Kevin Welner: The Supreme Court Is Likely to Support Public Funding of Religious Schools That Discriminate

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2022 //
165

Kevin Welner, an expert in education law and policy at the University of Colorado and executive director of the National Education Law Center. He writes that the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to render a decision reversing the historic American tradition of prohibiting the funding of K-12 religious school.

The Founding Fathers were clear about their antipathy to funding religious institutions. It was Thomas Jefferson who coined the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state.” That wall, which has plenty of holes in it, is about to be demolished. Perhaps we should relearn why the Founders were opposed to mixing church and state. They were well aware of the religious wars and religious persecution that had torn Europe apart for centuries. In the new nation, they believed, religious groups would thrive or fail on their own, without government intervention or direction. We are soon to see a Supreme Court dominated by so-called “Originalists” overturn the clear intentions of the Founders.

Welner notes that religious schools are not bound by civil rights laws, especially under the current Court, which places religious freedom above civil rights. This, states will be required to fund schools that indoctrinate and discriminate.

Exactly what the Founding Fathers feared.

From the National Education Policy Center:

BOULDER, CO (May 12, 2022) – In the coming weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court will hand down a series of decisions that may transform American society. One of those decisions is in a case called Carson v. Makin, the latest in a series of cases brought to expand the use of private school vouchers. This decision in Carson may be particularly radical and transformative, explains University of Colorado Boulder professor and NEPC director Kevin Welner.

In a policy memo titled, The Outsourcing of Discrimination: Another SCOTUS Earthquake?, Welner, an education law and policy scholar, contends that the majority of Supreme Court justices, in deciding Carson v. Makin, will likely adopt a rule that requires public funding in Maine to be used to subsidize religious teaching and proselytizing. But the Court may also take the nation far beyond that determination.

Specifically, the Court may require that whenever a state decides to provide a service through a non-state employee (e.g., through a contracting mechanism), the state will face the highest level of judicial scrutiny if it “discriminates” against churches and church-affiliated service providers that infuse their beliefs into the provided services. Moreover, the Court may impose that same heightened scrutiny to limit any state anti-discrimination enforcement if providers’ religious beliefs direct them to engage in that discrimination against people because of, for example, their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Welner explains that such a judicial ruling would amount to a license to outsource discrimination. While a conventional public school cannot violate a state’s anti-discrimination laws, a school run privately by a religious organization might be allowed to do so. He points in particular to charter school laws as creating this possibility, and he describes how Supreme Court cases in recent years have laid the groundwork for courts to require authorizers to grant charters to religious organizations.

“The Supreme Court is just a few small steps away from transforming every charter school law in the U.S. into a private-school voucher policy,” says Welner. In addition, he argues, charters run by religious organizations would likely gain a constitutionally protected right to discriminate against, for example, members of the LGBTQ+ community.

If this happens, states that abhor such discrimination may find themselves forced to pull back on private contracting to provide public services, ending policies that allow private operators of everything from social services like foster care, health care, prisons, and charter schools.

Find The Outsourcing of Discrimination: Another SCOTUS Earthquake?, by Kevin Welner, at:
https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/carson-makin

Categories Funding, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state

Is Elon Musk Reconsidering His Plan to Buy Twitter?

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2022 //
54

Timothy L. O’Brien, who has written critically about Trump’s claims to be a multi billionaire, wonders whether Elon Musk is having buyer’s remorse about his offer of $44 billion for Twitter. Musk tweeted on Friday morning that his offer was “temporarily on hold” while there is an investigation of Twitter bots.

O’Brien wrote at Bloomberg News:

Elon Musk took to Twitter early Friday to say that his takeover of the company was “temporarily on holdpending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.”

Musk might be serious about this. Or he might be joking and just using his vast social media reach to have fun with the investors, Twitter Inc. employees, journalists, free-speech advocates and others who have been watching this garbage fire ignite. (A couple hours later he tweeted he was still committed to the deal.)

I’m in the camp of: “Musk is serious about this but he’s finding the most unserious of reasons to explain why he’s bailing.” As in: “I was thinking about buying that mansion, but the deal is on hold pending details about whether there are termites in some of the planters on the patio. I still have plenty of cash and can get a mortgage from the bank, believe me. It’s not about the money.”

