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I Wish I Could Vote for Hillary Clinton Twice

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2016 //
47

[This article was posted last night at zhuffington Post.]

As we all know, James Comey, the director of the FBI, shook up the Presidential election by informing Congress that the FBI is re-opening the investigation of Hillary Clinton after finding thousands of emails on the computer used by her close aide Huma Abedin and her lecherous husband Anthony Wiener. Director Comey said in his brief message that the emails have not been reviewed and may not be significant.

This announcement was contrary to the Justice Department’s longstanding policy of not commenting on ongoing investigations and not interfering in elections within the 60 days prior to the vote. Comey’s intervention may influence the outcome of the election, and he surely knows it. Let me repeat from his own statement to Congress that the emails have not been reviewed and may not be significant.

A Trump supporter in Iowa was arrested for voting twice. She was caught breaking the law. She said she was convinced that the election was “rigged,” as her candidate has said scores of times, so she thought she should vote twice.

Well, I won’t be voting twice, because it is against the law.

But I feel more strongly than ever that Donald Trump is a menace to our nation and to the world. He will do anything and say anything to spew hatred of Hillary Clinton and distrust for our democracy and its electoral process. He said a few days ago that the election should be canceled and he should be anointed President.

Let me count the reasons why I will do whatever I can to support Hillary Clinton.

She is far better qualified for the presidency than Donald Trump, who is completely unfit for the position.

She is better educated, more experienced, more thoughtful, wiser, and more knowledgeable than Trump.

She has a demonstrated commitment to the well-being of all Americans, while he is a bigot who has manipulated his followers’ fear of anyone who is not white and Christian.

Let me count the reasons that Trump should not be president.

He has stirred bigotry against blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, and women.

By his own admission, he is a sexual predator.

He will appoint Supreme Court justices committed to rolling back Roe v. Wade, civil rights, environmental protection, and any restrictions on campaign finance and on corporate greed.

He has given no evidence that he understands either foreign or domestic policy.

He has given permission to all the hate groups in the nation to crawl out from under their respective rocks and voice their venom against Jews, blacks, Muslims, Hispanics, and anyone they consider “other.” Anyone who expresses criticism of Trump on Twitter receives hundreds or thousands of responses that are anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-everything but white nationalism.

Trump has unleashed a virulent form of white nationalism that has felt ashamed to show its face–or its hoods–for many years. If you want to know more about the Trump base, read this article that appeared in the New Yorker about a man who spends full time as a “troll for Trump.”

To understand his campaign and the white nationalists who are managing it, read this article “Inside the Bunker,” which I posted a few days ago.

Donald Trump is ignorant of the government, of democratic processes, of economics, and of any of the issues facing our nation.

Trump lacks the character or temperament to be President. He is a bully. He is vengeful. He is thin-skinned. He is a braggart. He is a con man. He is a liar. He has a documented history of defrauding the same people who are now voting for him, the working people to whom he offers lies and false promises of bringing back jobs that were lost to automation and outsourcing (which he participated in with his own products). And then there is Trump University, which ripped off working people, widows, and pensioners with false promises of riches. He should be selling snake oil, not running for the highest office in the land.

Listening to the radio this morning (CNN), I heard one of his biographers defend him (“The Truth about Trump”), saying that he was a consummate performer. He actually believes in nothing. No, there won’t be a wall, and Mexico won’t pay for it. He is running because he wants to win the biggest prize of all: the Presidency. He isn’t interesting in being President, just winning. Not to worry, Mike Pence will run the country. Pence is a homophobe who went on national television to defend discrimination against gays but was forced by corporations to back down when they threatened to leave Indiana. Mike Pence, darling of the far right, former talk-show host, is the Rush Limbaugh of Indiana.

James Comey acted inappropriately. He ignored the policies and norms of the Justice Department and the FBI. He announced a new investigation without any facts or evidence or charges; it will be weeks or months before the FBI decides whether there is anything of significance on the laptop shared by Anthony Wiener and Huma Abedin. If Comey helps elect Donald Trump, he should start a new investigation of the fraudulent voting inspired by Trump’s phony claims of vote rigging and the fraudulent business practices of President Trump. Will Trump separate himself from his hotel chain and his golf courses? Will he use his position as President to drum up money for his business empire? Will his children continue to profit from his businesses? He can’t put his business empire into a blind trust. Will he pause in affairs of state to open a new hotel, as he did a few days ago, or to launch a new line of clothing?

