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Fact-Checking the GOP Debate

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2023 //
23

I am reposting this because the first version was incomplete.

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post frequently fact checks claims by politicians. He was very busy during the Trump administration. He identified more than 30,000 outright lies by #45. He awards “Pinocchios” to lies. Four Pinocchios’” is for the worst lies.

This is his fact check of the first GOP debate.

Fox News aired the first GOP debate of the 2024 election cycle from Milwaukee on Wednesday night, featuring eight candidates. Not every candidate uttered facts that are easily fact-checked, but following is a list of 10 suspicious claims. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates. These claims are examined in the order in which they were uttered.

“We all need to understand Joe Biden’s Bidenomics has led to the loss of $10,000 of spending power for the average family.”

— Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.)

This seems wildly overstated. In April we had checked a claim by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) that families have lost the equivalent of $7,400 worth of income. We tracked down the source of that statistic — E.J. Antoni, a research fellow in regional economics with the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis. As of last week, he’d revised his estimate down to $6,800.

But, more to the point, economists we contacted were dubious about the math, which relied on a change in purchasing power and a change in borrowing power. The change in borrowing power relied on mortgage rates — and not every family is looking for a new home. As for Antoni’s reliance on average weekly wages, this measure does not follow the same workers across time, and consequently the economists said it was an imperfect basis for families’ income changing over time.

Several economists pointed to another metric — real disposable personal income per capita— as a better gauge. That figure is produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the Commerce Department.

Per capita income, after inflation, was $46,790 in December 2020 and $46,795 in June 2023 — an increase of $5. That’s basically flat — but a far cry from a $10,000 decline.

“A 15-week ban is an idea whose time has come — it’s supported by 70 percent of the American people.”
— Former vice president Mike Pence


Recent polling does not back up Pence’s claim of such support for banning all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, when people are directly asked about it, though in general, polls have shown majority opposition to second-trimester abortions.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll last year found that 36 percent supported and 57 percent opposed a law that would make abortions legal only in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.


Last month, a Marquette Law School poll found that 47 percent of those surveyed favored a ban after 15 weeks, compared with 53 percent who said they would oppose it.


Also last month, an AP-NORC poll found that about half of Americans say abortions should be permitted at the 15-week mark.


A Fox News poll in April found that 54 percent supported such a ban, while 42 percent opposed it. But that is still well short of 70 percent.


“We’re better than what the Democrats are selling. We are not going to allow abortion all the way up till birth, and we will hold them accountable for their extremism.”
— Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis


This is a common Republican talking point — that Democrats support nationwide abortion-on-demand up until the moment of birth. The implication is that late-term abortions are common — and that they are routinely accepted by Democrats.

The reality, according to federal and state data, is that abortions past the point of viability are extremely rare. When they do happen, they often involve painful, emotional and even moral decisions.


About two-thirds of abortions occur at eight weeks of pregnancy or earlier, and nearly 90 percent take place in the first 12 weeks, or within most definitions of the first trimester, according to estimates by the Guttmacher Institute, which favors abortion rights. About 5.5 percent of abortions take place after 15 weeks, with just 1.3 percent at 21 weeks or longer.


Increasingly, there is a period when premature births and late abortions begin to overlap. The CDC recorded almost 22,000 births between 20 and 27 weeks. Babies born before 25 weeks are considered extremely preterm, with vital organs such as heart, lungs and brain very immature. But the survival rate has climbed to 30 percent for 22-week babies and 55 percent for 23-week babies, according to a 2022 study.


Some states record whether a fetus was born alive during an abortion and whether efforts were made to save it. Seven were born alive in Florida in 2022, nine in Arizona in 2020, one in Texas in 2021 and five in Minnesota in 2021. A CDC study of 143 cases between 2003 and 2014 found that most died within hours, with only 4.2 percent surviving for more than 24 hours.


“Crime is at a 50-year low in Florida.”
— DeSantis


This statement is based on incomplete data, according to the Marshall Project, an online journalism organization that focuses on criminal justice issues.

“About half of the agencies that police more than 40% of the state’s population are missing from figures the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) used for a statewide estimation,” the news organization said.

Participation in national data collection is even lower, with less than eight percent of Florida’s police departments included in an FBI federal database. Many of the largest, such as the Miami Police Department, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office and the St. Petersburg Police Department, are missing from the national numbers.

It is impossible, then, to compare Florida’s crime rate with that of other states. And in any case, the crime rate in Florida has been steadily declining for three decades.


“We have a crime wave in this country.”
— Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy

This is a bit out of date. Crime spiked during the pandemic, and though rates are still higher than before the pandemic, homicides are dropping in dozens of major cities, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Examining homicides in 30 cities that make homicide data readily available, an analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice found that the number of killings in the first half of 2023 fell by 9.4 percent compared with the first half of 2022.

Moreover, gun assaults (-5.6 percent), robberies (-3.6 percent), nonresidential burglaries (-5 percent), larcenies (-4.1 percent), residential burglaries (-3.8 percent) and aggravated assaults (-2.5 percent) fell in the first six months of this year compared with the same period last year. However, car thefts continued to increase.

FBI data shows that the nationwide violent crime rate peaked in 1991 with 758.2 crimes per 100,000 people; in 2020, the rate was 398.5. The nationwide homicide rate reached a high in 1991, at 9.8 per 100,000 population. By 2019, it had dropped to 5.1.


“Not only weaponization in the Department of Justice against political opponents, but also look at the parents who show up at school board meetings. They’re called, under this DOJ, domestic terrorists.”
— Scott


This is a frequent GOP talking point but it’s false. Attorney General Merrick Garland has never equated parents to terrorists, and in fact he told Congress he “can’t imagine” a circumstance under which that would happen.


This all started with a Sept. 29, 2021, letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) that asked President Biden for federal resources to help monitor “threats of violence and acts of intimidation” against public school board members and other school officials. Five days later, Garland issued a memo addressed to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and federal prosecutors. He called for action within 30 days to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats” against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff.


Garland’s memo never mentioned domestic terrorism, but the NSBA letter that prompted it included a line that asserted “these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” There was enough blowback to that language that on Oct. 22, the NSBA apologized for the letter, saying “there was no justification for some of the language included.” A new executive director for the association was installed, the letter was deleted from the NSBA website, and the association announced in February that it had launched an independent review of how the letter was created.

Nevertheless, the Justice Department never equated parents to domestic terrorists.
When questioned by Republicans in congressional hearings, Garland and other top Justice officials have insisted that they do not think concerned parents are terrorists. “I can’t imagine any circumstance in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children, nor can I imagine a circumstance where they would be labeled as domestic terrorism,” Garland told the House Judiciary Committee.


“The Biden administration wanted to put 87,000 people in the IRS instead of giving the money we need to our own Border Patrol.”
— North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum


“Let’s fire the 87,000 IRS agents and hire or double the number of Border Patrol agents.”
— Scott


This 87,000 figure is a common GOP talking point but it is wildly exaggerated to speak of “agents” as Scott did. When Congress passed a bill to provide the IRS with an additional $80 billion in funding over 10 years, that money was to be used in part to hire 86,852 full-time employees in the next decade. But many of those employees would not be enforcement “agents” but people hired to improve information technology and customer service. Treasury officials say that because of attrition, after 10 years of increasing spending, the size of the agency will have grown only 25 to 30 percent when the hiring burst is completed.

The administration’s strategic plan for the IRS, released in April, estimated that an additional 1,543 full-time employees would be hired for enforcement in 2023, or about 15 percent of newly hired staff. That would grow to 7,239 in 2024, or 37 percent of new staff.

