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Susan B. Glasser: A Report on Trump’s Acceptance Speech

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2024 //
4

Susan B. Glasser of The New Yorker reviewed Trump’s acceptance speech and quickly discovered that there was no new Trump. Some thought, after he narrowly escaped assassination, that Trump would lower the temperature on his rhetoric. No way, she reported.

Despite promises to tone down the rhetoric, it didn’t happen.

Soon enough on Thursday night, the audience was back to its comfort zone, booing as Trump criticized “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and warned that the hated Democrats were “destroying our country,” cheering him on as he demanded the firing of union leaders and rambled about the “China virus” and the “plunder” of our nation by rapacious foreigners. The second coming of George Herbert Walker Bush this was not. All the Trump standbys were there: the supposed “invasion” at the southern border, the “caravans” and the illegal alien crime wave, the 2020 election that was stolen from him by Democrats “who used covid to cheat,” the weakness and incompetence of everyone else. The theme of the speech, of the night, of the campaign, was the same theme of Trump’s entire life, summed up in the one word that he had shouted in Pennsylvania on Saturday, before he was carried off the stage, bloodied but intact: “Fight!”

…listening to Trump talk on and on and on this Thursday evening, more than an hour and a half of strange and untruthful and incoherent freestyle rambling, it was hard to think that America was truly on the brink of reëlecting this man. He may have had a brush with death but he has not been reborn. He is the same Trump, only four years older, angrier, and far, far more incoherent than anyone who has any business being President of the United States. If Biden can’t beat him, then surely someone else can—and must. 

Categories Elections, Trump

Will Bunch on the Republican Convention and the Cult of Trump

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2024 //
135

For those of who have watched Trump over many decades and seen him as a rich playboy who hangs out in nightclubs with a different woman on his arm every time, for those of us who know him as a publicity-seeker who used to call the tabloids and pretend to be his own PR agent hawking tips about his latest exploit, for those who remember him as a crony of Roy Cohn, the elevation to Saint of the Republican Party is incomprehensible. For those of us who watched the insurrection on January 6, the GOP adulation of Trump is baffling.

Will Bunch, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, attended the Republican Convention in Milwaukee and reported:

MILWAUKEE — I came to the American Heartland to cover a political convention, but all I found was a tent revival, Brother Trump’s Traveling Salvation Show.

The Republican National Convention took just minutes after Monday’s opening gavel to officially nominate its Dear Leader for the third and probably not the last time. The roll call, once the highlight of past conventions, is now an empty ritual. A party platform that was probably written on a Mar-a-Lago cocktail napkin was rammed though with no dissent. RNC schedulersquickly liberated all four nights for the only real purpose they had here in Wisconsin.

The deification of Donald J. Trump.

The undulating white hats that staked a claim for Texas; the buttoned-down accountants under their ill-fitting, newly purchased red MAGA hats; and the tightly-wound blonde women in their adult cheerleading outfits — all of them populated the crowded floor of the Fiserv Forum wearing a badge that read “Delegate,” but they were only extras in the ultimate reality show. They mildly whooped for the transphobic jokes and Second Amendment bravado of faceless GOP Congressional candidates but by 8 p.m. Central most were sucked by a cosmic force toward the back corner of the floor, iPhones aloft to capture a moment of political transubstantiation.

It reaches fever pitch as the Village People’s gay disco anthem “Y.M.C.A.” floods the massive basketball arena, with images of the Leader’s goofball dancing on a big screen. A house band segues into The Romantics’ “What I Like About You” as he finally enters the long tunnel and climbs to his seat, white bandage covering the stigmata of his right ear, which bled from Butler, Pa. to Milwaukee for the salvation of America and this delirious throng.

In the minutes that follow, vanquished rivals like Nikki Haley or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis plead for mercy by pledging their undying fealty. The faithful thank their God for intervening Saturday to save Trump and save America. Eventually, the speeches all start sounding like a riff on The Manchurian Candidate: “Donald J. Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

But the camera is drawn, like a moth to flame, to Trump — head-cocked, absorbing the adulation, probably hoping the TV talking heads are speculating wildly about this obviously changed man. Here in Milwaukee, the political pundits finally saw the thing they’ve been pleading for — unity — and what that really looks like. It looks a lot like Jonestown.

“It seems that our party is really getting unified quite well,” Daniel Bobay, an ex-Californian who retired near Sulphur Springs, Texas, and was attending his first RNC as an alternate delegate, told me inside the Fiserv Forum. It was a variation of a quote I heard again and again and again. Bobay said he hopes the Trump shooting will reduce overheated rhetoric — but only from the media, and not especially from Republicans. “That’s always been the message,” he said with a slight chuckle, referring to tough talk on immigration. “You can’t only build half the wall, or deport only half the people.”

Like any cult, the real mysticism in Milwaukee was the things that went unsaid. I never thought I’d see a four-day national celebration of a presidential candidate who just 45 days earlier had been convicted on 34 felony charges, stemming from his efforts to win the 2016 election by paying off the porn star who would later testify she had sex with him.

