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Arkansas: Governor Assures Christian Schools That They Can Continue to Discriminate

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2024 //
2

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders spoke to a summit of Christian school leaders and pledged to them that the state would not prevent them from discriminating against students or teachers or families if they accepted students with vouchers. Governor Sanders, who previously served at Trump’s press secretary, pushed through legislation launching vouchers and protecting the state against indoctrination and “critical race theory,” even though there was never any evidence that teachers were “indoctrinating” students or teaching “critical race theory.” Nothing quite so satisfying as battling non-existent demons, ‘cause you always win. But Governor Sanders had to reassure the church folk that they could go on discriminating.

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders made her support of Christian education crystal clear Monday at the Arkansas Christian School Summit held at the Capital Hotel — even hinting to a superintendent that she would fight to allow schools to set their own rules.

Brad Jones, the superintendent of Fayetteville Christian School, told Sanders of being forced to display an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission poster that includes sexual orientation as a protected class.

“We were like, ‘Whoa!’ Of course we discriminate, we’re a Christian school,” Jones said, then asked if that non-discrimination requirement could find itself in the LEARNS Act down the road with future administrations.

Sanders said there’s certainly going to be things that are fluid in the future.

“As much as we want things like the banning of indoctrination and CRT that we put into Arkansas LEARNS, that doesn’t mean that a future legislature administration can’t come up behind us and make changes down the line,” she said.

She urged Jones and the others in the room to be diligent about engaging and continuing to build those coalitions of support “to make sure like-minded people are representing you” in the Arkansas Legislature.

One comment said:

It’s disgusting they’re so open in their disdain. Imagine being proud of that.

Pretty sure Jesus didn’t feel that way.

Categories Arkansas, Bigotry, Extremism, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Michael Tomasky: The Rightwing Takeover of the Media

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2024 //
63

Writing in The New Republic, Michael Tomasky describes how the rightwing has deftly invested in buying up media properties, even those that lose money. They play the long game, Tomasky argues, while Democrats and liberals ignore the reality of media control. Sinclair has been so successful in rural areas that Democratic candidates don’t have a chance. He wonders whether Democratic big wheels will ever catch in.

I subscribe to The New Republic. So should you.

He writes:

You have no doubt seen the incredibly depressing news about the incredibly depressing purchase of The Baltimore Sun by the incredibly depressing David Smith, chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, the right-wing media empire best known for gobbling up local television news operations and forcing local anchors to spout toxic Big Brother gibberish like this.

The Sun was once a great newspaper. I remember reading, once upon a time, that it had sprung more foreign correspondents into action across the planet than any American newspaper save The New York Times and The Washington Post. It had eight foreign bureaus at one point, all of which were shuttered by the Tribune Company by 2006. But the Sun’s real triumphs came in covering its gritty, organic city. And even well after its glory days, it still won Pulitzers—as recently as 2020, for taking down corrupt Mayor Catherine Pugh, who served a stretch in prison thanks to the paper.

Smith wasted no time in showing his cards during his first meeting with the staff Wednesday. He was asked about a comment he made to New York magazine back in 2018, when he said, “Print media is so left wing as to be meaningless dribble.” (“Dribble”? Let’s hope he won’t be on the copy desk.) Did he feel that way about the Sun specifically? “In many ways, yes,” Smith said, adding that he wants the paper to emulate the local Fox affiliate, which is owned … by Sinclair.

But this column isn’t about the Sun and Smith. In fact, I applaud Smith and Sinclair in one, and only one, respect. They get it. They understand how important media ownership is. They are hardly alone among right-wing megawealthy types. Of course there’s Rupert Murdoch, but there are more. There’s the late Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who, after he got rich from his Unification Church, sprouted media properties, most notably The Washington Times, still owned by the church’s News World Communications (once upon a quaint old time, it was shocking that the conservative newspaper in the nation’s capital was started by a cult). And Philip Anschutz, whose Clarity Media Group started the tabloid newspaper The Washington Examiner in 2005. These days, the list includes Elon Musk with X/Twitter, Peter Thiel and Senator J.D. Vance with Rumble (a right-wing YouTube alternative), Ye with his attempted purchase of the now-defunct Parler, and, of course, Donald Trump, with Truth Social. They all understand what Viktor Orbán told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022: “Have your own media.” Shows like Tucker Carlson’s old Fox show, the Hungarian strongman said, “should be broadcast day and night….”

The right-wing media is now the agenda-setting media in this country, and it’s only getting bigger and more influential every year.

And how have the country’s politically engaged liberal billionaires responded to this? By doing roughly nothing.

