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Right-Wingers Claim Tim Walz Was Not Really a Coach; GOP Investigates Whether He Is a Spy for China

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2024 //
27

Trump supporters are desperate. First, they attacked Tim Walz’s 24 years of service in the National Guard because he retired to run for Congress at a time when his unit knew they might be deployed to Afghanistan in the next two years.

The Trump rumor mill has been working overtime to depict Walz and his wife as dangerous, leftwing radicals.

Snopes debunked a rightwing rumor that Tim and Gwen Walz have a net worth of $182 million and their daughter Hope got a student loan of $82,000 forgiven. In fact, the Walz family has a net worth made up of their pensions; they own no stocks or bonds. In 2023, they had a joint income of $299,000, with almost half coming from pensions. By contrast, Republican VP candidate J.P. Vance is a multimillionaire, with a net income of $1.2 million-$1.3 million in 2022, according to the Wall Street Journal. Some Americans like the fact that Walz is not wealthy, says the WSJ, but others think he lacks the financial acumen of a wealthy man.

Now, says The New York Times, they say Walz wasn’t really a coach because he was not the head coach of the high school football team. Only the head coach, they claim, is a real coach. How petty can they be?

Meanwhile, hard–right Congressman James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, announced that his committee will investigate Walz because of his visits to China as an exchange student and as chaperone for student exchanges. Is he a spy?

All of this is a reflection of Republican desperation and Red-baiting.

Jess Bidgood, a reporter for the New York Times, asked her colleague Alan Blinder of the New York Times to explain whether Walz was really a coach:

Fact-checking questions about Walz’s role as a coach

A surprising argument has emerged from some right-wing circles: that Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was not a high school football coach because he was his team’s defensive coordinator, not the head coach. I asked my colleague Alan Blinder, a font of football knowledge who wrote about Walz’s coaching career *and* answers my questions about sports whenever I have them, to explain what’s what.

Setting aside that assertion’s spuriousness for the moment, our reporting last week on Tim Walz as Coach Walz suggests just how comfortable he is with not being the top dog.

Rocky Almond, who coached basketball with Walz in Nebraska in the early 1990s, said that Walz had “been the supporting actor for his whole life,” recalling a trip to China that the future vice-presidential pick organized. Even though Walz was the group’s veteran Asia hand, Almond remembered a coach who never tried to seize command.

“He just was always in the background,” said Almond, who thought the vice presidency was “the perfect role” for his old colleague’s temperament.

“I think he had the intensity, but it was a positive energy,” said Jeff Tomlin, the Nebraska high school head football coach who brought Walz aboard to coach linebackers. “He was a very good assistant that way. As the head coach, you sometimes have to be an enforcer and really guard your culture and make hard decisions. As assistant, you want to be loyal to your head coach and back up your head coach, and he was all of those things.”

And as for that question of whether Walz should count as a coach at all? Some players on his Minnesota title-winning team still refer to him as “Coach Walz,” and football staffs are filled with specialty coaches who are, in fact, coaches with headsets and playbooks.

“Defensive coordinator is arguably the most important position on a coaching staff other than the head coach,” the ESPN commentator Paul Finebaum mused to me today. “You can’t win a game, let alone a state championship, without being able to stop someone.”

— Alan Blinder

Categories Character, Elections, Ethics, Lies, Republicans, Trump, Walz, Tim

Thom Hartmann: Scams, Corruption and the Election

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2024 //
6

Thom Hartmann encourages readers to beware of political scams right before the elections. The economy is cooling off. Why isn’t the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates? Is it because the chair of the Federal Reserve is a Republican? Did you know about Trump’s increase in wealth during his presidency? I don’t agree that Trump wants to get elected to make money; I think he wants to stay out of jail. But we may both be right.

He writes:

