[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.

jdzappa wrote:

Of course, if the right can follow the Hungary playbook, then it will be easier to co-opt the military.

FWIW, this is almost explicitly the current gameplan.

As a vet, both active and reserve, I'm trying to envision a garrison unit in the continental U.S. going rogue and accessing weapons, tactical vehicles and equipment. If they're not deployed these items are tightly controlled.

It would be very difficult for junior personnel to accomplish as they don't have access to the keys and people needed to gear up. Even If the motor pool and arms room NCOs were on board, they'd still need to convince the GS guys at the fuel point and ammo depot. It's a lot of logistics. And rolling a convoy out the gates without prior approval is going to get noticed.

But a rogue LTC or COL could get pretty far before being questioned.

Jim Watkins was caught last night posting as himself while accidentally using the Q tripcode on 8kun. Tripcodes on the chan sites are basically passwords that create a unique ID number that appears on your posts so people can differentiate your posts from everyone else’s anonymized posts. After he realized what he had done he edited the 8kun database to change the ID but people had already gotten screenshots. This is the first hard evidence that the Watkins’ are in control of the Q account.

Will it move the needle for even 1% of those lost in the Qverse?

I have noticed a pretty interesting parallel between Browns' Deshaun Watson fans and Trump fans. In both cases, it is characterized by ride or die, brainless devotion despite the fact that neither has done sh*t for them.

Badferret wrote:

Will it move the needle for even 1% of those lost in the Qverse?

A lot of them were already dubious of the new Q posts because many of the big influencers were pushing the idea that they were fake. The influencers have been able to write their own narrative for the last two years and they don’t want Q to return to undermine things.
It’s probably not going to drastically change things among the cult, but it could be enough to pin legal liability on the Watkins’ for a broad range of crimes linked to Q.

JLS wrote:

As a vet, both active and reserve, I'm trying to envision a garrison unit in the continental U.S. going rogue and accessing weapons, tactical vehicles and equipment. If they're not deployed these items are tightly controlled.

Supporting a coup wouldn't require "going rogue" if they were simply obeying the orders of their commander in chief. Or do you think there won't be another Republican president?

If by some miracle American Democracy survives this, the next GOP president will be Liz Cheney.
I guess I should put that in the political predictions thread.

CaptainCrowbar wrote:
JLS wrote:

As a vet, both active and reserve, I'm trying to envision a garrison unit in the continental U.S. going rogue and accessing weapons, tactical vehicles and equipment. If they're not deployed these items are tightly controlled.

Supporting a coup wouldn't require "going rogue" if they were simply obeying the orders of their commander in chief. Or do you think there won't be another Republican president?

Going rogue would be attempting to break from the orders of their higher echelon commander, wherever that line is drawn. In your scenario it could be a GEN Milley-type refusing to follow the CinC's orders.

If a division or base has orders to remain in garrison it's going to be difficult for more junior troops to breach the controls in place. I've worked as a staff officer at brigade command level and it's difficult to envision how they would succeed. But then, I've never conspired to overthrow the government, so maybe I'm just not creative enough.

That said, a Michael Flynn-type commanding a division could attempt to give the order to deploy in support of an illegal order against US citizens. I'd like to think that his plans would leak, or that his staff would rise up, to relieve him of command before he could do real damage.

SCOTUS expands state power over Native American tribes. Just in case one forgot that was a square on the GOP's anti-civil rights bingo.

JLS wrote:
CaptainCrowbar wrote:
JLS wrote:

As a vet, both active and reserve, I'm trying to envision a garrison unit in the continental U.S. going rogue and accessing weapons, tactical vehicles and equipment. If they're not deployed these items are tightly controlled.

Supporting a coup wouldn't require "going rogue" if they were simply obeying the orders of their commander in chief. Or do you think there won't be another Republican president?

Going rogue would be attempting to break from the orders of their higher echelon commander, wherever that line is drawn. In your scenario it could be a GEN Milley-type refusing to follow the CinC's orders.

