DL Open Thread: Thursday, April 28, 2022

D’s ‘Shocked’ That Ohio Union Members Love Trump.  Not to mention, Rethugs’ relentless gerrymandering has placed D seats at risk.  Right on cue, NY Court rules rare D redistricting unconstitutional.  It’s starting to look like Hungarian democracy is the best we can hope for.  Assisted every step of the way by so-called D centrists who believe in nothing but their corporate coffers and keeping their corporate benefactors happy.  You can’t stand when you stand for nothing.

Elon Musk Purchases Free Speech For $44 Mill. Immediately Violates Contract.  Pretty debt-laden purchasing agreement as well.  Here’s the real danger, though:

The Twitter sale will reportedly take about six months to conclude, and for a lot of journalists, including myself, the biggest concern is the fate of the platform’s openness as a key hub where the world’s journalists communicate unhindered. Huge corporations now control most of the communications between journalists on the internet, and authoritarian governments have either tightened their grip on permitted sites or eliminated the open internet entirely. For all its faults, Twitter is one of the few places left where individuals in democratic countries can contact one another, freely and in public, outside the immediate control of a platform. It’s very dangerous for one mercurial, imperially self-involved man, the richest in the world, to have absolute control over it.

And this isn’t a random whim. Musk’s purchase of Twitter is of a piece with oligarchical moves like Peter Thiel’s attack on Gawker in 2016 and Joe Ricketts’ closure of DNAinfo in 2017. Money itself having long since ceased to have any real meaning to them, hyper-rich men are quite willing to squander enormous amounts of it in order to control and silence their critics, and remove all impediments to their own ambitions.

Biden ‘Mulling’ Student Debt Relief.  After not ‘mulling’ it for a year and a half.  Way to make it anti-climactic, Joe.  Announce you’re not running for reelection the day after the mid-terms.

How Valley Forge Military Academy Devolved Into ‘Lord Of The Flies’.  Absolute must-reading from Mother Jones.  No excerpts, there’s just so much to this story.  I learned something I didn’t know, however.  Didja know that one of Valley Forge Military Academy’s alumni was J. D. Salinger?

Illinois Schools Can’t Ban Students?  Let the Cops Do It For Them:

The nearly 30 students summoned to the Tazewell County Courthouse that January morning were not facing criminal charges; they’d received tickets for violating a municipal ordinance while at school. Each was presented with a choice: agree to pay a fine or challenge the ticket at a later hearing. Failing to pay, they were told, could bring adult consequences, from losing their driving privileges to harming their future credit scores.

Across Illinois, police are ticketing thousands of students a year for in-school adolescent behavior once handled only by the principal’s office — for littering, for making loud noises, for using offensive words or gestures, for breaking a soap dish in the bathroom.

Ticketing students violates the intent of an Illinois law that prohibits schools from fining students as a form of discipline. Instead of issuing fines directly, school officials refer students to police, who then ticket them for municipal ordinance violations, an investigation by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica has found. (Use our interactive database to look up how many and what kinds of tickets have been issued in an Illinois public school or district.)

Another state law prohibits schools from notifying police when students are truant so officers can ticket them. But the investigation found dozens of school districts routinely fail to follow this law.

“Basically schools are using this as a way to have municipalities do their dirty work,” said Jackie Ross, an attorney at Loyola University Chicago’s ChildLaw Clinic who specializes in school discipline. “It’s the next iteration of the school-to-prison pipeline. Schools might be patting themselves on the back and saying it’s just the school-to-municipality pipeline, but it’s the same philosophy.”

What do you want to talk about?