But I’m much, much more flabbergasted by how quickly those convictions just vanished from your TV screen and the national conversation — just like the massive financial fraud, just like the E. Jean Carroll rape case, just like the taking of our top secret documents, just like the role he played in trying to tamper with his 2020 election defeat, and his summoning of a violent mob to the U.S. Capitol.

Any need to “tone it down” or “lower the national temperature” after Saturday’s shooting in Butler doesn’t undo the fact that all of those disqualifying things have happened. But here’s the other thing: Nobody at the RNC was really toning it down or lowering the temperature. Instead, it was like a weeklong heat dome of baseless accusation settled over eastern Wisconsin.

The harsh tone was set early on Monday, when Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson welcomed the faithful to his home state by declaring “the Democrat agenda, their policies, are a clear and present danger to America, to our institutions, our values and our people.” Johnson then claimed that “the wrong speech” had been stuck into the teleprompter.

Really? In that case, the teleprompter guy must have brought all the wrong speeches. Because if there was some kind of memo about a new GOP message of peace, love, and understanding, it was not widely circulated. As I looked on from the upper deck Tuesday night, I heard a string of “everyday Americans” present a nonstop saga of murder, rape, and drug-related deaths. I wasn’t sure at times if I was watching the RNC or if Comcast had reactivated FEARnet. While some of the crimes were committed by undocumented migrants and others they sought to blame on liberal prosecutors, these truly awful, heartbreaking incidents were always tied back to President Joe Biden.

“I hold Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — the border czar, what a joke — and every Democrat who supports open borders, responsible for the death of my son,” a Southern California mom named Anne Fundner, who lost her 15-year-old son to a fentanyl overdose, told the delegates. Fundner burst into tears while the crowd erupted in chants of “Joe must go!” It was a moment which, like so many at the RNC, turned only emotional dials, without context about any link between Biden’s actual policies — or Trump’s, for that matter — and the calamity that befell Fundner’s son.

And look, no one expects convention goers to mount the RNC podium and admit that Biden’s border policies — which refugee advocates say are too strict and too similar to what Trump did — and his recent curbs on asylum have brought southern border crossings to their lowest levels of the 2020s, But did anyone expect that emotional dog-whistle speeches like Fundner’s would be greeted with delegates waving pre-made placards, “Stop Biden’s Border Bloodbath.”

Did they bring “the wrong signs,” just like Johnson brought “the wrong speech”? Or is this how the Republican Party lowers the temperature, even as it commits a type of stochastic terrorism by describing the most awful rapes and murders and telling America: Biden did this? Their version of “tone it down” is…”bloodbath”? Seriously? And yet when I walked around the inner bowels of the Fiserv Forum, RNC delegates swore that only Democrats are responsible for violent rhetoric.

“The level of violent rhetoric on the left has been escalating for years — they’re awful,” Bob Witsenhausen, the GOP county chair of Santa Fe, N.M., an alternate delegate wearing a red MAGA hat autographed by Laura Loomer, told me. He insisted that the “bloodbath” signs were OK because they address undocumented migrants — but he claimed Biden is “trying to label every MAGA Republican as a domestic terrorist.” He slammed Black Lives Matter but when I asked about the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, he replied with debunked tales about undercover FBI and “antifa” infiltrators. “Jan. 6 was a set up. Anybody who has their eyes open can see that.”

But paranoia strikes deep. Big-time Republicans here in Milwaukee like Donald Trump Jr. and the veep pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, both said in interviews that “they” had tried to kill the GOP nominee in Butler County. Wait, I thought the GOP absolutely hates “preferred pronouns.” Why are they calling a 20-year-old registered Republican male “they”? What’s more outrageous — that Republicans only want the rhetoric cooled off toward them? Or that the elite media is letting them get away with it?

The bubble of disinformation walled off in downtown Milwaukee from the rest of America by a maze of concrete barriers could be suffocating at times. I kept wondering one thing: What would the great gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson have made of all of this? How long before he started seeing hideous green lizards crawling from underneath the MAGA hats of these rhinestone cowboys, before the numbing conformity revealed the psychedelic terror of the grim American future that crawls just underneath the surface?

But even if everything they said here about Biden and his porous border were actually true, there still wouldn’t be enough illicit pharmaceuticals to satisfy the Hunter S. Thompson of 1972, or to make sense of this Republican Kool-Aid acid test. Besides, America needs less hallucination and more clarity.

The 2024 RNC is indeed all about unity, but only the creepiest and most cultist kinds. I saw unity of fear, in a party of ritual humiliation where dissenters like Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney are tossed down the memory hole. I saw the unity of people professing their love of community and a so-called “real America” that looks like the floor of the Fiserv Forum, overwhelmingly white, with any “different” folks pushed down the escalators.

We should be worried about the far right’s Project 2025, but we should be horrified by what we’re seeing right now in 2024, right here in the all-American city of Milwaukee. The cult of personality around Donald Trump is already creating its own reality, starting with his campaign’s refusal to release any medical information about his treatment or prognosis after Saturday’s shooting.

