Did Robert Reich Predict the Future in 1995?

Plea for Action on Pedophile Coverup

 

Full Politico Interview with Gov. Gavin Newsom, August 27, 2025

Warning about Trump 3rd term starts just past 25:00:

Know Your Rights When ICE Comes Knocking

 

While making an arrest or conducting a search, ICE MUST present either a signed, judicial warrant to enter private property, or an admin. warrant from the government agency authorizing an arrest or seizure. Spread the word!

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— Freedom Writers Collaborative (@fwcollaborative.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 12:21 PM

Jeffrey Epstein Survivor SLAMS RELEASE & Possible Pardons

Another Epstein witness that conservative media rigorously avoids:

Gov. Bill Lee: Punishing Poor Children and Lying About It

This year Tennessee and Indiana joined 13 other Trump Party states to opt out of a federal summer program to help feed schoolchildren whose parents need the help. Instead of telling the truth about his decision to shortchange children in need, Tennessee’s bible-waving governor, Bill Lee, chose to deny the facts.  From Truthout:

. . . In a statement provided to NBC News, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee described the Summer EBT [Electronic Benefit Transfer] program as a pandemic-era program, when in fact it grew out of a USDA pilot program launched in 2011. The USDA’s evaluation found the money reduced food insecurity among American children by a fifth. Tennessee even participated in it in its final year in 2018. 

Lee also said the program was “mostly duplicative” because other programs, like the Summer Food Service Program, already existed. That program typically serves free meals to kids at specific sites, but only about one in six eligible children receive meals through it. Couch, for example, works from midday until as late as 11 p.m. on some nights, leaving no time to take her children there. 

The existing programs “are not enough to serve the families who need support during the summertime,” said Signe Anderson, senior director of nutrition advocacy at the legal nonprofit Tennessee Justice Center. Some Tennessee counties don’t have any summer meal programs; those that do don’t always operate every day and may open in the middle of a work day. Less than 65,000 Tennessee children participated in summer lunch programs in 2023, compared to the 700,000 children served by Summer EBT last year.

Janice Cleveland’s 17-year-old granddaughter is one of the 700,000 served last year who now isn’t receiving any food assistance. Last summer, Cleveland, who gets by on disability insurance and Social Security income, was able to pay her bills and have enough to feed her granddaughter thanks to Summer EBT. But this year she was confused when the benefits didn’t show up. She called the number on the back of her card and was told her state wasn’t offering the program. “That was a big blow,” she said, adding that she hasn’t been able to afford soap and other necessities. She is unable to take advantage of the pre-selected food at summer meal sites given that she’s diabetic and has a sensitive stomach and has to be very careful about what she eats. 

Stories of families losing access to food are widespread. “We’ve heard from parents who haven’t been able to pay [their] bills,” Anderson said. “We often hear from parents who skip meals so their kids can eat during the summer time.”

Instead of participating in Summer EBT, Tennessee created its own program to send one-time $120 payments to 25,000 students in just 15 counties at a cost of $3 million. Running Summer EBT statewide, officials estimated, would have cost about $4 million, though that bill could have been smaller if the state had applied for a $1.1 million federal grant to cover administrative costs. 

“The economics of it doesn’t make sense when the state could have reached 700,000 kids across the state,” Anderson said. “It feels almost cruel to do something so limited when you know you could be serving so many more kids.”

Five Ways to Fight Trump's Fascism

Lisa Rubin Analyzes How "careful" Todd Blanche Was in Ghislaine Maxwell Questioning

Massive Fraud in AZ School Voucher Program

From News 12, Phoenix:

 PHOENIX — Home and private school parents with Empowerment Scholarship Accounts for their kids bought diamond rings and necklaces, Kenmore appliances, and even lingerie with education tax dollars, a 12News investigation has found.

Parents of ESA children also purchased more than 200 Apple iPhones, more than 50 smart TVs, and dozens of gift cards worth up to $500 each since last November, when the state Department of Education began automatically approving all ESA requests because of a massive backlog.

