Reader Thomas Goff posted this wise comment:
Yes, we live in a different world, one in which the decent man who holds our highest office is, in effect, now being asked to hand over the White House to a convicted criminal who will abandon Ukraine, kowtow to Putin, trash our environmental regulations, strip away the rights of women, BIPOC and LGBTQ people, and establish a right-wing dictatorship. Have we gone completely nuts?
Now that the initial shock of Biden’s poor performance in last night’s debate is fading, there are several bottom-line facts that should not be overlooked.
Biden has been an excellent President. Trump was a failed President, impeached twice, who inspired an insurrection intended to overthrow the government and the Constitution. Historians have judged Trump to be the worst of all presidents.
Biden has many legislative accomplishments: the Infrastructure bill, which directed billions of dollars to repair our nation’s crumbling bridges, tunnels, roads, and other vital parts of the economy. His CHIPS act brings high-tech jobs back to the U.S. and has already encouraged more than $300 billion in new investments. His efforts to create good union jobs and to revive unions strengthen the middle class. He has also relentlessly tried to reduce the massive debt that college students are saddled with.
By contrast, Trump’s only legislative accomplishment was a massive tax cut for the 1% and corporations.
Biden has aggressively promoted action to curb climate change. Trump opposed any effort to deal with climate change, forbade the use of the term, and insists that it is a hoax.
Biden appointed highly accomplished people to his cabinet, with few exceptions; Trump appointed rightwing extremists and had a high turnover among the few qualified people he appointed.
Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices who were prepared (though they didn’t admit it in their hearings) to overturn Roe v. Wade and to gut gun control. if re-elected, he will have the opportunity to appoint more extremists to the Supreme Court who want to roll back the New Deal.
Biden has revived NATO. Trump wants to withdraw from NATO.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden rallied Europe to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression. Trump wants to abandon Ukraine and let Putin take whatever he wants in Europe.
Biden respects the Constitution. Trump does not. Trump refuses to admit that he lost the 2020 election, despite losing more than 60 court decisions against his claims. Trump refused during the debate to accept the results of the 2024 election. Trump undermines respect for the Constitution, the electoral system, the judicial system.
Biden is not a good speaker. He is not a good debater. He has a slow gait. He is a good President. He is actually a GREAT President.
And Trump is a demagogue, a world-class liar, a wannabe Fascist, and a danger to the nation and the democratic institutions that are the soul of our nation.
I repeat, Biden has been a great President. If he doesn’t step aside, as many nervous people urge, I will support him. With my heart, my soul, and my wallet.
Tim O’Brien is executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. He was formerly a writer and editor for The New York Times. His book TrumpNation caused Trump to sue him for saying that Trump was not a billionaire. Trump’s lawsuit was dismissed by the courts.
Joe Biden could have started writing the final chapter of his political career a year or so ago, when he still controlled the narrative.
“I’ve capped my long journey in public service by defeating Donald Trump, revivifying our economy and moving the US past the Covid era,” he might have said. “Therefore, I’ve decided not to seek a second term so the next generation of Democrats can succeed me and secure the White House and democracy for the American people.”
Instead, a humiliating and unsettling debate performance on Thursday night is now writing Biden’s final chapter for him. He shuffled onto the debate stage like the old soul that he is, rarely answered questions with more than a whispering rasp, often looked bewildered and failed to land enough memorable blows. Biden was so abysmal that Donald Trump, a convicted felon and sexual predator, effectively mastered the debate’s momentum and left Biden appearing like little more than a punching bag.
It may be time for Biden to consider moving on — and an intervention might be necessary to speed that along before the Democratic National Convention in August…
Biden ran for president three times before finally winning in 2020, and his ego may prevent him from letting go. He has spent most of his adult life in the Senate and the White House. He also took an admirable, courageous and necessary gamble by choosing to debate Trump so early in the election cycle, which I noted in a previous column this week. Biden wagered that he could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump and prove he was more vital and acute.
Biden lost that bet.
While Trump lied broadly and shamelessly throughout the debate, he was sharp-tongued and much faster on his feet than he has been in recent campaign appearances. He overshadowed Biden and the president’s loping, nebulous presence, reinforcing doubts about his ability to steer the ship of state.
None of this means Trump is fit for higher office. Biden’s Cabinet is populated by judicious and talented people, and the president himself has been purposeful throughout his career. Trump is a dangerous and unpredictable anarchist who has rarely attracted top-flight talent into his orbit.
