Former President Bill Clinton released the following statement about what’s happening in Minneapolis and other places, as Trump unleashes the armed, masked ICE agents to arrest, harass, and murder our fellow citizens in pursuit of undocumented immigrants .
Well said. Where are other retired Presidents, Vice-Presidents, Senators?
Please speak up, Former Presidents Bush and Obama.
Station KARE in Minneapolis reported:
MINNEAPOLIS — The man shot and killed by a federal agent in Minneapolis on Saturday has been identified as Alex Pretti.
The Associated Press reported Pretti’s parents confirmed his identity, and that he worked as an ICU nurse.
State records show Pretti was issued a nursing license in 2021, we’ve also confirmed he worked for some time at US Dept of Veterans Affairs as a nurse.
Pretti was an American citizen.
Before Pretti’s killing, Governor Tim Walz activated the Minnesota National Guard to assist local police in maintaining safety.
The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that Pretti had criminal record. He had parking tickets. He was a licensed gun owner.
Just moments earlier, Border Patrol Cmdr. Greg Bovino said at a press conference that the man who was killed “wanted to do maximum damage to agents.”
Walz rejected that as a false narrative.
“Thank God we have video,” Walz said. “It’s nonsense people. It’s nonsense and it’s lies.”
When killed by 10 shots, Alex Pretti did not have a gun in his hand. An ICE officer removed his licensed gun, which he never drew.
The video is startling. Between 3-6 armed, masked ICE agents surround a man, wrestle him to the ground, throw punches at him while he seems to be completely immobilized.
Then shots ring out, and the detainee is dead.
The Department of Homeland Security says he was armed and dangerous. The ICE agents killed him while defending themselves.
The sheriff said he was 37 years old. He believes the victim was an American citizen.
Yesterday, Minnesota held a general strike to protest the military occupation of Minneapolis. There were no incidents of violence.
Some Minneapolis businesses have opened their doors to help people who need to get out of the tear gas or pepper spray.
State and local officials have demanded that the federal government pull ICE out of Minneapolis.
Trump has prepared 1,500 US military to join the 3,000 ICE agents currently in Minneapolis, to subdue protestors. .
Is this America or Germany in 1933?
As is well known, the day after the first #No Kings Day, Trump began demolition of the East Wing of the White House. He announced that he was adding a huge ballroom that would be almost twice the size of the White House. He didn’t bother with required reviews and approvals from “independent” commissions, which are required by statute.
Before anyone could absorb the shock, the East Wing was gone. Reminded that he needed to go through a formal approval process, Trump fired the members of the two commissions and replaced ed them with his loyalists. Approval, even post facto, would be no problem, thanks to his lapdogs.
But the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which he does not control, filed a lawsuit to stop work.
A federal judge, Richard Leon, appointed by President George W. Bush, appears to view their lawsuit sympathetically.
CNN reported:
A federal judge expressed deep skepticism Thursday that the White House has legal authority to construct President Donald Trump’s massive new ballroom without express authorization from Congress.
US District Judge Richard Leon said during a hearing in a challenge to the project that the White House was attempting to “end-run” Congress’ role in the historic undertaking. Leon appeared ready to at least partially side with the nation’s top historic preservation group in a lawsuit it brought late last year.
The judge said government lawyers defending the project were adopting “a pretty expansive interpretation of the language” of a federal law they’re leaning on in the case. That law, which authorizes the president to spend taxpayer dollars to maintain the People’s House, is meant to cover “very small sized projects,” Leon said, pointing to air conditioning and heating, lighting, and other standard maintenance.
“It’s not (for) $400 million worth of destruction and construction,” the judge told Justice Department attorney Yaakov Roth.
As Roth pointed to two other White House projects that didn’t receive congressional approval, Leon quickly pushed back and accused the lawyer of downplaying the significance of the ballroom project, which is expected to dramatically expand the size of the building.
The other projects Roth cited – Gerald Ford’s swimming pool and cabana and a tennis pavilion overseen by first lady Melania Trump during the president’s first term – did little to advance their arguments, the judge said.
