Open Thread For July 21, 2017
Trump Considering Pardoning Family and Himself. Anyone surprised?
They’re Also Looking To Undermine Mueller’s Investigation. Criminals looking to kill criminal investigation. Rethug response? Crickets. Entire party is a criminal enterprise, or at least acting like one.
Carney Vetoes Controversial Charter School Radius Bill. Seems like for good reasons. What do our education mavens think?
City Council President Flat-Out Lies. Says that council slush fund maintains ‘highest standards’. Yo, Ms. Shabazz, it’s a slush fund. Oh, and here are some of those highest standards:
The council does not limit how much money an organization can receive, does not vote on which organizations get grants and is not obligated to share grant information with council members or the public.
More Trump Dealing With Russia. Yep, it’s all about how the Russians have saved Trump’s business empire. Which is why he will try to shut down the investigation.
Microsoft Does What Trump Won’t–Goes After Russian Hackers. Some rare encouraging news.
Colfax, Louisiana: Victim Of Blatant Environmental Racism. Yes, the military plays the role of the racists.
What do you want to talk about?
Dewey Beach is an interesting microcosm of the Trump administration.. Entertaining too lol
On the Charter School veto: The NJ missed the key underlying issue here … legislatively barring access to Newark Charter for kids from the Christina portion of Wilmington is virtually identical to barring the merger of Wilmington schools with any suburban district … a key provision of the 1968 Educational Advancement Act that was ruled unconstitutional in 1975 in the Wilmington/New Castle County deseg case.
Allowing this bill to become law would most certainly have triggered another lawsuit that the state would have little chance of winning.
John Carney, of course, should know quite a bit about the Wilmington deseg case, because his father was an administrator in the Wilmington school system from the late 1960s through its consolidation with suburban schools.
Kudos to Carney for this wise veto. His spine just grew by a quarter of an inch.
One more point: Donald Trump would be proud of David Sokola’s bizarre quote about the goal of charter schools being to foster “feeder-pattern type attendance,” a la neighborhood schools.
Charters, as originally conceived, were all about promoting alternative learning methods and curricula that were not offered in traditional public schools. They were part of a revolt against kids having to go to school in their neighborhood, or to whatever school they were assigned by the district office.
As for the “neighborhood schools” BS, while deseg did away with that for a while, the biggest obstacle to neighborhood schools today is the choice program so beloved by Sokola and his Red Clay and Christina constituents. Choice, as we know, enables families to hopscotch their kids from school to school, even across district lines, without regard to what’s in their neighborhood.
On Trump looking into his pardoning power: Yeah, nothing says “no story here” like asking whether you’re allowed to pardon yourself.
Here’s Josh Marshall’s take, which lays out the path toward the coming constitutional crisis.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-president-at-war
The survival of the country as a Republic depends on people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell doing the right thing. In other words – we’re screwed.
Theo Gregory had been a crook since the day he got into politics. And if Hanifa Shabazz was thinking about running for Mayor she can forget it. I know people don’t want to hear this but it’s time to elect some Republican for Mayor and City Council President. At least if they steal they don’t make it so blatant.
Yes, @mouse, Max Walton was caught in a conflict-of-interest lie he told to Dewey officials. That is a headline I’d like to see.
He’s, among other things, of counsel for Del. City and he wrote their Ft. DuPont/DE City Dev. Corp. legislation.
A Republican was elected mayor by his Republican neighbors in the Highlands.
I agree with the assessment of both Gregory and Shabazz.
Theo Gregory is finally gone from city gov’t … time for Medusa, I mean Haniffa, Shabazz to hit the bricks NEXT! Maybe the brand new city Chairwoman can help make that happen.
People think Trump leaked these voice intercepts to undermine Sessions, but you’ll recall I told FBH a couple of weeks ago that WaPo was sitting on voice intercepts. Here they are:
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/07/russian-ambassador-proves-sessions-lied-about-topics-at-meeting-sessions-concealed-washington-post/?platform=hootsuite
Well, yes, but I think it could be both. If WaPo was not releasing the intercepts at the request of Mueller, then the catalyst to publish the story could well have been that the White House made a move to leak them.
More likely the catalyst was the fear that Sessions would soon be out of office, at which point the story would have less impact.
Yep, the two were related, no doubt.