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Month: December 2022

He put it in writing

And it isn’t the first time.

I know it’s hard to keep caring that Donald Trump is a lunatic who happens to have tens of millions of followers, many of whom are armed to the teeth and primed for violence. But we have to.

Charlie Sykes on the weekend events:

In the last two weeks, Donald Trump pledged solidarity with the January 6 rioters, dined with two Holocaust-denying fans of Adolf Hitler, and called for the termination of the Constitution.

And he remains the front-runner and clear favorite for the GOP nomination for president in 2024.

No wonder the right would rather talk about Hunter Biden’s dick pix.

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3:42 PM ∙ Dec 4, 20221,726Likes287Retweets

JesusMaryandJosephandtheweedonkey, Trump put it in writing.

A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.

This was not a one off. As Mike Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short noted on Meet the Press, Trump’s attack on the Constitution was consistent with “what he asked the vice president to do two years ago, when rioters were attacking the Capitol and he asked the vice president to overturn the election results.”

On Sunday, Trump doubled down, firing off a declaration that: “UNPRECEDENTED FRAUD REQUIRES UNPRECEDENTED CURE!”

In other words, Goddam right I orchestrated coup to overthrow the Constitution — and I’ll do it again!

On Earth 2.0 (a rational and totally imaginary world), this would be the clearest, easiest, most obvious moment for Republicans to rid themselves of this troublesome and deranged demagogue.

Prominent Republicans would deliver major speeches rejecting (1) sedition, (2) collaboration with Nazis, and (3) the former president’s call to terminate the Constitution, so he can be be reinstated.

“No honest person can now deny that Trump is an enemy of the Constitution,” Liz Cheney tweeted on Sunday. Her fellow J6 Committee member, Adam Kinzinger called out his fellow Republicans: “With the former President calling to throw aside the constitution,” he said, “not a single conservative can legitimately support him, and not a single supporter can be called a conservative. This is insane. Trump hates the constitution.”

But here’s the headline of the day: “Top Republicans stay silent on Trump’s call to terminate the Constitution.”

Because, of course.

And check out this pathetic dingleberry: “Trump’s call to suspend Constitution not a 2024 deal-breaker, leading House Republican says.”

Exit question: Will Ron DeSantis denounce Trump’s anti-constitutionalism? If not, why not? Discuss among yourselves.

I think we know, don’t we?

Why didn’t the media run with Hunter’s laptop?

A few months back Philip Bump did a definitive piece on the context surrounding the NY Post’s publishing of the Hunter Biden laptop story. It’s worth reading in full if you want to understand the still unfolding brouhaha about twitter refusing the Post the story and the impending House investigations. You might want to bookmark it for future reference:

When the New York Post reported on Oct. 14, 2020, that it was in possession of emails between a Ukrainian businessman and Hunter Biden, son of the then-Democratic presidential nominee, it would have been hard to predict what followed. This was less than three weeks before the election itself, and the content of the report was soon subsumed to the odd way in which the paper obtained the information. Mainstream outlets and social media companies balked at elevating the story’s claims, triggering frustrations on the right that remain to this day.

New reporting has re-elevated questions about how the story emerged and was handled. In light of that resurrection, it seems useful to articulate exactly why there was suspicion about the story’s origins — suspicion that itself has not entirely been resolved.

There are at least four questions that arose from the initial report. Those are:

-How did the information published by the New York Post purportedly get from Hunter Biden to the paper?

-Was that information legitimate?

-Was the media’s skepticism about the chain of custody and the information warranted?

-Was the social media blackout of the Post’s story warranted?

In this article, we’ll only look at the overlap of the first and third questions: Was the sourcing for information sufficiently dubious to justify caution by mainstream outlets? The answer, it seems clear, is yes.

You’ll remember the story. Hunter Biden allegedly showed up at a computer repair shop with three water-damaged laptop computers. According to John Paul Mac Isaac, the proprietor of that shop, one of the three computers was beyond repair, one simply needed an external keyboard and one required data recovery. Mac Isaac recovered the data, but no one ever came to pick the machine up. Eventually the data from the computer made its way to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal attorney. It was Giuliani that gave it to the Post.

That summary excludes a lot of detail, some known at the time the Post story broke, some that only emerged afterward. Here, in the form of a timeline, is detail that seems salient to our current consideration of how the Post got the material from the laptop as well as what was known at the time.

