TrumpReich in action

[Rach3]

This will not end well.

The "auditors" may even alter or damage ballots:

https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/cyber-ni ... 11955.html

But it appears 70M+ voters will buy the fraud just as they did Trump's fraudulent Presidency.

[maestrob]

A private company hired by Arizona’s Republican Senate to do another presidential recount has been smacked down by a judge for battling to keep the process secret.The Cyber Ninjas company — headed by a conspiracy theorist and disciple of the “Stop the Steal” lie that the presidential election was rigged — has no election or balloting experience. Its lawyer argued in court this week that it could not reveal its “trade secrets” on how it would conduct the recount, and wanted to bar oversight of its audit process.

Clearly their intent is decidedly unethical. Their only goal is to sow doubt with the Maganderthal base.

I wonder if the judge's order to turn over their documents outlining procedures will be obeyed?

Why am I not surprised?

Never forget.

[Rach3]

https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/trump-ma ... 47717.html

70% of all GOP polled said they believe the 2020 election was stolen.What is clear is now they are really trying to steal it.Plus 49% GOP men, 34% GOP women per Maris Poll, not getting vaccinated.Criminal.

[maestrob]

https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/trump-ma ... 47717.html

70% of all GOP polled said they believe the 2020 election was stolen.What is clear is now they are really trying to steal it.Plus 49% GOP men, 34% GOP women per Maris Poll, not getting vaccinated.Criminal.

Even with all the insanity now happening in Arizona, changing their electoral college votes would not even come close to changing the results of the 2020 election.

I just thought I'd point that out.

This is being done for propaganda value to rile up all the QAnon believers. Will they dare to challenge results in Georgia or even Michigan?

I'd be VERY surprised if that happens.

[Rach3]

This is being done for propaganda value to rile up all the QAnon believers. Will they dare to challenge results in Georgia or even Michigan?
I'd be VERY surprised if that happens.

Trump claims that is the plan.He and they are all crazy and criminal enough to try,the local GOP mostly cowards or just as crazy.

[maestrob]

This is being done for propaganda value to rile up all the QAnon believers. Will they dare to challenge results in Georgia or even Michigan?
I'd be VERY surprised if that happens.

Trump claims that is the plan.He and they are all crazy and criminal enough to try,the local GOP mostly cowards or just as crazy.

As has been said elsewhere, he will drag this out and fight to the bitter end, and inevitably lose again & again.

Doesn't that hurt?

Perhaps a bit of self-flagellation is in the works.....

[lennygoran]

Hitler youth, anyone?

Rach, talk about hitler yesterday he came up here:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppNqos2FDEE
Glad they found him guilty-throw the book at the guy! Regards, Len

[Rach3]

Philip Bump, WAPO,5/7:

"Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) will probably soon be the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House. On Thursday, she demonstrated why: She’s onboard with even the most dubious efforts to question the results of the 2020 presidential contest.
“I fully support the audit in Arizona,” Stefanik told former Donald Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon in a podcast interview. “We want transparency and answers for the American people. What are the Democrats so afraid of?”

The “audit” to which Stefanik refers is a remarkable exercise in trying to gin up doubt about the results in the state. Authorized by the Republican state Senate, it is being managed by a firm with no demonstrable track record in validating ballots and run by a man whose embrace of debunked conspiracy theories about fraud were elevated by former Trump attorney Sidney Powell. The effort to review every ballot cast in Maricopa County — which by itself gave President Biden his margin of victory in the state — has been undertaken using an opaque, often inscrutable process, outside of the close view of objective third parties and with the assistance of obviously motivated actors, such as a former legislator who was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

All of this has been known for a while, and all of it suggests that the motivation for the audit is not “transparency and answers” so much as “cobbling together a rationale for claims about fraud.” But no element of the review better captures its nature than an element that was revealed on Wednesday.

One of the people helping coordinate the review is John Brakey, founder of AUDIT Elections USA. Speaking to a reporter from a local CBS affiliate, he explained one of the tests that was being conducted as part of the review process.
“There’s accusations that 40,000 ballots were flown in to Arizona and it was stuffed into the box, okay?” Brakey said. “And it came from the southeast part of the world, Asia, okay? And what they’re doing is to find out if there’s bamboo in the paper.” Because, he added later, “they use bamboo in their paper processing, people in southeast Asia.”

He discussed the high-definition cameras being used to photograph the ballots, noting that it was a process that could identify if ballots were hand-completed. He also made clear that he didn’t really believe the bamboo-ballot theory.
“I don’t believe any of that,” Brakey said. “I’m just saying that is part of the mystery that we want to un-gaslight people about and this is a way to do it.”

There’s obviously value in debunking false narratives. The problem with the Great Bamboo Conspiracy, though, is twofold: first, that the claims about ballots being flown in don’t pass an initial smell test and, second, that the process being used by the volunteers in Arizona wouldn’t be able to detect bamboo anyway.

It’s actually a bit hard to track down the source of the “40,000 ballots from Asia” story. Before the election, Trump and his allies repeatedly claimed that ballots could be brought in from overseas and added to counts, a claim that by itself was never feasible. It requires precisely forging ballots, completing them without detection, ensuring that they are from registered voters who hadn’t already voted and, perhaps most importantly, getting them into the country without detection.

One theory behind that latter necessity emerged on a conservative online radio show in December. Host Stew Peters elevated a claim made by a man named Ryan Hartwig, a past contributor to the right-wing group Project Veritas. Hartwig claimed that he got a tip from a Veritas staffer about a woman named Staci Burk who knew someone who’d seen ballots being loaded into planes in Seattle and flown around the country. Hartwig went to the airport in Phoenix, allegedly in the company of a congressional staffer, and saw someone loading boxes onto a Korean Air plane. A lot of spy-movie stuff ensued but, unsurprisingly, no actual ballots were seen.
Incidentally, this all purportedly happened on the evening of Nov. 7, 2020, hours after Biden had already been declared the winner of the election.

In another broadcast, Peters published audio of a man purporting to be affiliated with the Defense Department and also a nephew of the Koch brothers who alleged that he knew about ballots being unloaded in Arizona, under the protection of the National Guard. That audio was allegedly recorded by Burk — though, again, there’s nothing offered to substantiate the claims.

This appears to be the genesis of the ballots-from-Asia claim. By itself, it should be obvious that there is no reason to assume that any of this is true. There is certainly not enough here to decide to double-check more than 2 million ballots for signs that some of them might have originated in Asia, much less to do so by trying to figure out if the paper used to print them included bamboo.
Not that what the volunteers were doing would detect that anyway.

Steven G. Drexler is a forensic document examiner from Birmingham, Ala. He has decades of experience in forensic science, including two decades in analyzing documents, including as an expert witness in criminal trials.
Drexler spoke with The Post on Thursday afternoon and explained that the only way to actually determine what the paper used for the ballots was made out of was destructively.

“The destructive test to do fiber content of the paper is, like, punching a pinhole in the paper,” he explained. “But you’ve got to take like 20 samples to make sure you’re using a good random sample.” Those samples are then closely examined to determine what fibers they contain.
In other words, it takes more than just eyeballing the paper or photographing it. It requires taking multiple physical samples of the paper and examining them independently. It requires knowing what you’re doing and what you’re looking for.
Drexler pointed out that there were other, easier ways to evaluate the legitimacy of a document.
“The first characteristic I would look at is how a genuine document was printed,” he explained. “What type of process was used to print and produce the documents? And then I would examine the disputed documents and determine whether or not they followed the same printing process as a genuine document.” “A lot of times a forger will mess up somewhere in the document,” he said.
This, too, requires an experienced eye. It seems unlikely that such experience is in great supply at the vote-counting site in Maricopa County.

We should not jump to conclusions about what the Arizona effort will find. Perhaps the conspiracy-theorist running the show will come to the lamentable determination that no fraud was manifested in his review. Perhaps the volunteers will step forward to explain their work and to validate the original, nonpartisan audit of the tally done by the county.
Or maybe, instead, we’ll be treated to a battery of allegations about what might have been found, about photographs of ballots that appear to show what some have concluded look like the fibrous tissue from bamboo shoots. Maybe this team will introduce all sorts of new questions based on their opaque review process, more than enough, by their measure, to throw the results in the state into doubt.

If you had to guess which outcome seems more likely, which would you pick? "

[Rach3]

By Michael Wines,NYT
May 6, 2021

Untrained citizens are trying to find traces of bamboo on last year’s ballots, seemingly trying to prove a conspiracy theory that the election was tainted by fake votes from Asia. Thousands of ballots are left unattended and unsecured. People with open partisan bias, including a man who was photographed on the Capitol steps during the Jan. 6 riot, are doing the recounting.

All of these issues with the Republican-backed re-examination of the November election results from Arizona’s most populous county were laid out this week by Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, in a scathing six-page letter.

Ms. Hobbs called the process “a significant departure from standard best practices.”

“Though conspiracy theorists are undoubtedly cheering on these types of inspections — and perhaps providing financial support because of their use — they do little other than further marginalize the professionalism and intent of this ‘audit,’” she wrote to Ken Bennett, a former Republican secretary of state and the liaison between Republicans in the State Senate and the company conducting it.

