Rubio SEN 2

SEE THREE 3 SOS 25 USAID WH AMBUSH SHAME

sort of bak, 2/19

no merri

LCV 7%

veepstakes 7 24

an 3 25

An executive at USAID, the foreign aid agency in the process of being dismantled, was placed on administrative leave after sending memos criticizing the Trump administration’s cuts, Sam Stein writes Monday at the Bulwark. Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID, was showing the consequences of the Trump administration was not honoring its promise to exclude life saving foreign aid.

“Enrich had authored two memos, both dated February 28, 2025,” Stein writes. “One noted the dramatic staff reductions that had taken place at the Bureau for Global Health, whose workforce had gone from 783 ‘encumbered’ positions to 69 personnel ‘that received Essential Personnel Designations, of which 15 received RIF letters.’ In the other, Enrich identified ‘72 activities across 31 awards’ that had been approved for waivers by Secretary of State Marco Rubio but for which no payments had been released. He said the death toll from this was ‘not known.’”

In a third unfinished memo, which Stein called, "more alarming than the other two," Enrich outlined consequences of a stop to $7.7 billion in global health aid. This could lead to “12.5–17.9 million cases of malaria with an additional 71,000–166,000 deaths annually, a 28 to 32 percent increase in tuberculosis globally, an additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases a year, and potentially more than 28,000 cases of Ebola, Marburg, or related diseases.” In addition, nearly 17 million pregnant women would lose out on lifesaving programs.

He noted that these cuts could affect global trade. They could also cause job losses for American farmers providing food to send overseas. Finally, he pointed out that risk of preventable diseases would reach the U.S.

Ending these programs, he said, could pose risks for national security. “Weakened disease surveillance doesn’t only jeopardize natural outbreak detection — it also creates openings for malicious actors,” Enrich wrote. “Global health monitoring systems serve as the ‘smoke alarm’ for unusual disease patterns that could signal a bioterrorism event. If those alarms are switched off or muted due to lack of funding, a deliberate release of a pathogen could spread for weeks under the guise of a normal outbreak.”

Enrich was aware that the memos would have repercussions for his own career. “He knew sending those would result in discipline and the end of his career (at USAID), but also sending those ‘for the record’ ensured that the world had a light on what was really going on,” a source told the Bulwark.

“How much good will come of this is the larger question,” Stein writes. “It’s fair to be skeptical. That said, there is some precedent for people using public pressure to compel DOGE and Trump to reverse their decisions to shutter critical programs. Over the weekend, Elon Musk took to Twitter to try and shame folks for insisting that 400,000 boxes of USAID-branded nutrient-rich, peanut-based paste were languishing in a warehouse because of the aid pause. But he also pledged to look into it. And then he reported back that the payments for those shipments had been restored — which, by late Sunday night,they had been.”

scotus stay order to release $

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During his years in the U.S. Senate, now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio was a strong supporter of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — which he viewed as a valuable asset from a foreign policy standpoint. Rubio and Senate Democrats had plenty of disagreements, but they agreed that foreign aid via USAID did a lot to advance the United States' interests abroad.

But now, USAID is a major target of the Trump Administration and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Experiencing mass layoffs, USAID is being gutted by MAGA Republicans. Axios reported that 92 percent of foreign assistance grants were being "axed."

According to NOTUS reporter Haley Byrd Wilt, spending Rubio approved as secretary of state was blocked by DOGE staffers. And some GOP lawmakers are crying foul.

Wilt, in an article published on February 27, reports, "Republicans love Elon Musk's plans to slash government spending, but they're not quite as thrilled at how a set of unelected bureaucrats is carrying it out — or how those new staffers are defying Senate-confirmed Cabinet secretaries in the process.

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio approved foreign aid programs he deemed critical to American interests, two Department of Government Efficiency employees canceled the spending instead. The Washington Post reported that those DOGE employees have access to the payment system and manually blocked the funding, including money for Ukraine and HIV treatment programs — prompting pushback from Republicans on Capitol Hill."

One of the GOP lawmakers who is speaking out is Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee).

Burchett told NOTUS, "I have problems with that. I have problems that they have access to that. If it was a mistake, I get it. But if it wasn't, they need to be fired."

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) isn't happy either.

The conservative senator told NOTUS that when it comes to the U.S. State Department, "I consider Marco Rubio to be the head chef." And Tillis described the DOGE block on funding Rubio approved as "a natural consequence of a lot of cooks in the kitchen."

Tillis argued, "Now that Marco is confirmed and in place, there should be nobody in the (Trump) Administration — outside of the president of the United States or at the direction of the president — that should pause, delay or cancel anything Marco thinks is in our best national interest."

Marco Rubio facing major disadvantage in key meeting with high-ranking official: retired Army general

'Bloodbath by design': Trump’s Russia negotiators criticized for 'almost no experience'

an 2 25 see zelen anno ukraine talks, trump funder?

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NOTE STRAIGHT NEWS SLING BS

MMA

Right-wing media want you to think stopping infectious diseases and feeding the poor is woke

Written by Gideon Taaffe

Research contributions from Jack Wheatley

Published 02/11/25 MMA

Right-wing media are focused on culture war battles as the Trump administration suspends lifesaving work from the U.S. Agency for International Development, cherry-picking USAID programs to dismiss the agency as “woke,” “radical,” and “overwhelmingly hard left.” In reality, USAID is responsible for providing health care and nutritional aid to thousands of the world’s vulnerable people, many living in war-torn regions.

The Trump administration has sought to put a halt to USAID’s operations

- On February 4, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that USAID was now under the direct authority of the State Department, and the administration froze U.S. foreign aid.Rubio placed Pete Marocco in charge of USAID; he served in the agency during Trump’s first term and has been accused of attempting to dismantle it during his tenure. CNN, [2/3/25]

- Following Rubio’s takeover, 10,000 USAID employees were placed on administrative leave, and a couple days later the Trump administration announced plans to leave fewer than 300 workers in place to carry out the organization’s work. A judge put a temporary pause on some of the Trump administration’s job cutting, resulting in 2,200 employees being reinstated but with uncertain futures at the agency. USA Today,[2/4/25; The Associated Press, 2/6/25; NBC News, 2/7/25]

- USAID workers in high-risk locations have reported being cut off from communication and were left unsure of how to access evacuation protocols. Employees of USAID are also facing interruptions to medical care and housing insecurity. Bluesky, [2/7/25]

- Rubio claimed he had issued a blanket waiver for lifesaving programs, but workers on the ground have said that operations have come to a halt. While some programs have been granted a waiver to continue under Rubio, many have lost access to supplies, and payments to contractors that are covered by the waiver have not come through. That has affected emergency food aid in Ethiopia, a refugee camp in Syria, a resettlement program for victims of the Islamic State group, and more. One USAID worker told CNN, “That work is grounded to a halt because there’s no staff to manage it, and there’s no staff in DC to answer questions from partners.” The Washington Post, [2/10/25; CNN, 2/8/25]

## The Trump administration’s antics have prevented USAID from providing critical aid to some of the world’s most vulnerable people

- The freeze impacted the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which has been credited with saving more than 25 million lives and reducing AIDS-related deaths by 68% since 2004.Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, told The Associated Press that even short interruptions in care could have negative outcomes, as “HIV viral loads rebound in about three weeks if you go off antiretrovirals.” The initial freeze to USAID has already sparked confusion among PEPFAR workers and local partners as appointments are canceled. The Associated Press, [2/3/25; AVAC, 2/8/23; The New York Times, 1/27/25]

- As a result of the USAID freeze, thousands of people in medical trials for dealing with HIV and other illnesses have been left adrift, with their treatments suddenly stopped or with medical equipment in their bodies. The New York Times, [2/6/25]

- The freeze will also impact millions of dollars in aid that is being used to help those in war zones dealing with infectious diseases.The Associated Press reported that 1.2 million people in Congo could lose lifesaving support and 600,000 people in Sudan will be at risk of catching and spreading cholera, malaria, and measles. The Associated Press, [2/3/25]

- Defunding USAID also hurts American farms that sell products to the organization for disbursement via its nutrition programs.According to The Washington Post, “Purchases and shipments of U.S. food aid worth over $340 million — including rice, wheat and soybeans — have been paused during Trump’s foreign-aid freeze.” The Post also reports that the aid freeze “disrupted more than 507,000 metric tons of American food aid.” The Washington Post, [2/6/25]

- The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a USAID program that helps aid programs determine where to send resources, has also been shut down. An analyst specializing in food insecurity told Reuters, “Famine was disappearing from the world in the 2000s, and now its return will likely accelerate as we become increasingly blind to it, even as it becomes a more common tool of politics and war.” Reuters, [2/6/25]

## Right-wing media have dismissed USAID as a “woke” left-wing “slush fund”

- Fox & Friends Weekendco-host Rachel Campos-Duffy claimed USAID is “not aid like you would imagine,” like “setting up soup kitchens in Africa.”She claimed it’s a “slush fund for Democrat donors, the Clinton Foundation, George Soros, all of the NGOs who have been doing stuff that American people never voted for them to do.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends’ Weekend*, [2/9/25]

- Fox News contributor Ben Domenech claimed USAID has “not been acting in the interests of the American people or the United States for a very long time” and is instead enacting a “woke agenda.” Fox News, *Sunday Night in America*, [2/9/25]

- Podcast host Megyn Kelly dismissed USAID as an organization that seems to give money to “woke” projects like “LGBTQ and that kind of promotional stuff.” Kelly also said it “appears” that USAID employees are “overwhelmingly hard left.” iHeartRadio, *The Megyn Kelly Show*, [2/5/25]

- On Fox, former podcast host Vivek Ramaswamy claimed USAID funds are “not even going to help starving children in Africa,” adding that it was a “smokescreen.” He claimed that instead foreign aid is being used to push “progressive ideas, LGBTQ+ agendas, woke and DEI agendas, onto foreign countries.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [2/5/25]

- Newsmax’sFinnertyran a chyron reading “USAID funded some ridiculous causes.”Guest and former Trump deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley criticized USAID’s operations, calling them “crazy, ridiculous programs.” Newsmax, *Finnerty*, [2/5/25]

- Fox’s Sean Hannity said everything USAID does is “radical DEI, woke, transgender, you know, leftist, Green New Deal madness.”Premiere Radio Networks, *The Sean Hannity Show*, [2/4/25]

- On Fox News’The Five, Jesse Watters claimed USAID is a “slush fund for social justice warriors and permanent Washington to bribe people, staff people at NGOs, and just create hell.”Fox News, *The Five*, [2/4/25]

## Others in right-wing media have bizarrely claimed USAID’s critical work will continue despite the Trump administration’s efforts to gut the agency

- Jesse Watters claimed saving babies from getting AIDS in Africa is “still going to happen once they look at everything and get this thing streamlined.”Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [2/7/25]