The 2016 election. It’s critical to remember what happened in the 2016 election cycle. Then WikiLeaks published two large clusters of documents stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee’s network and from John Podesta, a top aide to the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. The Podesta material in particular was released in tranches for days beginning Oct. 7, 2016. It was real information, understood even then to have been a product of Russian efforts, that became fodder for criticism of Clinton.

After the election, we learned the full scope of Russia’s involvement in the election. Suddenly, the coverage of the WikiLeaks material took on a new light: It was stolen by a foreign government to try to influence U.S. politics. Media companies reconsidered their coverage; should there have been more caution about playing into the hands of a foreign influence campaign?

This question was very much on people’s minds in the months before the 2020 election — particularly given indications that Russia was again hoping to aid Trump’s election.

The 2019 impeachment. The other overlapping factor coloring the release of the Post story was the investigation into Trump’s effort to leverage Ukrainian aid to damage Biden the previous year.

Giuliani was central to that effort. In late 2018, he began exploring the idea that Biden, as vice president several years before, had improperly tried to influence Ukraine to block an investigation of Burisma, a company for which Hunter Biden served as a board member. This story, promoted by an investigator targeted for termination by the U.S. government, was later debunked, but it seemed a promising line of attack. On April 1, 2019, a writer linked to Giuliani named John Solomon wrote the first of several stories about the allegations.

On April 12, the laptops were dropped off at Mac Isaac’s repair shop. Mac Isaac is legally blind and was not able to identify Hunter Biden by sight. One of the laptops, though, bore a sticker for the Beau Biden Foundation, an organization dedicated to Hunter’s late brother.

At some point in the middle of this month, Hunter Biden left Burisma’s board. Presumably he was by that point aware that questions were being asked about his role. If not, it became very clear on May 1, when the Times elevated the Burisma question in its coverage.

In the meantime, Volodymyr Zelensky had been elected president of Ukraine, and efforts to pressure him to announce an investigation into Biden began. In early May 2019, Giuliani planned a trip to Ukraine to dig up information that might damage Biden — a plan that was covered in the press. After broad outcry, he scrapped the trip. But the signal was sent: Giuliani was seeking information deleterious to Biden.

2020: Hunter Biden reveals he is under federal investigation

Later that month, someone in Kyiv was approached about buying Hunter Biden’s emails. This was not reported until Oct. 21, 2020, a week after the Post’s story about the laptop.

“The two people who said they were approached with Hunter Biden’s alleged emails last year did not know whether any of them were real and they declined to identify who was behind the offers,” Time’s Simon Shuster wrote. “ … The two people said they could not confirm whether any of the material presented to them was the same as that which has been recently published in the U.S.” At least one, though, said the material in the Post was “familiar-looking.”

It’s not clear what this was or what the source was. It could have been from Biden’s business partners in Ukraine. It could have been from a hack of Biden’s account; his primary email address was an Apple iCloud account, meaning that emails and photos probably sat online where hackers might be able to access them. In mid-September 2019, the other person who spoke with Shuster was offered similar material.

When the Post first reported on its possession of material from Hunter Biden’s laptop, it shared a PDF of an email included in that material. That PDF carried metadata indicating that it was created on Oct. 10, 2019, meaning that either it was created on a machine that had the wrong date set or that it was created after the laptop came into Mac Isaac’s possession.

It’s possible that Mac Isaac himself created the PDF, as the beginning of the impeachment investigation into Trump for his interactions with Ukraine had begun the previous month. Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender reported in his book “Frankly, We Did Win This Election” that Mac Isaac, hearing Hunter Biden come up as part of the impeachment investigation, asked his father for advice on the laptop. Eventually, a connection was made to the FBI and, on Dec. 9, the FBI appeared with a subpoena for the laptop and for a hard drive. It’s not clear what was on that hard drive, though it may have been a backup made by Mac Isaac.

At the time, incidentally, Giuliani was in Ukraine looking to dig up dirt disparaging Joe Biden. That included meeting with a member of the Ukrainian parliament who was later sanctioned by the Treasury Department as a Russian agent.

In spring 2020, Joe Biden secured the Democratic presidential nomination.

At some point, Giuliani came into possession of the material from the laptop. The Daily Mail reported in December 2020 that the material was turned over to Giuliani’s lawyer no later than May of that year. According to Bender’s conversation with the lawyer, Robert Costello, that didn’t happen until August — purely by chance.