The effort has no official standing and will not change the state’s vote, whatever it finds. But it has become so troubled that the Department of Justice also expressed concerns this week in a letter saying that it might violate federal laws.
“We have a concern that Maricopa County election records, which are required by federal law to be retained and preserved, are no longer under the ultimate control of elections officials, are not being adequately safeguarded by contractors, and are at risk of damage or loss,” wrote Pamela Karlan, the principal deputy assistant attorney general with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

The scene playing out in Arizona is perhaps the most off-the-rails episode in the Republican Party’s escalating effort to support former President Donald J. Trump’s lie that he won the election. Four months after Congress certified the results of the presidential election, local officials around the country are continuing to provide oxygen for Mr. Trump’s obsession that he beat Joseph R. Biden Jr. last fall.

In Arizona, the review is proving to be every bit as problematic as skeptics had imagined.

Last month, the Arizona Republic editorial board called for the state’s G.O.P. Senate majority to stop “abusing its authority.”

“Republicans in the Arizona Legislature have set aside dollars, hired consultants, procured the hardware and software to conduct what they call ‘an audit’ of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County,” the editorial said. “What they don’t have is the moral authority to make it credible.”

Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, said the process had ignored long-established safeguards against mistakes or deliberate manipulation of the election results.

Republican state senators ordered a review of the election in Maricopa County, whose 2.1 million ballots accounted for two-thirds of the entire vote statewide, in December, after some supporters of Mr. Trump refused to accept his 10,457-vote loss in Arizona. Democrats had flipped the county, giving Mr. Biden more than enough votes to ensure his victory statewide.

The senators later assigned oversight of the effort to a Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, whose chief executive had publicly embraced conspiracy theories claiming that voting machines had been rigged to deliver the state to Mr. Biden. Since then, supporters of Mr. Trump’s stolen-election story line have been given broad access to the site of the review, while election experts, the press and independent observers have struggled to gain access, sometimes resorting to going to court.

In one much-noted instance, Anthony Kern, a former state representative photographed on the Capitol steps on the day of the insurrection — and who was on the Maricopa ballot both as a legislative candidate and as a presidential elector — was hired to help recount ballots.

Among other concerns, Ms. Hobbs’s letter contended that stacks of ballots were not properly protected and that there was no apparent procedure for preventing the commingling of tallied and untallied ballots.

The security violations spotted by observers, the letter stated, included ballots left unattended on tables and ballots counted using scrap paper instead of official tally sheets. Counters receive “on the fly” training. Ballots from separate stacks are mixed together. Software problems cause ballot images to get lost.

The letter also noted that some aspects of the process “appear better suited for chasing conspiracy theories than as a part of a professional audit.”

For instance, some ballots are receiving microscope and ultraviolet-light examinations, apparently to address unfounded claims that fraudulent ballots contained watermarks that were visible under UV light — or that thousands of fraudulent ballots were flown in from Southeast Asia using paper with bamboo fibers.

John Brakey, an official helping supervise the effort, said high-powered microscopes were being used to search for evidence of fake ballots, according to a video interview with the CBS News affiliate in Phoenix.

“There’s accusations that 40,000 ballots were flown in, to Arizona, and it was stuffed into the box,” he said in a taped interview. “And it came from the southeast part of the world, Asia, OK. And what they’re doing is to find out if there’s bamboo in the paper.”

“I don’t believe any of that,” he added. “I’m just saying it’s part of the mystery that we want to un-gaslight people about.”

Republicans in the Senate signed a contract agreeing to pay $150,000 for the vote review, a figure that many said then would not cover its cost. A variety of outside groups later started fund-raisers to offset extra expenses, including the right-wing One America News cable channel and an Arizona state representative, Mark Finchem, who argues the election was stolen. How much in outside donations has been collected — and who the donors are — is unclear.

The letter from the secretary of state also said that equipment and software being used to display images of ballots had not been tested by a federal laboratory or certified by the federal Election Assistance Commission, as state law requires. That left open the possibility, the letter said, that the systems could have been preloaded with false images of ballots or that the software had been designed to manipulate ballot images — concerns similar to those that believers in a stolen election had themselves raised.

Ms. Hobbs also said the procedures for checking the accuracy of the effort included no “reliable process for ensuring consistency and resolving discrepancies” among the three separate counts of ballots.

It also appeared that the task of entering recount results into an electronic spreadsheet was performed by a single person rather than a team of people from both political parties, the letter stated.

Mr. Bennett, the liaison between Republicans in the State Senate and the company conducting the vote review, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But Ms. Hobbs concluded her letter to him by saying, “you know that our elections are governed by a complex framework of laws and procedures designed to ensure accuracy, security, and transparency. You also must therefore know that the procedures governing this audit ensure none of those things.

“I’m not sure what compelled you to oversee this audit, but I’d like to assume you took this role with the best of intentions. It is those intentions I appeal to now: either do it right, or don’t do it at all.”

[maestrob]

I'm just waiting for this whole sham to be challenged by federal election officials.

At this point, only Maganderthals will believe it if any "discrepancies" are "revealed" by these nitwits. Not only that, but in the unlikely event that the nitwits actually proclaim that no new reasons to challenge the already certified results in Maricopa County, they still won't believe that either.

There is simply no credibility here.

[Rach3]

Adam Sullivan, Cedar Rapids (Iowa ) Gazette, 5/7/21:

" The Freedom Governor "

The Iowa Legislature is in overtime, scrambling to strike a compromise on a multibillion-dollar budget. It could be several more weeks, we’re told.

With real work yet to be done, Gov. Kim Reynolds is calling on the Legislature to spend time debating young Iowans’ genitals.

A bill to restrict transgender girls from participating in girls sports is apparently a top priority for the governor. She didn’t mention it during her Condition of the State address five months ago, but instead during a Fox News broadcast a week ago, after the Legislature’s targeted adjournment date.

Reynolds’ late addendum to the legislative agenda was part of a panel discussion among a select group of GOP governors on Laura Ingraham’s prime-time program. The forum was meant to highlight how the governors “preserved our God-given freedoms” during the pandemic, Ingraham said in the show’s introduction.

Reynolds and her peers delivered a topsy-turvy vision of freedom — one where you don’t have to wear a mask but where classroom speech is dictated by the government, social media companies are heavily regulated and the contents of kids’ underwear are subject to state-sanctioned inspection.

Panelists lashed out at a federal proposal to increase legal protection for LGBTQ Americans. When the Mississippi governor boasted of being the first to sign legislation “to protect female athletes,” Reynolds jumped in to say she would do the same.

“We are working on legislation. I should have that on my desk by the end of this legislative session and we will sign that bill,” Reynolds said, drawing applause from the Florida audience.

However, lawmakers aren’t actually working on that issue. They introduced legislation to that effect early in the session but never even hosted a subcommittee hearing.

Under the proposal, which was dead until Reynolds ordered its revival, “students of the male sex” (including transgender girls) would be ineligible to participate in girls sports.

Such a policy is spiteful and unnecessary, but what’s really enraging is a section on “Disputes of biological sex.”

To prove their biological sex, an athlete would have to get a signed statement from a doctor to verify their “internal and external reproductive anatomy” and “normal, endogenously produced levels of testosterone.”

What constitutes a legitimate dispute? The legislation doesn’t say. Anyone potentially could file a frivolous complaint to force a star athlete to go have their junk checked out at the doctor’s office. It’s a free country, after all.

One of Reynolds’ fellow GOP governors took issue with such infringements on privacy.

“You have a right to participate in society without them asking you to divulge your health information,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said.

OK, DeSantis wasn’t really talking about trans athletes. He was talking about vaccine passports.

Conservatives are moving to restrict COVID-19 vaccination verification schemes, even if they are imposed by private businesses. It’s a tricky issue, but vaccine passport bans can reasonably be seen as infringing on our rights to private property and free association.

The Iowa Legislature recently finalized a vaccine passport bill, which Reynolds is expected to sign.

“It’s a marginalized society, this two-tiered society, either adhere or be marginalized — and that is ridiculous, that is not who we are as Americans,” Reynolds said of vaccine passports.

Adhere or be marginalized? Imagine how transgender kids feel.

The vaccine passport discussion was teed up by a question from the audience. The asker offered an interesting frame: “Human beings have a right to free movement and to not have their daily activities infringed upon.”

Governors nodded along, but within the hour they had forgotten about the right to free movement when they took turns fear mongering over the surge of migrants at the southern border. Reynolds reiterated that Iowa would not aid migrant children, again calling it President Joe Biden’s problem.

Free movement, except for those people.

Governors participated in rounds of one-upsmanship, bickering over which one of them loves bloated police budgets and hates Big Tech the most. The common theme is using state power to impose a specific set of social values.

Their idea of freedom is flimsy, dissonant and plainly un-American. Freedom for some, genital inspections for others."

[maestrob]

“You have a right to participate in society without them asking you to divulge your health information,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said.OK, DeSantis wasn’t really talking about trans athletes. He was talking about vaccine passports.

That cognitive dissonance made me LOL!

Now, I hear that Norwegian Cruises is contemplating pulling up their Florida roots because of Gov. Desantis's misguided executive order barring them, as well as all other businesses and schools, from requiring that passengers be vaccinated in order to board!

https://www.wesh.com/article/norwegian- ... n/36368476

[maestrob]

Liz Cheney Refuses to Lie, So Elise Stefanik Steps Up

May 7, 2021
By Michelle Cottle

Ms. Cottle is a member of the editorial board.

Even by the standards of the Republican Party’s descent into Trumpian nihilism, the latest bloodletting within the ranks of its congressional leadership is gripping — the car crash next to the dumpster fire that you can’t look away from.

House Republicans are on track next week to oust Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming as conference chairwoman, the third-highest position in the conference. Ms. Cheney is being purged for her stubborn refusal to accept — much less peddle — the dangerous, crackpot lie that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. In today’s G.O.P., fealty to the defeated president’s false allegation of electoral fraud is the ultimate litmus test.

