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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.

I think it can be both.

mudbunny wrote:
Bfgp wrote:

If you keep using a fossilised document it clearly won't be fit for purpose and creates inefficiency in governance. Is this not obvious? I guess vested interests use this to their advantage in the US.

It is obvious to almost everyone. There are, however, many USAnians who feel the height of political document writing was done back in the day, and it could never be improved, and that you should totally apply things written over 200 years ago to things that were only invented in the past decade.

I’ll drag out this piece of “art” again. It’d be pretty arrogant of us mere mortals to improve on a holy document that came to the founding fathers straight from Jesus himself.

IMAGE(https://cdn10.bigcommerce.com/s-dcvfa4/products/1618/images/2314/JM101_One-Nation-Under-God---__73120.1460472535.1280.1280.jpg?c=2)

That's really Christian nationalism in a perfect nutshell there.

Neatly ignoring that bunch of the founders were, like, Deists at best.

A bunch of literal children of the Age of Enlightenment, but no, no, they were also religious fundamentalists, somehow.

Prederick wrote:
Veloxi wrote:

That's totally the game. Republicans love the poorly educated.

I don't think it's that.

For me, personally, a lot of this stuff makes the most sense if viewed as projection.

So, if you're them, and you believe that public schools from kindergarten all the way through college are indoctrination centers for liberal ideology, the way to fight it would be to do the exact same thing, but for conservatism. Just call it "parental choice."

The people who want to get their grubby little hands on the $8.5 billion the state spends on education (plus the $1.5 billion the feds kick in) tell the rubes it's about freeing their kids from liberal indoctrination and respecting their parental rights (to not educate their kids about things they don't like or believe in).

It's always about the grift of public dollars.

Turn every piece of government into the military industrialist profit center eh?

.... And since the facilities to teach and feed children are expensive let's auction off the existing properties for a one-time influx of dollars against decades of tax payer funded investments.

Remember that hilarious story (can't remember) of the community that tried micro schools and then complained that no one would do the admin part of the micro schools? Or that the teachers asked for too much pay?

It that amount of money even close to what a private school will want in a year?

This is a thing that, when it starts failing people, seems they could actually blame those who passed the changes BUT I'm sure they'll blame someone else.

Prederick wrote:
Veloxi wrote:

That's totally the game. Republicans love the poorly educated.

I don't think it's that.

For me, personally, a lot of this stuff makes the most sense if viewed as projection.

So, if you're them, and you believe that public schools from kindergarten all the way through college are indoctrination centers for liberal ideology, the way to fight it would be to do the exact same thing, but for conservatism. Just call it "parental choice."

The lens that makes the most sense to me is:
Conservatives don't want people to tell them what to do.
Conservatives want to tell people what to do.

It's a clean through-line from that blowing up public schooling. You say everybody needs to go to school? f*ck that, you can't tell me what to do. You want to select a curriculum? f*ck that, you can't tell me what to do.

Note that it has nothing to do with _what_ they are being told, it's the fact that they _are_ being told. Masking is a great example - the pushback was less related to the content of the message, more to the direction of the messaging.

Yes. I've been saying for years that they are children.
The GOP platform:
"You can't tell me what to do."
"I know you are but what am I."
"Nuh uh."
"I'm taking the ball and going home."
"Ew, she's a giirrrruuull."
"Nanananana. I can't hear you."
"I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you."

Prederick wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:

That is already happening. I guess it would be a bottom up thing that started with the local school boards.

School's out forever: Arizona moves "to kill public education" with new universal voucher law

Salon article, FWIW.

Last Friday, while the country reeled from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, Arizona made history of a different sort. Legislators in the Grand Canyon State passed a universal school voucher bill that, once signed by Gov. Doug Ducey, will become the most wide-reaching school privatization plan in the country.

In his January State of the State address, Ducey called on Arizona lawmakers to send him bills that would "expand school choice any way we can," and the Republican-dominated legislature obliged, delivering last Friday's bill, which will open a preexisting program for Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) up to the entire state. In practice, the law will now give parents who opt out of public schools a debit card for roughly $7,000 per child that can be used to pay for private school tuition, but also for much more: for religious schools, homeschool expenses, tutoring, online classes, education supplies and fees associated with "microschools," in which small groups of parents pool resources to hire teachers.

Ducey said the law had "set the gold standard in educational freedom" in the country, and right-wing politicians and education activists quickly agreed. Corey DeAngelis, the research director of Betsy DeVos' school privatization lobby group American Federation for Children, declared on Twitter that Arizona "just took first place" when it comes to school choice. Anti-critical race theory activist Christopher Rufo — the Manhattan Institute fellow who this spring called for fostering "universal public school distrust" in order to build support for "universal school choice" — tweeted, "Every red state in the country should follow [Ducey's] lead," since the law "gives every family a right to exit any public school that fails to educate their children or reflect their values."