“In August 2020 — on a whim, as Costello described it to me — he asked Giuliani’s assistant to keep an eye out for any strange political tips coming into the email boxes for Giuliani’s various companies. Costello had a couple of dozen emails within a few days, including one from J.P. Mac Isaac,” Bender wrote.

We do know that by September 2020, Stephen K. Bannon, another ally of Trump’s, was bragging about having it. On Sept. 28, he gave an interview with a Dutch television network hyping his possession of the laptop.

There were already strange rumblings about Hunter Biden at the time. Earlier that same month, someone was passing around a lengthy dossier of allegations about Hunter Biden’s business dealings with China, created by a nonexistent entity. That document was shared, among others, by an employee of the Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui.

Guo is also the owner of the boat on which Bannon had been arrested for fraud in August 2020. After the Post report on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Daily Beast uncovered claims promoted by outlets linked to Guo focused on a Hunter Biden laptop.

“3 hard disk drives of videos and dossiers of Hunter Biden’s connections with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have been sent to Nancy Pelosi and DOJ,” one tweet read. “Big money and sex scandal!” That was published Sept. 28, the same day as Bannon’s interview with Dutch TV. Similar allegations had been made days before.

The first time the Post saw the material was on Oct. 4. By Oct. 11, Giuliani had handed over the entire duplicated contents of the hard drive and the newspaper began debating how to handle it.

The Times would later report that this was contentious even at the conservative publication. Fox News had already passed on it, apparently in part because of the questions about provenance. A number of Post employees questioned whether the paper had done enough to vet the material. Speaking to the Times, Giuliani insisted that this was exactly why the Post was given all of it: “either nobody else would take it,” he said, “or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”

After the story came out, the Post didn’t share the material with other outlets for them to do their own investigations. In other words, coverage necessarily depended on taking the Post’s word for things, which is by itself a disincentive for other outlets.

After the story published Oct. 14, media outlets tried to assess its credibility, without luck. Mac Isaac gave a lengthy, odd interview to reporters that same afternoon in which he repeatedly gave evasive answers and appeared to change his explanations for how he knew whose laptop it was and how it got to the FBI. In the days that followed, the Time and Daily Beast reports reinforced questions about how the material was obtained and how it was being used explicitly to aid Trump’s campaign.

Even today, the full story isn’t clear. Is the story straightforward — Mac Isaac obtained a laptop, thought it might be relevant to national politics and then found only one taker, Giuliani, for the material? Was the material reportedly circulating in Ukraine the same stuff? Nonexistent? Obtained from an iCloud hack independently? Did Guo learn about the laptop from Bannon, with mentions of the material in September following from there? It is of course always easy to ask infinite questions when you’re skeptical, but that the answers to this aren’t known now reinforces the reasons for skepticism 18 months ago.

The reticence to aid possible Russian interference probably had one unintended effect: It made the contents of the drive itself as reported by the Post seem more important than it would likely have been considered otherwise. But that is a subject for a different article.

Since then, the Post got a hold of the laptop and were unable to validate its provenance because it’s been handled by so many right wing freaks.

Just keep all this in mind as they start throwing all this garbage at the wall hoping for something to stick.

Will “My Kevin” make it?

Probably…

This tweet thread explains the current state of play with the House Speaker election. The wingnuts are restless…

A few notes from this past week on McCarthy and the Speakership election—one structural and two political.

First, Representative McEachin (D-VA) sadly passed away last Monday. That means the total number of Representatives on January 3 is likely to be 434.

With 434 Members-elect (likely to be 222 R and 212 D), the math moves slightly in McC’s favor. 218 votes will still be needed if every Member-elect votes, but now 1 “present” vote (or non-vote) reduces the magic number to 217. (217 McC, 212 Jeffries, 4 other, 1 present wins).

Another slight change is the absolute winning floor for McCarthy. Now that the D’s will have 212 instead of 213, McCarthy’s bare winning number is 213 (instead of 214). So 10 present (or not voting) R’s now gets there (213 McC, 212 Jeffries, 10 present/not-vote).

The core math calculation for McCarthy (assuming all 212 Dems vote for Jeffries) is now: 213 hard yes Republicans + any combination of 5 additional ballots out of the last 10, where a hard yes is a full ballot and a “present” or non-vote is 1/2 of a ballot.

Next issue: McCarthy’s campaign for the Speakership is dragging him to the right on lame duck issues, particularly on the omnibus. McC participated in a WH negotiating session, but is evidently already a hard no on any omnibus deal.

