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Add Another Scandal to the GOP “Family Values” Facade

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2023 //
25

For decades, the GOP has claimed to be the party of “family values.” From what we have read recently about Governor Noem of South Dakota, who allegedly was romantically entangled with a Trump aide, and Rep. Lauren Boebert, ousted from a musical performance in Denver because she and her date were groping and vaping, the “family values” bit doesn’t fit.

And here is another broken vow, as reported by Business Insider:

A tale as old as time is playing out yet again: A politician who promotes the importance of family has abandoned them.

This time, it appears to be US Rep. Jeff Duncan, a Republican in South Carolina. Duncan’s wife, Melody Duncan, filed for divorce last week, citing her husband’s multiple affairs.

Melody Duncan, his wife of more than 30 years and mother to his three sons, accused her husband of at least two affairs in the divorce filing, which was first obtained and published by the Index-Journal, a local newspaper in Greenwood.

Duncan has been in office for 13 years and has long advocated for conservative Christian values.

“As a life-long social conservative, I am a strong advocate for life and traditional family values,” Duncan writes on his website. Accompanying the post is a stock image of the Holy Bible, a book famous for its views on infidelity.

He then pledges himself to the anti-abortion cause: “The most basic component of our society is the family.”

The family, plus a few mistresses, it would seem.

The divorce filing described Melody Duncan as a “dutiful wife” who “wholeheartedly supported” Duncan in his career. It cites a political event last month where Duncan echoed his wife’s sentiment.

At a “Faith and Freedom BBQ” on August 28, Duncan described his wife as “supportive and loving” while portraying himself as a “dedicated, dutiful husband,” according to the divorce filing. Duncan then “left the next day and went directly” to the home of his mistress, it says.

Categories Cheating, Lies, Republicans, South Carolina

Who Are the Billionaire Wilks Brothers of Cisco, Texas?

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2023 //
2

Dan and Farris Wilks are politically powerful billionaires who live in Cisco, Texas. They both finished high school but went no further. They got into fracking early on and sold their oil and gas business to the government of Singapore for $3.5 billion in 2011.

They are passionate evangelical Christians. They fund Christian nationalist groups. They fund anti-gay organizations and anti-abortion groups. They consider climate change a hoax. They are major funders of voucher advocacy. They would like to see every student enrolled in a private Christian school or home-schooled.

The brothers are closely associated with ALEC and the Koch network. They are big contributors to Senator Ted Cruz.

Dan and Farris Wilks are major funders of PragerU videos, which present history and economics from a rightwing perspective, echoing the views of Dennis Prager, the talk-show host who created the videos.

Read about Dan Wilks here.

Read about Farris Wilks here.

The Wilks brothers have been described as “the Koch brothers of the Christian right” for their funding of anti-abortion and anti-LGBTgroups. In addition to a variety of groups on the Religious Right, the brothers have funded organizations associated with the Koch brothers’ political network such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network (SPN). Farris Wilks runs The Thirteen Foundation, which has been described as “one of the biggest and quietest anti-abortion donors in the United States.”

The Guardian summarized their negative influence here.

Experts who follow the influence of the Wilks brothers say their sprawling agendas and big checks spark strong concerns.Videos denying climate science approved by Florida as state curriculum

“Farris and Dan Wilks, who believe their billions were given to them by God, have spent the last decade working to advance a dominionist ideology by funding far-right organizations and politicians that seek to dismiss climate change as ‘God’s will’, remove choice, demonize the LGBTQ community, and tear down public education, all to turn America into a country that gives preference to and imposes their extreme beliefs on everyone,” said Chris Tackett, a Texas-based campaign finance analyst.

“The goal of [the] Wilks and those that share their ideology is to gain control of levers of power and control information. That’s why they invest heavily into politicians, agenda-driven non-profits and media organizations like PragerU and the Daily Wire. It is all connected.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Racism, Religion, Republicans, Vouchers

Houston Chronicle Editorial: Three Theocratic Billionaires Threaten U.S. Democracy

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2023 //
2

The Houston Chronicle published a blistering editorial about the power of three billionaires who control Republican politics in Texas and threaten American democracy—not only in Texas. The three are adherents of Christian nationalism and dedicated funders of school vouchers. Their dream is to abolish public schools and enroll every student in a Christian school or home-schooled. They funded State Attorney General KennPaxton’s impeachment defense, and they are now funding Governor Greg Abbott’s campaign for vouchers.

The editorial board wrote:

Since its founding in the early 1880s, the little town of Cisco, 45 miles east of Abilene, has been in the news twice. In 1919, Conrad Hilton paid $40,000 for the Mobley Hotel in downtown Cisco, which eventually gained fame as the first in a worldwide chain of Hilton hotels. Eight years later, two days before Christmas 1927, Santa Claus and three of his helpers robbed the First National Bank of Cisco.

National notoriety will again fall on Cisco if Texas voters — Republican, Democrat and independent — don’t get engaged with their democracy sometime soon. The little town is home to the Wilks brothers, Dan and Farris, oil and fracking billionaires who, by playing Santa Claus to Republican officeholders receptive to far-right extremists, are on a mission to transform Texas into a Christian nationalist state. Their efforts, in conjunction with an even more influential West Texas oil billionaire, Tim Dunn of Midland, was on insidious display during the recent impeachment trial of the most corrupt state attorney general in America.

