[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

Netanyahu Sparks Outrage Over Pact With Racist Party

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made something of an art form of cutting deals with small Israeli political parties, but his latest alliance has earned him denunciations from quarters where he has usually been able to count on unshakable support.

Mr. Netanyahu, his future imperiled by prosecutors and political challengers alike, has enraged Jewish leaders in Israel and the United States by striking a bargain with a racist anti-Arab party whose ideology was likened by one influential rabbi to Nazism. Even pro-Israel groups in the United States that prefer to air their disagreements quietly have issued public condemnations.

The furor has aggravated already fraught relations between Israel and Jews in the diaspora, undercutting American and European Jewry’s efforts to fight anti-Semitism at a time when it is on the rise on both continents.

Mark Harris said he's skipping the re-do election for North Carolina’s 9th congressional district.

He said it's for health reasons and not, you know, because he's a POS who committed election fraud.

OG_slinger wrote:

Mark Harris said he's skipping the re-do election for North Carolina’s 9th congressional district.

He said it's for health reasons and not, you know, because he's a POS who committed election fraud.

Corruption is stressful stuff.

He thinks the medical issue is the proverbial knife his son put in his back.

OG_slinger wrote:

Mark Harris said he's skipping the re-do election for North Carolina’s 9th congressional district.

He said it's for health reasons and not, you know, because he's a POS who committed election fraud.

Harris has endorsed Stony Rushing, a Union County commissioner, for his seat.

Rushing owns a gun store and range and, apparently, is also a Boss Hoggs cosplayer.

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D0WyfndXcAIhYkg.jpg:large)

He's got my vote! I love the touch of the cigar photobombing as a middle finger...

He managed to cram two surrogate penises in one photo, while also looking like a plantation owner! How could he not win in the rural stretch between Charlotte and Fayetteville...

NYT: After India’s Strike on Pakistan, Both Sides Leave Room for De-escalation

NEW DELHI — For the first time in five decades, Indian warplanes crossed into Pakistan and conducted airstrikes on Tuesday. But in the jarring escalation of hostilities, the leadership of each nuclear-armed country also appeared to leave itself a way out of pushing the conflict into war.

In India, where election-year nationalism is fueling waves of anger over the militant attack in Kashmir that killed dozens of soldiers this month, the story line was of righteous vengeance accomplished.

Yeah, there's a lot going on there.

Jacob Wohl, a conservative activist who infamously attempted to smear special counsel Robert Mueller with false sexual assault allegations before the 2018 midterm elections, was banned from Twitter on Tuesday for operating a ring of fake accounts.

Wohl operated @Women_4_Schultz, which posed as a supporter of former Starbucks CEO and presidential hopeful Howard Schultz. He also operated two other banned Twitter accounts, according to a source familiar with the accounts who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Wohl's "account was suspended for multiple violations of the Twitter rules, specifically creating and operating fake accounts," Twitter told NBC News in a statement.

Wohl became the center of controversy in October when he claimed an unaffiliated intelligence firm had proof that Mueller had sexually assaulted an unnamed woman. The phone number for the intelligence firm was registered to his mother. The intelligence firm’s document attempting to prove the allegations was riddled with inaccuracies, and Wohl never produced the accuser.

In a phone interview Tuesday evening, Wohl admitted to operating @Women_4_Schultz.

“This is par for the course. We were just talking about how this was probably going to happen,” he said.

Wohl initially said he did not create the @Woman_4_Schultz handle before backpedaling and claiming the account.

“Thank you for reminding me,” he said. “I tweeted at it to be goofy, but it’s not a fake account. I was tweeting about women’s issues that Schultz happens to be good on.”

He will, of course, now become a cause celebre among a certain crowd.

It's not fake. I was just being goofy. For the lulz.

Sorry, asshat, that excuse doesn't work outside your bubble of sh*teaters.

Now think about how many people are doing the exact same thing as him but aren't total f*cking morons.

iaintgotnopants wrote:

Now think about how many people are doing the exact same thing as him but aren't total f*cking morons.

IMAGE(http://community.dewereldmorgen.be/images/cache/xl/2015/10/26/putin-smile.jpg)

OG_slinger wrote:

Mark Harris said he's skipping the re-do election for North Carolina’s 9th congressional district.