Monday’s shock cancellation of MSNBC’s Morning Joe proved that Big Media can be cowed from asking any tough questions that might pierce this bubble. The mostly desolate city blocks here — with cops on bicycles and helicopters and in large gaggles of officers on street corners — feel like a sneak peek at what Trump has in store for Democratic-run cities if he wins in November.

On Tuesday afternoon, five members of the RNC’s massive security force — imported from Columbus, Ohio, patrolling in a unfamiliar neighborhood one mile away from the Fiserv Forum — confronted a 43-year-old homeless man wielding a knife in an apparent altercation and killed him. The incident is still under investigation, but it felt like an opening volley of a Trump presidency that promises to send law enforcement and even troops into cities like Milwaukee, to round up the homeless or knock on the doors of undocumented migrants.

“Had that been Milwaukee PD, that man would be alive right now,” a neighborhood resident, David Porter, told the Huffington Post. “I know that because they know him.” You could argue that the homeless man, Samuel Sharpe, from the wrong side of the concrete barriers, is the first victim of a Trump restoration. And as the cult of Donald Trump swoons and sways toward November with little resistance, you can probably guarantee he won’t be the last.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Republicans, Trump

Dan Rather on the Republican Convention

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2024 //
36

Dan Rather is gobsmacked by the short memories of the delegates at the RNC. How could they have wiped their memories of the insurrection of January 6? How could they take pride in nominating a convicted felon? How could they opine for the Trump economy when Biden’s economy has been so successful? How could they endorse a man who still insists that he won in 2020 without a scintilla of evidence? Sore loser.

He writes:

At their convention in Milwaukee, Republicans see themselves as celebrating what they are convinced is going to be not only a win in November, but an overwhelming one. Among delegates and others on the convention floor and around the hall, there is much chatter about an “avalanche” building. 

This, as they have nominated for president a man who tried to overthrow our government.

Their hope is that a majority of voters will simply forget all Donald Trump has done to help himself and hurt this country. That strikes many Americans as falling in the narrow space between revolting and appalling. 

And my goodness, the lies are flying fast and furious at the Republican fantasy convention. This glitzed-up affair is full of speeches that don’t even come close to the truth. Here’s how bad it is: Some major news organizations (although unfortunately not all) are fact-checking the speeches live, calling out the lies in real time. 

But it’s more than that. Republicans must believe Americans are in a mood to forgive and forget. To forgive the insurrection of January 6 and forget the fact that the former president kept top-secret documents strewn about Mar-a-Lago like last month’s junk mail, among many other indiscretions.

How much airtime and how many column inches will be devoted this week to what the previous president has done to harm our democracy? My guess is almost none. Instead there will be a celebration, one devoid of context. It will be an anointing without proper perspective and analysis. And there will be misleading speech after misleading speech. 

Tip of the Stetson to The Washington Post and The New York Times, whose fact-checkers are calling out a myriad of false claims. MSNBC is doing the same in real time. CNN is airing a fact-checking segment after the convention coverage. Unsurprisingly, Fox “News” is airing live speeches unchallenged and unchecked.

So far, the speeches have been riddled with stunning yet emphatically stated lies. Trump, the liar-in-chief, is getting a run for his money in the telling of tales. Over two days, the Post’s fact-checkers have found that convention speakers have made false claims about border crossings, gas prices, fentanyl, tax cuts, Vice President Kamala Harris, peace during Trump’s presidency, voting by migrants, energy independence, the relative wealth of young Americans, and Easter Sunday.

The lies and misinformation are meant to rile and to scare. Texas Senator Ted Cruz actually said this out loud from the convention podium: “Americans are dying, murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.”

And then there’s the old chestnut, election denialism. According to the Post, 62 convention speakers have previously questioned President Biden’s 2020 election win. 

Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis have capitulated, forgiving Trump for his miserable and untruthful treatment of them when they were running against him. They both gave speeches endorsing him on Tuesday night.

And don’t forget House Speaker Mike Johnson’s claim that the Republican Party is “the law and order team,” as it nominates a convicted felon.

It is no secret that the political nominating conventions lost their significance decades ago. Today, they are nothing more than hour upon hour of campaign advertising, which makes them a great place to court undecided voters. This MAGA convention will be hard-pressed to appeal to middle-of-the-roaders. Republicans can no longer claim to be the party of Lincoln or even of Reagan. It is wholly the party of Trump and his MAGA extremist followers. Their newly anointed vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, is even more extreme on issues like gun control and abortion than Trump.

Vance and the convention speakers are talking some about America’s need for unity, and that’s good, if they actually mean it. But after only two days, they seem to have abandoned the calls for unity and reverted back to the MAGA talking points. Against the backdrop of Republicans celebrating in Milwaukee, let’s hope that most of the rest of the country gives itself a gut check on Trump’s record and the reality of what his victory in November would mean.

Categories Democracy, Economy, Elections, Extremism, Republicans, Shame, Trump

Politico: Party Leaders Pressure Biden to Step Aside

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2024 //
125

President Biden has been a great President. He has been an amazingly effective President, passing crucial legislation that helped ordinary Americans even though he has only a razor-thin margin in the Senate and none in the House. I have supported him vigorously, believing that he would do what was best for the country. I took offense at the media pile-on against him, even though I was stunned by his frail appearance and appalling performance at the June debate.

