The Network for Public Education Action endorses Rebekah Jones, who is running for Congress against Matt Gaetz.
Vote for a woman of integrity: Rebekah Jones, District 1, Florida.
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In Tampa, a teacher was fired for teaching false claims to students, but was then hired by a charter school. She was not an exception. Public schools have standards for teachers. Charter schools sometimes do.
Parents said Kimberly Gonzalez was upsetting their children by saying Eve was a man, Adam was gay and God was as real as Santa Claus.
Gonzalez denied making these statements. She kept her job teaching science at Progress Village Middle School in Tampa.
A year later, the concerns escalated. Children said they were told that the Holocaust basically did not happen, that Jewish people wanted World War II, and that the Auschwitz death camp was like a country club with soccer and a cinema. A parent received a link to an antisemitic conspiracy site through Gonzalez’s district messaging server.
Gonzalez told Hillsborough County school officials she wanted her students to think critically about what they learned in school. They opted not to renew her contract. After an argument about sick pay, in which she accused them of “enslaving” her, she left.
She soon found work at Bell Creek Academy, a charter school in Riverview.
Teachers at Florida charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently managed, must hold state credentials in most cases. But when they have a disciplinary history at the organizations they left, it’s unclear how extensively charter schools review them.
The Tampa Bay Times examined 14 such cases in Hillsborough County, often delving deeper into teachers’ backgrounds than the charters did when they hired them.
In Miami, a judge threw out the charge of voter fraud against the first person arrested by Governor DeSantis’ election fraud task force.
A Miami Judge on Friday tossed out a criminal case against one of 19 people accused by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ election fraud force of voting illegally in the 2020 election. In the first legal challenge to DeSantis’ arrests, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Milton Hirsch rejected the idea that the Office of Statewide Prosecutor could charge Robert Lee Wood, 56, with registering to vote and casting a ballot in the general election. Wood was convicted of second-degree murder in 1991, making him ineligible to vote.
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article267659012.html#storylink=cpy
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a master of political stunts that target the weak, like flying Venezuelan immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vinyard. Another stunt is his crackdown on voter fraud. (Florida went for Trump.) voters in the state passed a law allowing ex-felons to vote after they served their time. The law excluded those convicted of murder or sex crimes. Nonetheless, his voting police grabbed some ex-convicts who thought their voting rights had been restored.
The people of Florida can sleep easier now that these 19 dangerous voters have been arrested. DeSantis doesn’t care. He got the publicity he wanted.
Tallahassee — When police went to arrest Tony Patterson outside his Tampa home in August, he couldn’t believe the reason.
“What is wrong with this state, man?” Patterson protested as he was being escorted to a police car in handcuffs. “Voter fraud? Y’all said anybody with a felony could vote, man.”
Body-worn camera footage recorded by local police captured the confusion and outrage of Hillsborough County residents who found themselves in handcuffs for casting a ballot following investigations by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new Office of Election Crimes and Security.
The Aug. 18 arrests — conducted hours before DeSantis called a news conference to tout his crackdown on alleged voter fraud — were carried out by state police officers accompanied by local law enforcement.
The never-before-seen footage, obtained by the Herald/Times through public records requests, offers a personal glimpse of the effects of DeSantis’ efforts to root out perceived voter fraud.
“They’re going to pay the price,” DeSantis said during the news conference announcing the arrests.
Of the 19 people arrested, 12 were registered as Democrats and at least 13 are Black, the Herald/Times found.
Romona Oliver, 55, was about to leave for work when police walked up her driveway at 6:52 a.m. and told her they had a warrant for her arrest.
“Oh my God,” she said.
An officer told her she was being arrested for fraud, a third-degree felony, for voting illegally in 2020.
“Voter fraud?” she said. “I voted, but I ain’t commit no fraud.”
Oliver and 19 others are facing up to five years in prison after being accused by DeSantis and state police of both registering, and voting, illegally.
They are accused of violating a state law that doesn’t allow people convicted of murder or felony sex offenses to automatically be able to vote after they complete their sentence. A 2018 state constitutional amendment that restored the right to vote to many felons excluded this group.
But, as the videos further support, the amendment and subsequent actions by state lawmakers caused mass confusion about who was eligible, and the state’s voter registration forms offer no clarity. They only require a potential voter to swear, under penalty of perjury, that they’re not a felon, or if they are, that their rights have been restored. The forms do not clarify that those with murder convictions don’t get automatic restoration of their rights.
Oliver, who served 18 years in prison on a second-degree murder charge, registered to vote at the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles on Feb. 14, 2020. Six months later, she updated her address and completed another registration form.