Ken Paxton skated, not necessarily because he was innocent of the charges that 121 House members, including 60 Republicans, brought against him. He’s back on the job and baying for RINO blood because most Republicans in the Texas Senate are either in thrall to the West Texas triumvirate or they tremble in terror at the prospect of being “primaried” by a Wilks-and-Dunn-anointed challenger. All 19 Republican senators and at least half of the Republican House members have taken money from the West Texas billionaires or their affiliated PACs and organizations.

The biggest recipient by far in this state is none other than Paxton himself. It’s likely that the Wilks and Dunn trio paid for his $4 million impeachment defense, which included the time and effort of very expensive Houston lawyers, Tony Buzbee and Dan Cogdell.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the judge during the impeachment trial, also is beholden to the West Texans. Their Defend Texas Liberty PAC donated $1 million to the lite guv, while loaning him another $2 million. The PAC largesse came shortly before Patrick began presiding over Paxton’s trial, a trial that ended with a fiery Patrick speech denouncing the impeachment process.

In addition to being fossil-fuel billionaires, both Dunn and Farris Wilks are Christian nationalist evangelists — Dunn as a lay preacher for the Midland Bible Church, Wilks as a preacher for a Cisco congregation founded by his father called the Assembly of Yahweh Seventh Day Church. Dan Wilks and his wife oversee the Heavenly Fathers Foundation, a group funded with a portion of the $3.2 billion the brothers made when they sold the majority stake of their Cisco-based oil field trucking company, Frac Tech Services.

From the pulpit to the campaign pockets of politicians, the West Texans are on what they see as a God-imbued mission to transform Texas and beyond. Over the past 20 years, they’ve contributed nearly $100 million to think tanks, nonprofits, fundraising committees, websites and Texas candidates who support their crusade.

In their preaching and practice, climate change is merely God’s will; homosexuality is an evil on par with incest, bestiality and pedophilia; abortion is murder, unlawful with no exceptions; gun owners enjoy a God-given right to carry their weapons in public without permits or training; only Christians have the God-given right to hold leadership positions in government (which, as Texas Monthly reported, left former House Speaker Joe Strauss, who is Jewish, beyond the pale). Also, oil and gas is a gift from God to be used with gratitude. (They don’t mention God’s gift of sunlight and wind.)

Kel Seliger, a longtime GOP state senator from Amarillo, ran afoul of the triumvirate in recent years. Reasonable, affable and conservative, Seliger is no longer in the Legislature. “It’s a Russian-style oligarchy, pure and simple,” he told CNN last year. “Really, really wealthy people who are willing to spend a lot of money to get policy made the way they want it — and they get it.”

What those “really, really wealthy people” want these days is to destroy Texas public education, a hotbed, as they tell it, of critical race theory and other elements of what one Dunn-and-Wilks-backed group calls “Marxist and sexual indoctrination,” all funded by “far-Left elites for decades.” (That would be the Texas taxpayer.) [Bold-face added by DR, here and below.]

Their strategy, as Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor, told Chron.com, is to recruit a generation of Wilks and Dunn-funded mouthpieces in state and local positions to push the narrative that public schools are harmful to students and their parents. Once public education is weakened beyond repair, they offer private religious schools as “a better way.”

With an insidious, well-funded effort, our home-grown theocrats will make sure that Gov. Greg Abbott has all the financial ammunition he needs in the next few weeks for his last-ditch, special-session effort to persuade lawmakers to use taxpayer money in the form of vouchers for private, often Christian-based schooling. Abbott calls it “school choice.” Rural lawmakers, who’ve fought the plan for years, know it’s school suicide.

The West Texans “want to destroy the public school system as we know it and, in its place, see more home-schooling and more private Christian schools,” former state Sen. Bob Deuell, a northeast Texas Republican, told CNN. Deuell, a physician, got crossways with the West Texans when he supported a bill that updated the state’s end-of-life procedures. Dan Wilks, falsely claiming that the legislation would “strengthen Texas’s death panels,” backed tea party activist Bob Hall, who defeated Deuell in 2014. Hall was one of Paxton’s most outspoken supporters during the impeachment trial.

Texas is a big state, but the West Texans have Christian nationalist ambitions beyond our borders. They are reliable supporters of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and, of course, former President Donald Trump, who decried Paxton’s “shameful impeachment.” In an expansive, post-impeachment mood these days, Paxton seems to be pondering a larger field of dreams for himself. He told Tucker Carlson last week he may challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn. “His time is done,” Paxton told a radio talk-show host.

If Trump wins the presidential election next year, the disgraced Texas AG would be a prime candidate to head the U.S. Justice Department. (His paramour, the woman he brought from San Antonio to Austin, could be installed in a Georgetown townhouse, only a short Uber ride away from Justice.) He (they) would be right at home in a Trumpian Washington, where, as U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney said to The Atlantic writer McKay Coppins, “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

The party’s presidential nominee in 2012 has said he worries about the survival of America’s democratic experiment.