This reflects the fact that a lot of the swing votes on the Speakership are the same Republicans who are the hardest no votes on the annual omnibus appropriations bills. They just never want to vote for these things, and almost never do.

It has put the GOP House leaders (Boehner, then Ryan) into tough boxes in the last decade. Holding the House majority, but often relying on 100+ Dems to pass Senate approps compromises, while sometimes not even getting a majority of their own caucus. It’s a tough spot.

McCarthy is almost certainly in the “vote no, hope yes” caucus here. Pretty sure the last thing he wants is to have the first big issue of his Speakership in the 118th Congress be him negotiating a deal with the Dems for an omnibus that a majority of his caucus votes against.

But this is a precursor to his basic problem over the next 2 years. The GOP House leadership will be put in a box with the conservative wing of the caucus, needing to actually negotiate deals on must-pass legislation, but becoming the party villain for doing so.

Again, this is not a new dynamic. It’s a consequence of a lot of things (GOP primaries, conservative media, lots of chucklehead Members in the caucus), but it’s the same dynamic that worked against Boehner and Ryan. Here’s more on the primary angle: https://mattglassman.substack.com/p/primaries-all-the-way-down

And here’s an old tweet storm on the partisan media problem.

The other glaring McCarthy issue is that Trump is going off the rails this week, and McCarthy just can’t bring himself to criticize him in any real way.

Whether it’s Kanye, Fuentes, or declaring that the Constitution should be “terminated,” right now there’s really nothing that Trump can do that will bring a strong direct rebuke from McCarthy. I expect that dynamic to continue at least through 1/3/23.

Here’s a thread from last month that explains the basic math of the Speakership election

Originally tweeted by Matt Glassman (@MattGlassman312) on December 5, 2022.

He’ll make it. But this just illustrates how much he will be under the thumb of the extremists in his caucus. Not that he’s trying to hide it:

He will give them every last thing they want. Marge Green didn’t endorse him for nothing.

It’s all about the dirty, dirty

The right’s ratfuckers are still hard at work

Donald Trump and his fellow traveler Elon Musk had a good weekend — if you judge such things on their terms. They both managed to accomplish something you would not have thought was possible: distract attention from their open association with Nazis and white supremacists. You have to hand it to them; that takes skill.

After a couple of weeks facing off an avalanche of criticism, Musk made a sharp pivot by releasing internal company documents pertaining to Twitter’s decision last summer to briefly delete tweets relating to the now-infamous New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop. At least momentarily, that shifted the conversation from Musk’s relationships with the numerous unsavory characters with whom he interacts on Twitter to a long thread he commissioned from journalist Matt Taibbi, supposedly revealing, at least according to Musk, that Joe Biden had defiled the First Amendment.

He did no such thing, of course. First of all, this went down during the 2020 campaign and Biden wasn’t president at the time. As a presidential candidate, he had a perfect right to appeal to a private company not to publish salacious material about his family, following Twitter’s own rules. (For an excellent analysis of the substance of the documents, I recommend this one from Nicholas Grossman.)

Nonetheless, the ensuing brouhaha on the right was overwhelming. This will give you a taste of the hysteria:

Then Donald Trump said, “Hold my Diet Coke.” His response to the “revelations” came shortly thereafter:

There are certainly unsavory aspects of Hunter Biden’s ignominious personal and professional career, which I wrote about in detail years ago. There is no clear evidence of any illegal and the chronology doesn’t work when it comes to allegations that Biden took corrupt action on behalf of his son as vice president. There is nothing there other than a man making money by trading on his family name, which you might think would be an embarrassing issue for a family that literally sells its name to the highest bidder.

The right has attempted to turn Joe Biden’s care and concern for a son who was going through a major life crisis, which included substance abuse, wild partying and a range of self-destructive behavior, into a corruption scandal. No one can possibly read the emails from father to son that have been extracted from Hunter Biden’s laptop and see anything but compassion and love. In fact, I’m sure Republicans understand that: What they are really trying to do is push Joe Biden to break down and cry in public.

Seriously: It’s an old ratfucking trick from the Nixon years whose dastardly crew famously goaded Sen. Edmund Muskie, the Democratic frontrunner early in the 1972 campaign, into getting emotional over a fake letter impugning his wife. I have no doubt that the right-wing dirty tricksters of today are believing their own propaganda that Biden is a feeble old man who is overly sentimental about his family, and they think they can push him into doing the same thing.