The 12News I-Team, through a public records request, also uncovered more than $3 million in purchases to Amazon, Costco, and Best Buy, with no indication of what was bought. There were also nearly $2,000 payments to a person identified as "me" and "Jamie the tutor," as well as for a purse.

Many of the purchases are considered "unallowable" under ESA guidelines, and Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said his office eventually will claw back the money. A spokesman said Monday that parents may be referred to the Attorney General's Office for prosecution, and 400 accounts have been suspended because of improper spending.

"Most people are honest and request reasonable things," Horne said. "The unreasonable ones are about 1 percent, and we recover them afterwards….So, there’s nothing where people can get away with murder on things under $2,000.”

The I-Team's public records request was made after 12News uncovered that 1.2 million ESA requests totaling $124 million were automatically approved since late last year.

The Department of Education's website said the ESA program, which has about 90,000 kids and will cost the state $1 billion this school year, "may be the most accountable program in the state."

Beth Lewis, who leads Save Our Schools, Arizona, said that's laughable.

"Tom Horne has instituted this policy, which is, you know, the exact opposite of any sort of financial stewardship or responsibility," Lewis said. "We have no idea where the funds are going, and whether they’re being used to just improve people’s homes or pay for things that no other person in the state would ask people to pay for.”

The questionable -- and possibly illegal -- ESA spending was uncovered by 12News as a Maricopa County judge ruled last week that Arizona isn’t properly funding capital needs for its public schools, calling it unconstitutional.

In Judge Dewain Fox's 114-page ruling, the judge included several pictures of damaged roofs, cracked floors and peeling walls from various schools across Arizona to emphasize how some districts "languish with substandard facilities for years."

Other purchases automatically approved include:

• Two 1-carat diamond rings and several necklaces.
• Kenmore washers, dryers, and a range.
• Gift cards to Kohl's and Happy Moments, which can be used at restaurants and clothing.
• Gaming laptops.
• Apple iPods and watches along with warranties.
• Hotel and resort stays, including Knott's Berry Farm, Great Wolf Lodge and Hilton properties.
• Broadway tickets at ASU Gammage, including one for nearly $1,300.
• Airline tickets.
• Luxury clothing like Psycho Bunny.
• Maternity wear and corsets.
• Diapers.
• Dog food.
• High-end office furniture like a $1,750 Herman Miller Embody Ergonomic Office Chair.
• Sports camps.
• Dozens of Lego sets, including 15 for more than $1,000 each.
• Above-ground pools.
• Personal fitness training.
• More than 300 purchases at The San Diego Zoo and SeaWorld.
• Traeger grills.
• Electric bikes and mopeds.
• Massive inflatable water slides.
• Horse saddles.

Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association, said it's shameful that ESA parents are making such luxury purchases when so many public schools are struggling.

She notes that numerous teachers are asking for donations for basic necessities like books, and added that public school employees would be fired if they made similar purchases as ESA parents.

"It just doesn’t happen. And there would be accountability, multiple layers of accountability," she said. "Hearing about these extravagant purchases breaks my heart."

The Arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell: 60 Minutes Australia (2020)

Arizona Teachers and Students Celebrate Historic Funding Win

Source:

 Phoenix, AZ – August 13, 2025: Today, Judge Dewain Fox ruled that Arizona’s funding for the capital needs of Arizona’s public schools is unconstitutional and must be reformed.

In a thorough, 114-page Order, the court explained, “After carefully and thoroughly reviewing the record . . . the Court concludes that the current public-school capital finance system does not meet the constitutional minimum standards established by the Arizona Supreme Court.”

The school districts and education associations who brought this case issued the following joint statement.

