Stephan: Could it get any clearer where Republicans stand about saving a woman's life in a pregnancy crisis? I wonder how Republican women are processing this, or do they just look the other way, put their fingers in their ears, and go YaYaYaYa.
GOP delegates gathering in a general session during the Idaho Republican convention in Pocatello, Idaho. Idaho Republicans on Saturday rejected an amendment to the party platform that would allow abortions to save a mother’s life.
Idaho Republicans rejected an amendment to their party platform that would have allowed abortion to save a mother’s life.
At the Idaho GOP convention in Twin Falls on Saturday, delegates approved changes to the party platform that criminalize all abortions without exceptions for rape, incest or to save the life of the mother, according to Idaho Reports.
Delegates voted 412-164 to reject an amendment that would have allowed an exception if the mother’s life was in “lethal danger.”
The platform states: “We affirm that abortion is murder from the moment of fertilization. All children should be protected regardless of the circumstances of conception, […]
Stephan: Did you go to public school, learn to read, get an education you are still using in public school? Public education was once one of America's proudest achievements. Now the Republican Party is doing everything it can to end public education. Here is Betsy DeVos speaking on this.
Former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, appointed by former president Donald Trump, told conservative activists in Tampa Saturday that the federal Education Department should be abolished, leaving education decisions to state and local boards.
Christofascist Betsy DeVos, perhaps the worst and most incompetent Secretary of Education in U.S. history.
“I personally think the Department of Education should not exist,” said DeVos, author of a recent book called “Hostages No More” and a keynote speaker at the “Moms For Liberty” summit. Members of the audience leapt to their feet, cheering and applauding.
DeVos is one of the prominent Republicans featured at the three-day summit in Tampa, which provided training to members from 30 states on how to create conservative majorities on their local school boards, in what they call a parental-rights movement. Moms For Liberty was founded in Florida, sparked in part by parents’ objections to their children being required to wear face masks at school during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a series of breakout sessions not open to the press, guest speakers instructed participants on how to […]
Stephan: Like ignorant children playing in the garden as a tornado sweeps down on them we simply are not paying appropriate attention to what is happening with climate change. Our technologies are destroying the earth's matrix of life, and that has the potential to destroy our civilization.
This picture taken on October 18, 2018 shows newborn green turtles heading to the sea after being released from a protected area on Thameehla Island. – Peril plagues the young life of a baby turtle in Myanmar; if the crabs don’t get them before they scramble from the beach to the sea, poachers or fishing trawlers may do – while habitat destruction also decimates their numbers. Myanmar’s waters boast five of the world’s seven sea turtle species, including the critically endangered hawksbill, the endangered green turtle as well as the olive ridley, leatherback and loggerhead turtles, all listed as vulnerable. Credit: YE AUNG THU/AFP/Getty
Even as American politicians uselessly quibble over whether climate change is real (it is) and how humanity should address it, the natural world does not need humanity to humansplain to them that the Earth is becoming uninhabitable.
According to a recent report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a United Nations body,
Stephan: From this report, "Less than a quarter of young American adults are physically fit to enlist and have no disqualifying criminal record, a proportion that has shrunk steadily in recent years. And shifting attitudes toward military service mean that now only about one in 10 young people say they would even consider it." When we transformed the American military from an elitist conscription system to an all-volunteer, gender and racially neutral meritocracy we did not anticipate the physical condition of so many Americans deteriorating in the future. That surprises me. A dwindling number of people enlisting does not. ,
Recruiters talk with young people in a store
FOUNTAIN, COLORADO — The local Army recruiting station was empty. The normally reliable recruiting grounds at the nearby Walmart were a bust. With the Army still thousands of soldiers short of its recruiting goal, the station commander, Sgt. First Class James Pulliam, dressed head to toe in camouflage, scanned a strip-mall parking lot for targets.
He spotted a young woman getting out of a car, and put on his best salesman smile.
Hey, how’d you know I was going to be here today!” the sergeant said with an affable Carolina drawl, as if greeting an old friend. “I’m going to help put you in the Army!”
These are tough times for military recruiting. Almost across the board, the armed forces are experiencing large shortfalls in enlistments this year — a deficit of thousands of entry-level troops that is on pace to be worse than any since just after the Vietnam War. It threatens to throw a wrench into the military’s machinery, leaving critical jobs unfilled and some platoons with too few […]
Stephan: The Republican Party has been trying to dismantle public education in the United States for years. They have two goals. Keep schools segregated and make sure children of color get fewer resources, and have poorer programs; make publica education a process of indoctrination not education about facts. This is all part of making America an anocracy.
US government officials highlighted two contributing factors to the continued segregation of America’s children: school district boundaries and the phenomenon of local communities breaking away from larger school districts. Credit: Brittainy Newman/AP
While US schools are growing more diverse, they remain highly segregated by race and class, according to a new analysis.
More than a third of students in the US attended racially segregated schools – schools in which more than three-quarters of students accounted for one race or ethnicity, according to an analysis of 2020-21 Common Core education data by the US Government Accountability Office. What’s more, more than one in 10 students – 14% – attended schools where 90% of students were of one race or ethnicity.
The report, released Thursday, comes just six years after the agency found a stark increase in the percentage of poor, Black and Latino students attending predominantly poor and minority schools over the course of a decade and a half. It also comes decades after the US supreme court declared “separate but equal” schooling unconstitutional in the landmark case Brown v Board […]