We are a long way from 1972 and I suspect that even if Biden did cry about his son, the country would feel kinship with him, not disdain. There is hardly a family in America that is not touched by similar trauma.

Hunter Biden’s laptop has the right in the throes of ecstasy. They don’t care about Trump crapping on the Constitution. They care about the dirty pictures on that laptop, and want the whole country talking about them.

Years later, when Hillary Clinton ran for president, the right’s hit men tried it again with a whisper campaign about her and her assistant Huma Abedin. They had long since planted rumors that Hillary was a closeted lesbian who was only with Bill to power her ruthless ambition. (Why do you think they wanted so desperately to get hold of all those personal emails?)

The mainstream media has always jumped right into these scandal stories with enthusiasm — and if they hadn’t done so, it’s unlikely such narratives would have gained traction with the broader public. For instance, the New York Times actually published a front-page story headlined “Huma Abedin, a Clinton Aide, Is Back in Spotlight as Republicans Seize on Emails” in 2015, which began with this suggestive lead:

Among the trove of emails released from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state was this instruction to a trusted aide who needed to brief her on a matter that could not wait: “Just knock on the door to the bedroom if it’s closed,” Mrs. Clinton wrote in November 2009 to Huma Abedin, then her deputy chief of staff.

The Times wasn’t the only publication pushing this line.

The pseudo-scandal surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop is yet another chance for right-wingers to embarrass and harass their political enemies by talking incessantly about their sex lives. They the laptop — which, by the way, has been handled by so many people with dubious intentions that it can’t be authenticated — would be their October surprise, somethinjg like Anthony Weiner’s laptop back in 2016, which arguably cost Hillary Clinton the presidential election. They seem to be trying to convince people that pictures of Hunter Biden with lots of drugs and various different women would have shocked people into voting for Donald Trump over Hunter’s dad, which is patently ridiculous. They are delicately choosing not to mention that he’s the guy who has been accused by dozens of women of sexual assault and who paid off a porn actress during his 2016 campaign.

I don’t know if conservatives really believe that the laptop would have turned the tide or they just get off on sharing naked pictures of the president’s son and talking about his problems. But they expected the media to jump on that story and for the most part it didn’t, largely because of all the hacking and ratfucking and foreign interference on the Republicans’ behalf that had gone on during the 2016 campaign. I wish I were confident that the national media has finally learned its lesson about right-wing scandal-mongering in general, but that may be too much to hope for. 

We’ll just have to see how the press and pundits handle it when House Republicans hold their inevitable “investigative” hearings on Hunter’s laptop. Will that make it “news” that political reporters simply have to cover? Will they harangue the president day in and day out, to see if he’ll break down and cry? It looks like we’re going to find out.

Salon

Why should teachers have to be educated?

Making America Great Again

This is, quite simply, lunacy. Instead of paying college educated, trained teachers a living wage they are turning the profession into a minimum wage level job.

This will really be the end of us No other country so devalues education that they are abusing their teachers, requiring superstitious nonsense, myth and legend to be taught instead of real information. The American right wants people to be stupid:

In response to Oklahoma’s continued teacher shortage, lawmakers passed a measure that no longer requires educators to have a college degree in order to teach permanently in public schools.

All a prospective educator needs now is a high school diploma and “distinguished qualifications” in their field to make them eligible to teach full time in K-12 classrooms. Those people don’t have to work toward a teaching certificate or take college classes, and legislators gave local districts latitude to determine what meets the “distinguished qualifications” threshold.

Supporters claim the law will make it easier for doctors, lawyers and other trained professionals to enter the teacher pipeline, but critics say those aren’t the people applying to teach. Public school watchdogs say they’re hearing of superintendents and school boards so desperate that they’re hiring people with high school diplomas.

Bryan Duke, interim dean at the University of Central Oklahoma’s college of education, said while the so-called adjunct teachers have previously been permitted, until this year lawmakers limited how long they could be in a classroom.

He said lawmakers promised the changes would draw highly-trained professionals, but based on conversations with district leaders, he said “that is not what we’re seeing.”

“We’ll just say that I’m not aware of those qualifications,” Duke said. “And, I certainly doubt that most folks would have those qualifications.”

The State Department of Education reported that Oklahoma districts have alrady hired 370 non-certified adjunct teachers for full-time positions since the new law took effect July 1. Where they’re working and their qualifications were not clear.