He said it's for health reasons and not, you know, because he's a POS who committed election fraud.

Uhhh, I'm pretty sure election fraud gets you more votes if it's for the right party.

Mixolyde wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

Mark Harris said he's skipping the re-do election for North Carolina’s 9th congressional district.

He said it's for health reasons and not, you know, because he's a POS who committed election fraud.

Uhhh, I'm pretty sure election fraud gets you more votes if it's for the Right party.

Ugh im embarassed to be in the same state as these dudes, and am frankly concerned that the seat will just end up going to Penis Envy Boss Hogg instead. (something Stone I think is his actual name?)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/BHv1NOn.png)

Why White School Districts Have So Much More Money

NPR wrote:

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools are unconstitutional.

In 2018, on the 64th anniversary of that ruling, a lawsuit filed in New Jersey claimed that state's schools are some of the most segregated in the nation. That's because, the lawsuit alleged, New Jersey school district borders are drawn along municipality lines that reflect years of residential segregation.

The idea that school district borders carry years of history is the premise of a new report from the nonprofit EdBuild, which studies the ways schools are funded in the U.S.

The report starts with a number: $23 billion. According to EdBuild, that's how much more funding predominantly white school districts receive compared with districts that serve mostly students of color.

"For every student enrolled, the average nonwhite school district receives $2,226 less than a white school district," the report says.

EdBuild singles out 21 states — including California, New Jersey and New York — in which mostly white districts get more funding than districts composed primarily of students of color.

More than half of students in the U.S. go to segregated or "racially concentrated" schools, according to the report. Those are schools in which more than three-quarters of students are white, or more than three-quarters are nonwhite.

Researchers found that high-poverty districts serving mostly students of color receive about $1,600 less per student than the national average. That's while school districts that are predominately white and poor receive about $130 less.

The report has some interesting breakdowns and even lets you drill down to detailed data for your state.

Using local area funding for schools is the easiest and most direct way to maintain barriers to advancement for poor children, so it should be no surprise that that's the main way that the US does it.

Then threaten what funding they do get through negative feedback testing loops that squeeze schools already on a tight budget when their historically disadvantaged students score worse on standardized tests. Shut those schools down and convert them to for-profit ventures. Turn racism into cash!

Also greatwhiteschools.org isn't helping. It's actually making the problem worse.

Abstract

We analyze whether widespread online access to school quality information affected economic and social segregation in America. We leverage the staged roll-out of GreatSchools.org school ratings across America from 2006-2015 to answer this question. Across a range of outcomes and specifications, we find that the mass availability of school ratings has accelerated divergence in housing values, income distributions, education levels, as well as the racial and ethnic composition across communities. Affluent and more educated families were better positioned to leverage this new information to capture educational opportunities in communities with the best schools. An unintended consequence of better information was less, rather than more, equity in education.

OMG, Chairman Mao, why do you always have the most disturbing avatars?!

ClockworkHouse wrote:

OMG, Chairman Mao, why do you always have the most disturbing avatars?!

Yep, I recoiled in horror when I saw it just now. I'm going to need a stiff drink, I think. Shalalm Baskur!

Just tryin' to be the zeitgeist... But maybe I'm going a little too heavy on the geist.

Dear Chairman. Founding father of our great way of life. Do not listen to this rabble. Here. Have another mango.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Also greatwhiteschools.org isn't helping. It's actually making the problem worse.

Abstract

We analyze whether widespread online access to school quality information affected economic and social segregation in America. We leverage the staged roll-out of GreatSchools.org school ratings across America from 2006-2015 to answer this question. Across a range of outcomes and specifications, we find that the mass availability of school ratings has accelerated divergence in housing values, income distributions, education levels, as well as the racial and ethnic composition across communities. Affluent and more educated families were better positioned to leverage this new information to capture educational opportunities in communities with the best schools. An unintended consequence of better information was less, rather than more, equity in education.

I struggle with this. Our family moved cross country 3 years ago and we've been renting, but have been looking into buying the whole time.

It's hard to turn down schools that are 9s and 10s when the alternatives are 4s and 5s.

