Can Trump and Melanie sink any lower than this photograph?
The discussion on Twitter is priceless.
One person wrote that the PeePee tape in the Steele report is dignified compare to this.
Another photoshopped the baby in a cage.
Someone else posted a photo on Twitter of Trump at the Parkland hospital after the massacre of 17 students, smiling and giving a thumbs-up.
These people are not normal.
Peter Irons, professor emeritus of political science at the University of California, San Diego, demonstrates that racism and extreme intemperance are impeachable offenses.
He attempted “to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach the Congress of the United States.”
He delivered “with a loud voice, intemperate, inflammatory, and scandalous harangues, and has uttered loud threats and bitter menaces, against Congress [and] the laws of the United States, amid the cries, jeers and laughter of the multitudes.”
He has brought the “high office of the President of the United States into contempt, ridicule and disgrace.”
For these reasons, President Andrew Johnson was impeached.
Johnson’s deep-rooted racism, along with his verbal excoriation of his congressional foes as “treasonous” — something our current president has also done — led to his impeachment in 1868. Article 10 of his impeachment indictment provides a legal basis and historical precedent for making a president’s racist speech an impeachable offense, by itself, as evidence of unfitness to hold the highest and most powerful office in the land.
The state settled a racial discrimination case Friday with a desegregation plan for a tiny Marin County school district whose nonwhite students were mostly enrolled in a struggling, underfunded elementary and middle school.
Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office announced the settlement with leaders of the Sausalito Marin City School District. The district said it was “an opportunity to openly and transparently acknowledge past failures” and to “put an end to inequitable education.”
The district had 528 students in 2018-19, about one-third of them white and the rest black, Latino, Asian-American or multiracial, according to district records. One of its two schools, Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy in unincorporated Marin City, had 119 students, eight of them white.
Becerra said state investigators found that the district had intentionally created Bayside MLK Academy in 2013 as a racially and ethnically segregated school for grades kindergarten through eight. The district “cut critical classroom programming” at the school while providing stable funding for its other school, Willow Creek Academy, a publicly funded charter serving students in Sausalito, Becerra said.
Jeremy Mohler of the organization “In the Public Interest” wrote this reflection on the meaning of democracy:
The word “democracy” either fires you up or makes your eyes roll.
It’s so overused that even Donald Trump is wielding it to ramp up support for his administration’s meddling in Venezuela.
There’s even a new documentary out called What is Democracy? by filmmaker and activist Astra Taylor, who interviews everyone from philosophers to factory workers to get at the answer. The conclusion? There’s no definitive single answer to the question.
Maybe all we can say is: you know democracy when you see it.
I certainly see a refreshing example of democracy on display in the growing public school teachers movement. And it’s the real thing—not the electoral kind that we’re used to.
It’s called “bargaining for the common good.” The gist: teachers and other government workers use their ability to negotiate for better wages and working conditions to also improve the lives of other people in their community.
Some recent examples:
In January, striking teachers in Los Angeles won better wages and benefits but also 300 more nurses district wide, more green space at every school, support for immigrant families, a stop to random police searches at schools, and more.
In Oregon, the state’s largest unions came together a few years ago to collectively win higher wages, paid sick days, better retirement security, and nondiscrimination protections for most full-time workers statewide.
The Chicago Teachers Union is considering demanding the city’s board of education support rent control efforts and new taxes on corporations and the wealthy to fund more affordable housing.
And it’s not just happening in blue cities.
In March, West Virginia’s teachers shut down a bill that would’ve allowed charter schools to open in the state. Having witnessed the pain caused by the opioid crisis, job losses, poverty, and homelessness to their students and families, they argued that privatization isn’t the answer.
It just makes sense, right? Government workers often live in the communities they serve and therefore share many of the same interests.
That’s what makes bargaining for the common good so refreshing and potentially powerful.
It’s a direct counter to the past four decades of conservative attacks on government and corporate “trickle down” economics. And it’s a crystal clear example of what democracy actually looks like in action.
Jonathan Burdick, a history teacher in Pennsylvania, wrote on Twitter about a new group called “Free to Teach,” which encourages teachers to abandon their union and form an “independent” union.
He can be found @JonathanBurdick on Twitter. In case you are not on Twitter and can’t find the thread, Jonathan writes that the group’s ads are sponsored by an Oklahoma-based organization called “Americans for Fair Treatment.” Here we go down the rabbit hole of right-wing groups. That group shares the same registered address in Oklahoma with “The Fairness Center,” which sued the teachers’ union in Philadelphia and lost. The Fairness Center shares offices in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with the Commonwealth Foundation. The Commonwealth Foundation is funded by DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. These organizations are part of a massive network of right-wing groups called the State Policy Network. These organizations have donated HUNDREDS OF MILLION OF DOLLARS to extreme right causes: many anti-union and pro-educational privatization. These organizations are funded by billionaires including the Koch Brothers and Richard and Helen DeVos—the parents-in-law of Betsy DeVos. They also fund the Mackinac Center in Michigan, a favorite cause of Betsy DeVos, which works to crush unions and workers’ rights. Jonathan Burdick points out that Peter Greene wrote about “Free to Teach” and its connections to the right-wing oligarchs.