State Rep. Kyle Hilbert, R-Bristow, the House author, said the bill “epitomizes local control” because school boards get to determine who is qualified. He does not dispute the law technically requires only a high school diploma, but questioned whether anyone is “abusing it.”

He said Oklahoma has a teacher shortage, and legislators must do everything they can to give districts as many options as possible to create the best learning environment for children.

“I would push back on anyone that says that just because someone doesn’t have some letters next to their name that they’re less intelligent than someone else,” Hilbert said. “Some of the smartest people I know, their highest level of education is high school. And if they’ve got a career of experience and excellence in their field, perhaps they do have some expertise that they can bring.”

State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister, though, appeared stunned when she learned during an interview that lawmakers had stripped the college degree requirement for permanent teachers. She whispered “Oh my God!” under her breath.

She called the change “worrisome,” and said Oklahoma parents expect and deserve a college-educated teacher for their child.

Educating is a science, and students benefit from college-trained graduates who have the practice and expertise in helping students lift outcomes, particularly in reading, she said.

“Overall, we shouldn’t be watering down standards in something so very important individually for students and for our collective workforce in the state,” Hofmeister said. “I am worried that we have pushed legislation to a place where it is answering a temporary emergency need that is actually creating a standard of normalcy, and that is not good for our state.”

Oklahoma already is grappling with disappointing student outcomes compared to other states. Recent data from the National Assessment of Education Progress showed Oklahoma student scores in reading and math dropped more than most other states during the pandemic, according an October analysis from Oklahoma Watch.

Hofmeister said when someone enters school having previously owned a Hallmark store, they don’t have the experience and training to step into a second-grade class.

“There are some who really seem to think that what is happening in school is a lot of babysitting,” Hofmeister said, “and it’s not. Kids don’t get back these days. They need to be spent with those who have the expertise to deliver an excellent education, and we have to do more.”

Kevin Kumashiro, an education policy expert, said Oklahoma is the first state he’s heard of that requires no college education. He said in an email there is a nationwide trend to expand eligibility for teaching to individuals who have not completed college or a teacher-preparation program, but other states still require at least some college education.

Arizona, for instance, requires teachers only have a high school diploma, but they must be enrolled in college. Idaho requires a college degree for most educators, but allows work experience to substitute for people interested in teaching CareerTech-related programs. Florida, meanwhile, has expanded its “Troops to Teaching” program by requiring teachers have about two years of college plus four years of military service, Kumashiro said.

“The teacher-shortage crisis is fueling such moves to require less and less preparation in order to become a teacher,” he said.

State Sen. Jessica Garvin, R-Duncan, who authored the law, said her bill was never intended to address Oklahoma’s teacher shortage, and argued that districts have theoretically been able to hire high school graduates even before her law eliminated restrictions on the number of hours adjuncts could teach.

A mother of two public school children, Garvin said it’s “extremely frustrating” that people are insisting her bill lessens teaching requirements.

“If anything, in my opinion this increases or enhances the requirements,” Garvin said.

She said she doesn’t believe her bill takes away the college-degree requirement, but said Oklahoma needs to have a broader conversation about who would be a good fit in public schools. She said there should be many paths to the classroom and someone who brings many years of real-world experience, but no college education, could be a better educator than someone just starting out.

“I’m not saying that this makes it OK for people to lessen any sort of stipulations that they would tend to hire someone with in the event that they needed a teacher, but what I am saying is we’ve got to get away from this mentality that the only way you can have a successful career is to go to college because that’s not true,” Garvin said.

She said she’s heard from a number of school districts that have told her they’re using her law to hire people with college degrees, but who hold no teaching certification. She said she doesn’t know any school districts that have changed their requirements “to not hire someone with a bachelor’s degree.”

“That’s just a blatant lie,” Garvin said. “That’s very misleading. … And, quite frankly, if a school district is hiring someone who’s not qualified to be in a classroom then they need to be voted out of the school board or the superintendent needs to be fired. I mean that’s just asinine.”

Katherine Bishop, president of Oklahoma Education Association, said she can’t even think of a word to illustrate how “highly disappointed” she is with the new law.

She said lawmakers never revealed that the law would allow the permanent hiring of unprepared and “unqualified teachers” with only high school degrees. They said the law was targeted at professionals with college degrees who couldn’t pass the teaching certification test, she said.