But this is an election, not a management report card. Voters often respond to candidates emotionally, and perceptions of leadership can be deeply subjective. In that universe, Thursday’s debate was a monumental and debilitating setback for Biden. He failed to give full-throated and linear arguments for where he stood on core issues such as abortion and immigration. Some questions that he initially handled effectively, such as one about inflation and the economy, wound up following a meandering, perplexing path.
Biden’s most loyal supporters may forgive all of this, just as Trump fans have endless patience for his predations, lawlessness and buffoonery. But moderate and independent voters in swing states have had little patience for either man, and the debate may leave them permanently wary of Biden.
The president put on such a petrifying show that Trump got away with all of his usual atrocities.
Trump was impeached twice as president, and he was recently found guilty in three different courtrooms of sexual assault and criminal and civil fraud. He faces three other criminal prosecutions. Yet he managed to try labeling Biden a “criminal” during the debate.
Trump is a pathological liar who has dissembled with gusto for most of his 78 years. During the debate he offered a list of fabrications, including claiming Biden wants to quadruple personal tax rates and has been bribed by China; that the federal deficit is the biggest it has ever been; that he passed the Veterans Choice bill; that Biden indicted him; that more than 18 million undocumented immigrants have entered the US during Biden’s presidency; that the US footed 100% of NATO’s defense spending prior to his own presidency; that no terrorist attacks occurred during his presidency, and that states led by Democrats allow babies to be executed after they’re born.
Yet Trump tried labeling Biden a “liar” during the debate.
Biden, on the other hand, was spot on when he told Trump that he has “the morals of an alley cat” for romancing a porn star during his third marriage. Trump himself also briefly indulged the truth when he said he wouldn’t accept the outcome of this year’s election should he lose.
Trump also mentioned during the debate that he was running for the presidency because he thought Biden has been a singularly bad executive. I suspect the primary factor motivating Trump’s bid is his belief that a second White House stay will allow him to escape the multiple legal prosecutions bearing down on him.
Trump’s sordid business and political history, and his statements during the debate, are all reminders of how imperative it is that voters don’t send him back to the Oval Office. He and Biden are slated to debate again in September, and perhaps Biden envisions that as an opportunity to turn around his candidacy. It may be too late, alas.
The US is in perilous waters and Biden has always recognized that. He’s also done enormous good in protecting and preserving democracy at home and abroad. But he’s had his chance and he’s now come up short. He should consider stepping aside.
I couldn’t watch it continuously. It was too painful. Joe Biden mumbled and misspoke; Trump lied nonstop. The CNN moderators could have, should have stepped in to correct blatant misstatements by both candidates. They didn’t. Watching Trump call Biden a criminal who should be in jail, watching Trump blame Nancy Pelosi for the January 6 insurrection, was more than I could bear to watch.
This was a good night for Trump, and a bad night for our democracy.
Thom Hartmann warns that the growing power of religious extremists threatens democracy. The Founders knew the danger of organized religion and inserted guardrails against its zealotry in the Constitution
He wrote:
Twenty-eight states, nearly all Republican-controlled, are now spending billions of taxpayer dollars to support indoctrinating children in religion through voucher programs that can be used for mostly Christian schools. Five Republican-controlled states are in the process of letting vouchers ghettoize their entire public-school systems.
As The Washington Post noted yesterday:
“Billions in taxpayer dollars are being used to pay tuition at religious schools throughout the country, as state voucher programs expand dramatically and the line separating public education and religion fades.”
Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, flies an “Appeal to Heaven” flag outside his official congressional office that, since 2013, has been the semi-official logo of a militant arm of charismatic Christianity involved with January 6th. Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito flew a similar flag outside his summer home.
Another man flying that flag is outspoken Catholic evangelist Leonard Leo, who now controls over a billion dollars and helped run the process that selected Trump’s picks for the Supreme Court as well as hundreds of federal bench nominees. As ProPublica pointed out in a story about “the man that remade the American judicial system”:
“Leo is a major supporter of the [Catholic Information Center], and its unabashed projection of political power aligns with the central role of religion in Leo’s political project.”
Proselytizers for evangelical Christianity believe they are on the verge of taking over our country, from our schools to our courts to Congress itself. History warns us — as did the Founders and Framers of the Constitution — that, if successful, this will be deadly to American democracy.