If a division or base has orders to remain in garrison it's going to be difficult for more junior troops to breach the controls in place. I've worked as a staff officer at brigade command level and it's difficult to envision how they would succeed. But then, I've never conspired to overthrow the government, so maybe I'm just not creative enough.

That said, a Michael Flynn-type commanding a division could attempt to give the order to deploy in support of an illegal order against US citizens. I'd like to think that his plans would leak, or that his staff would rise up, to relieve him of command before he could do real damage.

I defer to JLS since the farthest I made it was assistant S2 and acting platoon sergeant. When I was talking about desertions, I was also assuming units get deployed and are spread out. But yes, it would be hard to stage a Red October style revolt.

But I also see the point of an Orban style takeover where a Republican president and congress pass a bunch of new legislation limiting free speech and assembly and the Supreme Court upholds it. Military command would probably just go along with it, given how cowed they've been throughout the Afghanistan and Iraq eras.

Teachers alarmed by state’s infusing religion, downplaying race in civics training

Miami Herald wrote:

Several South Florida high school educators are alarmed that a new state civics initiative designed to prepare students to be “virtuous citizens” is infused with a Christian and conservative ideology after a three-day training session in Broward County last week.

Teachers who spoke to the Herald/Times said they don’t object to the state’s new standards for civics, but they do take issue with how the state wants them to be taught.

“It was very skewed,” said Barbara Segal, a 12th-grade government teacher at Fort Lauderdale High School. “There was a very strong Christian fundamentalist way toward analyzing different quotes and different documents. That was concerning.”

The civics training, which is part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative, underscores the tension that has been building around education and how classrooms have become battlegrounds for politically contentious issues. In Florida, DeSantis and the Republican-led Legislature have pushed policies that limit what schools can teach about race, gender identity and certain aspects of history.

Those dynamics came into full view last week, when trainers told Broward teachers the nation’s founders did not desire a strict separation of state and church, downplayed the role the colonies and later the United States had in the history of slavery in America, and pushed a judicial theory, favored by legal conservatives like DeSantis, that requires people to interpret the Constitution as the framers intended it, not as a living, evolving document, according to three educators who attended the training.

“It is disturbing, really, that through these workshops and through legislation, there is this attempt to both censor and to drive or propagandize particular points of view,” said Richard Judd, 50, a Nova High School social studies teacher with 22 years of experience who attended the state-led training session last week.

A review of more than 200 pages of the state’s presentations shows the founding fathers’ intent and the “misconceptions” about their thinking were a main theme of the training. One slide underscored that the “Founders expected religion to be promoted because they believed it to be essential to civic virtue.” Without virtue, another slide noted, citizens become “licentious” and become subject to tyranny.

Another slide highlights three U.S. Supreme Court cases to show when the “Founders’ original intent began to change.” That included the 1962 landmark case that found school-sponsored prayer violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which Judd said trainers viewed as unjust. At one point, the trainers equated it to the 1892 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine.

“Ending school prayer was compared to upholding segregation,” Judd said. In other words, he said, trainers called both those rulings unjust.

DeSantis’ administration has spent nearly $6 million to train public school teachers across the state on how to teach civics as part of the governor’s initiative. The first training sessions were June 20-22, at Broward College in Davie. Teachers in Hillsborough County are training this week.

The civics training is the latest effort in a long line of education policies that aim to fight what DeSantis and conservative education reformers say are “woke ideologies” in public schools.

It also provides a snapshot of how national groups, including Hillsdale College, a politically influential private Christian college in southern Michigan, are working with the DeSantis administration to reshape education in the state. The goal is to put a greater emphasis on civics than on socially divisive issues such as race and gender identity, which DeSantis has said is an effort to reorient teaching away from “indoctrination and back towards education.” But to several educators who went through the state’s training it felt like a broader effort to impose a conservative view on historical events.

