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Peter Greene: Why Sex Scandals Matter

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2024 //
8

When I first heard about the sex scandal swirling around Corey DeAngelis, I didn’t believe it. As I did more digging through links on the Internet, my disbelief turned to amazement. I never met Corey, but he used to harass me on Twitter until I blocked him.

How could someone who had inveighed against “the woke agenda” and urged the adoption of vouchers to escape that agenda have done what the rumors said? I didn’t think I would touch it with a ten-foot pole. I don’t care what others do in their private lives. I believe in Tim Walz’s credo: “Mind your own damn business.” But I was troubled by the hypocrisy.

Corey worked for Betsy DeVos and was her leading salesman for vouchers. DeVos and her family are rabidly anti-LGBT. For years, they have funded anti-LGBT organizations like the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and Alliance Defending Freedom. Yet the rumor was that Corey had performed in gay porn, and there were many videos online to prove it.

One of the alleged virtues of vouchers was that they enable students to escape pedophile teachers and to attend schools that ban LGBT students. I couldn’t make sense of these two lives.

Peter Greene wrote about Corey’s apparent double life.

Peter began:

I’m old enough to remember when you could have a reasonably civilized conversation with Corey DeAngelis on social media, and everyone is old enough to remember when his main social media function was to lead a small army of trolls against anyone who dared to oppose the right wing school privatizing culture panic crowd (we can all remember that because it was as recent as about a week ago).

Those days are gone, of course, now that DeAngelis has become the sixty-gazzilionth person to discover that the internet is not a private place, as he’s been outed as a featured performer in a bunch of gay porn under the name Seth Rose. Since the story was broken (in a far right website of all places), DeAngelis has been erased from several websites of the many thinky tanks and advocacy groups that employed this chief evangelist for choice. 

The pro-public school crowd has been largely quiet about the news, and big time education media hasn’t picked it up yet. Andy Rotherham has a piece about it, which is appropriate– Rotherham and Bellwether have been unique in the right-tilted reformster edusphere in not jumping on the culture panic bandwagon. 

There is no reason for any of us to care what an adult human person does. Lord knows we could have some more useful conversations right now if folks weren’t wasting so much time panicking over other peoples’ business. 

And yet this parade of personal scandal– the Zieglers, Mark Robinson, Seth Rose–matters for several reasons….

I don’t wish DeAngelis ill, even though he so often wished people ill straight to their faces. At the same time, I don’t wish him to be spared the karma that he has so richly and ambitiously earned; he used cultural panic over LGBTQ persons to help him sell vouchers and troll armies to try to silence anyone who dared to disagree with him. He had a choice to pursue his ambitions without being awful to other human beings, and he chose being awful. And you can’t spread toxins all around you without getting soaked in it yourself. 

You should open the post and read Peter’s measured views.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bigotry, Character, Ethics, Extremism, Hypocrisy

Paul Krugman: Why Do Republicans Oppose Free Lunches for Children?

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2024 //
35

Paul Krugman, the economist who writes a regular column for the New York Times, recently explored why Republicans oppose free lunch for students. The simple answer is that it’s just plain weird. The more complex answer is that they don’t want to create an “entitlement” for children. The irony that he does not explore is why Republicans are unwilling to pay for free lunches, yet eager to pay the tuition of students who attend religious or other private schools, regardless of their family’s income.

He writes:

You could say that Tim Walz became the Democratic vice-presidential nominee with one weird trick — that is, by using that word to describe Donald Trump and JD Vance, a categorization that went viral. In his maiden campaign speech he upgraded it a bit further to “creepy and weird as hell.” (If you think that’s over the top, have you seen Trump’s bizarre rant speculating about whether Joe Biden is going to seize back his party’s presidential nomination?)

But Walz is more than a meme-maker. He has also been an activist governor of Minnesota with a strong progressive agenda. And I’d like to focus on one key element of that agenda: requiring that public and charter schools provide free breakfasts and lunches to all students.

Perhaps not incidentally, child care has long been a signature issue for Kamala Harris, and Walz’s policies may have played a role in his selection as her running mate.

In any case, free school meals are a big deal in pure policy terms. They have also met fierce Republican opposition. And the partisan divide over feeding students tells you a lot about the difference between the parties, and why you really, really shouldn’t describe the MAGA movement as “populist.”