If this charlatan is elected, our democracy is at risk. Our economy is at risk. Our ideals, our values, and our aspirations for a more perfect union will be endangered by the takeover of the national government by the alt-right, by men like Steve Bannon of Breitbart, Roger Ailes of Fox News, and Rudy Guiliani, the skeletal ex-mayor of New York City who cheers on all of Trump’s wildest exaggerations.

Trump says he represents change, and that is true. But Trump’s change would mean chaos, incompetence at the highest levels of government, and a revival of the worst racism and bigotry of our lifetimes.

I can only vote for Hillary once, but I will vote for her with renewed enthusiasm.

Categories Clinton, Fraud, Politics, Trump

Trump’s Clever, Risky Plan to Win the Presidency and/or Destroy the Republican Party

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2016 //
66

A stunning story in Bloomberg BusinessWeek reveals Donald Trump’s end game: Suppress the Hillary vote. Target certain audiences and bombard them on the Internet with negative stories that discourage them from turning out.

Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg went “inside the Trump bunker” to learn the campaign’s strategizing. Trump has abandoned traditional fund-raising events and is replying now exclusively on the Web to find campaign contributions. He has a small team with pre-written Tweets, ready to go to synchronize with his speeches. He has a highly sophisticated data team, conducting its own polling. His campaign is led not by veteran political operatives but by people skilled at marketing. Marketing the candidate is no different from marketing any other product.

They write:

When Bannon joined the campaign in August, Project Alamo’s data began shaping even more of Trump’s political and travel strategy—and especially his fundraising. Trump himself was an avid pupil. Parscale would sit with him on the plane to share the latest data on his mushrooming audience and the $230 million they’ve funneled into his campaign coffers. Today, housed across from a La-Z-Boy Furniture Gallery along Interstate 410 in San Antonio, the digital nerve center of Trump’s operation encompasses more than 100 people, from European data scientists to gun-toting elderly call-center volunteers. They labor in offices lined with Trump iconography and Trump-focused inspirational quotes from Sheriff Joe Arpaio and evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. Until now, Trump has kept this operation hidden from public view. But he granted Bloomberg Businessweek exclusive access to the people, the strategy, the ads, and a large part of the data that brought him to this point and will determine how the final two weeks of the campaign unfold.

The Trump team knows very well that they are behind in the polls, and they have shaped a plan to reverse Clinton’s edge: suppress her voters.

Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.

The nation is at risk if Trump wins, and the Republican party is at risk if he loses.

Regardless of whether this works or backfires, setting back GOP efforts to attract women and minorities even further, Trump won’t come away from the presidential election empty-handed. Although his operation lags previous campaigns in many areas (its ground game, television ad buys, money raised from large donors), it’s excelled at one thing: building an audience. Powered by Project Alamo and data supplied by the RNC and Cambridge Analytica, his team is spending $70 million a month, much of it to cultivate a universe of millions of fervent Trump supporters, many of them reached through Facebook. By Election Day, the campaign expects to have captured 12 million to 14 million e-mail addresses and contact information (including credit card numbers) for 2.5 million small-dollar donors, who together will have ponied up almost $275 million. “I wouldn’t have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn’t known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine,” says Bannon. “Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power.”

Since Trump paid to build this audience with his own campaign funds, he alone will own it after Nov. 8 and can deploy it to whatever purpose he chooses. He can sell access to other campaigns or use it as the basis for a 2020 presidential run. It could become the audience for a Trump TV network. As Bannon puts it: “Trump is an entrepreneur.”

Whatever Trump decides, this group will influence Republican politics going forward. These voters, whom Cambridge Analytica has categorized as “disenfranchised new Republicans,” are younger, more populist and rural—and also angry, active, and fiercely loyal to Trump. Capturing their loyalty was the campaign’s goal all along. It’s why, even if Trump loses, his team thinks it’s smarter than political professionals. “We knew how valuable this would be from the outset,” says Parscale. “We own the future of the Republican Party.”

Win or lose, he is not going away. White nationalism is his base, and he is cultivating it with dexterity. And keeping it intact for the future.

Categories Clinton, Politics, Trump

Where Does Clinton Stand on Charter Schools?

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2016 //
80

At a policy forum in Miami before the Council of the Great City Schools, surrogates for Trump and Clinton clarified their views, sort of.

Carl Paladino, remembered in New York for his racist and sexist emails during his campaign against Cuomo, promised that Trump would not put an educator in charge of the Education Department. That’s no surprise. In other settings, both Trump and Paladino have promised to turn all federal funding over to charters and vouchers and to abandon public education.

