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Houston Chronicle Endorses Joe Biden for President

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2024 //
11

This may be the earliest Presidential endorsement ever by a major newspaper. The Houston Chronicle endorsed Joe Biden. Come to think of it, why should any newspaper hesiatate when the choice is between Biden, a lifelong centrist and accomplished President, and the unhinged Trump, who is facing multiple criminal indictments and attempted a coup when he lost in 2020?

The editorial says:

Now that the Kansas City Chiefs have triumphed over the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl LVIII — and without the help of Taylor Swift and the CIA, as far as we know— this nation can turn its attention to another winning team. We have in mind the Biden administration. Under the leadership of the oldest and arguably the most experienced president in American history, the team in the White House for the past three years has performed remarkably well, despite the rancor and divisiveness that have afflicted this nation for nearly a decade.

The accomplishments of an administration dedicated to governing, one that believes in the power of government to make life better for the American people, is a key reason we heartily endorse the reelection of President Joe Biden. The other reason, equally important, is to fend off the chaos, corruption and danger to the nation that would accompany the return of Donald Trump to the White House.  

The president has his shortcomings, to be sure, but what his administration has managed to get done during the past three years is a potent reminder to his fellow Democrats, to independents and to those Republicans who have somehow resisted Trump’s cultish appeal that the nation has a viable alternative. Here is a sampling:

If it’s really “the economy, stupid,” that determines success in presidential elections, then Biden can probably rest easy at neutral. No, Bidenomics alone didn’t save us but neither did they damn us. One of the clear advantages of a president as experienced as Biden is wisdom: in this case, the wisdom to get the heck out of the Fed’s way as it masterfully applied the breaks to what could have been runaway inflation.  

The economy has recovered from the perils of the pandemic and is now healthier than that of any other advanced nation. With unemployment approaching a 50-year low, companies large and small need workers. (Notice the “help wanted” signs in shop windows, the “We’re Hiring” signs outside huge warehouses and distribution centers just off I-10 east of Brookshire.)

Inflation is trending downward, somehow, despite all dire prophecies of economists, without the bitter medicine of a recession or a period of high unemployment. Food prices are still high, and hard-working Americans are still wincing at grocery store receipts, but gas prices have fallen, as the U.S. produces more oil than any country in history, including Saudi Arabia. In an ongoing effort to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, the administration is investing $7 billion in an ambitious solar-power projectand is promoting other alternative energy projects, as well.

The stock market is percolating along and hitting record highs.

“Infrastructure week” became a punch line during the inept Trump administration, but the Biden administration in its first year managed to pass a bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that’s expected to add an estimated 1.5 million jobs per year for the next 10 years. This administration’s “infrastructure week” is investing in clean water and high-speed internet. It’s repairing roads and bridges, upgrading air- and seaports, modernizing our power infrastructure, investing in public transit and pahssenger rail and cleaning up Superfund and brownfield sites.

A little heralded initiative related to infrastructure involves “strategic sector” investments in employment-distressed counties around the nation. In 2021, according to a study conducted by Brookings Metro (a think tank) and MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy, these 1,071 counties have received about $82 billion in private-sector investment from industries the Biden administration has targeted. Industries that will locate in these areas include manufacturers of semiconductors (in this country instead of China) and equipment to generate solar and wind power.

One of the distressed areas to benefit is Wilbarger County, Texas, along the Red River northwest of Wichita Falls. A $4 billion private-sector venture is constructing a mega-scale green hydrogen plant that’s expected to create 115 permanent jobs and more than 1,300 construction jobs in a county where population has declined almost every decade since 1940. It’s worth noting that Wilbarger County in 2020 cast 21 percent of its votes for Biden, nearly 78 percent for Trump.  

Steadily growing reliance on the Affordable Care Act during this administration has made coverage more affordable and more accessible for millions of Americans. More than 21 million Americans are now enrolled, up from 12 million shortly before the pandemic.

The Biden White House also has given Medicare the power to directly negotiate with Big Pharma, thereby lowering drug prices and placing a $35-per-month cap on the cost of insulin for Medicare beneficiaries. 

After decades of “thoughts and prayers” and little else in response to mass killings, the Biden White House managed to shepherd a bipartisan Safer Communities Act through a balky Congress. With the support of 15 Republican senators and 14 Republican House members, the act represents at least a modest effort to address gun safety in this country.