Ms. Cheney has not simply failed this test, repeatedly — she brandishes her defiance like a weapon.

On Monday, Mr. Trump issued a proclamation: “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!” Ms. Cheney fired back on Twitter (from which the former president is still banned): “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”

“The Republican Party is at a turning point,” she warned in a May 5 opinion piece in The Washington Post, “and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.”

Clearly, such apostasy cannot stand.

But with a House leadership dominated by white men, and a party plagued by a longstanding gender gap, Republican lawmakers recognize the potential risk of replacing their top-ranking woman with another white guy. Such bad optics. So it is that Republican House leaders have been whipping votes to install another woman in the job, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York.

Unlike Ms. Cheney, Ms. Stefanik is happy — make that eager — to go along with Mr. Trump’s pernicious election-fraud fiction. Just this week, she sat down for interviews with Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s onetime political guru, and Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump aide, to praise the former president and suggest that there are many, many questions that still need to be answered about the outcome. Among other Trumpist talking points, she accused judicial officers in Pennsylvania of “unconstitutional overreach,” and she endorsed the sketchy election audit that Republicans are conducting in Arizona.

Ms. Stefanik is assumed to have more than enough votes lined up to replace Ms. Cheney. Her ascension is considered close to a done deal.

Here’s where things really get awkward. Aside from her Trump bootlicking, Ms. Stefanik is a terrible pick to help lead House Republicans, with both an ideology and a political style ill-suited to the conservative zeitgeist. At least they were until recently. In aiming to swap out Ms. Cheney with Ms. Stefanik, Republican leaders are revealing — again — just how hollow their party has become and how far it has fallen.

With her establishment pedigree and her neocon foreign policy views, Ms. Cheney may not be a perfect fit for today’s Republican Party, but she is a rock-ribbed conservative who has for years fought fiercely in the party trenches. Like her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, she is tough and aggressive, and she delights in lobbing partisan bombs at Democrats. She is pro-torture and anti-abortion. In other words, she has long been the kind of Republican that Democrats love to hate.

Ms. Stefanik, on the other hand … Most of America had never heard of the New York lawmaker before her emergence as a passionate Trump defender during his first impeachment. Her toadiness has only grown since, earning ever more love from Mr. Trump. On Wednesday, he endorsed her for conference chairwoman.

But before all that, Ms. Stefanik was seen as an exemplar of the kinder, gentler future of the Republican Party. Elected in 2014 at age 30, the polished, media-savvy Harvard alumna was a fresh, friendly, moderate face that many hoped would help the G.O.P. shed its image as a bunch of angry old white guys. Pro-business and uninterested in culture warring, she fit in well with the party’s establishment wing. Her first political job was in the Bush 43 White House. In 2017, she was elected co-chair of the Tuesday Group (since renamed the Republican Governance Group), a caucus of moderate, centrist House Republicans.

Ms. Stefanik’s voting record reflects this brand. She has a measly 44 percent lifetime score from the American Conservative Union — compared to Ms. Cheney’s 78 percent — and a 56 percent from the conservative Heritage Action, versus Ms. Cheney’s 82 percent. Ms. Stefanik’s ratings from conservative groups like FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth are even lower (37 percent and 35 percent), and both organizations have come out against her joining leadership. During Mr. Trump’s presidency, Ms. Stefanik voted with him 77.7 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight, but Ms. Cheney did 92.9 percent of the time.

One of Ms. Stefanik’s top priorities has been to improve her party’s image with women and, more specifically, to get more Republican women elected. Her PAC is credited with having contributed to the victories of several women in this year’s freshman House class. Her efforts, which can run up against the G.O.P.’s professed disdain for identity politics, have occasionally put off some party brethren.

Ms. Stefanik is, in short, the kind of Republican that conservatives generally love to hate.

Despite the seal of approval from Mr. Trump and some congressional leaders, not everyone is thrilled by the idea of Ms. Stefanik’s likely promotion. Some of her male colleagues have grumped that they were not even considered for the post because of their gender. The conference vice chair, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, has reportedly been griping about the “coronation.”

Trickier still, some hard-core MAGA loyalists suspect Ms. Stefanik of being a pretender — a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” as one far-right site put it — and are raising a stink about her voting record and political background. Lou Dobbs, the deep-MAGA former TV host, declared her a RINO — that is, a Republican in name only. Her more creative critics at the website Revolver coined a fresh term for her: TINO — Trumpist in name only. They also dubbed her “another neocon establishment twit.”

So much for Republican unity.

To be fair, having sold their soul to Mr. Trump, Republican lawmakers cannot allow Ms. Cheney to remain in leadership. Unlike most of her colleagues, she refuses to let the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol fade from memory, pretend it was no big deal or falsely claim that it was perpetrated by lefty extremists. Every word out of her mouth is an indictment not merely of Mr. Trump but also of her fellow lawmakers’ degeneracy and opportunism.

Ms. Stefanik, by contrast, is scrambling to reassure MAGA voters that she is worthy of their support. In addition to doubling down on election-fraud nonsense, she has been test-driving a more populist, own-the-libs persona, whining about “cancel culture” and “Trump derangement syndrome” and the anti-conservative bias of Big Tech.

In other words, Ms. Stefanik is forsaking the ideology and the political brand that brought her to Congress as she grovels before the gold-plated altar of Trumpism. All this to impress the followers of a defeated president who would just as soon see the Republican Party burned to ash.

In that sense, she may be a perfect leader for her House colleagues after all.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opin ... e=Homepage

[Rach3]

From AxiosAm today:


" The fracas over school reopening is fueling a surge of candidates for school boards across the country, Axios' Stef Kight writes.

Why it matters: What was long a nonpartisan, hyper-local role is now at center of a swirling debate, as conservative and progressive parents clash over when and how to reopen classrooms
Grassroots conservative groups are getting involved in school board races all across the country.

"Patriots for Delaware" endorsed five pro-school-reopening candidates for the state's May 11th elections.

Parents in Pennsylvania formed a PAC to support school board candidates running to keep kids in school in person.

In El Paso, the Facebook group "Let Schools Ring" supported Leslie Hoard, who reportedly questioned the use of masks in school and supported school reopening. Hoard lost.

A group called "Moms for Liberty" has been pressuring the school board in Brevard County, Fla., to drop its mask mandate for students.

What we’re watching: The next flashpoint for local school boards is the debate over critical race theory, an academic movement focusing on systemic racism in U.S. laws.

The issue has already become divisive in Texas, Utah and Oregon, and it could drive even more interest in school board elections."

[maestrob]

We really are splitting into two societies, aren't we?

Seems nobody cares about the external threats we face.

This is how Rome disintegrated. Can it really be happening here so quickly?

[Rach3]

More " BIG LIES ":

From WAPO today:


Anthony S. Fauci forcefully batted down Sen. Rand Paul’s baseless claim that the U.S. government funded research in China that might have helped make the coronavirus more contagious, calling Paul’s assertion “entirely and completely incorrect.”
“The U.S. government should admit that the Wuhan Virology Institute was experimenting to enhance the coronavirus’s ability to infect humans. Juicing up super viruses is not new,” the Kentucky Republican said at a Senate hearing on combating the pandemic before asking the nation’s leading infectious-disease doctor if he believed U.S. funding of the Wuhan lab should stop.
“Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely, entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute,” Fauci said.
Gain of function is a scientific term for studying how to make a virus more efficient, typically used in labs to study the effectiveness of drugs and vaccines against the virus.
“Government scientists like yourself who favor gain function … ” Paul began.
“I don’t favor gain of function research in China and you are saying things that are not correct,” Fauci interjected.
Last year, the Trump administration forced the NIH to terminate a grant for a study that examined how coronaviruses spread from bats to humans. The study’s sponsor was a New York-based nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology had a subgrant under the contract. The NIH halted payments to the subcontractor in Wuhan last year as experts tried to determine whether the virus could have slipped out of the lab in Wuhan.

Some right-wing media and politicians have seized on the theory that the virus was engineered in or escaped from the lab in Wuhan, and suggested falsely that the NIH helped fund that research.
“I fully agree that you should investigate where the virus came from,” Fauci said. “But again, we have not funded gain of function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology … no matter how many times you say it, it didn’t happen.”
This is the second tense exchange at a Senate hearing between Fauci and Paul. In March, the two had a heated disagreement over the importance of continued mask-wearing.

