Both Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh testified at their Senate hearings that they considered Roe v. Wade to be an established precedent.
Now, it appears that they will join with three other extremist justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, which has been in effect for half a century.
They both lied.
Is that perjury?
Amber Phillips reported in The Washington Post that the Michigan Republican Party selected a Trump-chosen person for the role of Secretary of State—the official who oversees and certifies elections. She sounds like a true believer in conspiracy theories:
Until the 2020 election, secretaries of state — at least at the state level — worked mostly under the radar, overseeing state elections and certifying the results. But then an election in a pandemic, combined with efforts by the sitting president to call into question the results, suddenly made the job a politically charged one.
That’s still true for the 2022 midterm elections. Donald Trump and his allies have recruited, supported and endorsed candidates who have denied the results of the 2020 election to run for secretary of state in key swing states. That has election-integrity experts worried that people who haven’t recognized basic election facts could be in charge of deciding who wins the 2024 presidential contest.
In Michigan, one of those candidates just got nominated to be on the ballot in November. Kristina Karamo is one of the loudest provocateurs among a dozen or so secretary of state candidates running on false election-fraud claims. She has Trump’s endorsement.
This weekend, in a sign of how much the grass roots of the Republican Party is with Trump on election fraud, the Michigan GOP voted to nominate her. In addition to denying election results without evidence, she has called schools “government indoctrination camps,” opposes the teaching of evolution and opposes coronavirus vaccines and childhood vaccines.
Thinks Trump won in 2022: check.
Hates public schools: check.
Opposes teaching about evolution: check.
Opposes COVID vaccines: check.
Opposes all childhood vaccines (polio, measles, mumps, smallpox, diphtheria, etc.): check.
No one asked about the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.
Wrap all those issues into one candidate and you gotta worry about the future of our democracy.
A
High school students in several districts in Iowa have staged walkouts to protest legislation that affects their education. Students want their teachers to have the freedom to teach, and they want the freedom to learn. Iowa legislators don’t want either.
In light of recent education bills at the Iowa Legislature, whether it’s promoting vouchers for private schools or restricting what teachers are allowed to mention in class, many Iowa students are getting fed up. And they’re standing up.
Friday afternoon in Johnston, a group of close to 100 students walked out of class and stood on school grounds to talk about those bills, explain how they’re impacting Iowa students and teachers, and encourage their peers to register to vote and to elect different legislators.
“I think the biggest thing now is putting people in positions of power that actually will do the work and will care and represent the student voices that are speaking out about this,” said Waverly Zhao, a junior at Johnston High School who helped lead the walkout.
The walkout was organized by students and two student organizations, Johnston Community of Racial Equity (CORE) Club and Iowa WTF.
And Johnston was only one of several with recent walkouts. Thursday, students walked out at Ankeny and other events have been planned for public and private high schools in Ames, West Des Moines, Des Moines, and possibly Waukee. All are organized by student groups, and generally around the same issue of not having their voices heard about their educations. Students have also held walkouts in recent months in Iowa City, Cedar Rapids and Waterloo.
Specifically, students are calling out House File 2577, the bill that requires teachers to post every single piece of classroom material online, and Senate File 2369, the bill which allows vouchers for private schools and includes a parents’ bill of rights. Both have only passed in their chambers.
Students are also calling out House File 802, the law that prohibits so-called “divisive concepts” being taught in school, which passed last year…
HF 802 prohibited teachers from teaching “divisive concepts” and targets ideas such as systemic or institutionalized racism and sexism, and how those have shaped the way the country was built and how it functions now. Students say they’ve already seen it cause a chilling effect in their classrooms.
“As a student of color, it’s been hard enough in the district, and with the recent legislation, it’s harder to discuss racism and harder for us to combat that in schools,” said Anita Danakar, a Johnston high schooler.
For example, she said her history teacher made sure to tell students they weren’t trying to make student feel guilty when they talked about redlining in class.
Zhao said in her history and social studies classes teachers are talking less about racism and sexism so they don’t cross any lines. A history lesson she had about the 3/5ths compromise in the Constitution left most of the class confused, Zhao said, because the teacher was never quite able to explain why it existed….
Overall, the students said they want to learn about these topics in school, from a trusted source and in an environment where they can ask questions.
“This entire attitude that [says] these students are not mature enough to learn and have mature conversations in the classroom about race, gender, sexuality, to say we can’t even talk about that in an educational environment is disgusting,” said Nicholas Arick, a 17-year-old student who plans to vote in the next presidential election. “It’s saying these students don’t deserve to learn about these things, and eventually when they get out of high school, they’re be ignorant and they won’t know what they’re voting for.”
