ACLU sues to stop new Nev. School vouchers

Edd Doerr (arlinc.org) notes the Washington Post, article, Aug 28. “ACLU sues to stop new Nev. School vouchers,” by Emma Brown. Here is the comment Edd posted on line  ----

Nevada's Republican-rammed-through school voucher plan clearly violates Article XI, Sections 2, 9 and 10 of the state constitution. If the legislature had done the honorable thing and tried to amend the constitution, the amendment would have been rejected by the voters. How do we know? Because the neighboring states of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah and Colorado have had twelve referendum elections in which vouchers or similar schemes to divert public funds to private schools were rejected by an average margin of 64% to 36%. Nevada voters would surely follow suit.

And the annual PDK/Gallup education poll released on August 23 showed opposition to vouchers at 57% to 31%.

Nevada's GOP lawmakers thumbed their noses at the state constitution, at the voters, at the public schools that serve 95% of the state's kids, and at the religious liberty of the state's citizens, their right not to be forced by government to support religious institutions. 

See ACLU site for more.

Can Vouchers Fix Vegas’s Schools? No says Edd

(Aug 26) New York Times ran an op ed, “Can Vouchers Fix Vegas’s Schools?”, by U of Nevada English prof Brittany Bronson. Here is the response Edd Doerr  posted on line  --

Nevada's Republican-rammed-through school voucher plan clearly is out of sync with the state's constitution (Article XI, Sections 2, 9 and 10). If the Republican lawmakers had done the honorable thing and allowed the state's voters a say, they would surely have voted the voucher plan down. How do we know? Because voters in the surrounding states of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah and Colorado have rejected vouchers or their variants eleven (!) times by two to one margins over the years. And the 47th annual PDK/Gallup education poll released on August 23 showed opposition to vouchers nationwide by 57% to 31%. The poll showed that even Republicans are divided on vouchers 46% to 46%.

Fewer than 5% of Nevada's kids attend private schools, most of them run by churches. So the voucher plan is clearly a blatant all-out attack on public education and religious liberty, the right of citizens not to be forced by government to support religious institutions. The plan can only promote the fragmentation of the school population along religious, ideological, social class, ethnic, ability level and other lines.

Sadly, diverting public funds to private schools is now standard Republican policy nationwide, including the positions of all of the GOP presidential aspirants.

Edd Doerr (arlinc.org)

An Hypothesis on the Secular Vote in 2016

by Gary Berg-Cross


Bill Scher, the Online Campaign Manager at Campaign for America's Future, (and the executive editor of LiberalOasis.com), often blogs about the problems that the Republican Party & Conservative Pols face. Recent ones include "Why Republicans Can’t Stop The Iran Deal (And Shouldn’t Want To) and "Republicans On Track To Lose The Latino Vote, And The Election, Again." But the most recent one (JULY 20, 2015) to catch my eye was, "Republicans Can’t Win Without Solving Their ‘Secular Problem. ’

The idea is simple, the highly religious and fundamentalist vote is maxed out.  The less religious and nones are growing and up, like the Latino vote, for being grabbed.

Scher points out some trends starting with an 2006 exit poll data that showed that:

'Democrats crushed Republican among voters who went to church “a few times a year” (60-38 percent) and “never” (67-30 percent), while the Republican margin among those who attended church “weekly” was slashed from 16 points in the previous midterm to seven."

The trend contnued in 2008, and Sher argues that the Republican secular problem was magnified:

'…In 2008, Sen. John McCain received 39 percent support of voters who seldom attend religious services, and 30 percent from those who never go. Both numbers represent a 6-point drop from what Bush received in 2004…

…Obama received 43 percent of the vote from voters who attend religious services weekly or more than weekly. For Kerry, those numbers were 41 percent and 35 percent…'

The idea here, which jives with the type of things we see among the current crop of GOP candidates  is that conservatives are aiming at keeping their Evangelical base.  The battle is for the more casual religious.

Scher reports that in 2012 an openly religious Obama did no better than Kerry among the  42 percent of voters who said they were regular worshipers. (The secular vote is also about 42%) Although a very religious Mitt did worse than Bush's 2004 results among the 57 percent who "never went to services or who went irregularly."