I suspect Musk’s jitters about buying Twitter are all about the money and has nothing to do with how many bots are zooming around the platform. He just doesn’t want to say that. If the richest guy in the world wanted to be more honest about what’s going on, he might have to acknowledge that his primary credit card — his shares in Tesla Inc. — doesn’t have the buying power it once did.

Musk said last month that he wanted to buy Twitter for $43 billion — when he only had about $3 billion in cash on hand. Most of the fortune of the world’s richest man, which added up to some $259 billion at the time, was tied up in his Tesla shares. Since then, Tesla’s shares have lost about 36% of their value, and Musk’s net worth has fallen to about $215 billion.

Frankly, I would be pleased to see this purchase fall through. It’s frightening to think that one person would wield the power to control what has become the nation’s public square.

Musk has said he believes in unlimited free speech, but that too is dangerous in these times of disinformation and pervasive propaganda. In a famous Supreme Court decision, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that free speech does not give you the right to shout “Fire” in a crowded theater. Holmes was using the reference to justify a decision against a man handing out flyers opposed to recruitment for the military during World War 1. (Schenck vs. United States). That decision was subsequently overturned but the metaphor remains apt.

Musk would not exclude those on Twitter who offer phony cures for COVID or other diseases or those who urge people not to take the vaccines that would protect their lives. He would not exclude those who peddle hatred and bigotry.

This not to say that he does not exclude anyone. A group called “Public Citizen” has complained that it was blocked by Elon Musk. It may be that he blocks groups and individuals who post tweets about the riskinesss of Tesla. Who knows?

The Twitter platform should have standards for screening and deleting tweets that incite violence or circulate medical misinformation. That’s why Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene were banished.

Musk is apparently politically biased. He tweeted not long ago ““I strongly supported Obama for President, but today’s Democratic Party has been hijacked by extremists.” Extremists? Inciting an insurrection on January 6 doesn’t count as extremist? Invading the halls of z Congress and attacking police officers is not extremism? Insisting that the 2020 election was stolen is not extremist? If any party has been hijacked by extremists, it is the Republican Party.

Twitter is too important in our common life to be controlled by one man and his wildly inflated ego. I’m hoping the deal never happens.

Categories Media

Heather Cox Richardson on John McCain, Paul Manafort, and Putin

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2022 //
34

Historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote a fascinating column about Steve Schmidt’s recent revelations about important political figures. Like the good historian she is, she connects the dots.

At home, a big story broke over the weekend, reminding us that the ties of the Republican Party to Russians and the effect of those ties on Ukraine reach back not just to former president Trump, but at least to the 2008 presidential campaign of Arizona senator John McCain.

Late Saturday night, political strategist Steve Schmidt, who worked on a number of Republican political campaigns including McCain’s when he ran for president in 2008, began to spill what he knows about that 2008 campaign. Initially, this accounting took the form of Twitter threads, but on Sunday, Schmidt put the highlights into a post on a Substack publication called The Warning. The post’s title distinguished the author from those journalists and members of the Trump administration who held back key information about the dangerous behavior in Trump’s White House in order to include it in their books. The post was titled: “No Books. No Money. Just the Truth.”

Schmidt left the Republican Party in 2018, tweeting that by then it was “fully the party of Trump. It is corrupt, indecent and immoral. With the exception of a few governors…it is filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party’s greatest leaders…. Today the GOP has become a danger to our democracy and our values.” Schmidt helped to start The Lincoln Project, designed to sink Trump Republicans through attack ads and fundraising, in late 2019.

The apparent trigger for Schmidt’s accounting was goading from McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain, a sometime media personality who, after years of slighting Schmidt, recently called him a pedophile, which seems to have been a reference to the fact that a colleague with whom Schmidt started The Lincoln Project was accused of online sexual harassment of men and boys. Schmidt resigned over the scandal.

Schmidt was fiercely loyal to Senator McCain and had stayed silent for years over accusations that he was the person who had chosen then–Alaska governor Sarah Palin as McCain’s vice presidential candidate, lending legitimacy to her brand of uninformed fire-breathing radicalism, and about his knowledge of McCain’s alleged affair with a lobbyist.

In his tweetstorm, Schmidt set the record straight, attributing the choice of Palin to McCain’s campaign director and McCain himself, and acknowledging that the New York Times had been correct in the reporting of McCain’s relationship with the lobbyist, despite the campaign’s angry denial.