—  Is the Fed Chair “trying to get Donald Trump elected” by keeping rates high? The anti-corruption watchdog group Revolving Door Project is claiming that lifetime Republican and former commercial banker Jerome Powell, now the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, is “trying to get Donald Trump elected.” Fully two months ago, Powell noted that “this is no longer an overheated economy” and “the labor market appears to be fully back in balance.” Yesterday’s jobs numbers — lower than expected new jobs (144,000) and a jump in unemployment to 4.3% — suggest the economy is on the verge of tipping into recession, an event that Trump yesterday pointed out and proclaimed is happening because of “Kamalanomics.” The Project’s Executive Director Jeff Hauser was explicit: “That Powell’s Fed still refuses to lower interest rates—after Trump said that rates shouldn’t be lowered before the election—raises questions about the central bank’s independence. Whether the Fed keeps rates high or brings them down, one of two presidential candidates will benefit. While lower rates would provide much-needed economic relief to the American people, Powell has instead chosen to stick it to the people and give an electoral boost to Trump.” Senator Elizabeth Warren yesterday called on the Fed chair to “cancel his summer vacation” and “lower interest rates now.” The warnings signs are flashing bright red — with worldwide declines in stock market indexes — and if Powell and the Fed don’t lower interest rates at least a half point within the next few weeks, it’ll be safe to conclude that Hauser is exactly right in his diagnosis of this situation. 

— Did Egypt give a $10 million bribe to Trump? The Washington Post published a blockbuster report yesterday, detailing how the Egyptian government pulled together $10 million in cash in 2016 right after Donald Trump sought out Egyptian dictator El-Sisi and promised him a presidential visit (which he fulfilled) right after his inauguration. The Department of Justice found out about it in 2019 and the FBI began an investigation, but Attorney General Bill Barr — one of the most publicly corrupt senior government officials in modern history — put the kibosh on the investigation. As a result, nobody knows if or how the money was delivered to Trump, although right around the time it would have been delivered Trump took the unusual step of putting exactly $10 million of his own money into his campaign. Saudis and Russians own large parts of Trump Tower and multiple nations funneled millions to Trump by booking blocks of rooms in his DC hotel and then just leaving them empty. Forbes estimates that Trump’s businesses brought in $2.4 billion during his four years as president; hundreds of millions of that came from foreign governments and from his charging the Secret Service and our US government a small fortune for their stays at Trump properties around the world. His entire presidency, it turns out, was a giant grift; no wonder he wants back into office. 

— Senate Republicans tell us who they are. President Biden’s American Rescue Plan increased child tax credits in a way that lifted an estimated 30 million children out of poverty, cutting the US child poverty rate in half. They expired last year, and legislation to reinstate them passed the House with roughly equal votes from both Democrats and Republicans. Iowa Senate Republican Chuck Grassley famously opposes help to poor families, saying “passing a tax bill that makes the president look good mailing out checks before the election, means he could be reelected and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts.” Senate Republicans got the message and killed the bill on Thursday afternoon, keeping child poverty in America at a higher level than any other developed nation in the world.

Republicans say that the child tax credits are an effort by Democrats to buy votes. Maybe they are but when they were in effect, they cut child poverty rates in half. That’s reason enough for both parties to support them.

Categories Cruelty, Economy, Elections, Fraud, Republicans, Trump

Keep Smiling and Laughing, Vice President Harris

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2024 //
21

Republicans were blindsided when President Biden announced that he was stepping down, and he endorsed his Vice President, Kamala Harris. All of their planning and strategy was targeted on Biden, who—they said—was too old, senile, sleepy, confused, and unable to lead the country. They had ads and video clips ready to roll. They were not at all happy to learn that Biden was taking himself out of the race. They had to redirect their slime machine to Harris, not Biden.

Sad, very sad, as Trump might say.

They quickly recalibrated their attack ads. First, they insisted that Biden could not leave the ticket. It wasn’t fair, they said. Then they said Harris could not have access to the money raised for the Biden-Harris ticket; they threatened to sue. Then they said it was undemocratic to put Harris at the top of the ticket because primary voters didn’t choose her. But of course they did vote for her. They voted for Biden and Harris.

They said that Kamala Harris was “a radical Communist.” They said she was the “worst Vice President in American history.”

None of these claims caught fire, so they settled on attacking Harris because she laughed too much. Really. They called her “a cackling hyena.”

It’s true, Kamala smiles a lot and flashes her joyous smile at crowds. And she laughs often. Her laugh is genuine and it is contagious. She makes people happy.

So the Republicans thought they could diminish her by denouncing her expressions of happiness.

They must have thought that people would recoil at the sight of Kamala Harris laughing.

But they haven’t, they didn’t, and they won’t.

People see Trump and they see him scowling and angry. He likes to look angry. When he had his mug shot taken in Atlanta, he posed with a dark scowl.

Have you ever seen him laugh or smile? I haven’t. Does he have a sense of humor. I think not.

Imagine if you were offered an hour with either Trump or Harris. Which would you choose? The angry one or the happy one? The one who was embittered by his grievances or the one who would take an interest in you? The one who was angry or the one who was joyful?

