Florida: Circuit Court Overturns “Stop Woke” Law in Workplaces

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2024 //
1

At DeSantis’s urging, the Florida legislature passed a law known as “Stop Woke.” The law restricts teaching about race and gender in the state’s classrooms and bans “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs in the workplace. Several employers sued to block the law, calling it a restriction on free speech. The employers won in the federal District Court, and the state appealed the decision. Today the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the Stop Woke Act as applied to employers. It remains in effect for schools.

The Orlando Sentinel reported:

TALLAHASSEE — A federal appeals court Monday rejected restrictions that Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican lawmakers placed on race-related issues in workplace training, part of a 2022 law that DeSantis dubbed the “Stop WOKE Act.”


A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the restrictions violated First Amendment rights.


“This is not the first era in which Americans have held widely divergent views on important areas of morality, ethics, law and public policy,” the 22-page opinion said. “And it is not the first time that these disagreements have seemed so important, and their airing so dangerous, that something had to be done. But now, as before, the First Amendment keeps the government from putting its thumb on the scale.”


The panel upheld a preliminary injunction issued in 2022 by Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker of Tallahassee against the restrictions. The law was challenged by Primo Tampa, LLC, a Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream franchisee; Honeyfund.com, Inc., a Clearwater-based technology company that provides wedding registries; and Chevara Orrin and her company, Collective Concepts, LLC.

Orrin and her company provide consulting and training to employers about issues such as diversity, equity and inclusion.


Walker also separately issued a preliminary injunction against part of the law that would restrict the teaching of race-related concepts in universities. The state has appealed that decision.


The workplace-training part of the law listed eight race-related concepts and said that a required training program or other activity that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels such individual (an employee) to believe any of the following concepts constitutes discrimination based on race, color, sex, or national origin.”


As an example, the law targeted compelling employees to believe that an “individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the individual played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin.”

The state disputed that the law violated speech rights, saying that it regulated “conduct.” It said businesses could still address the targeted concepts in workplace training but couldn’t force employees to take part.


But the appeals court flatly rejected such arguments Monday. It described the law as the “latest attempt to control speech by recharacterizing it as conduct. Florida may be exactly right about the nature of the ideas it targets. Or it may not. Either way, the merits of these views will be decided in the clanging marketplace of ideas rather than a codebook or a courtroom.”

Categories Bigotry, DeSantis, Disruption, Extremism, Florida, Gender, Racism

New York: Governor Hochul Slashes Budget Aid for Rural Schools

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2024 //
19

Governor Kathy Hochul has fashioned a state budget that will profoundly damage rural schools in New York. She had to trim the budget somewhere but why cut foundation aid to the state’s most important function: the education of its children?

North Country Public Radio reported that nearly half the school districts in rural upstate New York face steep cuts. Hochul has proposed the elimination of a “hold harmless” requirement that requires each year’s state aid to be no less than in the previous year. This guarantee has provided stable funding but Governor Hochul says it’s obsolete. The cuts, however, will disrupt planning and inflict damage on the schools’ programs and staffing.

Educators and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are outraged over the way Governor Kathy Hochul is funding schools in her new budget plan.

Her proposed 2024-2025 education budget is for $35.3 billion, including a record $825 million increase for public schools. But it’s being distributed differently than in the past, and for the first time in years, many schools would actually lose funding.

Dozens of North Country districts face that scenario if the legislature doesn’t make changes.

Christopher Clapper is the superintendent of Alexandria Central School, a district of about 460 kids in Alexandria Bay, in Jefferson County.

With increases in state aid over the last few years (they got a 3% increase for two years from Foundation Aid being fully funded, and money from the American Rescue Plan Act) he says they’ve been able to do a lot.  

“That has included buying all student supplies, so that burden isn’t on parents. We’ve had free school lunch for all students since 2021,” said Clapper. They’ve also increased the number of college credit classes in the high school, and expanded their Future Farmers of America (FFA) program. 

But Clapper says he and other superintendents knew they couldn’t count on more increases. “We all assumed that that we would be dropped down to zero and there’d be no growth in foundation aid for ‘hold harmless’ districts,” said Clapper, following the two years of 3% increases. “And that [scenario] is kind of what my colleagues and I around the North Country have been budgeting for.”

Then Governor Hochul released her 2024-25 budget proposal.