“I am offended as a professional that we would even think that this was OK,” Bishop said. “Our students, their education, deserve better than that. And our taxpayers should be appalled, to be honest with you, that a person that just graduated high school could then be a teacher.”

Bishop called the law “a slap” in the face to educators who worked hard to get certified and said the law is an example of how not to address a teacher shortage.

Professional Oklahoma Educators, which also advocates for teachers, and Oklahoma State School Boards Association did not respond to requests for comment.

“School unions criticize any legislation or policy that threatens their monopoly over kids,” said Kate Vesper, a spokeswoman for Gov. Kevin Stitt, in an email.

Stitt and lawmakers will continue “to deliver new and innovative ways” to make it easier to recruit and retain more teachers, she said, and included the law as an example of Stitt’s efforts to do that.

“Getting a four-year degree at a university should not be the only route to become a teacher,” she said.

The new law makes it easier for industry professionals such as farmers, ranchers, accountants, pilots and bankers to teach, she said.

Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s secretary of education and soon-to-be state superintendent, said Oklahomans have talked about the desire to get more teachers into the classroom.

He said the law provides more options, more competition and a broader applicant pool for school districts. It also provides more pathways for talented people to come into the classroom. He said there are Fortune 500 CEOs who never graduated from college.

“I don’t think that a sheet of paper necessarily makes them a better teacher,” Walters said. “Having our certificate doesn’t magically make you a better teacher. There’s real life experiences that are important in being an effective teacher in the classroom.”

Not have “letter next to your name” doesn’t make you a great teacher but not having them makes you an unqualified one. It’s ridiculous.

Those poor kids …

Woke? Not woke?

The press is not awake enough, it seems

The Republican Party’s frontrunner for its 2024 presidential nomination wants to suspend the U.S. Constitution and it’s not front-page news? Apparently not.

“Defeated former president Donald Trump, within the space of two weeks, sat down to dine with two antisemites (one of whom later declared his love of Hitler) and declared on Truth Social that the U.S. Constitution should be subject to ‘termination’ so he could be installed as president,” writes Jennifer Rubin. “Rarely has an authoritarian insurrectionist under criminal investigation for attempting to overthrow the government issued so candid a confession.”

Rubin continues, “Neither the press nor the American people can afford to ignore a MAGA GOP that embraces a racist, an antisemite and an enemy of democracy. Trump’s rants are more than just “talk”; they’re an invitation to repeat the horrors of Jan. 6.”

Indeed they are. Trump is preparing the ground for more violence should he be indicted either by the Department of Justice or by Fulton County, Ga. district attorney Fani Willis. I’m not even sure the man is self-aware enough to know it. He operates on feral instinct more than on his limited intellect. He’s priming his cult to burn the place down for him in revenge. If Trump knows it, he knows it in his bones.

The MAGA cult will make martyrs of convicted Proud Boys and pariahs of FBI informants. It is a good bet that the substation attack in North Carolina is connected to MAGA extremists of some variety. Over 20 from North Carolina have been arrested for actions in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Over a thousand from the state, including elected officials, law enforcement officers, and military members, are found in an Oath Keepers database. Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, antisemites, xenophobes, Christian nationalists. They all see Trump as one of their own. Plenty have proven they will engage in violence on his behalf. All he has to do is give the word.

Shots fired in North Carolina

Lights out: An update from the front

Electrical substation photo via Wikipedia.

Roughly 35,000 homes are still without power in Moore County, North Carolina after domestic terrorists (let’s be clear) opened fire on and damaged two electrical substations Saturday evening. A state of emergency was declared. A curfew was in effect Sunday night. Schools in Moore County are closed today. Power may not be fully restored until Thursday.

The FBI is involved in the investigation. The agency thwarted a similar attack two years ago.

Gov. Roy Cooper issued a statement, saying, “An attack like this on critical infrastructure is a serious, intentional crime and I expect state and federal authorities to thoroughly investigate and bring those responsible to justice. Moore County has strong, vibrant communities and the state will continue to provide transportation and public safety assistance.”

CNN:

The mass outage in Moore County turned into a criminal investigation when responding utility crews found signs of potential vandalism of equipment at different sites – including two substations that had been damaged by gunfire, according to the Moore County Sheriff’s Office.

“The person, or persons, who did this knew exactly what they were doing,” Moore County Sheriff Ronnie Fields said during a Sunday news conference. “We don’t have a clue why Moore County.”

Fields said multiple rounds were fired at the two substations. “It was targeted, it wasn’t random,” he said.