The Harris campaign made an ad that begins with Trump saying that he hates it when people laugh at him. Then there is about 60 seconds of clips showing Kamala laughing uproariously.

They cleverly took Trump’s sneering at her laugh and made a cartoon ad featuring her laugh.

Keep laughing, Kamala.

Categories Biden, Democrats, Elections, Harris, Kamala, Politics, Propaganda, Republicans, Trump

Chris Tomlinson: Project 2025 Was Born in Texas

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2024 //
16

Chris Tomlinson, a columnist for The Houston Chronicle, explained the origins of Project 2025, the extremist agenda for Trump’s second term. It was born in Texas, where it merged Republican thought with the demands of rabid white Christian nationalism.

He wrote:

What starts here changes the world, the University of Texas at Austin’s motto says, and one Longhorn’s plan for a second American Revolution, known as Project 2025, offers a return to white supremacy, patriarchy and theocracy.

Before Kevin Roberts became president of the Heritage Foundation and the impresario behind a radical agenda for a second Trump administration, he was a doctoral student in the UT history department and later head of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Many of the ideas found in Project 2025 originated in the Lone Star State.

TPPF, with backing from Christian nationalist billionaires such as Tim Dunn, has long called for defunding public schools, banning abortion, repealing climate change legislation, deporting undocumented immigrants and imposing burdensome voting restrictions.

The Austin-based think tank is an official contributor to Project 2025. Many policies pioneered by TPPF in Texas appear in the 900-page roadmap officially known as the “2025 Presidential Transition Project.”

Heritage, founded in 1973, radically changed when Roberts took over in 2021. Roberts transformed the traditional country club conservative organization into a group committed to “institutionalizing Trumpism,” he told the New York Times. Heritage under Roberts is much closer to TPPF’s Christian fundamentalist politics than former President Ronald Reagan’s.

Disclosure: Roberts used his perch at TPPF to convince Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to cancel a scheduled appearance by Bryan Burrough and me to discuss our book “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth” at the Bullock State History Museum. Roberts has since deleted his Twitter posts, but his quotes condemning us and praising Patrick’s acquiescence live on.

In addition to the hot-button, culture-war issues, the plan drafted by 140 former Trump administration officials would overhaul the Department of Commerce to privatize the National Weather Service, slash the Census Bureau’s economic data gathering and restrict economic development programs.

At the Treasury Department, Project 2025 calls for shutting down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government agencies that make most mortgages possible. Conservatives also want to end programs to fight discrimination in the banking and securities industries and efforts to address climate change.

Of particular interest to Texas businesses is the abolition of the Export-Import Bank. The federal agency has helped 938 businesses export $16 billion in products and services over the past decade. The bank guarantees financing when commercial banks will not with an almost perfect success rate.

Lastly, the most radical economic proposal is to end the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate to set interest rates in a way that will maximize employment while limiting inflation. Project 2025 proposes limiting the central bank to limiting inflation with no regard for unemployment rates. The game plan also limits the Fed’s authority to prevent bank failures.

Conservative deregulation of the banking and financial industries led to the Great Recession. If repealing civil rights and raising the Social Security retirement age don’t frighten you, Project 2025 would remove many economic guardrails designed to avoid another Great Depression.

Project 2025’s radical ideas put off most Americans, which is why Trump has recently distanced himself from it. But he was there at the inception and welcomed Heritage’s help drafting an agenda for his first 180 days in office.

“This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what you’re movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America,” he told a Heritage fundraiser in April 2022.

Trump’s choice for vice president, J.D. Vance, also praised Heritage and Project 2025 before polling showed it was poisonous to their campaign. He wrote the forward to Roberts’ new book “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America.”

“Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,” Vance wrote. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lie ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”

Texas has become a workshop to test conservative ideas, and Roberts’ ascendancy to Heritage Foundation president is only one example. If Trump is reelected, what started here will undoubtedly change the world, but not necessarily for the better.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Religion, Republicans, Trump

Jim Hightower: The Real Purpose of Project 2025

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2024 //
14

Jim Hightower is a Texas Democrat who spent some time in state government, back in the days when Democrats had a shot at winning statewide offices in Texas. He warns here about the real purpose of Project 2025: to turn our country into a white Christian nation. The Founders never said that. In fact, the only things they said in the Constiturion was that there should be no religious test for office. And the First Amendment barred any establishment of any religion and guaranteed freedom of religion. So what these extremists are doing is a blatant violation of the Constitution.