“When we saw the numbers that came out, I mean, it was drastically different than a 0% increase,” said Clapper. Instead, it was a 13.2% decrease in aid, a reduction of about $517,000.

Clapper was shocked. He says “if that did come to pass, it would be absolutely catastrophic for this district.” 

The state responds that the new budget reflects declining enrollments in many rural districts.

In a recent op-ed, Blake Washington, Hochul’s Division of Budget Director, wrote: “Instead of asking the question, “how much more money are our schools getting?”; it should be “why do we have a formula that forces us to pay for students that don’t exist?”

He’s referring to the fact that New York school enrollment has declined by about 10% since 2014.

In many North Country school districts, enrollment declines have been more dramatic, as high as a 50% decline in student populations over the last decade. 

In Alexandria Central School District, public enrollment data shows about a 25% decrease in the student population since 2014, from roughly 620 to 460 kids.

But educating students doesn’t happen on a per-pupil basis, said Superintendent Chris Clapper. “If you have a kindergarten class of 20 students, and then that kindergarten class decreases to 17 students, it’s not as though there’s less cost of maintaining a classroom.” 

He says you can’t hire 75% of a teacher, you can’t heat part of a room.

Kristen Barron wrote in the Hancock Herald about the fight against Governor Hochul’s proposed cuts.

Leaders of the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) came to Hancock to meet with teachers and students. The Hancock Teachers Association (HTA) has been organizing the Hancock community to protest the cuts. There will be a protest rally in Hancock on March 8. The town, the teachers, the parents and the students are wearing blue to show their opposition to the cuts and their support for their schools.

HCS stands to lose $1.2 million dollars in state aid if the proposed cuts are adopted in the 2024-2025 budget, which is due by April 1. 

“You’ve really stepped up here, and you have the best organized response that we’ve seen,” said Tim O’Brien, who oversees the Southern Tier for the state union. He noted the sea of blue t-shirts which were worn by students and staff on Friday as a sign of unity against the proposed aid cuts.

The HTA has also reached out in support of other area organizations facing proposed cuts such as the Delaware County ARC.

Of the twelve schools in Delaware County, 10 are getting cuts amounting to a loss of $4,919,401.00, according to a fact sheet compiled by HCS. Hancock and Franklin school districts, the smallest districts in the county, will receive the deepest losses, said Asquith during Friday’s meeting. 

HCS has around 317 students. 

Of the $4.9 million cut from the ten county districts, Hancock is shouldering $1.2 million or 24%, says the fact sheet. 

The neighboring Deposit Central School District, which operates a merged sports program with HCS, is facing a 7.4% cut in aid. Downsville Central School District is facing a 33.8 % loss and Sullivan West in neighboring Sullivan County confronts a 17.1 % loss in aid, according to an Albany Times Union map based on data compiled by the New York State Education Department and New York State United Teachers.  

Opposition to the cuts is bipartisan.

In an education budget of $35.3 billion, the cuts to rural districts look like a rounding error. And yet each cut represents lost jobs, lost courses, lost opportunities for rural students.

Categories Budget Cuts, Democracy, Education Reform, Funding, New York, Rural Schools

The Mysterious Deaths of Putin’s Critics

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2024 //
8

There is a strange malady in Russia since Vladimir Putin decided to be the new Stalin. His critics die of a bullet to the head or the heart, they die of poisoning, they fall out of buildings, they commit suicide. In the most recent case, Alexei Navalny died in an Antarctic prison camp, and no one knows for sure what happened. But one thing is certain: he’s dead and can no longer mock Putin or challenge his rule.

Just weeks ago, Maxim Kuzminov, a young Russian helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine was murdered in Spain, where he thought he was safe. Five quick bullets aimed at his heart, and he was dead.

CBS News reported:

Moscow — Russia’s spy chief on Tuesday said a pilot who defected to Ukraine with a military helicopter and was reportedly shot dead in Spain last week was a “moral corpse.” Maxim Kuzminov flew his Mi-8 helicopter into Ukraine in August in a brazen operation, saying he opposed Russia’s military offensive.

Reports in Spanish media said Kuzminov was found shot dead in the southern town of Villajoyosa last week, where he had moved after receiving Ukrainian citizenship for switching sides.

The Guardian published a story last fall about the sudden deaths of Putin critics.