Now, even many conservatives generally support, or at least claim to support, the idea of cheap or free lunches for poor schoolchildren. The National School Lunch Program goes all the way back to 1946, when it passed with bipartisan support and President Harry Truman signed it into law.

Why should the government help feed kids? Part of the answer is social justice: Children don’t choose to be born into families that can’t or won’t feed them adequately, and it seems unfair that they should suffer. Part of the answer is pragmatic: Children who don’t receive adequate nutrition will grow up to be less healthy and less productive adults than those who do, hurting society as a whole. So spending on child nutrition is arguably as much an investment in the future as building roads and bridges.

There’s a strong case that in general child nutrition programs more than pay for themselves by creating a healthier, higher-earning future work force. In other words, this is one area where there really is a free lunch.

Schools, then, should feed students who might otherwise not get enough to eat. But why make free meals available to all children, rather than only to children from low-income households? There are multiple reasons, all familiar to anyone who has looked into the problems of antipoverty policy in general.

First, trying to save money by limiting which children you feed turns out to be expensive and cumbersome; it requires that school districts deal with reams of paperwork as they try to determine which children are eligible. It also imposes a burden on parents, requiring that they demonstrate their neediness.

Additionally, restricting free meals to children whose parents can prove their poverty creates a stigma that can deter students from getting aid even when they’re entitled to receive it. I know about this effect from family history: My mother, who grew up in the Depression, used to talk about her shame at not being able to afford new shoes because her parents, although just as poor as her classmates’ parents, couldn’t bring themselves to apply for government assistance.

And it’s not as if feeding children is prohibitively expensive. So if you want to make sure that children get enough to eat, having schools offer free meals to all their students, without an income test, would seem to be simple common sense.

But Republicans in general aren’t on board. The Minnesota law that Walz signed passed essentially along party lines. The people behind Project 2025, in particular, don’t approve. (Yes, despite denials, Project 2025 is a very good guide to what a second Trump administration might do.) The project’s magnum opus, “Mandate for Leadership,” whose 900 pages lays out a detailed policy agenda, singles out feeding students as something that should be reined in. “Federal school meals increasingly resemble entitlement programs,” it warns, as if this is self-evidently a bad thing. A bit farther down, it reads, “The U.S.D.A. should not provide meals to students during the summer unless students are taking summer-school classes.” I guess being hungry isn’t a problem when school is out.

Stories like this are why my hackles rise whenever people call MAGA a populist movement. The people who will almost certainly make policy if Trump wins are as committed as ever to a right-wing economic agenda of cutting taxes on the wealthy while slashing programs that help Americans in need — including programs that help children.

In addition to being cruel, this agenda tends to be unpopular. Most Americans support providing all students with meals, regardless of their income, just as most Americans now support the Affordable Care Act, which Trump will very likely again try to destroy if returned to office.

But the American right lives in an echo chamber that normalizes views on both economic and social policy that are very much at odds with what a majority of voters want. Those extreme views often fly under the radar. But sometimes they do attract attention. And when they do, many people find them … weird.

Categories Childhood, Cruelty, Elections, Funding, Health, Hypocrisy, Inequality, Poverty, Students, Vouchers

Anand Girihadaras: Yes, Kamala Is Both

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2024 //
7

Donald Trump is incredulous that Kamala Harris is both Indian and black. He ridiculed before an audience of black journalists for “turning black,” presumably to advance her career. The claim is false and bigoted. It says more about Trump than it does about Kamala. JD Vance endorsed Trump’s insulting statement, saying that Kamala is a “chameleon.” This is rich coming from a man who is married to an Indian woman and whose children are biracial.

Anand Girihadaras, a brilliant journalist, wrote about the dilemmas of biracial people on his blog, The Ink:

Today Donald Trump sought to question Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity, much as he rose to political prominence doubting Barack Obama’s origins.

He mused that she had always cast herself as Indian, until one day, suddenly, magically, she turned Black. Well, this is false, first of all. And dumb. Harris went to Howard University, an historically Black college, and has identified as both Indian and Black all her life. She had the unusual childhood situation of being raised by an Indian mother who, having divorced Harris’s Black father, nevertheless invested great effort and intention in exposing Harris and her sister, Maya, to the Black community and Black tradition and thought, as Harris writes in her memoir, The Truths We Hold.

Since Trump, who is of German and Scottish heritage, cannot seem to hold in his head the notion of people with more than one heritage, we’re offering this primer. It’s an essay from our archives, from 2020, on Vice President Harris’s layers of identity, viewed through the lens of caste — of the divisions and hierarchies that have haunted both the Black and Indian sides of her lineage.