From Cedar Rapids Gazette today :

Iowa will stop its participation in federal unemployment benefits, effective June 12, Gov. Kim Reynolds announced Tuesday morning.
Starting then, Iowans will no longer be able to receive Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation, Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation or Mixed Earners Unemployment Compensation. The programs do not expire nationally until Sept. 4.
“Federal pandemic-related unemployment benefit programs initially provided displaced Iowans with crucial assistance when the pandemic began,” Reynolds said in a news release.
“But now that our businesses and schools have reopened, these payments are discouraging people from returning to work.”
Those programs, which do not expire nationally until September 4, made up more than 80 percent of unemployment benefits paid in the week ending May 1.
State unemployment benefits will remain in place. The minimum weekly payment for an unemployed Iowan without any dependents is $73.
Senate Minority Leader Zach Wahls, D-Coralville, said the benefits Reynolds is cutting are “helping Iowans stay housed, clothed, and fed.”
“It makes no sense for Governor Reynolds to pull the rug out from unemployed Iowans while we remain in the grip of a worldwide pandemic,” Wahls said in a statement.
House Minority Leader Todd Prichard, D-Charles City, called Reynolds’ decision “unconscionable and heartless.”
“In search of national headlines, Governor Reynolds has thrown common sense out the window and again failed the leadership test,” Prichard said in a statement.
“Governor Reynolds needs to advocate for Iowans instead of using vulnerable Iowans as a stepping stone for her own political gain.”
The Iowa Association of Business and Industry, which represents about 1,500 employers in the state, lauded Reynolds’ decision.
“Iowa had a workforce shortage prior to the pandemic,” Iowa ABI President Mike Ralston said in a statement.
“The continued extended benefits have only exacerbated the challenge and slowed our recovery.”
The Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance is among the business groups in support of Reynolds’ decision.
“As businesses struggle finding employees to return to work and fill open jobs throughout Iowa, we support terminating Iowa’s participation in the federal weekly supplemental unemployment benefits,” Economic Alliance spokeswoman Melissa McCarville said.
“We must take steps that help our businesses grow and get more employees back to receiving their retirement, health care and other employment benefits.”
A Gazette analysis of information from Iowa Workforce Development shows someone without any dependents would need to earn less than $9.33 an hour to earn less working than in unemployment benefits.
Dustin Miller, the executive director of Iowa Chamber Alliance, issued a statement neither supporting or opposing Reynolds’ decision, instead focusing on the workers who have left the workforce and not filed for unemployment.
“Iowa’s prepandemic workforce issues have been exacerbated with many individuals choosing to leave the labor force entirely,” Miller said.
“Iowa’s economy needs people to safely and responsibly get back to work to continue our economic recovery.”
Iowa is among the states to have more job openings than job seekers. IWD Director Beth Townsend said the agency’s IowaWORKS site has more than 66,000 job openings.
The state had only 31,826 unemployment claims in the week ending May 1, according to preliminary data released last week.
Iowa is not alone in cutting federal unemployment benefits. Several other Republican-led states, including Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Montana and South Carolina, have taken similar actions.
Tuesday’s decision adds to the ongoing tensions between Reynolds and the Biden administration.
In a Fox News Channel appearance with four other Republican governors last month, Reynolds announced Iowa turned down $95 million in federal aid for COVID-19 testing in schools.
She also directed Attorney General Tom Miller to join 12 other states in a lawsuit against the Biden administration over a provision prohibiting states from using federal aid to offset tax cuts.

[maestrob]

In a Fox News Channel appearance with four other Republican governors last month, Reynolds announced Iowa turned down $95 million in federal aid for COVID-19 testing in schools.She also directed Attorney General Tom Miller to join 12 other states in a lawsuit against the Biden administration over a provision prohibiting states from using federal aid to offset tax cuts.

Why the hell should my tax dollars go to fund tax cuts in Iowa, or any other state?

If your cruel and heartless governor wants to deny mothers who cannot work unemployment benefits while they are caring for their children who have no daycare, that's her business and her political future. Keeping schools open while refusing to fund covid testing is further endangering the lives of teachers and those vulnerable people that live in the homes that kids go home to.

I am continually astonished at how Republicans continue to shoot themselves in the foot, and at the people whom they torture that continue to vote for them.

[barney]

Exactly so, Brian. My theory is that you don't have to have a lobotomy to vote Republican, but it certainly helps.

[maestrob]

Exactly so, Brian. My theory is that you don't have to have a lobotomy to vote Republican, but it certainly helps.

[Rach3]

Rand Paul and the GOP try to blame Fauci for the coronavirus. Extraordinary considering Paul was swimming in the Senate pool, attending meetings, etc., while waiting for results of his COVID test ( undoubtedly triggered by some symptom concern ) all without telling any of his Senate colleagues he had been tested until after his positive test came back.After recovering, he has refused to wear a mask contrary to CDC advice and Senate rules.

Rand Paul: Fauci is 'fooling with Mother Nature'

In a May 11 hearing, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) asked top infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci about NIH funding of research in China. (The Washington Post)
Aaron Blake
Senior reporter
May 12, 2021 at 7:04 a.m. CDT



" For much of the past year, Republicans have decried lead government coronavirus expert Anthony S. Fauci’s prescriptions for mitigating the pandemic — including masks, social distancing and keeping society shut down.
But increasingly in the past week, the effort has taken on a new flavor — with suggestions that Fauci might be personally to blame for the advent of the virus itself.

There remain major questions about just how the virus emerged, including the idea that it somehow escaped a lab in the city of Wuhan, China, where the virus originated. The theory, which was once highly speculative and which was downplayed by top medical experts such as Fauci, is suddenly being treated more seriously, though there is no conclusive evidence either way.
But while some Republicans have criticized the initial dismissal of that theory as evidence of a lack of curiosity from the media and health officials about the origins of the virus — or even some kind of pro-China or anti-Trump bias — the theories about Fauci’s complicity take things to another level.

With Fauci set to testify before the Senate on Tuesday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson teed things up the night before. In a commentary leading off his show, he played up the idea of a lab leak, pointing (rightly) to shifting beliefs in the medical community about its plausibility and treating it as an open question.
But then he pivoted to treating this as something amounting to fact.

While talking about National Institutes of Health funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Carlson referred to “the deadly experiments that were going on there” — which is valid, given that’s the kind of thing virologists do.
But he then referred to them, as if the lab-leak theory were proved, as “the experiments that clearly went so wrong.”
Again, there is no firm evidence that the spread of the coronavirus was the result of experiments that “clearly” went “so wrong” in the Wuhan lab. Carlson has a knack for suggesting things without saying them directly, but this veered in a much more conspiratorial and unproven direction than usual.

“This wouldn’t have happened if Tony Fauci didn’t allow it to happen — that is clear,” Carlson continued, referring to the funding. “It’s an amazing story. It is a shocking story. In a functional country, there would be a criminal investigation into Tony Fauci’s role in the covid pandemic that has killed millions and halted our country, changing it forever."

The easy answer is that it’s speculative and that criminal investigations generally involve some kind of genuine evidence of wrongdoing or violations of specific laws. It has been known for a long time that U.S. health agencies funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and it’s valid to ask whether that funding was a good idea. But there is no evidence that such funding ran afoul of U.S. law or that it contributed to the pandemic.

Carlson doubled down Tuesday night on the unproven lab leak theory and Fauci’s supposed responsibility for it, suggesting Fauci should not just be investigated but indicted. “The guy in charge of America’s response to covid turns out to be the guy who funded the creation of covid,” Carlson said, again going much further than the evidence allows. And Carlson’s guest, coronanvirus and vaccine skeptic Alex Berenson, actually pushed back on the idea of Fauci’s culpability.

GOP senators picked up that ball and ran with it Tuesday, pressing Fauci on the idea that funding the Wuhan lab put him at fault.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has clashed repeatedly with Fauci, pressed him on funding for the Wuhan lab. Paul suggested that the funding ran afoul of a prohibition on “gain-of-function” research — i.e., altering genomes to give viruses new properties, such as the ability to infect a new host species or to transmit more easily. The idea behind such research is that it might provide insight into how a virus spreads and improve efforts to counteract it, though it also carries obvious risks, which is why funding for such research is limited.

Paul claimed that the U.S. government was downplaying the link between gain-of-function research and the coronavirus because it was “self-interested” in continuing such research, or even covering up its role in the pandemic. He went on to press Fauci on the funding for the Wuhan lab, at which point Fauci said repeatedly that such funding was not intended to fund gain-of-function research (which fact-checkers have validated).

“With all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that — the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute,” Fauci said.

Paul then reverted to pointing to alleged gain-of-function research that is taking place in the United States, rather than the Wuhan lab, to which Fauci offered a rather lawyerly response about what gain-of-function research is. Paul then pressed him on sending broader funding to the Wuhan lab.

Fauci did at one point say about the lab-leak theory: “I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I am fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China.”

Paul later got some backup from Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.).
Marshall, who like Paul is a doctor, repeatedly pressed Fauci on the idea that such viral research could have led to the novel coronavirus. He asked whether Fauci could definitively say that NIH funding didn’t, in some way, play a part in a theoretical eventual lab leak, citing research on mice.

“Could some of the funding [have] indirectly ended up to the contribution of covid-19?” Marshall asked.
Fauci, testily, responded that the question was excessively broad, because many types of research could conceivably meet the definition as having one day contributed to the spread of the virus.
“I’m not sure exactly where that question is going,” Fauci said. “I mean, you could do research on something as benign as looking at something that has nothing to do with it, and it could, indirectly, some day, somehow be involved. So if you want to trap me into saying yes or no, I’m not going to play that game.”

There are valid questions about the lab-leak theory and whether funding the Wuhan lab was a good idea, in light of all we know. And Fauci acknowledges it’s worth figuring out whether the lab and China more broadly played a role. But as always in politics, it’s worth being skeptical of a conveniently erected boogeyman.
The idea that Fauci is somehow using all of this to keep people in masks or locked down for his own edification has been a fixture in some corners of conservative media, and in their telling he’s gradually emerged as perhaps the epitome of overzealous government scientists. But this new line of attack is painting him as something else entirely."

Just as the Nazis blamed the Jews for all Germany's problems.

[jserraglio]

[maestrob]

Paul claimed that the U.S. government was downplaying the link between gain-of-function research and the coronavirus because it was “self-interested” in continuing such research, or even covering up its role in the pandemic. He went on to press Fauci on the funding for the Wuhan lab, at which point Fauci said repeatedly that such funding was not intended to fund gain-of-function research (which fact-checkers have validated).

“With all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that — the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute,” Fauci said.

