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.
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.
Washington Post Dana Milbank writes about the long game of Republicans, which culminated in Justice Alito’s draft decision overturning Roe V. Wade.
So Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell thinks the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe is a “toxic spectacle” and an “attack.” Chief Justice John Roberts calls it a “betrayal.”
Cry me a river.
There is indeed a toxic spectacle and a betrayal going on here, but it isn’t the leak. It’s the betrayal of democracy by McConnell’s Republicans and the toxic spectacle of the Roberts court aiding it.
The reported 5-to-4 split on the draft shows that this cataclysmic ruling would be forced on the public by the narrowest possible majority. This means the ruling is possible only because of the seat on the court McConnell and his Republican colleagues effectively stole by refusing for 293 days to confirm — or even consider — President Barack Obama’s duly nominated candidate, Merrick Garland.
Republicans handed that seat in 2017 to Neil Gorsuch — in the process going “nuclear” and eliminating the filibuster so that only Republican votes were needed for confirmation.
Then, in a feat of astounding hypocrisy, McConnell’s Republicans reversed their pious claim that Supreme Court vacancies late in a presidency should be left to the “next president” and confirmed Amy Coney Barrett eight days before Joe Biden was elected president — essentially stealing a second seat.
Some justices reported by Politico to be voting to overturn Roe now stand accused by Republican Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) of misrepresenting their positions on the “super precedent” during their Senate confirmations.
Greg Brozeit notes here an alarming aspect implicit in the Alito draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade. His comment appeared on the blog. Alito and four other radical conservatives demonstrated that precedent and stare decisis mean nothing to them. Despite their assurances under oath to the Senators who interviewed them, the radical justices intend to overturn a right declared by the Supreme Court 49 years earlier. Never in the history of the Supreme Court has a right granted by the Court been overturned. This radical, reckless decision will set off more demonstrations and protests. Recent polls show that only about 20% of the nation believes that abortion should be banned under all circumstances. The rest believe that it should be safe and legal, with certain conditions, such as rape, incest, the life of the mother. The sweep of this unprecedented revocation will leave many people wondering what other prior decisions will be overturned.
Greg Brozeit writes:
Just as CRT is not about education, the Alito Roe draft is not about abortion. It is much bigger. Some of you come oh so close to crossing the rhetorical goal line. The real question is not if or why, but how this becomes a legal mallet that makes no decision “safe.”
If the wording “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start” remains intact in the final opinion, it basically creates a precedent that precedent no longer exists. It would effectively be the first mortal wound in the legal doctrine of stare decisis as a check on judicial power. Its goal is to make a mockery out of the idea of judicial review as to render it meaningless. It’s “reasoning” could seep into and dominate all law from civil to maritime to military. And it fits perfectly with ALEC’s strategy to marginalize judicial review with packaged, ready-to-go legislation for lazy, partisan, or stupid (or all of the above) statewide elected legislature or governor.
This was not a legal shot over the bow. It was a direct hit on democracy and left no doubt that the only thing this court wants more is a tailor-made case that will give them stronger legal “reasoning” to be even more draconian. That would be the only reason this language might not be in the final decision handed down. It would be a short-lived “victory” that would be a prelude to something even worse for average and poor Americans.
This is the typical drivel the DNC-driven agenda gives us, focusing on individual policies rather than the real existential threat to democracy the Republican Party poses from local government through the office of the presidency. Now as correct as we may be about the fate of women’s rights and as big as that issue is, this is about much, much basic stakes. The radical right and their few partners on the looney left understand this. Hardly anyone else, it seems, does. Or at the very least, they can’t identify the true threat this enemy is posing. If they do not win now or in the next elections, they will continue to poison and cripple the system until they do. That, it seems, is the best we can hope for now. A slow death with faint hope for a miracle recovery rather than an immediate plunge into fascism.
Women’s rights are going backward, in the United States and in Afghanistan.
Susannah George writes in The Washington Post that the Taliban have ordered women to wear clothing that completely covers their face and body. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court plans to prevent women from exercising control over their own bodies, the first time in the nation’s history that the High Court has removed a right from anyone. Zealots, zealots, everywhere.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Muslim women in Afghanistan must cover from head to toe in public, according to a Taliban ruling announced Saturday, its latest move to constrain the lives of women since taking control of the country last year.
“This is not a restriction on women but an order of the Quran,” said Akif Muhajir, a spokesman for the Ministry of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, referring to the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islamic law. “It is the order of Allah and the prophet Muhammad.”