The form of the attacks has varied, from underwear daubed with the nerve agent novichok and polonium-laced tea to more straightforward assassinations by bullet, but throughout Vladimir Putin’s 23 -year rule, Kremlin critics, journalists and defected spies have met with similarly ruthless treatment for opposing the Russian president.

The fatal crash of a private jet carrying the Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin two months after he spearheaded a mutiny against Russia’s top army brass two months ago appeared to have added a new method to the Kremlin’s extensive assassination menu.

Wikipedia has an entry titled “Suspicious Deaths of Russian businesspeople, 2022-2024.” The first listing is a prominent businessman.

Ravil Maganov, chairman of the national oil company Lukoil, fell from a Kremlin Hospital window under suspicious circumstances, according to reports: CCTV cameras had been “turned off for repairs”, President Putin was visiting the hospital the same day, and associates did not believe he was suicidal.

Euronews has a list of oligarchs and business leaders who died under mysterious circumstances. Of course, there is overlap. Some of those who died opposed the Ukraine war.

Another mysterious death among Russian top executives last week drew further attention to the ever-increasing number of suspicious demises among the oligarchs and critics of President Vladimir Putin, raising questions on whether they have become all too common to be completely coincidental.

Ivan Pechorin, a top manager at the Corporation for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic, was found dead in Vladivostok after allegedly falling off his luxury yacht and drowning near Cape Ignatyev in the Sea of Japan two days before, according to the local administration.

Categories Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International

Thom Hartmann: How the Bork Doctrine Promoted Monopolies and Billionaires

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2024 //
40

If you are old enough to remember a different America, an America of neighborhood shops, of local bakeries, butchers, drugstores (with a soda fountain), shoe stores, bookstores, and dress shops, you may have wondered why most of them have been replaced by national chain stores and anonymous strip malls. Now we see even neighborhood public schools replaced by national charter chains, some even operated by for-profit corporations. Thom Hartmann explains the roots of this change in his new book The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream. He is releasing the book a chapter at a time on his blog, which should whet our appetite to buy and read the book. This chapter describes the legal ploy that resulted in crushing local enterprise and creating billionaires.

He writes:

Robert Bork was Richard Nixon’s solicitor general and acting attorney general and had a substantial impact on the thinking in the Reagan White House—so much so that Reagan rewarded his years of hard work on behalf of America’s monopolists with a lifetime appointment to the federal bench in the DC Circuit, frequently a launching pad for the Supreme Court.

In the years following Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, as numerous “conservative” and “free market” think tanks and publications grew in power and funding, Bork’s ideas gained wide circulation in circles of governance, business, and the law.

In 1977, in the case of Continental T.V., Inc. v. GTE Sylvania, the Supreme Court took up Bork’s idea and, for the first time in a big way, embraced the “welfare of the consumer” and “demonstrable economic effect” doctrines that Bork had been promoting for over a decade.

Neither of those phrases exists in any antitrust law, at least in Bork’s context. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court embraced Bork’s notion that the sole metric by which to judge monopolistic behavior should be prices that consumers pay, rather than the ability of businesses to compete or the political power that a corporation may amass.

When Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, bringing with him Bork’s free market philosophy and a crew from the Chicago School, he ordered the Federal Trade Commission to effectively stop enforcing antitrust laws even within the feeble guidelines that the Supreme Court had written into law in GTE Sylvania.

The result was an explosion of mergers-and-acquisitions activity that continues to this day, as industry after industry concentrated down to two, three, four, or five major players who function as cartels. (A brilliant blow-by-blow cataloging of that decade is found in Barry C. Lynn’s book Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction.)

Bork’s reasoning—that antitrust law should defend only the consumer (through low prices), and not workers, society, democracy, or local communities—has become such conventional wisdom that in the 2014 Supreme Court case of FTC v. Actavis, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a virtual word-for-word parroting of Bork: “The point of antitrust law is to encourage competitive markets to promote consumer welfare.”

Barak Orbach, professor of law at the University of Arizona, is one of a small number of scholars today who are genuine experts in the field of antitrust law. In a 2014 paper published by the American Bar Association, he wondered if Bork knew he was lying when he wrote that the authors of the Sherman Antitrust Act intended to reduce prices to advance “consumer welfare,” instead of protecting the competitiveness of small and local businesses, and the independence of government at all levels.