I’ve been in the trenches of this fight for many years. Back in the George W. Bush era, the late Rob Stein, a Democratic insider and good friend of mine, mapped for the first time the conservative infrastructure in a PowerPoint presentation that became such a hot ticket in Washington liberal circles that The New York Times Magazine did a story about it. He showed, from looking over conservative groups’ 990s (because they were mostly all nonprofits), how much was spent on policy development, how much on field operations, how much on youth training, and how much on media. I don’t remember the numbers, but the media figure was high.

Much of this spending was coordinated. Murdoch’s empire didn’t count, because his properties were for-profit, as was The Washington Times. But a lot of the nonprofit spending was directed by a handful of anointed movement leaders, and they made certain that a big chunk of money was spent on media.

I used to try to argue, whenever I was lucky enough to get the ear of one of our side’s rich people for five minutes, that we needed to build an avowedly liberal media infrastructure. I was told that they just weren’t that interested. They had other priorities. They were concerned with the issues. They weren’t prepared to lose all that money, and for what?

For what? Ask Viktor Orbán. He knows. Ask Rupert. Why has he held onto the New York Post? News Corp., the parent company, makes a profit. But the Post loses kajillions. Nobody knows how much, but here’s an estimate from 12 years ago that put the paper’s losses at $60 to $120 million a year.

So why does he keep it? Because it’s worth every penny. It gives him power. The Post’s editors know how to use its front page and its news pages to shape discourse. Where did last fall’s New York crime scare come from, the one that had Westchesterites convinced they dare not set foot in the city, and which elected all those Republican members of Congress? From the Post, that’s where.

I used to be told sometimes, “Yes, but we have The New York Times, The Washington Post …” Really? No, not really. Sure, they endorse Democrats mostly. And sure, much of their social and cultural coverage proceeds from liberal assumptions. They, and almost all of the mainstream media, will not write a story today suggesting, for example, that undocumented immigrants across America should be rounded up en masse and deported. This has been a hard-won reality forged by many activists and intellectuals over many years, and it is a good thing.

But it isn’t capital-P Politics. On capital-PPolitics, The New York Times and The Washington Post often let liberals down. I was having these arguments, as I said, back when Dubya was president, and he and his vassals were ginning up their phony case for invading Iraq. Which newspaper published the infamous “aluminum tubes” story charging that Saddam Hussein was seeking material that could only be used in nuclear centrifuges? The Times, on its front page on a crucial Sunday in the fall of 2002, as Bush officials spent the day fanning out onto the political chat shows touting the article.

It was false. Eventually, the Times itself debunked the story—but in 2004, well after the war had started. And as for the Post, that liberal paper’s editorial page was one of the most important promoters of the Iraq invasion in all of American media. (Speaking of the unreliability of liberal media outlets at that time, it would be evasive of me not to mention The New Republic’s own fervent support of the war, but that wasn’t me; I was helming The American Prospect at the time, and we opposed it.)

I used to say to people: What we need is a full-throated liberal tabloid in Washington—a Washington version of the New York Post that would use its front pages and its news columns to promote embarrassing stories and scandals about Bush administration officials, evangelical grifters, and other prominent right-wingers. It would be agenda-setting. It would have some juicy gossip columns and a great sports section because a tabloid newspaper has to. And most of all, it would have done the vital work of connecting liberal values to a proletarian tabloid sensibility.

Everyone I mentioned this to laughed in my face, and maybe you are too. But Phil Anschutz didn’t laugh. He started a conservative tabloid right around the same time I was saying our side should start a liberal one. And what’s happened? I suppose he’s lost money, although I don’t really know. But The Washington Examineris a respected property (it gave up on print in 2013, but that was fine; by then it was an established presence). I see its people on cable news, and it has produced some legit stars like Tim Alberta. It has influence, I assume its reporters have Hill press credentials, and I don’t see anybody laughing at it…

And now let’s return our thoughts to Sinclair. How different would things be out there in America if, 15 or 20 years ago, some rich liberal or consortium of liberals had had the wisdom to make a massive investment in local news? There were efforts along these lines, and sometimes they came to something. But they were small. What if, instead of right-wing Sinclair, some liberal company backed by a group of billionaires had bought up local TV stations or radio stations or newspapers all across the country?

Again, we can’t know, but we know this much: Support for Democrats has shriveled in rural America to near nonexistence, such that it is now next to impossible to imagine Democrats being elected to public office at nearly any level in about two-thirds of the country. It’s a tragedy. And it happened for one main reason: Right-wing media took over in these places and convinced people who live in them that liberals are all God-hating superwoke snowflakes who are nevertheless also capable of destroying civilization, and our side didn’t fight it. At all. If someone had formed a liberal Sinclair 20 years ago to gain reach into rural and small-town America, that story would be very different today…

What will the result be 20 years from now? Will we be raising a generation of children in two-thirds of the country who believe that fossil fuels are great and trees cause pollution, that slavery wasn’t the cause of the Civil War, that tax cuts always raise revenue, and that the “Democrat” Party stole the 2020 election? Yes, we will. And it will happen because too many people on the liberal side refused to grasp what Murdoch, Anschutz, Smith, and Viktor Orbán see so clearly. Have your own media.