Whether it survives depends in large part on what happens here in Texas, where the national far right comes for funding and ideas. Decades of one-party rule have contributed to voter apathy and made our state a fertile testing ground for extreme policies. It’s telling, for example, that the AG was reelected last year with the support of about 13 percent of the populace (4 million votes out of a population of nearly 30 million). Paxton and other Dunn and Wilks dependents only have to listen to their West Texan Santa Claus trio, not to the people of Texas.

On a Friday morning in Cisco nearly a century ago, a little girl was among the first to notice that the Santa who stepped out of a stolen Buick and into the lobby of the First National Bank was a fake (and a dangerous one, at that). In Texas these days, maybe we’ve grown jaded. Perhaps it will be young voters of all political persuasions who will take the lead in calling out — and rejecting — the dangerous extremists in our midst. Perhaps taking heart from the brave Republicans who dared impeach an errant AG, they’ll elect representatives of the people, not altar boys and girls on call for Christian nationalists.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Dark Money, Democracy, Freedom, Funding, Home Schooling, Religion, Republicans, Texas, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: GOP Prepares to Shut Down the Government

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2023 //
3

Heather Cox Richardson writes about the tumultuous showdowns yesterday:

The fight over how we conceive of our federal government was on full display today.

The Biden administration announced the creation of the American Climate Corps. This will be a group of more than 20,000 young Americans who will learn to work in clean energy, conservation, and climate resilience while also earning good wages and addressing climate change.

This ACC looks a great deal like the Civilian Conservation Corps established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats in 1933, during the New Deal. The CCC was designed to provide jobs for unemployed young men (prompting critics to ask, “Where’s the She, She, She?”) while they worked to build fire towers, bridges, and foot trails, plant trees to stop soil erosion, stock fish, dig ditches, build dams, and so on.

While the CCC was segregated, the ACC will prioritize hiring within communities traditionally left behind, as well as addressing the needs of those communities that have borne the brunt of climate change. If the administration’s rules for it become finalized, the corps will also create a streamlined pathway into federal service for those who participated in the program.

In January, a poll showed that a climate corps is popular. Data for Progress found that voters supported such a corps by a margin of 39 points. Voters under 45 supported it by a margin of 51 points.

While the Biden administration is establishing a modern version of a popular New Deal program, extremists in the Republican Party are shutting down the government to try to stop it from precisely this sort of action. They want to roll the government back to the days before the New Deal, ending government regulation, provision of a basic social safety net, investment in infrastructure, and protection of civil rights.

Extremists in the House Republican conference are refusing to acknowledge the deal worked out for the budget last spring by President Biden and Republican speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). Instead, in order to pass even a continuing resolution that would buy time for Congress to pass an actual budget, they are insisting on cuts of up to 8% on discretionary spending that Senate Democrats, as well as Biden himself, are certain to oppose.

The White House has noted that the cuts the Republicans demand would mean 800 fewer Customs and Border Protection agents and officers (which, in turn, would mean more drugs entering the United States); more than 2 million women and children waitlisted for the WIC food assistance program; more than 4,000 fewer rail inspection days; up to 40,000 fewer teachers, aides, and key education staff, affecting 26 million students; and so on.

House speaker McCarthy cannot corral the extremists to agree to anything unless they get such cuts, which even other Republicans recognize are nonstarters (those cuts are so unpopular that Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported today that Republicans are somewhat bizarrely considering changing their messaging about their refusal to fund the government from concerns about spending to concerns about border security).

Meanwhile, the extremists are threatening to throw McCarthy out of the speakership. There are rumors that Republican moderates are considering working with Democrats to save McCarthy’s job, but Democrats are not keen on helping him when he has just agreed to open a baseless impeachment inquiry into the president in order to appease the extremists.

“If you’d asked about two months ago I would have said absolutely,” Representative Dean Phillips (D-MN) told Manu Raju, Lauren Fox, and Melanie Zanona of CNN. “But I think sadly his behavior is unprincipled, it’s unhelpful to the country,” he said.

As a shutdown appears more and more likely, even Republicans acknowledge that the problem is on their side of the House. Until the 1980s, funding gaps did not lead to government shutdowns. Government agencies continued to work, with the understanding that Congress would eventually work out funding disputes. But in 1980 a fight over funding the 1,600-employee Federal Trade Commission led President Jimmy Carter to ask Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti if the agency could continue to operate when its funding ran out. Civiletti surprised participants by saying no.

Four years ago, Civiletti told Ian Shapira of the Washington Post that his decision was about a specific and limited issue, and that he never imagined that politicians would use shutdowns for long periods of time as a political weapon. And yet, shutdowns have become more frequent and longer since the 1990s, usually as Republicans demand that Congress adopt policies they cannot pass through regular procedures (like the 34-day shutdown in 2019 over funding for the border wall former president Trump wanted).

Many observers note that “governing by crisis,” as President Barack Obama put it, is terribly damaging and that Civiletti’s decision should be revisited. Next month’s possible shutdown has the potential to be particularly problematic because there is no obvious solution. After all, it’s hardly a surprise that this budget deadline was coming up and that the extremists were angry over the deal McCarthy cut with Biden back in May, and yet McCarthy has been unable in all those months to bring his conference to an agreement.

Republicans appear resigned that voters will blame them for the crisis, which, honestly, seems fair. “We always get the blame,” Representative Mike Simpson (R-ID), a senior appropriator, told Katherine Tully-McManus and Adam Cancryn of Politico. “Name one time that we’ve shut the government down and we haven’t got the blame.”

