Christofascists Plan To Dismantle Head Start

Trump’s christofascists are finalizing plans to destroy Head Start through deregulation.  Eliminating standards for Head Start programming will throw open the door for states and localities to send our most vulnerable children to white nationalist versions of vacation bible school to begin their oppressive indoctrinations with taxpayer dollars. 

Story in the Times:

The Trump administration is preparing a major rollback of federal requirements for Head Start, a change that supporters of the child care program fear could gut its longstanding antipoverty mission.

The proposed changes would remove most of Head Start’s 133 pages of requirements for math and literacy curriculums, class sizes, medical screenings, home visits and even a requirement that children brush their teeth after meals, according to three people with knowledge of the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

Administration officials say the changes will streamline a heavily regulated program while giving states and cities more control over how it is run.

But Head Start advocates say that erasing regulations serves as a backdoor way to dismantle a program the administration does not like. The White House last year called Head Start “radical” and tried but failed to freeze spending on it. . . .

Republican Plan to Make TN Centralized Nuclear Waste Dump for U.S.

TN’s governor, Bill Lee, approved a proposal on March 26 of this year that offered a detailed plan for making Tennessee the main U.S  “campus” for a nuclear “life cycle innovation center,” i.e., a “one-stop shop” for nuclear waste storage. 

Lee and his cronies sent the proposal to Trump's boys at the Department of Energy in hopes of landing another massive federal handout—the kind of federal welfare payment that “small government” Tennessee Republicans have come to depend on to keep the state functioning at least minimally.

. . . the State intends to transform the nuclear lifecycle by embracing fuel reprocessing and recycling as well as diverting critical materials and isotopes into other health, defense, and industrial uses. This substantially reduces the amount of material to be stored and reshapes the country’s needs for interim and long-term materials management solutions. The State remains interested in identifying and assessing candidate sites for interim storage and long-term storage of nuclear materials. Interim storage is already underway in Tennessee at current nuclear power generation sites, and the State is exploring innovative methods to expanding storage capacity with federal and private partners. The State has also identified next steps for site assessment and testing to identify a long-term geologic repository option in Tennessee.

. . . . Selection of Tennessee as a Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus will allow the State to hasten planned development in this sector and benefit DOE and the country through establishment of a comprehensive, one-stop-shop for nuclear lifecycle management and reindustrialization.

With Bill Lee known nationally as one of Trump’s most loyal sycophants, this week Tennessee was named as one of the five finalists to be rewarded with fed dollars to become the research center and central depository for U.S. nuclear waste.  

More on the story from WKRN.

Gangster-in-Chief

 

A shakedown www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

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— Molly Jong-Fast (@mollyjongfast.bsky.social) July 31, 2026 at 8:03 AM

Bigger Pumps Needed to Keep the AI Bubble Inflated

"Negative free cash flow" means your costs are growing faster than your revenue.  If you retreat and draw down the insane levels of spending on data centers, then everyone will know it’s time to cash out. Can’t do that. So you just keep pumping.  

From the NYTimes:

. . . . Across this year and next, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are expected to spend a staggering $1.5 trillion building data centers and stuffing them with advanced chips, according to Wall Street estimates compiled by FactSet.

“The scale of it is nuts,” said Melissa Otto, who leads research at S&P Global’s Visible Alpha division.

Alarms are rising as Wall Street and others question whether this spending can be justified. On Thursday, shares of Microsoft, which did not change its spending forecast, jumped more than 15 percent, but Meta’s stock sank more than 7 percent after it revealed its A.I. outlays and that costs were growing faster than its revenue.

And last week, for the first time since going public in 2004, Google said it had “negative free cash flow,” which meant it was spending more on day-to-day operations and building new infrastructure than it was taking in from its businesses. Google’s stock fell more than 6 percent the next day. . . .

Zuckerberg in Louisiana: Mega-Corruption Case Study

How Meta Got Everything It Wanted in a Secret Louisiana Data Center Deal www.nytimes.com/2026/07/27/t...

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) July 27, 2026 at 5:29 AM

Jerri Green and Marsha Blackburn: A Study in Contrasts

While Grandma Marsha spends her campaign funds fearmongering about the Chinese making nonexistent purchases of TN farmland, and ginning up hate with lies against brown and black immigrants, Democratic candidate, Jerri Green, mother of three school-age boys, has a detailed and multifaceted plan for her first term as Governor of Tennessee. Including education, which is a top priority.

From Andy Spears:

Green has said she supports suspending the state’s voucher program - so, at a minimum, halting future growth - so state funds can be directed toward public schools. 

Her campaign also spells out the framework for a comprehensive Pre-K-12 education agenda.