Categories Bias, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Extremism, Fake News, Media, Republicans, Trump

“Democracy“: A Yale Historian Speaks Out About the Changes in the Republican Party

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2024 //
81

A new commenter on the blog ssserted recently that real scholars don’t express their views about current events. Our reader “Democracy” here excerpts a recent article by a genuine scholar, David Blight of Yale University. Professor Blight is an eminent scholar of African American history, who recently edited a volume of Frederick Douglass’s writings for the Library of America. The following excerpt cited was published in the New York Review of Books.

Incidentally, the Washington Post reported that Trump responded to Nikki Haley’s concern about his age by saying that he took a mental test of 35-40 questions where he was shown a picture of a giraffe, a tiger, whale, and he correctly identified the whale. It sounds like a test for little children or non-English speakers.

Democracy wrote to the blog:

David Blight, historian from Yale, recently called Trump woefully “ignorant” about history, and, in essence a liar.

But Trump IS the current Republican Party, and here’s Blight on that:

“Changing demographics and 15 million new voters drawn into the electorate by Obama in 2008 have scared Republicans—now largely the white people’s party—into fearing for their existence. With voter ID laws, reduced polling places and days, voter roll purges, restrictions on mail-in voting, an evisceration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a constant rant about ‘voter fraud’ without evidence, Republicans have soiled our electoral system with undemocratic skullduggery…The Republican Party has become a new kind of Confederacy.”

“This new Confederacy is regional and rural. It knows what it hates: the two coasts, diverse cities, marriage equality, certain kinds of feminism, political correctness, university ‘elites,’ and ‘liberals’ generally. It is racial and undemocratic. It twists American history to its own ends, substituting ‘patriotism’ for scholarship and science. It has weaponized ‘truth’ and rendered it oddly irrelevant. It has brought us almost to a new 1860, an election in which Americans voted for fundamentally different visions of a proslavery or an antislavery future.”

Republicans: The New Confederacy

You can see all of this in Trump’s words and actions, and it’s parroted in turn by his minions, and his supporters, and by his lawyers.

Trump has proved himself to be a serial liar, racist, misogynist, and seditious traitor to the Constitution and the republic. The Republican Party is his enabler.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, History, Ignorance, Racism, Republicans, Trump

Florida “Proud Boy” Sentenced for Violent Attacks on Police Officers on January 6

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2024 //
8

Well, here is another “hostage” or “patriot” for Trump to pardon if he is re-elected. A 58-year-old man from Florida who was a member of the “Proud Boys, not even a man. He beat up several police officers during an event on January 6, 2021, that Trumpers insist was “a normal tourist visit” or (as the president of the Republican National Committee put it) “legitimate political discourse.” Clearly, this is not the party of law and order.

The Miami Herald reported:

A South Florida member of the far-right Proud Boys was sentenced to five years in prison Wednesday after federal prosecutors described him as “one of the most violent January 6 rioters” who assaulted at least six police officers while attacking the U.S. Capitol three years ago.

Kenneth Bonawitz, 58, of Pompano Beach, grabbed one of the officers in a choke hold and lifted her up and injured another so badly that he was forced to retire, according to federal prosecutors.

Bonawitz, a member of the Miami chapter of the Proud Boys, was carrying an 8-inch knife in a sheath on his hip when he stormed the Capitol with a mob of Donald Trump supporters after gathering for the president’s “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse before the attack.

“Police seized the knife from him in between his barrage of attacks on officers,“ Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean McCauley wrote in a sentencing memo recommending the high end of the guidelines, or nearly six years in prison. “His violent, and repeated, assaults on multiple officers are among the worst attacks that occurred that day.”

U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb in Washington DC gave Bonawitz a five-year sentence, followed by three years of supervised release. Arrested a year ago, he pleaded guilty in August to three felonies — one count of civil disorder and two counts of assaulting police.

Bonawitz arrived in DC via a chartered bus for Trump supporters.

After police confiscated his knife and released him, Bonawitz assaulted four more officers in the span of seven seconds, according to court records. He placed one of the officers in a headlock and lifted her off the ground, choking her.

“Bonawitz’s attacks did not stop until (police) officers pushed him back into the crowd for a second time and deployed chemical agent to his face,” the prosecutor wrote in the sentencing memo. More than 100 police officers were injured during the siege.

And yet the Trump people say the event was organized by the FBI or Antifa.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article284387720.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Justice, Republicans, Trump

The Media’s Worst Mistake about Trump

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2024 //
40

Jennifer Rubin is a regular columnist for the Washington Post. She was originally hired to give the view from the right, having arrived with excellent conservative credentials and a law degree. But Trump changed her political outlook, and she is a clear-eyed critic of Trump and an admirer of Biden.