But, Politico reports, Democratic Party leaders have decided he can’t win and have coalesced to persuade him to step aside. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but it seems unlikely that Biden can continue when those who know him best withdraw their support.

Politico reports:

For weeks, the Democratic Party has been paralyzed by uncertainty about whether President JOE BIDEN should stay atop the ticket or step aside. But over the last 24 hours, that uncertainty has given way to a growing clarity about the reality facing the president: The walls are closing in, and his position leading the Democratic ticket appears increasingly unsustainable.

The president’s reelection bid has now lost the confidence of Congress’ senior-most Democratic leaders, as well of party elders around the country.

Yesterday alone …

  • ABC News’ Jon Karl scooped on World News Tonight that Senate Majority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER and House Minority Leader HAKEEM JEFFRIEStold Biden in person that he should end his reelection campaign for the good of the country.
  • CNN’s MJ Lee, Jamie Gangel and Jeff Zeleny reported that former Speaker NANCY PELOSI told the president that he can’t win and is dragging down the party, jeopardizing potential majorities in Congress. (More on this below) 
  • Rep. ADAM SCHIFF (D-Calif.), Pelosi’s longtime protégé, became the latest Hill Democrat to publicly call on Biden to step aside, arguing that he has “serious concerns about whether the President can defeat DONALD TRUMP,” and that it’s “time for him to pass the torch.”
  • Biden’s confidant and campaign adviser JEFFREY KATZENBERG confronted the president about new financial woes, telling him that big donors — skeptical that he can win — have all but stopped writing checks, Semafor’s Liz Hoffman and Ben Smith scooped.
  • Senior Democrats started privately circulating jarring numbers from Blue Rose Research, which found that “just 18 percent of voters and only 36 percent of people who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 believe he is mentally fit and up to the job of being president,” according to the NYT. Other super PAC polling shows “Biden’s deficit growing to 5 percentage points or more in the must-win states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.”
  • And DNC officials were pressured by their own party into pushing back a virtual roll call nominating Biden after an attempt to move it up was seen as a way of assuring Biden could run out the clock on the Dump Biden crowd.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi speaks with reporters.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has coordinated with senior Democrats to try to push Biden out. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

This flurry of stories yesterday is no accident. Senior Democrats had hoped to address this matter privately — Pelosi herself certainly advised members to try to do so, at least for a time.

But Biden and his inner circle have refused to listen. So now, Democrats are leaking tidbits of private conversations with the president himself, using the news media as a microphone to send a message: We’re no longer with you — and we will force you off the ticket, if needed. 

“The speaker does not want to call on him to resign [as the Democratic nominee], but she will do everything in her power to make sure it happens,” one Pelosi ally we spoke with said.

The developments underscore a new, more public phase of the Dump Biden movement. It’s also an astonishing turn of events that puts Biden’s presidential bid on life support: With Democratic leaders like Pelosi, Schumer and Jeffries against him, how can he possibly continue?

Open the link to read more.

Categories Biden, Elections

Nebraska: Public School Supporters Fight Vouchers

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2024 //
6

In a short period of time, friends of public schools in Nebraska collected enough signatures to get on the November ballot. That is, if a hostile state official doesn’t kick off enough names to render their petition invalid, as happened in Arkansas. Voucher pushers are terrified of referenda; vouchers always lose—by big margins.

Public school supporters surpass signature goal to put repeal of LB1402 voucher scheme on the November ballot


LINCOLN – They had only 67 days – the shortest timeline for a petition drive in the state’s history – and Nebraska public school supporters rose to the occasion, again.


The Support Our Schools Nebraska coalition needed to collect 61,621 signatures to let voters repeal or retain a bill that spends millions of public tax dollars to pay for private schools. Today, the coalition submitted more than 86,000
signatures to the Nebraska Secretary of State to ensure the issue will appear on the November ballot. The group also exceeded the 38-county requirement with 5% of voters signing the petition in more than 60 of the state’s 93 counties.


“Since last summer we’ve collected more than 200,000 signatures from Nebraskans who believe voters should decide whether public funds should be used to pay for private schools,” said Jenni Benson, Support Our Schools Nebraska
sponsor and president of the Nebraska State Education Association. “The incredibly short timeline was a huge challenge, but Nebraskans wanted to sign this petition – many were appalled that LB1402 was passed to block citizens from voting on the issue and to impose a costly new voucher scheme on taxpayers.”

This is the second time Support Our Schools Nebraska has collected enough signatures to ensure voters have a say on a legislative bill that diverts public tax dollars to pay for private schools.


Last summer, the group gathered 117,415 signatures in 85 days to put the repeal of a previous voucher bill, LB753, on
the November 2024 ballot. Even after the Secretary of State certified that the LB753 petition met all statutory and
constitutional requirements to put the issue on the ballot for voters to decide, the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Lou Ann Linehan tried to have the Secretary of State take it off the ballot. When her attempt failed, she introduced LB1402, a bill that
denied Nebraskans their right to vote on LB753’s voucher scheme while imposing a new costly voucher plan on Nebraska taxpayers.