After brief eligibility checks by the Department of State — which reports to DeSantis and is responsible for cleaning the rolls of ineligible voters — she was given a voter ID card both times.
Oliver wasn’t removed from the rolls until March 30 this year, more than two years later.
The recordings by Tampa police and Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies reveal officers who were patient, understanding — almost apologetic.
A handcuffed Nathan Hart, 49, found a sympathetic ear when he explained how he ended up registering and voting illegally, according to the sheriff’s office recording.
As he stood handcuffed, he told officers that he signed up to vote at the encouragement of somebody at “the driver’s license place.” Records show it was in March 2020.
“I said, ‘I’m a convicted felon, I’m pretty sure I can’t,’” Hart, a registered sex offender, told officers. “He goes, ‘Well, are you still on probation?’”
Hart’s probation had ended a month earlier, Hart recalled. The person told him to sign up anyway.
“He said, ‘Well, just fill out this form, and if they let you vote, then you can,’” Hart said. “‘If they don’t, then you can’t.’”
“Then there’s your defense,” one of the officers replied. “You know what I’m saying? That sounds like a loophole to me.”
“Well, we can hope,” Hart said.
The officer was correct in one way: State law says that a voter has to “willfully” commit the crime — a hurdle that has forced some prosecutors not to charge ineligible voters.
In Lake County this year, for example, prosecutors declined to bring charges against six convicted sex offenders who voted in 2020.
“In all of the instances where sex offenders voted, each appear to have been encouraged to vote by various mailings and misinformation,” prosecutor Jonathan Olson wrote. “Each were given voter registration cards which would lead one to believe they could legally vote in the election. The evidence fails to show willful actions on a part of these individuals.”
ProPublica, the journalistic voice of integrity, suggests that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may have broken the law when he took personal control of redistricting the state’s Congressional seats. The Miami Herald reported the story.
“May have broken the law” is an understatement.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was incensed. Late last year, the state’s Republican Legislature had drawn congressional maps that largely kept districts intact, leaving the GOP with only a modest electoral advantage. DeSantis threw out the Legislature’s work and redrew Florida’s congressional districts, making them far more favorable to Republicans. The plan was so aggressive that the Republican-controlled Legislature balked and fought DeSantis for months. The governor overruled lawmakers and pushed his map through.
DeSantis’ office has publicly stressed that partisan considerations played no role and that partisan operatives were not involved in the new map. A ProPublica examination of how that map was drawn — and who helped decide its new boundaries — reveals a much different origin story. The new details show that the governor’s office appears to have misled the public and the state Legislature and may also have violated Florida law. DeSantis aides worked behind the scenes with an attorney who serves as the national GOP’s top redistricting lawyer and other consultants tied to the national party apparatus, according to records and interviews.
Florida’s Constitution was amended in 2010 to prohibit partisan-driven redistricting, a landmark effort in the growing movement to end gerrymandering as an inescapable feature of American politics. Barbara Pariente, a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court who retired in 2019, told ProPublica that DeSantis’ collaboration with people connected to the national GOP would constitute “significant evidence of a violation of the constitutional amendment.” “If that evidence was offered in a trial, the fact that DeSantis was getting input from someone working with the Republican Party and who’s also working in other states — that would be very powerful,” said Pariente, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Democrat Lawton Chiles.
A meeting invite obtained by ProPublica shows that on Jan. 5, top DeSantis aides had a “Florida Redistricting Kick-off Call” with out-of-state operatives. Those outsiders had also been working with states across the country to help the Republican Party create a favorable election map. In the days after the call, the key GOP law firm working for DeSantis logged dozens of hours on the effort, invoices show. The firm has since billed the state more than $450,000 for its work on redistricting. A week and a half after the call, DeSantis unveiled his new map.
No Florida governor had ever pushed their own district lines before. His plan wiped away half of the state’s Black-dominated congressional districts, dramatically curtailing Black voting power in America’s largest swing state.
One of the districts, held by Democrat Al Lawson, had been created by the Florida Supreme Court just seven years before. Stretching along a swath of North Florida once dominated by tobacco and cotton plantations, it had drawn together Black communities largely populated by the descendants of sharecroppers and slaves. DeSantis shattered it, breaking the district into four pieces. He then tucked each fragment away in a majority-white, heavily Republican district….
Analysts predict that DeSantis’ map will give the GOP four more members of Congress from Florida, the largest gain by either party in any state. If the forecasts hold, Republicans will win 20 of Florida’s 28 seats in the upcoming midterms — meaning that Republicans would control more than 70% of the House delegation in a state where Trump won just over half of the vote.