The Oklahoma legislature just passed a bill guaranteeing the free speech rights of professors and students in Oklahoma higher education. It has been sent to Governor Kevin Stitt for his signature.
The sponsor of HB 3543, Rep. Chad Caldwell, (R)-Enid, said the goal is to protect students who may not have the same viewpoints as their classmates and professors.
“We shouldn’t have a professor worried about getting fired if they say this or that,” Rep. Caldwell said. “We shouldn’t have a student that has to worry about, if I don’t take a Republican view or a liberal view that I’m going to get an ‘F’ on a paper. That shouldn’t be something that’s going on at any of our colleges or universities.”
The legislature apparently forgot that they banned the teaching of “critical race theory” in 2021 and discouraged teaching the facts about the horrific Tulsa Massacre. Kathryn Schumaker, the Edith Kinney Gaylord presidential professor in the department of classics and letters at the University of Oklahoma, wrote at the time that the law banning discussion of racism would make it impossible to teach history honestly on campus.
She wrote in The Washington Post:
The law is aimed at eradicating the supposed scourge of critical race theory (CRT) from state classrooms and campuses, a cause that has become a right-wing talking point over the course of the past few months. Oklahoma educators and academics have denounced the law, noting that it will deter teachers from discussing Oklahoma’s fraught racial past of Native American dispossession, lynching and racial terror.
For example, as we mark the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre in late May, state political leaders are making it clear that they would like Oklahomans to leave the past behind. In 2001, a state commission report called for reparations and public recognition of the legacy of the massacre. But this new law undermines efforts to reckon with our collective past, and it will chill classroom discussions of this history. H.B. 1775 instructs educators to emphasize that although the perpetrators of the Tulsa Race Massacre did bad things, their actions do not shape the world we live in — even though White rioters murdered scores of Black Tulsans and destroyed more than 1,200 buildings in the Black Greenwood neighborhood, annihilating decades of accumulated Black wealth.
Meanwhile, a seventh-grade science teacher at Jenks Middle School was fired for refusing to remove a rainbow-colored flag from a display of flags in his classroom.
Oklahoma suffers from a severe case of schizophrhrenia or hypocrisy.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the free speech law is used to defend teaching critical race theory in higher education.
Thanks to John Thompson of Oklahoma for the updates from his state.
State Senator Mallory McMorrow gave a speech of four minutes to her colleagues in the Michigan Legislature. A Republican State Senator accused Senator McMorrow of wanting to “groom” and “sexualize” kindergartners, a charge right out of the QAnon cuckoo playbook.
Senator McMorrow replied with a powerful speech that has gone viral. Watch it.
Jane Mayer is a brilliant and meticulous journalist for The New Yorker. She is the nation’s leading expert on “Dark Money,” the money funneled into politics whose donors are anonymous. In this article, she details the group that was behind the effort to derail the Supreme Court nomination of the highly-qualified Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. The smear campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, because it was built on lies and distortions, and the attacks foundered in the face of Judge Jackson’s poise, demeanor, and temperament.
Formed in 2020, the group is called The American Accountability Foundation. It is registered as a tax-exempt charitable organization (like the odious ALEC), but is up-to-its-eyeballs in negative political activism. Its goal appears to be to block all Biden nominees with smear campaigns, lies, and distortions of their record and their views.
She writes:
While the hearings were taking place, the A.A.F. publicly took credit for uncovering a note in the Harvard Law Review in which, they claimed, Jackson had “argued that America’s judicial system is too hard on sexual offenders.” The group also tweeted that she had a “soft-on-sex-offender” record during her eight years as a judge on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. As the Washington Post and other outlets stated, Jackson’s sentencing history on such cases was well within the judicial mainstream, and in line with a half-dozen judges appointed by the Trump Administration. When Jackson defended herself on this point during the hearings, the A.A.F. said, on Twitter, that she was “lying.” The group’s allegation—reminiscent of the QAnon conspiracy, which claims that liberal élites are abusing and trafficking children—rippled through conservative circles. Tucker Carlson repeated the accusation on his Fox News program while a chyron declared “jackson lenient in child sex cases.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist representative from Georgia, called Jackson “pro-pedophile.”
Their attack on Judge Jackson failed, but Mayer shows that they have slimed other well-qualified nominees, leaving key positions unfilled. she calls AAF “the slime machine.”