Clinton’s surrogate said that she is a “big backer” of charter schools, but not for-profit schools. That is not at all reassuring, since some of the most rapacious charter schools are technically non-profit but are managed by for-profit EMOs. And some rapacious charter chains are non-profit but pay their executives obscene salaries. And some non-profits are agents of privatization, even when the profit motive is absent.

The article also said:

During her 2016 campaign, Clinton’s position on charters became a bit less clear. During her time as a U.S. senator from New York, for example, Clinton was a supporter of charters. She’s even taken some grief from the teachers’ unions for that stance. But during this White House run, she also criticized charters for not necessarily accepting all the same students that traditional public schools do. And she’s said charters should supplement what public schools do and not replace them.

She was right. Charter schools do not accept the same students that real public schools do. They can admit those they want and kick out those they don’t want. And while it is admirable to say that charters should not replace public schools, the reality is that charters drain both resources and students from public schools, causing public schools to cut their programs and staff and to have even less capacity to serve the overwhelming majority of students.

The United States simply cannot afford to have a dual school system: one that chooses the students it wants, and the other required to accept all who apply. No high-performing nation in the world operates a dual school system.

If Clinton is to have an intelligent policy about public and charter schools, she must be better informed than she is now, and she can’t rely solely on charter advocates for her information about the way charters are systematically eroding public education in America. She need only look at what is happening in Pennsylvania, Ohio, California, Arizona, Nevada, Florida, and a dozen or more other states.

She might learn that more than 90% of charters are non-union. She might bear in mind that her strongest supporters have been the NEA and the AFT, whose jobs will be lost as charters expand.

Profit is not the only issue, though it is one. The central issue is privatization and the danger to America’s historic commitment to universal public education, doors open to all, not to some.

The good news is that one of the Podesta emails leaked by Wikileaks said that a group of billionaire reformers organized by Laurene Powell Jobs wanted to meet with Hillary but she couldn’t make time for them, and Podesta responded:

Probably worth the time. Not sure we can reassure them. Want to discuss by phone?

Note bene: she didn’t make time to meet with them, and the staff was not sure it could reassure them. That’s a good sign. Take that, reformers!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Clinton, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Democrats, Education Industry, Privatization, Trump

Mike Klonsky: The Trump Plan to Eliminate Public Education

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2016 //
20

Mike Klonsky reports on the Trump plan to get rid of public education, as described by Carl Paladino, a Trump surrogate and far-right extremist who owns charter schools in Buffalo, New York.

http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2016/10/trump-plans-to-do-away-with-public.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mikeklonsky+%28SmallTalk%29

“If there was any doubt, Trump surrogate Carl Paladino made it perfectly clear that if his boss is elected his goal will be nothing less than the elimination of public education and complete liquidation of the nation’s teacher unions.

Paladino ran for governor against Cuomo and lost. He is the Trump of upstate New York.

Home

Klonsky writes:

“Paladino, Trump’s N.Y State co-chairman told a group of urban school superintendents yesterday, that Trump would seek to do away with “corrupted, incompetent” public school systems in America’s cities, replacing them with charter schools and vouchers for private schools.”

Clinton may or may not continue Obama’s disastrous education policies, but she will listen when we push back.

“

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Trump, Vouchers

The Sanctity of the Electoral Process and Trump’s Efforts to Destroy It

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2016 //
35

Some years ago, I visited Constitution Hall in Philadelphia with my then-young children. The guide, a young man, said, “One of the most momentous events in world history happened in this room.” Long pause. He continued: “George Washington decided not to run for re-election. He could have but he didn’t. He could have appointed himself king. He was the most popular man in the new nation. But he stepped aside and there was another election. And he was succeeded by John Adams. Adams didn’t inherit the office. He had to win the election.” He went on to explain how unusual it was to have a peaceful transfer of power in a world of hereditary kings, tribes, and dynasties.

The young man’s reverence for our democracy has remained with me all these years. In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the election in Florida by 537 votes. The winning candidate, George W. Bush was the big brother of the Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush. Ralph Nader won nearly 100,000 votes in Florida. Gore had good reason to be angry and feel cheated. But Gore was gracious. He conceded, and he never complained that the system was “rigged.”