The many layers of Kamala Harris’ identity

Kamala Harris is the first woman of color on a major-party presidential ticket. She is, in fact, you might say, a woman of two colors: Black, owing to her Jamaican father; and brown, owing to her Indian mother. And each of those lineages comes with its own histories and complications and inheritances related to caste.

Harris almost certainly wouldn’t exist if her maternal grandfather had not been an improbably progressive upper-caste Indian, a defier of caste. A Brahmin civil servant in newly independent India, P.V. Gopalan might have been expected, as The Los Angeles Times notes, to hew to the convention that “destined Brahmin offspring for arranged marriages and comfortable careers in academia, government service or the priesthood — if they were men. Women were not expected to work at all.” Instead, all four of his children traveled untraditional roads. His son married a Mexican woman. A daughter became a doctor and never married. Another daughter became an information scientist and didn’t have children. And Shyamala, the senator’s late mother, pulled off a caste-defiance hat trick of Things a Well-Born Indian Woman is Not Supposed To Do: leaving the country alone as a 19-year-old woman; pursuing a master’s degree as said woman; and not only failing to marry an Indian man but marrying a Black man — a brave act given anti-Black racism among Indians.

So Harris descends from privilege in the Indian system of caste, but only came to be born because of the rejection of the rules of that privilege. And her father’s background implicates other systems of — and questions about — caste. Donald Harris was Black and Jamaican. He and Shyamala met during their work for the civil rights movement. So it was the battle against the American caste regime that brought them together. Yet because of her father’s foreign provenance, Harris has long been met with (rather unfair) questions about the authenticity of her Blackness. “What does it mean to call Kamala Harris ‘black’ in an American context?” the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams has tweeted. “People keep saying, ‘Well, she looks black.’ Always good to keep in mind that ‘race’ has never strictly been about how someone looks. My blue eyed children would qualify for reparations and Harris would not.” His ground for this latter claim is that Harris cannot trace an ancestor back to American slavery. (There have also been unsubstantiated suggestions that Harris’ ancestors include an enslaver — suggestions that are intended to cast her bona fides as a survivor of the American caste system into doubt, suggestions that seem utterly unfamiliar with hemispheric history.) But whether or not Kamala Harris’ future critics would recognize her and her sister as Black, their mother had no doubt. As Harris writes in her memoir, Shyamala “understood very well she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident black women.”

At that, Shyamala couldn’t be accused of failing. And as Harris grew into a trailblazing public official and a political superstar, the ghost of caste hovered. At every step of her career, she defied America’s racial caste system and other hierarchies, accumulating a pile of firsts: first woman elected district attorney of San Francisco; first woman, first African-American, and first person of South Asian origin elected as attorney general of California; first United States senator of South Asian descent (and only the second African-American woman). But, like Barack Obama’s ascent to power, Harris’ successes also illustrated the limitations of singular defiers of caste regimes. As the writer Casey Gerald has said of his own transcendence of caste, rising to great heights from a hard-up African-American community in Dallas, “The American dream relies on stories like mine…to distract from the American reality: There is a conveyor belt that sends most young people, especially from neighborhoods like mine, from nothing to nowhere, while the chosen few are randomly picked off and celebrated.”

There is also the issue of what is expected of those from disfavored castes in exchange for the chance to defy caste systems. A lot of us would have wanted an angrier Barack Obama when it came to the abuses that led to the 2008 financial crisis, but, given how many white Americans react to Black anger, that man would probably have remained a professor in Chicago. Those of disfavored castes permitted to rise within caste systems must often navigate an extra expectation to prove that they will not rock the caste boat. Which is hardly to excuse Senator Harris’ controversial record as a prosecutor — a record that, for certain progressives, puts her beyond the pale. She did what prosecutors do — put people in jail — and she did it within the caste regime that is, in Michelle Alexander’s phrase, “the new Jim Crow.”For many of Harris’ critics, it is especially disheartening that a pioneering woman of color — of those two colors — rose to power through, among other things, jailing Black and brown people. It is a reminder that representation matters, and that structure matters as well, and advances in representation can bring about advances in structure or can crowd them out and stave them off. It is progressive to diversify the rooms where it happens, but diversifying those rooms doesn’t necessarily, on its own, make them progressive.