- Fox News anchor Bret Baier claimed that Marco Rubio is not against critical foreign aid, but he is going to “scrub what is real and what is not.”His guest, Republican strategist Matt Whitlock, agreed and said that “so much of what we have seen” is “exporting a social agenda.” Fox News, *Special Report with Bret Baier*, [2/7/25]

- Fox News anchor John Roberts claimed that Marco Rubio will “continue with the good that USAID does.” Roberts: “The Democrats are literally losing their minds over all of this, saying that Elon Musk is gutting U.S. foreign policy. But Rubio is saying, ‘No no, we’re going to continue with the good stuff that USAID does. We’re just going to get rid of what we think is the wasteful spending that has been engaged in and the insubordination of the entire agency.’” Fox News, *America Reports*, [2/7/25]

- Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner falsely claimed, “No one is talking about taking the food and taking the things for people who actually need those things away.”She added, “Who doesn't audit? It’s been years. We need to know where that money is going. And some of it is going to terrorist organizations.” Fox News, *The Faulkner Focus*, [2/6/25]

- OutKick columnist Mary Katherine Ham claimed the frozen funds were just getting “audited.” Ham: “We're told that waste, fraud, and abuse is such a small percentage of the federal government's budget, and should be easy to deal with, given that. And yet we're also told that that small slice of the federal government is the end of democracy if you start auditing it.” Fox News, *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, [2/5/25]

===

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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is facing backlash after criticizing charity workers and nonprofit organizations striving to deliver essential, lifesaving supplies—humanitarian aid such as food and medicine—to those in desperate need. According to The Washington Post, Secretary Rubio went so far as to suggest that these organizations are intentionally obstructing their own efforts to score a “political point.”

“Secretary Rubio blamed aid groups for failing to navigate Trump’s freeze on foreign aid, saying they are either too incompetent to apply for exemptions or deliberately sabotaging their work to make a ‘political point,'” Washington Post diplomacy and national security reporter John Hudson wrote.

“I issued a blanket waiver that said, if this is life saving programs … if it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives … you’re not included in the freeze,” Rubio told reporters (video below), according to Hudson. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.”

The U.S. Secretary of State “added that if an aid group [is] receiving funds from the United States and “does not know how to apply a waiver, then I have real questions about the competence of that organization -or I wonder whether they’re deliberately sabotaging it for purposes of making a political point.”

Experts sharply criticized Secretary Rubio, suggesting he failed to grasp that while aid groups can apply for waivers, those applications cannot be reviewed or approved if no one is working at USAID.

Rubio was made acting head of USAID by President Donald Trump. USAID is expected to be folded into the U.S. State Department, although experts question the legality of such a move.

Derek Martin is the founder of Pathfinder Research. He previously conducted “supply chain counterintelligence at the National Security Agency (NSA), where he further developed his investigative skills and protected critical government IT infrastructure from foreign threats.”

Pointing to a Politico article that reports the Trump administration is putting “thousands” of USAID employees on “forced leave,” Martin responded to Rubio’s remarks by saying: “Might be hard to apply for waivers with all agency staff on forced leave.”

Politico also cited a senior USAID official who “said the agency’s human resources department said in a meeting Tuesday morning that it had already revoked system access for more than 1,400 staffers — an indication that many more are being put on leave than those previously announced.”

“That’s in addition to hundreds of USAID contractors who have been laid off or furloughed in recent weeks. The contractors lost their jobs in part due to an ongoing freeze on foreign aid imposed by President Donald Trump and his aides, who are making moves to fold USAID into the State Department.”

Dylan Williams, Vice President for Government Affairs at the Center for International Policy, noted that “Trump put out overbroad orders that Rubio failed to coherently operationalize, resulting in mass confusion at nearly every point in the aid supply chain — and now Rubio is calling those trying to make sense of it incompetent or malicious.”

Refugees International president Jeremy Konyndyk served in both the Obama and Biden administrations in senior USAID positions, including “as USAID’s lead official for COVID-19,” according to his bio:

“He oversaw USAID’s multi-billion-dollar COVID-19 assistance portfolio, led the design and implementation of the administration’s Global VAX initiative, and coordinated the U.S. government’s global donations of hundreds of millions of vaccine doses. He later served as the administration’s lead official for the global MPox response. He also served on the Biden-Harris transition teams for the Departments of State and Health and Human Services.”

“A very cheap shot by Rubio to accuse the NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] of politicizing this, when the breakdowns are in fact coming from the (willful?) dysfunction within the administration,” Konyndyk charged.

He also called Rubio’s remarks a “very damning admission,” and said it “makes clear he’s blind to what’s happening on his watch.”

“Why aren’t waivers going through? Because @USAID staff (not by the NGOs) have to request them case-by-case from State, and DOGE has now purged all those personnel.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

IFrame Content

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USAID, the nation’s primary distributor of foreign aid, remains in DOGE purgatory. Elon Musk says President Donald Trump has agreed to shut it down, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the agency will be absorbed by the State Department.

Rubio on Monday tapped State Department Director of Foreign Assistance Pete Marocco to take over USAID. Marocco, a former Trump appointee and longtime critic of USAID, was pushed out of the agency during Trump’s first term. He also was allegedly photographed storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

According to NBC News, in 2023 “online sleuths who aided the FBI in cases against hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters identified Marocco and his now-wife as being among the rioters who stormed the Capitol in 2021.” The online group Sedition Hunters — which worked to identify participants in the Capitol riot using open source research and facial recognition technology — alleged in November that Marocco and his wife, Merritt Corrigan, entered the Capitol during the riot through a broken window. The pair were allegedly identified using their clothing, jewelry, and the facial recognition software PimEyes. In a November statement to *D Magazine*, Marocco did not address questions about his alleged participation in the attempted insurrection, but claimed that he was being subjected to “petty smear tactics and desperate personal attacks by politicians with no solutions.”

Marocco was never charged with offenses related to the assault on the Capitol.

The Trump loyalist had a tumultuous career in various foreign policy jobs during the president’s first administration. Marocco was reportedly ousted from jobs at the Department of Defense, State Department, and Department of Commerce after clashing with coworkers and officials.

In 2020, high-level USAID officials wrote a 13-page memo scorching Marocco — then an assistant to the administrator at the USAID Office of Transition Initiatives — accusing him of leveraging his position to benefit his personal political goals over the agency’s mandate. Marocco would frequently “re-litigate decisions or commitments, revoke long-delegated authorities in favor of his personal control, or both,” the memo read, adding that he “has leveraged once-routine administrative processes to reopen previously-approved plans, interrogate and redirect country programs, halt movement on programs, procurements, and people, and inject uncertainty into daily operations and office planning.”

“There has been and continues to be significant waste of USG resources because of [Marroco’s] directives and decisions. Taxpayer dollars are being wasted through hundreds of USG staff hours squandered on unproductive or duplicative tasks, midstream activity cancellations, ill-advised program pivots, interventions in the PSC contracting process, and in the potential legal liabilities created by [Marroco’s] actions,” officials added. Marocco left the agency shortly after, and his return is doing little to temper the frustration of agency staff.

“What he’s doing now is frighteningly similar to everything he was trying to do at USAID before, but this time he’s destroying it,” one USAID official told NBC News on Tuesday.

“He hasn’t been responsible for building anything ever. He’s very good at turning things off and questioning things and making people feel uncomfortable. He’s taken apart a lot of things,” said another staffer.

Marocco isn’t the only questionable Trump loyalist Rubio has brought into the State Department in the past few days. Earlier this week, Semafor reported that disgraced former White House speechwriter Darren Beattie would be tapped to serve as acting under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are considered some of the less controversial members of President Donald Trump's administration. Although Senate Democrats have vigorously opposed some of Trump's nominees — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth didn't receive a single Democratic vote — Rubio and Bessent were easily confirmed along bipartisan lines.

Rubio and Bessent have a reputation for being traditional conservatives rather than far-right MAGA Republicans. But the Washington Post's Catherine Rampell, in a February 4 opinion column, lays out some reasons why she believes they are acting like "spineless cowards."

"Many of President Donald Trump's appointees have been self-evidently bad — unqualified, ethically-conflicted cranks," Rampell explains. "A few, though, were supposed to be competent. Responsible, even. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a respected hedge fund manager, was considered a relatively traditional pick, allowing him to clear his confirmation vote with the help of 16 Democrats. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, similarly, sailed into his Cabinet post with unanimous support from his former Senate colleagues."

Rampell continues, "Yet, two weeks in, they have both turned out to be spineless cowards. Both are complicit in the ongoing dismantling of the federal government and shredding of the Constitution."

The Post columnist argues that both the U.S. Treasury and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are under attack by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk. And she contends that Bessent isn't doing enough to protect the integrity of the U.S. Treasury Department, while Rubio "repeatedly praised" USAID in the past but "remained silent" when Musk "went nuclear on the agency."

"On Monday, (February 3)," Rampell writes, "Rubio belatedly announced that he was taking control of USAID, assuming it continues to exist. Meanwhile, Rubio has nothing to say about Trump's decision to strip legal protections from 350,000 Venezuelans who have been living and working in this country lawfully."

The columnist adds, "They are now vulnerable to deportation back to their repressive homeland — a fate Rubio described in 2022 as a 'death sentence'…. The 'adults in the room' sometimes failed in Trump's first term. Now, they're not even pretending to try."

===

no lnx

Alternet

The devastating truth about the GOP's war on education

Thom Hartmann December 31, 2024

“Those who control the present, control the past; and those who

control the past control the future.” —George Orwell, 1984

From outlawing the polio vaccine to ignoring the scientific consensus on gender dysphoria to refusing to wear masks in hospitals to trying to strip evolution and science from our schools, stupid has become fashionable in today’s GOP.

When Republican politicians want to score points, they criticize their opponents as having had “elite” educations; the GOP’s war against Ivy League colleges was particularly evident during the student protests of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. Congressional Republican inquisitors voices' dripped with scorn and contempt as they grilled university presidents.

It wasn’t always this way.

I remember when the USSR launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth. It was the fall of 1957, I was six years old, and my dad and I watched it arc over our house from our back yard one clear October night. My best friend’s father, a ham radio operator, let us listen on his shortwave radio to the “beep beep beep” it was emitting when it was over North America. I’d never seen my dad so rattled.

That dramatic technological achievement lit a major fire under the Eisenhower administration and Congress. In his January 27, 1958 State of the Union address, Republican President Eisenhower pointed to Sputnik and demanded Congress fund a dramatic transformation of America’s educational system:

“With this kind of all-inclusive campaign, I have no doubt that we can create the intellectual capital we need for the years ahead, invest it in the right places--and do all this, not as regimented pawns, but as free men and women!”

In less than a year Congress wrote and passed the National Defense Education Act that poured piles of money into our public schools and rolled out programs for gifted kids.

