The Washington Post reports that Steve Bannon is on thin ice with Trump. He made the mistake of feuding with Jared Kushner. Guess he never learned that blood is thicker than water and family is always first.
Sad.
Inside Bannon’s struggle: From ‘shadow president’ to Trump’s marked man – The Washington Post
https://apple.news/AAuvugSQkQ4aT-L0OqMk-6g
This article was written by An Garagiola-Bernier and published in the Washington Post.
She had a difficult life, growing up in a low-income home, dropping out of high school to help pay expenses, then suffering a debilitating disease that made it impossible to work and required multiple surgeries. She relied on charity to get by, but eventually enrolled in a community college. She made it to Hamline University, where she has a scholarship awarded by the John Kent Cooke Foundation. But she could not have made it to where she is today without the help of multiple federal assistance programs for low-income students like her. Those programs are now jeopardized by the proposed budget cuts.
She writes:
President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos never had to worry about the cost of a college education for themselves or their children. They never had to skip meals because they couldn’t afford to buy food. They never feared becoming homeless because they couldn’t afford a place to live.
Unfortunately, I — like millions of other low-income people — have had these worries. Not because we are lazy, ignored our school work or are not very bright. We simply didn’t have the good fortune of Trump and DeVos to be born into wealthy families. Many of us have had other bad breaks as well.
In my own case, I dropped out of high school to work at a low-wage job to help my mother pay mounting bills. Later, I was stricken with a disease called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome that made it impossible for me to work for seven years and required me to undergo 12 surgeries, leaving me and my husband struggling to get by with our three children. I turned to a charity to pay my enormous medical bills. Disabled, with little education, my employment opportunities were dismal.
Fortunately, I found my way to community college and then transferred to Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., where I am now a student. My life was transformed when I received a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship that provides me with up to $40,000 a year for my education at Hamline. But most low-income students aren’t as lucky.
I resumed my education after many years out of school because, like the vast majority of low-income students, I want to make something of myself, get a good job and leave poverty behind. I am told the best way to do this is to get an education beyond high school.
But instead of helping us to further our educations, President Trump recently proposed his “America First” budget that calls for a 13 percent cut in the Education Department budget, amounting to $9 billion.
In higher education, Trump has proposed taking $3.9 billion in surplus funds from Pell Grants for low-income students to use for other parts of government; $200 million in cuts to other programs that help low-income students pay for and succeed in college; cuts to the Federal Work-Study program that pays students to hold part-time jobs; and elimination of the Supplemental Education Opportunity Grants for low-income students.
Two particularly effective programs that prepare low-income students for college and help them graduate would be hit hard — one called GEAR-UP (the acronym stands for Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) would be eliminated, and a group of programs called TRIO would be cut. TRIO got its name from three initiatives that date to the 1960s.
How can Trump “make America great again” by denying access to higher education to those students who are low-income?
How is he “putting America first” if he closes the doors of opportunity to those who were not born rich like him?
Sean Spicer is clueless.
Sean Spicer may be the dumbest person in the Trump administration. He should definitely check in with Jared Kushner for a little lesson.
But then, you don’t need to be Jewish to know that Hitler used chemical weapons to kill millions of his own citizens: Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, Roma, people with disabilities, political dissidents, etc. You don’t even need to be a historian.
I thought it was common knowledge.
Lesson: Make no assumptions about what Sean Spicer knows.
CNN reports that the government has spent more than $20 million for Trump’s weekend trips over 80 days–and will spend more in one year than was spent on Obama in 8 years.
This would not be an issue if Trump had not ridiculed Obama for excessive spending on his vacations.
Excessive??
Trump on pace to surpass 8 years of Obama’s travel spending in 1 year – CNN
Did Trump order the strike against a Syrian airbase to boost his sagging poll numbers? Did he do it to divert attention from the glacial investigation of his ties with Putin? Did he do it to show he is not colluding with Putin?
Reports today say that Syria war planes bombed the same town again, taking offfrom the airfield that our missiles allegedly destroyed.
Syria strikes: Site of chemical attack hit again – CNN
https://apple.news/AHhbLlTtcQu6K8mm5_7vNcA
An ineffectual gesture. Nothing like the appearance of decisive military action to give the impression of leadership.
This symbolic action is known as Wag the Dog. It generically means change the subject of discussion to divert attention from something you don’t want discussed
http://www.gingersoftware.com/content/phrases/wag-the-dog/#.WOkQ9oEpCaM
Yesterday the Maryland General Assembly voted to override Governor Larry Hogan’s veto of a bill meant to protect public schools against the privatization agenda of Betsy DeVos.