Today’s decision declaring Arizona’s public school financing system unconstitutional is a historic victory for Arizona’s public-school students, as well as their teachers and staff. It will change the future for millions of students and their families. Our state’s constitution requires the legislature to fund our public schools. It’s time for our legislature to fulfill its constitutional obligation to fund public schools in every corner of Arizona so that all students, whether or not they live in a wealthy area, can receive a quality public education.

Danny Adelman, the Executive Director of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest, explained, “We presented mountains of evidence proving that the current system fails to provide even the most basic resources needed for a quality education. The state is failing to adequately or equitably fund our public schools. This is not only wrong, it’s unconstitutional.”

“This is an incredible victory,” said John Bullock of Osborn Maledon, who served as co-counsel with the Center for Law in the Public Interest. “Our clients have devoted their lives to educating students. But the State has set up a system that results in vast disparity between the haves and the have-nots. Whether schools can afford to have decent facilities should not depend on the amount of property wealth in the district. Unfortunately, due to a lack of state funding, that is exactly the system we have today.”

The case, Glendale Elementary School District et al. v. Arizona, was filed in 2017 by four Arizona public school districts (Glendale Elementary, Crane Elementary, Chino Valley Unified, and Elfrida Elementary), and the Arizona School Boards Association, the Arizona Education Association, and the Arizona School Administrators. They sued the State of Arizona for failing to uphold the legislature’s constitutional obligation to provide a “general and uniform” system of public education.

In the 1990s, the Arizona Supreme Court struck down the then-existing funding system as unconstitutional and established specific tests that any funding system must meet. The school plaintiffs in this case proved that the current system violates every part of those tests.

Why is Donald Trump refusing to release the Epstein files? | 60 Minutes Australia ...

Victory for Right to Read: Federal Judge Eviscerates Florida Book Banning Law

From MSNBC:

A federal judge has closed the chapter on key parts of Florida’s censorious ban on school library books that conservatives deem “pornographic” and harmful to children.

Amid a broader assault on diversity in the state, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law in 2023, known as House Bill 1069, that set up a process for parents to challenge books for removal from school libraries that they feel are unsuitable for young readers. The repressive law requires that schools remove books within five days of a parents’ complaint and make them unavailable while they’re reviewed. The process, broadly targeting books with “pornographic” content or that “describe sexual conduct,” has ensnared many titles by nonwhite and LGBTQ authors over purported obscenity.

Last year, multiple publishing companies, Florida parents and authors filed a lawsuit seeking to thwart the bill, naming as defendants various members of the state education board and school boards in Orange and Volusia counties. And the suit appears to have succeeded, in large part.

“By enacting HB 1069, the Florida legislature sought to prohibit material from entering or remaining in school libraries that is not obscene for minors,” District Court Judge Carlos Mendoza said in his ruling on Wednesday, which found the section that targets descriptions of sexual conduct to be unconstitutional.

He listed several examples:

The following books, among others, have been removed: The Color Purple, Half of a Yellow Sun, Cloud Atlas, The Splendid and the Vile, I am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them, On the Road, Nineteen Minutes, Paper Towns, Looking for Alaska, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, The Kite Runner, Slaughterhouse-Five, Shout, Last Night at the Telegraph Club, The Handmaid’s Tale, Native Son, Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa, Water for Elephants, Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Homegoing. None of these books are obscene.

Read the rest here. 

Taking Stock of What Tennesseans Will Lose From Republican Budget

Steve Cohen, the only Democratic member of Tennessee’s Congressional delegation, voted against the massive Medicaid, SNAP, and Obamacare cuts that were approved by the Republican majority and signed into law by D.C.’s real crime wave, Donald “Felon" Trump.  

Regardless of how their constituents are negatively affected, Tennessee’s seven Republican House members are loyal Trump sycophants who can be counted on to support ANY position or piece of legislation that Trump commands them to approve.