From the American Enterprise Institute, education researcher Max Eden happily concluded that "Arizona now funds students, not systems," deploying a formulation that has become common among conservative education activists, as when last week the Moms for Liberty network chastised Arizona public school advocates who opposed the bill as "system advocates" rather than "education advocates." From Rhode Island, anti-CRT activist Nicole Solas, a fellow with the right-wing Independent Women's Forum, tweeted, "You know what happens when you abuse people? People leave you. Bye, public school."

And back in Arizona, the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian think tank founded in honor of former senator and right-wing icon Barry Goldwater, celebrated the law it had done much to create as a "major victory for families wary of a one-size-fits-all approach to education," plus a cost-saving measure to boot, since the total funding parents would receive through ESA vouchers is $4,000 less than Arizona's already paltry per-pupil funding for public schools.

By contrast, Democratic politicians and public education advocates described the law as the potential "nail in the coffin" for public schools in Arizona, as Beth Lewis, director of Save Our Schools Arizona (SOS Arizona) put it.

"The Republican universal voucher system is designed to kill public education," tweeted former Arizona House Rep. Diego Rodriguez. "OUR nation's greatness is built on free Public schools. The GOP goal is to recreate segregation, expand the opportunity gap, and destroy the foundation of our democracy."

"I think it's a very serious mistake and the result will be that, within a decade, Arizona will have a very, very poorly educated adult population," added Carol Corbett Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education. "Maybe that's the game."

Rezzy wrote:

.... And since the facilities to teach and feed children are expensive let's auction off the existing properties for a one-time influx of dollars against decades of tax payer funded investments.

You can already look at Rockland county in New York for a blueprint.

karmajay wrote:

Remember that hilarious story (can't remember) of the community that tried micro schools and then complained that no one would do the admin part of the micro schools? Or that the teachers asked for too much pay?

It that amount of money even close to what a private school will want in a year?

This is a thing that, when it starts failing people, seems they could actually blame those who passed the changes BUT I'm sure they'll blame someone else.

Arizonan here, and direct service provider for special needs children. One of my clients' mothers went the voucher route with her girls during COVID lockdowns, because she (quite rightly, as far as this part goes) decided that her school district didn't know what the hell it was doing with remote learning and that remote learning wasn't likely to work well given her girls' special needs even under ideal circumstances.

She tried to go the "do it yourself" route and come up with a home school plan and use the vouchers to hire tutors to supplement whatever she didn't have the time or lacked the expertise to do herself. Because of her girls' special needs, she had a lot more to work with than the bare-minimum $7k they're talking about for the general population, and she was mostly approaching friends and family who quoted her friends-and-family rates, not what a professional tutor would quote.

She got a hard lesson in the economics of rolling your own education for a child. She finally wound up going the private school route with her daughter on the autism spectrum, which seemed to be working out the last I heard. Arizona, whatever its other faults, has some good resources for kids with autism, so the budget was there for that daughter.

Her other two school-aged daughters, as far as I can tell, just... didn't get an education during those lockdown years.

I don't doubt that there will be a cottage industry of ersatz "educators" trying to figure out the best way of extracting the maximum number of voucher bucks from parents while just barely meeting whatever minimum requirements are in place to get them. I have rather more doubts about how much actual education will happen.

Public schools suck in a lot of ways, but a lot of parents who think they can invent a better wheel from scratch are in for a rude awakening.

IMAGE(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/eb/e5/89/ebe589eb95d2113789c4fd3becbb0f19.jpg)

This one seems more accurate.

fangblackbone wrote:

Yes. I've been saying for years that they are children.
The GOP platform:
"You can't tell me what to do."
"I know you are but what am I."
"Nuh uh."
"I'm taking the ball and going home."
"Ew, she's a giirrrruuull."
"Nanananana. I can't hear you."
"I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you."

Indeed. Through that lens Trump is the perfect figurehead for them

Shot.

Chaser:

Georgia’s Conspiracy-Magnet Guidestones Monument Has Been Bombed

The Georgia Guidestones, a granite monument that has been at the center of right-wing conspiracies for decades, was partially destroyed in a bombing Wednesday morning.

The monument is made up of five massive concrete slabs with a capstone and is located in the city of Elberton, Georgia. It’s covered in messages written in eight languages that reflect a belief in population control, internationalism, respect for nature, and the rule of reason over faith. “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature,” is one message on the Guidestones.