More, though, Schmidt’s point was to warn Americans that the mythmaking that turns ordinary people into political heroes makes us unwilling to face reality about their behavior and, crucially, makes the media unwilling to tell us the truth about it. As journalist Sarah Jones wrote in PoliticusUSA, Schmidt’s “broader point is how we, as Americans, don’t like to be told the truth and how our media so loves mythology that they work to deliver lies to us instead of holding the powerful accountable.”

Schmidt’s biggest reminder, though, was that the director of the 2008 McCain campaign was Richard (Rick) Davis, a founding partner of Davis Manafort, the political consulting firm formed in 1996. By 2003, the men were representing pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Yanukovych; in July 2004, U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov was murdered in Moscow for exposing Russian government corruption; and in June 2005, Manafort proposed that he would work for Putin’s government in former Soviet republics, Europe, and the United States by influencing politics, business dealings, and news coverage.

From 2004 to 2014, Manafort worked for Yanukovych and his party, trying to make what the U.S. State Department called a party of “mobsters and oligarchs” look legitimate. In 2016, Manafort went on to lead Donald Trump’s campaign, and the ties between him, the campaign, and Russia are well known. Less well known is that in 2008, Manafort’s partner Rick Davis ran Republican candidate John McCain’s presidential campaign.

Schmidt writes that McCain turned a blind eye to the dealings of Davis and Manafort, apparently because he was distracted by the fallout when the story of his personal life hit the newspapers. Davis and Manafort were making millions by advancing Putin’s interests in Ukraine and eastern Europe, working for Yanukovych and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Schmidt notes that “McCain spent his 70th birthday with Oleg Deripaska and Rick Davis on a Russian yacht at anchor in Montenegro.”

“There were two factions in the campaign,” Schmidt tweeted, “a pro-democracy faction and…a pro Russia faction,” led by Davis, who—like Manafort—had a residence in Trump Tower. It was Davis who was in charge of vetting Palin.

McCain was well known for promising to stand up to Putin, and Palin’s claim that she could counter the growing power of Russia in part because “[t]hey’re our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska” became a long-running joke (the comment about seeing Russia from her house came from a Saturday Night Live skit).

But a terrific piece in The Nation by Mark Ames and Ari Berman in October 2008 noted: “He may talk tough about Russia, but John McCain’s political advisors have advanced Putin’s imperial ambitions.” The authors detailed Davis’s work to bring the Balkan country of Montenegro under Putin’s control and concluded that either McCain “was utterly clueless while his top advisers and political allies ran around the former Soviet domain promoting the Kremlin’s interests for cash, or he was aware of it and didn’t care.”

Trump’s campaign and presidency, along with Putin’s deadly assault on Ukraine, puts into a new light the fact that McCain’s campaign manager was Paul Manafort’s business partner all the way back in 2008.

Note: Richardson has a list of sources at the end of her post. For some unknown reason, WordPress did not permit me to copy her notes. I inserted some but not all. Open the post to check the links.

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Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Fraud, Lies, Politics, Republicans, Scandals, Trump

Tom Ultican Reports on the Highlights of the #NPE2022 Conference in Philly

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2022 //
1

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics in California, is now a significant chronicler of the Destroy Public Education movement. He attended the recent national conference of the Network for Public Education in Philadelphia and recapitulates the excitement we shared at being in person after a 2-year hiatus.

After every conference, attendees say, “This was the best one yet.” They enjoy meeting people who are doing the same work to fight privatization of their public schools. By the end of the conference, attendees say they feel energized, hopeful, and happy to know that they are not alone.

I urge you to read Tom’s post. You will get a sense of the embarrassment of riches available to attendees.

I should add that the Nebraska Save Our Schools group shared the Phyllis Bush Award for Grassroots Activism. Nebraska is one of the few states that has managed to protect its public schools and keep out both charters and vouchers, despite being a Red State.

The Pastors for Texas Children, a co-winner of the award, has repeatedly blocked vouchers in the Texas Legislature and has consistently fought for funding for public schools. PTC has opened chapters in other Red states, where they mobilize clergy to support public schools.

A high point for me was interviewing “Little Stevie” Van Zandt, a legendary rock star and actor (“The Sopranos”), who is dedicated to getting the arts into schools, not as an extra, but across the curriculum. we had a wonderful conversation. He has funded lesson plans based on rock and roll, available free at his website TeachRock.