We have the financial means, and I can't figure out the incentive to me and my family to choose a poorer performing school. To make matters worse, it's different districts with very different services available.

The High School I went to was a 3 or 4 (it's currently showing 9, but everything is below state average except graduation rate), and I turned out fine. Granted, I took all advanced and AP courses and rarely interacted with people outside those classes (which were lily white in a ~40% Hispanic school).

This phenomenon is not isolated to just Murica. Over here we have parents deliberately moving to get within school catchments and get access to schools with children from upper demographics and performance. I'll confess I deliberately moved 6 years ago for this very reason.

The end result has been a clear geographic and demographic divide across the city as to school performance and socioeconomic advantage. Look up "latte line" in Sydney for a very obvious geographic/demographic divide between wealth and school performance. It gets even more extreme when one looks at the top performing private schools which are almost exclusively within top tier socioeconomic suburbs.

Ah, Arizona. Apache Junction, a distant suburb southeast of Phoenix, elected this state representative.

Arizona Republican claims vaccines are just like Communism in bizarre tirade

“The most holy and sacred last frontier of sovereignty is our own body,” the Republican wrote. “Dearest friends and people of Arizona, it seems we are prepared to give up our liberty, the very sovereignty of our body, because of measles.”
The Times also noted that Townsend has a history of making inaccurate statements on her social media accounts. In past posts, Townsend has posted that women who do not dress in a moral way don’t have a defense if they are raped.
Oddly enough, Townsend called vaccines a breach of liberty, but she believes the government should control women’s bodies and be able to breach liberty to make decisions about pregnancies.

She's a piece of work.

Virginia first lady under fire for handing cotton to African American students on mansion tour

WaPo wrote:

A Virginia state employee has complained that her eighth-grade daughter was upset during a tour of the historic governor’s residence when first lady Pam Northam handed raw cotton to her and another African American child and asked them to imagine being enslaved and having to pick the crop.

...

The tour took place Feb. 21, when the Northams hosted a traditional gathering of about 100 young people who had served as pages during the state Senate session, which was wrapping up that weekend.

Trained docents often lead tours of the Executive Mansion, which was built with slave labor in 1813 and is the oldest active governor’s residence in the country. In this case, Pam Northam — a former middle school teacher — took groups of pages to an adjacent cottage that had long ago served as a kitchen.

Before a huge fireplace with iron cooking implements, Pam Northam held up samples of cotton and tobacco to a group of about 20 children and described the enslaved workers who picked it.

“Mrs. Northam then asked these three pages (the only African American pages in the program) if they could imagine what it must have been like to pick cotton all day,” Walker wrote. “I can not for the life of me understand why the first lady would single out the African American pages for this — or — why she would ask them such an insensitive question.”

The governor’s office, which did not make Pam Northam available for an interview, said she simply handed the cotton to whoever was nearby and wanted everyone to note the sharpness of the stems and leaves on the raw cotton, to imagine how uncomfortable it would’ve been to handle all day.

...

The complaint about the tour is the first time the scandal’s stain [of her husband posing in blackface] has spread to Pam Northam, who insiders say has been a strong advocate behind the scenes for her husband to stay in office and work to clear his name.

“I regret that I have upset anyone,” Pam Northam said Wednesday in a statement emailed by the governor’s spokeswoman, Ofirah Yheskel.

wow... i was still leaning on possible misunderstanding until i got to the non-apology. We really need to be veting these people better than we do.

OG_slinger wrote:

“Mrs. Northam then asked these three pages (the only African American pages in the program) if they could imagine what it must have been like to pick cotton all day,” Walker wrote. “I can not for the life of me understand why the first lady would single out the African American pages for this — or — why she would ask them such an insensitive question.”

Before this detail I thought it might be a badly flubbed exercise in empathy--a common thing ethical plantation tours try to convey to their white visitors. But you don't ask your black students to do it: they've been thinking about it since before they arrived at the place where their ancestors were enslaved. A school teacher should know better. Turns out that the white excuse of "Oh I don't see color" does harm people. Who knew.

Also, if I was governor I'd consider advocating to change the official residence to someplace that wasn't literally a place of enslavement and oppression, but that's just me.