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Dana Milbank: House GOP Discovers Aliens Among Us

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2023 //
71

Dana Milbank, a regular columnist for the Washington Post is always insightful and sees the humor in the antics of politicians. In this account of recent hearings about UFOs, he hits it out of the park. He explains why Trump supporters are avid believers in the presence of mysterious aliens: they believe the Deep State is hiding what it knows. Another conspiracy. The missing link in their conspiracy: why didn’t Trump release all this secret stuff during his four years in office? Milbank casts doubt on whether outer space aliens are real; I can answer him. They are; a few of them have been posting on this blog recently.

Milbank writes:

The aliens have landed. And they have a gavel!

That is as plausible a takeaway as any from this week’s House Oversight Committee hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena, the curiosity formerly known as UFOs. The panel’s national security subcommittee brought in, as its star witness, one David Grusch, a former Defense Department intelligence official who now claims:

  • That there are “quite a number” of “nonhuman” space vehicles in the possession of the U.S. government.
  • That one “partially intact vehicle” was retrieved from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1933 by the United States, acting on a tip from Pope Pius XII.
  • That the aliens have engaged in “malevolent activity” and “malevolent events” on Earth that have harmed or killed humans.
  • That the U.S. government is also in possession of “dead pilots” from the spaceships.
  • That a private defense contractor is storing one of the alien ships, which have been as large as a football field.
  • That the vehicles might be coming “from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here.”
  • That the Roswell, N.M., alien landing was real, and the Air Force’s debunking of it a “total hack job.”
  • And that the United States has engaged in a nearly century-long “sophisticated disinformation campaign” (apparently including murders to silence people) to hide the truth.

I’d tell you more, but then they would have to kill me.

Alas, Grusch has no documents, photos or other evidence to corroborate any of his fantastic claims. It’s classified, you see.

Maybe everything he says is true, even the claim that “the Vatican was involved” in pursuing extraterrestrials, and Grusch has just exposed the best-kept secret and most sprawling conspiracy in the history of the universe. Or maybe Grusch himself is a conspiracy theorist, or he’s just having a lark at the subcommittee’s expense. Easier to discern was the motive of several Republicans on the panel: They greeted his out-of-this-world claims with total credulity, using them as just more evidence that the deep-state U.S. government is lying to the American people, covering up the truth and can never be trusted. Their anti-government vendetta has gone intergalactic.

“There has been activity by alien or nonhuman technology and/or beings that has caused harm to humans?” asked Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.).

Grusch said what he “personally witnessed” was “very disturbing.”

“You’ve said that the U.S. has intact spacecraft,” Burlison continued. “You’ve said that the government has alien bodies or alien species. Have you seen the spacecraft?”

Grusch said the nonclassified setting prevented him from divulging “what I’ve seen firsthand.”

“Do we have the bodies of the pilots?” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) wanted to know.

“Biologics came with some of these recoveries, yeah,” Grusch told her, and the remains were “nonhuman.”

Mace asked whether, “based on your experience,”Grusch believes “our government has made contact with intelligent extraterrestrials.”

Classified, Grusch replied.

Just over a year ago, a House Intelligence subcommittee held a similar hearing on “unidentified aerial phenomena” but with dramatically different results. The panel’s bipartisan leadership said the matter should be taken seriously to protect pilots and to make sure enemies don’t develop breakthrough weapons. But they assured the public there was no evidence of “anything nonterrestrial in origin,” and they cautioned against conspiracy theories. In addition, Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, where Grusch worked, testified to senators in April that his UAP-hunting office “has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics.” NASA has said likewise.

At the start of this week’s hearing, Rep. Robert Garcia (Calif.), the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, reminded colleagues of Kirkpatrick’s testimony. One of the other witnesses, David Fravor, a retired Navy commander, told the subcommittee that the government is “not focused on little green men.” But this Republican majority has yet to meet a conspiracy theory it wouldn’t amplify, so it was only a matter of time before it landed on Roswell and Area 51.

There’s only one reason Trump failed to release the top-secret documents about extraterrestrials: he is part of the Deep State too! Shhhhhh.

Categories Ignorance, Politics, Republicans, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Trump’s Big-Lie Ad Threatens Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2023 //
23

Journalist Thom Hartmann shows that Trump’s latest ad is an exercise in the Big Lie Technique. It contains vile smears that simple-minded people are likely to believe. It resounds with echoes of fascism.