The bombing was first reported by local news which quoted authorities and did a fly-over of the site, confirming it had been partially destroyed. When Motherboard called the Elbert County, Georgia Sheriff’s Department, a woman who answered the phone said she had been in the office since 8 a.m. and that no one at the department had come to the office because they were all busy presumably working at the scene of the explosion. She said that any emails to officers would likely not be returned because they were busy at the explosion site.

“Nobody has been here all day,” she said. “They probably will not check email because they’re all out there working on the scene.”

Motherboard reached several people at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, but none were able to give a comment. A voicemail inbox for the bureau’s public information department was full. On Facebook, the GBI said that it and local police are investigating the scene.

The Afghan refugee crisis collides with the American housing disaster

Afghanistan was no longer safe after their 14-year-old son, Abdul-Azim, was kidnapped on his way home from school. For years, the Taliban abducted children for ransom or used them as leverage in negotiating with the Afghan police. As much as it pained them to abandon their son, Fazela and Hakeem Abdil had other children — two teenage daughters — to think about. They were faced with a difficult choice: stay in an increasingly dangerous Afghanistan or leave their home forever.

Up until then, things had been peaceful for the Abdils. “We had a well-arranged life. We had work, a house. Life was pretty comfortable,” Hakeem says. But conditions in Kabul had grown worse when many assumed they’d get better. In February 2020, the Trump administration negotiated a deal with the Taliban, promising to withdraw all troops within 14 months so long as it abstained from attacking US soldiers. The violence did not end and, in fact, became more pronounced.

So the Abdils made the painful decision to flee, knowing that they would be leaving Abdul-Azim behind.

If the decision to leave is complicated, it is followed by the equally convoluted, bureaucratic process of emigrating. Hurriedly, the Abdils fled to Tajikistan where they awaited visas into Ukraine. Then they began a process to enter the US. After working alongside the Americans for nearly a decade in logistics and transport, Fazela qualified for a Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV, granting her and her family permanent safety in the States. The SIV can be read two ways: as a reward for aiding American forces or an acknowledgment that helping the US can put an Afghan’s life in peril.

That process left them in nearly two years of limbo. But, last December, the Abdils finally arrived in California. From the airport, they were transported to a mosque near Union City, where they slept on floor mats for one night, shielded by a single curtain. Without any money to spend on Ubers or bus passes, the family walked an hour and 40 minutes to a local nonprofit, the Afghan Coalition, to begin the process of resettlement.

When I meet them, it is the first week of February 2022. The early afternoon sun is beginning to clear Northern California’s winter haze as Hakeem Abdil carries a laundry basket full of cleaning supplies to the door of his family’s first apartment in the United States. This arrival is long overdue, but the family has little time to ease into this new life. Shooing my hand away from the doorknob, the staunch middle-aged man welcomes me into their modest two-bedroom apartment in Fremont, just under an hour’s drive northeast of Oakland.

The kitchen is tiny; the living area is mostly empty save for a rug and a handful of bed pillows lined up against the wall for sitting. There’s a laptop on the floor of the first bedroom. Beside it are English-language learning workbooks and a binder of resettlement paperwork. In the second room, there is one queen-size bed, the largest piece of furniture in the home and the only place for any of the four people living in the home to sleep.

It’s not extravagant, but after two years without a permanent home, it’s a place of their own, at least for now.

“We are happy here,” Fazela says. She generously hands me a plate of mandarin oranges, and we sit on the living room floor as we talk. “Happy, but we would like to receive some support.”

The Abdils’ fraught living situation might seem surprising when you consider that, even still, they are some of the luckiest recent Afghan refugees. They’d left before the US announced it would pull out, giving them a head start of nearly a year on the wave of new refugees, many on SIVs, that would attempt to resettle in California. But, if finding semipermanent housing was so difficult for the Abdils, what can even newer Afghan families expect to find when they land in the States? And can an already strained housing crisis absorb 100,000 new people?

Mother f*ckers

A right-wing evangelical activist was caught on tape bragging that she prayed with Supreme Court justices. The court’s majority cited a legal brief that her group filed while overturning Roe v. Wade

Feature, not a bug.

Stele wrote:

Mother f*ckers

A right-wing evangelical activist was caught on tape bragging that she prayed with Supreme Court justices. The court’s majority cited a legal brief that her group filed while overturning Roe v. Wade

While entirely possible, I’m calling bullsh*t attention grabbing narcissism until someone corroborates the story.