The Biden administration has managed to organize and lead an allied response to a brutish dictator’s invasion of a neighboring democracy. As Ukraine desperately tries to hold off Russia’s invasion, Biden, in the words of former Republican Party operative Stuart Stevens, is “standing on the side of freedom versus tyranny in the largest land war in Europe since WWII.” 

Under the leadership of a president with decades of experience in the Middle East, the administration is seeking a path to peace and stability in the post-October 7 conflagration involving Gaza, Iran and Israel and the desperate Palestinian people. The administration also is trying to tamp down the potential danger of a region-wide war. It’s hard to imagine Biden’s predecessor having either the patience or the prowess to play a significant role in resolving a devilishly complex crisis.

Another attribute of the Biden administration is its normality. Stevens, the former GOP operative, put it this way in a recent article in The New Republic: “One of the greatest gifts of a democratic civil society is the freedom not to think about government, to wake up and not worry about the mood of a leader. Joe Biden has made governing boring and predictable, both fundamental rights of the people in a healthy democracy.” 

We are well aware that the Biden administration has not been successful on every front. The calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan was the most obvious failure. The administration’s inability to quell chaos at the border is another, although blame primarily belongs to caviling and cynical MAGA Republicans in the House. In servility to Trump, they torpedoed a bipartisan border-security plan painstakingly crafted in the Senate. Biden can’t solve the crisis by executive order; he needs Congress to act.   

We are well aware of Biden’s age, 81, (and Trump’s, 77), as well as memory lapses that have prompted near-panic among many of the president’s fellow Democrats. Those of us who remember the energetic, garrulous, occasionally even eloquent Joe Biden of years past can see the difference a few years have made, even if he was always prone to gaffes. Accounts other than the report of Special Counsel Robert Hur suggest, however, that Biden remains focused, engaged and in command on the vital issues that occupy a president. Experience counts.   

We are reassured in large part because Biden has restored the tradition of a capable team running the White House, a tradition trampled by Trump’s deeply flawed scheme to run a one-man show. Like Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt, Biden’s deft management of his team has made him, arguably, the most productive president since LBJ in the early months of his administration. 

He has, as they say, forgotten more than his presumed Republican rival will ever know. That’s not saying much, and at the same time, it says it all.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Elections, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Manafort, Trump, and Ukraine

By dianeravitch
February 20, 2024 //
47

Heather Cox Richardson displays the value of learning history in order to understand the world today. In this post, she reviews the facts about the Trump campaign’s connection to Ukraine in 2016. The one important point she overlooked is the change in the Republican platform of 2016, made at the request of the Trump campaign. The 2012 Republican platform stated the Party’s support for Ukraine. That section was deleted in 2016.

She wrote:

Although few Americans paid much attention at the time, the events of February 18, 2014, in Ukraine would turn out to be a linchpin in how the United States ended up where it is a decade later. 


On that day ten years ago, after months of what started as peaceful protests, Ukrainians occupied government buildings and marched on parliament to remove Russian-backed president Viktor Yanukovych from office. After the escalating violence resulted in many civilian casualties, Yanukovych fled to Russia, and the Maidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, returned power to Ukraine’s constitution.


The ouster of Yanukovych meant that American political consultant Paul Manafort was out of a job. 


Manafort had worked with Yanukovych since 2004. In that year, the Russian-backed politician appeared to have won the presidency of Ukraine. But Yanukovych was rumored to have ties to organized crime, and the election was full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe. The U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results, while Russia’s president Vladimir Putin congratulated Yanukovych even before the results were officially announced. 


The government voided the election and called for a do-over.  


To rehabilitate his reputation, Yanukovych turned to Manafort, who was already working for a young Russian billionaire, Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska worried that Ukraine would break free of Russian influence and was eager to prove useful to Vladimir Putin. At the time, Putin was trying to consolidate power in Russia, where oligarchs were monopolizing formerly publicly held industries and replacing the region’s communist leaders. In 2004, American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the chief editor of Forbes in Russia, was murdered as he tried to call attention to what the oligarchs were doing.  


With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych finally won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. In November 2013, Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine’s course toward cooperation with the European Union, refusing to sign a trade agreement and instead taking a $3 billion loan from Russia. Ukrainian students protested the decision, and the anger spread quickly. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power and he fled to Russia.  

