Scotty is finally beamed up - to the International Space Station - and the backstory is revealed
December 30, 2020
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How right-wing activists are using school shootings to reignite the 'homeschooling' movement
March 29, 2023
Elected Republicans around the country have no plans of any kind to pass laws to prevent guns from falling into the wrong hands after the devastating mass shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee this week.
Instead, many of them have another idea, wrote Molly Olmstead for Slate: get kids out of public shools altogether.
"After the mass shooting at a Nashville elementary school this week, Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett was asked how Congress should respond to the violence. And Burchett was remarkably forthright. 'It’s a horrible, horrible situation,' he said. 'And we’re not gonna fix it,'" wrote Olmstead. "But there was another part of the interview that revealed the specific place this belief was coming from. When asked what should be done to protect children like his own daughter, Burchett replied, 'Well, we home-school her.'"
Similar rhetoric was pushed after the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde, Texas last year, which actually led to the first major federal gun legislation passed in 30 years. “It is clear now from the long list of school shootings in recent years that families can’t trust government schools, in particular, to bring their children or teachers home safely at the end of the day,” wrote Jordan Boyd for the far-right site The Federalist. “The same institutions that punish students for ‘misgendering’ people and hide curriculum from parents are simply not equipped to safeguard your children from harm.”
On the face of it, this doesn't make a lot of sense, since the vast majority of shooting deaths of children occur in the home, not in school shootings. But this is part of a pattern, wrote Olmstead, of the right-wing religious homeschooling movement latching onto unrelated issues to push their influence.
"The modern 'parental rights' movement was built off the work of conservative Christians who bemoaned changes in public schooling that occurred in the 1960s — namely that the Supreme Court ruled that school-sponsored prayer and Bible readings in the classroom were unconstitutional," wrote Olmstead. "Those Christians pushed white evangelicals to pull their children out of schools to give them a more 'Christian' education. The Home School Legal Defense Association, a Christian organization, campaigned during the 1980s to popularize and legalize home-schooling — and it quickly won political victories: home-schooling went from being largely illegal to legal everywhere by the early 1990s."
Burchett, Olmstead noted, makes no effort to hide this as his own motivation. “I think you’ve got to change people’s hearts,” he told reporters in the viral interview. “You know, as a Christian, as we talk about in the church — and I’ve said this many times — I think we really need a revival in this country.”
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Trump planning for military invasion of Mexico to attack cartels if re-elected: report
March 29, 2023
Former President Donald Trump is asking his advisers for a plan to launch a military invasion of Mexico to attack drug cartels if re-elected in 2024, Rolling Stone reported on Wednesday.
"Trump lieutenants have briefed him on several options that include unilateral military strikes and troop deployments on a sovereign U.S. partner and neighbor, the sources say. One such proposal that Trump has been briefed on this year is an October white paper from the Center for Renewing America, an increasingly influential think tank staffed largely by Trumpist wonks, MAGA loyalists, and veterans of his administration," reported Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley. "The policy paper — titled 'It’s Time to Wage War on Transnational Drug Cartels' — outlines possible justifications and procedures for the next Republican commander-in-chief to 'formally' declare 'war against the cartels,' in response to 'the mounting bodies of dead Americans from fentanyl poisonings.'"
The magazine acknowledges that this would be an invasion of a sovereign country, writing that the U.S. should “conduct specific military operations to destroy the cartels and enlist the Mexican government in joint operations to target cartel-networked infrastructure, including affiliated factions and enablers with direct action.” However, it brushed off the legal concerns, saying that “It is vital that Mexico not be led to believe that they have veto power to prevent the US from taking the actions necessary to secure its borders and people.”
This idea is not new. In 2019, Trump considered designating the drug cartels as terrorist organizations, a move that could have opened the door to military action against them, but administration officials decided against it. More recently, some Republicans like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have called for the cartels to be bombed.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has made clear that he does not support American military operations inside his country's borders. And there are a number of ways such an operation can go wrong; this comes after the U.S. spent 20 years trying to stabilize Afghanistan and clear the Taliban out of the country, only for the government to collapse and the Taliban to re-emerge.
This comes as President Joe Biden has stepped up efforts against the cartels, which in addition to flooding the U.S. with dangerous drugs fueling a nationwide epidemic of overdose deaths, are committing widespread organized violence in Mexico on a level seen in some civil wars. The U.S. and Mexican governments are working toward a deal where the former cracks down on guns going south to arm the cartels, while the latter tries to stop fentanyl from going north.
ALSO IN THE NEWS: Trump busted by CNN fact checker for telling a 'story that cannot possibly be true'
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Former President Donald Trump spent his afternoon giggling over poll numbers showing Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) failing to persuade Fox viewers to support him over Trump.
The Fox poll showed Trump at 43 percent support in Feb. 2023, and DeSantis at 28 percent. After a rollout of his book, a tour of early primary states and a slew of speeches and appearances on Fox, DeSantis fell to 24 percent. Trump, by contrast, went up to 54 percent support among Republican primary voters.
"It’s bad news for Ron DeSanctimonious and his RINO Globalist Donors," Trump needled the Florida governor. "Probably because of his terrible Votes against Social Security and MediCare (sic), and also, of course, because people love the job I did as President of the United States. We were Number One (sic) in every category, respected all over the World, and now our Country is going down the 'tubes'—We are a Failing Nation!" (sic)
Less than 30 minutes later, Trump had to post another comment trashing DeSantis and his falling numbers.
"FoxNews Viewers are VERY Happy about the just released FoxNews Polling that shows Ron DeSanctimonious being absolutely CRUSHED and, more importantly, dropping like a ROCK!" Trump wrote.
The drop comes a month after DeSantis saw a loss in support in the Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll. The poll then showed Trump leading DeSantis 46 percent to 23 percent. It was a 5 percent decrease for DeSantis since Jan. 2023.
The news comes on the same day that DeSantis is being mocked for being outwitted by the cartoon character "Mickey Mouse."
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