JC wrote:
Stele wrote:

Mother f*ckers

A right-wing evangelical activist was caught on tape bragging that she prayed with Supreme Court justices. The court’s majority cited a legal brief that her group filed while overturning Roe v. Wade

While entirely possible, I’m calling bullsh*t attention grabbing narcissism until someone corroborates the story.

Yeah. Five of the conservative justices are Catholic, which the rabid evangelical crowd barely considers Christian. And, in general, Catholics aren't really into the "let's openly pray in public or at work" thing like evangelicals are.

I have no doubt that those conservative Catholic justices were familiar with and sympathetic to Liberty Counsel, but that's not everyone getting together in chambers and praying.

JC wrote:
Stele wrote:

Mother f*ckers

A right-wing evangelical activist was caught on tape bragging that she prayed with Supreme Court justices. The court’s majority cited a legal brief that her group filed while overturning Roe v. Wade

While entirely possible, I’m calling bullsh*t attention grabbing narcissism until someone corroborates the story.

The former leader of the group did in the article. He used to do it all the time with 2 of the hacks still there and Scalia

Stele wrote:
JC wrote:
Stele wrote:

Mother f*ckers

A right-wing evangelical activist was caught on tape bragging that she prayed with Supreme Court justices. The court’s majority cited a legal brief that her group filed while overturning Roe v. Wade

While entirely possible, I’m calling bullsh*t attention grabbing narcissism until someone corroborates the story.

The former leader of the group did in the article. He used to do it all the time with 2 of the hacks still there and Scalia

That was 12 years ago. I’m talking about this person caught on the hot mic.

Trump left Sarasota media company weeks before federal subpoenas were issued

Sarasota Herald-Tribune wrote:

Donald Trump removed himself from the board of his Sarasota-based social media company, records show, just weeks before the company was issued federal subpoenas by both the Securities and Exchange Commission and a grand jury in Manhattan.

Trump, the chairman of Trump Media and Technology Group, was one of six board members removed on June 8, state business records show.

Among the board members removed were Kashyap Patel, Trump's former point man in the White House; Scott Glabe, a former assistant to Trump who was counsel for the media company; and Donald Trump, Jr.

The SEC served Trump Media and Technology Group with a subpoena on June 27, according to a regulatory filing. Trump's media company owns Truth Social, an app similar to Twitter. Trump was banned by Twitter for inflammatory remarks concerning the insurrection.

Four days later, on July 1, a grand jury in the Southern District of New York handed the company another federal subpoena, an action that typically means a potential criminal investigation is in progress.

The investigations appear to be related to a proposed merger between Trump's media company and a blank-check company called Digital World Acquisitions Corp., according to a recent regulatory filing.

More evidence that Trump Media and Technology Group wasn't a grand strategy for Trump to create a rival to Meta or Twitter. Rather it was just an old school boiler room pump and dump/stock manipulation scheme with Trump removing himself from the company right as the criminal investigations got close.

Wisconsin Supreme Court rules absentee ballot drop boxes are illegal

Voters casting absentee ballots this fall for the highest state offices won't be able to return their ballots in upcoming elections by using drop boxes following a ruling Friday by the Wisconsin Supreme Court's conservative majority.

The 4-3 ruling, coming four weeks before statewide primaries Aug. 9, is a win for Republicans who now oppose the longstanding use of ballot drop boxes after their use proliferated during the coronavirus pandemic and was heavily criticized by former President Donald Trump, who alleged with no evidence that absentee voting was rife with fraud and led to his re-election loss in 2020.

Writing for the majority, Justice Rebecca Bradley said state law does not permit drop boxes anywhere other than election clerk offices and only state lawmakers may make new policy stating otherwise — not the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which issued guidance to clerks allowing them.

Will No One Defend the American Republic?

In a previous newsletter, I frankly discussed my view that the United States is careening towards a right-wing dictatorship that is highly likely to be either deranged or unstable or both over the medium term, thus threatening a chaotic collapse of the global economic system that might kill billions (especially in concert with climate change).

We see in the ethnic cleansing campaign that Russia, a comparatively poor and feeble state, is undertaking in eastern Ukraine the danger of that kind of government. Imagine the damage, say, Colorado's mini-Trump Lauren Boebert (age 35) might inflict if she were to end up in firm command of the world's largest military, second-largest nuclear arsenal, the global reserve currency, and the global financial plumbing, for 20-30 years, without any of the (insufficient yet still important) checks that stymied many of Trump's worst impulses, and hence all the opportunity for permanent, total, unaccountable power to do what it usually does to corrupt imbeciles.