She wrote recently that the biggest mistake of the media in covering Trump was treating him like a normal President or a normal candidate, rather than recognizing that he is a cult leader.

After missing the significance of the MAGA movement in 2016, innumerable mainstream outlets spent thousands of hours, gallons of ink and billions of pixels trying to understand “the Trump voter.” How had democracy failed them? What did the rest of us miss about these Americans? The journey to Rust Belt diners became a cliché amid the newfound fascination with aggrieved White working-class Americans. But the theory that such voters were economic casualties of globalization turned out to be false. Surveys and analyses generally found that racial resentment and cultural panic, not economic distress, fueled their affinity for a would-be strongman.


Unfortunately, patronizing excuses (e.g., “they feel disrespected”) for their cultlike attachment to a figure increasingly divorced from reality largely took the place of exacting reporting on the right-wing cult that swallowed a large part of the Republican Party. In an effort to maintain false equivalence and normalize Trump, many media outlets seemed to ignore that the much of the GOP left the universe of democratic (small-d) politics and was no longer a traditional democratic (again, small-d) party with an agenda, a governing philosophy, a set of beliefs. The result: Trump was normalized and a false equivalence between the parties was created.

Instead of reporting Trump’s wild assertions as legitimate arguments, media outlets should explain how Trump rallies are designed to instill anger and cultivate his hold on people who believe whatever hooey he spouts. How different are these events from what we see in grainy images of European fascist rallies in the 1930s? (When Trump apologists insist that tens of millions of people cannot be part of a cult, it’s critical to remember mass fascist movements that swept entire populations.) The appeals to emotion, the specter of a malicious enemy, the fear of societal decline, the fascination with violence and the elation just to be in the presence of the leader are telltale signs of frenetic fascist gatherings. Trump’s language (“poisoning the blood”) even mimics Hitler’s calls for racial purity.


Even as Trump shows his authoritarian colors and his rants become angrier, more unhinged and more incoherent, his followers still meekly accept inane assertions (e.g., convicted Jan. 6, 2021, rioters are “hostages,” magnets dissolve in water, wind turbines drive whales insane). More of the media should be covering this phenomenon as it would any right-wing authoritarian movement in a foreign country.


Though polls continue to show Trump’s iron grip on his followers, mainstream outlets spend far too little attention on why and how MAGA member cling to demonstrably false beliefs, excuse what should be inexcusable conduct and treat him as infallible. Outlets should routinely consult psychologists and historians to ask the vital questions: How do people abandon rationality? What drives their fury and anxiety? How does an authoritarian figure maintain his hold on followers? How do ideas of racial purity play into it? Media outlets fail news consumers when they do not explain the authoritarian playbook that Trump employs. Americans need media outlets to spell out what is happening.


“Authoritarian, not democratic dynamics, hold the key to Trump’s behavior as a candidate now and in the future,” historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote. “The main goals of his campaign events are not to advance policy proposals but rather to prop up his personality cult, circulate his lies, and emotionally retrain Americans to see violence as positive and even patriotic…”

A message from a mentally sound, serious leader (President Biden) cannot be equated with the message of an authoritarian who seeks absolute power through a web of disinformation and, if need be, violence. (When the media doesn’t grasp this, we get laughable headlines such as: “Clashing Over Jan. 6, Trump and Biden Show Reality Is at Stake in 2024.”)


Instead of probing why MAGA followers, despite all evidence to the contrary, deny that Trump was an insurrectionist and a proven liar, pollsters insist on asking Trump followers which candidate they think might better handle, for example, health care. The answer for Republicans (Trump! Trump!) has nothing to do with the question (Trump never had a health-care plan, you recall), and the question has nothing to do with the campaign.


The race between an ordinary democratic candidate and an unhinged fascist is not a normal American election. At stake is whether a democracy can protect itself from a malicious candidate with narcissistic tendencies or a rational electorate can beat back a dangerous, lawless cult of personality. Unfortunately, too many media outlets have not caught on or, worse, simply feign ignorance to avoid coming down on the side of democracy, rationality and truth.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, History, Republicans, Trump

Dana Milbank in Iowa: Trump Owns the Republican Party

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2024 //
30

No matter how many times he is caught lying, no matter how many top-secret documents he squirreled away, no matter how lavishly he praises dictators, no matter how many porn stars he has partied with, no matter how many millions he took from foreign governments during his term, no matter how many criminal counts he faces, no matter how many times he was indicted, the base of the GOP loves him.

Trump owns the Republican Party. It used to be the party of “family values,” but that pretense has been tossed aside. Trump, a thrive-married philanderer, has never talked about family values.