His conclusion, in “Was the ‘Crisis in Antitrust’ a Trojan Horse?” was that Bork was probably just blinded by ideology and had never bothered to go back and read the Congressional Record, which, he noted, says nothing of the kind.74

While Bork wrote that “the policy the courts were intended [by the Sherman Antitrust Act] to apply is the maximization of wealth or consumer want satisfaction,” Orbach said, “Members of Congress . . . were determined to take action against the trusts to stop wealth transfers from the public.” So much for that: today the Walton (Walmart) family is the richest in America and one of the richest in the world. They’re worth more than $100 billion, having squirreled away more wealth than the bottom 40% of all Americans. And they spend prodigiously on right-wing political causes, from the national to the local.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is now wealthier than any Walton; with a registered net worth of $112 billion, he is the richest single person in the world. Bezos is so rich that when he divorced his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, she received 19.7 million shares of Amazon worth $36.8 billion. She instantly became the world’s third-richest woman, and Jeff Bezos remained the world’s wealthiest man.75 While local newspapers are shutting down or being gobbled up all over the country, Bezos personally purchased the 140-year-old Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million. Now Bezos, like the Walton family, can use his sub- stantial wealth to obtain political ends that protect his wealth and allow Amazon to continue to grow.

Categories Billionaires, Competition, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Extremism, For-Profit, History

Florida District Alters Illustrations in Classic Children’s Books to Appease Moms for Liberty

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2024 //
46

The local leader of Moms for Liberty was outraged! There was a book in the elementary school library that depicted a naked child! Another showed the naked butt of a goblin! What depravity!

Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria at Popular Information have the story, which actually happened in Indian River County, Florida, when Jennifer Pippen of Moms for Liberty complained about Maurice Sendak’s classic In the Night Kitchen.

Pippen said the book was “pornographic” because it showed a naked little boy in a bathtub; if you peered closely, you could see that the little boy had a penis. Shocking!

The other book that offended Pippen was Unicorns Are the Worst, which depicted a goblin with a naked butt.

The answer: Draw clothing on the “pornographic” images. So now the little boy is taking a bath while wearing shorts, and the goblin has long pants on.

In other cases, the Indian River County librarians were more creative. Another book Pippin sought to remove was Draw Me A Star by Eric Carle, who is best known for The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Pippin was concerned about this image of “two adults that were naked.” She said that her concerns were addressed when the district librarians drew “board shorts on the man” and “put the girl in a bikini.” 

Also targeted was the book No, David! because it included this image.

Well, you simply can’t show Adam and Eve buck naked in the Garden of Eden, can you? Or can the author and illustrator of a children’s book show a boy’s butt.

It would be satisfying if the author or publisher of the targeted books sued the district for defacing them.

Categories Censorship, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Libraries, Literature

Jay Kuo: Don’t believe the New York Times/Siena Presidential Poll!

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2024 //
46

When I saw the latest presidential poll in the New York Times, it literally ruined my day. The New York Times/Siena poll showed Trump leading Biden by five points nationally. Of course, that set off another round of hand-wringing about Biden’s age.

Happily a friend pointed me to a blogger I had never read: Jay Kuo, who blogs at The Status Kuo.

Today, Jay deconstructed the poll and made my day!

He wrote:

Leave it to the New York Times to stir up Democratic anxiety right before the State of the Union address, with a poll showing Trump beating Biden by five points nationally. A number of my friends sent the poll to me. Some of them are now filled with such gloom and doom that I wanted to lay out my thoughts on it plainly here for a wider audience.

It seems no matter how often I beat the drum about the polls being unreliable, premature and wrong, it doesn’t allay people’s fears enough. Talk of “ditching Biden” then ensues, which of course is not going to happen. We should just stop any discussion of it right now if we know what’s good for us.

So what about this poll? Isn’t the NYT / Siena a reliable indicator? They wouldn’t publish something that is basically false information, right?

Polls aren’t “false.” They report what people actually told the pollsters. But they can be misleading, and they are often faulty. Importantly, we shouldn’t trust any polls to be predictive of the final result when there are still more than 200 days to go till the election and a whole lot of unknowns. But let me focus in particular on this poll and what some experts on polling and methodology are saying about it. I hope you come away with the same conclusion I did: that this is some data, yes, but it’s not very reliable or useful except to make big headlines.