The Taliban’s treatment of women has been a key point of contention as the group has pushed for formal international recognition and increased aid money to address the country’s spiraling economic crisis. When asked for greater engagement with the Taliban, the international community has repeatedly requested a demonstration of greater respect for women’s rights, among other things.
Republicans like to complain about “cancel culture,” but they are its biggest practitioners. If it were up to them, Democrats would be completely silenced, as would gay students and teachers who want to teach honestly about racism.
Beto O’Rourke is running against Republican Governor Gregg Abbott, and he’s discovering that many venues in red districts won’t allow him to speak because he is a Democrat.
The Texas Monthly describes what happened to Beto in Comal County, a deep red district.
When Democratic candidates for statewide office tour Texas, an atmosphere of doom and despair typically haunts their campaigns, like a pack of wolves shadowing a wounded elk. In 2014, I rode on state senator Leticia Van de Putte’s campaign bus as she embarked on a multiday expedition to South Texas toward the end of her race for lieutenant governor. The bus, which departed from San Antonio, ran for two hours before breaking down around Falfurrias. A few weeks later, she lost by nearly twenty points.
Beto O’Rourke’s first statewide campaign, when he challenged Ted Cruz for a U.S. Senate seat, by contrast, felt enchanted—the political equivalent of a Disney-animated romp with singing woodland creatures. For a year and a half, O’Rourke roamed the state, putting thousands of miles on a truck and a minivan that did not break down, visiting towns other statewide politicians of both parties wouldn’t waste time in. He played with dogs, livestreamed even the smallest events, and had (sometimes awkward) meetings with local elected officials in conservative parts of Texas, trying to find areas of agreement. He spoke often, and in a pretty idealistic manner, about his hope that Democrats he fired up in small red towns would be empowered to create lasting change in their communities.
It felt wrong, somehow. I chatted with O’Rourke about how smoothly things seemed to be going after a picture-perfect event at the hip tent-hotel El Cosmico in 2017, in the decidedly not red town of Marfa, on one of those summer nights in West Texas when the sun sets in a peach-colored sky a little after nine. When I asked him what he would do if protesters—anti-abortion, pro-gun, whatever—started actively disrupting his events, denying him space in the public square and threatening the premise of his campaign, he said he would engage them in dialogue. That struck me as naive, but to my surprise those protests never materialized in the 2018 election. He seemed, in all things, charmed. Of course, he still lost, but by an unexpectedly small margin, all the while boosting down-ballot candidates in suburban districts he helped to flip.
Since then, O’Rourke has had an eventful few years, as has the nation, and his second campaign for statewide office has been more difficult. Gun-rights protesters and open carriers have been showing up at his events since well before he launched his bid for governor, drawn by O’Rourke’s rash proclamation, during his brief 2020 presidential campaign, that he favored confiscation of semiautomatic weapons. And this past weekend, in a small community an hour north of San Antonio, the O’Rourke campaign, hoping to hold a town hall, tried and failed to secure the use of four different event venues and was effectively run out of town.
This debacle took place in Comal County, the southernmost of the two counties in the Interstate 35 corridor between San Antonio and Austin, which ranks as one of the most Republican areas of the state. But there’s still reason for Democrats to think they can do better here. In 2016, Trump won Comal by fifty points; in 2020, he won by a little more than forty. The county’s major population center, New Braunfels, is one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation.
When O’Rourke’s gubernatorial campaign set out to hold a town hall in Comal County, it aimed not for New Braunfels but for Canyon Lake, population around 30,000. That community, remote and deeply conservative, was the kind O’Rourke had made a special effort to visit in 2018. This time, however, news that O’Rourke would be coming set off agitation in Canyon Lake, especially on social media.
The campaign first announced that O’Rourke would speak at Maven’s Inn & Grill. Some locals threatened to boycott the restaurant if it hosted the event, according to the local news website My Canyon Lake. On Facebook, the restaurant’s patrons made clear their displeasure. “So I heard y’all are hosting Texas’s most famous drunk driver on Saturday,” one wrote, referencing O’Rourke’s 1998 arrest for driving while intoxicated. Maven’s soon canceled the event. Another woman, voicing what clearly was a minority view, objected. “Knuckling under to bullies,” she wrote. “This is how democracy dies and autocrats rise.”