Steve Cohen was also alone among the TN delegation to vote against massive tax giveaways to those who need them the least.  In order to give massive tax cuts to the super rich, i.e., tax filers making $5 million per year, this 0.1 percent of taxpayers will get on average an annual tax reduction of $300,000.  In other words, Tennessee’s Sycophantic Seven voted to run up the national debt by $4 trillion in order to give millionaires and billionaires tax cuts they don’t need.  Here’s the latest estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, reported by U.S. News:

• The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the OBBB Act will increase the national debt by $4.1 trillion over the next 10 years. 
• The bill increased the statutory debt limit by $5 trillion. 
• The U.S. national debt is growing at an unsustainable rate, outpacing the country's economic growth. 
• Snowballing national debt can eventually lead to stagnant wages, higher interest rates, rising inflation and a weaker U.S. dollar.

The national debt numbers would be much worse if were not for the unprecedented and draconian Republican cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, Medicare, and Obamacare.  Here are some current estimates of what these cuts mean for Tennesseans.

Nine rural Tennessee hospitals are likely to close because of the Republican budget cuts:

• Dyersburg: Dyersburg Regional Medical Center
• Erwin: Unicoi County Hospital
• Huntingdon: Baptist Memorial Hospital Huntingdon
• Lebanon: Vanderbilt Wilson County Hospital
• Martin: West Tennessee Healthcare Volunteer Hospital
• Smithville: St. Thomas Dekalb Hospital
• Sparta: Saint Thomas Highland Hospital
• Waynesboro: Wayne Medical Center
• Woodbury: Saint Thomas Stones River Hospital

Nationwide, 13.7 million people will lose health insurance, and 243,037 of them are in Tennessee.  Over 166,689 will lose Obamacare coverage, and 76,348 will lose Medicaid coverage.

In Tennessee, alone, 130,000 households with school-age children will likely lose Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Nationwide, that number is 7.4 million households.

Republican Mark Green, who decided to retire from his House seat misrepresenting the 7th District in Tennessee, delayed his departure until after one last bow to the gang boss in the Oval Office. 

In a special election this fall, Tennesseans will choose Green’s replacement in the House. Tennesseans cannot survive another three years of brown-nosed Trump Party Congressmen. 

 We need someone to join Tennessee’s lone Democrat, Steve Cohen, in representing the needs of working Tennesseans.

My pick to replace Green in the 7th District is Bo Mitchell. Vote Bo!

Bo grew up in Dickson County, the son of a drywall finisher. At 10, his father had a massive heart attack. The family lost its income and its health insurance. Being uninsured was an experience that shaped his life and why he fights FOR US

.

ONE MILLION RISING:The Moment & Your Mission, Session 1 - July 16

Voucher Laws Supercharge Corruption and Thievery of Public Funds

The Texas Tribune and ProPublic have an important investigative piece on how private school bosses in Texas appropriate and misuse public funds to grow their businesses, hire their relatives, buy products and services from cronies, and take extravagant vacations—all without breaking any laws.  

The voucher scammers' “legal" diversion of public funds expands the form of illegal leeching done by charter schools with zero public oversight to enforce laws governing public school finance. With taxpayer funds now going to private schools where state education statutes do not apply, there are not even any laws to ignore.

And so voucher laws further undergird the unspoken theory and practice of viewing public monies, whether for education or otherwise, as unrestricted sources of welfare, not for the needy, but for the needless.

Worried about Crime? How about the Epstein Pedophile Crime Ring Files?

Trump busted in real time as networks' graphics shoot down DC crime claims www.rawstory.com/trump-dc-cri...

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— James Horn, PhD (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) August 11, 2025 at 11:33 AM

Lying Fascist in the Oval Office Seeks to Militarize the Capitol

TRUMP: Violent crime in DC is spiraling out of control so I'm deploying the National Guard REALITY:

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— Judd Legum (@juddlegum.bsky.social) August 11, 2025 at 9:08 AM

Trump in TERROR after SHOCK POLLS for GOP…in TENNESSEE!!