Hightower writes:

We’ve seen a ton of social media posts and emails in the last week or so about Project 2025, and although we’re still working on a fuller analysis to give you the lowdown on what it means to you, as well as tools to fight it, we felt it was urgent to get some solid info into Lowdowner’s hands as soon as we could. Y’all are quite the army of activists (we see the results when you take action!) and we know that if we offer up the goods, you can take them and run with them.

Here’s our brief primer on what this mess is, what’s at stake, and what you can start to do.

What is it?

If you don’t know what Project 2025 is, or would like a brief summary to use to alert others about it, here you go:

It’s a painstakingly detailed, 922-page step-by-step plan to impose an American dictatorship of moneyed authoritarians and Christian nationalists, removing your and my democratic rights. Yes, this is an actual coup.

It sounds insane, yet there it is—a document written and being loudly promoted by a power-mad cluster of Trump bosses, Putin-esque despots, Reagan-loving economists and Ayn Rand-ian academics, moneyed corporate donors, and general far-right quacks and media blowhards. It’s innocuously coded “Project 2025” because the intent is to launch their full assault on the democratic fabric and structure of our national government next January, on Day 1 of another Trump presidency.

This scheme has been devised by The Heritage Foundation, a DC think tank set up in 1973 to promote the elitist economic and cultural doctrines of its über-rich founding funders, Joseph Coors (yes, that Coors) and Richard Mellon Scaife (yes, that Mellon). In recent years, Heritage has gone from merely being right-wing zealots to off-the-charts Trumpists… and now they’re going deep into the distant extremist cosmos. Thus, the head cosmonaut, Kevin Roberts, has megalomaniacally exulted that Project 2025 is “the second American revolution.” Unfortunately, it’s a dangerous devolution, with little tin-hat Kevin acting out what he pretends is a heroic coup.

This would be silly and inconsequential, except the Trump Party has become alarmingly treacherous. Ominously referencing the January 6th violent assault on democratic rule, Kevin said that his coup “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Of course, “the left”—i.e., sane democracy fighters like you and me—do not acquiesce to tyrannical wannabes.

But his ace is that The Donald, despite his denials, has hailed Heritage’s authoritarian agenda as his own and has cheered its plan to fire thousands of public employees on Day 1, replacing them with a lockstep army of enforcers that Heritage and others say they’ve already recruited to seize and Trump-ize every federal agency. This, combined with Trump’s own pledge to use the US military to enforce his political will, is where Project 2025’s subversive coup gets real. 

Here are just a few of the steps we’ve learned so far that Heritage autocrats intend to implement: 

  • Nearly eliminating abortion access altogether at the national level.
  • Cutting Social Security benefits.
  • Giving ever-more tax breaks to corporations and gabillionaires. 
  • Selling off national parklands, wetlands, wildlife sanctuaries and other public properties
  • Eliminating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR, PBS).
  • Imposing a “biblically-based” definition of marriage and families.
  • Eliminating the Department of Education.
  • Preventing LGBTQ+ couples from adopting children.
  • Eliminating the food stamp program (SNAP) and the free school lunch program.
  • Putting the Department of Justice and other independent agencies under the direct political control of the President.
  • Eliminating organic food promotion, conservation programs, and most climate policies of the Agriculture Department

For more in depth reading, check out this series from the Center for American Progress.

Why is this different from previous right-wing agendas?

One, they were piecemeal proposals, like Bush the Second’s failed attack on Social Security, or they were just sloganeering war whoops, like Grover Norquist’s empty call to make government small enough to drown it in a bathtub. 

Two, Project 2025 is a comprehensive, all-in-one blueprint for a radical plutocratic and theocratic takeover of our government, surreptitiously advanced by many of the same anti-democracy corporate supremacists and billionaires who’ve already seized control of the judicial branch.

Three, the Republican Party is perfectly willing to submit to and grovel at the feet of moneyed extremists, media demagoguery, and political thuggery—even in support of stupid, poisonous policies the American people overwhelmingly reject.

Four: Donald.

What can I do?

Right now, the most important thing you can do is to tell your friends and family about this terrifying agenda. Right-wingers are currently attacking the media reporting on this, calling progressives and even moderates who oppose the coup “Chicken Little”-types, trying to minimize this elitist assault on America itself. We cannot let them.