Biden administration officials have pledged that enforcement efforts to collect unpaid taxes will concentrate on those earning more than $400,000.

“We secured the southern border and reduced illegal immigration by 90 percent.”
— Pence


Ninety percent is a cherry-picked number, apparently comparing May 2019, the highest month for border apprehensions during the Trump administration, with April 2020, when apprehensions plunged because of lockdowns at the start of the covid pandemic. Another complicating factor is that U.S. Customs and Border Protection changed the way it counted apprehensions during the pandemic, making apples-to-apples comparisons difficult because the numbers were inflated by people who were expelled for health policy reasons, not just enforcement actions. But generally, annual apprehensions increased during the Trump administration.


“We eliminated critical race theory from our K through 12 schools.”
— DeSantis


Critical race theory refers to an academic framework centered on the idea that racism is systemic, and not just demonstrated by individual people with prejudices. It is generally taught in higher education, such as law or graduate school, not at lower grade levels. So this is a bit of an empty boast. Educators, school officials and several Florida public school districts told PolitiFact that critical race theory wasn’t taught in Florida’s elementary, middle or high schools.
PolitiFact rated DeSantis’s claim as “mostly false,” saying that at most the state under DeSantis “rejected prospective teaching materials in recent years that it claimed was related to CRT. But questions remain about its rationale in several cases.”

“I did not grow up in money.”
— Ramaswamy


Earlier in the debate, Ramaswamy had said, “My parents came to this country with no money 40 years ago.” But then he went further later in the evening with the line “I did not grow up in money.” His parents did well enough, however, that in his book “Nation of Victims,” Ramaswamy wrote that by the time he was in sixth grade, he had a “comfortably middle-class family with two incomes.” His father worked for General Electric, which had a cost-cutting boss at the time, and he wrote that the fear of a layoff was ever present, so his father “tried to make himself indispensable” by becoming a patent attorney for the firm.


By the time he was 18, Ramaswamy had a stock portfolio significant enough that he earned $453 in dividends in 2002, according to his tax return. By his sophomore year in college, when he made about $3,500 in wage income, he earned $11,712 from dividends alone.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Lies, Trump

Fact-Checking Ramaswamy on Climate Change: Is It a Hoax?

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2023 //
10

Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post fact checker dug into Vivek Ramaswamy s claim that more people died from climate change policies than from climate change.

He wrote:

The climate change agenda is a hoax … The reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.”
— Vivek Ramaswamy, during the first GOP presidential primary debate, Aug. 23

We did an instant fact check of Wednesday’s presidential debate but decided to set aside this puzzling statement until we did more research.
Many have interpreted Ramaswamy’s comment that the “climate change agenda is a hoax” as a flat statement that climate change is a hoax. But that doesn’t seem accurate, because a moment later he referred to deaths from “actual climate change.” Instead, he appeared to be suggesting that policies used to stem climate change don’t deliver what they promise and thus are a hoax.


Ramaswamy, a business entrepreneur, is a fan of fossil fuels — in his closing statement he asserted that “fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity” — and many green energy projects, such as electric cars, seek to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. So that might be part of the reason for his skepticism.


At The Fact Checker, we’re interested in numbers; in discussing climate change, Ramaswamy offered a big one. He asserted that more people were dying of bad climate policies than climate change itself. What’s that about?


The Facts


When we called Kristie L. Ebi, a professor at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington, she was at a loss: “I would ask his staff — what climate policies?” She noted that President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is the first major U.S. green energy program passed into law and that “it is just starting.”m

Ebi paused. “I don’t understand.”


Neither did we. But Ramaswamy’s staff did not answer our queries on this statement — though it responded to another one. That’s often suspicious. It usually means the staff doesn’t have data to back up the boss’s claim. Despite diligent searching, we could not find any study that accounted for such deaths.


In other words, we’re missing half of Ramaswamy’s equation — deaths from climate change policies. But there are plenty of estimates on deaths from climate change around the world. Of course, these are all estimates, and so depend on a variety of assumptions. But they were produced by credible organizations.


The World Health Organization in 2014 concluded that between 2030 and 2050, an additional 250,000 deaths a year would take place because of climate change, mostly through hunger, communicable diseases, malaria and dengue fever — all fostered by longer rainy seasons. In 2030, there would be 38,000 deaths due to heat exposure in elderly people, 48,000 due to diarrhea, 60,000 due to malaria and 95,000 due to childhood undernutrition. Mitigation efforts between 2030 and 2050 would reduce deaths from undernutrition and diarrhea, the WHO said, but heat deaths would soar to 100,000 a year.


Ebi said the report is considered authoritative, but many experts now believe the potential deaths were significantly underestimated by WHO, perhaps even by half.


That’s the future. Looking backward, the World Meteorological Organization in May concluded that extreme weather, climate and water-related events caused 11,000 reported disasters between 1970 and 2021, resulting in just over 2 million deaths. Nine out of 10 deaths took place in developing countries. Economic losses amounted to $4.3 trillion.

Whether all of these deaths are the result of climate change could be subject to dispute. Many of the highest death tolls from extreme weather took place decades ago; better weather forecasting and improved disaster response have helped reduce death tolls. The highest death tolls listed by WMO are 300,000 from a 1983 drought in Ethiopia and 300,000 from a 1970 storm in Bangladesh. Among those on the top-10 list, the most recent was an estimate of nearly 56,000 dead in Russia from extreme temperatures in 2010.


Extreme heat is one of the most visible manifestations of climate change. The WHO reported in November that at least 15,000 people had died of heat in 2022, including nearly 4,000 deaths in Spain, more than 1,000 in Portugal, more than 3,200 in Britain and about 4,500 deaths in Germany. Europe is the fastest-warming region in the world, with average temperatures spiking since 1961.


In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a steady increase in deaths from high temperatures since 2014, when 407 were recorded, to 2022, when 1,714 were recorded. The figures jump around a bit — in 1999, 2006, and 2011 there were more than 1,000 heat-related fatalities — but the trend has been clear for the past six years.


Again, not every heat-related death can be attributed to climate change. A well-regarded study published in 2021 in the journal Nature Climate Change found that, on average, 37 percent of heat deaths in warm seasons could be attributed to climate change.

We should note that on social media earlier this month, Ramaswamy posted that “the climate disaster death rate has declined by 98% over the last century, even as carbon emissions have risen,” attributing that decline to fossil fuels. Not only is that different from what he said in the debate, but experts say better weather forecasting and warning systems are largely responsible.
Harvard-led research published in 2021 determined that the burning of fossil fuel was responsible for 1 out of 5 deaths worldwide. That adds up to more than 8 million people a year — a population the size of New York City.


The Pinocchio Test


No matter how you slice it, credible research has concluded that thousands of people a year die because of the effects of climate change. We can’t find data that suggests green energy policies actually kill even more people — and Ramaswamy’s campaign did not provide any source for his claim. He earns Four Pinocchios.

Categories Environment, Extremism, Lies

Thom Hartmann’s Debate Prep: Biden’s Accomplishments in Three Years

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2023 //
44

The Republican debates, starting tonight, will attack President Biden relentlessly. Thom Hartmann has compiled a list of Biden’s accomplishments to counter the lies and exaggerations of Republican contenders for the nomination.

He writes:

The first Republican debate of the 2024 election cycle is tonight, and while all the drama seems focused on whether or not anybody beyond Chris Christie will take a serious swing at Trump, odds are most of the evening’s time will be devoted to trashing President Joe Biden.

So, to help keep you sane through all the lies and BS — and the fog you may be in by the end of the debate if your drinking game involved the word “woke” — here’s a quick summary* of the things that Biden has accomplished (with a little help from Democrats in Congress) in his first two-and-a-half years in office.

