Category: Government

Next goal for reactionaries – mandate funding for religious schools

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Conservatives have spent the past decade warning of the evils of government mandates, how they reduce freedom and damage liberty. But the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is poised to take the cues of far-right legal interests and mandate that states send thousands of taxpayer dollars per pupil to religious schools…

The case, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, seeks to overturn a Montana Supreme Court ruling that prohibited money from a voucher program to be put toward private religious schools, consistent with the state’s nearly five-decade ban on state aid for religious purposes. Thirty-seven other states have similar “no aid” provisions. But the plaintiffs, bankrolled by a right-wing organization called the Institute of Justice, are not simply trying to allow public voucher funding for religious institutions; they want to require it.

The case will be heard on Wednesday, January 22.

Keep your eyes and ears open, folks. With the short-focus attention span of American media we’re not likely to hear about anything other than the pantywaist impeachment trial of our Fake President – for the next couple of months. Regardless of the likely rigged verdict promised by Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party.

Fake President lies about snowflakes

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“Official White House Photo”

(Last) Tuesday, it snowed in Washington.

This isn’t really newsworthy, by itself. It’s January in the District, a month in which more than five inches of snow will fall on average. In any number of years, some of that snow has fallen on the seventh day of the month…What makes last week’s snowfall newsworthy was the point at which the White House decided to share the news about it: on Sunday, a day when the temperature in Washington hit a high of 70 degrees. More importantly, the low was 49 degrees — too warm for snow and a temperature reached only after the White House’s tweet…

For an administration with a robust track record of dishonesty, the tweet struck many people as being another, albeit unusually odd, example of exaggeration or misrepresentation…What’s been missed in the reaction to the tweet, though, is a more important contrast. It’s not just that the tweet about snow overlapped with an unusually warm day that matters. It’s that this is the precise opposite of how President Trump has traditionally tried to leverage the weather to his political advantage…

What the White House tweet did — no doubt unintentionally — is highlight how warm it was in Washington on Sunday. The normal high in Washington on Jan. 12 is 43 degrees, putting Sunday’s temperature 27 degrees above normal. That is no more proof that the climate is warming than a cold day is proof that it isn’t, but a warmer-than-usual winter day is certainly more suggestive of something abnormal happening than a winter day that’s cold.

Whatever the intricacies of lies from the White House, they are exactly what is expected from the Fake President. Sometimes, I have to think they’re expected – enjoyed – by the fools who voted for him in 2016 and probably will, again, in 2020. He never learned to tell the truth. They don’t care. As long as he rolls out the drumroll of slander and slurs that satisfy bigotry and ignorance.