He writes:

Trump’s people are promoting a new lie-filled fascist advertisement, which even the normally unflappable Frank Luntz called “disturbing.” It follows a fairly ancient pattern of destructive Big Lies that goes back to Renaissance Italy and even the Roman republic and ancient Greece.

German filmmaker Fritz Hippler, one of Goebbels’ most effective propagandists (he produced the infamous movie The Eternal Jew), said that two steps are necessary to promote a Big Lie so the majority of the people in a nation would believe it.

The first is to reduce an issue to a simple black-and-white choice that “even the most feebleminded could understand.” 

The second is to “repeat the oversimplification over and over.” 

If these two steps are followed, Hippler and Goebbels both knew, enough people will come to believe a Big Lie that it can change the politics of a nation.

In Hippler’s day, the best example of his application of the principle was his 1940 movie “Campaign in Poland,” which argued that the Polish people were suffering under tyranny — a tyranny that would someday threaten Germany — and that the German people could either allow this cancer to fester, or preemptively “liberate” Poland.

Hitler took the “strong and decisive” path, the movie suggested, to liberate Poland, even though after the invasion little evidence was found that Poland represented any threat whatsoever to the powerful German Reich. The movie was Hitler’s way of saying that invading Poland was the right thing to do, and that, in retrospect, he would have done it again.

The Big Lie is alive and well today in the United States of America, and what’s most troubling about it is the basic premise that underlies its use. For somebody to undertake a Big Lie, they must first believe Niccolo Machiavelli’s premise (in “The Prince,” 1532) that “the ends justify the means.”

Hitler, after all, claimed to have based everything he did on the virtuous goal of uniting Europe — and then the world — in a thousand-year era of peace, which he claimed was foreshadowed in the Bible. If you believe that a thousand years of peace is such a noble end that any means is justified to reach it, it’s a short leap to eugenics, preemptive wars, torture of dissidents and prisoners, and mass murder.

Believing that the end justifies the means is the ultimate slippery slope. It will kill any noble goal, because even if the goal is achieved, it will have been corrupted along the way by the means used to accomplish it…

In real life, it’s the story of the many tinpot dictators around the world who quote America’s Founders while enforcing a brutal rule, of fossil fuel executives pushing for lax CO2 rules to “help the American economy,” of the legion of lobbyists who work daily to corrupt democracy in the name of GMOs, pharmaceuticals, and the insurance industry (among others).

Here in the US it was used by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to lie us into murderous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and when there was little consequence to them personally or the GOP, Republicans decided to continue the Big Lie strategy and are using it to this day.

Gandhi, Jesus, and Buddha all warned us about this, as did Tolstoy, Tolkien, Hemingway, and Kafka.

Be it “small sins” like the Green Party and No Labels getting into bed with Republicans to get on state ballots, or “big sins” like rightwing think-tanks working to turn America into a strongman oligarchy with their Project 2025, trying to accomplish a “good” by using the means of an “evil” like a Big Lie inherently corrupts the good.

Now the Trump campaign and its allies are encouraging a new series of Big Lies to assail President Biden and the very idea of democracy itself.

With the smug assurance of damage done to the enemy, Republican governors are rewriting American history (the Big Lie that white children are injured by learning about Black history), criminalizing the LGBTQ+ community (the Big Lie that queer people are “groomers”), and throwing millions of people in Blue cities off the voting rolls (the Big Lie of voter fraud).

They are pushing and celebrating nakedly fascist policies, tropes, and memes.

Most recently, a Trump-aligned group rolled out an ad that strings a whole series of Big Lies together. It says:

If I was the deep state and I wanted to destroy America, I would rig the election with a puppet candidate, one that was so compromised that they would never say a word about it. I would create a false flag that allows for mail-in ballots. I would be in charge of the ballot-counting machines. I would create a false flag to blame all who question the results of the election.

If I was the deep state, I would prosecute anyone that went against me. I would sue and prosecute anyone that spoke up about the fraudulent election. I would use my powers to shut down all your internet businesses and bankrupt you.

If I was the deep state, I would make everyone an example why you should never question a Democrat ever winning an election. I would imprison my foes. I would use my corrupt DAs and blackmail judges to destroy you. I would make sure all crimes I ever committed never happened. I would prosecute my biggest competition. I would make sure they could never run for office ever again.

If I was the deep state, I would convince everyone that Ukraine Nazis were good, and women are men.