First of all, Joe Biden has restored trust, confidence, and faith in the honesty, credibility, and integrity of America. He doesn’t suck up to dictators like Trump did, and doesn’t lie to Americans or our allies. He’s restored independence to the Department of Justice and funding and support to regulatory agencies like the EPA.

Over united Republican opposition, the Biden administration has succeeded in lowering most Americans’ cost of living. The Inflation Reduction Act has reduced inflation to a full point lower than it was when Reagan was running his “Morning in America” ads in 1984 (unemployment is several points lower, too!).

Because of that law, for the first time, Medicare is able to negotiate the price of certain high-cost drugs: a month’s supply of insulin for seniors is capped at $35, Medicare beneficiaries pay $0 out of pocket for recommended adult vaccines, and seniors’ out of pocket expenses at the pharmacy will be capped at $2,000 a year.

America has just completed the strongest two years of job growth in the history of our country. Nearly 11 million jobs have been created since President Biden took office — including 750,000 manufacturing jobs. The unemployment rate is at a 50-year low, and a record number of small businesses have started since Biden took office. Black Americans and Hispanic Americans have near record low unemployment rates and people with disabilities are experiencing record low unemployment.

We’re experiencing a boom in manufacturing and the construction of manufacturing facilities like we haven’t seen since before the Reagan Revolution began offshoring American factories and jobs. Companies have invested more than $300 billion in good jobs, many of them unionized, as America’s technical capabilities sharpen along with this job growth.

Biden has expanded services available to our veterans (after Trump cut them), including 31 new clinical sites and a comprehensive program to help the estimated 5 million veterans who, like President Biden’s son Beau, have been exposed to toxic chemicals as a result of their service to our country.

President Biden brought together Democrats and Republicans to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first major piece of gun safety legislation in three decades. The law will save lives by:

— requiring young people ages 18 to 21 to undergo enhanced background checks; 
—narrowing the “boyfriend loophole” to keep guns out of the hands of convicted dating partners;
— funding crisis interventions, including extreme risk protection orders (“red flag”) laws; 
— making significant investments to address the mental health crisis in America, including in our schools; 
— clarifying who needs to register as a federally licensed gun dealer and run background checks before selling a single weapon; 
— and making gun trafficking and straw purchases distinct federal crimes.

Over ten years ago, President Biden announced his support for marriage equality, becoming the highest-ranking U.S. government official to do so. Building on his longstanding support and generations of civil rights advocacy, President Biden signed historic bipartisan legislation protecting marriage for same-sex and interracial couples.

And the President took historic steps to advance full equality for LGBTQI+ Americans, including reversing the discriminatory ban on transgender servicemembers in the military, strengthening non-discrimination protections in health care, housing, education, and employment, and ensuring that transgender Americans can access government support and services.

Biden has put a more diverse group of people on the federal judiciary than any president in history. Sixty-six percent of his nominees have been women and 65 percent were people of color, including the Supreme Court’s first Black woman justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson.

After Putin declared war on democracy and launched a terrorist invasion of Ukraine, targeting civilians and using rape as a weapon of war, President Biden has brought the world together to stand up to a fascist autocracy and defend Europe’s largest democracy.

Following Trump’s humiliating groveling before Putin and attacks on NATO, the European Union, and our democratic allies around the world, President Biden has rebuilt the American alliances that have, in some cases, stood for over two centuries. Sweden and Finland have joined NATO, and China appears to be re-thinking their belligerent attitude toward Taiwan after last week’s meeting and agreements between the leaders of the US, South Korea, and Japan.

After Trump unilaterally closed all but one of our air bases in Afghanistan to maliciously make his successor’s job more difficult, the Biden administration ended the war in Afghanistan that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had lied us into. He’s also decapitated the leadership of ISIS and El Qaeda.

Ever since six Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted American women’s right to abortion (and multiple Republicans are now trying to ban birth control), President Biden has stood up for women’s healthcare rights. He’s signed several Executive Orders to protect access to reproductive healthcare (including for our military). When 19 Republican state attorneys general demanded the healthcare records of women who’ve sought abortions in more than thirty states, Biden signed an Executive Order strengthening patient privacy.

The Biden administration rolled out a plan to cut as much as $20,000 from the debt carried by America’s student borrowers (student debt of these proportions, the direct result of the Reagan Revolution, does not exist in any other nation on Earth). When a Republican lawsuit before the Supreme Court blocked his efforts, he announced a plan to provide millions of borrowers with more affordable monthly student loan payments through changes to income-driven repayment plans.

While Red states still put people in prison for years for possessing a single marijuana cigarette, President Biden pardoned allAmericans who’ve ever been convicted of a federal pot offense. He’s more recently initiated a multi-agency review of the drug’s Schedule 1 status, with an eye to decriminalizing it nationwide.

After centuries of police violence against Black people and other minorities, Biden signed a landmark executive order on safe, effective, and accountable policing that mandated federal reforms such as banning chokeholds, restricting no-knock entries, creating a national police accountability database, and restricting the transfer of military equipment to local police departments.

Through over a hundred executive actions and the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden has finally put America on course to cut our emissions in half by 2030 and to get to net-zero by 2050. He also protected more lands and waters in his first year than any President since John F. Kennedy.

While Republicans continue to strip people off Red state Medicaid rolls in their pursuit of cruelty, Biden expanded the Affordable Care Act. Millions can now find healthcare for $10 a month or less, and most Americans will see an Obamacare saving of an average of $800 a year.

Since he took office, there has been a combined 50 percent increase in enrollment in states that use HealthCare.gov and the nation’s uninsured rate is historically low at 8 percent. Over 16 million Americans signed up for quality, affordable health coverage, the highest number ever produced in an Obamacare open enrollment period.

Perhaps the most important accomplishment of President Biden has been re-aligning the Democratic Party with its progressive base. Biden worked hand-in-hand with Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders to put forward a sweeping progressive agenda involving an investment of over $5 trillion in America and American working people.

Although united opposition from Republicans and a handful of sellout Democrats (including Manchin, Sinema, and the “corporate problem solvers”) forced him to cut the program back, it is still revolutionary given the past 40 years of bipartisan embrace of neoliberalism. 

Reversing the anti-organized-labor trend started by Reagan that continued through the Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, President Biden has aggressively promoted unions and unionization as essential to the future of working people in America.

President Biden also worked with and helped Nancy Pelosi pass through the House the For The People Act, which would have rolled back much of Citizens United and ended most Republican voter suppression by asserting Americans’ absolute right to vote. Had he not been betrayed by Manchin and Sinema, it would now be law.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (founded by Bernie) has gone from the handful of members (fewer than 10) it was when I did fundraisers for them more than a decade ago to being one of the strongest and largest in Congress (104 members right now). While this isn’t Biden’s doing and much credit goes to its members, Biden is the first Democratic president since LBJ to fully embrace progressives in Congress and fast-track their legislation. 