“Despite attempts by a few politicians and some wealthy special interests to ignore the will of the people, Nebraskans have once again affirmed their support for public schools. This direct democracy effort is a testament to the resolve of
the people of Nebraska and highlights the immense importance of public schools in our communities,” said Brad Christian-Sallis, Director of Power Building, Nebraska Table.


“Our Nebraska neighbors have made two things very clear: they expect that the state of Nebraska will make responsible investments with their tax dollars, and they love their public schools. That’s why they have turned out once again to have the chance to vote to repeal this legislation in November,” said Dr. Rebecca Firestone, Executive Director of OpenSky Policy Institute. “They have seen costs for similar programs balloon across the nation, like in Iowa, where the
cost of the program is expected to triple, reaching $345 million in just two years, or Arizona, where the cost of its universal voucher program has exceeded budget projections by 1,346%.”


“The underestimated anger among voters about being denied their earlier chance to vote is palpable. I heard this sentiment frequently, often unsolicited, as voters lined up to sign the petition,” said Cynthia Peterson, president of the
League of Women Voters of Lincoln-Lancaster County and representing the League of Women Voters of Nebraska.


“Nebraskans deserve the opportunity to vote on school vouchers—yes or no. Recently, even a nun signed our petition, jokingly acknowledging potential consequences but steadfast in her belief that voters should have the final say. Every
Nebraska voter has a voice in our system of government. This referendum petition all boils down to letting the people decide.”


“Today, the people of Nebraska have once again exercised their constitutionally protected right to referendum, ensuring that their voices will always be heard. This moment stands as a testament to the deep and unwavering love Nebraskans have for their public schools, which remain the heart and soul of our communities. In this defining moment, we celebrate the power of democracy and the enduring spirit of our great state,” said Dunixi Guereca, Executive Director of
Stand for Schools.


“PTA’s mission is to make every child’s potential a reality by engaging and empowering families and communities to advocate for all children. We value collaboration, commitment, diversity, respect, and accountability. Nebraska PTA is
proud to stand with the Support Our Schools Nebraska Coalition. We align with the National PTA in advocating for the improvement of public education for all children and to guarantee that public funds are not diverted to any private
school choice proposal and/or voucher systems,” said Christine Clerc, Executive Committee of the Nebraska PTA. “Public dollars must remain invested in public schools for the benefit of all students and the future of our nation. We are
so grateful for all the individuals who have signed the petition and collected signatures so that we might continue the Nebraska tradition of strong public schools in every corner of our state.”


“Public Education is the great equalizer in ensuring that all children regardless of geographical or social location have
access to learning, growing, achieving and giving back in service,” said Rev. Dr. Karla Cooper, LPS Foundation Board of Directors.


“The overwhelming success of the Support Our Schools campaign falls in line with what the majority of Nebraskans believe and support. According to the Institute’s 2023 public opinion poll, 64 percent of Nebraskans said they oppose
using public dollars to subsidize private, religious, or charter schools. Simply put, state lawmakers should respect the will
of the people and support our public education system, instead of undermining our community’s interests and priorities,” said Hadley Richters, CEO of the Holland Children’s Movement.


“Nebraskans have wisely rejected public funding of private institutions at the ballot box three times previously and we need to do so again,” said Tim Royers, a sponsor of Support Our Schools Nebraska and president of the Millard
Education Association. “All we have to do is look at states with similar voucher programs. Those states and their taxpayers are struggling with the skyrocketing cost of these programs, as well as with the lack of transparency and
accountability. Arizona’s voucher program is a fiasco with the governor there saying it will likely bankrupt the state, that it does not save taxpayers money, and it does not provide a better education for students. Our neighboring state of Iowa passed a voucher program last year. It led to a huge spike in private school tuition while the cost to state taxpayers far exceeds the initial estimates, growing to nearly $180 million for this coming year. We can avoid those problems by
voting to repeal LB1402’s voucher scheme at the ballot box this November.”


This year’s sprint to collect signatures was a grassroots effort from a broad base of nonprofits supporting public schools.

The effort included more than 2,800 volunteers who circulated petitions and coordinated more than 800 signing events. More than 1,300 individuals have donated to the effort with an average donation of $42.


The Secretary of State will forward the petitions to local election officials, who have 40 days to verify the petitions and the signers’ information. Once all petitions have been reviewed and requirements met, the Secretary of State will certify the measure for the November 2024 General Election ballot.


For more information on the effort to repeal LB1402’s voucher scheme, please visit:


Website: https://supportourschoolsnebraska.org/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SOSNebraska
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SOSNebraska
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sosnebraska/


Contact: Karen Kilgarin at 402-432-7776 or Kelsey Foley at 308-643-7268

Categories Elections, Nebraska, Resistance, Vouchers

Dr. Paul Offit: A Frightening Talk Between Trump and RFK Jr.

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2024 //
7

Dr. Paul Offit is an authority on vaccines and infectious diseases. Please read this post from his blog Beyond the Noise.