If I was the deep state, I would own every politician that mattered.

If I was the deep state, I would push my pedophilia ambitions on you.

If I was the deep state, you’d question your sexual identity, but not the medical establishment.

If I was the deep state, you would fear to ever resist me.

If I was the deep state, you would wish I was really the devil.

If I was the deep state, I would say mission accomplished.

Frank Luntz wrote of it, “This is the most disturbing political ad I’ve seen this year.”

Defenders of the Trump campaign are overrunning social media, defending the lies and threats in this new ad and Trump’s previous, “If you fuck around with us…” statements. They claim that Joe Biden is reviving our economy with “socialism and communism,” and Jack Smith and the DOJ prosecuting Trump and the January 6th traitors is some sort of “deep state tyranny.”

There is no equivalence, moral or otherwise, between the work the administration is doing to punish seditionists and rebuild our economy from the wreckage of the Trump years and these sorts of naked appeals to fascism.

Truths and issues — however unpleasant — cannot be weighed on the same scale as lies, threats, and character assassination, explicit or implicit.

Lee Atwater, on his deathbed, realized that the “ends justify the means” technique of campaigning he had unleashed on behalf of Reagan and Bush was both immoral and harmful to American democracy.

“In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I ‘would strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his [Dukakis’] running mate,’” Atwater said. “I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not. Mostly I am sorry for the way I thought of other people. Like a good general, I had treated everyone who wasn’t with me as against me.”

But Atwater’s spiritual and political protégés in the Trump campaign soldier on. He and his GOP allies in Congress are using Big Lies with startling regularity, and old Big Lies are being resurrected almost daily, most on social media, right-wing talk radio, podcasts, and TV.

The most alarming contrast in the coming election of 2024 is between those who will use any means to get and hold power, and those who are unwilling to engage in a Big Lie.

History tells us that, over the short term, the Big Lie usually works. Over the long term, though, the damage it does — both to those who use it, and to the society on which it is inflicted — is often incalculable.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, Ignorance, Lies, Propaganda, Trump

Florida: DeSantis Doesn’t Want Students to Study Honest History

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2023 //
7

Andrew Spar, president of the NEA in Florida wrote the following opinion article for the Orlando Sentinel.

Florida’s public schools are the places where children of every race, religion and background learn and grow together. No matter what they look like or where they come from, all our children must have the freedom to learn the full and honest history of our nation. They deserve an education that teaches them about the past while helping them understand the present.

Accurate history is powerful knowledge that prepares our youngsters for the world while enabling them to create a better future by avoiding past mistakes.

Unfortunately, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his political appointees have made it clear that they don’t think Florida’s students deserve to learn the full truth of our nation’s history. Instead, DeSantis envisions a history curriculum that downplays the horror of slavery while ignoring pivotal events such as the 1957 resolution adopted by the Florida Legislature that proclaimed the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which justices ruled that racial segregation in public schools is illegal, was “null, void, and of no force or effect.” When our state intentionally forgets historical events such as Florida’s response to Brown, how can we ever reckon with the racial disparities that are still present in public education today?

In another example of the ahistorical nature of the proposed standards, the Society of Friends (Quakers) can be found five times, whereas “racism” is only found once. Are we truly to believe that the legacy of Quakers is deserving of five times the importance of the legacy of racism when it comes to understanding African American experiences?

Yet, that is exactly what DeSantis wants — a history devoid of context, a history that denies students their freedom to learn uncomfortable truths. He is even willing to flout state law in order to keep students from having the freedom to learn. In 2020 amid great fanfare, legislators passed and DeSantis signed into law HB 1213, which among other things required Florida’s African American History Task Force to look for ways to incorporate the Ocoee Election Day Massacre into Florida’s required history instruction.

The task force produced a comprehensive report outlining exactly how to do this. Yet, here we are mere weeks away from the start of the 2023-2024 school year, and the recommendations still have not been implemented. While the proposed standards do (finally) mention Ocoee, where at least 30 African Americans are thought to have been killed, they do not come anywhere close to providing the comprehensive history Florida’s students must learn to understand the connections between the past and the present. It would appear DeSantis is scared that a complete and honest reckoning of our state’s history will force people to draw connections between the voter intimidation of the past and his current attacks on the rights of Black and Brown people to vote.