Biden has also:

— Set new policies to reduce super pollutants like HFCs and methane to protect communities and reduce emissions fueling climate change
— Advanced cutting-edge research on cancer and other diseases through the ARPA-H initiative
— Signed legislation to put more cops on the beat and invest in community policing
— Signed the Electoral Count Act, which takes long overdue steps to protect the integrity of our elections
— Lowered the cost of hearing aids by making them available over the counter
— Created more manufacturing jobs in 2022 than in any single year in nearly 30 years
— Signed an Executive Order to encourage competition across industries
— Took action to lower energy costs for families
— Lowered seniors’ health care expenses, including by capping out of pocket expenses on prescription drugs for seniors at $2,000 per year, ensuring that people enrolled in Medicare will not pay more than $35 for a month’s supply of insulin, and recipients will receive free vaccines
— Accelerated adoption of electric vehicles by reducing costs for families, jumpstarted the first national EV charging network, and made historic investments into EV batteries and materials
— Rejoined the Paris Agreement on day one to reassert the United States’ global leadership to combat the climate crisis
— Jumpstarted the American offshore wind industry and convened the nation’s first federal-state offshore wind partnership
— Set new policies to reduce super pollutants like HFCs and methane to protect communities and reduce emissions fueling climate change
— Lowered the deficit with the single largest annual reduction in American history
— Secured commitments from 20 leading internet providers to increase speeds and cut prices
— Signed legislation to reauthorize and strengthen the Violence Against Women Act
— Awarded the most ever federal contracting dollars to small businesses and disadvantaged small businesses
— Reignited the Cancer Moonshot with the goal of cutting the cancer death rate by at least half over the next 25 years
— Appointed a record number of women and people of color to serve in his Administration
— Hosted the first White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health in over 50 years and released a National Strategy to end hunger and reduce diet-related diseases and disparities by 2030
— Awarded more than $1 billion to initiate cleanup and clear the backlog of 49 previously unfunded Superfund sites, over $250 million to clean up hundreds of contaminated brownfield sites, and $725 million for abandoned mine lands
— Restored protections for Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monuments and designated Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument to conserve our lands and waters, honor our nation’s veterans, protect Tribal cultural resources, and support jobs and America’s outdoor recreation economy
— Signed an Executive Order on Improving Public Safety and Criminal Justice for Native Americans and Addressing the Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People
— Invested historic funding for Tribal governments and Native communities, and
— Mailed over 740 million free COVID-19 tests directly to tens of millions of Americans

Below are a set of handy memes you can copy and paste into social media if any of these accomplishments resonate with you or you want to back up claims you’re making online. Just right-click and choose to save, copy, or download them: they’re copyright free. 

Here’s to a fascinating (and, no doubt, infuriating) debate!

OPEN THE LINK TO SEE HARTMANN’S MEMES.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Funding, Health, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Maureen Dowd: Trump Is a Sore Loser and a Fool

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2023 //
31

Maureen Dowd is a regular columnist for the New York Times. Here she reviews Trump’s ongoing coup. Dowd refers to Trump at the end of the article as an Amadán. Carol Burris, who is of Irish origin, sent the following explanation: “She calls him amadán at the end, which in Irish is a fool. But the full terminology, “amadán dubh,” comes from Irish folklore and refers to the “dark fool” or “dark fairy.” Amadán Dubh is a trickster fairy found in Irish folklore, and is the ‘bringer of madness and oblivion.’ That he is.”

Maureen Dowd wrote:

WASHINGTON — The man who tried to overthrow the government he was running was held Thursday by the government he tried to overthrow, a few blocks from where the attempted overthrow took place and a stone’s throw from the White House he yearns to return to, to protect himself from the government he tried to overthrow.

Donald Trump is in the dock for trying to cheat America out of a fair election and body-snatch the true electors. But the arrest of Trump does not arrest the coup.

The fact is, we’re mid-coup, not post-coup. The former president is still in the midst of his diabolical “Who will rid me of this meddlesome democracy?” plot, hoping his dark knights will gallop off to get the job done.

Trump is tied with President Biden in a New York Times/Siena College poll, and if he gets back in the Oval, there will be an Oppenheimer-size narcissistic explosion, as he once more worms out of consequences and defiles democracy. His father disdained losers and Trump would rather ruin the country than admit he lost.

The Trump lawyer John Lauro made it clear they will use the trial to relitigate the 2020 election and their cockamamie claims. Trump wasn’t trying to shred the Constitution, they will posit; he was trying to save it.

“President Trump wanted to get to the truth,” Lauro told Newmax’s Greg Kelly after the arraignment, adding: “At the end he asked Mr. Pence to pause the voting for 10 days, allow the state legislatures to weigh in, and then they could make a determination to audit or re-audit or recertify.”

In trying to debunk Jack Smith’s obstruction charges, Lauro confirmed them. Trying to halt the congressional certification is the crime.

Smith’s indictment depicts an opéra bouffe scene where “the Defendant” (Trump) and “Co-Conspirator 1” (Rudy Giuliani) spent the evening of Jan. 6 calling lawmakers attempting “to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” by sowing “knowingly false allegations of election fraud.” Trump melodramatically tweeted about his “sacred landslide election victory” being “unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots.”

Giuliani left a voice mail message for a Republican senator saying they needed “to object to numerous states and raise issues” to delay until the next day so they could pursue their nefarious plan in the state legislatures.

Two words in Smith’s indictment prove that the putz knew his push for a putsch was dishonest: “too honest.” Bullying and berating his truant sycophant, Mike Pence, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, Trump told his vice president, “You’re too honest.”

The former vice president is selling “Too honest” merchandise, which, honestly, won’t endear him to the brainwashed base. Pence’s contemporaneous notes helped Smith make his case.

It’s strange to see Pence showing some nerve and coming to Smith’s aid, after all his brown-nosing and equivocating. He and Mother, who suppressed her distaste for Trump for years, were the most loyal soldiers; in return, according to an aide, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows saidTrump felt Pence “deserved” to be hanged by the rioters.

Pence told Fox News on Wednesday that Trump and his advisers wanted him “essentially to overturn the election.”“It wasn’t just that they asked for a pause,” Pence said, at odds with Lauro. “The president specifically asked me and his gaggle of crackpot lawyers asked me to literally reject votes.”

Ron DeSantis, another presidential wannabe who enabled Trump for too long, acknowledged on Friday that “all those theories that were put out did not prove to be true.” But Trump and his henchmen were busy ratcheting up the lunacy.

“IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” Trump threatened on Truth Social on Friday.

On the same day and platform, he accused “the corrupt Biden DOJ” of election interference. Exquisite projection. In Trump’s warped view, it’s always the other guy who’s doing what Trump is actually doing.

Kari Lake told House Republicans to stop pursuing a Biden impeachment and just decertify the 2020 election because Biden is not “the true president.” Lake said of Trump: “This is a guy who’s already won. He won in 2016. He won even bigger in 2020. All that Jan. 6 was, was a staged riot to cover up the fact that they certified a fraudulent election.”

Before laughing off this absurdity, consider the finding from CNN’s new poll: Sixty-nine percent of Republicans and those leaning Republican believe Biden is an illegitimate president, with over half saying there is “solid evidence” of that.

While Trump goes for the long con, or the long coup — rap sheet be damned, it’s said that he worries this will hurt his legacy. He shouldn’t. His legacy is safe, as the most democracy-destroying, soul-crushing, self-obsessed amadán ever to occupy the Oval. Amadán, that’s Gaelic for a man who grows more foolish every day.

Categories Accountability, Cheating, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Lies, Pence, Republicans, Trump

Bob Shepherd: Trump’s Cuckoo Coup

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2023 //
62

Bob Shepherd, our blog polymath, reviews the current status and likely future of The Former Guy.

The Next Cuckoo Coup

So, there are two kinds of Trump voters.

First, there are the Trumpanzees, true disciples of the Trump cult, some of whom show up on this blog from time to time to espouse some utterly lunatic notions from the Qanon-o-sphere: Trump won the 2020 election, Joe Biden sits atop a vast criminal empire, Hilary Clinton leads an international pedophile ring, Ukraine is run by Nazis, George Soros funds caravans of rapists and murderers who are overwhelming our borders, and so on. That’s about 60 percent of the Trump base. I say “notions” above, btw, because when a Trumpanzee talks or writes in imitation of the toddler English of the cult’s Glorious Leader, it all comes out in a geyser of crazy conspiracy theories, one after another in rapid succession, sounding very much like some bizarre political catechism from a low-budget Exorcist remake. These Trumpanzee ‘merkins think that Trump stands between them and black and brown people who hate EVERYTHING GOOD–America, Jesus, apple pie, guns. They think that Trump actually is a self-made billionaire and a Christian nationalist and that he gives a damn about them. He doesn’t.