Manafort, who had borrowed money from Deripaska and still owed him about $17 million, had lost his main source of income. 


Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in U.S. territories. These sanctions were intended to weaken Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs. 


By 2016, Manafort’s longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone—they had both worked on Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign—was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort was happy to step in to help remake it. He did not take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him, “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?” 


Manafort began as an advisor to the Trump campaign in March 2016 and became the chairman in late June.  


Thanks to journalist Jim Rutenberg, who pulled together testimony given both to the Mueller investigation and the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, transcripts from the impeachment hearings, and recent memoirs, we now know that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded, and -directed ‘separatists’ were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead.” 

In exchange for weakening NATO, undermining the U.S. stance in favor of Ukraine in its attempt to throw off the Russians who had invaded in 2014, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign. 


Now, ten years later, Putin has invaded Ukraine in an effort that when it began looked much like the one his operatives suggested to Manafort in 2016, Trump has said he would “encourage Russia to do whatever they hell they want” to NATO allies that don’t commit 2% of their gross domestic product to their militaries, and Trump MAGA Republicans are refusing to pass a measure to support Ukraine in its effort to throw off Russia’s invasion. 
The day after the violence of February 18, 2014, in Ukraine, then–vice president Joe Biden called Yanukovych to “express grave concern regarding the crisis on the streets” and to urge him “to pull back government forces and to exercise maximum restraint.”  


Ten years later, Russia has been at open war with Ukraine for nearly two years and has just regained control of the key town of Avdiivka because Ukrainian troops lack ammunition. President Joe Biden is warning MAGA Republicans that “[t]he failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten.”


“History is watching,” he said.

Categories Elections, History, Trump

Florida: How Conservative Billionaires Shaped DeSantis’s Cruel Agenda

By dianeravitch
February 20, 2024 //
23

Since I started following the cruel and unusual policies of Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, I have seen him repeatedly attack public schools, divert public money to private and religious schools, and remove whatever offends him from the curriculum (such as accurate histories of Black people).

I have also discovered some fearless bloggers who are not afraid of DeSantis. Billy Townsend and Jason Garcia. They take on political corruption without flinching.

Jason Garcia, an investigative reporter, wrote recently about how conservative billionaires have shaped DeSantis’s political agenda. The part I don’t understand is why someone of vast personal wealth would want to take food stamps away from impoverished children or make the lives of homeless people even more miserable. What kinds of sadists are they?

Jason Garcia writes:

Late last year, the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made it harder for older Floridians to get food stamps.

Earlier this month, the DeSantis administration sued the federal government for the right to remove poor children from public health insurance.

And last week, the Republican governor came out in support of a plan to round up homeless people across Florida and — potentially — put them into secured camps.

Each move was, at least on the surface, a disparate executive decision. But they share something in common: They are all ideas promoted by conservative billionaires and the right-wing think tanks they fund.

Taken together, the moves offer a window into how super-rich mega donors shape action across DeSantis’ state government.

Let’s start with the food stamps.

Though it didn’t get much attention at the time, the Florida Department of Children and Families late last year changed the rules for the state’s food-stamps program, which is formally known as the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.”

Funded by the federal government but administered by the states, food stamps currently help more than 3 million impoverished Floridians buy groceries and keep food on the table for themselves and their families.

But the state of Florida makes it much harder for some people to qualify for food stamps, by imposing what are commonly called “work requirements” — mandatory employment and training programs that someone must participate in each week in order to obtain and continue receiving aid.

Florida had previously imposed work requirements on adults without children between the ages of 18 and 52. But late last year, the state expanded work requirements to adults without children up to age 59 — sweeping up somewhere around 100,000 more very low-income Floridians, according to materials provided to the governor’s office and obtained in a public-records request.  

Anti-poverty activists and advocates for working families have long argued that work requirements don’t actually work. Rather than helping people find sustainable employment in which they can work themselves out of poverty, mandatory work requirements merely create barriers that block some people from receiving any aid at all and push others into erratic, poor-paying and poverty-entrapping jobs — all while enriching a few private contractors that administer the programs.