All of the general sessions were taped. I will post them when they become available.

Categories Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Closing schools, Community Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Courage, Creativity, Dark Money, Democracy, Detroit, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, For-Profit, Hope, Innovation, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Nevada, Philadelphia, Privatization, Racism, Resistance, Standardized Testing, Supporting public schools, Teachers

Carol Burris: What Jonathan Chait Forgot to Mention in His Latest Defense of the Charter Industry

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2022 //
14

Jonathan Chait writes for New York magazine, where his latest article appeared, opposing the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed regulations for the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). CSP currently spends $440 million annually to underwrite new charter schools. Chait titled his article “Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools,” but it might as well have been titled “Biden Abandons the Betsy DeVos Legacy on Charter Schools.”

Chait also attacked the Network for Public Education, which had issued two reports (see here and here) documenting the waste, fraud, and abuse in the CSP, based on the Education Department’s own data. NPE found that almost 40% of CSP funding went to charters that either never opened or closed within a few years of opening. In the life of the program, almost $1 billion had been wasted. In addition, NPE pointed out the scandals associated with some high-profile for-profit charter operators, as well as the use of CSP money to open white-flight charters.

This year, for the first time since the CSP was created nearly 30 years ago, the Department proposed to ban the funding of for-profit charter management organizations and of white-flight charters. The regulations also ask applicants for an impact analysis that describes what effect the new charter is likely to have on existing public schools and why the new charter is needed. These sensible reform proposals sent the charter lobbyists into frenzied opposition, claiming falsely that these regulations were meant to destroy all charter schools. This was nonsense because they would have no effect on the thousands of existing charters, only on applicants for new federal funding, that is, charters that do not yet exist.

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, sharply denounced the lies and misrepresentations of the “trade organization” for the charter industry. But, despite her reproach, the charter industry still promotes dishonest diatribes about the Department’s efforts to reform the CSP.

Carol Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education, was incensed when she read Chait’s defense of the charter industry’s effort to protect the for-profit managers who have abused CSP funds and of the operators that have used CSP funding to provide white-flight charters.

She wrote the following response.

In his recent column, “Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools,” Jonathan Chait is perturbed that the U.S. Department of Education referred Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum to me for comment on an article he was writing about the Department’s proposed regulations for funding new charter schools. He then scolds Barnum for not disclosing that the Network for Public Education has received donations from unions. He calls Barnum’s story “neutral.” Chait’s source for this big scoop? The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Jonathan Chait then parrots the “wild exaggerations and misrepresentations” that Rosa De Lauro called out last week after expressing her support for CSP reforms during the Education Department’s 2023 budget hearing. The Appropriations Chairwoman noted that “this kind of information campaign is a familiar tactic for the trade organization [National Alliance for Public Charter Schools]. It does represent charter schools that are run by risky low-quality for-profit education management organizations.”

You know those “wild exaggerations.” I wrote about them here. Obviously, Chait did not read the mentioned Barnum piece, which was solid reporting, and he certainly did not read the proposed regulations carefully (which Representative DeLauro described in a letter to Secretary Miguel Cardona about the charter industry’s misrepresentations). Or he just chose to twist facts and truth.

Now let’s talk about what Jonathan Chait failed to disclose as he opposed the CSP regulation reforms, using the same misinformation that has appeared in other op-eds.

His wife worked for Center City Charter Schools as a grant writer when that charter chain received two grants from the Charter School Program (CSP), the program whose loose rules he is now defending. Download the 2019 database that you can find here and match the years of dispersion to the resume of Robin Chait. But the undisclosed conflict continues to this day. Since 2018, Robin Chait has worked for West Ed which evaluated the CSP during the Betsy De Vos era. And her employer, West Ed, once got its own $1.74 million grant from CSP.

But back to NPE funding. During some recent years we got modest donations from unions to bring teachers to our conferences. At our very beginning, we received start-up funds from the Chicago Teachers Union through a fiscal sponsor, Voices for Children. That ended in 2015. We will always be grateful to our friend, the late Karen Lewis, for that jump-start. Karen foresaw the growing attacks on public schools and teachers as an ominous trend and wanted to encourage allies to support a bedrock institution of our democracy.