Second, there are the Repugnican doctrinaire pragmatists who have been holding their noses since the escalator ride down to new lows in American politics. These are evangelicals, Libertarians, and other supporters of Reich-wing policies like outlawing abortion, eliminating social services for the poor, regressive taxation, building a wall to keep out immigrants, giving companies the freedom to pollute at will, enabling the assertion of a right to religious bigotry in public fora, banning books from libraries, withdrawal from international treaties and obligations, and so on, who know Trump for what he is–an amoral career criminal and conman, a seditious, dishonest, irreligious, murderous, traitorous, profoundly ignorant and stupid RICO boss who can nonetheless be counted on to sign ANY piece of Reich-wing legislation put in front of him. So, while Trump might not actually be against abortion (he vociferously supported it in the past when he was trying and failing at being a playboy), he will do whatever the Reich-wing wants because he doesn’t care about anything except adulation from his base and, of course, extracting money from Trumpanzees. So, that’s the Hold-Your-Nose-ers, the Trumpeteers, the other 40 percent of the Trumplings.

So, because of the size of the Trumpanzee cult, it appears at present (that is, ever since Ron DeSantis basically threw away his opportunity of a lifetime because he evidently has the political instincts and charm of a rabid coyotes or parasitic wasp larvae) that no one has any chance of winning the 2024 Repugnican Presidential nomination EXCEPT Trump, so most of the Nose-holder Trumplings now have two choices: they can hope against hope that The Loser will pull off another 2016 victory-by-a-hair-on-the-end-of-an-Adderall-covered-orange-schnoz OR that he will be convicted and sent to prison before the election so that someone else can run in his stead.

Meanwhile, the Orange One has been using increasingly martial rhetoric (against judges and prosecutors, no less!). Having lost the defamation case brought against him by E. Jean Carroll and having been determined in that case by a jury and judge to have committed rape, he now has been indicted on 78 felony charges, with many more in the pipeline. His choices are limited. Trump can liquidate his assets and board the Trump plane to Russia to stay under the wing of his dying handler, the kleptocratic state Mafia boss, defenestrater of dissidents, and now indicted international war criminal Tsar Vladimir Putin, or he can whip up his base to carry out an actual Civil War. We know, now, that Trump was furious that he was not allowed by his own Secret Service to go with the mob to the Capitol and fulfill his fantasy of being an actual martial leader. And we’ve known for a long, long time that he is a delusional madman. Perhaps, in extremis, he is actually starting to believe that there can be a coup, an insurrection, that can bring him to power. For even he, crazy as he is, knows that HE CANNOT WIN IN 2024. He has lost and lost and lost in the past, and he has even less support now. He wishes he could win. Then he could pardon himself and crawl back under the protection of presidential immunity. But he can’t.

So, how does this play out?

I suspect that the more moderate right-wingers, KNOWING that he will lose in 2024, are working behind the scenes right now to make sure that he is convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors before the election and thus made ineligible for the presidency. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if some wealthy Repugnican donors are, even as you read this, calling up disaffected members of the former Trump team (which would be almost all of them, lol) and saying, “Let’s get this guy out of the way so we can win; cooperate with the investigations.”

Meanwhile, ex-cadet Bone Spurs is at Mar-a-lago or Bedminster fantasizing about leading a Civil War against Jack and Tanya and Alvin and Fani and the Marxists and about millions of members of the Trumpanzee Citizens’ Militia turning out to make him Glorious Leader for Life–January 6th having been a dress rehearsal, his Beer Hall Putsch, prior to the main event.

Here’s the thing: It ain’t gonna happen. The Trumpanzees have seen what happens when they actually put themselves on the line for him: he doesn’t join them, and he doesn’t save them. They go down. He goes to lunch and golf.

“I’ll call it a day,” the con man did say,
“I’m still president anyway.”
Then he farted and stood
and called it all good,
and went to his golf course to play.

What if he gave a coup and it didn’t happen?

I guess we would then have people debating whether he should be charged and prosected and sent to prison for THAT.

Categories Elections, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Can Humanity Survive Trump and the GOP?

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2023 //
38

Thom Hartmann is an insightful, incisive journalist and blogger. In this terrifying post, he describes what to expect if the Republican Party wins the presidency.

Please read and react.

Thom Hartmann

So, yeah, let’s take seriously the existential threat a GOP president represents to our nation, the nations of the world, and all life on Earth. The stakes have literally never been higher…

Hartmann writes:

Every day that goes by, even with yesterday’s newest indictment, looks more and more like Donald Trump will be the GOP’s standard bearer in 2024. After all, his popularity stood at 44 percent when NY DA Alvin Bragg indicted him; it then rose to 49 percent when he was indicted in the documents crime; following his conviction for raping E. Jean Caroll it rose to 54 percent among Republicans.

But even if he’s not the candidate, Republican primary voters will demand a candidate with the same affection for Putin and other dictators; the same disdain for racial, religious, and gender minorities; the same abusive attitude toward women and girls; the same faux embrace of Confederate and hillbilly values and hatred of city-dwellers and college graduates; the same cavalier attitude toward guns and fossil fuels.

There’s also the growing possibility that Trump or another MAGA Republican could win the White House. Yesterday, both the New York Times and CNN reported on polls showing that Trump and Biden are right now at a dead heat.

And even if Trump collapses in the polls as the result of the indictments, which is unlikely (Netanyahu is under indictment for bribery and some pretty terrible stuff and he just got re-elected), there are numerous other Republicans who would love to take his place. 

And no matter who it is, if they are MAGA inclined, Trump has shown them where there are levers of power and corruption that are consequential in ways that they never dreamed of before him.

Joe Biden, at 81, faces multiple possible personal scenarios that could pull him out of the race. No Labels and the Green Party’s candidates (presumably Joe Manchin and Cornell West) could pull enough votes from Biden to hand the election to Trump as Jill Stein did in three swing states in 2016 (she pulled more votes in each of those states than Trump’s margin of victory).

The prosecution of Trump (which almost certainly won’t be resolved before the election — and it’s not even remotely possible that appeals would be resolved by then — because of Garland’s dithering for two years) could backfire politically and make him into a popular martyr even with Republicans who disliked him before.

And don’t discount the impact Putin throwing millions of rubles into social media can have: his previous fleet of trolls overwhelming social media helped get Trump elected in 2016 and drove Brits to make the crazy decision to separate from the European Union.

So, it’s important to examine what a second Trump or 2025 MAGA presidency would look like, what effect it would have on America and the world, and how it will impact average Americans. 

Forewarned, after all, is forearmed, and all these predictions are based on past behavior and public statements:

Women make up 51 percent of the American populace but they won’t be spared by a MAGA presidency.

MAGA voters celebrate Trump’s “proof of manhood” through his multiple sexual assaults, from his alleged rape of 13-year-old Katie Johnson (with Jeffrey Epstein) to the adult E. Jean Carroll and more than 20 others. He publicly bragged that he just “grabs them by the…” whenever he wants, and Republicans — including more than half of all white women voters — ran to the polls to mark his name on their ballots.

The MAGA base supports bans on abortion: the white nationalist part of that base is fervent about having more white babies (and middle class white women are the most likely to get abortions when they’re legal, according to these people).