[There was one other election where the loser won the popular vote and may have even won the electoral college, in 1876, but a deal was struck that gave the election to Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel J. Tilden. The deal involved an agreement to end Reconstruction, withdraw federal troops from the south, and leave southern blacks to the mercy of southern whites. That was not included in my high school U.S. history textbook in Texas.]

What is remarkable in the election of 2016 is that the Republican nominee is claiming that the entire electoral system is rigged before the election has occurred. He offers no evidence for this belief. There is none. The election system is very decentralized, and besides, most states now have Republican governors. There is no rigging going on. At the conclusion of the third debate, he refused to say whether he would accept the results of the election if he lost. That shocked a lot of people. The next day he said he would accept the results “if he won.” Not good enough.

Donald Trump is trying to discredit the election and the American electoral process because he is behind in the polls. Clearly, he doesn’t understand that a basic rule of democracy is to be dignified and gracious, whether in victory or defeat. Instead, he prefers to sow doubt about the legitimacy of democracy itself. He must have been a horribly spoiled child, raised with a sense of entitlement. Maybe his father fixed all the games he played in so he could always win.

Nothing is so pitiable as a sore loser.

Categories Accountability, Trump

Jane Mayer on Trump’s Abuse of Women, Including One of His Wives

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2016 //
11

The New Yorker has a fascinating article by investigative reporter Jane Mayer about Donald Trump, or rather about one of his biographers, Harry Hurt III.

Hurt wrote a biography of Trump in 1993, in which he detailed Trump’s divorce from Ivanka Trump, his first wife. Hurt somehow obtained a copy of her sworn divorce deposition and quoted it in his book.

The part of the book that caused the most controversy concerns Trump’s divorce from his first wife, Ivana. Hurt obtained a copy of her sworn divorce deposition, from 1990, in which she stated that, the previous year, her husband had raped her in a fit of rage. In Hurt’s account, Trump was furious that a “scalp reduction” operation he’d undergone to eliminate a bald spot had been unexpectedly painful. Ivana had recommended the plastic surgeon. In retaliation, Hurt wrote, Trump yanked out a handful of his wife’s hair, and then forced himself on her sexually. Afterward, according to the book, she spent the night locked in a bedroom, crying; in the morning, Trump asked her, “with menacing casualness, ‘Does it hurt?’ ” Trump has denied both the rape allegation and the suggestion that he had a scalp-reduction procedure. Hurt said that the incident, which is detailed in Ivana’s deposition, was confirmed by two of her friends.

Hurt held on to his copy of Ivana’s sealed deposition for years. “It was sworn testimony,” he said. But eventually, when he was cleaning house during his own divorce, he said, “I threw it all out.” He went on, “The larger tragedy is that Trump might be elected President of the United States. I never imagined in my wildest nightmares that it would come to this.”

Before Hurt’s book came out, Trump’s lawyers pressured the publisher, W. W. Norton, to paste a clarifying statement from Ivana into the flyleaf of every copy. In it, she confirmed that she had said in a deposition that her husband had “raped” her, but added that she did not want those words to be interpreted in “a literal or criminal sense.” She also said, “As a woman, I felt violated.” Hurt said that he considers the note a non-denial denial, and believes that Ivana agreed to amend her words in order to secure the divorce settlement, in which she reportedly received fourteen million dollars in cash.

When the rape story resurfaced last summer, Ivana issued a statement saying that it was “without merit.” “She and Donald have raised three kids together. They’re picking their bedrooms in the White House,” Hurt said. “But she’s not saying it’s untrue, or that she didn’t swear to it under oath.”

Trump was deposed during the divorce, too. According to a report by the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, which examined the divorce records, Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination approximately a hundred times when Ivana’s lawyers asked him about adulterous relations with other women.

Hurt’s publisher, W.W. Norton, refuses to reissue the book, presumably because Trump will sue. Hurt has been booked four times on CNN and canceled every time. The only correspondent who has interviewed him recently is Megyn Kelly of Fox News. She is a journalist, not an empty talking head or a propagandist.

Categories Trump

Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane in a Hilarious Spoof “Trumped”

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2016 //
7

One of the great all-time Broadway shows was Mel Brooks’ “The Producers,” starring Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane (based on the movie with Zero Mostel). The two men were failed producers who came up with a brilliant idea: raise lots of money to produce a really terrible play, which would quickly close as a flop. They would raise money by promising investors a large share of the ownership, totaling more than 100%. They would keep the money as soon as the play closed and get rich.