I was lucky enough to be enrolled in one of those in 1959: by the time I left elementary school I was functioning at high school and college levels in math, science, and English. I’d had two years of foreign language and two years of experimental music instruction. IQ tests were all the rage: mine was 141 and my best friend, Terry, was 142, something he never let me forget.

Most all of those programs died over the following decades as a result of Reagan’s war on public education, which began with his bringing private religious school moguls like Jerry Falwell and bigots like Bill Bennett into the White House.

Repudiating Eisenhower’s embrace of public education, Reagan put Bennett in charge of the Department of Education, which Reagan had campaigned on shutting down altogether. Bennett is probably best known for defending his proclamation that:

“If you wanted to reduce crime you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

Much like Bennett back in the day, the catch phrase among white supremacists and their fellow travelers today is that “Western Civilization” is either under attack or at risk because we teach history, tolerance, and critical thinking skills in our public schools, which are often racially integrated. The answer, Republicans will tell you, is to defund our public schools.

When Reagan was elected in 1980, the federal share of total education spending in America was 12 percent; when he left office in disgrace in 1989 amid “Iran/Contra” rumors he’d cut a deal with the Iranians to keep the American hostages to screw Jimmy Carter, that share had collapsed to a mere 6 percent. (It’s 3 percent today.)

Reagan also wanted to amend the Constitution to allow mandatory school prayer, and unsuccessfully proposed a national tax credit — a sort of tax-system-based national voucher system — that parents could use to send their kids to religious schools like Falwell’s.

Reagan made anti-intellectualism a political weapon, repeatedly criticizing colleges and professors throughout his political career. When asked why he’d taken a meat-axe to higher education and was pricing college out of the reach of most Americans, he said that college students were “too liberal” and America “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.”

Four days before the Kent State Massacre of May 5, 1970, Governor Reagan called students protesting the Vietnam war across America “brats,” “freaks” and “cowardly fascists,” adding, as The New York Timesnoted at the time, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement!”

Before Reagan became president, states paid 65 percent of the costs of colleges, and federal aid covered another 15 or so percent, leaving students to cover the remaining 20 percent with their tuition payments.

That’s how it works in many developed nations; in most northern European countries college is not only free, but the government pays students a stipend to cover books and rent.

Here in America, though, the numbers are pretty much reversed from pre-1980, with students now covering about 80 percent of the costs. Thus the need for student loans here in the USA.

Ever since Reagan’s presidency, the core of Republican positions on public education have been five-fold:

Let white students attend schools that are islands of white privilege where they don’t have to confront the true racial history of America,
Use public money to support private, for-profit, and religious schools that can accomplish this (and cycle some of that money back to Republican politicians),
Destroy public schools’ teachers’ unions,
End the teaching of science, critical thinking, evolution, and sex ed, and,
Bring fundamentalist Christianity into the classroom.

Earlier this year, Republican Senator Marco Rubio called America’s public school system a “cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.”

“Dangerous academic constructs like critical race theory and radical gender theory are being forced on elementary school children,” Rubio wrote for the American Conservative magazine, adding, “We need to ensure no federal funding is ever used to promote these radical ideas in schools.”

Instead, multiple Republican-controlled states are now actively gutting their public schools with statewide voucher programs, and instituting mandatory bible instruction or posting of the Ten Commandments. Book bans and panics around queer kids using bathrooms or playing sports are the new wedge issues.

There is no more powerful urge we humans can experience than to protect and defend our children. For most people it beats hunger, sex, and money. So if you’re a politician looking for an issue to motivate voters, just tell them their children are under attack. It’s cynical, but effective.

In an interview for Semafor, Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid it out:

“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’ The most dangerous person in the world is [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids…”

Just a few months ago, Donald Trump laid out his plan to deal with the “major problem” America is facing. That problem, he said, is:

“[W]e have ‘pink-haired communists teaching our kids.’”

Turning the Constitution upside down and arguing the Founders intended to protect teaching schoolchildren religion, Trump elaborated, arguing that mixing religion, politics, and education was the intention of that document:

“The Marxism being preached in our schools is also totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, and in many ways it’s resembling an established new religion. We can’t let that happen. For this reason, my administration will aggressively pursue intentional violations to the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the Constitution.”

As Jonathan Chait wrote for New York magazine:

“More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.”

George W. Bush followed the trend, bragging about his pathetic performance in college at Yale’s 2001 commencement:

“To those of you who received honors, awards, and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States!”

Similarly, JD Vance gave a speech in 2021 titled Universities Are The Enemy.

This isn’t the first time elected officials have used public education as a political weapon. In 1844, 25 people died and over 100 were severely injured in riots in Philadelphia over whether there should be daily Bible readings in that city’s schools. Two churches and several city blocks of homes were burned to the ground.

The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 didn’t provoke riots, but was a major event in the history of public education. Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was charged and convicted of the crime of teaching evolution. Mississippi and Arkansas joined Tennessee in passing laws making such instruction a crime that stood until the 1967 repeal of the Butler Act.

While Republicans across the country successfully rode a wave of white outrage about Critical Race Theory in November’s election, polls suggest the issue is really only meaningful to a fragment of the American electorate: an anti-science “Christian” subset of white Republican voters.

The annual PRRI American Values Survey found:

“Americans overwhelmingly favor teaching children history that includes both the good and bad aspects of our history so that they can learn from the past, versus refraining from teaching aspects of history that could make them feel uncomfortable or guilty about what their ancestors did in the past (92% vs. 5%).

“There are no substantial partisan differences, though Republicans favor excluding aspects of history slightly more (7%) than Democrats and Independents (both 4%). There are few differences across religious traditions or demographics. This consensus holds up across different levels of exposure to critical race theory: 92% of those who have heard a lot about critical race theory, 94% of those who have heard a little, and 93% of those who have heard nothing about it state that we should teach children the good and bad of history.”

Nonetheless, they note:

“[A] majority of Republicans (54%), compared with 27% of independents and only 7% of Democrats, believe that teachers and librarians are indoctrinating children.”

America spent $794.7 billion on primary education last year. For-profit private schools and megachurches that run schools look at that pile of money and drool. Republicans are committed to delivering as much of it to them as possible, regardless of the damage it does to our nation’s kids.

Their strategy for privatizing our public schools is pretty straightforward, and echoes the plan of action Republicans are using right now to replace real Medicare with the privatized Medicare Advantage scam.

First, they falsely claim that they’ll deliver a better product at a lower cost. In the education realm, we see this with Florida and several other Red states now offering vouchers that can be used at private or religious schools to every student in the state.

(Nearly 2,300 private schools in Florida accept vouchers, but “69 percent are unaccredited, 58 percent are religious, and nearly one-third are for-profit.”)

As more and more students use the vouchers to flee public schools, the public schools sink into deeper and deeper financial troubles. Those cut the quality of teaching and upkeep of the school buildings, causing even more students to use the vouchers.

Because the vouchers never cover the full cost of private school tuition (typically they pay for half to two-thirds), the truly poor can’t use them: the result is the public school system becomes ghettoized, leading to even more flight by middle- and upper-class (mostly white) people.

Once the public schools are dead and the state has transitioned entirely to private schools, the state will claim budget problems and begin to dial back the amounts available for vouchers. (The same will happen with Medicare Advantage once real Medicare is dead.)

This will widen the relationship between the educational and wealth divides; the racial and class cleavage will become so great that the state will have effectively gone back to a “separate but equal” educational system. Which, of course, is the GOP’s goal and has been since 1954.

Republicans are generally convinced — and surveys show they’re right — that when people have a good, well-rounded education they will vote for Democrats, who explicitly value science and egalitarian social values.

Thus, keeping our kids ignorant and destroying one of America’s largest unions, all while helping their education and religion industry friends get rich, is a complete win-win.

Much of this battle is playing out in state houses around the country, but there’s a huge and well-funded effort to take control of local school boards as well.

Driving this ethos with a constant flood of anti-intellectual, anti-science propaganda are an army of rightwing podcasters, YouTubers, hate radio hosts, and the billionaire-owned Fox “News” network (among others). They argue, essentially, that “stupid is the new smart.”

Barely coherent politicians like Tommy Tuberville and Marjorie Taylor Greene are their heroes. Donald Trump, who still refuses to release his grades, is their avatar. Bob Kennedy is their avenging angel. And people with college educations — and teachers/professors — are their enemies.

Bottom line: the Republican war on public education and science is real, and if we want to stop it we must get involved. Show up for your local school board meetings and, if you have the time and ability, run for a position on the board.

Lobby your state legislators and support pro-science and pro-education politicians. It’s time to make smart cool again!

Our children’s and grandchildren’s futures are literally at stake.

NOW READ: Poor Trump supporters are about to get a rude awakening — but we shouldn't be celebrating

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omfg desantis would pick

an 11 24

If Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is confirmed as President-elect Donald Trump's next secretary of state, it could open the door for Trump's family to get an even deeper foothold in the federal government.

Any Senate vacancy in Florida has to be filled by Governor Ron DeSantis (R) until the next election, which wouldn't happen until 2028. And MAGA is now pushing for Trump's daughter-in-law, Lara, to be appointed senator in Rubio's place should his seat become vacant. The Daily Beast reported that Lara Trump herself is now actively offering herself as a replacement for Rubio.

"This is my home state now and has been for three years," the Republican National Committee co-chair told Fox News' Sean Hannity, adding that she would "love to serve the people of Florida." Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) also endorsed the idea of Lara Trump's appointment. And CBS News' Scott MacFarlane posted to the social media platform Bluesky that Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) is also reportedly on board.

Ric Grenell, who was Trump's acting Director of National Intelligence in his first administration, was thought to be a front-runner to helm the State Department before the news of Rubio's appointment was made public. Tara Palmieri of Puck News tweeted that DeSantis was not in the loop, and learned about Florida's senior U.S. senator being nominated as the nation's potential next top diplomat while he was on vacation in Italy.

Trump tapping Rubio to head the State Department is particularly noteworthy given that they were bitter rivals in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. In a debate, Rubio took a jab at the size of Trump's hands, implying that the billionaire reality TV star was small elsewhere. This led Trump to say there was "no problem" with the size of any of his body parts.

Political strategist and columnist Cheri Jacobus, who is a former communications staffer for the RNC, offered one potential explanation for Rubio's appointment to one of the most high-ranking Cabinet positions — "to open the seat for his daughter-in-law."

"I think that may be the main reason Trump picked Rubio," Jacobus wrote on Bluesky.

However, not all Republicans are as enthusiastic about the prospect of Lara Trump joining the Senate. Conservative columnist Scott Morefield called it a "bridge too far" in a post on X.

"Yes, Donald Trump should get his Cabinet picks, but the Senate pick is DeSantis’, not Trump’s," Morefield wrote. "And it would be a bad idea because it would make the seat vulnerable when election time rolls around."