Catholics and evangelicals even support bans on birth control, an issue that’s already been floated by Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and in several state legislatures. Fully 195 Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against protecting birth control from state bans. And all of the Republicans on the Court are conservative Catholics (Gorsuch attends his wife’s church, but was raised Catholic).

Additionally, MAGA Republicans support ending no-fault divorce and limiting alimony, putting women back under husband’s thumbs; lowering the marriage age for girls to as low as 12, as Republicans have already attempted in Idaho, Wyoming, Tennessee, Missouri, and Louisiana; and seizing and monitoring the health and doctor’s records of all childbearing-age women to catch early pregnancies so those women can be detained or surveilled “for their own good” (yes, it’s already happened).

The LGBTQ+ community will come under assault in ways not seen for decades.

Like in Germany in 1933, the trans communitywill be the first to come under assault, a process that’s already begun as Red state after Red state enacts laws banning gender-affirming healthcare. Drag queens are already criminalized in multiple states.

Gays and lesbians won’t be far behind; Republicans are already trying to outlaw gay marriage and adoption. Three-quarters of all House Republicans voted against a Democratic bill protecting gay marriage; all but one Republican on the House Appropriations Committee voted for a Republican bill that would allow states to ban gay and lesbian parents from adopting.

Stochastic terrorism against the LGBTQ+ community will explode, and, in a throwback to the 1980s (when Reagan refused to say the word “AIDS” for 8 long years as tens of thousands, including close friends of mine, died) and before, rural law enforcement will often yawn when queer people are assaulted or even murdered.

Terror against racial and religious minorities will become routine.

The last time Trump was president and sanctioned a “very fine people on both sides” climate of hate and bigotry, incidents of lone-wolf terrorism exploded. Jews executed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue; Blacks gunned down in a supermarket in Buffalo and executed at Mother Emmanuel church in Charleston; Hispanics slaughtered in El Paso. All of the killers cited or wrote what were essentially MAGA or MAGA-aligned propaganda instruments as part of their motivation.

When minority communities rise up in indignation and step out into the streets to demand protection from roving bands of street Nazis, armed vigilantes will threaten and even kill them with impunity. As I noted yesterday, Kyle Rittenhouse is now lionized by Republicans and three states have passed into law provisions that hold people who kill protestors with their cars free from prosecution.

American support for democracy around the world will end and Putin will destroy Ukraine.

During his first four years, Trump did everything he could to ridicule and minimize our democratic allies and suck up to strongman dictators around the world.

He tried to blackmail Ukraine’s president and then withheld defensive weapons from that country when Zelenskyy refused to go along.

He told the world that he trusts Putin more than America’s intelligence services. After meeting privately with Putin, he demanded a list of all of America’s spies and their stations around the world; within months, the CIA reported that their assets were being murderedwith an unprecedented speed and efficiency.

He or his son-in-law conveyed top-secret documents to the brutal murderer MBS in Saudi Arabia that enabled him to stage a coup and seize control of that nation, a gift for which the Trump family has already received at least $2.5 billion with more coming every day.

Trump has now said that he will end the Ukraine war “in 24 hours.” His strategy? As Mike Pence (who would know) said, “The only way you’d solve this war in a day is if you gave Vladimir Putin what he wanted.”

Putin’s allies, in fact, have told the press that his main strategy for seizing all of Ukraine is to wait for Trump to re-take the White House (and, of course, he’ll do everything he can to make that happen). And just last week, in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump came right out and saidthat he’d end all arms support to Ukraine on day one.

Seeing that America will no longer defend democracies, China will take Taiwan and North Korea may well attack South Korea. It could trigger a nuclear World War III, although instead of America being the “bulwark of freedom” as we were in the 1940s, that burden will fall to Europe, Japan, and Australia.

Reagan’s Republican War on Workers will resume and even pick up steam.

The Heritage Foundation already has a 900+ page plan to change the American government, stripping the DOJ, FBI, FCC and the Fed of their independence while ending most union rights and effectively outlawing strikes.

Billionaires will receive more tax cuts, Social Security and Medicare will be fully privatized, and public schools will be replaced with vouchers for private, segregated, religious academies as has already happened under Republican administrations in Arizona and Florida.

The EPA and other regulatory agencies that protect workers, consumers, and the environment will be gutted to the point of impotence in the face of corporate and billionaire assaults.

Efforts to mitigate the climate emergency will be rolled back and fossil fuel extraction and use will explode.

The world just lived through the hottest month in human history; ocean waters off Florida are at the temperature Jacuzzi recommends for their hot tubs; the world’s oceans are dying and winter sea ice isn’t forming in Antarctica.

Right now we humans are adding heat to the atmosphere (because of higher levels of greenhouse gasses) at a rate identical to 345,600 Hiroshima bombs going off in our atmosphere every day: four nuclear bombs per second, every second, minute, and hour of every day.

In response, our planet is screaming at us.

Fossil fuel billionaires and their shills, however, are unconcerned as they continue to fund climate denial nonprofits and Republican politicians who claim it’s all a hoax. They apparently believe their vast wealth will insulate them from the most dire effects.

And they’re probably right: a third of poverty-stricken Bangladesh was underwater this year, as drought, floods, wildfires, heat domes, bomb cyclones, tornadoes, derechos, and typhoons ravaged America with unprecedented ferocity. Increasingly, those without the financial means to withstand weather disasters are killed or wiped out, losing their family homes and often their livelihoods.

Scientists tell us we may have as few as fiveyears, and certainly not more than 20, to end our use of fossil fuels and fully transition to clean renewables. Even within the five-year window it’s technically feasible, but if Trump or another MAGA Republican is elected, civilization-ending weather and the death of much of humanity is virtually assured.

We must wake up America.

So, yeah, let’s take seriously the existential threat a MAGA president represents to our nation, the nations of the world, and all life on Earth. The stakes have literally never been higher.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Environment, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, For-Profit, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Guns, Health, History, Ignorance, Injustice, Insane, Lies, Politics, Privatization, Racism, Vouchers

Michael Hiltzik: More About Florida’s Hapless African-American Studies Curriculum

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
5

Michael Hiltzik is the business columnist for The Los Angrles Times, but he has important things to say about Education and the culture wars. In this post, he adds to what we have learned about DeSantis’s efforts to show that slavery was sometimes beneficial to slaves. Some of them—not the ones picking cotton under the blazing sun—learned a trade. Of course, that would not apply to the many slaves who lived and died as slaves. What the Florida excuse-makers don’t get is that we use today’s values to judge slavery, not the values of the slave owners.

Hiltzik writes:

If there’s a bet that you will almost always win, it’s that no matter how crass and dishonest a right-wing claim may seem to be, the reality will be worse.

That’s the case with Florida’s effort to whitewash the truth about slavery via a set of standards for teaching African American history imposed on the state’s public school teachers and students.

The curriculum, you may recall, was condemned for a provision that the curriculum cover “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Dogs and Negroes Not Welcome

— Sign posted until 1959 at the town line of Ocoee, Florida, site of a 1920 racial massacre

Another provision seemed to blame “Africans’ resistance to slavery” for the tightening of slave codes in the South that outlawed teaching slaves to read and write.

A section referring to “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” goes on to list five race riots and massacres from American history, every one of which was started by whites.

More on that in a moment. As the indispensable Charles P. Pierce put it, the Florida standards “look as though they were devised by Strom Thurmond on some very good mushrooms.”

I reported last week on this reprehensible project, which was publicly presented as the product of a work group of the state’s African American History Task Force.

Two members of the task force, William B. Allen and Frances Presley Rice, responded to the scathing reaction to the curriculum from Democrats and Republicans with a defensive statement purportedly on behalf of the entire work group.