Maryland has a rightwing Republican Governor, Larry Hogan, who has appointed a pro-privatization state board of education.
But Maryland also has a legislature controlled by Democrats. They hold a veto-proof majority.
The legislature passed an anti-privatization bill called the “Protect Our Schools Act,” intended to block state takeovers and the Trump/DeVos agenda.
Governor Hogan vetoed the bill on Wednesday, saying it would prevent the state from identifying low-performing schools and taking them over (and privatizing them). His appointed state board agreed with him.
Yesterday, the Democratic-controlled legislature overrode Hogan’s veto.
The governor is angry:
The bill [that he vetoed] would set standards for how the state would identify low-performing schools that Hogan says rely too little on standardized tests. And it would prevent the state from taking several actions to improve those schools, including converting them to charter schools, bringing in private management, giving the students vouchers to attend private schools or putting the schools into a special statewide “recovery” school district.
Hogan and members of the state school board argue that the bill would tie their hands as they try to rescue low-performing schools.
Let it be stipulated that neither the governor nor any member of the state school board has EVER rescued a low-performing school.
Congratulations to the educators and parents and students of Maryland for defeating Governor Hogan’s effort to impose the DeVos agenda on the state’s public schools.
I read the Washington Post every day. It is an excellent source of news about the events in the nation’s capital.
One thing is clear. Trump is surrounded by leakers in his closest circle. There is great internal strife and leaking is a way of putting the shiv in your rival’s back. One story implies that a very senior official inside Trump’s circle is leaking. My guess: Jared Kushner. Maybe someone else.
Here are some stories I found interesting.
Stephen Bannon is in deep doodoo. Trump gets very annoyed when people refer to “President Bannon.” Brannon’s “economic nationalism” is sham.
Devin Nunez, Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee, recused himself from the Trump-Russia investigation, after disgracing himself by getting tips from the White House and reporting the “tips” to Trump as new information (without bothering to tell other members of his committee).
Jennifer Rubin is the designated conservative columnist for the Washington Post. Rubin blasts the administration, Paul Ryan and rightwing media for trying to undermine the investigation of foreign interference into our elections. She writes:
“The episode underscores the degree to which we are vulnerable when those in positions of authority — Nunes, Trump, Ryan, the leakers — abuse their trust and turn the most consequential national security investigation of our lifetimes into a circus.”
The paper’s regular fact-checker column says that Trump’s claim that Susan Rice committed a crime is “absurd.”
Russ Walsh has written an important post, which is a call to arms for all of us who care about public education and don’t want it to be turned into a free-market consumer good.
Last week on his show, Real Time, Bill Maher introduced the Yale professor and author, Timothy Snyder, whose new book is entitled, On Tyranny. The book outlines 20 lessons we can learn from the rise of fascism and communism in the 20th century to make sure the same does not happen to us in the 21st century. Lesson #2 caught my ear immediately: Defend Institutions. Snyder says
It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about – a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union – and take its side.
OK, Professor Snyder, I choose public education as my institution to defend.
One way we can be sure that Trump and his minions are coming after our institutions is to see who the Tweeter-in-chief has chosen to head up various government departments. Almost to a person (Pruitt, Perry, Price), people who are opposed to the very institutions they are leading have been put in charge. If public education is to survive, we are going to have to fight for it. We cannot sit back and wait for this current nightmare to pass because by the time we wake up, it may be too late. It should be clear to all of us that the institution of public education is under a very real threat from the authoritarian Trump administration and its anti-public schools Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.
The appointment of DeVos was the clearest indication from the new Trump administration that public education would be under siege. Next came the Trump budget proposal that, as Jeff Bryant reports here, strips money from after-school programs for poor children, reduces the overall budget of the department by 13%, but still finds billions of dollars for various school choice schemes.
Russ says:
Be informed.
Speak up.
Get involved.
Our institutions are under assault. One of the most vulnerable of these institutions is public education. If we do not fight for it, we will lose it. If we do fight for it, perhaps we can turn the conversation about schools around and focus on what is really causing our educational problems – income inequity, prejudice, and segregation.
This is the fourth and last editorial published by the Los Angeles Times about Trump. It contains links to the preceding three. These are strange times we live in. We have a president who lies and doubles-down on his lies and is incapable of apologizing; a president who refuses to divest or even disclose his worldwide financial holdings, which may be affected by decisions he makes; a man who trusts his immediate family members more than his cabinet to carry out government functions; a man without honor or integrity or knowledge or decency or even a sense of irony (after declaring April to be Sexual Assault Awareness Month, he defended Fox News host Bill O’Reilly who has settled multiple sexual harassment complaints; Trump said O’Reilly had “done nothing wrong.”)