The most important people to share it with are not your super conservative relatives that drive you nuts, but rather people who may be feeling ambiguous about voting for a Democrat (whoever that is ends up being) for President. You’re not going to change the people who’ve already gone over to the crazies, but you have a chance at inspiring more undecided voters to at least vote against an explicitly un-American, Christian Nationalist, fascist ideology.

Categories Citizenship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Republicans, Trump

Slate: Silicon Valley Loves J.D.Vance

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2024 //
12

Nitish Pahwa writes in Slate about Silicon Valley’s devotion to J.D. Vance, although women are not so happy in light of Vance’s misogyny.

Pahwa writes:

Who was happiest about Donald Trump’s Monday decision to pick Ohio Sen. and former ivory-tower Appalachia whisperer J.D. Vance as his vice presidential hopeful? It wasn’t rural America, swing-state independents, or women voters. It wasn’t the conservative intelligentsia or the Catholic hard-liners, despite Vance’s self-pronounced conversion. It certainly wasn’t the traditional Republican donors currently opening up their checkbooks for Trump, or even Vance’s own Senate colleagues.

In actuality, it was the Big Tech and venture capital ambassadors who were the happiest of all. Trump had been the target of a heated effort from Silicon Valley types of all strata (well, mostly billionaires) to get Vance to the VP slot. Or, as Axios reported Monday, “a secret lobbying campaign continued into yesterday morning, with Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson and tech investor David Sacks all calling Trump to try to lock in Vance.”

Musk, of course, has struck up a close relationship with Trump in recent months, regularly chatting on the phone with the former president and helping to organize executives who desire to oust President Joe Biden over his pro-worker, pro-tax, and pro-regulation agenda. “Excellent decision by @realDonaldTrump,” Musk tweeted to the ex-president, who still hasn’t returned to posting on the social network formerly known as Twitter.

Longtime VC, podcast host, and political influencer Sacks gave a Monday night speech at the Republican National Convention that, like many of his other screeds, mostly made the case against Biden instead of one for Trump. He did, however, tweet his satisfaction with Vance, praising his military service and subsequent critiques of forever wars, calling him “an American patriot, with the courage to fight America’s wars but the wisdom to know when to avoid them.” (Sacks’ tweet also erroneously implied that Vance had enlisted “when the Twin Towers came down,” even though he couldn’t join and serve until a few years after 9/11.)

It’s not just them. The burgeoning (and amply funded) corpus of anti-regulation, anti-“woke,” pro-crypto, and A.I.–enchanted “effective accelerationists” are fully taken in with Vance. On X, Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey celebrated the coming matchup of “Tech Bro vs Kamala Harris,” while Chamath Palihapitiya—a now-right-leaning VC who co-hosts the megapopular All-In podcast with Sacks—reveled in the potential for “a Bestie adjacent as the VP.” (Besties refers to the four All-In hosts, who recently interviewed Trump on their show.)

Why the obsession with Vance? By the time his star began to rise with the 2016 publication of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, he had pivoted from a career in law to a Silicon Valley gig at Mithril Capital, one of Peter Thiel’s venture capital firms. At that time, Thiel—who’d co-authored an anti-“multiculturalism” bookwith Sacks in the 1990s—was one of Trump’s few outspoken tech-world surrogates, a position that had earned him a speaking slot at the RNC that first nominated Trump for president.

The conservative Vance wasn’t fully aligned with his boss, though: He frequently criticized Trump even while attempting to explain the candidate’s appeal to rural Americans. He also disparaged Silicon Valley in an interview with Slate as “more of a bubble than D.C.” and New York, full of Richie Riches with “no real sense of how frustrated and how destitute a lot of people outside of Silicon Valley are.” In an early-2017 New York Times op-ed, he expressed some admiration for both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama while also “hop[ing] for better policy from the new administration, a health reform package closer to my ideological preferences, and a new approach to foreign policy.” Just two months later, he wrote another Times piece about why the “optimism [that] blinds many in Silicon Valley to the real struggles in other parts of the country” had spurred him to move back to Ohio from California.

Although Vance may have left the Bay Area, he hadn’t left his position with Thiel’s company and remained a “friend and big fan” of him. He got more involved in the VC arena, joining Steve Case’s Revolution firm as a partner in managing a fund that aimed to support more startups based outside the coasts. As reporting from Business Insider has indicated, it is unclear how successful he really was at that mission.

