Stephan: Here is further evidence, if such were needed, that the anti-choice movement is not interested in protecting and supporting babies, or nurturing children. Their interest is only about keeping women subordinate to men and their bodies controlled by the state. The very poor health outcome data in the anti-choice Red states makes this point very clear. This is all part of the christofascist view of how American society should be structured.
McConnell to the people he’s forcing to have babies: “Good luck, you’ve got all the help you’re going to get.”Credit: Getty
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), to his very minimal credit, wants to ensure that some of the people being forced to have children get some financial support from the government, albeit minimal. He has a few Republican takers, a very few. And absolutely no support from leadership. According to Sen. Mitch McConnell, people are being coddled enough already.
“There are actually a lot of resources for expecting and new Moms, including Medicaid and S-CHIP for health care, maternal nutrition and child care programs,” McConnell spokesman Scott Sloofman toldThe Washington Post. “What we shouldn’t do is expand massive government stimulus programs which would exacerbate the runaway inflation that is crushing Kentucky’s working families.”
Get that? Kentucky’s working families don’t need any more help for those children Republicans are forcing them to have. Because all those programs exist, despite repeated efforts by Republicans to end them.
One of the main reasons people have been having […]
Mike Hixenbaugh, Senior Investigative Reporter - NBC News
Stephan: The christofascist MAGAt movement has been working for years to destroy public education or, if they can't dismantle public free education, then they want to restructure it so it does not educate instead it indoctrinates. And christofascist corporations like this cell phone company, Patriot Mobile, are financing this. Not surprisingly this is going on most intensely in Texas, a failed state that has become an anocracy. Why are the MAGAts so focused on this? The answer is simple. Ostensibly this is about promoting Christian nationalism. The real reason is that study after study has shown the more educated a person becomes the more likely they will vote Democratic and care about preserving democracy.
Karl Meek went to a Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District board of trustees meeting Monday wearing a T-shirt with the district’s name, GCISD, crossed out and replaced with the words “Patriot Mobile Action ISD” to protest the political action committee’s influence over the school system. Credit: Emil T. Lippe / NBC News
DALLAS — A little more than a year after former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declared that conservatives needed to win seats on local school boards to “save the nation,” he used his conspiracy theory-fueled TV program to spotlight Patriot Mobile, a Texas-based cellphone company that had answered his call to action.
“The school boards are the key that picks the lock,” Bannon said during an interview with Patriot Mobile’s president, Glenn Story, from the floor of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Dallas on Aug. 6. “Tell us about what you did.”
Story turned to the camera and said, “We went out and found 11 candidates last cycle and we supported them, and we won every seat. We took over four school boards.”
Stephan: Student loan forgiveness is driving the MAGAt Republicans crazy, as this report describes. The MAGAts want you to be in debt, the bigger the debt the better. It is an amazing political position. How do you feel about relieving student debt? I not only support it, but think the sum forgiven should have been much larger. It is in the interest of American society and the country's future that Americans become as educated as possible.
As long as Joe Biden prepares for an eventual return to fiscal normality he can defend his plan as common sense Credit: Jim Watson / AFP / Getty
President Joe Biden’s announcement Wednesday that the U.S. Department of Education would cancel $10,000 to $20,000 in student debt for millions of people was good news to many who took out federal loans to go to school. Some thought it should have gone further, given the sky-high price of a college education in the U.S.
The most high-profile conservatives in the country, however, reacted with near-uniform indignation at the prospect of helping people dig out from under mountains of debt.
Biden’s plan helps people who earn less than $125,000 per year; the White House says that 90% of relief dollars will go to people earning under $75,000 per year, targeting middle-income and low-income workers. Other measures include reducing monthly payments for undergraduate loans by half so it’s easier to make rent and cover living expenses.
There is debate over whether the plan will make inflation worse, although the White House […]
Stephan: There is something wrong with the American military, and this hard data report makes this clear. Part of the problem, I think is that of the 334 million people in America only 18 million Americans, or about 7 percent of the adult population have ever served in the military, and at the moment only about 1.4 million are actually serving. It is such a small percentage that few in the U.S. even think about the military, and the status of vets bears no relation to the way vets were viewed in past years.
Philadelphia police car with flashing lights Credit: Matt Rourke / AP
A criminal justice think tank has announced that it will try to study why veterans are ending up behind bars at far greater rates than those who never served. It will have help from two former defense secretaries.
In order to examine the causes of that elevated arrest rate, the think tank has put together a 15-member commission that includes “former defense secretary and White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, a former Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps, the chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, [and] two formerly incarcerated veterans.” It will be run by former U.S. Defense Secretary and U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel, the announcement added.
Stephan: I do love rigorously researched data, it tells you truths you might not even recognize otherwise. Here is a very interesting example of what I mean, showing a strong correlation between racism and America's obsessive gun psychosis. Also, since men and women from these same Southern counties disproportionately enlist in the armed forces, it may help explain the problem of the disproportionate arrest of military personnel.
Though the Civil War was over 150 years ago, the social fabric of the United States still suffers from the country’s former divisions. Cultural and political values are split between the so-called free counties and the former slave counties, which existed in 15 states (only 11 of which seceded during the Civil War). Now, a new study has shown one of the most peculiar, yet perhaps unsurprising, divisions between former slaveholding and free parts of the U.S.: the prevalence of slavery in a given county correlates closely to the prevalence of firearms owned by its residents.
A man carries a handgun emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag during an unveiling of a monument to unknown Confederate dead at Confederate Veterans Memorial Park, which is owned privately, in Brantley, Ala., Aug. 27, 2017. Credit: Kevin D. Liles / Washington Post / Getty
The researchers, led by psychology professor Dr. Nicholas Buttrick of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, hypothesize that this correlation exists because of the Reconstruction period in […]