Like Rubio, DeSantis is also a former Trump rival, having run a short-lived campaign for the Republican nomination in 2024. The two-term Florida governor went all-in on the Iowa Caucuses, only to come up short to Trump. He suspended his campaign shortly afterward and endorsed Trump.

Click here to read the Daily Beast's report in full (subscription required).

READ MORE:[All in the family? How Marco Rubio's Senate seat could go to a DeSantis or a Trump

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MMA 11 24

The revolving door between Donald Trump’s Fox News propaganda outlet and his incoming administration is already beginning to turn.

Trump announced that Fox News contributor Tom Homan will serve as “The Border Czar” with responsibility for “our Nation’s Borders” as well as “all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin” in a Sunday post to Truth Social. Homan joined Fox two months after his June 2018 retirement as acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director during Trump’s first term.

Homan’s hiring points to the influential role Fox will play during the second Trump administration. The notoriously Fox-obsessed president-elect hired at least 20 officials who previously worked at the network during his first term, including Cabinet secretaries and top White House aides. Fox, in turn, put more than a dozen members of the Trump orbit on its payroll during and after his presidency.

Homan highlighted the importance of his presence on Fox in a Monday appearance on Fox & Friends, Trump’s favorite morning broadcast.

“I have been on this network for years complaining about what this administration did to this border,” Homan said. “I have been yelling and screaming about it, telling them what they need to do to fix it.”

Trump subsequently posted the segment on Truth Social.

Indeed, Trump has had many opportunities over the years to see Homan using Fox’s platform to promote their shared brand of anti-immigrant vitriol. Homan made at least 441 weekday appearances on Fox from August 2017 through Election Day 2024, according to the Media Matters database, with 80 of those appearances coming since January 2023.

As a member of the Trump administration, Homan made the case for the then-president’s anti-immigrant agenda on his network of choice while reportedly serving as the "intellectual ‘father’” of Trump’s cruel family separation policy.

On Fox’s airwaves, Homan regularly fomented fear of immigrants and demanded radical and inhumane policies in response to their purported invasion.

Homan also appeared in the far-right fever swamps, pushing the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory in an appearance on the online program of a Hitler-praising antisemite.

And during the 2024 presidential campaign, Homan promised that if Trump were elected, Homan would “run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen” in which “no one’s off the table.”

Homan isn’t the only incoming Trump official to benefit from Fox’s megaphone. Several other people Trump reportedly plans to nominate for high-ranking positions in his administration have spent the last several years regularly appearing on the president-elect’s favored network.

According to the Media Matters database, from August 2017 through Election Day 2024:

Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL), Trump’s reported pick for national security adviser, made at least 569 weekday Fox appearances, including 176 since January 2023.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s pick for deputy White House chief of staff for policy, made at least 374 weekday Fox appearances, including 174 since January 2023.

Former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), Trump’s pick for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, made at least 307 weekday Fox appearances, including 92 since January 2023.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Trump’s reported pick for secretary of state, made at least 263 weekday Fox appearances, including 70 since January 2023.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Trump’s reported pick for secretary of homeland security, made at least 135 weekday Fox appearances, including 46 since January 2023.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Trump’s pick for ambassador to the United Nations, made at least 108 weekday Fox appearances, including 32 since January 2023.

Trump’s early staffing selections suggest that his administration will be every bit as intertwined with Fox as it was in his first term. And if Fox is helping with personnel, policy won’t be far behind.

//### A comprehensive review of the revolving door between Fox and the Trump administration

07/22/19

### Fox contributor Tom Homan is the “intellectual ‘father’” of family separation

08/08/22

### The Trump-to-Fox personnel pipeline: A comprehensive review

04/09/21

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alternet-Home | Corporate media keeps hiding the the truth about madman Donald Trump

Corporate media keeps hiding the the truth about madman Donald Trump

D. Earl Stephens

September 15, 2024.

We have a complete madman running for the President of the United States, and it would be about damn time our national media started reporting it this way.

We are just over seven weeks from a landmark election that will determine America’s standing in the world, and her ability to protect the rights, welfare and lives of her citizens.

With all of this on the line, we have bitterly learned that we can no longer count on the fourth estate.

It’s a terrible thing. They have catastrophically failed us like never before.

We have been forced to wait helplessly, and wonder if these incompetent, ponderous idiots will ever stop ignoring what is so clearly right in front of our tired eyes: a dangerous maniac backed by a massive propaganda network that disgracefully fills his dark, billowing sails, allowing him to rumble unchecked and uncovered across the American countryside, taking a blowtorch to the truth, dead aim on our vote and our election workers, and repeating insane, dangerous and racist conspiracy theories that assault our senses, and could well result in the death of our democracy and many of our citizens.

That run-on sentence has never needed writing more, because while I typed it, our media continued to massively underreport, and even disgracefully normalize its chilling message.

This is NOT OK, people.

We must demand that our collective media FINALLY removes their blinders and their heads from their asses and starts reporting on what WE KNOW they have been seeing and hearing from the 300-lb. sack of dirt, and his revolting followers in Congress who swoon at his fat, little feet to provide him cover.

Donald J. Trump means America harm, goddamnit, and he is getting sicker and crazier by the minute.

So tell me: At what point does this become the only thing worth leading every major media outlet in this country????

At its core, the mission of the working press is cut and dry and pretty easily executed: Reporters and news departments are assigned to cover various beats and report out to the American people about what is happening in their coverage areas. The press has the privilege of being where we too often can’t, so that they can tell us what has transpired on the football field, or the court room, or a theater of war, or the school board meeting, or on the election trail …

We depend on them to be our eyes and ears, to describe as vividly as possible what is happening where they are. We depend on them to provide this information to the editorial leaders in their respective newsrooms, who are tasked with processing it all and giving it the weight and “play” it deserves.

We depend on their news sense and professionalism to understand what is important and what isn't.

We depend on them to be accurate and credible, because without those two things, they are done, and we all suffer for it.

Again, it really isn’t that difficult a job to carry out, but man, is it monumentally important.

Well, right now our incompetent and potentially bought-off media is making a complete and utter mess of things, and only a damn fool would rate their coverage of this election as even remotely accurate and credible.

It’s an absolute disgrace is what it is.

The Republican candidate for president is a complete madman. A racist. Unhinged.

Even the slightest amount of fact-checking and casual observation would confirm this.

So WHY isn’t it being reported this way????

We are in the middle of a national emergency, and I am going to continue to use my small but sturdy platform built on years in the newspaper business to ask just one more time:

What the hell is going on in our nation’s newsrooms? WHAT can they possibly be covering that is more important than the most serious internal threat to America since the Civil War?

We must ALL keeping asking these questions until we get a damn answer. Our safety and our democracy depend on it.

The guy they are normalizing is a slovenly, dirty old man incapable of cogently reciting even the most basic political policy. That should be the very least we expect from a candidate — even policy that was written FOR HIM like Project 2025.

The guy they are bucking up as some legitimate candidate often forgets where he is, and confuses people all the time. He talks up murderous dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, and talks down leaders — even American presidents — who have stood with us for decades.

This is what traitors do.

He doesn't understand or respect NATO, geopolitical affairs, or even American history. And he damn sure doesn’t understand the economy. Trump’s hotel and casino businesses have declared bankruptcy SIX times. He couldn’t even sell steaks, for crying out loud. So listen to me, you media suckers, and take this note:

Trump inherited a perfectly good economy from Barack Obama in 2016, who brought us back from the brink after Republican George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, and left it smoldering in flames by the time he finally exited the scene by taking a torch to our Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Were any you watching this????? Seriously, WERE YOU????

Look, just because he SAYS he built a great economy during his repulsive four years in the White House does not make it so. Why not do some real reporting, and look into that?

He often gives answers to even the easiest questions as if he were auditioning to be the star of some deranged carnival. Here’s but one answer of hundreds like this, he offered up about providing affordable child care last week:

Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because, look, child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it — in this country, you have to have it.

But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to — but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not gonna stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.

Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.

We’re gonna have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care.

I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, that I just told you about.

We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world.

Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about Make America Great Again. We have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.

Well? That’s a direct quote right there.

Time and again, you sanitize all this crap as if it were your job to listen to the nuclear-grade bullshit he spits out about God knows what, and twist yourself in a pretzel trying to explain to your readers what you think he was trying to say.

That is NOT your job, you fools. Your job is to simply report word for word what he said. And if it doesn’t make any sense, well you better damn well report it that way.

And what about Tuesday night’s debate? That one should have mercifully ended his career forever. He was so overmatched, so insane and so revolting, that the very least one of his gross lackeys could have done was lasso him and use a two-ton winch to drag him off the stage.

Instead, the aforementioned Rubio called it “a big win” for his master.

Senator Lindsey Graham said he had “the best closing in presidential debate history.”

Both of these feeble men warned us of the dangers of Trump in 2016. Now they disgracefully run cover for him. Is this no longer worth a mention? Can they ever be trusted again?

Here’s what your headline should have been after that debate:

TRUMP AGAIN PROVES HIMSELF COMPLETELY UNFIT FOR LEADERSHIP

I didn’t see that one anywhere. Why? What debate were you watching?

His despicable attack on Haitian-Americans right now, is no different than his attack on Asian-Americans four years ago, or his attack on Mexican-Americans four years before that. And what about his lifelong attacks on Black Americans, including the repulsive “birther issue” he created in the dark pit that doubles as his filthy mind to attack Obama?

He is the literal definition of a bigot. Why won’t you call him that? Does accuracy scare you?

His is a mountain of steaming hate — the throttle between his addled brain and filthy mouth is now completely burned out and inoperable. He’s the racist drunk at the end of the bar screaming into his empty shot glass and trying to make all his miserable problems everybody else’s.

He’s a convicted felon, admitted woman-abuser, and is charged with violently attacking the United States of America.

There is literally nothing he won’t do to win this election.

NOTHING.

Do any of you doubt he will will continue to incite violence when he loses on November 5th? Do any of you doubt that were he to win he would order his orcs to exact revenge on anybody and everybody he deems disloyal, including you? Do any of you have any doubt he will spread all manner of lies and hate between now and election day that will further muddy the waters of our once unassailably honest election system?

Any doubt at all?

Why aren’t you reporting it then? Why aren’t you giving this the urgency the potential end of our country as we know it demands? People’s lives are on the line, you blithering idiots.

This is the biggest story you will ever cover and you are blowing it so catastrophically I literally shake every time I am forced to address it.

You are cowards, you are worthless, and you have failed in your quest to uphold your most basic responsibility to the public: accurately and credibly reporting the truth.

The end of America is potentially here, and you are either too damn stupid to know it, or worse: complicit in its demise.