Please open the link to read the article in full.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Hypocrisy, Racism, Trump

Ha’aretz: Netanyahu’s Duplicitous Speech to Congress

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2024 //
4

Benjamin Netanyahu is a hero to the party of Trump but not to the moderate and liberal Israelis who want him to be ousted from office and prosecuted for his failures. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz published the following scathing analysis of his speech to the U.S. Congress. Liberal Israelis believe that Netanyahu is prolonging the war in hopes of Trump winning the election, because Trump will let him do what he wants without pressuring him to make peace. The families of the hostages are furious at Netanyahu. Many thinks he’s delaying the day when he will be held accountable for his financial crimes, for the massive security lapse on October 7, 2023, and for his refusal to end the war.

Anshel Pfeffer writes:

If Benzion Netanyahu had his way and, instead of being forced by his wife Cila to return to Jerusalem in late 1948, he had kept his family in New York, Benjamin Netanyahu would have been born there. Perhaps he would have gone into politics and become the first Jewish president of the United States. On Wednesday evening, we had a glimpse of that parallel universe.

Netanyahu’s address to the joint meeting of Congress was a studied imitation of a presidential State of the Union, complete with the recognition of distinguished guests in the gallery at the start and the “God bless the United States of America” at the end.

But Netanyahu was not born in the U.S. He is the prime minister of Israel, and nowhere in the 52 minutes of his record-breaking fourth address (yes, he made sure to mention right at the very beginning how many times he had been given this honor) was there any detail, not even the slightest hint, of how he plans to extricate Israel from the tragic impasse in which it’s trapped, and on his watch.

Netanyahu may have won 52 standing ovations from the rapturous, majority-Republican audience, but his rhetoric that so impressed the natives in Washington offered nothing for Israelis watching back at home.

The first half of his speech was devoted to stories of the heroism of Israeli soldiers on October 7, and graphic details of Hamas’ bestiality on that day. But there was so much missing from that account. Nothing about how the strategic concepts of a prime minister who had led his country for 15 years crumbled that day. Nothing about the failures that allowed Hamas to kill and kidnap hostages at will. Or about his refusal to form a commission of inquiry.

He lauded the IDF soldiers who fought on October 7 as “unbowed, undaunted, unafraid,” and of course the soldiers brought to represent the IDF were an Ethiopian-Israeli paratrooper and a Bedouin master-sergeant. They are indeed worthy of recognition, despite Netanyahu’s blatant tokenization. But he has yet to summon up the courage to meet with any of the kibbutz communities devastated on that day.

He spoke of the ordeal of former hostage Noa Argamani, who stood there uncomfortably in the audience as an excruciatingly exuberant Sara Netanyahu gripped her with one arm and petted her with the other. Two seats away stood the beaming wastrel son Yair, on a day-trip form his opulent, taxpayer-subsidized exile in Miami. A 33-year-old Israeli who has nothing in common with the brave soldiers brought to serve as window-dressing for his father’s speech.

It was a speech that had Netanyahu written all over it. All the old hasbara clichés he’s used so many times, the regulatory lame joke (a tip he once got from Larry King that he abides by) and the biblical verse in Hebrew. But it was a speech about a reality Netanyahu is extraordinarily detached from. He talked of Hamas saying “they will carry out October 7 again and again and again. I swear to you today I will never allow that to happen,” and every Israeli watching who is not a member of the shrinking Bibi-worshipping cult said to themselves at that moment, “but you already have!”

There were some disruptions and protesters in the gallery. Seven members of hostage families were forced to leave by the Capitol Police. That humiliation was only compounded by the fact that Netanyahu had nothing for them but an empty promise that “efforts are happening right now” to free their loved ones.

They’ve been hearing those promises for nearly 10 months and they know the truth. That Netanyahu opposed the first hostage release agreement back in November and it took all of President Joe Biden’s pressure to make it happen, and that he’s spent the last few months, under pressure from his far-right coalition partners, delaying and preventing another deal.

Before the speech his entourage briefed that he would present “a vision” for the future of Gaza and the region. In the end that vision consisted of “a demilitarized and deradicalized” Gaza. Just how Netanyahu, who can’t even get his ultra-Orthodox partners to teach their kids math, is planning to educate “a new generation which must be taught not to hate Jews” wasn’t quite clear, but he was already on to the next round of slogans about an “Abraham Alliance” between Israel and “moderate” Arab nations, but once again, forgot to mention his coalition, which won’t allow him to even breathe the words “two-state solution,” which are the first condition for this alliance.