We appreciate any tax-deductible donations we get. You won’t get favors, but you will always get a thank you. Our income comes from individual donations from our large number of supporters—educators, parents, family foundations, and other citizens who have a deep and abiding love for public schools.

This is not the first time Chait has been called out for not disclosing his wife’s connections with charters. But given the topic and her work in organizations connected with the Charter School Program, this is the worst omission yet. Shame on New York Magazine for not making him disclose and for letting him play fast and loose with the truth. And shame on Chait’s hypocritical critique of Barnum even as he hides the family connections with the program he defends.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Scandals, School Choice, Shame, Support for public schools

Bob Shepherd: A Lament for a Destroyed City

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2022 //
52

Bob Shepherd is our resident polymath.

What have they done to you, Mariupol?

To your beautiful theatre with its park, your many museums, your galleries, your grand churches and synagogues and mosques, your restaurants, your 81 schools, your football club and water polo team and canoeing club and basketball club, your 60 hospitals and medical offices, your stunning beach on the Sea of Azov, your 20 newspapers, your 7 television stations, your nightclubs, your gardens, your parks and play facilities, your cinemas, your restaurants and cafes, your libraries, your marina and its sailors, your 500,000 men, women, teenagers, children, toddlers, babies? Where are your old men playing chess, your young people strolling and in love, your children at their games, your gorgeous, friendly people dancing and singing at one of your many festivals? Where are your guilds of artists, journalists, poets, novelists, dramatists, actors, musicians? What has become of your monuments? Your homes?

Where are Alla and Anatoly, Vasylyna and Vitali, Yeva and Ivan, . . . Maryna and Maksym, Natalia and Nazar, . . . Sofiia and Stepan, Titiana and Tymur, . . . Yuliia and Yakiv?

Gone. Obliterated. Turned into smoke and ashes and body parts and blood by war criminal Chekist reptile Tsar Vladimir.

Categories Cruelty, Evil, Fascism

Houston Chronicle: How Politicians Steal Your Right to Vote While You Sleep

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2022 //
6

As I mentioned in the previous post, the Houston Chronicle won a Pulitzer Prize for its editorial about the Big Lie and the follow-up efforts to suppress voting by those who might vote Democratic. It is a brilliant series, well deserving of a Pulitzer Prize. Here is another editorial that shines a bright light on the state legislature’s dastardly effort to curtail voting rights. How the Republican leaders voted to suppress voting rights while claiming to protect the integrity of elections.

You don’t say.

A voting bill that truly protects people’s rights instead of raiding them doesn’t need a shroud of darkness or legislative chicanery to prevail. It doesn’t run from the sun or shrivel under scrutiny. Only lies do.

The biggest problem Republican lawmakers have in pushing restrictive voting legislation in the name of integrity is that they themselves have none.

The latest example came Thursday, as the House Elections Committee abruptly took up Senate Bill 7, the upper chamber’s main voter-suppression legislation, without any warning and leaving no room for public comment. The bill aids voter intimidation by letting partisans film voters they find suspicious and takes aim at voting innovations that helped increase turnout in blue Harris County, including drive-thru voting.

Chairing the Elections Committee is none other than state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park, a young lawyer who earned his stripes in Texas-style voter integrity politics by proudly tweeting a photo of himself in November, in aviator glasses and a cowboy hat pulled low, announcing that he was headed to Pennsylvania to join Donald Trump’s quest to overthrow the presidential election through baseless allegations of voter fraud.

It surprised many when incoming House Speaker Dade Phelan entrusted Cain with his first chairmanship. It has been less surprising that Cain’s excellent adventure in committee leadership has, well, flunked most heinously. Last week, Cain blindsided fellow lawmakers by introducing a motion to substitute SB 7 with the language of his own bill, HB 6. His move, to hear him reason it, required no public discussion, since the committee had already discussed and approved the House bill.

Cain played it coy as Democrats sought clarification and questioned whether this would gut SB 7 and replace it wholesale with the language in HB 6. “I wouldn’t say that,” he responded.

Lesser and greater evil

HB 6 gives partisan poll watchers almost unlimited freedom inside a polling place and limits when they can be ejected to a narrow set of circumstances. It further criminalizes the electoral process, targeting elections officials who may fear that making a mistake could land them in jail (say, when trying to kick out a disruptive poll watcher). It also puts new burdens on those who assist voters who are elderly, disabled or have limited English proficiency, while also threatening them with a felony for even accidental violations of their oath.