Rather than showing true leadership by implementing the task force’s recommendations and ensuring Florida’s students learn the whole truth about Florida’s history, DeSantis has engaged in a multi-year campaign to sow division between parents and educators. Screaming about indoctrination and bemoaning everything that he doesn’t like as “woke” might have been a winning strategy for DeSantis electorally, but his ambitions come at a steep price for an entire generation of children whose freedom to learn is under attack.

Fortunately, with each passing day more and more people across Florida, and indeed across the nation, are rejecting DeSantis’ fearmongering and attempts to divide us. Instead, we are uniting across our differences and demanding Florida politicians stop censoring what students learn in our public schools.

Florida may be only a steppingstone for DeSantis, but for millions of educators, parents and students, this is our forever home. We are rooted in our communities and fully invested in a brighter future for our children. We are fighting to ensure a world-class public education that reflects and celebrates student identities, experiences, histories and cultures in order to meet students where they are and prepare them to succeed wherever they may go. We are fighting for students’ freedom to learn.

Andrew Spar is president of the Florida Education Association, representing more than 150,000 education professionals.


© 2023 Orlando Sentinel

Categories Bigotry, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, History, Ignorance, Injustice, Lies

Dan Rather: Vaccines Save Lives. Period.

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2023 //
122

Dan Rather and his friend Eliot Kirschner recently wrote about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s was against vaccines, which is either cynical or insane. You choose.

They wrote on the blog Steady:

When historians look back to analyze this era’s toxic irrationality, they may well focus on the anti-vaccine movement.

How tragic that we have to stand up and defend one of the most successful health innovations in the history of our species. Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives and eradicated or greatly reduced scourges like smallpox and polio. They have protected millions from the worst effects of COVID and hastened a return to our pre-pandemic way of life, even though the dangers of the disease are not fully behind us.

Vaccines are also incredibly safe, especially when compared to all the other things people put into their bodies. There is no reputable scientific debate over any of this.

But none of these facts have dissuaded the instigators of ignorance, the cultivators of conspiracy theories, and the sellers of pseudoscience. They have whipped up their throngs of followers into a mania around vaccines that threatens the safety of this country and the world. And they have targeted doctors, scientists, and other medical professionals — the very people trying to keep us healthy.

This past weekend, we saw a particularly grave example of this destructive dynamic. Joe Rogan, the right-wing podcast host and frequent amplifier of conspiracy theories, welcomed notorious anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr. to his show. Kennedy is running for president as a Democratic challenger to President Biden, even though he sounds more like a MAGA Republican. Not surprisingly, he spouted his usual nonsense about the alleged dangers of vaccines, and Rogan ate it up.

That would have been bad enough. But the incident quickly escalated across social media and into the general press in a manner that speaks to our particularly troubled times. Pediatrician and vaccine expert Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, shared this article from Vice: “Spotify Has Stopped Even Sort of Trying to Stem Joe Rogan’s Vaccine Misinformation.” Spotify, the online music service, hosts Rogan’s podcast.

The response to Dr. Hotez’s tweet — which has now been viewed more than 28 million times — was a tidal wave of bananas. The doctor, a prominent voice on the importance of reputable science, was already a boogeyman for the anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers. They were ready to pounce. Rogan challenged Dr. Hotez to come on his podcast to “debate” Kennedy.

Then Elon Musk piled on and attacked Dr. Hotez on Twitter, which further empowered the legions of right-wing radicals. Dr. Hotez said he was confronted by anti-vaxxers outside his home. Scientists, journalists, and even business leaders like Mark Cuban jumped to the researcher’s defense against the onslaught of anti-science nonsense from Rogan, Musk, and their confederates.

There are many angles to this particular story that highlight the bad faith of the vaccine critics. They like to paint promoters of inoculations as tools of “Big Pharma.” But Dr. Hotez has developed a patent-free vaccine for COVID, which means neither he nor a big drug company will benefit financially from its use. Furthermore, going onto a podcast to talk about vaccines with Kennedy is not a “debate” — it’s performative nonsense. We don’t have NASA scientists debate flat Earthers.

And the idea that this is a matter of free speech is undercut when Musk uses the platform he bought to intimidate responsible voices by unleashing the mob (not to mention that we aren’t talking about government prosecution). In the wake of this episode, reports indicate scientists are (understandably) leaving Twitter in greater numbers because it has become an increasingly vile environment for mainstreaming anti-science harassment.