Religious evangelism can be a deadly thought virus. It explicitly posits that, “There is only one right way to live and we know what it is” along with, “There is only one true god and he is the one we worship — and now you must, too….”
But now America finds itself under assault by a new, zealously evangelical movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (among other names) that seeks to use the force of law and the power of billions in untaxable dollars to create a new, two-tiered society in America.
At the top of this new America are the Catholic conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Speaker Mike Johnson and his followers in Congress, and an army of televangelists who claim moral superiority by virtue of their religion. They’re backed up by a small army of fundamentalist billionaires and politicians like Donald Trump who are willing to give them power and wealth in exchange for support at the ballot box.
Under them are the rest of us Untermenschen, whose opinions are tolerated so long as we don’t take away their nonprofit tax status (ensuring we must continue subsidizing them), stop their takeover of our schools, or correctly point out that the Founders were horrified at the prospect of America ever becoming a “Christian nation.”
But that is exactly what the majority of this nation’s Founders feared. It’s why they wrote a Constitution that forbids a religious test to hold office and put into the First Amendment “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
It’s why George Washington refused to say publicly whether he was a Christian or not, and authored the Treaty of Tripoli that begins with, “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion…”
It’s why Ben Franklin fled Massachusetts as a teenager to avoid mandatory church attendance and wrote, “I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.”
It’s why James Madison, one of the few actual Christians among that core group of Founders and the “Father of the Constitution,” made his first veto as president in 1811 against a bill that would have given government money to a Washington, DC church to run a poorhouse. It would, he said, “be a precedent for giving to religious societies, as such, a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.”
Madison added, in a July 10, 1822 letter to his old friend Edward Livingston:
“We are teaching the world the great truth, that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson: that Religion flourishes in greater purity without, than with the aid of Government.”
It’s why Jefferson took a razor blade to the Gospels and cut out all of the stories of miracles, producing The Jefferson Bible that presents Jesus as a wise philosopher instead of a god. The book is still in print and, to this day, a best-seller.
The cancer of evangelicalism now has its sights on literally every aspect of American society with its “Seven Mountain Mandate,” which argues that evangelical Christians must assert control over every other religion, every family in America, the US government itself, all public and private education, the arts and entertainment, all American media, and ultimately regulate all commercial business in our nation.
And they’re succeeding in every realm, even commerce. Recently, Southwest Airlines fired a flight attending for spamming their internal message boards with hostile anti-abortion messages and calling the company’s CEO “a murderer” because he supported women’s abortion rights. A Trump-appointed judge ruled in the flight attendant’s favor and required the company’s senior executives to take “religious liberty training” from an evangelical rightwing anti-abortion group.
Once today’s Christian Taliban made common cause with the 1980 Reagan campaign, the first great mission they undertook was seizing control of the rest of the Republican Party. Now that that has been accomplished, they’re coming for the rest of us.
As the tribal people who first occupied this land would tell you, this is the Great Sin. It turns religion from a spiritual exercise into a social, cultural, and political cancer that continually grows while devouring everything in its path.
Like biological cancer, it ultimately kills its host — as America’s founders knew well from the experience of Cromwell in England and seventeenth-century Salem here.
And now it’s made an unholy alliance with the billionaires behind Project 2025 and our rapist-in-chief, Donald Trump, the modern incarnations of the Roman empire and Prefect Pilate, who ordered Jesus crucified.
G-d help us all if they succeed.
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At what point does Florida go from the absurd to the ridiculous? Or has that point already been passed? A school board in Florida voted to ban a book called Ban This Book.
I wish someone would explain to school board members, to Moms Restricting Liberty, and to Governor Ron DeSantis that whenever a book is banned, that book gets national notoriety and a big sales bump. Authors are thinking, “Please ban my book,” it needs publicity, and yahoos oblige.
Scott Maxwell, columnist for the Orlando Sentinel, writes:
The headline that made its way around the world last week looked like a joke:
“Florida school board bans book about book bans”
The story couldn’t have been more meta. Or more Florida. I half-hoped it was satire, but having covered Florida’s increasingly ridiculous education priorities in recent years, knew it wasn’t.
The Tallahassee Democrat explained that the Indian River County School Board voted 3-to-2 to ban a book called “Ban This Book.”
The book is a lighthearted yet poignant tale about a 9-year-old girl named Amy Anne Ollinger who, upon learning that her school is trying to censor books, decides to fight back by cultivating her own secret library in her school locker. It’s part comedy and part thought-provoker. Some of the book focuses on how Amy Anne doesn’t always go about things the right way.