But work requirements have some influential supporters — like the Foundation for Government Accountability, an anti-worker think thank based in Naples that is also pushing bills in Tallahassee this session that would weaken Florida’s child-labor laws, erase wage and benefit protections for employees, and cut more laid-off workers off from unemployment insurance.

And the FGA isn’t just promoting work requirements generally. Records show it pitched this exact idea to DeSantis’ staff.

It happened in December 2022, when, emails show, the FGA met with senior staffers in the Governor’s Office and provided a series of policy proposals. One of the ideas they pitched? Forcing Floridians as old as 59 years old to participate in mandatory work requirements before they can get food stamps.

The recommendation was contained in a memo provided to the Governor’s Office tiled, “Taking Florida’s Food Stamp Work Requirements to the Next Level.”

One reason the FGA may have the ear of the DeSantis administration: Tax records show that its largest funder in recent years has been Richard “Dick” Uihlein, a Midwestern billionaire who is one of the biggest conservative donors in American politics.

More specifically, Uihlein is one of DeSantis’ top funders: Records show he has given DeSantis roughly $3 million in recent years — including $1.5 million to the Super PAC that supported DeSantis’ failed presidential campaign.

It’s important to note that the FGA wants DeSantis to go even further: The organization has also urged the Governor’s Office to extend food stamp work requirements to adults with children as young as six years old.

Kicking kids off health insurance

Food stamps aren’t the only safety net program that has come into DeSantis’ crosshairs recently.

Earlier this month, the state of Florida surprised anti-poverty advocates by suing the federal government over new rules related to Florida KidCare — a program that provides health insurance for low-income children whose families do not qualify for Medicaid.

KidCare is funded jointly by the federal government and the state. And Florida has long required families participating the program to pay monthly premiums in order to get coverage for their kids. 

But new federal rules require the state to provide at least one year of continuous health insurance coverage for any child who enrolls in the program — even if the child’s family misses a monthly premium payment.

The DeSantis administration has sued to overturn that rule. The suit argues that federal officials have overstepped their authority, and that forcing Florida to continue providing health insurance to kids whose parents have missed a payment would undermine the integrity of the KidCare program.

To buttress its argument, the DeSantis administration cited a think tank report, published a little more than a month before the lawsuit was filed, titled, “Resisting the Wave of Medicaid Expansion: Why Florida is Right.”

An excerpt from Florida’s lawsuit against the federal government regarding eligibility rules for children’s health insurance.

The report was produced by a two-year-old organization called the Paragon Health Institute. Tax records show it is largely funded by the nonprofit network of billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, another of the nation’s biggest conservative political donors. 

All of Paragon’s first-year funding came from one of Koch’s “Stand Together Trust.” Most of its second-year funding came from the Koch group, too.

Paragon is also intertwined with the FGA. The institute’s president — and the lead author of the report Florida cited in its lawsuit — is Brian Blase. Blase is also a visiting fellow with the FGA, according to the group’s website.

Blase said he wasn’t consulted by anyone from the state about the litigation and that he didn’t know anything about the lawsuit before it was filed.

Asked if the Governor’s Office conferred with anyone from the Paragon Health Institute or the FGA before launching its suit, DeSantis spokesperson Jeremy Redfern responded, “Not to my knowledge.”

Other closely aligned conservative groups are now cheering on the state’s lawsuit — such as the Tallahassee-based James Madison Institute, which tax records show also receives substantial fundingfrom Charles Koch’s network.

Koch and his network were important early supporters of DeSantis, though they splintered during the governor’s presidential campaign when Koch’s Americans for Prosperity ultimately decided to endorse former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

But this is a relationship that DeSantis likely wants to repair as tries to rehabilitate his political reputation and prepare for a second presidential run. Politico Florida reported last week that DeSantis allies expect him to run again in 2028 — and to restart his political fundraising operation later this year.   

Categories Billionaires, Corruption, Cruelty, DeSantis, Elections, Extremism, Florida

Trump Pauses Presidental Campaign to Launch “Trump Sneakers,” Marks Death of Navalny Without Mentioning Putin

By dianeravitch
February 20, 2024 //
20

Donald Trump continued his March to the Republican Presidential nomination and found time to attend “SneakerCON” in Philadelphia. There he hawked his new line of sneakers, proudly showing off the top of the line: Golden Trump sneakers priced at $399. The 1,000 pairs on hand quickly sold out. A business triumph for Trump, who is in hock for nearly half a billion $$$ in New York.