I watched that horrid and disgusting exchange on CNN yesterday, and couldn't believe what I was seeing.

Rand Paul, the twisted offspring of the bizarre Ron Paul, used to be considered just another flake in Congress, but has now crossed the line into fellow-traveler conspiracy theorist of the highest order. His attack on Fauci's credibility and reputation is plainly calculated to destroy this good man's reputation with supremely evil intent.

This takes the meaning of misinformation to anew level.

Never forget.

[Rach3]

"Moderate" GOP voters( if there are really any ) have 2 choices : either form a 3rd party or admit you're a TrumpReich insurrectionist , as your continued support of the GOP only continues to enable ilk like McConnell,McCarthy and these fellow vermin:

Huffington post tonight:


On Jan. 6, thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. The riot resulted in five deaths. More than 100 officers were injured. Hundreds of arrests were made. But you might never know that listening to Republican lawmakers.

During a House oversight committee hearing on Wednesday discussing what went wrong in police preparation for the Jan. 6 riot, and what the Trump administration did or did not do to quell the violence, Republican lawmakers tried to paint themselves as victims.


“Let me clear: There was no insurrection,” Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) falsely claimed during Wednesday’s hearing. “And to call it an insurrection, in my opinion, is a bold-faced lie.”Clyde went on to defend those who stormed the Capitol building, saying video of the day’s violence looked to him like “a normal tourist visit.”

It wasn’t a tourist visit. Egged on by then-President Trump to “fight like hell,” hundreds of his supporters stormed the Capitol, many with the intent to commit acts of violence against lawmakers who refused to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) falsely claimed that Trump supporters were the real victims that day, citing the death of Trump supporter Ashley Babbitt, who was killed by a U.S. Capitol Police officer as she tried to enter the House chamber by climbing through a broken glass door.

“It was Trump supporters who lost their lives that day, not Trump supporters who were taking the lives of others,” Hice said. ( Rach3: DUH !! Capitol Police officer killed,many other officer seriously injured.)


Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), a white nationalist sympathizer whose own family disavowed him for helping to incite the riot, attempted to paint Babbitt as a “veteran wrapped in an American flag.” He also described the hundreds of insurrectionists arrested and charged by the FBI as “peaceful patriots” who are being “harassed.”

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), questioned whether the rioters were in fact Trump supporters. It echoes an easily debunked conspiracy theory that posits those who stormed the Capitol that day were actually anti-fascists attempting to make Trump supporters look bad.

Wednesday’s hearing signaled another dangerous shift for GOP lawmakers, who continue to deny the results of the 2020 election and now appear to be denying the reality of the insurrection. And Republican lawmakers unwilling to accept the “Big Lie” that former President Donald Trump continues to harp on will find themselves excommunicated from the party."

Also, Huffington:


"To underscore the wackiness, a Michigan lawmaker (GOP) has drafted the “Fact Checker Registration Act,” which would license fact checkers and require them to post a $1 million bond, which could be forfeited if they erred. Seems to me that instead of declaring war on fact checkers, these elements of the G.O.P. should make peace with facts."

Cedar Rapids Gazette today:


"Gov. Kim Reynolds is defending her decision to end additional federal unemployment benefits as part of a push to “lean further into normal.” Reynolds and business groups say the extra payments to unemployed Iowans are keeping them from taking new jobs at a time when businesses can’t find enough workers. She says there are more jobs open than people to fill them, which was true before the pandemic. When asked about the impact this could have on food banks, Reynolds said pre-pandemic benefits, food-assistance and rental assistance would still be available." Except as the Gov.knows, pre-pandemic such assistance was spotty,under-funded,largely volunteer, and totally inadequate, and now with hugely increased need as the result of the economic effects of the pandemic, it is fraudulent to claim "still available."

The GOP war on the poor recalls Stalin's attack on the peasants of Ukraine.

[Rach3]

What will you do when they come for you ?

Des Moines Public Schools Superintendent Tom Ahart's pandemic leadership may cost him his license. Here's why.

The Des Moines Public Schools superintendent is under fire for how his school district handled virtual and in-person learning during the coronavirus.

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story ... 133947001/

[maestrob]

The fact-free zone continues to expand in Iowa.

Never forget.

[Rach3]

From "Men Yell At Me" today:


" This week, both Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who are battling it out in the Olympics of worstness, passed laws making it impossible for schools to mandate masks. Then, they ended their legislative sessions and called it a day.

“This is about freedom and liberty!” say the governors of two of the states with very restrictive abortion laws. “This is about individual rights!” shout the lawmakers, who absolutely refuse to also let women make their own healthcare decisions and who get mad when trans students want to play sports or use the bathroom.

“We love the rule of law!” shouts a party that, at least in Iowa, also snuck in a bill to require that schools make students say the Pledge of Allegiance, completely ignoring the West Virginia v. Barnette Supreme Court ruling that actually exists outlawing the thing they just did.

“We uphold the dignity of human life!” shouts the party that supports the death penalty and apparently has no sense of irony.

The laws take effect immediately and come with just a little over a week left of school in both states. They aren’t necessary at all. Not in the slightest. The only thing these laws serve is to appease a Greek chorus of dingii who have cabbages for brains and hate science.


Listen, face masks limit the transmission of the flu. That is a fact.


Students under 12 are not being vaxxed. That is also a fact.


And maybe the number of kids dying from COVID-19 is too small for you. But over 43,000 children have lost parents to COVID and what we fully don’t understand is the role kids played in the transmission of the virus to their parents. Instead, what politicians have done is make children’s bodies ground zero in an ideological war over science, without measuring or caring about the costs.


In Iowa, reporting COVID cases in schools is not mandatory and even if it was, the amount of secrecy involved in infections and outbreaks would make it impossible to know. This year, as my kids have attended school, students have disappeared for weeks and returned, teachers have too. No COVID-19 reports. Just silences. Disappearances. And then, sudden returns. The head of my children’s school was in the hospital for almost a week with pneumonia. An otherwise healthy white man. Why? No one is saying.

I do believe children have First Amendment rights, but I also believe these must be balanced with a health crisis. Teachers should also have the right not to die from a deadly novel virus. Also, schools have dress codes. Those are apparently fine, but mask wearing isn’t? That’s because this is about control. Whose bodies get controlled? Whose bodies are allowed to breathe?

Nearly 600,000 people are dead. Dead.

Last week, when I was traveling, I heard a tour guide flippantly say of her city, “We have so many dead here, we just keep paving over them.” I think about how we are doing that now, with a mass extinction event. Just narratively paving over the realities of death and destruction and for what? Because you didn’t want to wear a piece of paper over your face for a bit?

History will not judge us well for the deaths we paved over... "

[maestrob]

Texas Pushes to Obscure the State’s History of Slavery and Racism

Texas is awash in bills aimed at fending off critical examinations of the state’s past.

By Simon Romero
May 20, 2021

Every morning, schoolchildren in Texas recite an oath to their state that includes the words, “I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God.”

Now, a flurry of proposed measures that could soon become law would promote even greater loyalty to Texas in the state’s classrooms and public spaces, as Republican lawmakers try to reframe Texas history lessons and play down references to slavery and anti-Mexican discrimination that are part of the state’s founding.

The proposals in Texas, a state that influences school curriculums around the country through its huge textbook market, amount to some of the most aggressive efforts to control the teaching of American history. And they come as nearly a dozen other Republican-led states seek to ban or limit how the role of slavery and pervasive effects of racism can be taught.

Idaho was the first state to sign into law a measure that would withhold funding from schools that teach such lessons. And lawmakers in Louisiana, New Hampshire and Tennessee have introduced bills that would ban teaching about the enduring legacies of slavery and segregationist laws, or that any state or the country is inherently racist or sexist.

“The idea that history is a project that’s decided in the political arena is a recipe for disaster,” said Raul Ramos, a historian at the University of Houston who specializes in the American West.

Some of the positioning is politics as usual in Texas, where activists have long organized to imbue textbooks with conservative leanings. An especially active Republican-controlled legislative session has advanced hard-line measures from a host of new voting restrictions to a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.


But the Texas history measures have alarmed educators, historians and activists who said they largely ignore the role of slavery and campaigns of anti-Mexican violence and would fail to educate a generation of students growing up in a state undergoing huge demographic shifts.

One measure that recently passed the Texas House, largely along party lines, would limit teacher-led discussions of current events; prohibit course credit for political activism or lobbying, which could include students who volunteer for civil rights groups; and ban teaching of The 1619 Project, an initiative by The New York Times that says it aims to reframe U.S. history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the national narrative.

The bill would also limit how teachers in Texas classrooms can discuss the ways in which racism influenced the legal system in the state, long a segregationist bastion, and the rest of the country. Another bill that sailed through the Texas House would create a committee to “promote patriotic education” about the state’s secession from Mexico in 1836, largely by men who were fighting to expand slavery. And a third bill would block exhibits at San Antonio’s Alamo complex from explaining that major figures in the Texas Revolution were slave owners.

Mr. Ramos questioned how the Texas Revolution, a six-month rebellion that concluded in the spring of 1836, could be associated with patriotism and freedom when the state’s new Constitution explicitly legalized slavery seven years after Mexico had abolished it.

“How do you have freedom when you have slavery?” Mr. Ramos asked. “Eighteen thirty-six values would have enslaved African-Americans in perpetuity.”

The quarreling over the proposed legislation is testing the limits of Texas exceptionalism, with some questioning whether a broad sense of pride among residents should mean glossing over some of the state’s most painful chapters.