He writes:

On July 16, 2024, Brandy Zadrozny, an investigative reporter and journalist for NBC News, posted a video on X of a conversation between RFK Jr. and Donald Trump. “Whoops,” writes Zadrozny. “Seems like RFK Jr.’s son posted and has since deleted a video of a call between RFK Jr. and Trump.” When he realized that his son had posted the video, RFK Jr. was mortified. “When President Trump called me,” he wrote. “I was taping with an in-house videographer. I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately. I am mortified that this was posted. I apologize to the president.”

Trump was talking to RFK Jr. about vaccines.  “Something is wrong with the whole system,” said Trump. “Remember, I said you need small doses. Small doses. [Children receive] 38 different vaccines and it looks like it’s meant for a horse, not a 10 pound or 20-pound baby. And then you see the baby starting to change radically. And I’ve seen it too many times.”

None of this was new. Trump had repeated what he had said during a presidential debate on September 17, 2015. “Autism has become an epidemic that has gotten totally out of control,” he said, suggesting that high concentrations of vaccines given all at once was causing the problem. “Just the other day, two years old, two- and one-half years old, a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick and is now autistic.” Trump said that he wanted vaccines to be given in “smaller doses over longer periods of time.” Donald Trump, a reality TV star, real estate developer, and politician is asking us to believe that his knowledge of phase 1 dose-ranging studies is greater than the scientists and physicians who evaluate those studies.

Alison Singer, the president and co-founder of the Autism Science Foundation and the mother of a child with autism, responded to that immediately. “Donald Trump is a part of a fringe movement that…[has] dangerously perpetuated the false link between vaccines and autism,” she said. “The facts are clear. Vaccines do not cause autism. Some people may not like the facts, but they don’t get to change them, even if they are running for president of the United States.”

The most worrisome part of the conversation between RFK Jr. and Donald Trump occurred at the end, when Trump said, “I would love for you to do something. And I think it would be good for you. [Because] we are going to win. We’re going to win.” Was Trump implying that RFK Jr. might have a place in his administration. If so, the public should be aware that no one has propagated more false information about vaccines and vaccine safety than RFK Jr. When asked on a recent podcast with Lex Fridman to name a vaccine that he thought was valuable, he couldn’t think of one. If RFK Jr. is given a place in the Trump administration, we can be sure that his vaccine disinformation, conspiracy theories, and false beliefs will be center stage, putting the health of children and this nation at risk.

Imagine RFK Jr. as head of the Centers for Disease Control. The Federal Drug Administration. Good grief!

Categories Elections, Health, Science, Trump

David Frum: Violence: You Reap What You Sow

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2024 //
34

David Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush. His views evolved, and he is now a Never-Trumper. He is a staff writer for The Atlantic, where this article appeared.

Frum wrote:

When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.

After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”

Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening harm to Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on television.

Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well. The attempted murder of Trump—and the killing of a person nearby—is a horror and an outrage. More will be learned about the man who committed this appalling act, and who was killed by the Secret Service. Whatever his mania or motive, the only important thing about him is the law-enforcement mistake that allowed him to bring a deadly weapon so close to a campaign event and gain a sight line of the presidential candidate. His name should otherwise be erased and forgotten.

It is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence “has no place” in American society. Assassinations, lynchings, riots, and pogroms have stained every page of American political history. That has remained true to the present day. In 2016, and even more in 2020, Trump supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote-counters. Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election.

Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer martyrs as their proof of truth. The Mussolini movement in Italy built imposing monuments to its fallen comrades. The Trump movement now improves on that: The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance.

The 2024 election was already shaping up as a symbolic contest between an elderly and weakening liberalism too frail and uncertain to protect itself and an authoritarian, reactionary movement ready to burst every barrier and trash every institution. To date, Trump has led only a minority of U.S. voters, but that minority’s passion and audacity have offset what it lacks in numbers. After the shooting, Trump and his backers hope to use the iconography of a bloody ear and face, raised fist, and call to “Fight!” to summon waverers to their cause of installing Trump as an anti-constitutional ruler, exempted from ordinary law by his allies on the Supreme Court.

Other societies have backslid to authoritarianism because of some extraordinary crisis: economic depression, hyperinflation, military defeat, civil strife. In 2024, U.S. troops are nowhere at war. The American economy is booming, providing spectacular and widely shared prosperity. A brief spasm of mild post-pandemic inflation has been overcome. Indicators of social health have abruptlyturned positive since Trump left office after years of deterioration during his term. Crime and fatal drug overdoses are declining in 2024; marriages and births are rising. Even the country’s problems indirectly confirm the country’s success: Migrants are crossing the border in the hundreds of thousands, because they know, even if Americans don’t, that the U.S. job market is among the hottest on Earth.

Yet despite all of this success, Americans are considering a form of self-harm that in other countries has typically followed the darkest national failures: letting the author of a failed coup d’état return to office to try again.