More generally, this episode represents another data point in a very disturbing trend, one exacerbated by, but not limited to, COVID or vaccines. Science is under siege from powerful players in American politics, business, and culture. It is largely a phenomenon of the modern Republican party and its reactionary allies, but not exclusively. It can be seen in our haphazard response to the climate crisis but also in a broad assault on data, expertise, and knowledge. This overall, general attack on science as a whole is a threat to our national security, health, and welfare.

Science can be a wonderfully encouraging and hopeful endeavor. It is a means for learning about the mysteries of life and the universe. It can lead to solutions for seemingly intractable problems. It is why cancer is not always a death sentence, why we can turn sunlight into clean electricity and take pictures of distant stars. Scientists aren’t perfect, of course. They are humans, after all. But science offers a way for us to arrive at important truths and then figure out where to go from there.

The likes of Kennedy, Rogan, and Musk are robbing us of this better future. By sowing discord and confusion, they are turning science and medicine into political footballs they toss back and forth at the public’s expense. But ultimately, the truth often wins out. Dr. Hotez and those who support him are standing up to the destructive bullying. In their courage and commitment, we can find reasons for hope.

Categories Accountability, Fake News, Health, Ignorance, Lies, Science

Peter Greene: Indiana “Moms for Liberty” Quote Hitler: Not a Good Start

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2023 //
28

Peter Greene writes about the debut of the Indiana faction of “Moms for Liberty,” which issued a statement quoting Adolph Hitler: “He alone who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future”

Over the next 24 hours, they kept rephrasing their statement over and over, to make clear that they weren’t actually endorsing Hitler or taking inspiration from his quote. After a few contortions, they sort of clarified what they meant, I think. Your local public school is controlled by the government, so your local public school is a manifestation of Nazism.

This would be funny if it weren’t so stupid.

Ninety percent of Americans went to public schools. Are we assume then that ninety percent of Americans are fascists? Are all of us public school graduates controlled by the evil U.S. government? By Biden? Trump? Obama? Bush 1 or 2? Clinton? Reagan?

Did we get controlled when we were in school or later? For me, that means my mind went into control-mode during the era of Truman and Eisenhower. Which one am I controlled by? Or is it both?

It’s especially ironic for Moms4L to accuse anyone of “mind control” since it is they who are enthusiastically censoring what teachers may teach and banning books. If anyone is promoting mind control, it’s Moms for Liberty! It’s they who have adopted the tactics of the Storm Troopers.

A note to Moms for Liberty:

The goal of public schools is to teach children to think for themselves. The goal of religious schools is indoctrination.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Fascism, History, Ignorance, Stupid

Tom Ultican: Mississippi Malarkey

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2023 //
15

Tom Ultican, retired high school teacher of advanced math and physics, investigates the claims of Nicholas Kristof about a “Mississippi miracle.” In his article in the New York Times, Kristof attributed a rise in Mississippi’s test scores to “the science of reading” plus a policy of holding back third graders who don’t pass a reading test, allegedly proving that spending more money is not necessary, poverty doesn’t matter, and reducing class size is unnecessary.

He begins:

Nicholas Kristof’s opinion piece in the New York Times might not have been blatant lying but it was close. His depiction of the amazing education renaissance in Mississippi as a model for the nation is laughable. Lauding their third grade reading retention policies as enlightened, he claims their secret sauce for success is implementing the science of reading (SoR). This is based on a willful misreading of data while tightly embracing Jeb Bush’s futile education reform ideology.

Ultican then produces a graph showing that Mississippi fourth-graders ranked 20th in the nation in 2022, but its eighth graders ranked 45th.

Misusing data allows Kristof to end the paragraph indicating poverty is not an excuse for education failure. It reminds me of a statement written by education professor Kathryn Strom,

“The “no excuses” rhetoric (i.e, “poverty is not an excuse for failure”) is one that is dearly beloved by the corporate education reformers because it allows them to perpetuate (what many recognize to be) the American myth of meritocracy and continue the privatization movement under the guise of “improving schools” while avoiding addressing deeply entrenched inequities that exist in our society and are perpetuated by school structures.” (Emphasis added)

To add heft to his argument that poverty is no excuse, Kristof quotes Harvard economist David Deming from the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Graduate School of Education, saying “Mississippi is a huge success story and very exciting.” He adds, “You cannot use poverty as an excuse.”