Meanwhile, the House extremists continue to push their vision for the nation by undermining the institutions of the government. The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), today held what normally would have been a routine oversight hearing focused on policy, law enforcement, and so on. Instead of that business, though, Jordan and the hard-right Republicans on the committee worked to construct a false reality in right-wing media by attacking Attorney General Merrick Garland over his role in the investigation of President Biden’s son Hunter, begun five years ago under Trump.

Glenn Thrush of the New York Times noted drily that “[m]any of the claims and insinuations they leveled against Mr. Garland—that he is part of a coordinated Democratic effort to shield the Bidens and persecute Mr. Trump—were not supported by fact. And much of the specific evidence presented, particularly the testimony of an investigator who questioned key decisions in the Hunter Biden investigation, was given without context or acknowledgment of contradictory information.”

Instead, Jordan and his extremist colleagues shouted at Garland and over his answers, producing sound bites for right-wing media. Those included the statement from Representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN) that the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were actually “good Americans” who brought “strollers and the kids.” Even as both Biden and Garland have prioritized restoring faith in the Justice Department after Trump’s use of it for his own ends, the extremist Republicans are working to undermine that faith by constructing the false image that the Department of Justice is persecuting Trump and his allies.

Their position was not unchallenged on the committee, even within their own party. Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) defended Garland from their attacks, while Democrats on the committee went after the Republicans themselves. Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) accused Jordan of making the Judiciary Committee into a “criminal defense firm for the former president.”

Garland, who is usually soft-spoken, pushed back too. “Our job is not to take orders from the president, from Congress, or from anyone else, about who or what to criminally investigate,” he told the committee. “I am not the president’s lawyer. I will add I am not Congress’s prosecutor. The Justice Department works for the American people.”

“We will not be intimidated,” he added. “We will do our jobs free from outside influence. And we will not back down from defending our democracy.”

Please open the link for the footnotes and consider subscribing to this valuable blog.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Democracy, Democrats, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Republicans

Republicans Hold Congressional Hearings on Chinese Influence in American Schools

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2023 //
25

The Republican leadership of the House Education Committee held hearings on the threat posed by Communist China to American public and private schools. Read the summary and ask yourself the following questions: Would red states grant the Confucius Classrooms a charter to run their own schools? Would they let a school organized by the Confucius Classrooms accept voucher students? Are they equally concerned about the scores of Gulen schools that receive public funds and operate as charter schools? Gulen is a Turkish imam who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania; the board of trustees of his schools are led by Turkish men; the Gulen schools have a large number of Turkish teachers on staff. When will the House Committee on Education investigate the Gulen schools?

The release from the committee begins:

Hearing Recap: Confucius Classrooms Edition

Today’s Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education (ECESE) Subcommittee hearing, led by Chairman Aaron Bean (R-FL), investigated the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to infiltrate America’s K-12 schools.

In postsecondary education, the CCP exerts soft power on the American education system through cultural exchange outposts known as Confucius Institutes. The K-12 arms of this propaganda machine, called Confucius Classrooms, were under the microscope today for their potential malignant influence.

Chairman Bean opened the hearing by pointing out, “The risk posed by the proliferation of Confucius Classrooms is threefold, threatening America’s national, geopolitical, and academic interests.”

Expert witnesses testifying today included Mike Gonzalez, Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation; Nicole Neily, President of Parents Defending Education (PDE); and Ryan Walters, State Superintendent of Public Instruction at the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

The seminal report on Confucius Classrooms, and therefore the spark for congressional investigation, was led by Nicole Neily and PDE. In her opening testimony, Ms. Neily laid out the key findings of her organization’s report: “Our research found that over the past decade, over $17 million has been given to 143 school districts and private K-12 schools across 34 states (plus DC) – impacting over 170,000 students in 182 schools.” Furthermore, these classrooms were identified near 20 U.S. military bases, posing a potential national security threat.

As a state education officer, Mr. Walters offered a perspective on the impact of these donations in Oklahoma schools. After one of his school districts was named in the PDE report, Mr. Walters ordered a further investigation, which uncovered that, “Through a series of non-profits, that school district maintains an active connection with the CCP through a program called Confucius Classrooms, even after the federal government cracked down on similar programs in 2020.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Gulen Charter Schools, International, Republicans, Vouchers

The Party of “Family Values”?

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2023 //
56

The Daily Mail of London reported a shocking story about an alleged relationship between Kristi Noem, the Governor of South Dakota, and Trump aide Corey Lewandowski.

  • DailyMail.com uncovered evidence of Lewandowski and Noem’s fling: Dozens of trips that mixed business with pleasure, private flights and luxury resort stays
  • The pair met up Friday for a Trump campaign rally in Rapid City, South Dakota, but were careful to have no public interaction – despite being close for years
  • The two were first suspected of being romantically involved in 2021, but Noem scornfully dismissed the story as ‘total garbage and a disgusting lie’ at the time

A rising Republican star tipped by many to be Donald Trump‘s running mate should he win the presidential nomination has been involved in a clandestine affair for years, multiple sources tell DailyMail.com.