The Growing Call to Rein in AFT’s Embrace of AI

Here’s how TruthDig contributor, Nolan Higdon, summed up Weingarten’s crucial role in bringing unsafe AI technology into teacher rooms and student classrooms:

. . . .Big Tech’s push into education isn’t about learning. It’s about market capture. Schools offer a captive, young audience — ready to be mined for data, shaped into obedient users and sold to advertisers. These AI companies don’t want to “teach students about AI.” They want to define AI for them — framing it as inevitable, neutral and beneficial. They certainly won’t highlight its limitations, dangers or environmental toll.

They won’t teach that AI reflects the biases of its creators. They won’t teach that “AI” today is little more than a marketing label for probabilistic autocomplete systems. They won’t highlight examples like xAI’s Grok promoting Hitler rhetoric, or how AI routinely fails basic logical reasoning. And they won’t teach students how algorithmic systems entrench inequality or why surveillance-based models are fundamentally at odds with democratic education.

As shocking as AFT’s sellout is, it’s not the first time AFT President Randi Weingarten, who spent about three years as a full-time teacher, collectively, in her career, has cozied up to corporate power. Under her leadership, AFT has backed NewsGuard, a military-industrial-adjacent “news literacy” tool, and co-hosted an AI conference between AFT and Microsoft that turned out to be a Big Tech trade show. I was there. It wasn’t education — it was marketing.

This latest deal couldn’t have happened without her. As Bahat told Time magazine,“The critical thing here is that it was led by a worker organization. Randi and the AFT really drove this process.”

Let’s be clear: Any union that signs off on corporate control of the classroom isn’t defending education — it’s selling it off. It’s not just shortsighted. It’s reckless. It undermines labor. It undermines public education. And it hands over power to some of the most anti-worker, anti-democratic corporations in existence. If the AFT stays on this path, it won’t just become irrelevant — it will forfeit the right to call itself a labor union. We can’t build a just society by aligning with the very forces hollowing it out.

New Study Finds Racist AI Bots Used to Assist Teachers

With the acceptance of $23 million from Microsoft and OpenAI for an AI teacher training institute, we now know that Randi Weingarten has led the AFT over the cliff on AI.  

Meanwhile, the news media is reporting on a new Common Sense Media study that show that AI bots regularly exhibit racial bias when asked to design learning tasks or behavioral interventions for black and white children.

Asked to generate intervention plans for struggling students, AI teacher assistants recommended more punitive measures for hypothetical students with Black-coded names and more supportive approaches for students the platforms perceived as white, a new study shows. 

These findings come from a report on the risks of bias in artificial intelligence tools published Wednesday by the non-profit Common Sense Media. Researchers specifically sought to evaluate the quality of AI teacher assistants — such as MagicSchool, Khanmingo, Curipod, and Google Gemini for Education — that are designed to support classroom planning, lesson differentiation, and administrative tasks.

These findings underscore the need to halt the rush to use AI bots to “assist” teachers, especially new teachers or poorly-prepared one who have never taken increasingly-rare courses that offer guidance in how to root out bias in the classroom. Special education students are particularly vulnerable to misuse of these bots.

Current DOJ Special Investigator, Jared Wise, Proved His Loyalty to Felon Over Constitution on J6

Story from NPR.

Stories from Summer Camp

 

Editorial cartoonist Charles Beyl questions Trump administration values and its unusual preferential treatment of Epstein’s sex-offender accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

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— mweinstock.bsky.social (@mweinstock.bsky.social) August 5, 2025 at 7:46 AM

Putin Tutored GOP on How to Establish Dictator-Controlled Oligarchy?

Remember July 4, 2018?? when a bunch of Republican Senators decided to spend their July 4 in Moscow sweet talking the murderous Putin team?  

Do you remember that Putin’s ascent followed the intentional crashing of the Russian economy??  

DOGE provided our first step in that direction.  The establishment of fake economic news will be part of Step 2?  Will hyperinflation provide the required Step 3?