“The ‘77 Gerald Ford swimming pool? You compare that to tearing down and building a new East Wing? Come on. Be serious,” the judge said.
The sprawling ballroom project has an estimated size of approximately 89,000 square feet, according to lead architect Shalom Baranes. By contrast, the primary White House structure, the Executive Mansion, is just 55,000 square feet.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation seeks a stop-work order and a determination by Congress to hear from the public and review the project.
In 2023, the state of Texas took control of the Houston Independent School District because of an absurd state law that allows a state takeover of an entire district if only one school is “failing” for five years. In Houston, that one school was Phyllis Wheatley High Schol, which had disproportionately high numbers of students with disabilities, English language learners, and impoverished students. Wheatley was improving, but not enough to avert the takeover.
HISD went to court to block the takeover by the state, but eventually lost in 2023.
The State ousted the board and installed a new superintendent, former military officer Mike Miles, who had had a rocky tenure as superintendent in Dallas (teachers left in droves in response to Miles’ autocratic style.) Miles also started charter schools.
Miles imposed a standardized “New Education System” and ousted experienced (but noncompliant) principals.
A new study conducted by the Educatuon Research Center at the University of Houston found that a significant number of students and teachers had left the district since the state takeover. The beneficiaries of this exodus were charter schools–especially YES Prep and KIPP–and nearby school districts.
HISD enrolls about 168,400 students this year. It has lost 13,000 students since the takeover in 2023. Enrollment is growing in other districts, not declining.
Loss of enrollment means loss of state and federal funding.
The biggest enrollment losses occurred in schools closely implementing Mike Miles’ mandates. Researchers “found that campuses strictly implementing reforms lost more students. Certain magnet and specialty program schools with more autonomy gained students.”
Researchers said that this exodus from public schools to charter schools did not happen statewide.
The exodus of experienced teachers has led to a sharp increase in first-year teachers and uncertified teachers. The number of first-year teachers increased by 562 teachers, or 64.7%, since the takeover, according to the UH research center…
Area school districts and charters are hiring more HISD teachers after the first year of the takeover than they did previously, according to the report. Fort Bend ISD hired the most former HISD teachers, bringing on 207. Katy ISD ranked second in 2024–25, followed by Cypress-Fairbanks ISD.
The share of uncertified teachers in HISD’s teacher workforce increased to nearly 20% in 2024-25, even though research shows certified and experienced teachers improves student success.
Templeton said there is a trend of relying more on uncertified teachers statewide, but not to the extent seen in HISD.
“The increase in uncertified teachers and the increase of novice teachers … that increase was greater in HISD than the other districts surrounding it,” Templeton said.
Teacher turnover soared in Dallas when Mike Miles became Superintendent. In his first year, he ruled as an autocrat, and nearly 1,000 teachers quit. Over his three years, the rate of teacher resignations increased from the low teens to about 22% annually.
The deal with charters, we are frequently told, is a trade of autonomy for accountability. Let charters do things their own way, charter fans say. If they can’t produce, then shut them down. Hold them accountable.
Except somehow the accountability parts keeps not happening, as in North Carolina, where a couple of failing cyber charters have been renewed despite their continued failure to produce results.
North Carolina Cyber Academy and North Carolina Virtual Academy opened in 2015, the state’s first two cyber charters. That was just a year before the charter school industry itself issued a blistering report about the many ways in which cyber charters fail students and families. That’s the same year that charter-friendly CREDO issued a report indicating that students in cyber charters might as well just take a year-long nap. And of course it is five years before the nation launched the biggest experiment ever in distance learning and found that pretty much nobody was a fan.
NCVA appears to be actually operated by Stride (formerly K-12), a cyber charter business that has a list several miles long of misadventures and misbehaviors, much as one would expect from a business that is centered on making money and not all that interested in educating young humans.
The two schools have underperformed, scoring straight D’s on the state’s evaluation system (NCVA did better than a D in 2023, the only time either school did so). North Carolina’s Charter Schools Review Board mostly didn’t seem to care as they renewed the two schools for another five years. As reported by T. Keung Hui for the Herald-Sun
“We’re renewing two schools for five years that have been continually low performing for all 10 years and have not met growth, except one school for one year, and yet the enrollment is almost 2,500 in one and 4,000,” said Rita Haire, a Review Board member. “Do they not understand the quality of education that’s being delivered?”