Have we ever seen a former President monetizing his campaign?

And at last, Trump mentioned Navalny’s death, but he didn’t mention Putin. Instead, he compared himself to Navalny. Chutzpah!

He wrote on his Truth Social site:

“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Monday. “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.”

Words fail me when I read that Trump can’t bring himself to condemn Putin, and even more astonishing that he sees himself as analogous to Navalny.

Categories Elections, For-Profit, Trump

Jonathan V. Last: About That Georgia Election Fraud…

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2024 //
43

Jonathan V. Last writes for The Bulwark, which was founded by Republican Never Trumpers. It is one of the most engaging websites I read. This post is newsworthy, since so many Trumpers were citing Dinesh D’Souza’s book about election fraud.

Last writes:

Last August we talked about True the Vote, the group whose “data” on election fraud in Georgia constituted a large part of Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules.

Let me refresh your memory:

True the Vote is a Texas-based group which filed a complaint with the Georgia State Election Board alleging fraud in the 2020 presidential campaign.

The Georgia State Election Board (the SEB) investigated this complaint and found no fraud. So it asked True the Vote to share its evidence. True the Vote declined and instead said—whoopsie!—they’d like to just take the complaint back.

The SEB explained that that’s not how it works with sworn statements and subpoenaed the extensive evidence that True the Vote claimed in its complaint to have.1 The whole thing devolved into litigation that bore a striking resemblance to George Costanza’s attempt to convince his dead fiancée’s parents that he owned a house in the Hamptons.

Anyway, this week the Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke the news that True the Vote finally gave up and told the judge in the case that they don’t have any of the so-called evidence, or data, or names, or identities—or any of those other fancy legal whosywhatsits:

True the Vote said in a recent court filing that it doesn’t know the identity of its own anonymous source who told a story of a “ballot trafficking” scheme allegedly organized by a network of unnamed groups paying $10 per ballot delivered.

True the Vote also told the court it doesn’t have documents about illegal ballot collection, the name of its purported informant or confidentiality agreements it previously said existed.

You can read True the Vote’s filing here. It’s wild. But the cajones on these guys! In a non-court-filed public statement, True the Vote went on to say that while they don’t have any of this stuff they said they had, they know that the Georgia Election Board could come up with it if they really wanted:

“The [Georgia Bureau of Investigation] consequently has ready access to the underlying data, and could, we believe, reconstruct it, but it declines to do that,” True the Vote said in a statement. “At this point, it would be redundant and cost-prohibitive for True the Vote to do so on its own. It is in that sense that there is nothing more for True the Vote to provide that it has not already provided to the GBI.”

Translation: The real evidence of voter fraud isn’t in a computer. It’s in our hearts.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Georgia, Lies

Jennifer Rubin: Blame Merrick Garland for Appointing Hur

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2024 //
32

Jennifer Rubin is one of my favorite columnists at The Washington Post. She is both a journalist and a lawyer. She cuts to the heart of whatever matter she examines. She was hired to be the conservative commentator on the opinion page; she had Sterling credentials. But Trump pushed her out of the conservative bubble and into the center.

Here she pins the blame for the Hur fiasco where it belongs: on Merrick Garland, who appointed Hur knowing he was a loyal Republican.

She wrote:

Special counsel Robert K. Hur had a single task: determine if President Biden illegally retained sensitive documents after his vice presidency. The answer should not have taken nearly 13 months or a more than 300-page report. Hur also should have avoided trashing “the fundamental ethos of a prosecutor to avoid gratuitous smears,” as former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen told me.

Hur found that “the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” and that prosecution was “also unwarranted based on our consideration of the aggravating and mitigating factors.” He seemed to intentionally disguise that conclusion with contradictory and misleading language that “Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” He conceded that was not legally provable. (As Just Security pointed out, the media predictably and widely misreported this: “The press incorrectly and repeatedly blast out that the Hur report found Biden willfully retained classified documents, in other words, that Biden committed a felony; with some in the news media further trumpeting that the Special Counsel decided only as a matter of discretion not to recommend charges.”)

Hur acknowledged that Biden’s cooperation, “including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage,” leaves the impression he made “an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully — that is, with intent to break the law — as the statute requires.” Moreover, Hur conceded that the documents “could have been stored, by mistake and without his knowledge, at his Delaware home since the time he was vice president, as were other classified documents recovered during our investigation.”