The proposed laws have also stirred ideological battles over everything from the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, with Texas Republicans voting down a proposal that would have required schools to teach about the insurrection, to the immigration status of the white American enslavers who settled illegally in what was then northern Mexico before figuring among the state’s founders.


“Do you want our Texas kids to be taught that the system of government in the United States and Texas is nothing but a cover-up for white supremacy?” Steve Toth, a Republican legislator from the Houston suburbs, asked when he introduced the bill banning the teaching that the United States is defined by racism.

Texas mandates that students take courses on state history in the fourth and seventh grades, and some teachers have urged lawmakers to take a more nuanced look at the state’s complex history. Juan Carmona, the head of the social studies department at Donna High School in the Rio Grande Valley, said he was concerned about the chilling effect the proposed legislation could have on classroom discussions.

“It’s like you’re not wanting us to teach critical thinking because you want, ‘OK, these are the causes, the effects, that’s it,’” said Mr. Carmona, who was part of a 2018 effort that resulted in the long-sought implementation of a Mexican-American studies curriculum by the Texas State Board of Education.

Others have questioned the intent of a chauvinistic approach to civics and history in a state undergoing sweeping demographic shifts. Latinos are on the cusp of eclipsing Anglos as Texas’ largest ethnic group, and almost half of the state’s children are Hispanic.


“This kind of mythologizing can be really exclusionary for students not seeing themselves reflected in the curriculum,” said Maggie Stern, an organizer with the Texas office of the Children’s Defense Fund.

Over the past year, as several police killings thrust race into the national consciousness, some aspects of Texas history have come under strain.

Authorities removed a statue of a Texas Ranger from Dallas Love Field airport last year amid criticism of the Rangers’ involvement in lynchings of people of Mexican descent. The University of Texas recently changed the names of campus buildings in Austin and Arlington that honored avowed segregationists.

While the debates over some of the history bills have erupted into typical partisan arguments, including a “Texas Heroes Act” that is now before the Senate and initially sought to downplay how slavery was a driving force in the Texas Revolution, the proposed legislation to create an 1836 Project has received support from both Republicans and Democrats.

The bill drew inspiration from Donald J. Trump’s 1776 Commission, which similarly called for “patriotic education” about United States history. It was derided by scholars and canceled by President Biden on his first day in office.


The bill for The Texas 1836 Project, which is now before the State Senate, would empower the governor, lieutenant governor and house speaker — all Republicans — to appoint a nine-member committee to “increase awareness of the Texas values that continue to stimulate boundless prosperity across this state.”

The committee would ensure that “patriotic education” is provided to the public at state parks, monuments and museums. It would also create a pamphlet distributed to anyone getting a Texas driver’s license extolling facets of state history that “promote liberty and freedom for businesses and families.”

Republicans attached amendments to the bill requiring the project to also raise awareness of the state’s Christian heritage and its traditions of owning guns, while also acknowledging the Texas origins of the annual Juneteenth holiday that commemorates the emancipation of slaves.

Democrats were also allowed to amend the bill, and they added requirements to include the contributions to the state by people of Hispanic ancestry and the roles that Texans have played in bolstering voting rights since the 1960s. House lawmakers passed the bill by a margin of 124 to 19.

State Representative Chris Turner, a Democrat who submitted the amendments about voting rights, said he supported the legislation despite concerns that The Texas 1836 Project might “over-romanticize Texas history.”

Donald Frazier, a historian who is the director of the Texas Center at Schreiner University in Kerrville, said he supported the bill and saw it as “a reaction to the absolute lack of historical literacy of any kind.”

“There’s a lot to admire in Texas history and there’s a lot to cringe about,” said Mr. Frazier, who added that any honest telling of the state’s history would need to address issues like slavery. Key to The Texas 1836 Project would be the selection of the committee’s members.

“If they choose historians that are worth their salt, that are honest to their profession,” he said, “nobody’s going to have anything to worry about.”

Simon Romero is a national correspondent based in Albuquerque, covering immigration and other issues. He was previously the bureau chief in Brazil and in Caracas, Venezuela, and reported on the global energy industry from Houston.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/us/t ... oject.html

[maestrob]

How Hopes for a Bipartisan Jan. 6 Commission Fell Apart

A full accounting of the Capitol riot, with backing from both parties, is harder than ever to envision.


By Giovanni Russonello
Published May 20, 2021
Updated May 21, 2021, 7:09 a.m. ET

Republicans have so far shown neither a will nor a way to knock Donald Trump out of his position as the de facto leader of the party. And for the time being, that means they’re stuck blocking for him.

Just weeks ago, it looked as if a solid chunk of Republican legislators might be willing to support a commission to investigate the Capitol riot of Jan. 6.

Some establishment G.O.P. strategists and former lawmakers have said they see this as an opportunity to make a clean break with Trump (though, admittedly, we’ve heard that one before) by giving a full account of the role that he and his allies played in the events around the violence at the Capitol.

But just as the bill cleared the Democratically controlled House yesterday, with support from a small but significant minority of Republicans, the party’s leadership fell into step in opposition.

All of a sudden, it appears unlikely to pass the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to override the threat of a filibuster. It’s the latest sign, and possibly the clearest yet, that Trump retains an iron grip on the party’s direction. And that Senator Mitch McConnell’s old obstructionist approach — which he refined into an art form during the Obama presidency — may be the surest way to maintain it.


Republican lawmakers who fled for their lives as rioters stormed through the halls of Congress, including some who a few weeks ago argued that Trump must answer for his role in provoking the attack, are now against an investigation into it.

Just before the House’s vote yesterday, McConnell, the Republican leader, came out against the commission, painting it as a partisan maneuver just days after saying that he was open to starting one.

“I’ve made the decision to oppose the House Democrats’ slanted and unbalanced proposal for another commission to study the events of Jan. 6,” he said on the Senate floor, complaining that the deal reached in the House did not include an inquiry into left-wing violence.

It was a far cry from the harsh words McConnell dished out immediately after the Capitol attack, but this isn’t the first time the minority leader has swept in at the 11th hour to stop an action that could potentially lay bare Trump’s role in provoking the Jan. 6 uprising. In February, he waited until just before a vote on Trump’s second impeachment to state that he would oppose it, effectively ensuring the former president’s acquittal on charges stemming from Jan. 6.

In March, a Monmouth University poll found that a solid majority of Americans thought an independent commission should be set up to investigate the attacks, with just 37 percent preferring to let other “internal investigations” take care of things. Roughly half of Republicans favored a full independent inquiry.

But in the weeks since, Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits have coalesced as Trump has only tightened his grip on the party ahead of the 2022 midterms. A range of other polling shows that while Trump’s favorability ratings have slipped further among the country at large, he has retained widespread support from the Republican rank-and-file.

This month, House Republicans voted to remove Representative Liz Cheney from her post as conference chair because she had refused to stop criticizing Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. (Yesterday, she was one of the 35 House Republicans who voted in favor of the commission.) The party’s leadership is now firmly behind Trump’s distortions.

Commentators at the conservative fringe were already downplaying the Jan. 6 insurrection before the blood at the Capitol was dry, sometimes floating conspiracy theories to justify it. More recently, top Republicans have begun to draw more heavily on that narrative.

“The fact of the matter is even calling it insurrection, it wasn’t,” Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a staunch Trump ally, said on Fox News yesterday.

“By and large, it was peaceful protests, except for there were a number of people, basically agitators, that whipped the crowd and breached the Capitol.”

Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, denounced Johnson’s comments today on the Senate floor. “If there was ever a justification for creating a bipartisan commission to study and report on the truth behind the attack of Jan. 6, the comments of that senator provide it,” Schumer said. “Republicans in both chambers are trying to rewrite history in fealty to — or in fear of — the former president, Donald Trump.”

As envisioned, the inquiry would be modeled largely on the 9/11 Commission, which was approved with broad bipartisan support in 2002. Its work was roundly heralded upon its completion in 2004, and its leaders have endorsed the idea of a similar commission to investigate Jan. 6. This new inquiry would include 10 commissioners, appointed by both Democratic and Republican congressional leaders, and would be empowered to issue subpoenas. It would deliver findings by Dec. 31.

But, knowing that the party’s base remains committed to Trump, Republicans are aiming to portray the commission as partisan. In fact, this could become a self-fulfilling lament.

If the bipartisan commission fails to pass the Senate, Democratic committee leaders in both houses of Congress would still be able to investigate the events of Jan. 6.

And Democrats in the House are already threatening to take a no-holds-barred approach, through existing committees or by creating new select committees. Of course, such a strategy would play more neatly into Republicans’ argument that Democrats are pursuing a partisan investigation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/us/p ... e=Homepage

[Rach3]

You voted for Trump ? Your guys , like it or not:

" Michael Flynn says the coronavirus pandemic was made up to distract from the 2020 election.

The former Trump advisor said Friday he thinks COVID-19 was fabricated "to gain control" of society."

Flynn is a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory and pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI."

(Rach3: He actually pled guilty TWICE, then was pardoned by Trump.)

https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-trump ... 01883.html

[maestrob]

"This is my truth." Says Flynn.

This is the problem with Republicans. They think that they can make reality just by opening their mouths.

Never forget.

[Rach3]

Can't even figure out how to kill someone "humanely ", even when they agree to be killed.What a great Country.

Robert Barnes , WAPO
May 24, 2021 at 4:32 p.m. CDT


The Supreme Court on Monday refused to take up a case from a Missouri death row inmate seeking a firing squad instead of the lethal injection he said could lead to an excruciating death, drawing protests from the court’s liberals.