It is important to note that Harvard is famous for supporting privatization of public education and promoting failed scholarship. Deming is currently doing research with Raj Chetty and John Friedman. Along with Jonah Rockoff, Chetty and Friedman published the now thoroughly debunked value added measures (VAM) paper. Their faulty research caused many teachers to lose jobs before it was exposed as a fraud. Kristof is using an economist (not an educator) from a group best known for scholastic failure as his expert.

Kristof also indicates that spending is not important. He writes, “Mississippi has achieved its gains despite ranking 46th in spending per pupil in grades K-12.” If we look up at the 8th grade rankings, it seems they are getting what they paid for.

Ultican then goes on to describe the connections between the “Mississippi miracle” and TFA and Jeb Bush and a host of other corporate reform groups.

He concludes:

In this opinion piece, Nicholas Kristof touched on and promoted almost every billionaire inspired agenda item aimed at decreasing money going to public education. He acted as a representative of elites, advancing policies undermining education quality for common people.

This was not about improvement. It was about lowering taxes.

Please open the link and read this interesting article.

Categories Accountability, Class size, Fake News, Funding, Ignorance, Literacy, Mississippi

WAPO: Trump’s Lawyers Urged Him to Return the Classified Documents; He Refused

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2023 //
56

In a fascinating article, the Washington Post reported that several of Trump’s lawyers urged him to avoid an indictment by returning all the classified documents. He refused. He chose instead to take the advice of Tom Fitton, head of the conservative group Judicial Watch, who told him he could keep the documents. Fitton is not a lawyer. Early on, in 2021, one of Trump’s lawyers tried to persuade him to negotiate a return, to avoid an indictment. Trump refused.

Since the National Archives first asked for the return of presidential documents in Trump’s possession in February 2021 and until a grand jury issued its indictment this month, Trump was repeatedly stubborn and eschewed opportunities to avoid criminal charges, according to people with knowledge of the case, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal details. They note that Trump was not charged for any documents he returned voluntarily.


Interviews with seven Trump advisers with knowledge of the probe indicate he misled his own advisers, telling them the boxes contained only newspaper clippings and clothes. He repeatedly refused to give the documents back, even when some of his longest-serving advisers warned of peril and some flew to Mar-a-Lago to beg him to return them.


When Trump returned 15 boxes early last year — leaving at least 64 more at Mar-a-Lago — he told his own advisers to put out statements to the National Archives and to the public that “everything” had been returned, The Washington Post has previously reported. But he quietly kept more than 100 classified documents….

Trump time and again rejected the advice from lawyers and advisers who urged him to cooperate and instead took the advice of Tom Fitton, the head of the conservative group Judicial Watch, and a range of others who told him he could legally keep the documents and should fight the Justice Department, advisers said. Trump would often cite Fitton to others, and Fitton told some of Trump’s lawyers that Trump could keep the documents, even as they disagreed, the advisers said…

“I think what is lacking is the lawyers saying, ‘I took this to be obstruction,’” said Fitton. “Where is the conspiracy? I don’t understand any of it. I think this is a trap. They had no business asking for the records … and they’ve manufactured an obstruction charge out of that. There are core constitutional issues that the indictment avoids, and the obstruction charge seems weak to me.”


Several other Trump advisers blamed Fitton for convincing Trump that he could keep the documents and repeatedly mentioning the “Clinton socks case” — a reference to tapes Bill Clinton stored in his sock drawer of his secret interviews with historian Taylor Branch that served as the basis of Branch’s 2009 book documenting the Clinton presidency.


Judicial Watch lost a lawsuit in 2012 that demanded the audio recordings be designated as presidential records and that the National Archives take custody of the recordings. A court opinion issued at the time stated that there was no legal mechanism for the Archives to force Clinton to turn over the recordings.


For his part, Fitton said Trump’s lawyers “should have been more aggressive in fighting the subpoenas and fighting for Trump.”


Trump’s unwillingness to give the documents back did not surprise those who knew him well. Former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly said that he was particularly unlikely to heed requests from people or agencies he disliked.


“He’s incapable of admitting wrongdoing. He wanted to keep it, and he says, ‘You’re not going to tell me what to do. I’m the smartest guy in the room,’” Kelly said Tuesday…

Other advisers said the FBI and National Archives wanting the documents so badly made Trump less likely to give them back…

“It’s mine,” Trump said, explaining why he did not want to give the materials back, according to people with knowledge of his comments.

If this sounds like the behavior of a 2-year-old, well, draw your own conclusions.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Disruption, Ignorance, Justice, Lies, Stupid, Trump

DeSantis: “There’s No Book Banning in Florida.” Really?