Jerri Green will:

• Fully fund K-12 public education—not siphon dollars into unaccountable voucher schemes

• Raise teacher pay and restore respect to the profession

• Expand access to school counselors, nurses, and support staff

• Protect honest, inclusive education—not censorship and political theater

• Invest in universal pre-K, special education, and rural schools

• Launch Public Service Year Program for high school graduates

• Waive GED testing fees and take testing to all corners of the state

• Start a dedicated childcare and early education fund, to include investments in afterschool and summer care programming for households making less than $75K a year

• Ensure every public high school provides mental health screenings any parent can opt their child into

• Set up a Special Education Equity Fund to ensure no students fall through the cracks as the Trump Administration cuts critical services for students with disabilities and special needs

• Set up a “Teach Every Student” fellowship to encourage more teachers to go into special education

• Use all possible medicaid dollars within schools to make sure students have the supports they need

Marsha Blackburn, the Drug Industry, and TN’s #3 Ranking in Drug Deaths

  

After Marsha Blackburn co-sponsored the federal legislation that made it almost impossible for DEA to apprehend mail-order opioids, she received $120,000 from the drug industry. 

Link to the 60 Minutes story: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-dea-agent-opioid-crisis-fueled-by-drug-industry-and-congress/

OpenAI Models Display Impressive Capacities to Escape, Invade, and Steal

 from the NYTimes:

. . . .The intrusion into Hugging Face [a digital library of AI data] began when OpenAI tested a combination of two of its models . . . 

The trial was designed to keep the models in a safe testing environment, known as a sandbox, OpenAI said. But the models found a vulnerability that allowed them to escape the sandbox and connect to the internet. Then they targeted Hugging Face because they inferred that the library, which contains millions of A.I. models, could hold clues about how to successfully pass the evaluation.

“It seems to me that OpenAI did not adequately create a sandbox as a test environment,” said Dierdre Mulligan, a professor in the School of Information at the University of California Berkeley who focuses on security and A.I. systems. She questioned whether passing a test was worth the potential damage of an A.I. model escaping into the wider internet. . . .

Marsha Blackburn Wants to Keep TN as #1 in Worst State to Live

Tennessee has an incarceration rate of 817 per 100,000 people (including prisons, jails, immigration detention, and juvenile justice facilities), meaning that it locks up a higher percentage of its people than any independent democratic country on earth. —Prison Policy Initiative

Republicans have maintained a supermajority in both TN legislative chambers since 2010, and they have controlled the Governor’s Office since 2011. Governor Bill Lee’s term will end this year, and a new governor will be elected in November. 

For the past eight of those sixteen years, Marsha Blackburn has occupied one of Tennessee's U.S. Senate seats, and she has been a reliable rubber stamp for convicted felon and failed insurrectionist, Donald Trump. Now Blackburn, age 74, wants to retire to the soon-to-be-vacated Governor’s Mansion in the Fall, where she can continue Bill Lee’s efforts to make Tennessee the model state for MAGA extremism.  

And so she is amassing millions of out-of-state dollars in hopes of winning what could be a close primary. If she wins the primary, she is likely to face attorney and Memphis Councilwoman, Jerri Green, age 48. Never has there been a starker contrast between two U.S. Senate candidates. 

Yesterday Sen. Blackburn was on the Fox Propaganda Channel trying to push back on a question about Tennessee’s #1 ranking on CNBC’s recent analysis of Worst States to Live. Sorry, Marsha, but the facts are in:

Tennessee Republicans, led by Gov. Bill Lee, make no apologies for a rash of state laws targeting the LGBTQ+ community, including a so-called “bathroom law” requiring transgender people to use the facilities designated for their sex at birth. The state also explicitly bars localities from adopting their own antidiscrimination ordinances. To underscore the point, Lee signed a resolution earlier this year designating June “Nuclear Family Month.”  

“The nuclear family, consisting of one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children, is God’s design for familial structure and has been the bedrock of society since the creation of the world,” the resolution states. 

Its sponsors deliberately timed the observance to coincide with the month when Tennessee’s more than 300,000 LGBTQ+ people celebrate Pride. 

Inclusiveness isn’t the only area where the Volunteer State falls short. Tennessee also has one of the highest violent crime rates in the nation, according to FBI statistics. And it has the third-highest rate of drug deaths, according to the United Health Foundation. 

2026 Quality of Life score: 64 out of 290 points (Top States grade: F) 

Strength: Air Quality 

Weaknesses: Crime, Inclusiveness, Worker Protections 

FBI Director Going to Russia 3 Weeks Before Fall Election

To finalize plans for November mid-terms: "According to the U.S. official familiar with the travel plans, Patel is scheduled to visit Russia on Oct. 14-15. . . .His host is likely to be the FSB, the Russian security service that is heir to the Soviet-era KGB, the official said."

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) July 21, 2026 at 7:38 AM