It was clear that Vance’s return home was less about uplifting the “hillbillies” he had whitesplained to the liberal bubble with his memoir and more about seeking higher power. He teased a run for office as far back as late 2016, in a Washington Post interview about his moving plans, and floated the possibilityagain two years later, while joining a conservative influence group chaired by Federalist Society maven Leonard Leo. When that run for office flamed out, he dug deeper into the VC realm, starting a Cincinnati-based fund backed by Thiel and Marc Andreessen in 2020.

Categories Elections, Gender, Republicans, Trump

Project 2025: A Recipe for Disaster!

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2024 //
41

Former President Trump recently discovered that members of his administration had produced a set of plans for his next term. They did this under the guidance of the Heritage Foundation, the Republican Party’s ideological center. If you believed that Trump knew nothing about this 900-page guidebook, I know of a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Project 2025 is a handbook of extremism. It represents the far-right Republicans’ desire to eliminate many federal programs and, as right winger Grover Norquist one memorably said, “Shrink it so it can be drowned in a bathtub.”

North Carolina public school advocates Patty Williams and David Zonderman are public school graduates and parents. They wrote the following about Project 2025:

In the Spring of 2023, the Heritage Foundation released Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, aka Project 2025. Now, more than a year later, it is finally getting the serious attention that it demands. In its early pages, the Foundation claims to “have gone back to the future—and then some.” We are warned that, “The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.” To fight this supposed incubus sucking the life out of the republic, a growing number of conservative organizations have joined the Heritage Foundation in supporting this project and intend to assemble an army to march on Washington to “deconstruct the Administrative State.”

 

Project 2025 is both breathtaking and scary in its scope. It envisions a far-right rewriting of government missions, policies, and procedures, ranging from the White House, through all Cabinet-level departments, to the Federal Reserve and other independent regulatory agencies.  Tens of thousands of federal employees could be fired or subject to politically-inspired loyalty tests, gutting almost 150 years of civil service reform, and erasing institutional memory, knowledge, and expertise. Whole federal departments—including the Department of Education—and the funding that goes with them could be left on the cutting room floor, with disastrous consequences for the least among us.

 

This far-right “Playbook” is a frontal assault on honest and competent government, and the underpinnings of our 248-year-old democracy. Project 2025 flips the script on our nation’s foundation of liberty, prosperity, and the rule of law by inverting and perverting fact and data about how government actually functions to protect the environment, ensure safe workplaces, and provide some safety net for those in poverty. 

 

Project 2025 may appear to come from the right-wing fever swamp, which conjures up something out of science fiction. Indeed, it does remind us of a legendary Rod Serling Twilight Zone episode, first televised in March of 1962. In “To Serve Man,” earth is visited by the Kanamits. Enormously tall aliens, they appear frightening at first, but are eventually welcomed by humans. The Kanamits help end famine, eliminate war, and provide unlimited energy supplies for the betterment of the planet. 

 

Seemingly altruistic in their efforts, the Kanamits leave a book behind at the United Nations, which a decoding expert, Hero Chambers and his able assistant, Pat, begin to translate. Meanwhile, the Kanamits invite enthusiastic Earthlings to visit their planet, and flight reservations fill up quickly. Only when Pat races up to a space ship about to lift off does she reveal to Chambers that the title of the book—To Serve Man—is a cookbook. A recipe for disaster.

 

Project 2025 also proclaims to serve man, perhaps not literally on a silver platter like the Kanamits; but it may also cannibalize our government, our nation, and our democracy. Unlike the hapless denizens of earth in the Twilight Zone, we don’t need a decoding expert to see through the myths and deceptions that seek to dismantle our enduring republic and its Constitutional rights.

 

Let’s not wait until it’s too late and our collective goose is cooked. It’s time to stir the pot. Encourage your friends and family to vote as though their democracy depends on it—because it does.

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Early Childhood Education, Education Industry, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Privatization, Propaganda, Republicans, Vouchers

GOP Wants to Criminalize Porn: Is Trump a Hypocrite?

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2024 //
26

Ryan Teague Beckwith of MSNBC writes about one of Project 2025’s most unusual objectives: criminalizing porn. He digs deep and finds that beneath the rhetoric is an ill-conceived attack on transgender people and those who are LGBT.

But the immediate contradiction is that their candidate Trump has a long history of interacting with porn and—ahem—porn stars.

He writes:

Amid the 920 pages’ worth of conservative ideas in the Project 2025 plans for a second Donald Trump administration, one stands out for its sheer improbability: criminalizing pornography.