One reason this self-harm is nearing consummation is that American society is poorly prepared to understand and respond to radical challenges, once those challenges gain a certain mass. For nearly a century, “radical” in U.S. politics has usually meant “fringe”: Communists, Ku Kluxers, Black Panthers, Branch Davidians, Islamist jihadists. Radicals could be marginalized by the weight of the great American consensus that stretches from social democrats to business conservatives. Sometimes, a Joe McCarthy or a George Wallace would throw a scare into that mighty consensus, but in the past such challengers rarely formed stable coalitions with accepted stakeholders in society. Never gaining an enduring grip on the institutions of state, they flared up and burned out.

Trump is different. His abuses have been ratified by powerful constituencies. He has conquered and colonized one of the two major parties. He has defeated—or is on the way to defeating—every impeachment and prosecution to hold him to account for his frauds and crimes. He has assembled a mass following that is larger, more permanent, and more national in reach than any previous American demagogue. He has dominated the scene for nine years already, and he and his supporters hope they can use yesterday’s appalling event to extend the Trump era to the end of his life and beyond.

The American political and social system cannot treat such a person as an alien. It inevitably accommodates and naturalizes him. His counselors, even the thugs and felons, join the point-counterpoint dialogue at the summit of the American elite. President Joe Biden nearly wrecked his campaign because he felt obliged to meet Trump in debate. How could Biden have done otherwise? Trump is the three-time nominee of the Republican Party; it’s awkward and strange to treat him as an insurrectionist against the American state—though that’s what Trump was and is.

The despicable shooting at Trump, which also caused death and injury to others, now secures his undeserved position as a partner in the protective rituals of the democracy he despises. The appropriate expressions of dismay and condemnation from every prominent voice in American life have the additional effect of habituating Americans to Trump’s legitimacy. In the face of such an outrage, the familiar and proper practice is to stress unity, to proclaim that Americans have more things in common than that divide them. Those soothing words, true in the past, are less true now.

Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.

The Republican National Convention, which opens this week, will welcome to its stage apologists for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its aggression against U.S. allies. Trump’s own infatuation with Russia and other dictatorships has not dimmed even slightly with age or experience. Yet all of these urgent and necessary truths must now be subordinated to the ritual invocation of “thoughts and prayers” for someone who never gave a thought or uttered a prayer for any of the victims of his own many incitements to bloodshed. The president who used his office to champion the rights of dangerous people to own military-type weapons says he was grazed by a bullet from one such assault rifle.

Conventional phrases and polite hypocrisy fill a useful function in social life. We say “Thank you for your service” both to the decorated hero and to the veteran who barely escaped dishonorable discharge. It’s easier than deciphering which was which. We wish “Happy New Year!” even when we dread the months ahead.

But conventional phrases don’t go unheard. They carry meanings, meanings no less powerful for being rote and reflexive. In rightly denouncing violence, we are extending an implicit pardon to the most violent person in contemporary U.S. politics. In asserting unity, we are absolving a man who seeks power through the humiliation and subordination of disdained others.

Those conventional phrases are inscribing Trump into a place in American life that he should have forfeited beyond redemption on January 6, 2021. All decent people welcome the sparing of his life. Trump’s reckoning should be with the orderly process of law, not with the bloodshed he rejoiced in when it befell others. He and his allies will exploit a gunman’s vicious criminality as their path to exonerate past crimes and empower new ones. Those who stand against Trump and his allies must find the will and the language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all intolerable—and how the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

Jay Kuo: Judge Aileen Cannon’s Absurd Decision to Find Special Prosecutor Unconstitutional

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2024 //
7

Jay Kuo is a lawyer, a political consultant and a musician. His blog “The Status Kuo” is lively and well-informed. In this post, he documents how far-fetched is Judge Aileen Cannon’s recent decision to throw out the documents case against Trump, who appointed her.

He writes:

On Monday, Judge Aileen “Loose” Cannon issued a mind-exploding ruling dismissing the espionage and obstruction case against Donald Trump. Her reason? The appointment of the Special Counsel was not legally authorized.

Let me first say this. Her ruling flies in the face of every legal precedent. No less than eight courts have weighed in on this question before and found to the contrary. Yet somehow Judge Cannon has defied all that legal weight and ruled against the U.S. government.

The timing of the ruling is also very suspect. Judge Cannon has been sitting on the motion to dismiss for 144 days. Yet she issued her ruling on the first day of the Republican National Convention? This smells like legal mischief. She is raising her hand for a quid pro quo appointment to a higher bench during a possible second Trump administration.

In today’s piece, I’ll walk through why Judge Cannon’s ruling is far outside of anything we have ever seen on this question. But while precedent would dictate that she should be reversed by the 11th Circuit, she could theoretically still prevail, setting up a split in the circuits for the Supreme Court to decide. And the current High Court has shown it doesn’t give a damn about decades of precedent. Indeed, that is Cannon’s likely gambit, and it is a dangerous one.

But if she loses, as is likely, she could also pay a heavy consequence: a reassignment of the case to another judge because of her clear bias for Trump.

Why she’s wrong

The language of both the Constitution and the authorizing legislation make clear that the Special Counsel is something the Executive Branch, via its Justice Department, may appoint. 