Dana Milbank went to Iowa to see for himself, and he saw the devotion of the MAGA crowd.

INDIANOLA, Iowa — They lined up for hours, some of them, in the minus-38-degree wind chill to see their candidate. It was the only rally Donald Trump was giving in the state in the TV days before Monday’s caucuses, so for the MAGA faithful, this was the golden ticket.


For the lucky 500 Trump followers admitted to the event space, the Trump campaign played a video reminding voters that Trump had already come in first place in the God primary.


“And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump,” the narrator proclaimed.


“God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight. … So God made Trump.”
“‘I need somebody with arms strong enough to rassle the deep state and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild.’ … So God gave us Trump.”


And then it came to pass, a few minutes later, that this midwife-turned-prophet took the stage in the ballroom, and he spake thus to his flock:


“We’ve got a crooked country,” run by “stupid people,” “corrupt,” “incompetent,” “the worst.”
Trump, in the gospel according to Trump, was the victim of “hoaxes,” “witch hunts,” “lies,” “fake indictments,” “fake trials,” judges who “are animals,” a “rigged election,” “rigged indictments,” and a “rigged Department of Justice where we have radical left, bad people, lunatics.”


The nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., “is a rat-infested, graffiti-infested shithole,” he said, with swastikas all over the national monuments.

His opponents, the prophet Trump continued, are “Marxists,” “communists,” “fascists,” “liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps,” “warmongers” and “globalists.”
Immigrants are like a “vicious snake,” whose “bite is poisonous,” he told them, and there is an “invasion” at the border by “terrorists,” “jailbirds” and “drug lords.”


“Our country is dying,” he informed them. And, by the way, “You’re very close to World War III.”
Have a nice day!


It was, in short, a slightly updated version of the rage, paranoia, victimhood, lies and demonization that propelled Trump’s popularity over the past eight years. Yet there was something else Trump said in his appearance here at Simpson College, south of Des Moines, that, I’m sorry to say, seems reasonably accurate.


“MAGA is taking over,” he told his chilled but enraptured supporters. “On the fake news, they say MAGA represents 44 percent of the Republicans. No, no. MAGA represents 95 percent of the Republican Party.”


His numbers might be off, but the observation is true. Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses Monday night were an overwhelming triumph for Trump, who in early results was more than 30 points ahead of his nearest competitor and getting more votes than the rest of the field combined. The voters had shown that there essentially is no Republican other than a MAGA Republican…

Nikki Haley points out that she polls better against Biden than the others, and it’s true. Were she the nominee, Republicans would likely win the presidency in a landslide. But this Republican electorate wants something different.


They want a guy who talks about being a “dictator” on day one, echoes Hitler in his rhetoric about ethnic minorities, demands absolute immunity from legal liability and threatens “bedlam” if he’s prosecuted.


They want a guy who, after all these years, still derides “Barack Hussein Obama” and “Pocahontas” Elizabeth Warren, as he did in Indianola on Sunday. They want a guy who threatens, as president, to “direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical, out-of-control prosecutor because of their illegal, racist … enforcement of the law.”

And they want a man who promises: “We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmonger … We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that truly hates our country. We will rout the fake news media. And we will evict Crooked Joe Biden from the White House.” The crowd, in their MAGA caps and Trump 47 jerseys, cheered their candidate and broke into spontaneous chants of “Trump!” and “USA!”

Let there be no more excuses made that Republican voters haven’t been given an alternative. They had a choice — and they chose Trump.

Iowa is an atypical state. It is overwhelmingly white and has a large number of evangelicals. Let’s see how other states vote.

Despite his paranoia, despite his character—or because of them— Trump swept 51% of the vote in Iowa.

However. CBS News reported that less than 15% of registered Republicans turned out in the bitter cold to cast a vote.

Categories Bigotry, Character, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Insane, Iowa, Racism, Republicans, Trump

The Text Messages Between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2024 //
10

The text messages between Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, show how determined Ginni Thomas was to keep Trump in office. She was certain that Democrats were stealing the election. She urged Meadows to listen closely to lawyer Sidney Powell. She urged Meadows to “release the kraken,” Powell’s words. Even when Meadows told her that Powell had no evidence of voter fraud, Ginni Thomas was undeterred.

Note: Sidney Powell subsequently claimed that no reasonable person would believe what she said about the election. When indicted in Atlanta for lying about the election, she pleaded guilty. But Ginni Thomas believed her. This suggests that Ginni Thomas is not a “reasonable person.”

If you listen to the text exchanges, you are likely to conclude that Justice Thomas must recuse himself from any case brought to the Supreme Court about the 2020 election. He is not impartial.

This message was tweeted by Denver Riggleman, a former Republican Congressman from Virginia who served as a technical advisor to the January 6 Committee.