“We are constantly under attack, and there is this false narrative that we’re indoctrinating children, but that is nothing compared to what the state just threw in new civic educators’ faces. That’s straight-up indoctrination,” said Segal, a 46-year-old teacher with 19 years of experience.

The Florida Department of Education is leading the workshops, which were developed with the help of Hillsdale College and other groups. The Bill of Rights Institute, founded by Charles Koch in 1999, is one of those groups. The state aims to train about 2,500 teachers in 10 sessions across the state.

The three-day sessions are voluntary, but teachers get a $700 stipend as an incentive to attend. Under the governor’s civics initiative, teachers this fall will also be eligible for a $3,000 bonus if they complete a 60-hour online course on the new civics standards and earn a “Civics Seal of Excellence Endorsement.”

The Herald/Times reached out to John Duebel, the state’s director of social studies and the arts for the bureau of standards and instructional support, but he declined to be interviewed and referred questions to the Florida Department of Education’s communications office. A request for comment from the governor was also referred to the Department of Education.

“Every lesson we teach is based on history, not ideology or any form of indoctrination. Let us know if you are actually interested in reviewing the coursework and understanding it for yourself,” the Florida Department of Education said in a statement on Friday when asked about the session and educators’ concerns. On Tuesday afternoon, the department provided the slide presentations, which were reviewed by the Herald/Times. The documents provided did not include the trainers’ comments for each slide.

DeSantis and Republican lawmakers increasingly talk about how they believe the “woke left” is posing a threat to the public education system in Florida.

DeSantis describes a battle for the next generation in education. His former education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, last spring told the Hillsdale National Leadership Seminar that education is “100 percent ideological,” which is why picking leaders is so crucial. He added that leaders need to be strategic and quick when implementing policies to make sure they have impact.

“Education is our sword. That’s our weapon. Our weapon is education,” Corcoran said. “And we can do it. We can get it right.” The DeSantis administration has implemented its education agenda through a renewed emphasis on civics, and he has approved measures that limit what schools can teach about racism and other aspects of history, and his Department of Education has rejected math textbooks for containing what the state called “indoctrinating concepts.”

It's a long article, but worth the read.

Doubly so because Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law kicks in later this week and there's already reports that teachers are being informed they need to scrap rainbow stickers off their doors and hide photos of their same sex spouse.

f*ck desantis

Stele wrote:

f*ck desantis

There are millions of Floridians who agree, and who are sticking it out instead of moving elsewhere and leaving the needy and vulnerable to their fate in this place.

fangblackbone wrote:

If by some miracle American Democracy survives this, the next GOP president will be Liz Cheney.
I guess I should put that in the political predictions thread.

Is your point that the GOP will have to have done a 100% about-face in order to have survived this, because suggesting that they'll vote for A LADY as president is one of the funniest things I've read this month.

Liz Cheney also wants a Christian theocracy. She just wants to do it by vote and not by coup.

Meet Virginia, the county next to mine.

Some of the policies targeted in the America First Legal lawsuit, which the group noted was "on behalf of eleven courageous parents," include Policy 8040 and Regulation 8040, which, the group said, "compels student speech, forces young children to use bathrooms and locker rooms with members of the opposite sex, and keeps parents in the dark when their children lead a double life as a different gender during school hours."

If they want their kids to trust them, they could try not being a bigoted asshole

fangblackbone wrote:

If by some miracle American Democracy survives this, the next GOP president will be Liz Cheney.
I guess I should put that in the political predictions thread.

The fact that my estimate of Liz Cheney ever being president is less than 0% bodes poorly for the first half of your if-then statement.

Democrats hate the name Cheney but republicans loathe her.

Supreme Court limits Biden's power to cut emissions

Aaaaaand, there's that phrase again: "In a 6-3 ruling, the court sided with the conservative states and fossil-fuel companies."

Of course they did.

So, about that coup...

And this is makes Joe Manchin happy as a Senator from WV. So yeah, he ain't carving out any sort of special filibuster exception.