“Some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted [sic],” the statement read. “This is factual and well documented.”

As I reported, however, of the 16 individuals Allen and Rice mentioned to support their assertion, nine never were slaves, seven were identified by the wrong trade and 13 or 14 did not learn their skills while enslaved. One, Betty Washington Lewis, whom Allen and Rice identified as a “shoemaker,” was white: She was George Washington’s younger sister and a slave owner.

Now it turns out that Allen and Rice were not speaking for the work group, but for themselves. Thanks to reporting by NBC News, we know that most of the work group’s 13 members opposed the language suggesting that slaves benefited from their enslavement.

NBC quoted several members anonymously as stating that two members pushed the provision — Allen and Rice. Members “questioned ‘how there could be a benefit to slavery,’” one work group member told NBC.

Others said that the work group met intermittently over the internet and did not collaborate with the state’s African American History Task Force, which was created in 1994 to oversee the curriculum for African American studies in Florida’s K-12 schools.

The work group’s standards were approved unanimously on July 19 by the state board of education, every member of which was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is running a natural experiment to see whether bigotry and racism can carry someone to the presidency.

We’ve recently learned more about Allen and Rice. Allen, as I reported earlier, is a retired professor of political science at Michigan State University. (The university removed his bio page from its website sometime in the last few days, but here’s an archived version.)

Allen served as chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under George H.W. Bush, but angered civil rights activists and members of the commission itself for taking a stand against legal protections for gay people.

At a 1989 conference in Anaheim sponsored by anti-gay Christian fundamentalists, Allen delivered a talk titled, “Blacks? Animals? Homosexuals? What is a Minority?”

Its theme was that treating gays and Black people as distinct minorities would relegate them to animal status. Allen said, “My title is as innocent as a title can be,” a position that prefigured his current defense of the Florida slavery standards as no big deal.

He’s listed as a fellow of the Claremont Institute, which has been funded by a galaxy of right-wing foundations. The institute lists among its senior fellows John Eastman, who is one of the four attorneys identified as “co-conspirators” in the federal indictment of former President Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, handed up Tuesday. Eastman is also the target of a California State Bar proceeding aimed at his disbarment for his alleged role in that effort.

As for Rice, she’s chair of the Sarasota-based National Black Republican Assn., which appears to have shared its business addresswith her home address. She identifies herself as “Dr. Frances Presley Rice,” but she doesn’t appear to have a medical degree or PhD; she does hold a juris doctor degree, but that’s just a law degree and doesn’t customarily bestow the “Dr.” designation on its holders.

Rice has conducted a years-long campaign to associate today’s Democratic Party with the Democrats of the 19th century, a pro-slavery party that shares none of its positions on Blacks or slavery with the Democrats of modern times.

The normalization of Florida’s slavery whitewash has been abetted by a supine press. On July 27, for example, Steve Inskeep, the host of NPR’s Morning Edition, conducted a servile interview in which he sat meekly by as Allen spewed unalloyed hogwash.

When Allen suggested that Black journalist Ida B. Wells had drawn “inspiration” from the slavery experience, Inskeep — had he been even minimally prepared — could have pointed out that the Mississippi-born Wells was 5½ months old when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on Jan. 1, 1863, and 3½ years old when the 13th Amendment abolished slavery.

Nor did Inskeep challenge Allen about the list of 16 supposed slaves that he and Rice issued in defense of their curriculum. The list had been out for a full week before the NPR interview. Inskeep didn’t mention it at all.

When Allen asserted that he was not the author of the curriculum, nor were any other members of the work group, the proper follow-up would have been: “Who wrote it, then?” Inskeep kept mum.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, tried to shoehorn Florida’s whitewashing of slavery into a “both-sides-do-it” framework.

The Post article suggests that the Florida curriculum and President Biden’s July 25 proclamation of a national monument dedicated to Emmett Till, a Black teenager tortured and lynched by a white mob in Mississippi in 1955 for purportedly offending a white woman, are two sides of a “roiling debate” over Black history.

Of course that’s absurd. Most Americans, and most Democrats, don’t see slavery as a topic worthy of reconsideration. That’s all on the Republican side, especially in Florida.

DeSantis and his stooges are pretending that the truth about America’s racist past should be suppressed for fear of making white children feel bad. It’s nothing but a play for the most bigoted members of the GOP base.

That brings us back to Florida’s curriculum. Provisions other than the one about the benefits of slavery aren’t getting the attention they deserve.

Take the part about “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.” This standard is illustrated in the text by references to race riots in Atlanta in 1906 and Washington, D.C., in 1919, and massacres in Ocoee, Fla. (1920); Tulsa (1921); and Rosewood, Fla. (1923) — rampages by white mobs lasting a day or more.

In what sense do these point to violence perpetrated by Black people? Pierce conjectures that they “might distressingly be referring to attempts by the victims of those bloody episodes to fight back.”

The Ocoee massacre occurred when the town’s Black residents attempted to vote. When a squadron of Klansmen hunted down a Black leader in his home, his daughter tried to prevent them from taking him by brandishing a rifle, which went off, slightly wounding a white member of the gang.

“A volley of gunfire erupted in both directions,” according to an account on the Florida History blog. In the aftermath, nearly 60 Black residents were dead, their community was razed to the ground, and those who survived were driven from the town, never to return. Until 1959, a sign at the town line read, “Dogs and Negroes Not Welcome.”

Is Ocoee supposed to be an example of “violence perpetrated … by African Americans”? Nothing would speak more eloquently to the true nature of the Florida standards for teaching Black history.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, DeSantis, Evil, Extremism, Florida, Freedom, History, Lies, Racism

Harvard Prof. Laurence Tribe Denounces Use of His Name by Trump Lawyer

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2023 //
40

Six unindicted co-conspirators were listed in Jack Smith’s federal indictment of Trump. One of them, according to the media, is Trump campaign lawyer Kenneth Cheseboro. In one of his memos to the Trump team, Chesebro cited his former Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. Tribe was outraged, and he wrote this article to show how Cheseboro had distorted his words.

Tribe wrote in Just Security:

Special Counsel Jack Smith has concludedthat he can prove that several private lawyers acted as co-conspirators in former President Donald Trump’s criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election. That conclusion, which is backed up by an enormous body of evidence, has significant implications for American democracy as well as for what it says about members of the legal profession. In the wake of this historic indictment, it is important for those of us with more information to come forward.

I am personally familiar with an aspect of the indictment’s documentary evidence that may shed light on the actions of one of the attorneys – Kenneth Chesebro — who is identified as Co-Conspirator 5 by the special counsel.

In a civil suit, Judge David Carter called the 2020 election interference scheme “a coup in search of a legal theory.” What I have to offer here can shed light on the anatomy of that fraud. It shows how the attorneys concocted arguments that gave the scheme an air of legitimacy but one that could not withstand public scrutiny. I know this well because a key memorandum drafted by Chesebro — which might otherwise appear relatively innocuous even in how it is discussed in the indictment — laid the foundation for the scheme grounded, in part, on misrepresenting my work. I know this especially well because of my prior communications with Chesebro.

I. Background

According to the indictment, the Trump attorneys participated in a “corrupt plan to subvert the federal government function by stopping Biden electors’ votes from being counted and certified” (para 54). They allegedly helped devise and implement central parts of the conspiracy. Those schemes include an effort to use false slates of electors to obstruct the congressional certification of the election and an effort to get Vice President Mike Pence to use his ceremonial role to interfere with the certification.