Women voters

One of the things I look for in a polling result is if any of the breakdowns, found in what’s called the “crosstabs,” raise red flags. One jumped out right away for me in this poll, and others saw it, too. As LSU professor and political historian Robert Mann noted,

I do not believe Biden is tied with women nationally 46-46… Biden got 57% of women in 2020. You’re telling me that, post-Dobbs, his support among that demo group will drop to 46? Not credible.

I agree. If you see a poll and half the women are voting for Trump, something went wrong in the polling sample. If women voted like they did in 2020, which we should assume would at least be the case especially since Dobbs, that’s an 11 point difference from this poll. Assuming the poll is half men, half women, that would put the two candidates about even.

Democrats

Here’s a thing I’m sure the Dean Phillips campaign would love to see become reality: The NYT/Siena poll has Phillips at 12 percent support among Democrats. 

Really? Because last time I checked, in the actual official contests that have been held, his actual vote haul averages 1.5 percent. As UCLA professor Matt Barreto noted,

There have been 3 DNC sanctioned primaries and Phillips vote:

South Carolina – 1.7%

Nevada – 0.0%

Michigan – 2.7%

So what people are *telling* the NYT/Sienna does not square with how they are VOTING.

It’s fair to ask which Democrats are bothering to respond to and answer these polls to completion. Perhaps it’s those who, on average, tend to be more disgruntled and want to voice their displeasure to a pollster? Are these Democrats also more likely to say they are unhappy with the current president? Just throwing it out there.

Young people

The news in this poll was partway decent for Biden when it came to young voters age 18-29. He leads Trump by 13 points among them, 54 to 41 percent—but that’s still around half the spread that other major polls have on this age group. But when it comes to messaging on the youth vote, the NYT prefers to emphasize the negatives, and its own data seems at odds with itself.

For example, as former pollster and turned sometime polling industry critic Adam Carlson notes, the NYT/Siena poll of swing states conducted back in late October showed Trump actually leading in this age group in AZ and GA, while being tied with Biden in MI. On this contrary, surprising and incorrect result, Nate Cohn of the Times did a whole serious write upabout what it could mean.

But when the new poll shows Biden actually leading nationally within this group by 14 points, Carlson observes, the NYT analysis completely ignored this. 

Perhaps that’s because it is hard to square that earlier result of Trump leading with this very different one of Trump trailing without calling one or both into serious question. Such huge swings in such a short amount of time don’t suggest that the electorate is moving quickly so much as that the polling might be way off.

[Please open the link and keep reading the rest of his analysis. It will make you happy.]

Categories Biden, Elections, Opinion Polling, Trump

Greg Olear: Something Beautiful

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2024 //
25

Greg Olear is a novelist and journalist. His blog is called “Prevail.” He is author of Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/Russia. When I was in high school, I memorized poetry. It’s a great gift. He posted this today.

Dear Reader,

Roland Flint, who taught my Introduction to Poetry class freshman year at Georgetown, gave us extra credit for memorizing poems. Back then, my now-beleaguered brain was still in top operating condition, and I loved poetry and admired the professor, so I took full advantage of this. Other, more pragmatic students chose the shortest poems they could find to memorize; to show off, and because it’s not un-useful to be familiar with 250-year-old rhyming-couplet pick-up lines, I went with “To His Coy Mistress.”

With his red beard and his paunch and the glimmer in his eye, Flint was a commanding presence, stocky and stout, and blessed with a booming baritone that he sometimes used to sing Bulgarian folk songs. (You can see him in action here.) To demonstrate what we’d have to do to earn points, he recited a poem that he himself knew by heart. It was called “Two-Headed Calf,” by Laura Gilpin, and it blew all of us away. I memorized it too, and when I’m in the right mood, I still recite it to myself, all four sentences of it, and marvel at its power to move me.

Polycephaly is a genetical blip that in bovines is a death sentence. Calves with two heads—or, more commonly, two faces—are usually stillborn. With extremely rare exceptions, two headed-calves that survive birth die in a matter of days, if not hours. Flint, who grew up on a farm in Nebraska, certainly knew more about this sort of thing than this child of the Jersey suburbs.

Here is Gilpin’s poem, which I have known by heart since 1991:

Two-Headed Calf

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.

Three decades and change later, it still kills me every time.