The reverberations of DeSantis’ effort could go beyond Florida in another way. His erasure of Lawson’s seat broke long-held norms and invited racial discrimination lawsuits, experts said. Six political scientists and law professors who study voting rights told ProPublica it’s the first instance they’re aware of where a state so thoroughly dismantled a Black-dominated district.
If the governor prevails against suits challenging his map, he will have forged a path for Republicans all over the country to take aim at Black-held districts. “To the extent that this is successful, it’s going to be replicated in other states. There’s no question,” said Michael Latner, a political science professor at California Polytechnic State University who studies redistricting. “The repercussions are so broad that it’s kind of terrifying.” Al Lawson’s district, now wiped away by DeSantis, had been created in response to an earlier episode of surreptitious gerrymandering in Florida.
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article267118181.html#storylink=cpy
When Ron DeSantis entered Congress, he joined the Freedom Caucus, the far-right members of the House. His very first vote was in opposition to aid for the victims of Hurricane Sandy, which pummeled New York City and the New Jersey coast.
As a freshman congressman in 2013, Ron DeSantis was unambiguous: A federal bailout for the New York region after Hurricane Sandy was an irresponsible boondoggle, a symbol of the “put it on the credit card mentality” he had come to Washington to oppose.
But any hurricane that harmed a Red state got his vote. Four years after opposing federal aid for Sandy relief, he supported aid for victims of Hurricane Irma, which affected his own state.
The Washington Post wrote about GOP hypocrisy on hurricane relief. When a hurricane hits a Red state, they are for it. In the rare instance when the disaster is in a Blue state, not so much.
The GOP movement to question spending on disaster relief began to pick up amid the debate over Hurricane Katrina aid in 2005. Only 11 House Republicans voted against the $50 billion-plus package, but others cautioned that they’d be drawing a harder line moving forward, particularly if the spending wasn’t offset with cuts elsewhere.
“Congress must ensure that a catastrophe of nature does not become a catastrophe of debt for our children and grandchildren,” said future vice president Mike Pence, then a congressman from Indiana.
After the tea party movement took hold around 2010, members began to hold that line. A $9.7 billion flood relief bill for Hurricane Sandy was considered noncontroversial, even passing by voice vote in the Senate. But 67 House Republicans voted against it, including DeSantis.
Then came a larger, $50 billion Sandy bill. Fully 36 Senate Republicans voted against it, as did 179 House Republicans — the vast majority of GOP contingents in both chambers (again including DeSantis). They objected not just because the spending wasn’t offset, but because they viewed it as too large and not sufficiently targeted in scope or timing to truly constitute hurricane relief.
By the time 2017 rolled around, though, DeSantis wasn’t the only one who didn’t seem to be holding as hard a line. Despite the bill lacking such spending offsets, the GOP “no” votes on a $36.5 billion aid bill for Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria numbered only 17 in the Senate and 69 in the House.
Such votes show how malleable such principled stands can be, depending on where disaster strikes.
For instance, only three of 18 House Republicans from Florida voted for the larger Sandy bill, but every one of them voted for the 2017 bill that included aid for their home state.
Likewise, of the 49 House GOP “yes” votes on the larger Sandy bill, nearly half came from states that were directly affected, including every Republican from New York and New Jersey.
One of those New Jersey Republicans was Rep. Scott Garrett, who actually introduced the smaller Sandy bill. Just eight years before, he had been one of those 11 Republicans who voted against the Katrina package.
If you comb through all of these votes, you’ll notice that, the larger Sandy bill aside, lawmakers who come from states that are particularly vulnerable to hurricanes (i.e. along the Gulf Coast) are generally less likely to be among the hard-liners — perhaps owing to the fact that they know their states could be next in line.
That’s where DeSantis’s votes do stand out. On the first Sandy bill, he was one of just two Florida Republicans to vote no, and very few members from the Gulf Coast joined them.
It’s a stand that served notice of his intent to legislate as a tea party conservative; he cast the vote just a day after being sworn in to Congress.
Democrats don’t seem to have the same problem. They typically support disaster aid, even in Red states.
It’s also noteworthy that DeSantis has switched gears in addressing President Biden, whom he usually refers to as “Brandon” (a rightwing synonym for “F… you, Biden”). Now, for the moment, he calls him “Mr.President.” And he can be sure that Democratic President Biden will respond with federal aid for the victims of Hurricane Ian in Florida.