Tasty Pudding wrote:

Supreme Court limits Biden's power to cut emissions

Aaaaaand, there's that phrase again: "In a 6-3 ruling, the court sided with the conservative states and fossil-fuel companies."

Of course they did.

Is it weird that I’m strangely zen about this ruling? We now know that short of some moonshot tech we’re screwed as a species. I was worried about my grandchildren living in a dictatorship but they won’t ever be born so no need to worry. Not looking forward to dying of hunger or burning alive but hey all the a-holes who cut me off in their trucks emblazoned with Trump stickers will also die horrible deaths.

You guys want to read about some bullsh*t?

The Wisconsin Supreme Court endorsed a blatant power grab by the Republican-controlled state Senate on Wednesday, using a case focused on technical bureaucratic matters to endorse a scheme to seize control of state boards and commissions by declining to confirm appointments from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.
In a 4-3 decision, the court’s conservative justices ruled that Fred Prehn, a GOP member of the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board, could remain in his position despite the fact that his term ended more than a year ago, simply because the state Senate has not yet confirmed the replacement appointed by Evers.

Prehn refused to leave the role at the scheduled end of his term in May 2021, arguing that it is not technically vacant until his replacement is confirmed. The Republican-controlled legislature, meanwhile, is not confirming many of Evers’ appointments, creating an inescapable Catch-22 that effectively robs the Democratic governor of his appointment power.

Sounds like a play from the Mitch book. f*ck em all

Fuuuuuuuck

As if I wasn’t angry enough already

The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear a dispute over redistricting in North Carolina, a case that could have major implications for voting rights across the country and fundamentally change the landscape of election law.

At the center of the wide-ranging case is the fate of a legal doctrine that allows state courts to check the behavior state legislatures. A decision to undermine the courts could empower state lawmakers in disputes over redistricting maps and potentially offer them more freedom to intervene in federal elections.

gewy wrote:

You guys want to read about some bullsh*t?

The Wisconsin Supreme Court endorsed a blatant power grab by the Republican-controlled state Senate on Wednesday, using a case focused on technical bureaucratic matters to endorse a scheme to seize control of state boards and commissions by declining to confirm appointments from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.
In a 4-3 decision, the court’s conservative justices ruled that Fred Prehn, a GOP member of the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board, could remain in his position despite the fact that his term ended more than a year ago, simply because the state Senate has not yet confirmed the replacement appointed by Evers.

Prehn refused to leave the role at the scheduled end of his term in May 2021, arguing that it is not technically vacant until his replacement is confirmed. The Republican-controlled legislature, meanwhile, is not confirming many of Evers’ appointments, creating an inescapable Catch-22 that effectively robs the Democratic governor of his appointment power.

Evers should have Prehn arrested and then declare the position vacant.

State education board members push back on proposal to use “involuntary relocation” to describe slavery

Texas Tribune wrote:

A group of Texas educators have proposed to the Texas State Board of Education that slavery should be taught as “involuntary relocation” during second grade social studies instruction, but board members have asked them to reconsider the phrasing, according to the state board’s chair.

“The board -- with unanimous consent -- directed the work group to revisit that specific language,” Keven Ellis, chair of the Texas State Board of Education said in a statement issued late Thursday.

The working group of nine educators, including a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, is one of many such groups advising the state education board to make curriculum changes. This summer, the board will consider updates to social studies instruction a year after lawmakers passed a law to keep topics that make students “feel discomfort” out of Texas classrooms. The board will have a final vote on the curriculum in November.

The suggested change surfaced late during its June 15 meeting that lasted more than 12 hours. Board member Aicha Davis, a Democrat who represents Dallas and Fort Worth, brought up concerns to the board saying that wording is not a “fair representation” of the slave trade. The board, upon reading the language in the suggested curriculum, sent the working draft back for revision.

“For K-2, carefully examine the language used to describe events, specifically the term ‘involuntary relocation,’” the state board wrote in its guidance to the work group.