For Netanyahu, it was a triumph. It was a day on which he got in everything that means anything to him. But Israelis got nothing.

Categories Hypocrisy, International

Dan Rather: A Dangerous Double Standard

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2024 //
56

Dan Rather is puzzled about why the media scrutinizes Biden for any misstatements or gaffes and seems to be gleefully stoking the “resign” story. Yet Trump says crazy and incoherent things, and the media ignores it.

He writes on his blog “Steady”:

What a weekend. You know I have seen some things in my seven decades covering American politics. I have never seen anything quite like the wrangling, hand-wringing, and behind-the-scenes gamesmanship currently swirling around President Biden. These are compounded by the one-sided media coverage against Biden. And it isn’t over yet. 

One thing is for certain: If Biden stays in the race, every step, every word, every gesture will be parsed, dissected, and magnified. This is the reality, at least for the Democrats. Trump? Not so much. Or really, very little.

Case in point: On Friday, Biden sat down with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. In the transcript of the interview released by ABC, Biden said, “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.” Several news organizations and the White House took issue with the word “goodest.” According to The New York Times,the ABC standards team listened again to the audio and changed “goodest” to “good as.” According to the Times, “Mr. Biden’s actual words at that point in the interview were difficult to make out and open to interpretation.”

So here we are — one slightly hard to discern word in an otherwise coherent interview. And then there is the other guy. The one who can’t seem to string together a single coherent sentence — a fact news organizations don’t even bother mentioning any more. Try making sense of this gobbledegook from Trump’s remarks at a recent rally in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania:

“Our nation was saved by the immortal heroes at Gettysburg. Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was. The battle of Gettysburg, what an unbelievable. I mean it was so, was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways — it represented such a big portion of the success of this country. Gettysburg, wow! I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And uh the statement of Robert E. Lee, who’s no longer in favor — did you ever notice that? He’s no longer in favor. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.’ They were fighting uphill, he said. Wow, that was a big mistake, he lost his great general and uh they were fighting uphill. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys,’ but it was too late.”

What?? You may not have heard about this because it was “lightly” reported, i.e. not a word from The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, or the Associated Press. Jon Stewart did mention it on “The Daily Show,” saying it was “plagiarized, almost directly, from my seventh-grade book report, ‘Gettysburg, Wow.’”

Why are the rules so different for these two men? Both should be held accountable for their deeds and words. But they aren’t. Trump gets pass after pass.

The Republicans have hitched their wagon to a cult leader. They are willing to do just about anything to win back the White House: lie; obliterate the rules; blindly back a convicted felon, a cheater, a sexual assaulter, a Project 2025 promoter, a dictator on day one, and an insurrectionist. Maybe they should change their MAGA caps to say “The ends justify the means.”

The Democrats have, to this point, backed the president, a decent man who has devoted his life to the service of the country. Now that the proverbial chips are somewhere near rock-bottom, the party doesn’t know what to do. Remain loyal to a man who has objectively done a very good job after the debacle that was the Trump administration, and risk Trump 2.0? Or nudge Biden out in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris or any number of untested contenders? The finger-pointing and “blames-manship” will be epic if Trump wins. Where is this headed? As my father said, “he who lives by the crystal ball learns to eat a lot of broken glass.”

But for those of us who believe in the great American Experiment — a constitutional republic based on the principles of freedom and democracy — this is what it looks like, folks. It’s raucous, sometimes ugly, painful, and chock full of anxiety. But one thing we can do and are doing is speak freely. That could all change. Imagine a world where the Trump police track down naysayers and truth tellers. He has vowed retribution, even military tribunals for his political enemies. And then he would not be subject to prosecution. In our system of government, we have the right to question our leaders. If Trump wins, that could quickly disappear.

In the confusion, uncertainty, and anxiety of the moment, and amidst all the disappointing media coverage, it is time to remind ourselves once again what is at stake in this election.

Please know that we feel your anxiety and we welcome your insights, your frustration, your worries in the comments on this forum. It’s an open exchange. All I ask is that you remain respectful to your fellow Steady readers. Please, no name-calling or foul language. I enjoy reading your comments. We desperately need this passion come November. Our democracy depends on it.