Much like cyber charters in Pennsylvania, the two North Carolina cybers are sitting on a huge pile of taxpayer dollars— $16 million at Virtual Academy and $9.7 million at Cyber Academy. Maybe, some board members observed, that money could be spent on making the educational program results suck less (I’m paraphrasing).
Bruce Friend is chair of the review board, runs a virtual academy of his own, and thinks cyber charters are just awesome. He says that the schools draw students who “transition” in and out through the year, which is why many states use them as alternative schools. I’m not sure which states he’s talking about, but at any rate, when he was cheerleading for North Carolina to get on the cyber charter train, his pitch was that flexibility and personalized education and building confidence. Nothing about a holding pen for students “transitioning” in and out. That’s a version of a standard cyber charter argument, which is that cybers get a disproportionate share of students who are already in academic trouble and come to cybers already behind the curve. I expect there is some truth to that, but if that is the cyber charter customer base, and they know it’s their customer base, why have they not gotten any better at educating those students?
The Herald-Sun asked both cybers to offer a response. NCVA hasn’t so far (which is on brand for Stride), but NCCA chief Martez Hill said that it’s great to be renewed. His only offer to push back on the perception that they aren’t doing a great job is to note that NCCA has graduated more than 1,000 students in the last five years. This is no great achievement, since NCCA can graduate anyone they want to graduate.
The board apparently doesn’t have a lot of flexibility. One member complained that they would pick apart the pieces of a bricks and mortar charter to hold them accountable, but can’t do that with the cybers. They also have no flexibility to, say, renew for only two or three years, but either had to okay a five year renewal or none at all.
None at all seems like the correct choice here, but that’s not how seven of the ten-member board saw it, so North Carolina taxpayers get another five years of not-particularly-effective cyber chartering with no real accountability and no reason to think these charters will do any better in the next five years than they have in the previous ten. But at least they’ll have autonomy
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, reports on the latest education news from Oklahoma: the Chamber of Commerce is intent on reviving the failed test-and-punish agenda of the Bush-Obama years, plus the so-called “Mississippi Miracle,”which is credited with amazing results in reading.
John writes:
Once again, attacks on under-funded Oklahoma public schools are examples of the threats the nation’s schools face. Yes, we’ve gotten rid of State Superintendent Ryan Walters, but I’m more worried about today’s “accountability-driven” mandates, such as those pushed by the Chamber of Commerce.
On the other hand, our public schools have a history of receiving support from holistic, bottom-up efforts by a variety of excellent social work agencies, nonprofits, volunteers, and innovative educators.
These partners remind me of 1990’s, when student performance was growing. The head of the Oklahoma City Public School System curriculum department dropped into my History classroom, saying that she had been watching me teach, and I might like to try something new. She suggested that I start the year with the 20th century to get my kids hooked on history. Then, around Thanksgiving, we would return to the beginning of the subject, and reteach the 20th century.
It was a brilliant approach, supported by cognitive science. And it showed inner city students respect by nurturing meaningful, challenging instruction. The result was that my kids worked from bell-to-bell, from day one to their graduation day, learning how to learn.
I doubt that would be allowed today, when “everyone” is pressured to be on the “same page,” often requiring the same type of data-driven instruction.
Then, as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 approached, our principal gave us aligned and paced curriculum guidelines; They are now pervasive. She said that she knew we wouldn’t use it, but rather than throwing it away, we should keep it handy in case a top administrator visited the class.
Before NCLB, we had the autonomy to adjust our lessons in order to promote in-depth learning. For instance, when my students came to class carrying Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, which they were reading in their English class, I would quickly change my schedule. Our History class would learn about Ellison’s childhood in Oklahoma City, and how his famous “Battle Royal” scene was inspired by a cruel joke that was played on him when he applied for a job.