Denver Riggleman⁦‪@RepRiggleman‬⁩On the 3-year anniversary of #Jan6, I read aloud all 29 texts between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows.

It’s a reminder of the delusion that fueled the J6 attack- all the way to the top. Listen to the Bourbon texts because you’ll need a drink. youtu.be/UeDqnuSlrCA?si… via ⁦‪@YouTube‬⁩ 1/6/24, 9:12 PM

Categories Accountability, Bias, Biden, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Republicans, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: What Biden Has Accomplished

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2024 //
12

Heather Cox Richardson touches on some of the high points of Biden’s three years in office. If he had enjoyed a solid majority in both Houses of Congress, he would have surpassed Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson in constructing a fair society where everyone has a chance to lead a decent life. Trump celebrated Infrastructure Week yearly but did nothing. Trump said he had a healthcare plan that was better than Obamacare, but we never saw it.

Despite stubborn opposition from Republicans, Biden was able to deliver.

She writes:

One day short of his first 100 days in the White House, on April 28, 2021, President Joe Biden spoke to a joint session of Congress, where he outlined an ambitious vision for the nation. In a time of rising autocrats who believed democracy was failing, he asked, could the United States demonstrate that democracy is still vital?

“Can our democracy deliver on its promise that all of us, created equal in the image of God, have a chance to lead lives of dignity, respect, and possibility? Can our democracy deliver…to the most pressing needs of our people? Can our democracy overcome the lies, anger, hate, and fears that have pulled us apart?”

America’s adversaries were betting that the U.S. was so full of anger and division that it could not. “But they are wrong,” Biden said. “You know it; I know it. But we have to prove them wrong.”

“We have to prove democracy still works—that our government still works and we can deliver for our people.”

In that speech, Biden outlined a plan to begin investing in the nation again as well as to rebuild the country’s neglected infrastructure. “Throughout our history,” he noted, “public investment and infrastructure has literally transformed America—our attitudes, as well as our opportunities.”

In the first two years of his administration, when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress, lawmakers set out to do what Biden asked. They passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to help restart the nation’s economy after the pandemic-induced crash; the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) to repair roads, bridges, and waterlines, extend broadband, and build infrastructure for electric vehicles; the roughly $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act to promote scientific research and manufacturing of semiconductors; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which sought to curb inflation by lowering prescription drug prices, promoting domestic renewable energy production, and investing in measures to combat climate change.

This was a dramatic shift from the previous 40 years of U.S. policy, when lawmakers maintained that slashing the government would stimulate economic growth, and pundits widely predicted that the Democrats’ policies would create a recession.

But in 2023, with the results of the investment in the United States falling into place, it is clear that those policies justified Biden’s faith in them. The U.S. economy is stronger than that of any other country in the Group of Seven (G7)—a political and economic forum consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, along with the European Union—with higher growth and faster drops in inflation than any other G7 country over the past three years.

Heather Long of the Washington Post said yesterday there was only one word for the U.S. economy in 2023, and that word is “miracle.”

Rather than cooling over the course of the year, growth accelerated to an astonishing 4.9% annualized rate in the third quarter of the year while inflation cooled from 6.4% to 3.1% and the economy added more than 2.5 million jobs. The S&P 500, which is a stock market index of 500 of the largest companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges, ended this year up 24%. The Nasdaq composite index, which focuses on technology stocks, gained more than 40%. Noah Berlatsky, writing for Public Noticeyesterday, pointed out that new businesses are starting up at a near-record pace, and that holiday sales this year were up 3.1%.

Unemployment has remained below 4% for 22 months in a row for the first time since the late 1960s. That low unemployment has enabled labor to make significant gains, with unionized workers in the automobile industry, UPS, Hollywood, railroads, and service industries winning higher wages and other benefits. Real wages have risen faster than inflation, especially for those at the bottom of the economy, whose wages have risen by 4.5% after inflation between 2020 and 2023.

Meanwhile, perhaps as a reflection of better economic conditions in the wake of the pandemic, the nation has had a record drop in homicides and other categories of violent crime. The only crime that has risen in 2023 is vehicle theft.

While Biden has focused on making the economy deliver for ordinary Americans, Vice President Kamala Harris has emphasized protecting the right of all Americans to be treated equally before the law.

In April 2023, when the Republican-dominated Tennessee legislature expelled two young Black legislators, Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, for participating in a call for gun safety legislation after a mass shooting at a school in Nashville, Harris traveled to Nashville’s historically Black Fisk University to support them and their cause.

In the wake of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Supreme Court decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion, Harris became the administration’s most vocal advocate for abortion rights. “How dare they?” she demanded. “How dare they tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her own body?… How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future? How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms?” She brought together civil rights leaders and reproductive rights advocates to work together to defend Americans’ civil and human rights.