Categories Biden, Elections, Hypocrisy, Media, Trump

Louisiana Requires “10 Commandments” in Every Public School Classroom

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2024 //
67

Louisiana became the first state to enact a law requiring that the “Ten Commandments” be displayed in every public school classroom. Others have proposed such laws, but they didn’t pass. Governor Jeff Landry, who is Catholic, signed the law in a Catholic school, which is somewhat strange since the law applies only to public schools.

The New York Times reports that the bill is part of a larger agenda to turn the U.S. into an explicitly Christian nation. Despite the fact that the Founders wrote extensively against religion controlling the state and said in the Constitution that there could be no religious test for office-holders, the religious right continues to shove their religion—and only their religion—on everyone else

The crowd at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School in Lafayette, La., applauded Gov. Jeff Landry as he signed bill after bill this week on public education in the state, making it clear he believed God was guiding his hand.

One new law requires that transgender students be addressed by the pronouns for the gender on their birth certificates (“God gives us our mark,” he said). Another allows public schools to employ chaplains (“a great step for expanding faith in public schools”).

Then he signed into law a mandate that the Ten Commandments be hung in every public classroom, demonstrating a new willingness for Louisiana to go where other states have not. Last month, Louisiana also became the first state to classify abortion pills as dangerous controlled substances.

“We don’t quit,” Mr. Landry, a Republican, said at the signing ceremony.

Taken together, the measures have signaled the ambition of the governor and the Republican-led Legislature to be at the forefront of a growing national movement to create and interpret laws according to a particular conservative Christian worldview. And Mr. Landry, a Catholic who has been vocal about his faith’s influence in shaping his politics, wants to lead the charge.

It’s ironic to see a Catholic leading the charge, because for many years, the U.S. was strongly anti-Catholic. Governor Landry’s new evangelical allies would not have welcomed him into the country or their tent. Anti-Catholic sentiment was so powerful in the 19th century that most states wrote into their state constitution that no public money could be sent, directly or indirectly, to any religious institution. Thomas Jefferson wrote eloquently about the “separation of church and state.”

“Separation” benefitted both the church and the state, by keeping churches free of government regulation, and by keeping the government free of sectarian meddling. Under our Constitution, everyone is free to practice their religion or no religion, and the state cannot (should not) be used to enforce religious doctrine.

But the goals of the new religious dominionists is to make America “a Christian nation” and to impose their beliefs through law on everyone else, whether they are Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, Deist, Unitarian Universalist, Satanists, or any of the hundreds of other religions or sects in this country.

The Ten Commandments is purely symbolic. It’s one step in the plan to outlaw abortion, ban in-vitro fertilization, ban contraception, ban same-sex marriage, criminalize homosexuality, and restore the primacy of the father in families. It is the leading edge in a rightwing putsch to control the government and all of us.

Will posting this religious document solve any problems? Will it reduce crime or promiscuity or adultery? Donald Trump is a philanderer who has broken that commandment.

The Ten Commandments say nothing about abortion or gay rights or the rights of racial minorities or voting rights.

The Ten Commandments are a wish list . We should all strive to be better people. Hanging the Commandments on the wall doesn’t change anyone’s behavior. If they did, they should be hung in every prison cell. Let’s see how that works.

Categories Extremism, Hypocrisy, Louisiana, Religion, Separation of church and state

Steve Ruis: Why Did the Supreme Court Take the Abortion Pill Case?

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2024 //
23

Steve Ruis raises an interesting question: Why did four justices of the U.S. Supreme Court agree to take the abortion pill case, then rule unanimously that the litigants had no standing to sue? Wouldn’t the four who wanted to hear the case know that in advance? Why did they waste everyone’s time?

Steve has a suspicion that the six justices who voted to strike down Roe v. Wade were sending instructions for the next legal challenge to the pill: try again but avoid these pitfalls. Find a plaintiff with standing.

Just as he predicted, the plaintiffs are lining up to challenge the pill again. They are taking their cases to the same far-right judge in Amarillo, Texas, who previously said the Federal Drug Administration should never have approved the pill.

US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk will have to decide later this summer if three conservative states that want to continue the fight against the drug can do so in his court. The decision is one of several in coming weeks that will determine whether – and if so, how quickly – the case against mifepristone makes it back to the Supreme Court.

Before Trump appointed him, the judge was an attorney for a Christian advocacy group. He is known for his anti-abortion views.

Three conservative states—Missouri, Idaho, and Kansas—want to block access to the pill, and they plan to file their case in Amarillo, knowing that it will be heard by a friendly judge.