“I can’t say what their intention was, but that’s not going to be acceptable,” Davis told The Texas Tribune on Thursday.

The group proposing these second grade curriculum revisions was given a copy of Senate Bill 3, Texas’ law that dictates how slavery and issues of race are taught in Texas. The law states that slavery can’t be taught as part of the true founding of the United States and that slavery was nothing more than a deviation from American values.

“They were given Senate Bill 3, so that had to have influenced their mind with that being a document given to them right before they had to perform this review,” Davis said.

Ellis’ statement pointed out that slavery is currently not included in social studies instruction to second graders.

“The topic of slavery is not currently addressed in the 2nd Grade curriculum; this work is meant to address that deficiency,” he said.

Stephanie Alvarez, a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and a member of the group, said she was did not attend the meetings when the language was crafted because of personal issues, but that the language was “extremely disturbing.” She would not comment any further because of her role in the work group, she said.

Part of the proposed social studies curriculum standards outlines that students should “compare journeys to America, including voluntary Irish immigration and involuntary relocation of African people during colonial times.”

Annette Gordon-Reed, a history professor at Harvard University, said using “involuntary relocation” to describe slavery threatens to blur out what actually occurred during that time in history. There is no reason to use the proposed language, she said.

“Young kids can grasp the concept of slavery and being kidnapped into it,” Gordon-Reed said. “The African slave trade is unlike anything that had or has happened, the numbers and distance.”

If language like what the group of Texas educators propose is accepted and taught to children, it means the country is moving in the wrong direction, she said.

“Tell children the truth. They can handle it,” she said.

Texas is in the process of developing a new curriculum for social studies, a process that happens about every decade to update what children should be learning in Texas’ 8,866 public schools.

This process comes as the state’s public education system has become heavily politicized, from lawmakers passing legislation on how race and slavery should be taught in schools to conservative political action committees pouring large amounts of money to put more conservatives on school boards who promise to get rid of curriculum and programs they consider divisive and make white children feel bad.

Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have made parental rights a priority as they both seek reelection in November. Patrick has also vowed to push for a “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Texas, mirroring Florida’s conservative push to limit classroom discussions about LGBTQ people.

Last year’s SB 3 doesn’t mention critical race theory by name, but the bill was designed to keep the teaching out of secondary schools — even though it is not taught in K-12 Texas public schools. Critical race theory is a university-level field of study based on the idea that racism is embedded in legal systems and not limited to individuals. It has become a common phrase used by conservatives to include anything about race taught or discussed in public secondary schools.

Texas Tribune wrote:

Last year’s SB 3 doesn’t mention critical race theory by name, but the bill was designed to keep the teaching out of secondary schools — even though it is not taught in K-12 Texas public schools. Critical race theory is a university-level field of study based on the idea that racism is embedded in legal systems and not limited to individuals. It has become a common phrase used by conservatives to include anything about race taught or discussed in public secondary schools.

Nice to see a paper call this out.

As Ohio restricts abortions, 10-year-old girl travels to Indiana for procedure

Columbus Dispatch wrote:

On Monday three days after the Supreme Court issued its groundbreaking decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, took a call from a colleague, a child abuse doctor in Ohio.

Hours after the Supreme Court action, the Buckeye state had outlawed any abortion after six weeks. Now this doctor had a 10-year-old patient in the office who was six weeks and three days pregnant.

Could Bernard help?

Indiana lawmakers are poised to further restrict or ban abortion in mere weeks. The Indiana General Assembly will convene in a special session July 25 when it will discuss restrictio ns to abortion policy along with inflation relief.

Christian Nationalist must feel so damn good about themselves knowing they're further traumatizing a ten-year-old who's already gone through some unspeakable sh*t.

And I'm reading crap about what legislation other states are rushing to implement, like hitting people with 25 year sentences for merely helping a woman look up abortion information online or helping them in any manner whatsoever.