In fall 2023, Harris traveled around the nation’s colleges to urge students to unite behind issues that disproportionately affect younger Americans: “reproductive freedom, common sense gun safety laws, climate action, voting rights, LGBTQ+ equality, and teaching America’s full history.”

“Opening doors of opportunity, guaranteeing some more fairness and justice—that’s the essence of America,” Biden said when he spoke to Congress in April 2021. “That’s democracy in action.”

Categories Accountability, Biden, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Environment, Republicans, Trump

Jamelle Bouie: If Trump Is Not an Insurrectionist, What Is He?

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2024 //
55

Jamelle Bouie is one of the best opinion writers at the New York Times. In addition to reading his regular columns, I subscribe to the newsletter he writes, where he shares ideas, tells you what he is reading and what he is cooking.

In this post, he wrote persuasively about why Donald Trump is an insurrectionist and should not be allowed to run for the office he defiled.

Bouie wrote:

Last month the states of Colorado and Maine moved to disqualify Donald Trump as a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. In response, Trump has asked the Supreme Court to intervene on his behalf in the Colorado case, and he has appealed Maine’s decision.

There is a real question of whether this attempt to protect American democracy — by removing a would-be authoritarian from the ballot — is itself a threat to American democracy. Will proponents and supporters of the 14th Amendment option effectively destroy the village in order to save it?

It may seem obvious, but we should remember that Trump is not an ordinary political figure. And try as some commentators might, there is no amount of smoke one could create — through strained counterfactuals, dire warnings of a slippery slope or outright dismissal of the events that make the Trump of 2024 a figure very different from the Trump of 2020 — that can obscure or occlude this basic fact.

In 2020, President Trump went to the voting public of the United States and asked for another four years in office. By 51 percent to 47 percent, the voting public of the United States said no. More important, Trump lost the Electoral College, 306 to 232, meaning there were enough of those voters in just the right states to deny him a second term.

The people decided. And Trump said, in so many words, that he didn’t care. What followed, according to the final report of the House select committee on Jan. 6, was an effort to overturn the result of the election.

Trump, the committee wrote, “unlawfully pressured state officials and legislators to change the results of the election in their states.” He “oversaw an effort to obtain and transmit false electoral certificates to Congress and the National Archives.” He “summoned tens of thousands of supporters to Washington for Jan. 6,” the day Congress was slated to certify the election results, and “instructed them to march to the Capitol” so that they could “‘take back’ their country.’” He even sent a message on Twitter attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, knowing full well that “a violent attack on the Capitol was underway.”

In the face of this violence, Trump “refused repeated requests over a multiple hour period that he instruct his violent supporters to disperse and leave the Capitol, and instead watched the violent attack unfold on television.” He did not deploy the National Guard, nor did he “instruct any federal law enforcement agency to assist.”

Trump sought and actively tried to subvert constitutional government and overturn the results of the presidential election. And what he could not do through the arcane rules and procedures of the Electoral College, he tried to do through the threat of brute force, carried out by an actual mob.

Looked at this way, the case for disqualifying Trump through the 14th Amendment is straightforward. Section 3 states that “No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

As the legal scholar Mark A. Graber writes in an amicus brief submitted to the Colorado Supreme Court, “American jurists understood an insurrection against the United States to be an attempt by two or more persons for public reasons to obstruct by force or intimidation the implementation of federal law.” There was also a legal consensus at the time of the amendment’s drafting and ratification that an individual “engaged in insurrection whenever they knowingly incited, assisted or otherwise participated in an insurrection.”

We also know that the framers of the 14th Amendment did not aim or intend to exclude the president of the United States from its terms. In 1870 the Republican-controlled Senate refused to seat Zebulon Vance, the former Confederate governor of North Carolina. It strains credulity to think that the same Republicans would have sat silent if the Democratic Party had, in 1872, nominated a former Confederate leader for the presidency.

Under a plain reading of Section 3 — and given the evidence uncovered by the Jan. 6 committee — Trump cannot stand for the presidency of the United States or any other federal office, for that matter.

The real issue with disqualifying Trump is less constitutional than political. Disqualification, goes the argument, would bring American democracy to the breaking point.

In this line of thinking, to deny Americans their choice of presidential candidate would destroy any remaining confidence in the American political system. It would also invite Trump’s allies in the Republican Party to do the same to Democrats, weaponizing Section 3 and disqualifying candidates for any number of reasons. Disqualification would also give far more power to the courts, when the only appropriate venue for the question of Trump is the voting booth.

But these objections rest on a poor foundation. They treat Trump as an ordinary candidate and Jan. 6 as a variation on ordinary politics. But as the House select committee established, Jan. 6 and the events leading up to it were nothing of the sort. And while many Americans still contest the meaning of the attack on the Capitol, many Americans also contested, in the wake of the Civil War, the meaning of secession and rebellion. That those Americans viewed Confederate military and political leaders as heroes did not somehow delegitimize the Republican effort to keep them, as much as possible, out of formal political life.