Among the nominees the group boasts of having successfully derailed are Saule Omarova, a nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, and Sarah Bloom Raskin, whom Biden named to be the vice-chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve Board. David Chipman, whom the President wanted to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and David Weil, Biden’s choice for the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor, both saw their nominations founder in the wake of A.A.F. attacks. Currently, the group is waging a negative campaign against Lisa Cook, who, if confirmed, would become the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors.
Tom Jones, the A.A.F.’s founder and executive director, is a longtime Beltway operative specializing in opposition research. Records show that over the years he has worked for several of the most conservative Republicans to have served in the Senate, including Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin; Ted Cruz, of Texas; Jim DeMint, of South Carolina; and John Ensign, of Nevada, for whom Jones was briefly a legislative director. In 2016, Jones ran the opposition-research effort for Cruz’s failed Presidential campaign. When I asked Jones for an interview, through the A.A.F.’s online portal, he replied, “Ms. Meyers . . . Go pound sand.” Citing an article that I had written debunking attacks on Bloom Raskin from moneyed interests, including the A.A.F., he said, “You are a liberal hack masquerading as an investigative journalist—and not a very good one.” Jones subsequently posted this comment on his group’s Twitter account, along with my e-mail address and cell-phone number…
Mayer describes vicious A.A.F. campaigns against Biden nominees, most of whom were women or people of color. one such was the sliming of Lisa Cook.
Mayer writes:
Liberal and conservative political groups habitually scrutinize a prominent nominee’s record or personal life in search of disqualifying faults. But the A.A.F. has taken the practice to extremes, repeatedly spinning negligible tidbits or dubious hearsay into damning narratives. The group recently deployed its unorthodox methods, Politico has reported, while “desperately pursuing dirt” on Lisa Cook, the nominee for the Federal Reserve. Cook, who has been a tenured professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University since 2013, has attracted bipartisan support. Glenn Hubbard, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the George W. Bush Administration, has said, “Cook’s talents as an economic researcher and teacher make her a good nominee for the Fed, adding to diversity of perspectives about policy.” In college, Cook won a Marshall Scholarship. She subsequently obtained a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and served as a staff economist on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. She also held appointments at the National Bureau of Economic Research and at various regional Federal Reserve banks. The A.A.F., though, has portrayed her as unqualified, and suggested that her tenure at Michigan State is undeserved.
On April 13th, Jones sent out the latest of at least three e-mail blasts from the A.A.F. to about fifty of Cook’s colleagues at Michigan State. In the most recent of these messages, which were obtained by The New Yorker, Jones said that Cook “did not warrant” tenure. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the A.A.F. obtained records showing that the school’s provost had granted Cook full professorship in 2020, overruling a decision not to give her that title the previous year. Jones sent these personnel records to dozens of Cook’s colleagues, and asked, “Are any of you concerned that . . . she’s not good enough to sit on the Federal Reserve Board?” He urged any detractors to “not hesitate to” contact him. Meanwhile, Jones fished for further information by posting a message on an anonymous online gossip forum, Economics Job Market Rumors, which has been decried by one prominent economist as “a cesspool of misogyny.”
Some of the A.A.F.’s attacks on Cook carried racial overtones. Cook had made donations to bail funds for impoverished criminal defendants, including racial-justice protesters who had been arrested; she was following a tradition of activist lawyers in her family, and considered it a form of charity. The A.A.F. argued on Twitter that she had made “racist comments” and “even bailed out rioters who burned down American cities.” Cook’s reputation was sullied enough that the Senate Banking Committee vote on her nomination resulted in a tie, with no Republicans supporting her. Cook’s nomination can still proceed to the Senate floor, but her confirmation remains in limbo, as one conservative news outlet after another repeats the A.A.F.’s talking points. A writer for the Daily Caller, Chris Brunet, said in a Substack column that Cook is a “random economist at Michigan State University who has shamelessly leveraged her skin color and genitalia into gaining the backing of several key White House officials.” Brunet tweeted proudly that his critique had been promoted on Fox News by Tucker Carlson.
Cook’s nomination might yet go forward, but other targets with exemplary records, have been rejected because of A.A.F. slime campaigns.
Dark Money is a blight on our democracy. This particular group is using its resources to derail the agenda of the Biden administration. It is yet another strategy to undermine our democracy by preventing the duly elected President from staffing his administration with fully qualified appointees of his choice.
Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut is one of the most important members of the U.S. House of Representatives. She is chair of the House Appropriations Committee.