The body of the report refutes the element of willfulness — noting a variety of factors (e.g., a good-faith belief the Afghanistan memo was no longer classified, presidents’ practice of taking notes with them). Hur also distinguished Biden’s behavior from four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump:

Several material distinctions between Mr. Trump’s case and Mr. Biden’s are clear. Unlike the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts. Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview, and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.

That should have been the end of the matter.
But it was Hur’s gratuitous smear about Biden’s age and memory — most egregiously, his far-fetched allegation that Biden could not recall the date of his son Beau’s death — that transformed a snide report into a political screed. Speculating about how a jury might have perceived the president years after the incidents took place was entirely irrelevant because the lack of evidence meant there would be no case.

Former prosecutors were almost uniformly outraged. Jeffrey Toobin remarked, “It was outrageous that Hur put in some of that stuff in this report. That had no place in it.” He added, “There is no reason this report had to be 300 pages. There is no reason this fairly straightforward case had to be treated this way. … The job of prosecutors is to put up or shut up.”

Former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann called Hur’s jabs “entirely inappropriate.” He tweeted, “Of course, no crime was committed by Biden, but as anticipated, Hur takes the opportunity to make a gratuitous political swipe at Biden. … [Attorney General Merrick] Garland was right to have appointed a Special Counsel but wrong to pick Hur and to think only a Republican could fit the bill.” (Weissmann analogized to former FBI chief James B. Comey, who exonerated Hillary Clinton of crimes but savaged her conduct just days before the 2016 election.)

Likewise, ethics guru Matthew Seligman told me, “What Hur should have written — and all he should have written — is that there is insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that President Biden’s level of intent rose to the willfulness standard required by the statute.” Eisen argues that Hur violated the Justice Department’s prosecutorial principles. (“Federal prosecutors should remain sensitive to the privacy and reputation interests of uncharged parties,” the rules say.)
Hur is not solely to blame for going beyond his mandate and introducing smears. Garland erred in appointing and giving free rein to a Republican loyalist. He should have anticipated that a rock-ribbed Republican such as Hur would echo GOP campaign smears attacking Biden’s memory and age. Garland’s lousy judgment wound up sullying and politicizing the Justice Department.

As former prosecutor Shan Wu wrote, “It was Garland’s responsibility to ensure that Hur’s report did not stray from proper Justice Department standards. Garland should have known the risks when he picked Hur — who had clerked for conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist, served as the top aide to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who assisted [Attorney General] Bill Barr’s distortion of the Mueller Report, and who was a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney.” (Hur also clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski, a right-wing icon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit who was forced to resign over accusations of decades-long egregious sexual harassment.) Unlike Barr, Garland did not even release a summary to focus on the salient facts. This blunder, coupled with his unconscionable delay in investigating Trump, bolsters criticism that Garland has been the wrong man for the job.

Finally, the media — which made a spectacle of itself hollering at and interrupting Biden in his news conference after the report was released — certainly amplified the GOP talking point. Many outlets failed to explain that there was insufficient evidence of willfulness. For days, headlines focused on the memory smear rather than on Biden’s exoneration. Worse, Sunday news shows misreported the report.

The Biden-Harris campaign decried the media’s obsession with Biden’s age while virtually ignoring another rambling, incoherent Trump speech in which he insisted Pennsylvania would be renamed if he lost. (In South Carolina on Saturday, he was at it again, inviting Russia to invade NATO countries and insulting Nikki Haley’s deployed husband.) By habitually and artificially leveling the playing field, much of the media enables MAGA propaganda and neglects Trump’s obvious mental and emotional infirmities.

Still, facts matter. Biden acted responsibly and committed no crime. Trump faces multiple felony counts, including intentionally withholding top-secret documents and obstructing an investigation. Three years separate Biden and Trump in age, but the distance between their mental and emotional fitness remains incalculable — as is the chasm between the media we have and the media democracy requires.

Categories Bias, Biden, Elections, Ethics, Failure, Trump

Nebraska: Public School Supporters Fight Vouchers with Ballot Referendum

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2024 //
12

In the Public Interest is an excellent source of information about privatization in every sphere of life, wherever privatizers see a chance to turn a public service into private profit. Its latest post is about the citizens’ fight to overturn a new voucher plan in Nebraska.