A promotional blurb for the book says: “Ban This Book is a love letter to the written word and its power to give kids a voice.” Publishers Weekly said it celebrates “kids’ power to effect change.”
To that end, I have a new proposal for Florida’s book-banners: Before pushing to censor any book, you have to first actually read it and then prove you understood it. In this case, “Ban This Book” was written for 8-to-12-year-olds. So you might need to put on your thinking cap.
The story in Indian River got even more ridiculous when it revealed that virtually all the censorship stemmed from one person — a Moms for (so-called) Liberty member who objected to books by everyone from Toni Morrison to Kurt Vonnegut.
“She also got ‘Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation’ pulled from a high school,” the story said. “And, in response to her objection to a children’s book that showed the bare behind of a goblin, the school district drew clothes over it.”
OK, let’s stop here. If you’re a grown adult whose crowning accomplishments are to censor a book about the Holocaust, ban a book on book-banning and draw cartoon underpants on a cartoon goblin, then to paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy: You might be an idiot.
So this is my plea today to my fellow Floridians during an election year: Stop electing idiots. Specifically, stop electing them to school boards.
Good news! The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled against public funding for a religious charter school. Many were watching closely to see how the court ruled. A decision that went the other way would have rebuffed the tradition of separation of church and state and erased the distinction between charters and vouchers. The fact that Oklahoma’s ultra-conservative Governor Kevin Stitt and its State Commissioner of Education Ryan Walters strongly supported the religious charter school idea makes the decision even more startling.
CNN reports:
An effort to establish the first publicly funded religious charter school in the country has been blocked by the Oklahoma Supreme Court.
The court Tuesday ordered the state to rescind its contract with St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in a 6-2 decision with one recusal.
“Under Oklahoma law, a charter school is a public school,” wrote Justice James R. Winchester for the court. “As such, a charter school must be nonsectarian. However, St. Isidore will evangelize the Catholic faith as part of its school curriculum while sponsored by the State.”
A charter contract for St. Isidore was approved by a state board last year.
Charter schools in Oklahoma are privately owned but receive state funding under the same guidelines as government-operated public schools.
The fight over the school exposed a fault line between two of the state’s top Republican politicians. Gov. Kevin Stitt strongly advocated for the school, saying when the contract was approved that it was “a win for religious liberty and education freedom in our state.”
But the school’s charter status was strongly opposed by Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who filed the lawsuit against it and predicted the state could be forced to fund other types of religious education if St. Isidore succeeded.
“The framers of the US Constitution and those who drafted Oklahoma’s Constitution clearly understood how best to protect religious freedom: by preventing the State from sponsoring any religion at all,” Drummond said in a statement Tuesday. “Now Oklahomans can be assured that our tax dollars will not fund the teachings of Sharia Law or even Satanism.”
PLEASE OPEN THE LINK TO FINISH THE STORY.
[Thanks to reader FLERP for alerting us to this story.]
Judd Legum at Popular Information writes about South Carolina’s sweeping censorship of school libraries. The state superintendent Ellen Weaver is affiliated with the notorious Moms for Liberty. Clearly this group does not support the “liberty” to read the books of your choice.
Legum writes:
On Tuesday, the South Carolina State Board of Education will impose a centralized and expansive censorship regime on every K-12 school library in the state. The new regulations could result in the banning of most classic works of literature from South Carolina schools — from The Canterbury Tales to Romeo and Juliet to Dracula. The rules were championed by South Carolina State Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver, who is closely aligned with Moms for Liberty, a far-right advocacy group seeking to remove scores of books from school libraries.
The regulations restricting library books, which were first proposed by the State Board of Education in September 2023, would ban any instructional materials, including library books, that are not “Age and Developmentally Appropriate.” The term “Age and Developmentally Appropriate” is defined as “topics, messages, materials, and teaching methods suitable to particular ages or age groups of children and adolescents, based on developing cognitive, emotional, and behavioral capacity typical for the age or age group.” This definition is so broad and subjective that it could justify the removal of virtually any material.
Further, any library books (or other instructional materials) are automatically deemed “not ‘Age and Developmentally Appropriate’ for any age or age group of children if it includes descriptions or visual depictions of ‘sexual conduct,’ as that term is defined by Section 16-15-305(C)(1).” Critically, the regulations ban library books with any descriptions of “sexual conduct” whether or not those descriptions would be considered “obscene.” Under the South Carolina law, a library book is not considered obscene if it includes descriptions of “sexual conduct” if it has “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” or if the book, taken as a whole, does not appeal to a “prurient interest in sex.” This means that classic texts that contain descriptions of sexual content, including The Bibleand Ulysses, are not considered obscene.