The campaign then announced that it would hold the town hall at Canyon Lake High School. (It’s not uncommon for politicians to rent out school gyms and auditoriums to hold events.) Shortly thereafter, officials with the Comal Independent School District quickly reassured county residents that the event had not been “fully and properly vetted internally,” that the campaign had prematurely announced the town hall, and that the district did not, as a rule, allow rallies to take place on school grounds. Facebook commenters believed they now had Beto on the run. “DON’T BE SURPRISED TJAT BETO WON’T STEAL SOMETHING OUT OF COMAL CTY. OR BIRGLARIZE SOME BUSINESS,” wrote one man, with the tone that’s typical among users of the social network.
The campaign looked for a third venue. It believed it had found one in the Canyon Lake Resource and Recreation Center. But the center, too, backtracked. The head of the nonprofit group that runs it said his team was worried about “safety” at the event and that O’Rourke was polarizing. The campaign then briefly planned to hold an event at the nearby Whitewater Amphitheater, but that offer was rescinded too
Read on to see how closed-minded people did their best to shut down O’Rourke.
This is “national charter school week,” aka “national school privatization week.” The charter lobby—the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools—has been fighting furiously to block proposed regulations by the U.S. Department of Education that would ban federal funding of for-profit charter schools and white-flight charters. They have received sympathetic editorials, repeating the falsehoods that these sensible regulations would harm all charter schools (they won’t). Their ads are even on national television (I saw one last night on a cable news station), falsely claiming that the regulations are a direct attack on charter schools (they are not).
Who knew that the charter trade association would resort to outright lies to protect low-quality for-profit charter operators and keep federal funding available to open new white-flight charters? The regulations have zero effect on existing charters. They affect only the federal funding spent to open new charters, $440 million a year, which has been recklessly spent on for-profit chains and on charters that never opened or closed soon after opening. Why waste federal money on grifters and entrepreneurs?
By their lies, you shall know them.
The charter movement is heavily subsidized by billionaires and supported by public school haters like Charles Koch and Betsy DeVos. A few Democratic Senators sent a letter to Secretary Miguel Cardona opposing the regulations that would ban for-profit charters and white-flight charters, including Cory Booker, Michael Bennett, and Dianne Feinstein. Shame on them.
The origins of school choice are well-known: resistance to the Brown decision. Derek Black in his great book Schoolhouse Burning established beyond doubt that the Founding Fathers anticipated the establishment of public schools when they wrote the Northwest Ordinances, which required new states to set aside a plot of land in every town for a public school.
A reader who calls him/herself Democracy posted the following comment:
As I’ve noted more than once previously, the Founders were advocates of PUBLIC education as the means to promote the common good, and democratic citizenship. It – the idea that public schools should teach democratic citizenship – stretches back to Aristotle:
In Book 8 of Politics, Aristotle explained the importance of public education to democratic governance. He points out the different foundational ethos of governments:
“the legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy; and always the better the character, the better the government.”
It’s worth repeating: “…the better the character, the better the government.”
What occurred from January 20, 2017 until January 20, 2021 was a steep and marked absence of democratic character in the Oval Office and the halls of Congress.
In fact, the Founders created the constitutional structure for a democratic society “in which the common good was the chief end of government.” They adopted John Locke’s view that the main purpose of government –– the reason people CREATE government –– is to protect their persons through, as historian R. Freeman Butts put it, a social contract that placed “the public good above private desires.”
The goal, then, was “a commonwealth, a democratic corporate society in which the common good was the chief end of government.” Public education was part and parcel of social contract, helping to develop and maintain the common good.
It’s precisely because of the importance of public schooling to civic education and democratic citizenship that Aristotle concluded this:
“education should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not private- not as at present, when every one looks after his own children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort which he thinks best; the training in things which are of common interest should be the same for all. Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state, and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.”
That’s worth repeating too: “…the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.”
The democratic social contract – the guts of the American Republic – was under continued assault from January 20, 2017 until January 20, 2021, and was under DIRECT attack on January 6, 2021. Republican elected officials of all stripes, and Republican voters, were responsible. They refuse to take any personal responsibility; they try to evade and avoid accountability; and they redirected their efforts to undermine democratic values.
The current proxy is public schooling. At its core, the offensive against public education is an assault on democratic character and values, on the rule of law, and on equality and “liberty and justice for all.” And at its core, it relies on an ugly racism that casts whites as “the victims.”