President Obama carried Religiously Unaffiliated voters 70% to Mitt Romney’s 26% according to a report from The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life exit poll data of the 2012 election. Although the President’s percentage was lower than in 2008, it still continued a trend of the nones supporting the Democratic candidates. The exit poll numbers were larger than a similar election poll in September when the President held a 65 to 27 lead on Romney. (from  President Obama Wins A Landslide From The Religiously Unaffiliated)

So 2016 shapes up in this view to having a new swing vote group he call the Secular. Candidates need to speak to them on secular topics. Renouncing “religious freedom” laws

that would permit discrimination is one he sites along with women's freedom to choose. Supporting equal rights for the LGBT community is obviously one that appeals to young seculars in particular based on their experience.  Even if they are not persuaded by a liberal candidate they find offense in how a socially conservative candidate  panders to the Conservative base on these and other Judeo-Christian inspired topics that do not respect the separation of Church and State. 

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Perry, Romney and the Cult of Religion

The big story this weekend is the brouhaha about the Perry supporter who slammed Romney’s Mormon religion as a cult.

While Perry has tripped all over himself distancing his campaign from that big mouthed supporter, the news media has tripped all over itself carrying this story and trying to find out what peoples’ opinions are about whether Mormonism is or is not a cult, or even could be called Christian.

I think that is the wrong question, and the wrong position that the press should be taking.

The Constitution of the United States prohibits any religious test for public office in the government of the US, and the 14th Amendment extends that prohibition to the State and local governments as well. This is the only mention of religion in the original document and religion isn’t mentioned otherwise until one looks into the first of the ten Amendments in the Bill of Rights. That worthy Amendment further places this subject out of bounds by forbidding the influence of religion in making rules that either favor or disfavor religion in how our government and our democracy operates.

Yet, in this most crazy, insane of Presidential races, what is the most important criteria the right wing can come up with in deciding what individual will carry their party’s banner into the general election?

It is who can be the most right wing, fundamentalist, crazily insane religious nut possible! Remember that supporter of Perry’s? He even went so far as to say that he couldn’t vote for anyone who wasn’t a Christian, that he’d rather vote for an INcompetent Christian than a competent NON-Christian!

If there was ever any doubt as to just how insane the right wing has become, I think that puts the final nail in that particular coffin.

In a period of time in which the US and the world is on the brink of a double-dip recession that could easily sink into an actual Depression, the world is sliding into what is to be an increasingly hot period caused by mostly human industrial pollution, wars and violence is as much as ever before a commonly used method of settling disputes and the American Republican Party can only talk about social issues that offend their religious sensibilities and how religiously fundamentalist their nominee must be?

From what I’ve seen, the Democratic Party hasn’t been very smart about countering any of that craziness. The one thing that the press should be doing is asking why Romney’s religion has anything to do with his ability to perform the duties of the office of the President of the US. Yet, they are asking the question that stays within the bounds of how the Republicans have set the debate, giving the impression that it is a valid debate!

Perhaps our only hope of waking up the American people really is that group of kids occupying Wall Street.

Robert Ahrens

Rockville

Death Spiral or Something Else?

Since the 2010 elections, the country has watched as the Republican Party - egged on by the Tea party - has apparently gone insane. While the election campaigns focused on jobs, the Republicans have forsaken that mantra in favor of, well, just about anything BUT jobs.

From the anti-union legislation in Wisconsin that kept us entranced for weeks to the Florida governor's enactment of legislation to enrich his wife's drug testing company to the plethora of anti-abortion, anti-contraceptive, anti-woman and anti-child legislation all the way to the disastrous budget bill outlining Republican plans to end Medicare, is there a hot button social conservative issue they've missed? I mean, do we really want to make having a miscarriage a felony?

An interesting web site, Seeds for Thought, has brought together some of the more insane bills being worked on at the State level:

http://seedsforthought.org/articles3/watch.htm

I've watched this insanity on at least a weekly basis, and sometimes nightly, on Rachael Maddow's show. She is often gleeful at the misadventures of the right wing's current crop of Presidential hopefuls, but just as often seems just puzzled at the wide spread over reach of the Republicans on a national basis, as if they've all drunk some kind of insanity drug or something.

It helps sometimes, to step back and get out of the weeds and look at the bigger picture.