The court’s six conservatives did not explain the decision to keep Ernest Johnson from amending his lawsuit in a lower court to ask for execution by firing squad; such silence is not unusual.

But Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a withering dissent, saying the court was going back on its promise to let the condemned propose an alternative method of death when fearful that the state’s procedure would cause needless pain.

“Missouri is now free to execute Johnson in a manner that, at this stage of the litigation, we must assume will be akin to torture given his unique medical condition,” Sotomayor wrote on behalf of herself and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan.

Johnson, who killed three people during a robbery in 1994, suffers from epilepsy as a result of a brain tumor and then damage caused by surgery to remove it. He contends that he will experience excruciating seizures if Missouri executes him by lethal injection of the drug pentobarbital, a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
A lower court upheld Missouri’s refusal to execute him by nitrogen gas, a method authorized by state law. And it said Johnson could not amend his lawsuit to request a firing squad, which is not authorized by Missouri but has been used elsewhere.


“In other words, he asks that the courts decide between an execution that is ‘cruel’ and one that is ‘unusual,’ ” Breyer wrote.

Missouri told the Supreme Court that it should not allow additional legal maneuvering from Johnson, which it said was simply an attempt to delay his execution.


Breyer noted that a firing squad has been used only once since 1913. But some states are considering it as it becomes increasingly difficult for them to obtain the drugs used for lethal injections.

South Carolina this month passed a law saying death row inmates should choose between a firing squad and the electric chair should the drugs for lethal injection be unavailable.

South Carolina could force death row inmates to choose between electric chair, firing squad
Johnson’s execution was delayed by the Supreme Court in 2015, and he has been fighting the use of lethal injection since.

In 2016, he asked to be executed by nitrogen gas. But the Supreme Court subsequently ruled in another case from Missouri — Bucklew v. Precythe — that the state could not be forced to use a method without a proven record of success and said the Constitution did not require that executions be pain-free.

So the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit ruled against Johnson. And when he tried to then amend his suit to ask for a firing squad, the court said his request came too late. That is the decision the Supreme Court declined to review Monday.

Sotomayor said Johnson’s request was not unreasonable.
“Although not authorized in Missouri, the firing squad has a long history of successful use,” she wrote. She noted that the court said in Bucklew that an inmate suggesting another method of execution was not limited to those authorized by the state.

“Indeed, during oral arguments in Bucklew, Missouri itself suggested the firing squad as an available alternative,” Sotomayor wrote.

It takes four justices to grant a case, and Sotomayor indicated that she thought Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh should have joined the three others.

She noted that in Bucklew, he wrote a concurring opinion clarifying that an inmate suggesting an alternative method of execution did not have to suggest one already authorized by the state. And Kavanaugh wrote: “An inmate who contends that a particular method of execution is very likely to cause him severe pain should ordinarily be able to plead some alternative method of execution that would significantly reduce the risk of severe pain.”

“Johnson seeks only to take Bucklew up on that promise,” Sotomayor wrote. “Denying him leave to amend his complaint under these circumstances renders this Court’s words an empty gesture.”

The case is Johnson v. Precythe.

[maestrob]

The very definition of cruel and unusual punishment. Don't know why conservatives seem to lack a sense of common humanity, but they seem intent on proving the point over and over.

[Rach3]

From AxiosAM today:

Texas is set to remove one of its last major gun restrictions after the Republican-dominated legislature voted to allow people to carry handguns without a license, background check or training, AP reports.

Gov. Greg Abbott (R) says he'll sign it, despite objections by law enforcement groups, which say it'll endanger the public and police.

Gun control groups note the state’s recent history of mass shootings.

The big picture: Texas will become the 21st state, and by far the most populous, to allow some form of unregulated carry of a handgun, the NRA — which strongly supports the measures — told Reuters.

Gun-rights advocates call it a "constitutional carry" law.

( Rach3 : Stay the hell out of Texas ! )

------------

From NYT today :

Florida will fine social media companies that permanently bar political candidates, a response to Facebook’s and Twitter’s suspensions of Donald Trump.

------------

Rudy tried to interfere in the Arizona " audit " :

https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/rudy-giu ... 22189.html

[maestrob]

The insanity continues.

I certainly have no plans to travel to any Republican controlled states as things go from bad to worse there.

This is how democracy dies, not because of vast schemes or plots but by the accumulated small acts of cowardice.

Note that Republican leaders are finally denouncing MTG's holocaust remark about mask wearing in the House chamber after 5 days.

Sheep and lemmings with no idea how to govern.

Never forget.

[Rach3]

" Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican under federal investigation for alleged sex trafficking, suggested Thursday that followers should use their Second Amendment rights against social media companies that silence conservatives.

“The internet’s hall monitors out in Silicon Valley, they think they can suppress us, discourage us,” he said at a rally in Dalton, Georgia, co-hosted by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). “Well you know what? Silicon Valley can’t cancel this movement, or this rally, or this congressman. We have a Second Amendment in this country, and I think we have an obligation to use it.”

https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/matt-gae ... 05966.html


"About one-quarter of Republicans, 23%, agree with a set of conspiratorial beliefs linked to the QAnon movement, according to a PRRI report released Thursday. These believers said they mostly or completely agreed that "the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation," that "there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders," and, finally, that "because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country ",....

A majority of Republicans, 56%, say they believe that the 2020 election was the result of illegal voting or election rigging, per an Ipsos/Reuters poll released last week, with about 6 in 10 agreeing with the statement that "the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump." Republicans also say, 54% to 30%, that they agree with the myth that the January 6 riot at the US Capitol "was led by violent left-wing protestors trying to make Trump look bad."

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/28/politics ... index.html

[Rach3]

Your GOP "friends " enable this.Rep.Greene's Mexican slur:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/marjorie ... s-politics

[Rach3]

Your GOP "friends " enable this.Rep.Greene's Mexican slur:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/marjorie ... s-politics

And enable moron Santorum. Video here:

https://twitter.com/FullFrontalSamB/sta ... 8954505216

[barney]

the lobotomy party. If you met one of them in the street and started chatting, I wonder how long it would take for their insanity to emerge. 23% support QAnon? they really have surrendered their brains.

[Rach3]

the lobotomy party. If you met one of them in the street and started chatting, I wonder how long it would take for their insanity to emerge. 23% support QAnon? they really have surrendered their brains.

Indeed, but I'd counsel against chatting as they would probably be carrying a gun.

[maestrob]

the lobotomy party. If you met one of them in the street and started chatting, I wonder how long it would take for their insanity to emerge. 23% support QAnon? they really have surrendered their brains.

Indeed, but I'd counsel against chatting as they would probably be carrying a gun.

Not to mention an unregistered weapon of mass destruction.

[barney]

the lobotomy party. If you met one of them in the street and started chatting, I wonder how long it would take for their insanity to emerge. 23% support QAnon? they really have surrendered their brains.

Indeed, but I'd counsel against chatting as they would probably be carrying a gun.

Yes, and I've got exactly the sort of big mouth that would lead them to use it.

[Rach3]

Maybe she will sell the "trucker hats coming soon" so we can more easily identify these types.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/29/us/demon ... index.html

[Rach3]

From NYT today:

By Charlotte Alter
Ms. Alter is a senior correspondent at Time and the author of “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America.”

Once upon a time, a shiny new trio of young conservatives — Ryan Costello, Carlos Curbelo and Elise Stefanik — wanted to help build a modern, millennial Republican Party. The 30-somethings, all sworn into Congress in 2015, understood that millennials often agreed on many of the nation’s core problems, and believed it was up to them to offer conservative solutions. They were out to create a new G.O.P. for the 21st century.

“Whether it’s environmental policy or immigration policy, the younger generations are more open to the America of tomorrow,” Mr. Curbelo told me in 2018, when I interviewed him for a book about millennial political leaders. “We certainly have a lot of work to do on all those issues. The good news is that we have a lot of younger Republicans in Congress, and they all get it.”

It was clear, even then, that millennial voters across the political spectrum cared more about issues like racial diversity, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and college affordability than their parents did. Polls showed that young Republicans were more moderate on some issues than older ones, particularly on questions of immigration and climate change.

So Mr. Curbelo and Ms. Stefanik teamed up to fight for immigration reform, particularly for protections for young immigrants. They refused to join the right wing’s fight against marriage equality, likely recognizing that most young people embraced L.G.B.T.Q. rights. And Ms. Stefanik introduced a 2017 resolution, along with Mr. Costello and Mr. Curbelo, calling for American innovation to fight climate change — one of the strongest climate change statements to come out of the Republican Party in years. (Some octogenarian Republicans remained skeptical of climate science; just two years earlier, Senator Jim Inhofe brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to prove that global warming was a hoax.)

But their visions of the “America of tomorrow” hadn’t foreseen Donald Trump.

By 2018, Mr. Trump’s antics had helped lead Mr. Costello to opt for early retirement. That fall Mr. Curbelo, a sharp critic of the president, lost his re-election bid. Mia Love, the only Black Republican woman in Congress, was also defeated in the Democratic wave that year. Another young House Republican, Justin Amash, left the party in the face of Trumpism and dropped his bid for re-election in 2020. And Will Hurd, a young moderate and one of the few Black Republicans in the House in recent years, also decided not to run again.


Ms. Stefanik is one of the few of this set who survived, but only by transforming into a MAGA warrior. By 2020, she was co-chairing Mr. Trump’s campaign and embracing his conspiracy theories about a stolen election. Her pivot paid off: This month, she was elected to the No. 3 position in the House Republican Party. She is now the highest-ranking woman and most powerful millennial in the House G.O.P.