She sent the following letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, endorsing the Department’s proposed reform of the federal Charter School Program and criticizing the charter lobby for spreading lies:
Dear Secretary Cardona,
In July 2021, House Democrats passed the fiscal year 2022 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies appropriations bill which included a landmark provision prohibiting federal funding to charter schools run by for-profit education management organizations (EMOs). Under these management relationships, charters accept federal funds only to have their schools run by low-quality, for-profit companies rife with conflicts of interest. The provision was designed to safeguard our critical federal investments in education and protect us all from the financial risks posed by for-profit charter schools.
Predictably, the for-profit charter EMOs were not pleased with this legislative development. In response, their national trade organization led a well-funded misinformation campaign incorrectly claiming that the provision would prevent federal funds from going to any charter school that uses a contractor for any discrete service. These unserious efforts and false claims were advanced by their national trade organization to shift outrage and attention away from the risky, low-quality for-profit charter schools they represent.
Their national trade organization is employing similar tactics through the exaggerations and misrepresentations they are spreading in opposition to the Department’s reasonable proposed regulations for the fiscal year 2022 Charter Schools Program (CSP) competitions. Rather than accommodate the bad faith efforts of a trade organization that advocates for for-profit EMOs, the Department should move forward with its strong proposals to improve accountability and transparency for the CSP program.
For-profit EMOs
The Department has long recognized the particular risks posed by for-profit EMOs. In response to a 2016 audit, the Department conceded to the Inspector General, “ED is well aware of the challenges and risks posed by CMOs and, in particular, EMOs, that enter into contracts to manage the day-to-day operations of charter schools that receive Federal funds. We recognize that the proliferation of charter schools with these relationships has introduced potential risks with respect to conflicts of interest, related-party transactions, and fiscal accountability, particularly in regard to the use of federal funds.”
Such EMO-related conflicts are on clear display in the example of AmeriSchools in Arizona. Four AmeriSchools charter schools were chartered by Reginald Barr. His late wife Sandra was the president of the schools’ board. The schools pay the EMO Edventure to manage all activities and programs; Sixty Five Plus to lease their building; and One Employment Plus to pay school employee salaries. All three for-profit companies are owned by the Barrs. Ownership of One Employment Plus is also shared by the Barrs’ daughter, Deborah LeBlanc, who also sits on the schools’ board.
In addition, for-profit charter schools, including those run by for-profit EMOs, deliver concerning outcomes for students. A 2017 report from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes compared student performance at non-profit charters, for-profit charters, and traditional public schools and found that for-profit charters perform worse in reading, and significantly worse in math, than non-profit charters. In addition, the report found that for-profit charters perform worse in math than traditional public schools.
In light of these serious concerns, I am pleased that the proposed rule includes a clear requirement that a charter school receiving CSP funding cannot contract with a for-profit EMO; however, when considering the complicated web of for-profit conflicts in the AmeriSchools example, I recommend a modest edit to the proposed language:
Community Impact Analysis
The Department’s proposed requirement for CSP recipients to provide a community impact analysis will generate essential information to assist the Department’s grantmaking decisions. The language, which requires “descriptions of the community support and unmet demand for the charter school, including any over-enrollment of existing public schools or other information that demonstrates demand for the charter school…,” will generate helpful information for the Department and the public. I strongly urge you to retain this specific language in the final rule.
In addition, the Department’s proposed language aimed at determining whether a proposed charter school will increase racial or socio-economic segregation or isolation in the schools that the students currently attend is vitally important. I strongly urge the Department to retain this language to guarantee that CSP grants do not inadvertently exacerbate inequities in our public education system.
Charter School and Traditional Public School or District Collaborations That Benefit Students and Families
I strongly agree with the Department’s goal to support more CSP grants that strengthen both charter schools as well as the local public school system by establishing a new competitive preference priority (CPP). I am encouraged by the potential for CSP grants to support charters and districts through collaborations around curricula, teacher and school leader development, transportation, and other areas of shared interest. For this vision of collaboration to succeed within CSP, I urge the Department to include this priority as a CPP in the fiscal year 2022 CMO and Developer Grants competitions.
I applaud the Department for its efforts to introduce greater accountability and transparency in the CSP program. Further, I urge the Department to disregard bad faith arguments from self-interested organizations that misrepresent these important proposals. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Rosa L. DeLauro
Chair
House Appropriations Committee
# # #
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote about the letter that Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut sent to Secretary of Education Cardona. Congresswoman DeLauro is chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee:
Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, issued a blistering reproach of how “the national trade organization representing for-profit EMO’s is running a well-funded misinformation campaign” to stop the proposed regulations of the U.S. Department of Education to provide more accountability and transparency in the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP).
