entered politics.”

He continued, “For those who say why should a child be vaccinated for a sexually transmitted disease, at birth the child passes through the birth canal. … That passage through the birth canal makes that child vulnerable to the virus. … If that child is infected at birth, more than 90% of them develop chronic, lifelong infection.” That means a lifelong threat of cirrhosis or other deadly liver conditions.

“Before 1991, as many as 20,000 babies — babies — were infected” per year, Cassidy said. In the first decade, through 2001, after the vaccine was approved for newborns, however, “newborn infections of hepatitis B was reduced by 68%. Now, fewer than 20 babies per year get hepatitis B from their mother. That is an accomplishment to make America healthy again,” Cassidy said, mischievously citing RFK Jr.’s policy mantra.

“We should stand up and salute the people that made that decision,” Cassidy said, “because there are people who would otherwise be dead if those mothers were not given that option to have their child vaccinated.”

So, kudos, Sen. Cassidy, for finally explaining why vaccines are necessary.

Categories Childhood, Health, Science
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