Those are the facts, and it would be about damn time you started paying attention to them.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

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Former President Donald Trump told one of his least convincing lies last week, posting on his Truth Social platform that he “has nothing to do” with Project 2025, the devastating plan by former Trump administration officials and MAGA movement allies to “take the reins of government” if he wins in November. “I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump claimed.

Reporters and commentators were quick to call out Trump’s ridiculous claim. Rolling Stone noted, “Meanwhile, over at the Republican National Committee, at least seven of the individuals tasked with overhauling the party’s platform in anticipation of Trump’s second term in office have connections to Project 2025 — starting with Russell Vought, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget during Trump’s administration.”

Robert Reich took on Trump’s lie in his substack newsletter Saturday, pointing out the central role played by former Trump administration officials and noting, “The Trump campaign platform is basically Project 2025. Trump’s Make America Great Again PAC is running ads calling it‘Trump’s Project 2025.‘ The Make America Great Again PAC also created the website TrumpProject2025.com.”

President Joe Biden’s campaign also weighed in on Trump’s claim, noting in a statement Saturday that Project 2025 “was written for him, by those closest to him.”

Trump’s literally unbelievable claim was repeated by campaign surrogates J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio on Sunday talk shows, suggesting that the attempt to distance Trump from Project 2025 is a strategic decision by his campaign, one driven by extensive news coverage of Project 2025’s far-reaching and devastatingly harmful agenda. Former Trump aide Stephen Miller claimed that he has “never been involved” in Project 2025 even though the organization he runs—America First Legal—is on the project’s advisory board.

Columnist Will Bunch wrote on Sunday, “Republicans are in a state of panic now that voters are paying attention to Project 2025, their plan for dictatorship.” In the two years since Right Wing Watch reported on the Heritage Foundation’s launch of Project 2025, and with greater intensity in recent months, and advocacy organizations have been digging into the agenda for simultaneously giving the president virtually dictatorial power over the federal government while gutting federal agencies’ ability to protect Americans’ safety, health, environment, and fundamental rights.

Bunch credits actress Taraji P. Henson’s warning about Project 2025 at this year’s BET awards—and her challenge “Look it up!”—for initiating a “major vibe shift.” Notes Bunch,

An electorate that largely rolled its eyes when Biden or other Democrats told them that “democracy is on the ballot” in November suddenly has an ominous, TikTok-friendly two-word catch phrase for the very real and growing fearsthat a cult-like GOP, aided by the corrupt Supreme Court it imposed on America, has a scheme for dictatorship. Indeed, “Project 2025″ sounds a lot like the kind of conspiracy theory about a run-amok government that goes viral in the Age of Disinformation — except it’s not a conspiracy. It’s real — and set in type for anyone to read.

In a conversation on Political Research Associates’ “Inform Your Resistance” podcast, I suggested that Project 2025 has actually done a bit of a public service by making it clear just how serious the threat is. By making the unpopular right-wing agenda so explicit, Project 2025 organizers have given those of us who disagree with that agenda an opportunity to remind Americans how much of the progress made over the past century could be reversed if the far right takes power.

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2025 trashed by fetterman on fox

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note tropes lib press silence gag twit files laptop whattaboutism...

greivance projection, note attack dem women

running for trump vp

:{alternet- no lnx

Home | Marco Rubio shouts over Kristen Welker in cringeworthy interview about election fraud

Marco Rubio shouts over Kristen Welker in cringeworthy interview about election fraud

:{David Edwardsand Raw Story May 19, 2024

An animated Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) raised his voice and refused to say he would accept the outcome of the 2024 election on Sunday.

During an interview on Meet the Press, host Kristen Welker asked the senator if he would accept a loss by former President Donald Trump in this year's presidential election.

"Will you accept the election results of 2024, no matter what happens, Senator?" Welker asked.

"No matter what happens? No," Rubio insisted.

"No matter who wins?" Welker pressed.

"Well, why don't you, I think you're asking the wrong person," Rubio shot back. "The Democrats are the ones that have opposed every Republican victory since 2000."

"It's Hillary Clinton who said it," he continued.

Welker pointed out that "no Democrat has refused to concede," including Clinton.

"Hillary Clinton said the election was stolen from her and that Trump was illegitimate," Rubio asserted.

"Senator, she conceded the election," Welker noted again.

But Rubio raised his voice as he talked over the host.

"She said that the election had been stolen. Kamala Harris agreed," the senator argued. "And you have Democrats now saying they won't certify 2024 because Trump is an insurrectionist and ineligible to hold office."

"So you need to ask them," he complained. "I think you've ever asked the Democrats this question on your show. I bet you you've never asked the Democrat that question."

Welker reminded the lawmaker what he had said after certifying the 2020 election.

"Democracy is held together by people's confidence in the election and their willingness to abide by its results," Welker recalled. "So by your own definition, are Donald Trump's claims undermining Americans' confidence in democracy, given that he has not conceded the last election?"

Rubio, a possible vice presidential nominee, refused to condemn Trump.

"I think what undermines people's confidence in the election is when you have places like Wisconsin with over 500 illegal dropbox locations, when you have places like Georgia where liberal groups are [paying] people, $10 a per vote," he complained. "You couldn't even talk about it on social media. They would deplatform you."

"I have to jump in here, Senator," Welker interrupted. "You voted to certify the election. Nothing has been censored on this program."

Rubio griped about coverage of a laptop belonging to President Joe Biden's son, Hunter.

"We covered the laptop," Welker said.

"You couldn't even talk about it on social media," Rubio replied.

"And just to note that Chris Krebs, who was a top election official, called it the safest and most secure election in recent history," Welker added.

"But I'm telling you that if it's unfair, we are going to do the same thing Democrats do," Rubio pouted. "We're going to use lawyers to go to court and point out the fact that states are not following their own election laws."

Watch the video below from NBC or at the link.

Marco Rubio shouts over NBC host in cringeworthy interview

www.youtube.com

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PRESIDENT	10/2020
DONALD TRUMP (R-INC)	47
JOE BIDEN (D)	51

Rubio may lift hold on deputy secretary nominee

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said yesterday he hopes to resolve this week the hold he placed on the Interior deputy secretary nominee because of concerns over the administration's proposal to expand offshore drilling in his state.

an 1219

no lnx

Cruz draws audible laughs on live TV after pushing debunked Ukraine conspiracy theory

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon December 9, 2019

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., drew laughs from the NBC News studio after he pushed a debunked Ukraine conspiracy theory on Sunday’s edition of “Meet the Press.”

Host Chuck Todd got into a combative exchange with Cruz after he claimed that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election despite a Republican-led Senate investigation which found no evidence of Ukrainian interference.

“Do you believe Ukraine meddled in the American election in 2016?” Todd asked.

“I do,” Cruz replied. “And I think there’s considerable evidence of that.”

“You do?” a bewildered Todd asked, prompting laughter from inside the Washington studio.

“Senator, this sort of strikes me as odd, because you went through a primary campaign with this president. He launched a birtherism campaign against you,” Todd said. “He went after your faith. He threatened to ‘spill the beans’ about your wife about something. He pushed a National Enquirer story, which we now know he had a real relationship with the editors of the National Enquirer.”

“And Chuck, I appreciate you dragging up all that garbage,” Cruz complained.

“No, but senator, is it not possible that the president is capable of creating a false narrative about somebody in order to help him politically?” Todd asked.

“Except that’s not what happened. The president released the transcript of the phone call. You can read what was said on the phone call,” Cruz said. “Chuck, let me point out a game that the media is playing. You know, a question that you’ve asked a number of people is — you’ve said to senators sort of aghast, ‘Do you believe that Ukraine — and not Russia — interfered in the election?’ Now, that — that in a court of law would be struck as a misleading question. Of course, Russia interfered in our election. Nobody looking at the evidence disputes that.”

“But the president of the United States does,” Todd pointed out.

“Look, on the evidence, Russia clearly interfered in our election. But here’s the game the media is playing: Because Russia interfered, the media pretends nobody else did. Ukraine blatantly interfered in our election,” Cruz claimed. “The sitting ambassador from Ukraine wrote an op-ed blasting Donald Trump.”

“Do you know why he did that?” Todd asked. “What did Donald Trump — what did Donald Trump, as a candidate, say about Ukraine and Crimea during the election that might’ve inspired the ambassador?” Todd pressed, referring to Trump’s remarks about Crimea that alarmed Ukrainian officials.

“So you’re saying they had disagreements with Donald Trump,” Cruz said. “And they wanted Hillary Clinton to get elected.”

“OK, so they wrote an op-ed,” Todd said. “That’s the difference.”

Meet the Press

@MeetThePress

WATCH: @SenTedCruz says he believes Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election. #MTP #IfItsSunday

Embedded video

President Donald Trump and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani have baselessly alleged a far more nefarious Ukrainian plot, claiming that Ukraine — not Russia — hacked the Democratic National Committee and blamed the Kremlin.

Cruz’s joins senators like Richard Burr, R-N.C., John Cornyn, R-Tex., John Kennedy, R-La., and John Barrasso, R-Wyo., in pushing baseless allegations that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election in recent weeks.

After the interview, Cruz accused Todd of “deliberately LYING” on Twitter and doubled down on his claim that “there’s significant evidence” of his allegation against the media.

Top officials who reviewed the evidence told Congress that this is not true. David Hale, the No. 3 official at the State Department, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that he was not aware of any evidence of Ukrainian interference in the election.

Fiona Hill, the former top Russia expert on the National Security Council, told the House Intelligence Committee last month that “this is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services.”

Cruz’s GOP colleague Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, agreed that there was “no evidence” that Ukraine interfered in the election. And fellow Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told Politico that it is “important to distinguish op-eds . . . from the systemic effort to undermine our election systems.”

“There’s no way to compare any other efforts to what Russia did in 2016,” Rubio said. “There’s nothing that compares not even in the same universe.”

Former Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Penn., told CNN on Sunday that he was stunned by Cruz’s remarks.

“I can’t explain it,” he said. “You would think a man like that would have more self-respect. After all the things President Trump said about him and his family, you would think he would be out there trying to speak truth to power at a time like this.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/gops-ted-cruz-draws-audible-laughs-on-live-tv-after-pushing-debunked-ukraine-conspiracy-theory/

Ted Cruz draws audible laughs on live TV after pushing debunked Ukraine conspiracy theory

Igor Derysh / Salon

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/gop-sens-ron-johnson-and-marsha-blackburn-are-tied-to-russian-money-and-trump-conspiracy-theories-theyre-not-alone/

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GOP Sens. Ron Johnson and Marsha Blackburn are tied to Russian money and Trump conspiracy theories. They’re not alone

Written by Sophia Tesfaye / Salon October 30, 2019

Nancy Pelosi has announced that the House will finally hold a formal vote dictating the rules for the impeachment inquiry, six weeks after it was launched by a whistleblower’s complaint mysteriously withheld from Congress. And on Tuesday, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman backed up both the initial whistleblower and U.S. diplomat Bill Taylor by testifying that he too was concerned about the Trump administration’s push to use congressionally-allocated military aid to Ukraine to coerce an investigation into Joe Biden.