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2023 //
29

When Ron DeSantis launched his candidacy on Twitter, he scoffed at the notion that schools were banning books in Florida. That alone should disqualify him, based on what we have seen, heard and read about the state’s encouragement of banning books that refer to gays or racism. A complaint by a single parent is sufficient to get a book removed from the school library. Most recently, a parent at an elementary school complained about Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb,” which she read at President Biden’s inauguration. The poem is now available to middle school children, but not to those in the elementary school.

The Miami Herald published this editorial about the phenomenon that DeSantis says is non-existent, a hoax.

Perhaps it’s because of how Amanda Gorman alluded to the Jan. 6 attack in her famous poem, finished the night after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol: “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it.”

Or maybe she wrote too bluntly about race and the legacy of slavery:

“We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.”

Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, read “The Hill We Climb” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, watched by about 40 million people. She wrote the poem so “that all young people could see themselves in a historical moment,” she posted on Twitter Tuesday.

But Gorman’s poem is now deemed not age appropriate, one of four library titles Bob Graham Education Center banned, following a parent’s complaint, for elementary school students, the Herald reported. The books are now available only for middle-schoolers at the public school in Miami Lakes, even though some of them were written for younger children.

The school committee that reviewed the material didn’t offer an explanation for its decision. We’re left to wonder: What in the children’s illustrated book “The ABCs of Black History,” written for children ages 5 and up, made it so inappropriate?

Perhaps it was the mention of iconic author James Baldwin’s sexual orientation: “And he was a gay man who believed that when it comes to love, you should ‘go the way your blood beats.” Or the mention of the Little Rock Nine, the “first Black children in all-white schools,” or the Black Panther movement. Or were the colorful drawings of Black female icons like Michelle Obama and Toni Morrison — described as “ queens”— too much?

One thing is clear: Books by Black authors — and about the Black American experience — make up three of the four titles deemed inappropriate for young children at Bob Graham Education Center. The other one, “Cuban Kids,” uses photos to describe the lives of children in Cuba in the early 2000s and how different or similar they are to Americans, according to the author’s homepage. Learning about the lives of their counterparts in a socialist country — including how they got around paper shortages — is sure to turn our kids into communists.

We knew that the movement to “sanitize” school libraries that Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature unleashed would eventually catch up with Miami-Dade. Our melting pot, after all, might not be so different from Escambia County in the Panhandle, whose school board has been sued for removing books about race and LGBTQ topics.

Florida’s laws have emboldened parents and activists like Moms for Liberty to challenge materials dealing with these topics. Most recently, DeSantis signed a bill that empowers one person to file a complaint and ban a book, at least temporarily, while a district reviews it. Parents not satisfied with how a district ruled on the challenge can appeal to the state. That is bound to make schools acquiesce to offended parents.

The result, as Gorman wrote on Twitter after her poem was restricted, is that “most of the forbidden works are by authors who have struggled for generations to get on bookshelves.”

Elementary students were not required to read Gorman’s work or any of the challenged titles. These were options at Bob Graham Education Center’s library. Those options also should be available for the children of all parents, not only those offended by certain content or groups skimming books to find any remote reference to race or LGBTQ issues.

“Love to Langston” was written at a second-grade reading level but no longer is accessible to second-graders at Bob Graham. The illustrated biography of Harlem Renaissancewriter Langston Hughes describes his own elementary school experience, tainted by racism, in the early 1900s:

“In Topeka, Kansas the teacher makes me sit in the corner; in the last row; far away; from the other kids.”

The parent who filed the complaint said “Love to Langston” contained critical race theory, “indirect hate messages,” gender ideology and indoctrination, the Herald reported. It’s unclear how.

It is curious, however, that “indoctrination” and “hate messages” seem to be flagged mostly when when Black authors write about being Black, or when LGBTQ authors write about being queer. The adults must ask themselves why that’s the case before making them inaccessible to children.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom to Read, Hoax, Ignorance, Librarians, Libraries, Lies, Literature

Jim Hightower: Why Texas GOP Loves the Bible

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2023 //
24

Jim Hightower is a gadfly who keeps stinging the Texas GOP in the backside. He was elected State Agriculture Commissioner from 1983-1991. I recently subscribed to his blog to get a deeper insight into the clowns who now control my native state. You might consider doing the same.