The attack on public schools is NOT some spontaneous “parent rights” outburst. It’s orchestrated. It’s being funded and set into motion by right-wing “Christians” at the Council for National Policy, a far-right group that had tremendous influence with the Trump administration. Richard DeVos, husband of Betsy, has been president of CNP, twice. Ed Meese, who helped Reagan cover up the Iran-Contra scandal, has been president of CNP. So has Pat Robertson. And Tim LaHaye.
Current and former CNP members include Cleta Mitchell, the Trump lawyer who was on that call to the Georgia Secretary of State demanding that he find Trump more than 11,780 votes, and Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA who bragged about bussing tens of thousands of people to the January 6th ‘Stop the Steal’ rally and insurrection. Two of the top people at the Federalist Society, Eugene Meyer and Leonard Leo, are also CNP members. Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is a member.
You can read about Ginni Thomas here:
“The claim that the Justices’ opinions are politically neutral is becoming increasingly hard to accept, especially from Thomas, whose wife, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, is a vocal right-wing activist. She has declared that America is in existential danger because of the ‘deep state’ and the ‘fascist left’… on January 6, 2021 she cheered on the supporters of Donald Trump who had gathered to overturn Biden’s election…”
You can read about Betsy DeVos here:
Right-winger Milton Friedman argued for returning to a pre-Aristotle era of schooling, saying, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education.”
That’s what Republicans are dedicated to; destroying public schools, and stealing their funding.
My addendum: if they destroy our public schools, they will destroy public libraries, public lands, the right to vote and, in time, our democracy.
This is an important clip of the Kentucky Derby filmed by NBC Sports. Unlike the original clip, seen from the perspective of the audience, this clip is seen from above. It labels the winner, Rich Strike, and shows his dramatic acceleration as he passes the leading horses.
The dramatic win of the horse that was admitted into the race on the last day, whose odds were 80-1, is a real-life fairy tale, the stuff that dreams are made of.
Both Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh testified at their Senate hearings that they considered Roe v. Wade to be an established precedent.
Now, it appears that they will join with three other extremist justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, which has been in effect for half a century.
They both lied.
Is that perjury?
The Intercept published a stunning confession by a young man about his “grooming” by an elementary school teacher.
Jon Schwarz writes:
Anyone following the news knows the U.S. right is now obsessively accusing public school teachers, especially ones who are LGBTQ+, of being “groomers” — i.e., pedophiles. It’s both astonishingly vile and horrifyingly cynical.
This kind of propaganda — that some minority group is plotting to harm our children — has always been the specialty of history’s most vicious political movements. Today’s version is just one step away from the Taliban’s violent loathing of education, and two steps from declaring that teachers are using the blood of children to make their unleavened bread. Ignorant audiences have always been vulnerable to these fairy tales, which is why the abuse of children is a popular theme of literal fairy tales.
At the same time, the right-wing figures who spew out this sewage are absolutely indifferent to the actual sexual abuse of children. For instance, one of the most hateful proponents of the groomer narrative is Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at a conservative think tank called the Manhattan Institute. Rufo recently proclaimed on Twitter: “The public school system has a child sex abuse problem.”
That’s all you need to know about Rufo. He has no interest in the sexual abuse of children in private or charter schools. Nor did he mention churches. For that matter, he has nothing to say about the Republican Party: Its longest-serving speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, was a child molester, and the next GOP Speaker of the House may be Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has been accused by eight former studentsof helping cover up the sexual abuse of wrestlers at Ohio State University.
That’s because, for Rufo and his compatriots — such as the playwright David Mamet; Christina Pushaw, the press secretary for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; andDonald Trump Jr. — the victims of genuine sexual abuse don’t matter at all. They and the lifelong pain many experience are simply useful tools in the right’s centurylong attack on public education. Rufo and company understand that democracy is impossible without public education and so are willing to do anything to destroy it.
We know where this path leads, and we must step off it immediately. The people doing this are cruel and sadistic, but they’re also mewling cowards — and with pushback now, they will slink back into the holes from which they emerged.
At the same time, we should be telling the full truth about public school teachers. The one good thing I can say about this awful current phenomenon is that it’s made me remember all the beautiful teachers I’ve had, and how much better they made my life. Here’s my story of how my elementary school teacher.
Please read his memories of teachers who taught him to love learning.
He says:
From encouraging me to read and write, to nudging me to think for myself, their pernicious influence burdens me to this day.
Diane Ravitch's blog 