SB 7 also contains broad protection of partisan poll watchers while also giving them the ability to record voters if they think they are violating election law. It increases burdens on volunteers that help people get to the polls, regulates the distribution of polling locations in large urban counties and bans mega voting sites, 24-hour poll locations and drive-thru voting.

Cain, speaking over lawmakers’ objections that they didn’t have time to consider the substituted language, likely would have bullied through if not for his fellow Republican, state Rep. Travis Clardy, of Nacogdoches, refusing to cast a vote.

After the committee reconvened later that day, Clardy supported the measure and the revised SB 7 — to mirror HB 6 — passed on a party-line vote. Still, it was nice that however briefly, at least one Republican on the committee believed that if you claim election bills are about honest elections, you should show a little honesty in discussing them.

In March, Chairman Cain — yet, again — broke with legislative rules in a decidedly less successful scheme. He left about 200 people who traveled to the Capitol to testify on HB 6 twiddling their thumbs after he strayed from procedure in a hasty attempt to block testimony from Rep. Nicole Collier, D-Fort Worth, chair of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus.

In April, the Senate approved SB 7 in the middle of the night — after a slew of amendments that few had a chance to read in full — with few people watching. As reported by the Chronicle, lawmakers adjourned at 1:39 a.m. April 1, then cleverly reconvened one minute later at 1:40 a.m. to declare a new legislative day, complete with a new roll call and a fresh prayer — thus complying with public notice rules without slowing down the bill’s passage.

“If you really think you’re securing the election, do it in the light of day,” says Emily Eby, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project. “If you really think you’re preserving the integrity of the ballot box, do it in front of Texans.”

Of course, Republican lawmakers don’t think anything of the sort. Not if they understand basic math, anyway. An analysis of voter fraud cases by this editorial board found that over the past 15 years and more than 94 million votes cast in Texas elections, the Texas Attorney General’s Office has prosecuted only 155 people, with few of them facing charges serious enough to warrant jail time.

The GOP’s true motivation is not preventing fraud in voting, but preventing broader voting across demographic lines from an electorate that’s growing younger and more diverse. The only threat at the polls is the GOP’s attempt to bar the door.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Fraud, Houston, Lies, Texas

Houston Chronicle Wins Pulitzer Prize for Editorials Exposing “The Big Lie”

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2022 //
31

As a native Texan, I have not had a lot of reasons to proud of my state lately. The leadership—Governor Gregg Abbott and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick—compete to see who is meanest. They pushed through a very restrictive abortion law that pays bounties to people who squeal on women who got an abortion (the bill turns citizens into the Stasi of East Germany or the neighborhood spies of Cuba or the morality police of Iran). Dan Patrick is a voucher zealot, whose bad idea gets knocked down by the Legislature regularly. Abbott recently brought up his dim thought of revisiting a 1982 Supreme Court decision that ordered Texas and other states to educate the children of undocumented immigrants. Abbott wants them to remain illiterate, which is likely to cost the state more in the long run than allowing them to go to school (his proposal is also inhumane, but decency and humanity are not part of his calculus.)

But here is some good news from Texas! The editorial board of the Houston Chronicle won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about Trump’s absurd claim that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen from him. His team of lawyers brought dozens of lawsuits claiming election fraud, but lost all of them, even when the judges were appointed by Trump, even twice before the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a lop-sided majority of Republican-appointed justices.

The full series is here. The Chronicle is behind a paywall, and you may have to subscribe (as I do) to read them all. But I couldn’t resist sharing my favorite, which was published on January 8, 2021. It calls on Senator Ted Cruz to resign because of his shameful behavior in promoting The Big Lie.

The editorial says:

In Texas, we have our share of politicians who peddle wild conspiracy theories and reckless rhetoric aiming to inflame.

Think U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert’s “terror baby” diatribes or his nonsensical vow not to wear a face mask until after he got COVID, which he promptly did.

This editorial board tries to hold such shameful specimens to account.

But we reserve special condemnation for the perpetrators among them who are of sound mind and considerable intellect — those who should damn well know better.

None more than U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

A brilliant and frequent advocate before the U.S. Supreme Court and a former Texas solicitor general, Cruz knew exactly what he was doing, what he was risking and who he was inciting as he stood on the Senate floor Wednesday and passionately fed the farce of election fraud even as a seething crowd of believers was being whipped up by President Donald Trump a short distance away.