Although Chairwoman DeLauro does not mention the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) by name, that organization has been leading the campaign telling President Biden and Secretary Cardona to #backoff. “In 2019, the NACPS Hall of Fame winner was Fernando Zulueta, the founder and owner of the largest for-profit chain in the United States, Academica. Zulueta served on their board for years,” according to Carol Burris, the Executive Director of the Network for Public Education. NPE issued a report last year on the for-profit charter industry, entitled “Chartered for Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated for Financial Gain.”
Burris continues, “The campaign of misinformation waged by NACPS at defeating sensible reforms in CSP regulations has been relentless. Wild and untruthful claims made include that the Department does not believe rural charter schools and culturally affirming charter schools should exist, that public school districts would need to approve new charter schools, and that the regulations would override state law. Each of these outrageous false claims are intended to do one thing–frighten parents who send their children to charter schools to oppose the regulations in order to ensure that for-profit run charters and white flight charters can still get CSP funding.”
According to the Chair’s press release, which you can find here, this is not the first time that the same organization has used misinformation in order to protect the for-profit charter industry. The “trade organization” , presumably the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, led a similar campaign of misinformation last summer, according to Chair DeLauro.
“In July 2021, House Democrats passed the fiscal year 2022 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies appropriations bill which included a landmark provision prohibiting federal funding to charter schools run by for-profit education management organizations (EMOs),” wrote Chair DeLauro. “Predictably, the for-profit charter EMOs were not pleased with this legislative development. In response, their national trade organization led a well-funded misinformation campaign incorrectly claiming that the provision would prevent federal funds from going to any charter school that uses a contractor for any discrete service.”
Chair DeLauro goes on in the release to praise the Education Department’s CSP reforms. “I applaud the Department for its efforts to introduce greater accountability and transparency in the CSP program. Further, I urge the Department to disregard bad faith arguments from self-interested organizations that misrepresent these important proposals.”
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools received a CSP grant of nearly 2.4 million dollars in 2018, as did other charter school trade and lobby organizations who are joining the #BackOff campaign.
Republicans will say anything crazy and insulting about public schools as a way to radicalize parents against them. The worst example: the repeated claim that schools are installing litter boxes in bathrooms for children who identify as cats or dogs.
No one knows for sure where this started–could have been Moms for Liberty or the National Parents Union or some other money-grubbing rightwing extremists.
The AP reported:
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — A Nebraska state lawmaker apologized on Monday after he publicly cited a persistent but debunked rumor alleging that schools are placing litter boxes in school bathrooms to accommodate children who self-identify as cats.
Sen. Bruce Bostelman, a conservative Republican, repeated the false claim during a public, televised debate on a bill intended to help school children who have behavioral problems. His comments quickly went viral, with one Twitter video garnering more than 300,000 views as of Monday afternoon, and drew an onslaught of online criticism and ridicule.
Bostelman initially said he was “shocked” when he heard stories that children were dressing as cats and dogs while at school, with claims that schools were accommodating them with litter boxes.
“They meow and they bark and they interact with their teachers in this fashion,” Bostelman said during legislative debate. “And now schools are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools for these children to use. How is this sanitary?”
The rumor has persisted in a private Facebook group, “Protect Nebraska Children,” and also surfaced last month in an Iowa school district, forcing the superintendent to write to parents that it was “simply and emphatically not true…”
The false claim that children who identify as cats are using litter boxes in school bathrooms has spread across the internet since at least December, when a member of the public brought it up at a school board meeting for Midland Public Schools northwest of Detroit.
The claim was debunked by the district’s superintendent, who issued a statement that said there had “never been litter boxes within MPS schools.”
Still, the baseless rumor has spread across the country, and become fuel for political candidates, amid the culture wars and legislative action involving gender identification in schools.
Hours after his remarks, Bostelman backtracked and acknowledged that the story wasn’t true. He said he checked into the claims with state Sen. Lynne Walz, a Democrat who leads the Legislature’s Education Committee, and confirmed there were no such incidents.…
The furor over public school restrooms comes as a growing number of conservative states seek laws to ban transgender students from using bathrooms that match their gender identity.
People who believe this nonsense should actually visit a public school, talk to the principal, talk to teachers and students before they spread it and make fools of themselves.
Billy Townsend is an acerbic critic of Florida charter scandals and the state commissioner Richard Corcoran, whose wife runs a charter school. He never runs out of material.
In this post, he tells the story of a politician, Manny Diaz, who works for a charter chain, blaming a struggling community for the failure of his employer’s charter school, which was launched with much razzle-dazzle.
Diane Ravitch's blog 