Married South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, 51 – who stresses her belief in ‘family values’ – and Trump advisor Corey Lewandowski, who is also married, began carrying on in 2019, if not before.

Vanity Fair jumped all over the story.

The Daily Mail has published an explosive report that South Dakota governor Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski, a former Donald Trump aide, have been having a secret affair “for years”—at least since 2019. Noem’s spokesperson told the tabloid, “This is so predictable that you would attack Governor Noem less than a week after she endorsed Donald J. Trump as the 47th President of the United States.” Neither have denied the Daily Mail’s reporting, and Vanity Fair has reached out to both of them for further comment.

A “family values” Republican, Noem has three children with her husband, Bryon. They’ve been married for over 30 years. Lewandowski married his wife, Alison, in 2005, and they have four children.

Lewandowski has a reputation of being just one of the many characters that Trump can’t quit. Trump’s original campaign manager, Lewandowski was fired in June 2016 after “a series of incidents that the Trump family worried had cast the candidate in a negative light.” These may have included, but were not limited to, aggressively handling a reporter and protester, reportedly calling a coworker a “fucking bitch,” and reportedly calling a staffer to yell at him as the staffer’s grandmother was having her Last Rites read. Soon, though, Trump brought Lewandowski back in the fold.

Noem stoked speculation that she’s angling to be Trump’s running mate for 2024 with an early endorsement of the indicted man for president. Trump received her endorsement onstage in North Dakota last week, where a Trump-Noem 2024 graphic reportedly appeared on a screen behind them. “I will do everything I can to help him win and save this country,” Noem said when introducing the former president.

The Daily Mail claimed it has a long list of receipts including “stays at luxury resorts where their intimacy was observed and noted.” They allegedly took private planes on donors’ dimes, and would disappear frequently. Rumors of their alleged affair surfaced briefly in 2021, via far-right conservative website American Greatness, but Noem issued a strong rebuke of the story. She said it was “total garbage and a disgusting lie,” and she was “proud of the God-fearing family” that she raised with her husband. Lawyers for Lewandowski dismissed the allegations as “rumors.”

Lewandowski became a key adviser to Noem by 2019, and they would travel frequently together. Per the Daily Mail, “In the months leading up to the 2020 election, Noem and Lewandowski became virtually inseparable companions on the Trump campaign trail. By then, their relationship was an open secret at the White House and among high-level GOP lobbyists and political consultants.”

Open the links and read the story. This whole “family values” stuff is a fraud and a hoax.

Another GOP family values scandal:

Representative Lauren Boebert was ejected from a live performance of “Beetlejuice” after patrons complained that she and a male friend were vaping and petting and disturbing everyone near them. Boebert initially denied the story but apologized for her behavior after videos were released. This opinion piece in The Colorado Sun describes the ugly details and castigates Boebert for her arrogance. A pregnant woman sitting behind Boebert asked her to stop vaping and she refused; so much for protecting the unborn.

Categories Lies, Republicans, South Dakota, Trump

Politico Advises Democrats to Act Like GOP on School Choice

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2023 //
26

In what has to be the worst, most unbalanced article about education in all of 2023, Politico urged Democrats to act like Republicans and promote school choice.

Politico’s education writer, Juan Perez Jr., interviewed Democrats who are well known as advocates for charter schools as proof that Democrats must support choice policies.

He begins:

MINNEAPOLIS — President Joe Biden’s education chief believes public schools are facing a “make or break moment.” The rescue plan coming from some Democrats, however, rings of policies that have already landed wins for conservatives.

Political skirmishes over classrooms have left Democrats underwater, or dead even, with Republicans among voters in a clutch of battleground states. And as they worried their party has not honed a strategy to reverse declining test scores, enrollment and trust in public schools, liberals watched Republican governors sign historic private school choice laws this year.

The GOP wins and a generational crisis in schooling has convinced some Democrats that the Biden administration needs to promote a liberal version of public school choice in the 2024 campaign, or risk losing votes.

“We’ve lost our advantage on education because I think that we’ve failed to fully acknowledge that choice resonates deeply with families and with voters,” said Jorge Elorza, the CEO of Democrats for Education Reform and its affiliate Education Reform Now think tank.

Please open the link. It doesn’t get any better. Not only does he quote DFER, the hedge managers group that does not support public schools, he also quotes Kerri Rodrigues of the “National Parents Union,” funded by the billionaire Waltons as a leader of the 2016 failed campaign to increase charters in Massachusetts.

Not exactly typical Democrats. More like charter advocates.

I sent Mr. Perez the following email:

Dear Mr. Perez,

I am writing to express my strong disagreement with your article today about Democrats and schools. Democrats will not improve their popularity by acting more like Republicans.

Republicans are on a mission to transfer public funds to nonpublic schools. Whenever vouchers have been put to a state referendum, they are defeated by large margins, as they were in Florida, Arizona, and Utah. The Republicans leaders of those states ignored the will of the voters and authorized vouchers.

In every state with vouchers, 70-80% are claimed by students who never attended public schools. Vouchers are a giveaway to families who already put their kids in private and religious schools.

Nearly 90% of the parents in this country send their children to public schools.

The most recent Gallup Poll showed that the overwhelming majority of parents are happy with their public schools.

For decades, Republicans have promoted school choice by attacking public schools.