Jack Smith argued that Congress vested the appointment of “inferior Officers” like the Special Counsel in 28 U.S.C. § 533(4), in which Congress authorized the Attorney General to appoint officials “to conduct such other investigations regarding official matters under the control of the Department of Justice…as may be directed by the Attorney General.”

Pretty damn clear if you ask me.

Before jumping into the legal arguments, it’s important to recognize how long and time-honored the tradition is of appointing Special Counsel to handle politically sensitive matters. President Ulysses S. Grant appointed one some 150 years ago in 1875 during the Whiskey Ring scandal, where distillers bribed Treasury officials to increase profits and evade taxes.

In the 1920s, there was a Special Counsel for the Teapot Dome scandal, where Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall became the first cabinet member ever sent to prison after he accepted bribes in exchange for petroleum leases.

The question of the Special Prosecutor’s authority in the Watergate investigation was first broached by the Supreme Court in U.S. v. Nixon. (Special Counsel was previously termed “Special Prosecutor.”) In that case, the Supreme Court unanimously signed off on the Special Prosecutor’s authority to issue a subpoena to Nixon for tapes of conversations. 

Yet Judge Cannon, in her infinite wisdom, decided that U.S. v. Nixon  was mere “dictum,” meaning reasoning not essential to the decision before her. She wrote that because Nixon never actually contested the Special Prosecutor’s validity, the question was not squarely before the Supreme Court.

Come on, Aileen. 

It’s clear that the Supreme Court at least approved of the Special Counsel’s very existence. Otherwise, why even consider whether he could legally subpoena the President? Nixon didn’t challenge the very existence of the Special Counsel because it’s crystal clear that the Special Counsel was legally authorized, and no one on Nixon’s team even presumed to challenge the validity of the appointment. 

Judge Cannon also ignored another Supreme Court precedent from 1988, Morrison v. Olson, which upheld a law called the Independent Counsel Act. Prosecutors have cited that decision over the decades to consistently argue that special counsels did not violate the separation of powers. Cannon rejected this argument, however, ruling that the statute it upheld had lapsed. 

But Garland had cited four other statutes enacted by Congress—including the one discussed at the top of this section—that broadly authorized him to make Smith’s appointment. Yet Judge Cannon believes she somehow knows better than Congress about how to go about actually authorizing the appointment by statute.

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Categories Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Injustice, Trump

Project 2025: What Happens to K-12 in a New Trump Term?

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2024 //
11

Matthew Stone of Education Week described the plans for K-12 education in a second Trump term, as they appear in Project 2025, a document written by hundreds of former Trump officials. The 44-page education section emphasizes eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, distributing its functions to other agencies, converting categorical funds (like Title I for low-income children) into block grants, and rooting out “critical race theory” and any recognition of the existence of LGBT students. The document emphasizes the primacy of parental rights.

Trump has distanced himself from the document, because its recommendations are so radical, but it was prepared under the watchful eye of Kevin Roberts, president of the ultra-rightwing Heritage Foundation. Roberts is a close associate of Trump’s.

Stone wrote:

What would Donald Trump do in the realm of K-12 if voters return the former president to the White House?

He and his campaign haven’t outlined many specifics, but a recently published document that details conservative plans to completely remake the executive branch offers some possibilities. Among them: 

  • Title I, the $18 billion federal fund that supports low-income students, would disappear in a decade. 
  • Federal special education funds would flow to school districts as block grants with no strings attached, or even to savings accounts for parents to use on private school or other education expenses.
  • The U.S. Department of Education would be eliminated.
  • The federal government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws in schools would be scaled back.

The proposals are contained in a comprehensive policy agenda that’s part of a Heritage Foundation-led initiative called Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project, which includes nearly 900 pages of detailed plans for virtually every corner of the federal government and a database of potential staffers for a conservative administration. It will also feature a playbook for the first 180 days of a new term.

The agenda is designed to be ready for a conservative president to implement at the start of a new administration next year, depending on the outcome of November’s election.

Project 2025 involves former Trump administration officials and other allies of the former president, as well as dozens of aligned advocacy organizations. One of those is Moms for Liberty, the Florida-based group that rose to national prominence fighting school boards over COVID-19 safety protocols and has endorsed conservative school board candidates across the country in recent years.

On the campaign trail, Trump has said that parents should elect school principals, called for merit pay for teachers and the abolition of teacher tenure, promised to cut federal funding to schools pushing progressive social ideas, and pledged to establish universal school choice.

But because he’s released little in the way of detailed plans, Project 2025’s 44-page agenda for the U.S. Department of Education offers the clearest picture yet of the education priorities Trump could pursue in a second term, and how a second Trump administration could use the federal government to advance conservative policies like private school choice and parents’ rights that have taken root in many Republican-led states.

Trump is trying to distance himself from Project 2025 because it is so radical. But no one takes his protestations seriously.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Republicans, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

CNN Fact-Checks the Republican Convention

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2024 //
18

CNN reviewed the claims made at the Republican Conventuon and pointed out lies. Too bad CNN didn’t do this during the Presidential debate, but inexplicably both sides agreed to that condition.

Here are the lies, corrected.

Categories Elections, Lies, Republicans
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