Just five pages into the foreword by the president of the far-right Heritage Foundation think tank, the proposal stakes out an uncompromising position that porn should be banned, porn producers and distributors should be sent to prison, and tech companies that circulate it should be shut down.

It’s true that politics makes strange bedfellows, but we’re talking about anti-porn crusaders teaming up with Trump, who has literally had his share of strange bedfellows. To recap:

  • He was on the March 1990 cover of Playboy magazine next to Playmate Brandi Brandt, who was wearing his tuxedo jacket and nothing else. He hung it on his wall of his office in Trump Tower and often autographed copies on the campaign trail in 2016.
  • He had short cameos in 1994 and 2000 Playboy videos in which he interviewed models (who, to be fair, were wearing clothes at the time) and took Polaroids, asking them if they had “what it takes” to be a Playmate.
  • He opened the nation’s first strip club inside a casino in in his failed Taj Mahal venture in Atlantic City in 2013. The 36,000-square-foot club took up the space formerly occupied by three restaurants.
  • He allegedly had an affair with Playmate Karen McDougal and adult film actress Stormy Daniels and was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records over hush money payments to Daniels made during his 2016 campaign. (Trump denies that he had sex with either woman.)
  • He boosted future first lady Melania Trump’s modeling career by allowing her to do a photo shoot in his private jet that included partial nudity. (She also modeled fully nude before she met Trump in photos that were leaked during the 2016 race.)

Trump has said, unconvincingly, that he does not know the people behind Project 2025 and does not support all of its proposals. But on this subject, he has previously endorsed a similar idea, signing a pledge from the group Enough is Enough in 2016 to crack down on porn and potentially appoint a presidential commission to look at the “harmful public health impact of Internet pornography on youth, families and the American culture.” (He did neither.)

Hahahaha!

Trump on the cover of Playboy, one of his proudest accomplishments!
Categories Elections, Republicans, Trump

Mercedes Schneider: Politicking for Jesus

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2024 //
26

Mercedes Schneider read Project 2025 and concluded that its unifying goal is to turn the American people into white evangelical Christians. This “conservative” vision of a different America doesn’t give much thought to those who are neither white nor evangelical not Christian.

She writes in summary:

Free the churches, imprison the librarians.

Roberts was in the news for stating that an “ongoing American Revolution” will “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” According to The Hill, that comment caused “blowback” for Roberts and the Heritage Foundation.

None of Jesus’ ministry involved any political agenda, much less the government-driven denigration of “other” or the imposing of His will on any human being.

Yet here we are.

It behooves every literate American to read this extremist document before casting a vote in November.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Economics, Elections, Environment, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Gender, Librarians, Privatization, Propaganda, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Trump

Never-Trumpers Respond to the New Political Scene

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2024 //
112

Jonathan V. Last, editor of The Bulwark, a site founded by Never Trump Republicans, explains how he sees the new situation, the withdrawal of Joe Biden and the ascension of Kamala Harris as the likely nominee:

The Democratic party is healthy. The Republican party is not.

Our greatest living president. (Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

1. Seven Lessons

(1) The Democratic party is a healthy institution.

On the night of June 27, the various power centers within the Democratic party began a difficult conversation: Was Joe Biden still capable of running a vigorous campaign?

Over three weeks the party reached a diffuse—if not unanimous—consensus: He was not. This consensus was the product of all levels of the party: Elder statesmen such as Nancy Pelosi, elected Democrats analyzing their own future prospects, donors making decisions about spending, and the main body of public opinion among Democratic voters.

Once this consensus was reached, the various power centers began a dialogue with the party’s leader, President Biden. The party expressed its choice. Biden pushed back. The party took up the question again and, after due consideration, held firm.

Joe Biden then stepped aside for the good of the nation.

This is how healthy institutions are supposed to work…

2. The process which elevated Kamala Harris was sensible.

The Democratic party made another institutional decision in parallel with the Biden question: It vetted Kamala Harris.

This subroutine executed in the background, but it was active. Democratic voters began to consider her as the nominee and polling showed that they were comfortable with her. Party elders evaluated her fitness. Donors and elected Democrats took her measure. The fact that no anti-Harris groundswell—or even boomlet—emerged is proof that the party decided that Harris was an acceptable nominee.

After Biden blessed Harris on Sunday afternoon, the party coalesced around her in much the way it did Biden after the New Hampshire primary in 2020.

The Democratic party will enter the election more unified than it had been pre-debate.