Read about his funders here.
In the current campaign, he has the support of 18 billionaires, including Bill Gates.
Cory Booker has a long and well-documented record of disparaging public schools and enthusiastically supporting charters, even vouchers. Now, he says he will dedicate himself to public schools and stop privatization, as if he had not been one of the leading cheerleaders for both charters and vouchers for the past two decades.
Valerie Strauss wrote here about his deep ties over the years to Betsy DeVos.
Booker began his advocacy for vouchers twenty years ago.
“In 1999, Booker was a member of the Municipal Council of Newark and worked with conservatives to form an organization that sought to create a voucher program and bring charter schools to New Jersey.”
He helped Dick and Betsy DeVos try to sell vouchers in Michigan in 2000. Fortunately, they were unsuccessful. As Jennifer Berkshire pointed out in her article about Booker’s help for the DeVos voucher campaign, the DeVos family spent millions, but the people of Michigan rejected vouchers by a vote of 69-31%.
When Booker ran for mayor of Newark in 2001, the DeVos family contributed $1,000 to his campaign. Cheapskates.
Veteran journalist Dale Russakoff wrote a book called The Prize about Cory Booker’s alliance with Republican Governor Chris Christie and their determination to turn Newark into the “New Orleans of the North” by privatizing as many public schools as possible. Booker was a favorite of Wall Street and philanthrocapitalists, and he and Christie persuaded Mark Zuckerberg to put up $100 million to spur privatization in Newark.
Regular readers of this blog have read the many posts by blogger Jersey Jazzman (Mark Weber) about the statistical legerdemain that Newark charters play, the cream-skimming they do to get the students they want and exclude those that might pull down their test scores..
If you open the link at NPE Action, you will see that Booker’s campaigns have drawn the campaign funding of the usual billionaires and Wall Street hedge funders who have done their best to undermine public education.
Booker was feted by rightwing think tanks like the Manhattan Institute and named a “champion of charters” by the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools in 2017.
But his support for vouchers was not long, long ago.
In 2012, he endorsed Governor Chris Christie’s voucher proposal.
In 2016, he addressed Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children to express his support for their mission of replacing public schools with charters and vouchers.
Due to his contempt for one of our most important public, democratic institutions, I cannot support Cory Booker.
If he is the Democratic candidate, which seems unlikely, I will hold my nose and vote for him, because any Democrat is better than Trump. Even Cory Booker.
Bob Shepherd wrote this comment earlier today:
“Terrible things are happening outside… poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” – Anne Frank (Jan 13, 1943)
The horror. The horror. What are we doing? What do we tell our children?
Cory Booker has been a devoted promoter of charters and vouchers for many years.
He worked closely with Republican Governor Chris Christie and together they persuaded Mark Zuckerberg to pony up $100 million to promote the charterization of Newark. He often boasts about what he accomplished by privatizing public schools.
But now that he wants to be president, he has suddenly decided that he will be a champion for public schools, not charters or vouchers.
Could it be that he did the math and realized that 85-90% of students attend public schools. Only 6% attend charter schools. And he may have noticed that despite the efforts of his former dear friend Betsy DeVos, voters don’t like vouchers. They don’t want public dollars to underwrite religious schools.
Some of his allies are not at all happy about the new Cory.
It just goes to show where the wind is blowing: in favor of public schools, not charters or vouchers.
Virtual charter schools are a disaster for students, but a honey pot for their operators—that is, until they get caught and face the music and possible jail time.
John Thompson describes the epic fail of the EPIC virtual charter in Oklahoma.
Ghost students, straw teachers, parent bonuses. What a scam.
An Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation revealed that the co-founders of the state’s largest virtual charter school system, Epic Charter Schools, David Chaney and Ben Harris, split at least $10 million in profits from 2013 to 2018. They allegedly recruited “ghost students” (who were technically enrolled but received minimal instruction from teachers) from homeschools and sectarian private schools “for the purpose of unlawfully diverting State Appropriated Funds to their own personal use resulting in high NFAY [not full academic year] rates and low graduation rates for the students.”
Epic established an $800-to-$1000-per-student learning fund for students who did not enroll in a public school. These students were dubbed “members of the $800 club,” and assigned to “straw teachers,” who “would receive additional pay in the form of bonuses which included student retention goals,” while “those who dropped students would see a decrease in pay.”
A search warrant cited parents who received money but admitted they had no intention of receiving instruction from Epic. One family withdrew its ten children from public schools, received $8000, and allowed the kids to ride horses instead of attending school.
Does anyone have a link to Betsy DeVos’ Senate confirmation hearings when she rattled off the impressive but false statistics about virtual charter schools? It turns out they are the quintessential fraudsters of the Disruption Movement.