Congressional Republicans have long since stopped defending Trump on the merits since shortly after the White House released a transcript of a July call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Instead, they’ve sought refuge in increasingly meaningless process arguments. So of course Pelosi agreeing to a formal vote on the rules of impeachment hasn’t stopped Republican complaints about the process. The goalposts will shift once again. No matter what the Democrats agree to, Republicans will complain about procedural unfairness and also refuse to concede the inquiry is legitimate. But how much of Republicans’ unwillingness to hold Trump accountable for his self-dealing is because they’re in on it?

On Monday the Washington Post published an interview with a Ukrainian diplomat who claimed to have met with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., this summer to discuss the baseless conspiracy theory promoted by President Trump that Ukrainian officials had interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

Johnson reportedly met with Ukrainian diplomat Andrii Telizhenkofor at least 30 minutes on Capitol Hill in July, and Telizhenko then met with Johnson’s Senate staff for five additional hours. According to the report, “the discussions focused in part on ‘the DNC issue’ — a reference to his unsubstantiated claim that the Democratic National Committee worked with the Ukrainian government in 2016 to gather incriminating information about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Telizhenko said he could not recall the date of the meeting, but a review of his Facebook page revealed a photo of him and Johnson posted on July 11.”

Johnson is a vocal Trump defender who has hounded the inspector general of the intelligence community about investigating media leaks regarding the Ukraine call. He has previously admitted that he was told by Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, that Ukraine needed to “get to the bottom of what happened in 2016” in order to receive military aid.

As Johnson told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, after Sondland told him that, he was assured “if President Trump has that confidence” that the Ukrainians would do his bidding, “then he’ll release the military spending.” Now, as the Post points out, Johnson’s “knowledge of key events” in the case may “complicate his role as a juror in a trial by the Senate.”

Recall that when Johnson was asked about his defense of Trump’s actions, he snapped at the simple question from NBC News’ Chuck Todd and spun out the same deep state conspiracy theory pushed by the likes of Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

Beyond his apparent involvement in Trump’s Ukraine dealings, Johnson is alleged to have benefited from campaign money illegally funneled from Russia via shell corporations owned by the National Rifle Association, which helped him win his tight 2016 race in Wisconsin.

Political action committees for Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham reportedly accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a Ukrainian-born oligarch with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 election. McConnell and Graham are co-sponsors of a new resolution condemning the House impeachment inquiry. At least 50 Senate Republicans, several of whom have refused to publicly comment on the growing Ukraine scandal — citing a need to remain impartial for a likely Senate impeachment trial — have already signed onto that bill. The resolution is currently paused in the Senate Rules Committee until the House votes on impeachment rules later this week.

As House Democrats’ investigation has rapidly unveiled ever more damaging material regarding Trump’s Ukraine scandal, public support for impeachment has shot up. Reportedly nervous about his wall of defense in the Senate crumbling, the president recently hosted several GOP senators at the White House, including top Johnson, Graham, John Thune of South Dakota and John Kennedy of Louisiana, last week. A day earlier, Thune and Kennedy, had blocked a Democratic bill to provide funding for states to shore up election security. The next day, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., quietly blocked three election-security bills for the second time this year.

“You know, it’s not a good sign if you’re doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result,” Blackburn said on the Senate floor late last week. She is among the Republican senators with close ties to a U.S.-sanctioned Russian politician who is accused of illegally channeling Russian funds through the NRA. Under Senate rules, any individual senator can block a vote on a bill.

When Senate Republicans are not prematurely dismissing an impeachment inquiry on which they will probably have to render judgment, they continue to protect Trump’s refusal to clamp down on potential election interference. If Republican charges of a “kangaroo court” are anything, they are a classic case of projection: How can Senate Republicans possibly serve as impartial jurors in a trial of the president, when they are implicated in the same pattern of political malfeasance?

Sophia Tesfaye is Salon’s Deputy Politics Editor and resides in Washington, D.C. You can find her on Twitter at @SophiaTesfaye.

fresh faced so got cut slack? beat by trump but now ally in line with the rest?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/trump-is-testing-the-legal-limits-of-ethnic-cleansing-in-the-us-heres-how-marco-rubio-just-helped-him/

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Trump is testing the legal limits of ethnic cleansing in the US. Here’s how Marco Rubio just helped him.

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon July 26, 2019

It’s a story that flared up the outrage cycle swiftly and will almost certainly die down as swiftly. On Thursday afternoon, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., retweeted a video from the Daily Caller purporting to show Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., calling on Americans to be “more fearful of white men” and advocating “profiling, monitoring and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men.”

Rubio was clearly still angry that mainstream journalists correctly called it racist when Donald Trump told four congresswomen of color to “go back” to other countries (when three of the four were born in the United States). So the Florida senator tweeted, “I am sure the media will now hound every Democrat to denounce this statement as racist. Right?”

The problem, of course, is the video was a fake, and not even a good one.It was deceptively edited to remove the language that made it quite clear that Omar was not calling for the profiling of white men, but in fact the opposite. She was using the absurdity of that idea — that all white men would be profiled simply because a handful of white men commit terrorist acts — to illustrate why it’s unfair to treat Muslims that way.

As noted, this controversy is going to slip out of the attention-addled public and media consciousness soon enough. The controversy flared up 24 hours ago and is already in the dying stages, with Rubio coming up with an incoherent defense of why it was okay to tweet a falsified video that defamed a congressional colleague, while his critics throw up their hands and give up, because it’s clear Rubio and his defenders are beyond being reasoned with.

But before this one slides under the waves completely, it’s worth taking a closer look. This is yet another example of the way “mainstream” Republicans are drafted into Trump’s larger mission of echoing and amplifying white nationalist talking points, thereby pushing garden variety conservatives into more radical or frankly fascist views on race and ethnicity.

The argument embedded in the fake video — and in fact the entire point of faking the video in the first place — is to elevate the idea at the beating heart of the white nationalist movement, which is that people of color are coming to destroy white people. This is how hardcore racists defend their hostility towards racial diversity and their insistence that whiteness should be the main or even exclusive trait defining legitimate American citizenship. This ugly idea, rooted in a belief in white superiority, is recast as an act of self-defense: White nationalists claim they are only trying to prevent “white genocide,” which they see as an inevitable outcome if the country becomes more inclusive and egalitarian.

This idea that people of color are secretly plotting to “take over” the U.S. and oppress white people, used to be found only on the fringes of the conservative movement. But bit by bit, Trump has made it central to conservatism and Republican politics. Fox News features a nightly parade of hosts, especially Tucker Carlson, who gravely warn that white people are the real victims of racism and that “Western civilization” (an obvious euphemism) is under threat from immigration.

This sort of messaging preys on ignorance. Yes, our culture is changing, but what Fox News audiences don’t understand — or deliberately refuse to admit — is that culture is never static and is always changing. (Did you know Christmas trees used to be foreign to Americans until German immigrants brought them here?) It also relies on feeding the egos of bigots who want to believe that their knee-jerk hostility to difference and their profound incuriosity about other people is somehow deeper and more meaningful than it actually is.

But this kind of rhetoric, framing people of color and immigrants as a threat to white people, leads to support for — and there’s no other way to say this — policies of ethnic cleansing.

Overt white nationalists at least admit this, even if they don’t lead by saying, “Our plan is to pack all people of color on trains or planes and ship them out.” Trump and his more mainstream supporters, particularly Fox News pundits, tend to be more coy about the policy implications of painting entire groups of Americans as inherently suspect based on their race, religion or ethnicity.

But there can be no doubt that Trump is testing the legal limits of ethnic cleansing policies. His administration, especially under the management of blatantly racist policy adviser Stephen Miller, has systematically explored every possible legal method to kick as many nonwhite people as possible out of the country. They’ve ended TPS status for hundreds of thousands of migrants who Trump clearly sees as not white enough to stay. They’re trying to end DACA, a program that gives legal status to millions of people who grew up in the U.S., even though they were born elsewhere. They’re trying to fast-track deportation, even though doing so would clearly mean that some U.S. citizens get deported. Trump’s administration is basically fine with that, because the point is to evict people who aren’t white, whatever their legal status.

Just this week, we heard a horror story about an 18-year-old named Francisco Erwin Galicia, a U.S. citizen born in Dallas. He was held in a detention center for 23 days, where he was effectively starved and tortured, and apparently pressured to leave the country where he was born. (His brother, a Mexican citizen, has been deported.) Galicia had a valid Texas birth certificate, of course, but was held in detention anyway because the Trump administration ultimately believes the white nationalist talking points it’s peddling and wants to see how far it can go, under current law, to expel people who don’t “belong,” whatever their legal status may be.

Even these strenuous efforts are still nibbling at the margins, of course, since the vast majority of people of color in the U.S. are citizens or legal residents. Trump’s “go back” comments, which Rubio was trying to defend, in ham-fisted fashion, with his fake video, make clear that Trump longs to have the power to deport whoever he wants. When his supporters chant “send her back,” they long for that as well.

So it’s no small thing for Marco Rubio (who himself belongs to an ethnic category Trump has targeted) to be tweeting out a fake video that feeds fears that people of color intend to “steal” America and launch a campaign of oppression against white people. Rubio probably just thought it was a quick and easy way to score political points by digging into the conservative myth that they’re being unfairly treated by the “liberal media.” Instead, he ended up supporting talking points that are gradually turning mainstream American conservatives into fascists.

AN 719

no lnx

Marco Rubio gets pilloried for spreading a vicious and bogus smear about Ilhan Omar

Written by Cody Fenwick July 25, 2019

Once again, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has become the focus of a vicious right-wing smear, this time based on a deceptively edited video.

The video comes from a February 2018 interview Omar gave to Al Jazeera. In its new form, it was resurfaced by Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), which found its way to the Daily Caller report Molly Prince’s twitter feed, as Vox reported. From there, other right-wing figures picked it up, including, most prominently, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL).

Omar’s comments went viral because, in the video, she seemed to be saying people should be afraid of “white men” and said the government should be “profiling, monitoring” them. Rubio indicated that the statement was “racist,” and suggested that the media should “hound ever Democrat to denounce” it, apparently expressing frustration that Republicans were pressed to respond to Trump’s recent racist attacks.

But the video Rubio shared was highly deceptive, and it seems clear it was intentionally edited to mislead viewers about what Omar was saying.