Cruz, it should also be noted, knew exactly whose presidency he was defending. That of a man he called in 2016 a “narcissist,” a “pathological liar” and “utterly amoral.”

Cruz told senators that since nearly 40 percent of Americans believed the November election “was rigged” that the only remedy was to form an emergency task force to review the results — and if warranted, allow states to overturn Joe Biden’s victory and put their electoral votes in Trump’s column.

Cruz deemed people’s distrust in the election “a profound threat to the country and to the legitimacy of any administrations that will come in the future.”

What he didn’t acknowledge was how that distrust, which he overstated anyway, was fueled by Trump’s torrent of fantastical claims of voter fraud that were shown again and again not to exist.

Cruz had helped spin that web of deception and now he was feigning concern that millions of Americans had gotten caught up in it.

Even as he peddled his phony concern for the integrity of our elections, he argued that senators who voted to certify Biden’s victory would be telling tens of millions of Americans to “jump in a lake” and that their concerns don’t matter.

Actually, senators who voted to certify the facts delivered the truth — something Americans haven’t been getting from a political climber whose own insatiable hunger for power led him to ride Trump’s bus to Crazy Town through 59 losing court challenges, past state counts and recounts and audits, and finally taking the wheel to drive it to the point of no return: trying to bully the U.S. Congress into rejecting tens of millions of lawfully cast votes in an election that even Trump’s Department of Homeland Security called the most secure in American history.

The consequences of Cruz’s cynical gamble soon became clear and so did his true motivations. In the moments when enraged hordes of Trump supporters began storming the Capitol to stop a steal that never happened, desecrating the building, causing the evacuation of Congress and injuring dozens of police officers, including one who died, a fundraising message went out to Cruz supporters:

“Ted Cruz here,” it read. “I’m leading the fight to reject electors from key states unless there is an emergency audit of the election results. Will you stand with me?”

Cruz claims the message was automated. Even if that’s true, it’s revolting.

This is a man who lied, unflinchingly, on national television, claiming on Hannity’s show days after the election that Philadelphia votes were being counted under a “shroud of darkness” in an attempted Democratic coup. As he spoke, the process was being livestreamed on YouTube.

For two months, Cruz joined Trump in beating the drum of election fraud until Trump loyalists were deaf to anyone — Republican, Democrat or nonpartisan journalists, not to mention state and federal courts — telling them otherwise.

And yet, Cruz insists he bears no responsibility for the deadly terror attack.

“Not remotely,” he told KHOU Thursday. “What I was doing and what the other members were doing is what we were elected to do, which is debating matters of great import in the chamber of the United States Senate.”

Since the Capitol siege, Cruz has condemned the violence, tweeting after the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick that “Heidi and I are lifting up in prayer” the officer’s family and demanding the terrorists be prosecuted.

Well, senator, those terrorists wouldn’t have been at the Capitol if you hadn’t staged this absurd challenge to the 2020 results in the first place. You are unlikely to be prosecuted for inciting the riots, as Trump may yet be, and there is no election to hold you accountable until 2024. So, we call for another consequence, one with growing support across Texas: Resign.

This editorial board did not endorse you in 2018. There’s no love lost — and not much lost for Texans needing a voice in Washington, either.

Public office isn’t a college debate performance. It requires representing the interests of Texans. In your first term, you once told reporters that you weren’t concerned about delivering legislation for your constituents. The more you throw gears in the workings of Washington, you said, the more people back home love you. Tell that to the constituents who complain that your office rarely even picks up the phone.

Serving as a U.S. senator requires working constructively with colleagues to get things done. Not angering them by voting against Hurricane Sandy relief, which jeopardized congressional support for Texas’ relief after Harvey. Not staging a costly government shutdown to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2013 that cost the economy billions. Not collecting more enemies than friends in your own party, including the affable former House Speaker John Boehner who famously remarked: “I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”

We’re done with the drama. Done with the opportunism. Done with the cynical scheming that has now cost American lives.