3. Kamala Harris can run as an insurgent, but with the advantages of an incumbent.

The largest advantage of incumbency is that a candidate does not have to take base-pleasing positions during a primary campaign that can hurt him during a general election.

Because of the extraordinary nature of her ascendence, Harris possesses this advantage. She will carry nearly every advantage of incumbency and yet she can credibly position herself as this election’s change agent.

4. Trump is holding the age bomb.

The Trump campaign spent two years creating a political bomb concerning old age. They assumed that they could plant this bomb at the feet of Joe Biden.

Trump is now the one holding the age bomb. He is not only a full generation older than Harris—everything about him looks geriatric by comparison. From his gait to his bronzed-over pallor; from the way he rambles and gets lost in sentences to his inability to keep facts straight.

Every split screen now makes Trump look old and decrepit by comparison. 

5. There was enormous pent-up demand among Democrats for a younger leader.

In the first 24 hours, Kamala Harris raised over $100 million from small-dollar donors.

Sit with that for a moment. $100 million.

That’s more money than any Democrat has ever raised in a single day. It’s twice as much as Trump raised following his felony conviction. If this doesn’t snap your head back, it should.

Because it’s as good a proxy as you’ll find for excitement.

It will be several days until we have polling with a more detailed view of Harris’s support from Democratic voters, but it is already clear that she will perform much better than Biden has within her party.

Here’s my advice: You should be open to the idea that Harris could ride a wave of excitement and passion that absolutely no one was seeing until Biden stepped aside. I’m talking Obama ‘08-levels of energy.

It’s not a given. But it’s in the realm of the possible. Keep your eyes peeled for it.

6. The Republican party is a failed state.

At the debate, Donald Trump also demonstrated (again) that he is unfit for office. He rambled and lied incoherently. He is a convicted felon. A jury found him guilty of sexual assault. He has said he wants to be a “dictator” and that he wants to “terminate” parts of the Constitution. He selected as his running mate a man who advised disobeying orders from the Supreme Court and forcing a constitutional crisis.

Until last week there was nothing stopping the Republican party from forcing Trump off the ticket. The party elders and elected officials could have demanded that Trump step aside. Republican voters could have said that they had no confidence in his ability to govern. Donors could have closed their wallets.

But the plain fact is that not one single Republican called on Trump to step aside.

Not one.

Why? Because the various precincts of the Republican party understand that they hold no power—at all—over Trump. They could not ask him to withdraw from the race. Even broaching the subject would be grounds for excommunication from the party.

The Democratic party is a functioning institution, with checks and balances; constituencies and power structures. Like any institution, it is amorphous and its decision making is mostly organic.

The Republican party is an autocracy where the only thing that matters is the will of the leader. All power flows through him. All decisions are made by him. There are no competing power centers—only vassal states overseen by his noblemen.

7. Harris is an underdog.

One of the reasons the last three weeks have been so difficult is because Democrats were not choosing between a “good” outcome and a “bad” outcome. 

Those sorts of choices are easy.

Instead, Democrats were tasked with deciding between least-bad options. Humans rebel against the idea of “least-bad.” When faced with choices, we want to believe that at least one of them is “good.”

When the first real Harris-vs.-Trump polling comes out next week we’ll see how big of a hole she’s in. But unlike Biden, Harris has the ability to spend the next three months on offense, all day, every day. If she can deliver the goods, she has a puncher’s chance.

2. In Praise of Biden

A slight push-back against those who believe Biden took too long to step aside:

It was three and a half weeks from the debate to Biden pulling out. That’s it.

Joe Biden is the president, but he’s also just a man. Coming to a decision like this one—an unprecedented decision—is hard. There’s a lot to weigh and there’s a tremendous responsibility to get it right.

My own view is that Biden made the call basically as quickly as possible. He couldn’t have done it the week of the NATO summit. Then Trump was shot in the ear. Then there was the Republican convention. To my mind, Biden’s timing on this was optimal, actually.

Nothing about Joe Biden’s presidency was inevitable. Not his candidacy. Not his victory over Trump. Not his withdrawal from reelection.

At nearly every turn, Biden did the right thing for America.

His legacy is assured. He will be remembered as one of the great modern presidents.

I said this last night and I’ll say it again. History had its eye on Joe Biden, and he met the moment. He did his part. Now it’s up to Kamala Harris and us to do ours.

This is the moment. Live it with us.

Categories Biden, Courage, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, History, Hope, Republicans, Trump
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