When Prince shared the video, in a tweet picked up by Rubio, she included the caption: “Ilhan Omar contends that Americans ‘should be more fearful of white men.'” While the quoted words are accurate, they’re missing essential context. Omar was having a discussion with reporter Mehdi Hasan about Islamophobia, and Hasan had asked the then-candidate to respond to the idea that Americans might “legitimately” be afraid of Muslims because of “Jihadist terrorism.” So when Omar said Americans should be “more fearful of white men,” she wasn’t speaking in the absolute sense of trying to encourage prejudice against white men. She was correctly pointing out that white men have been more likely to be the perpetrators of terrorism in the United States in recent years.

I am sure the media will now hound every Democrat to denounce this statement as racist. Right? https://t.co/UewkblF8Oo

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 25, 2019

And indeed, as Hasan said on Twitter, none other than current FBI Director Christopher Wray made a similar point recently when he said: “A majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call ‘white supremacist violence.'”

The second part of Omar’s comments was even more gratuitously distorted. Here’s the full exchange in question:

HASAN: A lot of conservatives in particular would say that the rise in Islamophobia is the result not of hate, but of fear. And legitimate fear, they say, of quote-unquote “jihadist terrorism” — whether it’s Fort Hood, or San Bernardino, or the recent truck attack in New York. What do you say to them?

OMAR: I would say — our country should be more fearful of white men across our country, because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country. And so if fear was the driving force of policies to keep America safe, Americans safe inside of this country, we should be profiling, monitoring, and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men.

The CBN video cut out the phrase “And so if fear was the driving force of policies to keep America safe, Americans safe inside of this country,” making it seem as though she was seriously suggesting that the U.S. should be “profiling” and “monitoring” white men.

Of course, that’s not what she meant. She meant to illustrate the absurdity of trying to use “fear” to justify policy and how it often leads to discriminatory actions against minorities.

And in fact, the uproar over the deceptively edited video actually proves her point. She was using the example of targeting white men as an example of why these policies would be treated with outrage when the subjects are a majority group, even though the policies are often embraced by the right wing when Muslims face scrutiny.

And that’s exactly what happened with the conservative outrage over the video. Conservatives perceived a threatening position coming from a Muslim woman based on a misinterpretation of the facts — and they overreacted. And yet when Trump makes obviously racist attacks, most of the right bends over backward to give him the benefit of the doubt. Omar is continually facing this racist double standard that makes her a perpetual target of suspicion.

Hasan demanded that Rubio apologize for spreading the smear:

Senator @marcorubio will you delete this tweet and apologize? You’re sharing a selectively-edited video from my show @AJUpFront to make @IlhanMN look bad and increase the number of death threats she already gets. Shame on you. Here’s the un-edited clip:https://t.co/1xX5KMns8N https://t.co/9lOAr67iCX

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) July 25, 2019

Parker Malloy of Media Matters for America noted that the smear against Omar was a case of history repeating.

This happened with the outrage over Omar saying that American Muslims shouldn’t lose their rights just because some people who share their religion carried out 9/11,” she said. “It was clear what she was saying, but a bad-faith reading got amplified into the public consciousness.”

In a reply to Rubio, she wrote:

Hey, genius, this clip has been selectively edited.

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) July 25, 2019

Others echoed the sentiment:

I am sure you will apologize for falling for a deceptively edited video. Right? https://t.co/Xc8RrbOJva

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) July 25, 2019

A good idea would be for the media to hound every Republican senator who’s circulating a deceptively edited video tweet and ask why they are doing that? https://t.co/GblWB5TAmg

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) July 25, 2019

whatever happened to that short-lived GOP we care about the poor BS campaign? mostly ryan?

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/**2015/**06/what-matters-inequality-or-opportuniy/393272/

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Lately, one argument that’s been making the rounds is that people should worry less about inequality and more about opportunity. Arthur Brooks, head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said, “I don’t care about income inequality per se; I care about opportunity inequality.” Senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio believes that inequality is but a symptom of immobility and constrained opportunity. Tyler Cowen argued in the New York Times that what matters is not the fact that the top 1 percent is capturing a much larger share of total income growth than they used to, but that the poor are stuck in poverty.

These individuals have identified a worthy goal. Unequal access to opportunity offends deeply held American values, and poverty is not only a matter of near-term material deprivation—too often, it also robs low-income children of the chance to realize their intellectual and economic potential.

But it’s not possible to effectively address either poverty or inadequate opportunity if America hives off its opportunity concerns from the broader problem of inequality (nor, as Senator Rubio intimates, can America reduce inequality by focusing solely on increasing mobility). Boosting mobility will require reductions in wage, income, and wealth inequalities.

For many in the opportunity-not-inequality camp, the relationship between the two concepts is an inconvenient truth. Concerns about inequality smack of “class warfare,” of “going after” the top 1 percent and Wall Street.Cowen is revealing in this regard: “The inequality focus tends to draw us to redistribution, whereas a mobility focus is more conducive to ideas for wealth creation.”

Many politicians and analysts would rather not address the power imbalances that have channeled so much of our economic growth to the highest-income families. They are much more comfortable focusing on the benign-sounding theme of “wealth creation” or insisting that economic growth alone can improve mobility without any redistribution of resources or political power, as if “a rising tide can lift all boats” matters when a few people are in yachts and many are stuck in dinghies.

But a growing body of research shows strong links among inequality, poverty, and opportunity. For example, new research by Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute reveals that of the factors most commonly cited as driving poverty in America—education, family structure, race and more (see chart below)—the number-one factor by far is the growth in inequality, which added seven percentage points to the poverty rate since the late 1970s.

So why is that? How is it that inequality reduces mobility and deepens poverty?

* * *

The relationship between childhood family income and life outcomes is well-established. Socioeconomic status is unfortunately the strongest predictor of a child’s academic achievement, as decades of social science research have found. A child’s income rank—her family’s income relative to the household income of other families—makes a difference for that child’s future adult-income rank as well. Research by Raj Chetty of Harvard and his colleagues links every 10-percentile-point gain in childhood income rank with a 3.4-percentile-point gain in income rank as an adult. Since inequality by definition means that less income will reach poor and middle class Americans for any given rate of economic growth, these facts alone highlight inequality’s relevance to mobility discussions.

In addition, a large and growing body of evidence, recently reviewed by Katharine Bradbury and Robert Triest of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, directly connects inequality of outcomes to inequality of opportunity. As shown in the figure below, Bradbury and Triest find a significant, negative relationship between living in an area with greater income inequality and children’s expected upward mobility.

The Relationship Between Inequality and Mobility

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Commuting zones with greater inequality have reduced expected upward mobility for low-income children (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)]

It’s critical to understand the fundamental difference between these findings and the Cowen, Rubio, et al. view that America can address poverty without addressing inequality. As just noted,rising inequality implies that the income and wealth generated by GDP and productivity growth increasingly flow to those at the very top of the scale. As a result, relatively fewer resources reach everyone else. One thus would expect to see low-income families less able (relative to the wealthy ones) to invest in children’s futures, more indebted if they tried to go to college, more likely to be stuck in neighborhoods that lack opportunity, and more likely to experience the stressors that do permanent damage to children’s later educational and earnings outcomes.

And that’s exactly what happens.

Research indicates at least three causal pathways via which inequality constrains opportunity for those at the lower end of the economic spectrum.

First, inequality is driving increasing residential segregation by income. The shares of families in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and neighborhoods of concentrated wealth both more than doubled between 1970 and 2009, while the share of families in middle-income neighborhoods declined from 65 percent to 42 percent. Those high-poverty neighborhoods—where more and more families are living—create lasting disadvantages for many who grow up there: If a family with young children (less than age 13) relocates from a high- to a low-poverty neighborhood, the kids achieve better academic and economic outcomes later in life, as new work by Chetty et al. indicates.

Second, inequality leads to unequal access to quality educational experiences throughout a child’s lifetime. Over the period of growing inequality, these disparities have increased. In 1995, for example, families with education debt in the bottom half of the net worth distribution (a broader definition of income, including assets minus liabilities) had a mean debt-to-income ratio of around 0.26, meaning that for every dollar of their income, they owed 26 cents in college debt. For families in the top 5 percent, that ratio was eight cents on the dollar. But by 2013, the debt-to-income ratio had more than doubled to 0.58 for the bottom half (some of whom are poor but many of whom are middle class) while remaining unchanged for those at the top.

Third, and most importantly, inequality directly undermines equality of opportunity, likely through a variety of mechanisms.As the gap between the rich and poor widens, lower-income families have less ability relative to their rich counterparts to invest in enrichment goods for their children. Children from families with less income have relatively less extensive and privileged social networks and, compared to their rich peers, are more likely to experience the type of "toxic" stress that can hamper brain development and long term academic, health, and economic outcomes.

In short, inequality entrenches immobility not just by enabling increasingly unequal transfers of wealth from one generation to the next, but also through a number of more subtle pathways that affect opportunity on a daily basis. It may not yet be possible to explain all of these subtle pathways with great certainty, but the fact that “rich and poor children score very differently on school readiness tests before they enter kindergarten” should be viewed as an unsurprising consequence of the high levels of inequality American society currently tolerates.

Members of the “don’t-mess-with-the-rich-to-help-the-poor” crowd also ignore the political dimension of inequality. While Rubio, Paul Ryan, and others are professing their concern for the poor, they’re busy trying to repeal the estate tax (at a cost of $270 billion over 10 years) and writing budgets that gut the safety net. These policies restrict mobility at both the bottom and top by exacerbating the burdens of being poor, increasing the privilege of being born into riches, and eliminating revenue sources for investments that might begin to reverse the inequality of opportunity. Why do politicians pursue such policies? Because they are nudged along by the interests of wealthy donors. Inequality begets greater inequality.

In other words, disadvantages faced by children in low- and middle-income families and advantages held by their wealthy peers are two sides of the same coin. The lack of opportunity for those in poverty is not some separate problem from the unequal distribution of wealth and income across society.

* * *

Boosting mobility therefore requires directly addressing residential segregation, educational access, and other barriers described above. Here are some ideas that hold promise:

One conclusion that stems from the Chetty et al. findings regarding the benefits of moving from high- to low-poverty areas is to improve the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV) program. Housing analysts Barbara Sard and Doug Rice recently detailed a number of specific, straightforward changes that could eliminate barriers for voucher recipients to move into low-poverty areas, including tying voucher subsidies to rent in specific zip codes instead of entire metropolitan areas. Importantly, such a change could be implemented without significant funding or even congressional action, and HUD has just announced that it is considering doing so.

...

its statement, the White House called the situation in Venezuela “a threat to regional security and democracy” and said that the Trump administration would continue to strengthen a coalition of “like-minded, and right-minded, partners from Europe to Asia to the Americas to pressure the Maduro regime to restore democracy in Venezuela.”

American officials have openly discussed the possibility that Venezuela’s military could take action.

On Feb. 1, Rex W. Tillerson, who was secretary of state at the time, delivered a speech in which he said the United States had not “advocated for regime change or removal of President Maduro.” Yet, responding to a question afterward, Mr. Tillerson raised the potential for a military coup.