Why does nature fate some of us to live long, healthy lives, while others suffer in sickness and infirmity? Is there larger purpose to this design, or is it just random probabilities—simple, brutal math?

Gilpin died young. She was a poet of acclaim—she won the Walt Whitman Award in 1976 for her first poetry collection, The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe—with degrees from Sarah Lawrence and Columbia, and taught in the city for a time. Later she became a registered nurse. She worked for Planetree, and was a tireless advocate for its patient-oriented care model. In the late summer of 2006, she was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, an incurable brain cancer marked by terrible headaches, nausea, and (ironically, given that poem) double vision. She died half a year later, at age 56, right after finishing a second poetry collection, The Weight of a Soul.

After two Sundays in a row of breaking down heady novels, I intended this week to share something light, something simple and beautiful that did not require interpretation. For one thing, the news from the last seven days has been particularly bleak. For another, today is March 3—my father’s birthday. He would have been 76.

I considered writing about Roy Orbison, who my dad loved, but there was nothing I could think to say about The Big O that hadn’t already been better expressed by the likes of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Then I remembered “Two-Headed Calf.” I hadn’t shared it previously because it is relatively recent. But as both of Gilpin’s books are currently out of print, my hope is that some attention paid to her work might convince a publisher to re-issue her collections.

As I read about Gilpin last night, I came upon her obituary, which contains a quote from one of her poems, “Life After Death,” that I’d never heard before. I tracked it down and read it. This poem, too, requires no interpretation, and seems especially appropriate for my father’s birthday. 

At the end of this ugly week, Dear Reader, I leave you with something beautiful:

Life After Death

These things I know:
How the living go on living
and how the dead go on living with them
so that in a forest
even a dead tree casts a shadow
and the leaves fall one by one
and the branches break in the wind
and the bark peels off slowly
and the trunk cracks
and the rain seeps in through the cracks
and the trunk falls to the ground
and the moss covers it
and in the spring the rabbits find it
and build their nest
inside the dead tree
so that nothing is wasted in nature
or in love.

Categories Creativity, Literature

Jess Piper: Why Uncontested Seats Are Undemocratic and Breed Extremism

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2024 //
14

Jess Piper is an educator, a blogger, and a farmer in rural Missouri. In this post, she describes an extremist in the state legislature who wants to defund public libraries, Planned Parenthood, and public schools.

Now Rep. Cody Smith, chair of the House Budget Committee, is running for State Treasurer, and no Democrat is running against him. He can flourish as an extremist because he is unopposed.

She writes:

Uncontested seats are undemocratic. This is the story of one of those seats:

Last year, Missouri Representative Cody Smith, the House Budget Committee Chairman, proposed a motion to defund public libraries in the state? Why? Because lawmakers were trying to pass a bill to ban “pornography” in libraries. The bill would actually limit classic books and literature that may be offensive to some, but is literature none the less. 

So, the ACLU, the Missouri Association of School Librarians, and the Missouri Library Association sued the state. In retaliation, Rep Smith moved to strip public libraries from the state budget. To defund public libraries. He failed…

Now he’s going after Planned Parenthood, which no longer provides abortion services, but does offer women’s health services, like screening for breast cancer.

He also is promoting a universal school voucher program that would subsidize every student currently enrolled in private and religious schools. The cost might be as much as $1 billion a year.

Here is the worst part, friends. He’s running for State Treasurer…against two other Republicans. Not one Democrat has filed to run as of today.

We. Can’t. Win. When. We. Don’t. Run.

Representative Smith also ran unopposed in 2022. He just walked right into the Capitol and wrote bills to defund public libraries, public schools, and Planned Parenthood. He has been made near-invincible by the power to not have to answer to constituents. If he has no fear of opposition, he can be as extreme as his donors would like. And, that seems to be exactly what he’s doing.

Last year, 40% of Missouri House seats went unopposed. We let 66 Reps win by default, and friends, this is undemocratic. Most of these seats are in rural parts of the state…Rep Cody Smith is from Carthage, population 15K. Cody faced no opposition, won without any contest, and then wrote bills that could harm millions of folks in our state.

I work with Blue Missouri for this reason—I believe in running everywhere. Even in rural races. Even in places we know won’t flip for a few cycles. Robert Hubbell wrote about our organization a few days ago after hearing about what we are doing in Missouri…here it is. 

Run Everywhere. Contest every damn seat.