It's not like this is some kind of subtle argument here. The upcoming putsch, just like the last one, is being planned right out in the open—this time possibly enabled by the Supreme Court. The Republican Party is not just currently led by grossly immoral (and increasingly, openly white supremacist and antisemitic) maniacs unfit to operate a lemonade stand, it is producing them by the thousands, and they are climbing the party ranks.

A truly odd part of all this, and I suspect one reason why there is such an air of despair in liberal circles today, is that the opposition party is currently in control of the government yet is largely just sitting on its hands. Pennsylvania state Senator Doug Mastriano, for instance, was up to his neck in January 6. Yet not only has he avoided any prosecution or even criminal investigation so far, he was also recently nominated for the upcoming governor's race, where he will have vast authority over the state's electoral machinery if he wins. So far there is not so much as a whisper that Trump is going to be prosecuted.

Any student of history considering the abstract chances of an opposition party attempting a coup d'etat against a sitting president without first obtaining firm control of the military would surely rate them low. But the awesome feebleness of Democrats raises doubts. Surely one reason it would be unwise to attempt to seize power against an established incumbent would be the high probability of getting arrested or shot. But not only are Democrats not locking up the insurrectionist criminals, this same party had the presidency stolen from them by a popular vote loser in 2000 (admittedly in a much less blatant fashion, but still at bottom the same behavior) and back then they just rolled over and took it as well.

What explains the helpless passivity of President Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership? (To be fair, the January 6 committee has produced a lot of useful information and drama, which may even have shocked Garland into doing something.)

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt has called for the State Auditor & Inspector’s Office conduct a special audit of the Tulsa Public Schools, accusing them teaching CRT.

So we've already reached the point where the city that experienced the largest race massacre in US history can't educate its own children about it because it makes White people uncomfortable (which is illegal in Oklahoma now, thanks to HB 1775)

The supposed initiator of the audit was an irregularity with a vendor back in 2019 who billed the district $20,000. Tulsa Public Schools' annual budget is over $700 million.

Utterly fascinated and horrified by this part of a Vox article about how China's relationship with Hollywood is shaping movies:

Vox wrote:

What is Disney’s role in all of this, as the biggest entertainment company in the world?

If we were having this conversation two or three years ago, we would say that Disney without question has been the most successful studio in China. They have a massive theme park. Avengers: Endgame is still the highest-grossing American release in China. Obviously, a number of characters are as well-known in China these days as they are here in the US.

But I think increasingly that success is looking more and more like a liability. Going back 20 or 30 years, Disney has seen China as a growth market, a place where they could really establish a foothold. But they were off the entire country’s radar for decades while they were seeding America with their mythology.

The best example of that blind spot is probably Star Wars. When Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, one of the core pillars of their plan for monetizing that investment was bringing Star Wars to China.

But you remember when The Force Awakens came out in 2015? So much of that movie’s success traded on nostalgia for the original trilogy and the audience’s deep awareness of it. Disney discovered that when they released the movie in China, audiences were more confused than anything.

At one point there’s a scene where Han Solo and Chewbacca step onto the Millennium Falcon, and Han Solo says, “Chewy, we’re home!” In China, moviegoers thought that meant he lived on the ship. That [divide] only grew more and more pronounced as the movies continued to come out, and that investment in the characters and the storylines that had been a boon to American audiences actually started to feel like homework to Chinese audiences. Star Wars never really quite caught on.

The other fascinating part about Disney’s strategy involves the string of English language schools that they opened in the country.

When they were building their theme park in Shanghai, they knew that a child won’t beg their parents to go to a theme park unless they love the characters that they’ll see there. Disney said, “Well, okay, we don’t have decades of movies to do this with.” And they were not allowed [by the Chinese government] to get a Disney Channel onto Chinese airwaves.

So what they decided to do was to launch a string of schools called Disney English, which would essentially teach young Chinese children English, but using Disney characters: Mickey wants an apple, or Luke Skywalker is 30 years old. I walked by one of these schools when I was there, and I remember that Toy Story 4 was coming out that week; all of the teachers were wearing Toy Story 4 T-shirts. So it doubled as a really effective marketing tool as well. Not only did these kids learn the English that their parents wanted them to speak, but they also left with an affection for these Disney characters that they had been introduced to.

Serial liar and man with dubious business credentials reneges on promise to put Trump back on Twitter.

Elon Musk announced Friday that he will abandon his tumultuous $44 billion offer to buy Twitter

My first thought is, the analysts at Twitter and literally anywhere else who didn’t see this coming should all find different jobs.

My second thought it, “spambots” is just such a flimsy, silly reason that I’m pretty sure Musk continues to f*ck with people, as he was when he first lied about buying Twitter.