He writes here about the latest embarrassment to the state by its leading yahoos.

Cartoon via FFRF.org

Once again, the Texas Legislature leads by example! Erroneous and wrongheaded example, but, Bless Their Little Hearts, they’re just not real good at thinking complicated things through.

The present lawmaking adventure of the GOP-controlled Lege is an attempt to impose a militant brand of Christian Nationalism as the official public religion of Texas. Throughout history, such right-wing attempts to subvert a pluralistic society’s sense of the Common Good with the narrowest mindset of one particular pietistic group has led to both great harm and unintended hilarity. Indeed, the Lone Star State has a long and daffy history of getting the Bible jumbled up in public policy. In the 1920s, for example, Governor Miriam A “Ma” Ferguson rejected a proposal for bilingual education in our schools: “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ,” she explained, “it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.”

Likewise, today’s trio of Republican numbskulls running our state government – the governor, lt. guv, and attorney general – are acting as Bible-thumping Pentecostals. Lt. Governor Dan Patrick recently rose up on his hind legs to proclaim that ours is “a Christian nation,” that “there is no separation of church and state,” and that God Almighty himself “wrote the Constitution.” To enshrine this religious absolutism into law, these sanctimonious Texas politicos are now enacting a dictate that all public schools must conspicuously display The Ten Commandments “in every classroom,” and the nitpicking autocrats even specify that the displays “must be at least 16-by-20 inches.” It’s rule by rulers.

TIDBIT: The sanctity of the Ten Commandments derives from its devotees contention that the instructions were literally handed down by God. So, every word is sacrosanct. Except “ass.” The 10thCommandment directs: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house… wife… manservant… maidservant… ox… ass….” But the sponsor of the Texas bill, a self-righteous pissant of a senator named Phil King, took the ungodly liberty of removing ass from the holy version of the Lord’s Word. Thus, the children will be instructed by law to obey a religious code co-authored by Yahweh and Phil King. And, thanks to Phil’s red-ink editing pen, they will be morally free to covet their neighbor’s ass.

As proof that these Christian edicts are the holy foundation of US law, pushers of the public indoctrination of children point out that a frieze along the east Wall of the US Supreme Court is emblazoned with the numbers I through X. This shows, they assert, that our nation’s laws are derived from the higher authority of Christian commandments.

But – Holy Ma Ferguson! – they’re flaunting their ignorance. Those numbers refer not to the Bible, but to the Constitution, specifically the 10 Amendments that itemized our people’s original Bill of Rights. And remember that the very first one of those secular amendments prohibits government from enacting any law for the “establishment of religion.”

Note, too, that none of America’s founding documents (Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Federalist Papers) even mentions the Christian commandments. Finally, the various writers of the Bible itself don’t agree on the proper wording of the so-called commandments, how many there are, and what they mean.

DO SOMETHING!

To get the lowdown on the Ten Commandments (or is it 13? Or more?) The Freedom From Religion Foundation providesfactual insights and historical context for each one. FFRF is the leading source for tracking theocratic assaults on religious freedom and for providing how-to action items for battling right-wing efforts to turn our local, state, and national government into autocratic theocracies. Connect at ffrf.org.

Categories Accountability, Extremism, Humor, Hypocrisy, Ignorance, Religion, Separation of church and state, Stupid, Texas

Gavin Newsom Fires Back at DeSantis Insult

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2023 //
36

When Ron DeSantis held a press conference to celebrate his latest attacks on academic freedom, he sneeringly said, “If you want to study gender ideology, go to Berkeley,” because universities in Florida will focus on workforce preparation (which he thinks is a “classical education,” a sure sign that he never had one).

California Governor Gavin Newsom enjoys trading punches with DeSantis, and he sent out this reply:

Diane –

Ron DeSantis says if people want to study “niche subjects” they should go to Berkeley, but down in Florida they are going to focus on “the basics.”

His supporters chuckled. They thought it was a sick burn.

But some education is in order:

Six of the top ten public universities are located in California and the most popular majors at UC Berkeley are Cellular Biology, Computer Science, and Quantitative Economics.

That’s Math, Science and Technology.

It also probably explains why California outperforms Florida in all of those categories while having ten times the number of biotech companies as Florida and three times as many tech jobs as Florida.

But at least DeSantis got some laughs for his flailing presidential campaign…

Team Newsom

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, California, DeSantis, Florida, Higher Education, Ignorance, Lies
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