The way forward for the Democratic Party is not to embrace GOP policies but to support the adequate and equitable funding of public schools and to stand against the privatization of public schools.

Volumes of research show that charter schools on average do no better than public schools, even though they admit whom they want and oust whoever has low scores or is disruptive. The Network for Public Education, in which I am involved, reports frequently on the high rates of closings by charter schools, as well as the scandals that occur almost daily due to embezzlement and other financial misdeeds.

Voucher students do not take state tests. Their schools are not accountable. Their teachers need not be certified. They may discriminate against students and families on grounds of religion, LGBT, or any other reason. They are not required to accept students with disabilities. Students who leave public schools for voucher schools typically fall behind their public school peers, and many drop out and return to public school.

Why in the world should Democrats support schools that are free to discriminate, free to hire uncertified and unqualified staff, managed by for-profit entities, and are not as successful as public schools?

That is bad political advice, which you got by interviewing people whose organizations advocate for charter schools (DFER and the so-called “National Parents Union”). The only pro-public school voices in your article were Randi Weingarten and Miguel Cardona, a union leader and the Secretary of Education.

Why didn’t you interview parents engaged in the fight to keep public education public? They are in every state, fighting billionaire-funded organizations like DFER and Moms for Liberty.

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, could introduce you to them. Why don’t you come to our 10th annual national conference, which will be held at the Capitol Hilton in DC on October 28-29. You would meet parents from every state who are working to preserve their public schools and keep them safe from entrepreneurs, grifters, corporate chains, and religious interests.

Diane Ravitch

You too can write him at jperez@politico.com.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Democracy, Democrats for Education Reform, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Republicans

Dana Milbank: Biden Faulted by GOP for Liking Dogs and Ice Cream

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2023 //
34

Republicans have spent the past four years portraying Joe Biden as a senile fool, a bumbling idiot, giving him no credit for his legislative achievements. They boast about the infrastructure projects in their districts, but never mention that they voted against the legislation that funded the projects.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote recently that Republicans have found new reasons to ridicule Biden: he pets dogs and he likes ice cream. Shocking!

Milbank writes:

White House spokesman Andrew Bates is a happy warrior. For years, he has spiritedly fended off whatever calumny Republicans alleged at the moment, whether about President Biden’s age or Hunter Biden’s laptop or some imaginary scheme to take away Americans’ hamburgers or, most recently, their beer.

But Bates has found that he cannot in good conscience defend the man he serves against a deeply troubling new charge that the Republican National Committee has leveled at him. “I’m just coming to grips with the fact that I work for a dog-petting monster,” he told me.

It’s true. A couple of weeks ago, when Biden was touring the devastation in Maui, Hawaii, he encountered a golden lab named Dexter who was assisting with the grim search. He noted that Dexter was wearing booties to protect his paws from the scorching earth, and — Outrageously! Unforgivably! — Biden leaned over and petted Dexter on the top of his head.

The RNC swung into action. “Biden gets distracted by a dog: ‘That’s some hot ground, man!’” the GOP tweeted (or whatever one does now that Elon Musk has wrecked the platform) from its @RNCResearch account. It appended video of the offense.

This was not the first time the RNC caught the president in a scandalous act of canine affection. “Biden gets distracted by his dog on the balcony as he returns from Japan,” the RNC tweeted in May. The month before, @RNCResearch mocked Biden for answering “a child’s question about his dog” and for attempting to greet the Irish leader’s Bernese mountain dog (the animal barked at the president). “This dog wants nothing to do with Joe Biden,” the RNC tweeted.

Offensive though it is that Biden likes dogs, the RNC has exposed him for worse: enjoying ice cream. @RNCResearch has gone after him no fewer than 12 times for this deplorable behavior, tweeting out indefensible things Biden has said on the topic, such as “I know some really great ice cream places around here” and (parental discretion advised) “I got a whole full freezer full of Jeni’s chocolate chip ice cream.”

Impeach!

The GOP’s goal, of course, is to portray Biden as doddering and feebleminded. “Was Biden dozing off in Maui?” @RNCResearch tweeted with video that did not, in fact, show Biden dozing. “Biden looks confused as he heads back to his vehicle,” it tweeted in late August. “BIDEN: *stares blankly*,” it tweeted a few days later, after he ignored questions from a Fox News reporter. “BIDEN (very confused): ‘Who am I yielding to?’ ” @RNCResearch tweeted after the president inquired about the speaking order at a news conference with foreign leaders….

The RNC, which has defended Donald Trump’s lies that led to a violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election, has repeatedly faulted “SERIAL LIAR” Biden for exaggerating the damage done by a fire in his home decades ago. The accuracy standard of @RNCResearch’s attacks is little higher than the former president’s. It spread false storiesabout an unseen White House official silencing Biden with a mute button, about a bird pooping on Biden, about Biden making an antisemitic remark and about Biden being disoriented.

“Did Joe Biden just announce he has cancer?” the RNC ridiculed one day, apparently unaware that Biden has had various non-melanoma skin cancers removed.

“Joe Biden says the length of Barack Obama’s signature is shorter than his. Obama’s is 3 letters longer,” the RNC mocked on another day, clearly unaware that Biden signs his name “Joseph R. Biden Jr.”