But a comparison of her past goals and present ambitions makes clear that Ms. Stefanik has morphed from optimist to operator, choosing short-term power over the long-term health of her party.

When I interviewed Ms. Stefanik in 2018 and 2019, she seemed to understand that the Republican Party was in trouble with young people. “The G.O.P. needs to prioritize reaching out to younger voters,” she told me. “Millennials bring a sense of bipartisanship and really rolling up our sleeves and getting things done.” Now she has tied her political career to the man who has perhaps done more than any other Republican to drive young voters away from her party, resulting in surging youth turnout for Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

Ms. Stefanik’s rise — and her colleagues’ fall — is not just a parable of Trumpism. It’s a broader omen for a party struggling to reach a 21st-century electorate. She ascended by embracing a movement that is all about relitigating the past rather than welcoming the future. Now she and other new Trump loyalists in Congress are caught between their party and their generations, stuck between their immediate ambitions and the long-term trends. The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating their hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.

Of course, the road to political obsolescence is littered with the bones of political analysts like me who predicted that demographics would be destiny. But Mr. Trump didn’t just devastate the G.O.P.’s fledgling class of up-and-coming talent. He also rattled the already precarious loyalty of young Republican voters; from December 2015 to March 2017, nearly half of Republicans under 30 left the party, according to Pew. Many returned, but by 2017, nearly a quarter of young conservatives had defected.

Millennials and Gen Zers were already skeptical of the G.O.P., but Mr. Trump alienated them even further. His campaign of white grievance held little appeal for the two most racially diverse generations in U.S. history. Youth voter turnout was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, with 60 percent of young voters picking Joe Biden. His youth vote margin was sufficient to put him over the top in key states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, according to an analysis by Tufts University, and young voters of color were particularly energized.

Contrary to conventional wisdom that young people are always liberal and older people are always conservative, most voters form their political attitudes when they’re young and tend to stay roughly consistent as they age. And anti-Trumpism may now be one of the most durable political values of Americans under 50. By the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, after the Jan. 6 insurrection, almost three-quarters of Americans under 50 said they strongly disapproved of him. Even young Republicans were cooling off: According to a new CBS poll, Republicans under 30 were more than twice as likely as those older than 44 to believe that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and roughly twice as likely to believe the party shouldn’t follow Mr. Trump’s lead on race issues.

“Younger conservatives aren’t focused on the election being stolen or the cultural sound bites,” said Benji Backer, the president of the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative climate action group. He told me that Ms. Stefanik had “distanced herself from the youth conservation movement,” after years of being one of the most climate-conscious Republicans in Congress. Now, he said, “peddling misinformation about the election and Jan. 6 has made it harder for young people to look up to her as a future voice in the party.”

The new G.O.P. of 2015 has been replaced by a newer G.O.P.: a cohort of young Republican leaders who seem far more concerned with owning the libs on social media than with proposing conservative solutions to issues that matter to young people.

This cohort includes millennials like Representative Matt Gaetz and Representative Lauren Boebert as well as Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Gen Z-er, all Trump loyalists who voted to overturn the electoral vote result. Mr. Gaetz introduced a bill to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency, Ms. Boebert introduced a bill to designate antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” and Mr. Cawthorn has so embraced the Trumpian ethos of rhetoric as leadership that he once said he “built my staff around comms rather than legislation.”

It’s clear that this version of the Republican Party is firmly the party of old people: Mr. Gaetz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked off their America First tour with a Trumpian rally at the Villages, Florida’s famous retirement community.

Once, the young leaders of the G.O.P. were trying to present next-generation solutions to next-generation problems. Now they’ve traded their claim on the future for an obsession with the past.

[maestrob]

Whatever. They simply cannot win with this strategy, and they know it, thus the hard core of desperation in their fevered ranting and raging.

You always know who is losing the argument in the room: it's the loudest voice.

Never forget.

[Rach3]

Find your "representative " and express your view:

The 139 GOP who voted to coverup the GOP's and Trump's role in the Jan. insurrection:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/republic ... s-politics

[maestrob]

Find your "representative " and express your view:

The 139 GOP who voted to coverup the GOP's and Trump's role in the Jan. insurrection:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/republic ... s-politics

Cowardly traitors all.

This is how democracy dies, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

[Rach3]

Turning Child Care Into a New Cold War
June 5, 2021

By Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist,NYT

For a country brimming with “pro-family” politicians, the United States sure is a tough place to raise a family.

We Americans like to think “We’re No. 1,” but one recent study found that the United States was the second worst out of 35 industrialized countries as a place for families. We ranked behind Bulgaria. Behind Chile.

Now we have a historic chance to support children and families, for President Biden’s American Families Plan proposes programs such as high-quality day care and pre-K that are routine elsewhere in the world. You might think that the “pro-family” Republican Party would be eager to translate platitudes into practical help. But you’d be wrong.

“You know who else liked universal day care?” tweeted Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican. She cited the old Soviet Union, apparently suggesting that there is something Communist about day care, and falsely claimed that participation would be mandatory under the Biden plan.J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” warned, “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people.” Senator Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican, denounced efforts “to put Washington even more in the middle of your life, from the cradle to college.” Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, railed at “lefty social engineering.”In Idaho, a Republican state representative, Charlie Shepherd, explained that he was against a day care measure because “that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child.” He later apologized because his remarks “sounded” sexist.


This is sad because the G.O.P. is right to hail the importance of family. Having loving, supportive parents who read to children, hug them and help them with homework — that’s crucial for kids. One University of Minnesota study found that maternal attachment at age 3 was a better predictor of high school graduation than I.Q.

So Republicans are correct that healthy families make a healthy nation. Democrats sometimes are too reluctant to acknowledge the toll of dysfunctional families, for fear of blaming the poor for their poverty, but it’s difficult to have a serious conversation about improving opportunity and equity in the United States without acknowledging the complicated problems in many homes.

Some eight million American children — roughly one in eight — live with a parent with a substance abuse problem. Millions more live in a household with domestic violence. Others are latchkey kids who look after younger siblings because parents are working and no day care is affordable.
Editors’ Picks

Families desperately need help. In other countries, they get it. In the United States, they get empty homilies about the importance of family.

As a poorer nation in World War II, the United States could afford to operate an excellent day care program to enable moms and dads to hold jobs in the war economy. A follow-up study found that children in that wartime day care went on to enjoy higher high school and college graduation rates and earned more money as adults.

As of 2019, only 34 percent of American 4-year-olds attended state-funded preschool, and an important new study underscores why America needs national high-quality pre-K. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Boston offered public programs for 4-year-olds but couldn’t meet demand, so a lottery was used to determine which children to accept.

Scholars have now found that the long-term effects of this random assignment were enormous. Children who had been accepted into pre-K were 18 percent more likely to enter college on time. They were more likely to graduate from high school and get better SAT scores, and were less likely to be incarcerated while in high school and disciplined as often. Effects were particularly strong for boys.

This new study is part of an enormous body of research showing that the greatest leverage we have to help people may be early in life, as brains are developing.

Skeptics say early childhood programs are expensive. Sure — but poorer countries can afford them. And educational failure and juvenile delinquency are even more costly, and also undermine American competitiveness around the world.

Senators say they care about crime. Well, here’s a way to reduce juvenile crime: Offer high-quality pre-K. They say they want to help young people attend college. So back the Biden plan for pre-K. In other words, this isn’t spending, but high-return investment.

It’s odd that Republicans perceive early childhood programs as a Democratic plot. One of the best states for early childhood programs is Republican Oklahoma, and Oklahomans don’t see pre-K as Communist but as common sense: If you don’t invest in children at the front end, you pay at the back end.

Biden’s effort to slash child poverty and create systems for day care and pre-K could be historic. It’s the most important policy issue of 2021. These initiatives would do for children and families what Social Security and Medicare did for the elderly.

So, please, Republicans, come to your senses: Helping children isn’t the first step to Communism. It’s a step to strengthening America’s families, and thus to strengthening America.

[maestrob]

When i was attending Villanova as an undergraduate, my mother suffered a series of spinal strokes which left her paralyzed from the waist down during my freshman year. Already stressed by having to work a job to pay for my car and other expenses, I was suddenly at the tender age of 18, forced to assume the duties of head of household, by taking care of her AND my severely retarded (we now say autistic) brother. I went to class, worked at night, and somehow managed to keep mother out of a home and prepare her insulin injections twice a day, all without any help from family members.

I nearly flunked out of school that year, and had to plead with my professors to give me passing grades in order to continue my education. They did, and I will always be grateful for their kindness, but the psychic toll of having to do all of that with no help probably caused my current disability due to a rare sleep disorder.

How different my life would have been if there had been even one pair of willing hands during the four years before she died at the terribly young age of 51.

Young couples today must work two jobs in order just to afford a mortgage and two cars. No wonder so many are putting off or even refusing to have kids, yet Republicans bemoan the lack of births to replace their white constituents.

Please!

Just another example of the destructive and pathological cruelty of Republican economics.

[barney]

That is such a sad story, Brian. Is it still the same today?
In Australia and New Zealand we have government-funded carers and/or nurses who come to the home to shower, dress, administer medication etc to people who need it. Of course there aren't enough of the carers, and our ageing population is going to stretch resources, but it's a good policy.

[Rach3]

In Australia and New Zealand we have government-funded carers and/or nurses who come to the home to shower, dress, administer medication etc to people who need it.

Fortunately,my wife does not read CMG or she might be making arrangements now to have me shipped off to Alice Springs when my time arrives.