Just imagine for a moment that you were a stinking rich liberal with no public awareness of your political leanings, and you wanted to end the political power of the right wing. You figured out a way to use your money to obtain entre' into the upper reaches of the Republicans and were able to gain a measure of power over the actions of those at the top of the party.

Now, you are making a list. A checklist of actions that would result in the destruction of the Republican party by alienating every constituency in the country except the most hard core right wing. What kind of stuff would you put on that list?

Anti-abortion legislation? Anti-union legislation? Suggesting the end of Social Security?

I think if there is such a list, they've managed to hit about 80% of it so far this year alone. But why? It has been a well known formula for years that in order to win the Presidential elections, one has to win your party nomination by winning over your base, and then you've got to move to the center to win over the centrists and independent voters to add their numbers to your own party. Neither party has the numbers to elect their own nominee outright, so this has long been the recipe for winning the White House.

One doesn't win over the center by alienating them at the beginning. Campaigning is one thing, enacting legislation that proves your campaign promises are lies even before the campaign begins is completely another! I think just about the only subject they've missed so far is immigration, but they seem to be gearing up to hit that one, too.

Again, why? What do they have to win? How can they possibly win after enacting legislation that not only alienates almost half the electorate (women), another larger part (old folks), and a growing group (non-whites) that threatens to grow into the largest voting block in the country?

Add to that the suction of the Tea Party that has drawn off the craziest right wing of the party plus the Republicans' own tendency to eliminate the moderate wing by throwing out the likes of Meagan McCain and Colin Powell, and it seems that the GOP is headed down a road of complete self annihilation!

I wish I knew. Who gains if the Republicans do self destruct? Are people like the Koch Brothers really so insane and politically blind that they cannot see how this current trend is likely to end? How about the Republican slate of Presidential contenders? Are they that blind, too? Are men like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich not able to see how out of touch with the American mainstream their party has become? Is their right wing world so self contained that they really can't read the polls?

I don't think so. These people can't be so stupid, can they? I mean, Mitt Romney is wealthy, and one doesn't get and/or keep that kind of wealth by being stupid. Do they? I'd like to think that they really are that dumb, but something just doesn't ring true. There has to be another explanation for it. Smart, successful people don't just go off the deep end suddenly and begin doing stuff that is so destructive to their party interests, especially not in job lots.

This isn't just a few people at the top. This is ALL OVER THE COUNTRY! State legislatures, governors, just about everywhere that the Republicans have gained control of the reins of power without Democrats to slow them down. So, is it the true character of the Republican Party to do these things? If so, how have they kept that a secret for years if not decades? Plenty of Republicans have changed sides, and someone was bound to talk sometime, so that seems unlikely.

So who gains? Is there a small cabal of wealthy corporatists ready to move in after some measure of national confusion after the very public spanking the Republicans are likely to get in 2012? Is there some plan to destroy the right wing as a political force and substitute a more moderate party in its place?

I can't say. I'm not a political expert, I fix computers for a living. I can't imagine how this is going to play out, but when an entire political party goes stark raving mad, it can't be good.

Robert Ahrens

Revolutionary thoughts

This past week has been an incredible time to watch the news. To see a wave of revolution begin to sweep across the Middle East is a rare peek into the process of humanity’s yearning for the better things in life, beginning with the very most basic freedoms a culture can ask for.

It has been a pleasure to see the Egyptian people take their lives, their fortunes and their national honor into their hands and demand redress of a repressive government, asking relief from a government that fails to protect its people from economic ruin caused by wealthy corporations, backs the torture of prisoners, jails opponents without trial and protects the wealthy elite from the vagaries of economic cycles, forcing the poor to live without a safety net… wait … hold on, something sounds familiar about that.

No, could it be? Is it possible?

Man, I’ve been wondering why the Republicans have been so silent about this wave of revolutions. Usually they are so quick to note the similarity between popular revolutions and our own, but this time they have been so quiet. Usually, they praise the courage and bravery of the protesters as they bring down an oppressive government, but strangely, this time, they have not.

Could it be they have noted that the characteristics of the Egyptian government are just a little too close to the new Republican values this time? Think about it. Protection of the wealthy, laws that favor the wealthy elite and their businesses, failure to protect the poor, if not outright exploitation of them. A failure of the Republicans to condemn torture and the unending, indefinite nature of the detainment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay without trial. Sound familiar? It should be, these are the hallmarks of many of the dictatorships in the Middle East, and finally, the Tunisians, the Egyptians, the Sudanese, the Syrians and others are beginning to bestir themselves to bring down these nasty men of little honor.