An immediate question for Kacsmaryk is whether the states can continue to do so in his court. Generally, parties must be able to justify filing lawsuits in a specific federal court. The doctors and anti-abortion groups who sued over mifepristone incorporated a group called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine in Amarillo  months before their lawsuit.

The groups’ move to bring the case in Amarillo, a far-flung court division in Texas’ panhandle, was among the most controversial aspects of the lawsuit. Kacsmaryk is virtually guaranteed to hear every case that is filed there, and his courthouse has become a favorite option for conservative litigants and states seeking to halt the Biden administration’s agenda.

Steve Ruis was prescient. A few days after he posted his warning, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, a lawyer, dug down into the decision about the abortion pill.

She wrote:

Just as they did when the Supreme Court managed to reject the utterly outlandish independent state legislature theory in Moore v. Harper, too many credulous court watchers rushed forward last week to praise the high court for its “reasonableness” in rejecting a half-baked claim to restrict access to mifepristone, the medical abortion drug. It gets no brownie points for knocking down on technical standing grounds one of the more outlandish opinions from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit and antiabortion activist District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.

Despite headlines that the court was saving or preserving mifepristone, it did nothing of the sort. Worse, Americans have plenty of reason to fear what the most radical and aggressive Supreme Court since Dred Scott is up to.

The majority found that the respondent, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, lacked standing because the group’s members were already spared from any obligation to perform medical abortions by federal conscience clause protections, had only the most speculative injuries, and had to do more than prove it devoted resources to the issue to qualify for “associational” standing. (Plaintiffs cannot “spend” their way into standing, the majority held.)

As a preliminary matter, Justice Clarence Thomas (under fire for yet more unreported lavish gifts from right-wing billionaire Harlan Crow) filed a concurrence that was downright scary. He argued that no organization or association should ever be allowed to assert organizational standing. Here, he went after a nearly 50-year-old precedent.

As Reuters explained, “Thomas essentially attacked a long-recognized legal doctrine relied upon by associations ranging from the nation’s biggest business lobby — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — to environmental groups and gun rights advocacy organizations to challenge government policies by suing on behalf of their members.” By depriving the most able plaintiffs from challenging statutes, Thomas would give the federal government and states license to run roughshod over individual rights without necessarily changing the substantive law.

Following his attack on Brown v. Board of Education in the South Carolina redistricting case and his assault on Griswold v. Connecticut in the Dobbs case, Thomas once more reveals just how radical the Supreme Court, with the addition of more radical justices, might become in the future.

What was hyperbole is now a road map straight from the concurrences of one of the most radical justices. In the upcoming election, Democrats would do well to focus on the extremism of the Supreme Court as they explain how even more extreme the court would become with more MAGA appointees.

One could simply substitute Thomas for Robert Bork, the radical nominee whose appointment was scuttled in 1987, in Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s famous denunciation:


[Clarence Thomas’s] America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

What was hyperbole is now a road map straight from the concurrences of one of the most radical justices. In the upcoming election, Democrats would do well to focus on the extremism of the Supreme Court as they explain how even more extreme the court would become with more MAGA appointees.

Drilling down on the majority opinion, one finds that the court says nothing that would restrict states from banning all abortions, medical or otherwise. As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern remind us, “It remains unlawful to prescribe in states that criminalize abortion; it has even been deemed a ‘controlled substance’ in Louisiana.” Moreover, Thomas and other radicals’ pet theory for banning all abortions — expansion and contortion of the Comstock Act to prevent use of the mail to send abortion devices or literature — “will roar back with a vengeance,” the authors note, if Trump prevails and the Supreme Court, freed from worries about a national backlash, decides to take the issue on squarely.

Furthermore, while this particular plaintiff was denied standing, another party, such as a state or individual doctor, might easily establish standing to take another crack at outlawing mifepristone. Jenner & Block, a litigation firm, explains on its blog:

First and foremost, this decision does not spell the end of the mifepristone litigation. While this case was pending at the Supreme Court, three states — Missouri, Idaho, and Kansas — successfully intervened at the district court. Now that the case has been remanded, these three states will continue their challenge to the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone, and based on their complaint, they intend to make many of the same arguments as the Alliance. Specifically, the three states have challenged the FDA’s decisions to expand access to mifepristone from 2016 onward, including the ability to have mifepristone dispensed via telehealth services and distributed by retail pharmacies. Given the district court’s willingness to enjoin the FDA’s approval entirely and the Supreme Court’s failure to reach the merits, it is likely that the states will prevail on at least some of their claims. This would mean another year or more of appeals to the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court, with continuing uncertainty surrounding the regulation of mifepristone in the interim.