The new South Carolina regulation refers only to Section 16-15-305(C)(1), which defines “sexual conduct” as “vaginal, anal, or oral intercourse, whether actual or simulated, normal or perverted,” “masturbation,” or “an act or condition that depicts actual or simulated touching, caressing, or fondling of, or other similar physical contact with, the covered or exposed genitals.” Starting tomorrow, any book that contains any descriptions of “sexual conduct” that meets that sweeping definition is required to be banned from South Carolina schools, regardless of whether it has literary merit or would be considered obscene.
Similar language in an Iowa law “resulted in mass book bans affecting classics, 20th-century masterpieces, books used in AP courses, and contemporary Young Adult novels.”
The enforcement of the new regulation is highly centralized. Any South Carolina parent with a child enrolled in a public K-12 school can challenge up to five books per month on the grounds that they contain descriptions of sexual content or are otherwise not age-appropriate. The school district board is then required to hold a public meeting within 90 days to consider the complaint. At the meeting, the school district board is required to announce whether or not it will remove the book. If the school district board decides not to remove the book, the parent can appeal to the South Carolina State Board of Education. After the State Board receives the appeal, it must publicly consider it no later than the second public meeting.
If the State Board decides that the book should be removed, that decision is binding not only on the school district where the complaint originated by all K-12 schools in South Carolina. Any school employee who fails to comply with the bans will be subject to discipline by the State Board. The State Board is empowered to impose any punishment, including termination, that it deems appropriate.
The regulations are opposed by over 400 authors, prominent book publishers, and free speech groups.
Weaver is a close ally of Moms for Liberty, which has advocated across the country to remove books from school libraries. She appeared at the Moms for Liberty 2023 Joyful Warriors National Summit. “There is nothing more precious that God has created than the hearts and the minds of our young people,” Weaver said. “And that is what the radical woke left is after. Make no mistake: saving our country starts with saving our schools.”
Many of the books challenged by Moms for Liberty activists address racial or LGBTQ issues. Earlier this month, Weaver’s department announced it would “eliminate Advanced Placement African American Studies in [South Carolina] high schools.”
The South Carolina Association of School Librarians (SCASL) opposes Weaver’s efforts to impose a centralized censorship regime on school libraries. In response, Weaver wrote to the group and declared that “the South Carolina Department of Education will formally discontinue any partnerships with SCASL as an organization, effective immediately.” The SCASL has collaborated with the South Carolina Department of Education for over 50 years. Weaver said the move was punishment for suggesting her efforts to remove library books amounted to a “ban” or a “violation of educators’ intellectual freedom.”
Please open the link to finish the post.
Every time I see New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu interviewed on CNN, he plays the role of the GOP “moderate.” Don’t be fooled. When it comes to education, he’s a clone of Betsy DeVos.
Veteran New Hampshire Garry Rayno pulls away the mask of “moderate” that Sununu wears in this article in InDepthNH.
This is an important article for everyone to read, no matter where you live. It explains succinctly the true goals of the privatization movement.
He writes:
Public education has been since its inception with the work of Horace Mann, the great equalizer.
Students from poor families have been able to compete with students from the other side of the tracks, maybe not in reality, but close enough to at least have an opportunity to excel.
Many of the founding fathers understood the need for an educated public if democracy was going to survive and thrive.
A responsible citizen is an informed citizen, and that appears to be the problem today. Too many people interested in power instead of governing don’t want a truly informed public. Instead, they want enough of the public spoon fed “alternative facts,” conspiracy theories, and outright lies to ensure they retain power although they have views that are both harmful to the majority of citizens and allow the tyranny of the minority to overturn the will of the majority.
At the heart of the minority’s transformation plan is the destruction of the public school system.
New Hampshire has had a front row seat to the war on education since Chris Sununu was elected governor and named his rival for the Republican nomination in 2016, Frank Edelblut, to be Education Commissioner, a man without any experience in public education, which was the first for someone holding that position in our lifetime.
If Sununu did not know what would happen when he put Edelblut in charge of this critical state department, shame on him, because Edelblut’s one term in the House was a roadmap for his actions during his two terms as commissioner, his second ending in March 2025.