Please, don’t get me wrong. I am familiar with the requirements of realpolitic and the need of our government to secure our supply of life-giving oil. I know that in the past it has been necessary to be pals with some of the scum of the earth in order to feed our need for energy. Even today, in the midst of this new wave of uprisings, we still need to treat them with kid gloves, lest some of our current crop of scum dictators friends, get the idea that they might be next to get tossed under the bus.

Sometimes, yes, diplomacy means having to hold your nose when shaking hands.

If only politics at home weren’t beginning to have the same scent… er, flavor.

It is interesting that it is the middle east where people have finally woken up to the nasty nature of a political elite that favor the wealthy over everybody else, exploit the poor and deny human rights to opponents before the American people. We are so smug about our superior, modern progressive values that we have been blind to the conversion of an old trusted political party into something that Lincoln would never have recognized, much less accepted.

There was a time when the Republicans honored the values that made this country great. When they did not twist those values into something unrecognizable to the Founders they profess to worship so highly. But now, they not only twist those values, they twist history, intertwining lies with the truth in teaching our youth about the founding of this country, building the basic blocks of theocracy and oligarchic dictatorship while wrapping themselves in a flag that should stand for something else.

We live in dangerous times, when men like Rush Limbaugh can laugh at the attacks of an endangered dictator upon the free press - until reporters of his chosen network of propaganda become targets. When men like Glenn Beck can twist the current events in Egypt into a sinister plot to overthrow western civilization, and his audience not only does not turn him off, but listens, I begin to wonder about the applicability of the old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”!

The now famous quote from Sinclair Lewis, 'When Fascism Comes to This Country, It Will Be Wrapped in the Flag Carrying a Cross', is as apropos as ever today, and should be taught in every classroom in the country - right after evolutionary biology and modern physics!

Think again about the protesters in Cairo and every other Egyptian city. They have lived with such a regime for the last fifty-eight years, from Nassar to Mubarak. Civilian puppets bobbing on the strings of a military dictatorship with oligarchic characteristics. Today, they have participated in a massive protest, one the military has tried to hide from view by a coordinated attack on the free press.

Is that the future of this country? Is that what you want your children or grandchildren to live under? Is it possible that the freedoms we have taken for granted could be so easily swept away that it could take a second American revolution to correct the situation?

I know, it sounds so alarmist, so… kooky. Kind of like flying saucers, you know?

But it could happen, and it will, unless the American people can begin to see the illogic of backing a party that professes to honor the principles of individual liberty while backing the use of the power of the State to push one specific religious viewpoint. A party that refuses to condemn torture or indefinite detainment and warrantless surveillance of the American public.

All tools of dictators. Totalitarian governments. Theocracies. Oligarchies.

Nasty words, aren’t they? Conjuring pictures of concentration camps, middle of the night arrests and summary executions.

What can we do? Can we do anything?

Of course we can. We can spread the truth.

Fight for science education in the schools. Fight against religious indoctrination in public schools and the diversion of public school funds into religious schools through innocuous sounding voucher programs.

Every time you hear someone say this country was founded as a Christian nation, set them straight. Loudly and vociferously.

Fight the current trend to post the ten commandments or say prayers at city or county council meetings.

Fight for progressive ideals that protect the poor and control and restrain the wealthy elite.

Above all, if you are part of the silently non-religious that keep quiet because of a fear of being exposed to the majority, SPEAK OUT and make yourself known! It is ONLY through banding together to oppose the use of religion to make this country into a religious oligarchy that we can protect our descendants from having to live under a regime that would curb our freedoms and turn this country into the kind of place that millions have come here to avoid!

Two hundred and thirty four years ago, our forefathers did what no people had ever done before - they fought a king for their freedom and won! It took them over eight long years, but finally, they prevailed.

This week, the Egyptians are fighting for their own freedom. I hope I can honor their sacrifices in actually paying attention to their actions.

So let us take their example, take the lessons of history to heart and do what the Republicans have twisted into their own message - let’s take our country back!