And, around that time, the bipartisan MAPS for Kids succeeded in saving the OKCPS from a financial collapse by raising taxes. MAPS for Kids listened to educators, parents, top national education and cognitive science researchers, and students; it called for the meaningful instruction which treated high-challenge kids with the same respect and opportunities that are bestowed on students in the exurbs.
I was in the room when MAPS and OKCPS leaders agreed that educators should receive a clear message – their job is to teach the Standards of Instruction, not to standardized tests.
I was then in the room when top district administrators were supposed to reveal the agreement to a committee of principals. The committee chair started with summaries of ridiculous policies that had been imposed over the years. Principals replied with absurd, but hilarious stories, about the tumultuous effects of non-educators’ political demands.
But, the administrator then said that we would have to dramatically expand standardized testing.
When I pushed back, a highly respected administrator put her hands on my shoulders, and said, “John, I’ve always said you don’t make a hog heavier by weighing it. But this is politics. We have no choice.”
When NCLB and subsequent corporate school reforms were implemented, the supposed goal was using top-down, accountability mandates to rapidly transform schools serving our poorest children of color. But in my experience, those were the students who were most damaged by output-driven reforms that forced teachers to be “on the same page” when teaching the same lessons.
I didn’t have the expertise to get involved in the debates over aligned and paced instruction in pre-k and elementary schools, but the idea that it should be forced on high-challenge secondary students was absurd. Educators pushed back as much as we could, but our resistance was condemned as “low expectations.” And reformers who blamed us Baby Boomers for making “excuses,” sought to replace us with young teachers, such as those in Teach for America, who were trained in the culture of data-driven accountability
Reformers also brought frequent benchmark testing into schools. Lacking explicit stakes, benchmarks could have created a culture of testing for diagnostic, not accountability, purposes. In my experience, however, the test prep culture, combined with more frequent tests, further undermined the teacher autonomy required for holistic instruction.
Today, the campaign for the “Science of Reading,” now known as the “Mississippi Miracle,” is driven by “extensive use of formative and benchmark assessments to track student progress and inform instructional differentiation.” The American Federation of Teachers’ president Randi Weingarten supported much or most of the “Science of Reading” but she “doesn’t advocate for what we have found so disrespectful: scripted curricula or ‘teacher proof’ programs.”
And we face new threats when, as is happening in Oklahoma,” the ideology-driven, reward-and-punish parts of the “Mississippi Miracle,” are combined with the Moms for Liberty’s focus on “back to basics” foundational skills and phonics.
Despite the lack of evidence that the Miracle increases long-lasting reading comprehension, as opposed to short-term test gains for 4th graders, Oklahoma’s Chambers remain committed to retention based on reading test scores, like we did in 2015-2016 when we were second to Mississippi in retaining k-3rd grade students. They ignore that tragic results which seemed likely to occur in 2004, and in 2012, and 2015 when Oklahoma briefly required the passing of four End-of-Instruction tests to graduate from high schools.
But, I would remind the Chamber of its call for recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers in order to attract and retain business investors for Oklahoma. After all, the best way to attract high-quality teachers, and parents of students, is to allow for high-quality, holistic teaching and learning, not make them work in a 21st century version of a Model T assembly line.
Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, wrote regularly for The New York Times. Now he writes a blog at Substack. In this post, he characterizes the deepening dysfunction of our president, Donald Trump.
Things are not going well politically for Donald Trump. The polls show him underwater on every major issue. And while he insists that these are fake, it’s clear that he knows better. He recently lamented that the Republicans will do badly in the midterms and even floated the idea that midterms should be canceled.
And as January 6th 2021 showed, Trump simply can’t stand political rejection. He will do anything, use any tool or any person at his disposal, to obliterate the sources of that rejection.
So as we head into the 2026 midterm season, the best way to understand U.S. policy is that it’s in the pursuit of one crucial objective: Propping up Trump’s fragile ego.