Politifact reports how DeSantis and Rubio voted on hurricane relief.
A new report on Florida’s education budget found that vouchers will divert $1.3 billion from public schools this year alone. This is money that goes mainly to religious schools that meet no accountability standards and are free to discriminate and ignore state and federal laws.
The amount of public money being spent on private schools in Florida has increased substantially since 2019, according to a new report by the Florida Policy Institute and the Education Law Center.
The analysis estimates that some $1.3 billion in taxpayer funds will be diverted school vouchers this year, amounting to 10% of the overall funding the state earmarked for public school districts for the 2022-2023 school year.
“This enormous increase in the flow of public dollars to fund private education has happened so quickly that many Floridians are likely unaware of the financial impact being placed upon public school districts and the way these voucher programs are affecting the availability of their tax dollars for public education,” the report reads in part.
Private schools don’t have to comply with federal civil rights laws or state laws on standardized testing, teacher certification or certain building codes in the way that public schools do.
Leon County Schools Superintendent Rocky Hanna, who spoke at a press conference about the report’s findings, said expanding vouchers is taking away resources away from traditional public schools.
“Enough is enough,” Hanna said. “What’s happening is, we are diverting funds from students with special needs, from students who otherwise are going to lose programs that are vitally important to their academic success later in life….”
The report – titled ‘Florida’s Hidden Voucher Expansion’ – traces the growth in the state’s voucher programs to 2019, when the state legislature created the Family Empowerment Scholarship or FES.
State lawmakers expanded the program in 2021, loosening the qualifications for applying and rolling two other voucher programs into the FES – the McKay Scholarship and Gardiner Scholarship, which set aside funding for students with disabilities.
Now, families who make nearly $100,000 a year are able to qualify for the FES. Students are no longer required to have attended public schools to apply for a voucher; now, students who were homeschooled can also qualify. Families also have greater flexibility in how the funds can be spent, including on transportation, private tutoring, online learning and other costs.
The impact of the vouchers on school districts varies depending on how much they rely on state versus local money. Funding for the FES comes from the Florida Education Finance Program or FEFP – which allocates money on a per student basis and is a key source of revenue for local school districts.
The report estimates that in the Miami-Dade school district, $225 million will be diverted to private schools in the 2022-2023 school year, amounting to “8% of the district’s total FEFP budget”.
Bacardi Jackson is the Interim Deputy Legal Director for Children’s Rights at the Southern Poverty Law Center. She argues that diverting public funds into private schools is part of a long legacy of undermining students’ equal access to education – especially Black students.
Open the link and read on.
Polymath Bob Shepherd, a frequent contributor to this blog, lives in Florida. He recently received a survey from his member of Congress. He shows how deeply deceptive such a survey can be.
He writes:
I received in my email yesterday yet another transparently biased “survey” from my Flor-uh-duh Congressman Scott Franklin. It read as follows:
Do you support a Parents’ Bill of Rights to increase transparency on what children are being taught in school and how tax dollars are being spent? (yes/no)
Note that the survey DOES NOT ask,
Do you support allowing a handful of backward, provincial, undemocratic, authoritarian, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, white supremacist, Christian nationalist, fundamentalist wackjobs from among the parents in your community to decide what will be taught in your kids’ schools, what books can be in their library, who can teach, and what teachers can and cannot say? (yes/no)
These two questions are in fact equivalent.
Governor Ron DeSantis has terrorized school boards across Florida, who are afraid to endorse anything to do with racism or gender identity.
In the latest fiasco, the Miami-Dade school board censored a Pulitzer-prize winning play by a Miami author.
DeSantis is a bully and a wannabe fascist.
The story was written by Fabiola Santiago:
I told you, my fellow Cuban Americans, that the censors would get around to us, too.
And they have.
The same afternoon after the Miami-Dade School Board voted to suspend the district’s recognition of national LGBTQ History Month in October, school officials also quietly rejected — via email — the work of one of the most prominent Cuban Americans in U.S. cultural life.
Miami-Dade County Public School’s Division of Academics is refusing to allow high school students to attend — as they have in the past — Miami New Drama’s staging of Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work “Anna in the Tropics.” This year’s is the 20th-anniversary presentation of the play.
Why the rejection?
The school district’s not saying.
Is it because Cruz is gay? The district would never say that outright. But after the spectacle of last week’s School Board meeting, at which members were cowed into voting down recognizing LGBTQ History Month by hostile parents and un-Christian-like religious leaders — even the Proud Boys showed up — it’s not too far a leap in logic these days.