Mifepristone, therefore, has not been “saved” in any sense. If anything, it’s on life support, pending an election that would give the court a green light to go wild and/or offer felon and former president Donald Trump the chance to add to the ranks of the most extreme justices.

Categories Gender, Health, Hypocrisy, Science

Marco Rubio Wants to be the VEEP to the Guy He Denounced as a “Con Man”

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2024 //
24

It’s sad but not unexpected that Republican politicians who once denounced Donald Trump are now bowing down to him. They are singing his praises, kissing his ring, his toes, his backside.

Nikki Haley said he was “unhinged” and that he was “not fit” to be President. That was only a few months ago. We all heard her. But now she has endorsed the unhinged one.

Ted Cruz insulted Trump repeatedly in 2016. He suggested that Trump had ties to the Mafia; he called him “a sniveling coward,” and “a pathological liar,” who lies with every word that comes out of his mouth. He also called him “a serial philanderer” who is “utterly amoral.”Trump, in turn, mocked Cruz’s wife and suggested that Cruz’s father had some role in the assassinatiin of President Kennedy. Now they are best buddies.

Marco Rubio takes the cake, if a lapdog deserves a cake. Here is a video of Rubio denouncing Trump as a “con man” who has failed again and again. Now Rubio is hoping to be chosen as the Vice-presidential candidate by the Master Con Man.

At long last, these ambitious politicians have no integrity and no shame. They long to serve an unhinged con man and pathological liar who has been ranked by historians as the worst president in American history.

Categories Corruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Hypocrisy, Republicans, Trump

Why the British Don’t Like Trump: His Character, Not His Politics

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2024 //
27

Writing in the London Daily, Nate White explains why the British don’t like Donald Trump. It’s not his politics; the Brits have elected conservative politicians repeatedly. It’s him they don’t like: his character, personality, and essence.

White writes:

A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief. 

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. 

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness. 

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man. 

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?’ If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.

Categories Character, Cruelty, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Hypocrisy, Ignorance, Stupid, Trump

Sarasota: Christian Ziegler “Prowled” Bars to Find Female Partners to Bring Home to Bridget

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2024 //
30

The Daily Beast posted startling news from a Sarasota police report. The Ziegler power couple sought out women for their threesomes. Bridget Ziegler was a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and an outspoken critic of LGBTQ+; Christian Ziegler was chairman of the state GOP. They liked threesomes.

Newly released documents say Moms For Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler and her GOP chairman husband went “on the prowl” in Sarasota bars to find women to have sex with.

Text messages quoted in a Sarasota Police Department (SPD) memo that was obtained by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune revealed how Ziegler sent her husband, Christian, hunting for a third sexual partner at local bars and directed him to send photos of possible hits. She allegedly told him to pretend to take pictures of his beer while photographing the women so he wouldn’t get caught sneaking pictures of them…

The Zieglers, a local power couple in Florida Republican politics, were at the center of a sex abuse scandal after a woman alleged that Christian had raped her while she was involved in a three-way relationship with the pair. They were both ousted from their respective positions at the Florida GOP and the conservative Leadership Institute, although charges were never formally issued. Bridget Ziegler also faced a barrage of attacks for her “hypocrisy,” since she had taken a very public anti-LGBTQ+ stance but had engaged in sexual relationships with women.

Wary of what further revelations would cause for their torpedoed reputations, Bridget Ziegler had sued to keep the records kept by SPD and the State Attorney’s Office sealed from the public. That case is pending in Sarasota County, court records show.

I received this article from my friend James Harvey late last night. He remarked on the hypocrisy of some of the Christian Right’s moral leaders. There was Jerry Falwell, his wife Becki, and a 20-year-old pool boy. There was the president of the ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, George C. Roche III, who led the college for nearly three decades. He allegedly had an affair with his daughter-in-law over 19 years; she committed suicide. Hundreds, thousands of religious leaders—the people who are supposed to teach us about morality and ethics—have been accused of pedophilia (google “pastors or priests or rabbis accused of pedophilia” or “sex abuse”).

Hypocrites.

Categories Ethics, Florida, Hypocrisy, Lies
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