So many statehouse races have gone uncontested and unsupported. Democrats in these districts, especially rural Dems like those in my community feel abandoned, ignored…forgotten. Meanwhile, GOP nominees get free passes to the Capitol to do the business of extremist donors.

It doesn’t have to be this way. 

We can show up for Missouri’s Democrats, making sure no Democrat gets left behind. No Missouri voter is left without a choice. No Republican gets a free ride.

That’s the plan to deal with folks like Representative Smith. We take back our state seat by seat. We contest every single one of them on every ballot across the entire state.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Democrats, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Libraries, Missouri, Vouchers

Trump’s Debt to Putin

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2024 //
35

Our occasional commenter, who uses the sobriquet “Democracy” posted the following analysis of Putin’s involvement in the 2016 election. Russia and Wikileaks crippled Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and at least eight Republican Senators knew it. They endorsed a report which reached that conclusion. Yet they continued to defend Trump.

Democracy posted:

Volume V of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigative report on the 2016 election:

“the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign. Taken as a whole, Manafort’s highlevel access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat…”

“Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process…While the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.”

Click to access report_volume5.pdf

And if you’ve not read it before, here’s Adam Silverman, a national security expert, on that investigative report:

The Real Takeaway From the Senate Select Committee On Intelligence’s Bipartisan Report On Russia’s Active Measures Campaign and Interference In the 2016 Election: They All Knew Before They Voted To Acquit!!!!!

It’s quite clear…Trump and Republicans (and the NRA) are enthralled by and beholden to Putin.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Hillary Clinton, Republicans, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: The GOP is a Dying Party

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2024 //
43

Historian Heather Cox Richardson brilliantly analyzes the current moment.

She writes:

Behind the horse race–type coverage of the contest for presidential nominations, a major realignment is underway in United States politics. The Republican Party is dying as Trump and his supporters take it over, but there is a larger story behind that crash. This moment looks much like the other times in our history when a formerly stable two-party system has fallen apart and Americans reevaluated what they want out of their government.

Trump’s takeover of the party has been clear at the state level, where during his term he worked to install loyalists in leadership positions. From there, they have pushed the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election and have continued to advance his claims to power. 

The growing radicalism of the party has also been clear in Congress, where Trump loyalists refuse to permit legislation that does not reflect their demands and where, after they threw House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) out of office—dumping a speaker midterm for the first time in history—Trump lieutenant Jim Jordan (R-OH) threatened holdouts to vote him in as speaker. Jordan failed, but the speaker Republican representatives did choose, Mike Johnson (R-LA), is himself a Trump loyalist, just one who had made fewer enemies than Jordan. 

The radicalization of the House conference has led 21 members of the party who gravitate toward actual lawmaking to announce they are not running for reelection. Many of them are from safe Republican districts, meaning they will almost certainly be replaced by radicals.  

The Senate has tended to hang back from this radicalization, but in a dramatic illustration of Trump’s takeover of the party, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell today announced he would step down from his leadership position in November. McConnell is the leading symbol of the pre-Trump party, a man whose determination to cut taxes and regulation led him to manipulate the rules of the Senate and silence warnings that Russian disinformation was polluting the 2016 campaign so long as it meant keeping a Democrat out of the White House and Republicans in control of the Senate.

The extremist House Freedom Caucus promptly tweeted: “Our thoughts are with our Democrat colleagues in the Senate on the retirement of their Co-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (D-Ukraine). No need to wait till November…Senate Republicans should IMMEDIATELY elect a *Republican* Minority Leader.”

Trump has also taken control of the Republican National Committee (RNC) itself. On Monday, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel announced that she is resigning on March 8. Trump picked McDaniel himself in 2016 but has come to blame her both for the party’s continued underperformance since 2016 and for its current lack of money.

Now Trump has made it clear he wants even closer loyalists at the top of the party, including his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. She has suggested she is open to using RNC money exclusively for Trump. This might be what has prompted the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity to pull support from Nikki Haley in order to invest in downballot races. 

But the party that is consolidating around Trump is alienating a majority of Americans. It has abandoned the principles that the party embraced from 1980 until 2016. In that era, Republicans called for a government that cut taxes and regulations with the idea that consolidating wealth at the top of the economy would enable businessmen to invest far more effectively in new development than they could if the government interfered, and the economy would boom. They also embraced global leadership through the expansion of capitalism and a strong military to protect it. 