Sununu has also packed the State Board of Education with school choice advocates instead of supporters of public education, so you have the two entities in the executive branch responsible for the state’s public education systems, maybe not anti-public schools, but certainly not advocates for the state’s public education system.
According to the statutes, the education commissioner “is responsible for the organizational goals of the department and represents the public interest in the administration of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of administrative and instructional services to all public schools in New Hampshire.”
Notice it says public schools, not private schools or religious schools, or homeschooling, or learning pods, or any of the other non-public entities that are approved vendors under the state’s Education Freedom Account program, some with questionable philosophies or intent.
An attempt by lawmakers this year to better define the education commissioner’s qualifications and responsibilities to the public school system was defeated this term by the same element that pushed to establish the EFA program and then to expand it, although this year’s attempt to increase the income threshold to participate in the program failed on the last day of the session to act on bills.
The outright attacks on public education began in New Hampshire about a decade ago but gained more warriors as FreeStaters/Libertarians swelled the ranks of the House and Senate Republican members.
The attack on public education here has been much the same as it has been in other states, mostly in the south and the west, with claims of the indoctrination of students by leftwing faculty members.
They have also attacked educators directly and have tried to pack school boards — without much success — to undermine curriculum, educators and slash budgets as happened in Croydon several years ago when the annual school meeting was poorly attended due to a snowstorm.
The Republican majority in the 2021-2022 legislature passed the state’s divisive concepts law forbidding teaching controversial subjects such as institutional racism.
The law was recently found unconstitutional by a US District Court judge.
That was the same term the EFA program was approved after earlier unsuccessful attempts.
Both the EFA program and the divisive concepts law were included in the state’s biennial budget package because they were not likely to pass on their own.
The same folks also tied education into the trumped out recent outrage over the LGBTQ community and sold it as an attack on parental rights.
The intent was to start a war between parents and educators, although parents already have many of the rights touted by the anti-public school advocates.
The theory touted was that educators were keeping information from parents about their students and their sexual identification and that educators were urging students to explore different sexual identities.
Then came the book banning other areas of the country experienced like Florida where some school libraries were stripped of books.
The red herring advocates touted here came from a national app that contains almost every book published that students could access both in schools and at home, and not on school library shelves.
Some tried to enlist town and city libraries in the surveillance of children and what they read and accessed, but that did not go very far.
All of this goes to create the appearance that schools are hotbeds of leftist politics and anti-parental values, some fueled by Edelblut in an op-ed he sent to media outlets.
And despite all this ginned up controversy, local public schools that educate about 90 percent of the school age children in the state remain very popular with parents and the public at large.
If that is true, you have to ask what is behind the push to demonize public schools like political candidates demonize opponents.
Keep in mind this attack on public education occurs at the same time when the superior court’s latest education funding decision says the state does not provide enough money to cover the cost of an adequate education for every student and the way it raises its biggest contribution to public education — the Statewide Education Property Tax — is unconstitutional.
Education is governments’ —not just state government’s — single biggest expense, costing about $3.5 billion a year.
If you are a Libertarian or Free Stater who believes “taxation is theft,” destroying public schools will shift the cost directly to parents, and you could keep a lot more of your money to spend as you see fit and not for the good of society.
And if you espouse the philosophy of the Koch Foundation or former US Education Commissioner, Betsy DeVos, you not only keep more of your money, one of the largest union-backed workforces in the country will be dismantled when certified teachers are no longer needed.
Without a public education system, a child would receive the education his or her parents could afford and for many, particularly minorities, and the historically poor, that may not be much beyond the time they turn 16 and have to go to work to keep the family treading the economic waters.
And then maybe they will work for a lot less than if they had a high school, or even a college education.
And without even an adequate education, how informed will the general public be or how capable of the critical thinking needed to realize all those folks touting their parental rights really do not have their best interests at heart.
Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.
Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.
Dahlia Lithwick and Norman Ornstein are lawyers and close observers of national politics. In this article, they urge us to take Trump’s threats seriously. They are not just campaign rhetoric or empty promises. He means what he says. As Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Most of the mainstream media (MSNBC is an exception) attempts to normalize Trump, as though he’s just another in a long line of conservative politicians. He is not. He is an autocrat who longs to have total control and to use that control to get vengeance for his enemies (no “loyal opposition” for him).