MDCPS students have been bused to see this stellar play before. The district should tell them — and the rest of us — what’s changed.
“My work has been staged around the world — and the only place where it has been censored is in Iran,” Cruz, 62, told me in an interview from his Miami home.
Until now — when the first Hispanic to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama, a distinction that, in 2003, also brought prestige to his hometown’s booming literary and theater scenes, appears to have become the latest victim of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ culture wars.
Governor Ron DeSantis wants to make sure that students are never exposed to anything in school that acknowledges the existence of people who are gay. Maybe he thinks that if their existence is never mentioned, they will disappear or go back into the closet.
The Miami-Dade School Board got his message. Last year the board approved a measure to recognize LGBTQ History Month. It was not controversial. Recently the board voted overwhelmingly to cancel that decision, in deference to state law proclaiming that gay people should not be acknowledged.
Last year, when the Miami-Dade School Board overwhelmingly supported a measure to recognize October as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) History Month, some board members said their decision was rooted in another step toward civil rights for all people.
At the time, Vice Chair Steve Gallon III said he was “obligated to support the item because my DNA compels me to support inclusion. It compels me to support equity, it compels me to support equality.”
The nine-member board passed the proposal in a 7-1 vote, with Board Member Christa Fraga dissenting and Board Member Lubby Navarro absent.
This year, though, during a marathon and contentious meeting Wednesday, the board voted 8-1 to reject recognizing October as LGBTQ month. Only Board Member Lucia Baez-Geller supported the observance; she put forth the proposal, both last year and this year.
This time, Gallon said, his personal beliefs must be divorced from his obligation to follow the law, despite his “love for all humanity, my commitment to inclusivity and access to representation.”
He expressed concern Baez-Geller’s measure “did not fully comport with the law,” referencing Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education law, dubbed by critics as Florida’s “Don’t say gay” bill. In March, Gov. DeSantis signed the bill into law, prohibiting instruction related to gender identity or sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade and could potentially restrict such instruction for older kids.
Gallon and seven other board members voted no on the October observance and no on allowing the district to explore teaching two landmark Supreme Court decisions impacting the LGBTQ community to 12th-grade students. To some, the board’s vote on Wednesday underscores the chilling effect the law is having on school boards in Florida.
“Nearly every board member opposing the resolution voiced their belief that the proclamation violated the Don’t Say LGBTQ Law, further evidence of the sweeping censorship of this law,” said a news release sent by Equality Florida, a civil rights organization that works with Florida’s LGBTQ community.
School board attorney Walter Harvey told the board Wednesday that he believed the measure was in compliance with the state law because it did not have changes to curriculum or instruction.
Board members, however, believed otherwise.
Law’s potential chilling effect
Throughout the hours-long meeting Wednesday, Baez-Geller tried to debunk what she called “disinformation” being promulgated by people at the podium.
For one, she said, the item included an opt-out for students on the Supreme Court lessons in addition to language that required any recognition be pursuant to state law.
Nevertheless, speaker after speaker opposed to the measure said the recognition would indoctrinate students; in some cases, speakers likened the resolution to child abuse.
“What I think is happening, (following) the removal of members of Broward County and the language and rhetoric from the right, it’s a scary time for allies … and people who would have voted in favor of this in the past may now be thinking twice,” she told the Herald Thursday. “The law is vague on purpose and as we saw, the law is meant to have a chilling effect, and I believe the law has been successful in scaring people away from topics that are potentially controversial or that could bring a lawsuit.”
Last month, DeSantis removed four elected Broward County School Board members following a grand jury report that cited the members for “incompetent management” and “neglect of duty.” He replaced the four members with four men — the four he suspended were all women — who had ties to him or to the Republican Party.…
At the end of July, opponents to the law sued DeSantis, the Florida Board of Education and Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. in federal court in Tallahassee, challenging the law’s constitutionality. The case is pending.
A packed house, polarized crowd
Most of the speakers Wednesday spoke against the measure.
Patricia Moore was greeted with cheers from the packed auditorium after she said schools “are not here to indoctrinate with the LGBTQ agenda. We should not expose our children to this in school.”
Michael Rajner, however, was among those who spoke in favor of the measure, telling the board he knows what it’s like to have parents who told him not to tell others he was gay, including his siblings.
“Our struggle is real. Our struggle is history,” Rajner told the board members.
Now, if DeSantis should be elected President in 2024, he could tell cable and network stations not to broadcast any programs with gay characters, and he could censor the Internet.
He is a bigot and a bully.
Diane Ravitch's blog 