The sheriff would not say whether the criminal activity was domestic terrorism but noted “no group has stepped up to acknowledge or accept they’re the ones who [did] it.”

Traffic lights are out. Stores with generators are open, but many other remain closed. Grocery store chain Harris Teeter is distributing bags of ice.

“It is cold,” said Chris Thompson of Carthage. “We have a six-month-old baby in the house. We are trying to get heat for her now. I don’t know.”

My cohort Barry Summers of Greensboro posted this December 2020 CBS report on a strikingly similar plot thwarted by the FBI:

The FBI is investigating a neo-Nazi group that is believed to have been planning an attack on the United States power grid. The plot was being called “Lights Out.” One of the targeted structures that is mentioned is outside of Colorado Springs. It’s called “Midway” and it is operated by Xcel.

The information is contained in a search warrant affidavit that was accidentally unsealed in federal court in Wisconsin. The warrant is to seek information on a cell phone number from the telephone company service provider.

The affidavit details an alleged plot naming three people who have not been charged so far in this case. It was reviewed by CBS4 investigator Rick Sallinger on Sunday, Dec. 13. The next day, the warrant was resealed and no longer open to public viewing. It says the plot is to disable power substations in the southeastern United States and in El Paso County Colorado.

The affidavit cites an informant as claiming the target date to carry out the attack was to be for 2024, but sooner if Donald Trump was to lose the 2020 election.

A Wisconsin report from on that FBI leak from 2020:

In November 2019, investigators said the 17-year-old shared plans with a group of as many as 10 people to attack the U.S. electric grid in an operation dubbed “Lights Out.”

“The plan was to knock out key power grids by strategically shooting rifle rounds into power sub-stations costing the government millions in recovery spending,” the informant told investigators, according to the records.

The targets included Miami and Jacksonville, in Florida, and a substation in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Three people pleaded guilty in that case in February this year:

Three men, including one from Oshkosh, have been charged in Ohio with plotting to disrupt the nation’s power grid to advance their white supremacist ideology.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Justice Department announced all three men have agreed to plead guilty to charges of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. The charge carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison. The case was charged earlier this month in the Southern District of Ohio.

“We don’t have a clue why Moore County,” said Moore County Sheriff Ronnie Fields. They probably said the same thing in El Paso County Colorado.

People involved in the Moore County attack will be spending a large fraction of their lives behind bars. Perhaps trading notes with fellow domestic terrorists.

Herschel’s closing argument

I guess it’s too late to tell him that he’s running for the Senate not the House

If he wins do you think they’ll assign him a baby sitter to help him find the Senate?

Honestly, it is so insulting that the Republicans actually nominated this guy and it’s embarrassing that so many people in Georgia are voting for him. We just have to hope that it isn’t enough to get him over the line.

Hunter’s junk matters

Abraham Van Buren

The wingnuts are absolutely sure that if the public had only know about what was on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the election, Donald Trump would have won. Twitter censoring the pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis left the voters uninformed!

This twitter wag explains exactly why:

If i had seen Hunter Biden’s penis I might not have voted for Joe Biden. For Democracy to work I have to like the look of the President’s son’s penis. Take President Van Buren’s son Abraham for example. There was a President’s son with a strong shaft, and plentiful balls.

Now President Hayes’ son Sardis Birchard Austin, too veiny and with a weird mole at the base. Not befitting of the son of the leader of the free world. Old Rutherford would decidedly not have had my vote.

And then there was President Grover Cleveland, who’s son Oscar Folsom Cleveland, although born illegitimate, was very legitimate down in his nether regions. One look at that impressive display and I would have voted Grover for a 2nd term too.

And do I even need to mention Kermit Roosevelt? Let’s just say that President Theodore Roosevelt didn’t come up with the Big stick ideology out of nowhere.

Originally tweeted by Mr. Newberger (@jeremynewberger) on December 3, 2022.

I don’t think I have to mention Don Jr, do I?

Lol!

Update:

US Military snowflakes

This is the most “woke” thing I’ve heard of :

No service member should ever have to do anything they don’t want to do. What about their freedom?

By the way, service members have been required to get inoculated going all the way back to the revolutionary war. It’s kind of a problem if they get sick and spread viruses to each other in the middle of battle so the government has always required them to get the full battery of vaccines if they join up. I guess the woke right is too sensitive for such requirements. They are very delicate warriors.