Resign, Mr. Cruz, and deliver Texas from the shame of calling you our senator.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Fraud, Houston, Hypocrisy, Republicans, Texas, Trump

CNN: The Oligarchs Who Gave Millions to American Universities, Museums, and Other Prestigious Institutions

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2022 //
18

This article posted today on the CNN website is a handy guide to “reputation laundering” by Russian and American oligarchs. We knew about the Sacklers, who put their name on prestigious institutions for years to wash away the stain of the opioids that made them billionaires. Then there is pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who bought his way into MIT. And now there is a panoply of Russian oligarchs, who became wealthy during an era of massive corruption in the transition from the Soviet Union to Russia. They are philanthropists now.

Categories Billionaires, Corruption

Politico: “1 Million Deaths Was a Choice”

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2022 //
89

Myah Ward of Politico Nightly interviewed Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine about the depressing fact that one million Americans have died due to COVID. It’s fair to say that he was outraged by the many thousands of unnecessary deaths, encouraged by Republican politicians and by hostility to science. One man, not mentioned here, could have persuaded his followers to get vaccinated and boosted, as he did. Donald Trump. But while he rightly took credit for the rapid development of vaccines, but did nothing to discourage the anti-vaxxers.

1 million deaths. Did you ever think we’d get here?

For me, the big reckoning was the fact that we’ve not really come to a real national dialogue about what happened after May 1, 2021. That was the day the White House announced that there are so many Covid vaccines that any American who wants to get vaccinated can get vaccinated. Yet we lost another 200,000-300,000 Americans after that date. Those who were defiant to vaccines were overwhelmingly in red states, and the redder the county as measured by Trump voters in the 2020 election, the higher the vaccine refusal and the greater the loss of life.

It wasn’t by accident. It was a deliberate effort by members of the House Freedom Caucus, in the House, some U.S. senators, amplified nightly on Fox News.

I don’t even call it misinformation or disinformation anymore. I call it anti-science aggression, to convince millions of Americans not to take a Covid vaccine. And at least 200,000 Americans between May 1 and the end of 2021 died needlessly from Covid because of it. And everyone’s afraid to talk about it because it’s very unpleasant to have to point out that these deaths occurred along such a strict partisan divide. Even the White House won’t talk about it in that way.

So, with an exhausted public, how would you re-engage Americans at this point? Is it by having these “unpleasant” conversations?

You can understand the first wave of deaths in New York in the spring of 2020. You can even start to understand the second wave of deaths in the summer of 2020, in Texas, in the southern U.S. when we’re just trying to understand it. But then as you move forward, you have to start to come to terms with the fact that a majority of the deaths were probably preventable. And certainly just about all of the deaths after May 1 were preventable. And I think that needs to be front and center. That these are not accidental deaths. The people who lost their lives and died after May 1 were themselves victims of anti-science aggression. If you look at the big-picture threats to the U.S. that we spend billions of dollars every year to combat, like global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, or cyberattacks. Anti-science aggression kills more Americans than all those things combined by far. And yet we don’t recognize it as such. That’s critically important to point that out.

Alongside Americans being “done” with the pandemic, there’s also the concern about Covid funding running out if Congress doesn’t act. How important is this money in your view?

We have to recognize that the mRNA boosters are not holding up as well as we’d like. We’re going to have to probably go — unless we come up with a better technology, which I think we should, but that’s a different matter — we’re gonna need to ask the American people to get boosted yet again. And we’re gonna have to provide those vaccines.

And we’re going to need an ongoing amount of Paxlovid, for instance. I mean, why am I talking to you right now? I’m talking to you right now because I’m the beneficiary of Paxlovid, which I’m on right now, and I’m the beneficiary of having my second booster. And even though it’s not ideal to ask Americans to continue to boost, it’s still going to be essential.

The White House is warning we could see 100 million infections this fall. How do you see this fall and winter unfolding?

I know that’s what the White House is doing, but I don’t quite understand the logic of jumping to fall and winter. We still have two big peaks that are hitting us before fall and winter. We have this current BA.2.12.1, which is now about to become the dominant variant. It’s so transmissible, all you need to do is give a dirty look to that subvariant and you become infected. It’s up there with measles. So that’s issue No. 1. And issue No. 2 is we’ve had a terrible wave of Covid-19 both for the last two summers in Texas in the southern United States. I’m expecting that again. Even before the fall, we’re going to have another wave over the summer from variant TBD, to be determined.

Categories Accountability, Health, Politics, Propaganda, Republicans, Science, Stupid
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