There is nothing Biden does that will escape the ridicule of the RNC.

But what could be worse than petting dogs and liking ice cream?

Categories Biden, Elections, Humor, Republicans, Stupid

Thom Hartmann: The Cynical GOP Impeachment Claim

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2023 //
64

Thom Hartmann remembers when Republican operatives undermined John Kerry’s presidential campaign by “swift boating” him. Having no positive policies to advance to voters, they instead attack the character and ethics of the Democratic candidate.

He writes:

House Republicans have revived the infamous Swiftboat lie strategy that helped defeat John Kerry in 2004. In essence, it involves relentlessly lying about a candidate and smearing his or her name and reputation in the hopes it’ll shave a few points off their popularity with independent voters.

While virtually 100 percent of the men who served with Kerry in Vietnam spoke glowingly of his service, a group who did not serve with him made up lies and exaggerations. 

Kerry and those who served with him tried to get the truth out, but, as Mark Twain is often credited as saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

While Democrats prefer to win elections based on facts and policy positions, Republicans — not having anything to offer average Americans — instead default to slander and lies. Like with Obama’s birth certificate. Or Hillary’s email and Benghazi.

Wouldn’t most people, after all, resort to lies if all they had to offer was: 

— Forcing 10-year-olds to carry their rapist’s babies to term,
— More guns to slaughter more American children,
— Tax cuts for billionaires,
— More fossil fuels to create out-of-control weather,
— A government shutdown to cause a recession,
— And a Russian victory in Ukraine?

In this case, the essence of the impeachment inquiry Kevin McCarthy announced yesterday is straightforward: he believes that Joe and Hunter Biden profited from Joe’s being in the White House during the Obama administration and he thinks that’s an impeachable offense.

After all, there is:

— That $2 billion that Hunter got in a sweetheart deal from the Saudis with an annual paycheck of $25 million to manage it. 
—Or the billion he got from Qatar after his buddies in Saudi Arabia blockaded the country and threatened to starve them until they coughed up to bailout his fancy overpriced building in New York City. 
— And the more-than $600 million Hunter made while working in his dad’s White House. 
— Don’t forget the tens of millions in trademarks his wife got from the Chinese when she visited them with Dad. 
— Or his multiple meetings with Russians working for Vladimir Putin who was then trying to get his dad elected. 
— Or the $30 million given him to invest and manage by one of Israel’s largest insurance companies. 
— And the top-secret info he gave a Saudi prince that helped him overthrow his own government.

Oh, wait. That was Jared and Ivanka Kushner, not Hunter Biden.

Hunter appears to have committed three crimes, two of which he’s being prosecuted for by a Trump-appointed special prosecutor with help from a Trump-appointed judge.

First, he failed to report or pay his income taxes for two years while he was in the throes of alcohol and drug intoxication.

He’s since paid them in full, plus fines, as do tens of thousands of delinquent filers in the US every year. Republicans want him to go to prison anyway.

Second, he checked a box on an application to purchase a gun — which he only kept for two weeks and never used — which said that he wasn’t then a drug addict.

Checking that box when you are a drug addict is technically a crime, but there’s no instance I can find with a pretty thorough web search of anybody, anywhere, any time ever having been prosecuted for it.

Until now. It looks like Hunter might actually go to prison for checking the box, which raises the question: where are the Second Amendment Republicans protesting this violation of his sacred right to own a gun no matter what? Crickets.

Third, Hunter took a position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian fossil fuel giant, for which he was paid millions. This was a transparent effort to trade off his father’s name and nobody is denying that: it was “poor judgement” (to quote Hunter himself).

To show his employers how tight he was with the Vice President, he’d call his dad and conduct the phone conversation on a speaker phone for the room to hear; his business partner in the Burisma deal, Devon Archer, testified about that before James Comer’s House Oversight Committee. 

Sadly for Comer, though, Archer testified under oath that the two never discussed business or Burisma: Joe Biden kept the conversations to family, rehab, and the weather.

Nonetheless, the Republicans are sure if they dig deep enough they’ll find something at least as scandalous as Jared’s cutting the deals with Saudi Arabia that led to the Crown Prince funneling millions of dollars into Donald Trump’s pockets via the LIV Golf scheme. 

Good luck with that: unlike Donald Trump, Joe Biden actually has a moral compass. He used those phone calls to try to talk his son into rehab.

But Marjorie Taylor Greene had dinner with Donald Trump this past Sunday night, and he told her he wanted Joe Biden impeached according to people who were there, and then turned up the pressure on McCarthy. Trump, of course, doesn’t want to be the only guy running for the presidency who’s been impeached and whose family is known to be corrupt through-and-through.

Now Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz are in a pissing match over who was first with the very, very cool plan to impeach Biden.

Boebert’s proposal, Greene wants the world to know, is simply a rip-off of her own efforts. After calling Boebert a “little b*tch,” Green said:

“I had already introduced articles of impeachment on Joe Biden for the border, asked her to co-sponsor mine—she didn’t. She basically copied my articles and then introduced them and then changed them to a privileged resolution.”

Yesterday morning, after McCarthy’s coming announcement was public knowledge, Gaetz tweeted:

“When @SpeakerMcCarthy makes his announcement in moments, remember that as I pushed him for weeks, @kilmeade said I was: ‘Speaking into the wind’ on impeachment. Turns out, the wind may be listening!”