The first term was a warning. Trump tried in some cases to pick good people, but they didn’t last long. He won’t make the same mistake. He will demand loyalty, total loyalty. Anyone he appoints will have to agree that the election of 2020 was rigged and stolen.
He says he will take bold steps to reverse the progressive gains of the past 90 years, which he will attribute to “communists, socialists, fascists vermin, and scum”
Lithwick and Ornstein write at Slate about The dangers posed by Trump:
Most would-be dictators run for office downplaying or sugarcoating their intentions, trying to lure voters with a vanilla appeal. But once elected, the autocratic elements take over, either immediately or gradually: The destruction of free elections, undermining the press, co-opting the judiciary, turning the military into instruments of the dictatorship, installing puppets in the bureaucracy, making sure the legislature reinforces rather than challenges lawless or unconstitutional actions, using violence and threats of violence to cow critics and adversaries, rewarding allies with government contracts, and ensuring that the dictator and family can secrete billions from government resources and bribes. This was the game plan for Putin, Sisi, Orbán, and many others. It’s hardly unfamiliar.
Donald Trump is rather different in one respect. He has not softened his spoken intentions to get elected. While Trump is a congenital liar—witness his recent claim that he, not Joe Biden, got $35 insulin for diabetics—when it comes to how he would act if elected again to the presidency, he has been brutally honest, as have his closest advisers and campaign allies. His presidency would feature retribution against his enemies, weaponizing and politicizing the Justice Department to arrest and detain them whether there were valid charges or not. He has pledged to pardon the Jan. 6 violent insurrectionist rioters, who could constitute a personal vigilante army for President Donald Trump, presumably alongside the official one.
He has openly said he would be a dictator on Day One, reimplementing a Muslim ban, purging the bureaucracy of professional civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash protests and take on opponents while replacing military leaders who would resist turning the military into a presidential militia with pliant generals. He would begin immediately to put the 12 million undocumented people in America into detention camps before moving to deport them all. His Republican convention policy director, Russell Vought, has laid out many of these plans as have his closest advisers, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Michael Flynn, among others. Free elections would be a thing of the past, with more radical partisan judges turning a blind eye to attempts to protect elections and voting rights. He has openly flirted with the idea that he would ignore the 22nd Amendment and stay beyond his term of office.
The battle plan of his allies in the Heritage Foundation, working closely with his campaign via Project 2025, includes many of the aims above, and more; it would also tighten the screws on abortion after Dobbs, move against contraception, reinstate criminal sanctions against gay sex while overturning the right to same-sex marriage, among other things. His top foreign policy adviser, Richard Grenell, has reiterated what Trump has said about his isolationist-in-the-extreme foreign policy—jettison NATO, abandon support for Ukraine and give Putin a green light to go after Poland and other NATO countries, and reorient American alliances to create one of strongmen dictators including Kim Jong-un. Shockingly, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson violated sacred norms and endangered security by bypassing qualified lawmakers and appointing to the House Intelligence Committee two dangerous and manifestly unqualified members—one insurrectionist sympathizer, Rep. Scott Perry, who has sued the FBI, and one extremist demoted by the military for drunkenness, pill pushing, and other offenses, Rep. Ronny Jackson—simply because Donald Trump demanded it. They will have access to America’s most critical secrets and will likely share them with Trump if his status as a convicted felon denies him access to top secret information during the campaign. This is part of a broader pattern in which GOP lawmakers do what Trump wants, no matter how extreme or reckless….
We are worried about this baseline assumption that everything is fine until someone alerts us that nothing is fine, that of course our system will hold because it always has. We worry that we are exceptionally good at telling ourselves that shocking things won’t happen, and then when they do happen, we don’t know what to do. We worry that every time we say “the system held” it implies that “holding” equals “winning” as opposed to barely scraping by. We worry that while Trump has armies of surrogates out there arguing that Trump is an all-powerful God proxy, the rule of law has no surrogates out there arguing for anything because nobody ever came to a rally for a Rule 11 motion. The Biden administration has largely taken the position that the felony conviction is irrelevant because it’s proof that the status quo isn’t in danger. But the reality is that Republicans are openly campaigning against judges, juries, and prosecutors. Overt declarations of blowing up our checks and balances and following the blueprints to autocracy set by Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, meanwhile, are treated with shrugs by mainstream journalists and commentators. What’s more, Republicans in Congress have shown a willingness to kowtow to every Trump demand. The signals are flashing red that our fundamental system is in danger.
“The system is holding” is not a plan for a knowable future. It never was.
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