What unites Trump with the former secessionists under the disqualification clause is that like them, he refused to listen to the voice of the voting public. He rejected the bedrock principle of democratic life, the peaceful transfer of power.

The unspoken assumption behind the idea that Trump should be allowed on the ballot and that the public should have the chance to choose for or against him yet again is that he will respect the voice of the electorate. But we know this isn’t true. It wasn’t true after the 2016 presidential election — when, after winning the Electoral College, he sought to delegitimize the popular vote victory of his opponent as fraud — and it was put into stark relief after the 2020 presidential election.

Trump is not simply a candidate who does not believe in the norms, values and institutions we call American democracy — although that is troubling enough. Trump is all that and a former president who used the power of his office to try to overturn constitutional government in the United States.

Is it antidemocratic to disqualify Trump from office and deny him a place on the ballot? Does it violate the spirit of democratic life to deny voters the choice of a onetime officeholder who tried, under threat of violence, to deny them their right to choose? Does it threaten the constitutional order to use the clear text of the Constitution to hold a former constitutional officer accountable for his efforts to overturn that order?

The answer is no, of course not. There is no rule that says democracies must give endless and unlimited grace to those who used the public trust to conspire, for all the world to see, against them. Voters are free to choose a Republican candidate for president; they are free to choose a Republican with Trump’s politics. But if we take the Constitution seriously, then Trump, by dint of his own actions, should be off the board.

Not that he will be. The best odds are that the Supreme Court of the United States will punt the issue of Section 3 in a way that allows Trump to run on every ballot in every state. And while it will be tempting to attribute this outcome to the ideological composition of the court — as well as the fact that Trump appointed three of its nine members — I think it will, if it happens, have as much to do with the zone of exception that exists around the former president.

If Trump has a political superpower, it’s that other people believe he has political superpowers. They believe that any effort to hold him accountable will backfire. They believe that he will always ride a wave of backlash to victory. They believe that challenging him on anything other than his terms will leave him stronger than ever.

Most of this is false. But to the extent that it is true, it has less to do with the missed shots — to borrow an aphorism from professional sports — than it does with the ones not taken in the first place.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Yes! The Supreme Court Should Disqualify Trump from Appearing on the Ballot

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2024 //
36

I wrote a few days ago that Trump should not be removed from the ballot even though he unequivocally plotted to overturn the election he lost and provoked an insurrection against the orderly transfer of power. I was wrong. For me, it was a close call: I wanted him to lose convincingly at the hands of the voters; I predicted he would lose by 10 million votes in 2024.

But it should not have been a close call. Trump should not be allowed to run again. He violated his oath of office. I was persuaded I was wrong by the many comments by readers on this blog, by reading the new insider books by Liz Cheney and Cassidy Hutchinson, and by continuing to read other opinions, like that of Jamelle Bouie, whose columns will follow this one today.

Trump was exactly the kind of office-holder described in Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

In the lower federal court in Colorado, Judge Sarah B. Wallace ruled that Trump engaged in insurrection on January 6, 2021, but concluded that the President of the U.S. was not an “officer” as defined in the amendment. This was a bizarre conclusion, and the Supreme Court of Colorado ruled by a vote of 4-3 that Trump should not be allowed to run for President because he did take an oath to support the Constitution, he served as the highest officer of the nation, and he did engage in an insurrection against the Constitution to which he swore an oath. It’s no more complicated than that.

The Supreme Court will review that decision.

Trump continues to tell the Big Lie. Despite the fact that he lost 60 court decisions, including decisions by judges he appointed, including two decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court; despite the fact that his own Attorney General and his White House Counsel told him he lost, he continues to lie.

Trump continues to praise the insurrectionists. He has promised to pardon all of them who were convicted and sent to prison. He calls them “patriots” even though they defiled the U.S. Capitol, the seat of our government, and threatened the lives of Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence and the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and violently attacked police officers.

The members of Congress escaped the chamber where they were counting the electoral vote only minutes before Trump’s devoted followers broke through the doors. Had they broken through only five minutes sooner, there might have been a bloodbath, a massacre of our elected representatives. Some “patriots”!

Judges should not reach a decision based on fear of Trump’s mob.

Either the Constitution means what it says or it means whatever a politically appointed group of justices decide it says in contravention of the words themselves.

Either “no man is above the law” or only one man—named Donald Trump—is above the law.

Trump betrayed Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. He betrayed his oath of office. He incited, provoked, and engaged in an insurrection against the Constitution and the government that he swore to support.

Donald Trump should be removed from the ballot.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Justice, Lies, Propaganda, Republicans, Trump
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