Open the link to see the cost of vouchers in Arizona, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Ohio. Count on costs to go up every year, as legislators expand eligibility and raise income limits.

In early 2023, the Nebraska legislature passed LB753, which created a new private school tax-credit voucher program. The bill allows a dollar-for-dollar tax credit to individuals and corporations that donate to a scholarship granting organization (SGO), which would issue the vouchers to families to pay for private school. Eligibility requirements are broad, allowing, for example, any child entering either kindergarten or 9th grade at a private school, or any student who has spent at least one semester in a public school to apply for a voucher. The bill would divert up to $25 million annually from the state, but that figure could go up to $100 million.

The bill includes a standard “hands off clause,” which prevents the state from exercising any authority over the school and how it operates.  It’s basically a license to discriminate.

Shortly after the bill was passed, public school supporters launched a referendum petition drive to put repeal of the new law on the November 2024 ballot. In fewer than 90 days, the repeal campaign gathered nearly double the number of required signatures from across the state. The effort was led by Support Our Schools Nebraska, a coalition that includes, among others, the Nebraska State Education Association, OpenSky Policy Institute, Parent-Teacher Association of Nebraska, Stand for Schools, League of Women Voters of Nebraska, Omaha NAACP, ARC of Nebraska, Nebraska Farmers Union, and the Nebraska Civic Engagement Table.

In Nebraska, 84% of private schools are religiously affiliated. Many, if not most of these schools are legally permitted to discriminate against applicants based on their gender orientation, religious affiliation, or other characteristics. The Nebraska OpenSky Policy Institute has estimated that state aid distributed to public schools could decrease by almost $12 million in response to the new voucher program.

Forces aligned against the repeal include the usual suspects, like the American Federation for Children, founded by anti-public-education zealot Betsy DeVos, which donated $583,000 along with $103,000 of in-kind services to the pro-voucher effort, on top of money DeVos spent to influence Nebraska state senate races in the last cycle. The Nebraska Catholic Conference, whose coffers stand to gain from LB753, has also thrown its weight and reach behind the anti-public education side. Jeremy Ekeler left his job as associate director of education policy at the Conference in November to become the executive director of Opportunity Scholarships of Nebraska, a state-approved scholarship granting organization helping to implement LB753. They’re not only working to defeat the ballot measure, they’re trying to keep it off the ballot entirely, following a playbook the right has used to subvert a variety of citizen-led, petition-driven initiatives around the country.

As we have pointed out before and as the chart above illustrates, vouchers bleed public school districts of needed funds, allow for discrimination, lower educational standards (by not necessarily having many), and lead to resegregation.

As if that weren’t enough, they turn out to be budget busters for states.

In the Public Interest will keep an eye on this fight because it may be the clearest indication that, while conservative politicians have thrown their support to various schemes that divert public funds from public schools, the public opposes these efforts and will show up at the polls to make their feelings felt.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Courage, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Nebraska, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

World Leaders Express Outrage Over Navalny’s Death But Trump Is Silent

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2024 //
60

World leaders spoke out about the death of Alexei Navalny, who was obviously murdered on the order of Putin.

One prominent figure said nothing: Donald Trump. Trump has boasted about his friendship with Putin.

Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, was silent following news of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death on Friday. Instead, his campaign referred a reporter to a statement that didn’t reference Navalny or Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“In just three and a half years under Crooked Joe Biden, the World has experienced Misery, Destruction, and Death. America is no longer respected because we have an incompetent president who is weak and doesn’t understand what the World is thinking. I am the only one who can bring Peace, Prosperity, and Stability like I did during my first term. America will be respected and feared (if necessary!) again,” Trump said in the vague statement posted to Truth Social.

Nikki Haley blasted Trump.

“Putin murdered his political opponent and Trump hasn’t said a word after he said he would encourage Putin to invade our allies. He has, however, posted 20+ times on social media about his legal drama and fake polls,” Haley said on X, formerly known as Twitter, several hours after Navalny’s death was first reported.

“Putin did this. The same Putin who Donald Trump praises and defends,” Haley wrote in a social media post reacting to the news earlier Friday morning.