The play they picked was a musical called “Springtime for Hitler,” a concept so ludicrous that Bialystock and Bloom were sure it would close after the first performance. But audiences thought it was a parody, and they loved it. To the producers’ shock, their terrible play was a huge hit.

In this spoof recreated by Broderick and Lane, they are now political consultants trying to find the worst political candidate for President and raise millions that they could pocket after he flopped.

I promise you: This is hilarious!

It’s only flaw is that it can’t compete with real life, which is beyond parody!

Categories Hoax, Humor, Trump

The Washington Post: What Trump and Clinton Say about American Education

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2016 //
45

Reporters at the Washington Post asked both major party candidates what they would do in the area of K-12 education.

Trump gave a brief reply and ignored the questions.

Clinton (or her staff) answered all the questions.

Donald Trump’s answer was, go to my website, and he (or his staff) added this:

“As your president, I will be the nation’s biggest cheerleader for school choice. I want every single inner city child in America who is today trapped in a failing school to have the freedom – the civil right – to attend the school of their choice. I understand many stale old politicians will resist. But it’s time for our country to start thinking big once again. We spend too much time quibbling over the smallest words, when we should spend our time dreaming about the great adventures that lie ahead.”

Clinton’s answers were ambiguous; she is for testing, but not too much testing. She is for charter schools, but only good charter schools.

She opposes for-profit charter schools, but doesn’t seem to realize that many allegedly nonprofit charters outsource their management to for-profit companies.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Clinton, Common Core, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing, Trump

Politico: Five Trump Biographers Discuss What Makes Him Tick

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2016 //
7

Politico assembled five writers who have written biographies of Donald J. Trump.

They have watched him up close and personal.

They discuss his past, his motivations, what makes him tick.

You may find it interesting.

Categories Trump

Paul Krugman: The Facts About the Clinton Foundation

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2016 //
91

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist and columnist for the New York Times, became disgusted with mainstream reporting on the Clinton Foundation. The right wingers have tried to create a scandal, and to liken it to the Trump Foundation, which serves only Trump’s mammoth ego. But Krugman says the comparison is absurd. The Clinton Foundation actually uses its funding to alleviate poverty and combat AIDS and promote literacy.

He writes:

“Step back for a moment, and think about what that foundation is about. When Bill Clinton left office, he was a popular, globally respected figure. What should he have done with that reputation? Raising large sums for a charity that saves the lives of poor children sounds like a pretty reasonable, virtuous course of action. And the Clinton Foundation is, by all accounts, a big force for good in the world. For example, Charity Watch, an independent watchdog, gives it an “A” rating — better than the American Red Cross.

“Now, any operation that raises and spends billions of dollars creates the potential for conflicts of interest. You could imagine the Clintons using the foundation as a slush fund to reward their friends, or, alternatively, Mrs. Clinton using her positions in public office to reward donors. So it was right and appropriate to investigate the foundation’s operations to see if there were any improper quid pro quos. As reporters like to say, the sheer size of the foundation “raises questions.”

“But nobody seems willing to accept the answers to those questions, which are, very clearly, “no.”
Consider the big Associated Press report suggesting that Mrs. Clinton’s meetings with foundation donors while secretary of state indicate “her possible ethics challenges if elected president.” Given the tone of the report, you might have expected to read about meetings with, say, brutal foreign dictators or corporate fat cats facing indictment, followed by questionable actions on their behalf.

“But the prime example The A.P. actually offered was of Mrs. Clinton meeting with Muhammad Yunus, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who also happens to be a longtime personal friend. If that was the best the investigation could come up with, there was nothing there.

“So I would urge journalists to ask whether they are reporting facts or simply engaging in innuendo, and urge the public to read with a critical eye. If reports about a candidate talk about how something “raises questions,” creates “shadows,” or anything similar, be aware that these are all too often weasel words used to create the impression of wrongdoing out of thin air.

“And here’s a pro tip: the best ways to judge a candidate’s character are to look at what he or she has actually done, and what policies he or she is proposing. Mr. Trump’s record of bilking students, stiffing contractors and more is a good indicator of how he’d act as president; Mrs. Clinton’s speaking style and body language aren’t. George W. Bush’s policy lies gave me a much better handle on who he was than all the up-close-and-personal reporting of 2000, and the contrast between Mr. Trump’s policy incoherence and Mrs. Clinton’s carefulness speaks volumes today.
In other words, focus on the facts. America and the world can’t afford another election tipped by innuendo.”

Categories Clinton, Trump
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