“When things are so bad that the military leadership realizes that it just can’t serve the citizens anymore, they will manage a peaceful transition,” he said.

Days later, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who has sought to shape the Trump administration’s approach toward Latin America, wrote a series of Twitter posts that encouraged dissident members of the Venezuelan armed forces to topple their commander in chief.

Venezuelans waiting to register with the Brazilian immigration authorities in April. The economic collapse has set off an exodus of desperate Venezuelans.CreditMeridith Kohut for The New York Times

**Check out Climate Desk's ultimate guide to the presidential candidates' positions on climate change.**

Rubio responded: "Well, sure, the climate is changing, and one of the reasons why the climate is changing is the climate has always been changing," he said, interrupted by applause. "There's never been a time when the climate has not changed. I think the fundamental question for a policymaker is, is the climate changing because of something we are doing, and if so, is there a law you can pass to fix it?"

Rubio blamed Miami flooding on the city's low-lying land and listed a convoluted second reason:"higher sea levels or whatever may be happening." He continued his fact-free musings by dismissing the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. "But as far as a law that we can pass in Washington to change the weather, there's no such thing." The audience laughed.

Most of the time, reporters and debate moderators will leave it at that and move on to another topic. But Tapper followed up with the key detail Rubio wanted to skip over. "So just to clarify, Senator Rubio," Tapper said, "Mayor Regalado, when he talks about the reality of the scientific consensus about climate change…he's saying the scientific consensus is that man does contribute to climate change." Tapper asked if Rubio would tell the man he's wrong.

In fewer words, Rubio said, yes he would. "If we pass—if you took the gift list of all of these groups that are asking us to pass these laws and did every single one of them, there would be no change in our environment. Sea level would still rise." In a world where we really did enact that wish list, seas would still rise, yes, but the world would be well on its way to a more moderate path of warming.

You can watch Rubio's full answer here:

http://ecowatch.com/2016/01/08/marco-rubio-exxon

When asked by Annika Barth, a New Hampshire resident and freshman at American University, if he would support a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation on all that Exxon knew about climate change, Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio referred to the investigation as “nothing but a left-wing effort to demonize industries in America.”

Contrary to Rubio’s perception, Exxon is not being investigated for their political views, but rather for actively misleading the public and their investors on their extensive knowledge of climate change. A series of investigative reports revealed that as early as the 1970s, Exxon knew that burning fossil fuels caused climate change, but spent millions to sow public doubt around their own research. Just yesterday, in light of these reports, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin called on the state’s pension funds to divest their holdings in Exxon.

Now, momentum is growing to prosecute Exxon for their climate lies. New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has launched an investigation to uncover all Exxon knew. All three Democratic presidential candidates, as well as more than 60 prominent indigenous peoples, social and environmental organizations, have called on Attorney General Loretta Lynch to launch an investigation. Sec. of State John Kerry has also supported a DOJ investigation, saying Exxon “stands potentially to lose billions of dollars in what I would imagine would be one of the largest class-action lawsuits in history.” Organizers across the country are urging their state Attorney Generals to launch similar investigations.

To date, Rubio has accepted more than $13,500 in funding from ExxonMobil according toDirtyEnergyMoney.org. That amount doesn’t include donations from Exxon employees, nor any support that the corporation may have already made to Rubio’s presidential campaign or Super PACs supporting his candidacy.

Norman Braman

5.0 million

Billionaire auto dealer in Florida, and a longtime patron of Marco Rubio. 158 fams

Out of the $16 million raised by Conservative Solutions PAC, which is supporting Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, $12.5 million came from just four donors, including Norman Braman, a billionaire auto dealer and longtime patron of Mr. Rubio, and the tech investor Larry Ellison.

center, which would be built next to the city's airport, is being touted as a job-creator and a source of revenue.

Gary mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson estimated that the facility would generate $1 million in annual property taxes. “I can use that,” she noted.

Councilwoman Linda Barnes-Caldwell agreed, saying, “I think it is a wonderful idea. It will bring revenue to the city and jobs. And I think it is an ideal location.”

GEO Group has long come under fire for practices within its facilities as well as its profiteering off of the criminal justice system. From 2008 to 2012, CEO George C. Zoley had a compensation of $22,315,704. Because the company largely contracts with the government, almost all of this money came from American taxpayers.

The Private Corrections Working Group notes that GEO has faced hundred of lawsuits over conditions within its facilities, with scores being settled before reaching trial. As Brendan Fischer notes, research has shown that “assaults on guards by inmates were 49 percent more frequent in private prisons than in government-run prisons. The same study revealed that assaults on fellow inmates were 65 percent more frequent in for-profit/private prisons.”

GEO has steadily expanded its operations due to its close political connections. It has close ties to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who has in the past employed several staffers tied to GEO, including a chief of staff who co-founded the same lobbying firm employed by GEO.

Some local residents are concerned. Tom Dubois of Concerned Citizens of Hobart, who opposes such detention facilities, said, “It's a moral issue as well as an economic one.”

Gary's unemployment rate has been persistently high, and it has been described by some of its residents as a “ghost town.” In 2011, Gary had to close its main library due to budget cutbacks. Building an economy and tax base based on detaining migrants is probably not the ideal strategy, but in an America where so much of the Midwest has been deindustrialized and left in decay, it's the sort of perverse idea that makes sense to local leaders.

denier

For months, a group of high-rolling Republican donors with considerable resources to pour into super PACs or political nonprofits were undecided about which White House candidate to support with their millions. But that’s finally changing, in no small part due to billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer‘s announcement last weekend that he’s backing Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Singer’s decision could bring some unity to the prominent financier class that has already given 39.2 percent of all contributions to outside spending groups like super PACs this cycle. After all, it may have before.

Singer, the founder of Elliot Management, has already given $3.1 million to super PACs and candidates, though none to the presidential hopefuls. That makes him No. 12 on the list of top donors in the 2016 cycle so far. He placed No. 3 overall in the 2014 cycle, giving $10.6 million to conservative candidates and super PACs, and No. 20 in 2012 with $2.8 in contributions. In 2014, he was the top conservative donor overall; the only individuals to give more to super PACs and candidates were investor Tom Steyer and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who both supported liberal candidates.

Click here t o read the full article.

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/07082015/where-presidential-candidates-fall-climate-change

debate

...“We received a lot of questions from social media about climate change,” says CNN moderator Jake Tapper. One group, NextGen Climate pushed very hard ahead of the debate for the candidates to talk about climate change. They rolled out a three-figure ad campaign ahead of the debate, invoking Ronald Reagan’s “Common Sense” speech to urge CNN moderator Jake Tapper to ask candidates how they would address climate change—specifically what their plans are to get the country to 50 percent renewables by 2030.

While Tapper failed to ask them about their renewable energy plan, he did quote Ronald Reagan’s Sec. of State George Schultz in asking the candidates the following question:

Schultz reminds us that when Ronald Reagan was president, he faced a similar situation to the one we’re facing now. There were dire warnings from the mass consensus of the scientific community about the ozone layer shrinking. Schultz says Ronald Reagan urged skeptics in industry to come up with a plan. He said do it as an insurance policy in case the scientists are right. The scientists were right. Reagan and his approach worked. Sec. Schultz asks why not take out an insurance policy and approach climate change the Reagan way?

Rubio responded first saying, “Because we’re not going to destroy our economy the way the left-wing government that we are under now wants us to do.” Tapper reminded Rubio he’s citing George Schultz, a conservative in the Reagan administration. To which Rubio responded, Schultz “may have lined up with them on this position, but here’s the bottom line: Every proposal they put forward are proposals that will make it harder to do business in America—that will make it harder to create jobs in America.

“Single parents are already struggling across this country to provide for their families. Maybe a billionaire here in California can afford an increase in their utility rates, but a working family in Tampa, Florida or anywhere across this country cannot afford it. So, we are not going to destroy our economy, we are not going to make America a harder place to create jobs in order to pursue policies that will do absolutely nothing—nothing—to change our climate, to change our weather because America is a lot of things—the greatest country in the world, absolutely. But America is not a planet. And we are not even the largest carbon producer anymore—China is. And they are drilling a hole and digging anywhere in the world that they can get a hold of. So the bottom line is, I am not in favor of any policies that make America a harder place to live or to work or to raise their families.”

Tapper then turns to Gov. Chris Christie, saying “You have admitted that climate change is real and humans help contribute to it … What do you make of skeptics of climate change such as Sen. Rubio?”

“I don’t think Sen. Rubio is a skeptic of climate change. What Sen. Rubio said I agree with,” said Gov. Christie. “That, in fact, we don’t need this massive government intervention to deal with the problem. Look at what we’ve done in New Jersey. We’ve already met our clean air goals for 2020. When I was governor, I pulled out of the regional cap-and-trade deal—the only state in the northeast that did that. And we still reached our goals. Why? Because 53 percent of our electricity comes from nuclear. We use natural gas. We use solar power. We’re the highest using solar power state. You know why? Because we made all of those things economically feasible. I agree with Marco. We shouldn’t be destroying our economy in order to chase some wild left-wing idea that somehow [we] by ourselves [are] going to fix the climate. We can contribute to that and be economically sound. We can do that in New Jersey. Nuclear needs to be back on the table in a significant way if we want to go after this problem.”

Tapper reiterated that he was citing Sec. of State George Schultz. “I don’t think anyone would call him left wing,” said Tapper. Christie rebutted saying, “Listen, everybody makes a mistake once in a while, Jake. Even George Schultz. And if that’s truly a representation of what he believes we should be doing, then with all due respect to the former secretary of state, I disagree with him.”...

At that point, Sen. Rubio interjected to take issue with being called a “denier” by Tapper, but Tapper clarifies that he used the term “skeptic.” Rubio said, “You know you can measure the climate. You can measure it. That’s the not issue we’re discussing. I’m skeptical of the decisions that the Left wants us to make because I know the impact that those will have on the economy. They will not do a thing to lower the rise of the sea. They will not do a thing to cure California of the drought. But what they will do is make America a more expensive place to create jobs and today with millions of Americans watching this broadcast struggling from paycheck to paycheck that do not know how they are going to pay their bills at the end of this month, I am not in favor of anything that is going to make it harder for them to raise their family.”

Then, Gov. Scott Walker chimed in, disparaging U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s rules to address climate change. He said the rules would result in the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs in his state, as well as other states to enforce and would only “have a marginal effect on climate change.”

While Rubio at least acknowledges that California is in a drought, he clearly doesn’t take the issue very seriously. At the beginning of the debate, he made light of his “water-bottle-gate moment” in 2013 when his drinking a glass of water became an instant Internet meme. Last night, he joked “I’m aware California has a drought. That’s why I brought my own water bottle.” Nobody appeared to laughed, though.