Here is the editorial:
PART VI
Friday
By THE TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD
APRIL 5, 2017
In Donald Trump’s America, the mere act of reporting news unflattering to the president is held up as evidence of bias. Journalists are slandered as “enemies of the people.”
Facts that contradict Trump’s version of reality are dismissed as “fake news.” Reporters and their news organizations are “pathetic,” “very dishonest,” “failing,” and even, in one memorable turn of phrase, “a pile of garbage.”
Trump is, of course, not the first American president to whine about the news media or try to influence coverage. President George W. Bush saw the press as elitist and “slick.” President Obama’s press operation tried to exclude Fox News reporters from interviews, blocked many officials from talking to journalists and, most troubling, prosecuted more national security whistle-blowers and leakers than all previous presidents combined.
But Trump being Trump, he has escalated the traditionally adversarial relationship in demagogic and potentially dangerous ways.
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Most presidents, irritated as they may have been, have continued to acknowledge — at least publicly — that an independent press plays an essential role in American democracy. They’ve recognized that while no news organization is perfect, honest reporting holds leaders and institutions accountable; that’s why a free press was singled out for protection in the 1st Amendment and why outspoken, unfettered journalism is considered a hallmark of a free country.
Trump doesn’t seem to buy it. On his very first day in office, he called journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth.”
Since then he has regularly condemned legitimate reporting as “fake news.” His administration has blocked mainstream news organizations, including The Times, from briefings and his secretary of State chose to travel to Asia without taking the press corps, breaking a longtime tradition.
He apparently hopes to discredit, disrupt or bully into silence anyone who challenges his version of reality.
This may seem like bizarre behavior from a man who consumes the news in print and on television so voraciously and who is in many ways a product of the media. He comes from reality TV, from talk radio with Howard Stern, from the gossip pages of the New York City tabloids, for whose columnists he was both a regular subject and a regular source.
But Trump’s strategy is pretty clear: By branding reporters as liars, he apparently hopes to discredit, disrupt or bully into silence anyone who challenges his version of reality. By undermining trust in news organizations and delegitimizing journalism and muddling the facts so that Americans no longer know who to believe, he can deny and distract and help push his administration’s far-fetched storyline.
It’s a cynical strategy, with some creepy overtones. For instance, when he calls journalists “enemies of the people,” Trump (whether he knows it or not) echoes Josef Stalin and other despots.
But it’s an effective strategy. Such attacks are politically expedient at a moment when trust in the news media is as low as it’s ever been, according to Gallup. And they’re especially resonant with Trump’s supporters, many of whom see journalists as part of the swamp that needs to be drained.
Of course, we’re not perfect. Some readers find news organizations too cynical; others say we’re too elitist. Some say we downplay important stories, or miss them altogether. Conservatives often perceive an unshakable liberal bias in the media (while critics on the left see big, corporate-owned media institutions like The Times as hopelessly centrist).
The news media remain an essential component in the democratic process and should not be undermined by the president.
To do the best possible job, and to hold the confidence of the public in turbulent times, requires constant self-examination and evolution. Soul-searching moments — such as those that occurred after the New York Times was criticized for its coverage of the Bush administration and the Iraq war or, more recently, when the media failed to take Trump’s candidacy seriously enough in the early days of his campaign — can help us do a better job for readers. Even if we are not faultless, the news media remain an essential component in the democratic process and should not be undermined by the president.
Some critics have argued that if Trump is going to treat the news media like the “opposition party” (a phrase his senior aide Steve Bannon has used), then journalists should start acting like opponents too. But that would be a mistake. The role of an institution like the Los Angeles Times (or the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or CNN) is to be independent and aggressive in pursuit of the truth — not to take sides. The editorial pages are the exception: Here we can and should express our opinions about Trump. But the news pages, which operate separately, should report intensively without prejudice, partiality or partisanship.
Given the very real dangers posed by this administration, we should be indefatigable in covering Trump, but shouldn’t let his bullying attitude persuade us to be anything other than objective, fair, open-minded and dogged.
The fundamentals of journalism are more important than ever. With the president of the United States launching a direct assault on the integrity of the mainstream media, news organizations, including The Times, must be courageous in our reporting and resolute in our pursuit of the truth.