The special counsel alleges that Chesebro “assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding” (para 8). It is important to note that the indictment alleges that he and other attorneys’ criminal conduct involved knowingly misrepresenting facts (not just misrepresenting the law). For instance, the indictment states that Rudy Giuliani and Chesebro made factual claims they knew to be false to GOP electors in Pennsylvania to induce those electors to swear to certifications that the two attorneys knew to be fraudulent (paras 61-62).

Please open the link to read the rest of this fascinating article.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Lies, Trump

Read Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Indictment of Donald J. Trump

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2023 //
61

Inform yourself about the latest federal indictments of former President Donald J. Trump. Do not listen solely to what talking heads on the TV news say about the indictment.

Read it yourself.

When I read it, several points seemed especially noteworthy.

First, all of the incriminating evidence came from Republicans, most of whom were appointed by Trump to advise him as Justice Department officials and White House advisors.

Second, Trump was repeatedly told that he had lost the election. He was told this by a long list of high-level officials appointed by him.

Third, Trump was told repeatedly by state Republican leaders that his claims of voter fraud in specific states such as Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were wrong.

Fourth, no matter how many times Trump was told that there was no election fraud that would change the outcome, he continued to repeat the lies about dead voters, illegal voters, and biased voting machines in speeches and on Twitter. There was never any evidence of voter fraud, but Trump would not stop lying about it.

Fifth, Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman repeatedly told state officials about the scale of voter fraud in their states despite the lack of evidence for their claims.

Sixth, Trump and his co-conspirators devised a scheme to present alternate slates of electors in seven contested states. At first, they told the alternate electors that they would serve only if the courts determined that the results of the elections were illegal.

Seventh, since there were no successful court cases, the Trump strategy changed. He would pressure Mike Pence to recognize the alternate electors or to declare that he was returning the electoral votes to the states to investigate. Trump’s goal was to delay certification of Biden’s victory and to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the election.

Eighth, in the end, Trump’s conspiracy to block the peaceful transition of power was foiled because Pence would not go along with it. I read elsewhere that Pence consulted retired Federal Judge Mike Luttig, a conservative Republican. Luttig told Pence that his role on January 6 was purely ceremonial; he did not have the authority to change the outcome. Despite four years of obsequious loyalty to Trump, Pence stood up to Trump’s relentless pressure.

Lessons:

1. Our country avoided a major Constitutional crisis. If Pence had bowed to Trump, if Biden’s election had been canceled, the nation would have suffered grievously. The consequences would have been dire.

2. Trump knew that he lost the election. Almost all of his closest advisors told him so. But Trump is a sore loser. He refused to accept his loss. He simply ignored the facts and found a pod of true believers who conspired with him to overturn the election without regard to the vote, the Constitution or the good of democracy.

3. Trump and his co-conspirators are evil people who were ready to destroy our democracy rather than ceding power to the Biden administration.

4. I hope Trump is found guilty but I don’t believe he will ever serve a day in prison. He will be pardoned to avoid the spectacle of a former president in prison. However, in my view, the other conspirators are lawyers. They should lose their law licenses and serve time in prison.

Categories Accountability, Character, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Failure, Hoax, Injustice, Lies, Trump

Scott Maxwell: Florida Digs in Deeper on the Good Side of Slavery

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2023 //
12

Scott Maxwell is an excellent columnist for The Orlando Sentinel. He brings us up to date on Florida’s efforts to promote the bright side of slavery.

He writes:

Every week lately, Florida seems to make more headlines for trying to turn public schools into a political war zone. The two latest examples:

The Sentinel revealed the Florida Department of Education has hired a new political operative who’s working with the book-censoring Moms for Liberty — and won’t say how many of your tax dollars the state is paying him or even why.

Also, the state has approved new classroom videos made by a guy who admits his goal is “indoctrination.”

One video features a cartoon version of Christopher Columbus telling kids that, while slavery might not be great, “being taken as a slave is better than being killed.” Another tells students that one of the most important things kids “need to know” about slavery is that “White men led the world in putting an end to the abhorrent practice.”

White men as saviors is quite the top-line takeaway on slavery.

The Orlando Sentinel first broke the news about the new hire, revealing that the state had hired Terry Stoops, a guy who pushed GOP education policies in North Carolina, to lead its newly created Office of Academically Successful and Resilient Districts.

The office title sounds like gobbledygook. But what are Stoops’ job responsibilities? And how much are you, as a taxpayer, paying him? Well, the state wouldn’t answer either question.

Even Florida’s online employee-salary database somehow omitted Stoops.

But emails obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project — which is leading the fight against classroom book-banning and censorship — showed that Stoops seemed to be working as a state liaison to right-wing crusaders.

In one email, Stoops wrote a Volusia County school board member to say: “We would be happy to meet with the Conservative Coalition of School Board Members as a group to explore ways that our efforts may align.”

In another, he told Orange County school board member Alicia Farrant, a Moms for Liberty member leading Central Florida’s in-school book-banning crusade: “I just wanted to pass along a note to thank you for serving on the board and standing up for families.”

Just for argument’s sake, let’s say you think it’s a swell idea for government to use tax dollars to push a political agenda. What excuse could you possibly have for hiding from taxpayers how many of those dollars you’re using and for what allegedly public purpose?

In normal times, that secrecy would be big news. But that revelation was eclipsed by the even more disturbing news that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ education department had also decided to welcome videos into classrooms from a guy who admits his goal is indoctrination.

As the Miami Herald reported, the Department of Education said it had concluded that the controversial PragerU program “aligns to Florida’s revised civics and government standards” and “can be used as supplemental materials in Florida schools at district discretion.”

If you’re not familiar with Prager, you should first know that PragerU is an actual university in the same way Dr. Dre is an actual doctor. It’s not. Instead, it’s the creation of conservative radio show host Dennis Prager who freely admits his goal is to indoctrinate kids.

Just last month, at a Moms for Liberty event, Prager said that when critics say to him “you indoctrinate kids,” he responds that is true. “That’s a very fair statement,” he said. “But what is the bad about our indoctrination?”

In Florida, where DeSantis often decries the evils of indoctrination, we’re again reminded that every accusation is often a confession.

I encourage you to watch some of the PragerU videos for yourself.

In one video, a cartoon version of Columbus tells kids who ask about his support of slavery: “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?”

That’s quite a bar you’ve set for yourself, cartoon Chris. And for the kids.

Another video — “A Short History of Slavery,” narrated by conservative pundit Candace Owens — tells kids: “Here’s the first thing you need to know: Slavery was not ‘invented’ by White people.”

Yes, that’s actually “the first thing” PragerU thinks kids need to know about human captivity. Not how slavery destroyed generations of lives to help slavemasters enrich themselves. Or that, heaven forbid, that was wrong. But that White folks didn’t pioneer the system.

So were the harsh realities of human captivity at least the “second thing” kids need to know about slavery? Nope. According to PragerU and Owens, who is Black, the second-most important thing kids should know is that “White people were the first to put an end to slavery.”

So one of PragerU’s top two lessons on slavery is basically: Yay, White people!

Bizarre? Yes. Yet it seems to work well with the new Florida curriculum standards you read about last week — the ones that tell teachers to stress the “personal benefit” some slaves received in terms of learning job skills. And also with the laws GOP legislators passed that instruct educators to censor discussion about “systemic racism” and to sanitize history lessons that might upset some children’s parents.

The Freedom to Read organization is suggesting Florida families use the state’s new “parental rights” law to opt-out of PragerU’s indoctrination.

But it seems like it might be simpler to, oh, I dunno, maybe just not indoctrinate?

Maybe just teach history like it really happened, warts and all.

And maybe be fully transparent with taxpayer money and public positions.

Unfortunately, that all seems like too much to ask.

smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, History, Lies, Racism
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