Under Trump, though, the party has turned away from global leadership to the idea that strong countries can do what they like to their neighbors, and from small government to big government that imposes religious rules. Far from protecting equality before the law, Republican-dominated states have discriminated against LGBTQ+ individuals, racial and ethnic minorities, and women. And, of course, the party is catering to Trump’s authoritarian plans. Neo-nazis attended the Conservative Political Action Conference a week ago. 

But these changes are not popular. Tuesday’s Michigan primary revealed the story we had already seen in the Republican presidential primaries and caucuses in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Trump won all those contests, but by significantly less than polls had predicted. He has also been dogged by the strength of former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. With Trump essentially running as an incumbent, he should be showing the sort of strength Biden is showing—with challengers garnering only a few percentage points—but even among the fervent Republicans who tend to turn out for primaries, Trump’s support is soft.

It seems that the same policies that attract Trump’s base are turning other voters against him. Republican leadership, for example, is far out of step with the American people on abortion rights—69% of Americans want the right to abortion put into law—and that gulf has only widened over the Alabama Supreme Court decision endangering in vitro fertilization by saying that embryos have the same rights as children from the moment of conception. That decision created such an outcry that Republicans felt obliged to claim they supported IVF. But push came to shove today when Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) reintroduced a bill to protect IVF that Republicans had previously rejected and Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) killed it again. 

The party has also tied itself to a deeply problematic leader. Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in four different cases—two state, two federal—but the recently-decided civil case in which he, the Trump Organization, his older sons, and two associates were found liable for fraud is presenting a more immediate threat to Trump’s political career.

Trump owes writer E. Jean Carroll $88.3 million; he owes the state of New York $454 million, with interest accruing at more than $100,000 a day. Trump had 30 days from the time the judgments were filed to produce the money or a bond for it. Today he asked the court for permission to post only $100 million rather than the full amount in the New York case, as required by law, because he would have to sell property at fire-sale prices to come up with the money.

In addition to making it clear to donors that their investment in his campaign now might end up in the hands of lawyers or the victorious plaintiffs, the admission that Trump does not have the money he has claimed punctures the image at the heart of his political success: that of a billionaire businessman.   

Judge Anil C. Singh rejected Trump’s request but did stay the prohibition on Trump’s getting loans from New York banks, potentially allowing him to get the money he needs.  

As Trump’s invincible image cracks with this admission, as well as with the increased coverage of his wild statements, others are starting to push back on him and his loyalists. President Biden’s son Hunter Biden testified behind closed doors to members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees today, after their previous key witness turned out to be working with Russian operatives and got indicted for lying.

Hunter Biden began the day with a scathing statement saying unequivocally that he had never involved his father in his business dealings and that all the evidence the committee had compiled proved that. In their “partisan political pursuit,” he said, they had “trafficked in innuendo, distortion, and sensationalism—all the while ignoring the clear and convincing evidence staring you in the face. You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies about my father because there isn’t any.” 

After an hour, Democratic committee members described to the press what was going on in the hearing room. They reported that the Republicans’ case had fallen apart entirely and that Biden had had a “very understandable, coherent business explanation for every single thing that they asked for.” While former president Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself more than 440 times during a deposition in his fraud trial, Biden did not take the Fifth at all. 

The discrediting of the Republicans continued later. When Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) tried to recycle the discredited claim that “$20 million flowed through” to then–vice president Biden, CNN host Boris Sanchez fact-checked him and said, “I’m not going to let you say things that aren’t true.” 

That willingness to push back on the Republicans suggests a new political moment in which Americans, as they have done before when one of the two parties devolved into minority rule, wake up to the reality that the system has been hijacked and begin to reclaim their government. 

But can they prevail over the extremists MAGA Republicans have stowed into critical positions in the government? Tonight the Supreme Court, stacked with Trump appointees, announced that rather than let the decision of a lower court stay in place, it would take up the question of whether Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for his actions in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. That decision means a significant delay in Trump’s trial for that attempt. 

“This is a momentous decision, just to hear this case,” conservative judge Michael Luttig told Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC. “There was no reason in this world for the Supreme Court to take this case…. Under the constitutional laws of the United States, there has never been an argument that a former president is immune from prosecution for crimes that he committed while in office.” 

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Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Republicans, Trump
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