“The same Trump who said: ‘In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that,’” Haley continued, referring to comments Trump made in 2015, when he pushed back against the notion that Putin had killed journalists. Trump also praised Putin’s leadership, describing him as “a strong leader.”

Be sure to watch the CNN documentary NAVALNY tonight at 9 pm EST and midnight. It won an Academy Award as Best Documentary of 2023.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Elections, International

Abortion Foes Plan Onslaught of New Restrictions if Trump Wins

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2024 //
64

Well, that was fast!!

At 9 a.m. I posted about a New York Times article published yesterday revealing that Trump wanted a 16-week ban on abortions. Since 93% of abortions are performed by the 13th week of abortion, that would essentially render the Dobbs decision ineffective.

But Trump’s anti-abortion pals got wind of his intention and let it be known that they will play every trick in the book—including reviving an 1873 law—to make abortion illegal everywhere.

The New York Times reports today:

Allies of former President Donald J. Trump and officials who served in his administration are planning ways to restrict abortion rights if he returns to power that would go far beyond proposals for a national ban or the laws enacted in conservative states across the country.

Behind the scenes, specific anti-abortion plans being proposed by Mr. Trump’s allies are sweeping and legally sophisticated. Some of their proposals would rely on enforcing the Comstock Act, a long-dormant law from 1873, to criminalize the shipping of any materials used in an abortion — including abortion pills, which account for the majority of abortions in America.

“We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” said Jonathan F. Mitchell, the legal force behind a 2021 Texas law that found a way to effectively ban abortion in the state before Roe v. Wade was overturned. “There’s a smorgasbord of options.”

Mr. Mitchell, who represented Mr. Trump in arguments before the Supreme Court over whether the former president could appear on the ballot in Colorado, indicated that anti-abortion strategists had purposefully been quiet about their more advanced plans, given the political liability the issue has become for Republicans.

“I hope he doesn’t know about the existence of Comstock, because I just don’t want him to shoot off his mouth,” Mr. Mitchell said of Mr. Trump. “I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election….”

In policy documents, private conversations and interviews, the plans described by former Trump administration officials, allies and supporters propose circumventing Congress and leveraging the regulatory powers of federal institutions, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Justice and the National Institutes of Health.

The effect would be to create a second Trump administration that would attack abortion rights and abortion access from a variety of angles and could be stopped only by courts that the first Trump administration had already stacked with conservative judges.

“He had the most pro-life administration in history and adopted the most pro-life policies of any administration in history,” said Roger Severino, a leader of anti-abortion efforts in Health and Human Services during the Trump administration. “That track record is the best evidence, I think, you could have of what a second term might look like if Trump wins.”

Categories Elections, Gender, Health, Science, Trump

Trump Supports National Ban on Abortion at 16 Weeks

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2024 //
24

The New York Times reported that Donald Trump has been telling friends privately that he supports a national ban on abortion at 16 weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother.

A 16-week national ban would eliminate the authority of some 30 states that do not have abortion bans, but it would cancel the highly restrictive laws of states like Florida that have enacted a six-week ban, that is, before women know they are pregnant, and Texas, where abortion has been outlawed.

Very clever! A 16-week ban would restore abortions wherever it has been prohibited.

A 16-week ban would not end many abortions: nearly 94 percent of abortions happen before 13 weeks in pregnancy, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control. Nor is such a ban grounded in medical research. Even 15 weeks falls before the point when significant screens take place in a pregnancy to examine the fetus for rare — but potentially fatal — conditions. Instead, it has become a position that some Republicans, based on polling, believe will be the most politically palatable to voters.

Trump makes clear that this is a political calculation. It would please many in red states who support abortion rights, and he could still say he was against abortion.

For most of his life, Trump has been pro-abortion but turned against it when he realized he needed the support of Catholics and Evangelicals.

He has boasted to his right flank that he delivered what he promised: a Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade.

But he recognizes that voters are angry about the loss of abortion rights, and Republicans are losing elections because of abortion restrictions.

So now, at his transactional best, he proposes a 16-week ban that enables almost every abortion to proceed at the same rate as before the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe. He would openly revive abortion, bypassing the Supreme Court.

I have this visual image of Trump looking at his anti-abortion followers and cynically smirking, “Fooled you! Hahaha.”

Categories Elections, Health, Science, Trump
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