In response, Greene tweeted back at him:

“Correction my friend. I introduced articles of impeachment against Joe Biden for his corrupt business dealings in Ukraine & China while he was Vice President on his very first day in office. You wouldn’t cosponsor those and I had to drag you kicking and screaming to get you to cosponsor my articles on the border. Who’s really been making the push?”

The sad reality for this MAGA crowd is that there is no evidence, either direct or implicit, that Joe Biden ever had anything to do with his son’s business dealings or ever took any money from them. None. Even the two “IRS whistleblowers” who said Hunter had committed tax crimes that they claimed were overlooked during the Trump administration brought no evidence. The Department of Justice also denied their claims.  

Another much-heralded “whistleblower” that Comer and House Republicans had talked about for weeks turned out to be a professional con man, spy for China, and criminal who’s on the lam fleeing international arms trafficking charges. Understandably, he didn’t show up for the hearings.

But don’t let facts get in the way of a good swiftboating.

I remember when, during the 2004 election year, Jerome Corsi came on my programseveral times to hype his book Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. Corsi, it turned out, had never served in the US military, and his co-author, John O’Neill, served in Vietnam long after Kerry had returned to the US.

Literally none of their claims held up, but, like with the Obama birth certificate and Benghazi, they blew enough smoke that millions of swing voters concluded there must be a fire somewhere.

So now McCarthy is having to twist himself into pretzels to try to justify this bizarre fishing expedition.

Instead of seating a select committee to look into impeaching Biden, McCarthy is essentially doing a marketing move rather than a legal one. There is no “impeachment committee” with subpoena power because having one would require a majority of the House to vote for it and he knows he doesn’t have enough Republican votes to make it happen.

As McCarthy himself said just two weeks ago:

“To open an impeachment inquiry is a serious matter and House Republicans would not take it lightly or use it for political purposes. The American people deserve to be heard on this matter through their elected representatives. That’s why, if we move forward with an impeachment inquiry, it would occur through a vote on the floor of the People’s House and not through a declaration by one person.”

Back in 2019 — when Nancy Pelosi was debating having a vote to put together an impeachment committee when it came out that Trump had tried to extort Zelenskyy to say that Biden was corrupt — McCarthy said:

“Speaker Pelosi can’t decide on impeachment unilaterally. It requires a full vote of the House of Representatives.”

But instead of having that vote yesterday, McCarthy’s just attaching that “impeachment” label to the existing hustles being run by Comer at House Oversight and Jordan at Judiciary and Weaponization. It’s legally meaningless, but just the use of the word “impeachment” guarantees multiple news cycles, driving the “smoke” into the faces of American voters. 

This is the same McCarthy who said the entire Benghazi two-year circus was done purely to tarnish Hillary Clinton in the upcoming 2016 election. He told Sean Hannity it was his “strategy to fight and win” the election, adding:

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.”

The fact is that presidential elections, which are often decided by just a few points or less, can be won if a candidate can simply shave those few points off their opponents’ tally. And that can be done by discouraging base voters about a candidate and thus suppressing turnout, or simply souring swing voters on that candidate.

This strategy worked for Republicans in 2004 against John Kerry and again in 2016 against Hillary Clinton; we can fully expect them to play it out now. Particularly if Democrats once again respond by trying to ignore it and wrongly assume people will realize how absurd it is. 

Slander campaigns like this must instead be hit head-on with outrage and ferocity: Democrats need to take this seriously.

So, while Don Jr. and Eric Trump are facing prosecution in a $250 million fraud suit by New York State for corrupt acts that handed their family billions of dollars scammed from banks, insurance companies, and unpaid taxes, Republicans are going to try to impeach Joe Biden for his son’s poor but entirely legal decision to sit on the Burisma board.

Meanwhile, within hours of McCarthy’s announcement, Russian President Vladimir Putin came out and gushed about the “outstanding person” Elon Musk while taking Donald Trump’s side in his dispute with Jack Smith.

Irony is dead and hypocrisy has never been more alive.

Categories Biden, Elections, Ethics, Lies, Republicans

Raymond F. Tirana: The Libertarian Goal for K-12 Schooling

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2023 //
27

Reader Raymond F. Tirana posted a comment in which he described the end goal of the libertarian overhaul of school funding. In Kansas, Florida, and other red states, he says, they are trying to shift responsibility for funding and providing schools from the state to parents. This will not only exacerbate segregate but increase inequity. Of course, they will do this under false pretenses, claiming to “widen opportunities” and to “save poor children from failing schools.” Don’t believe them.

He wrote in a comment:

What will really happen once the state offloads all responsibility for educating children: Inevitably, the budget will be slashed each year (Kansas is already enacting a flat tax that will decimate the State’s ability to raise revenue – people remember Koch Industries is based in Kansas, right?) until the public schools are forced to fold and Kansas parents will be lucky to get any crumbs from their masters to be used toward the education of their kids. This was Milton Freidman’s fantasy, and we are close to seeing it realized in Kansas, Florida and other states, as parents sit by and let their children’s future be stolen from them.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Economy, Education Industry, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Florida, Funding, Hoax, Lies, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Vouchers
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