What was the motivation for the abduction of Nicolás Maduro? It wasn’t about drugs, which were always an obvious pretense. By Trump’s own account it wasn’t about democracy. Trump talks a lot about oil, but Venezuela’s heavy, hard-to-process oil and its decrepit oil infrastructure aren’t big prizes. The Financial Timesreports that U.S. oil companies won’t invest in Venezuela unless they receive firm guarantees. One investor told the paper, “No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country.”
The real purpose of the abduction, surely, was to give Trump an opportunity to strut around and act tough. But this ego gratification, like a sugar rush, won’t last long. Voters normally rally around the president at the beginning of a war. The invasion of Iraq was initially very popular. But the action in Venezuela hasn’t had any visible rally-around-the-flag effect. While Republicans, as always, support Trump strongly, independents are opposed:
And now the story of the moment is the atrocity in Minneapolis, where…an ICE agent killed Renee Nicole Good by shooting her in the head.
Trump and his minions responded by flatly lying about what happened. But their accounts have been refuted by video evidence which show an out-of-control ICE agent gunning down a woman who was simply trying to get away from a frightening situation. Yes, MAGA loyalists will fall into line, preferring to believe Trump rather than their own lying eyes. But public revulsion over Good’s murder and Trump’s mendacity are high and growing.
A president who actually cared about the welfare of those he governs would have taken Good’s killing as an indication that his deportation tactics have veered wildly and tragically off course. He would have called for a halt of ICE actions and made sure there would be an objective and timely federal investigation into this national tragedy.
But for Trump, ICE’s violent lawlessness is a feature, not a bug. Sending armed, masked, poorly trained, masked and out-of-control armed thugs into blue cities is, in effect, a war on Americans, just as January 6thwas a war on American institutions. In effect, Trump would rather savage his own people than be held accountable for his actions.
So in Trump’s mind, Renee Nicole Good’s murder is at most collateral damage, in service to his insatiable need to dominate and feel powerful — so insatiable that he is attempting to create an alternate reality, claiming that that Good ran over an agent although there is irrefutable video evidence that she didn’t.
And when one set of lies doesn’t work, he switches tactics – changing the topic, deflecting, and spouting even more lies. Thus, just hours after Good’s death, Trump proclaimed that he was seeking a huge increase in military spending:
It’s a near certainty that Trump’s assertion that he arrived at an immediate 50% increase in the military budget after “long and difficult negotiations” is yet another lie. There’s been no indication whatsoever that a massive increase in defense spending was on anyone’s agenda before he suddenly posted about it on Truth Social.
So what was that about? Given the timing, it’s clear that Trump’s announcement was yet another exercise in self-aggrandizement, as well as an attempt to grab the headlines away from Good’s killing. But what’s also important to realize from Trump’s announcement is that he is now clearly conflating the size of the US military with his ego. Evidently the sugar rush of Maduro’s capture has left him wanting more and more military validation, particularly as his poll numbers tank.
So here’s a warning to the US military: if you continue to indulge the sick fantasies of this man, he will drag this country into more and deeper international morasses to feed his need for glory. Do what Admiral Alvin Holsey, an honorable man, did – stand down and refuse an illegal order. Here’s a warning to the Republicans: if you continue to allow this man to perpetrate war against his own people with impunity through the actions of ICE, you will be remembered as cowards and hypocrites. Here’s a warning to all his other enablers: if you do not do something to stop this madman, you will go down in history as traitors to this country.
And here’s a warning to those directly perpetrating Trump-directed atrocities: He will not be in power forever, and I expect and hope that you will be held accountable, personally, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
This short video was made by Liz Oyer, who used to be the attorney in charge of Presidential pardons at the Justice Department.
Please watch.
Heather Cox Richardson obtained a pamphlet written during World War II for our troops overseas. Its purpose was to explain the tactics of fascists: how they gain power, how they lie to distort reality, how they use hatred to divide and conquer.
The pamphlet is insightful, incisive, and remarkably relevant to the world we live in now.
What we are learning is that “It can happen here.” We must arm ourselves with knowledge to preserve our democracy.
Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”
Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”
Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.
“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”
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Notes:
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=armytalks
War Department, “Army Talk 64: FASCISM!” March 24, 1945, at https://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/mode/2up
Diane Ravitch's blog 