Ron DeSantis, on the basis of his performance in office and his own words, is a not overly bright rather nasty thuggish man. He is the leader of the gutting library movement, and he is driving LGBTQ Floridians out of the state because of his sheer nastiness. Nothing but bad consequences arise from his policies as Floridians are discovering.
MAGAt Republican Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida Credit: Getty
The attempted erasure of LGBTQ+ people is accelerating in the state of Florida, thanks to Gov. Ron DeSantis, his Republican colleagues in the Florida Legislature, and compliant school officials. As reported by journalist and attorney Judd Legum, writing for Popular Information, in Charlotte County, Florida, an entire school district has banned all library books containing any LGBTQ+ individuals, regardless of whether any “sexual” or sexuality-affirming content is involved.
The school district apparently did not publicize its action. Legum reports that the guidance for the district’s librarians, purportedly issued in late July of this year, was obtained through a public records request submitted by the Florida Freedom to Read Project, known as FFTRP. That organization provided “a document memorializing a July 24 conversation” between district Superintendent Mark Vianello and the Charlotte district librarians. According to those documents, the policy includes the removal of all books that include or depict an LGBTQ+ person.
Legum posted a copy of one of the the electronic documents received on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter.
JON MARCUS, - Associated Press | The Hechinger Report
Stephan:
The Republicans are earnestly and actively trying to dismantle public education, trying to replace it with some bastardized profit-making system. They are also gutting libraries, gutting history programs because they don’t want children to know the truth about slavery, and they are sponsoring legislation that as I reported the other day will result in the loss of 200,000 teachers. The totality of this MAGAt effort is a radical debasement of education in the United States, and nowhere is that more alarming than in the decline of the math skills of American students. This article lays it out, and it is horrifying and is going to have long-term very negative consequences for the entire nation.
American students Credit: Associated Press
BOSTON — Like a lot of high school students, Kevin Tran loves superheroes, though perhaps for different reasons than his classmates.
“They’re all insanely smart. In their regular jobs they’re engineers, they’re scientists,” said Tran, 17. “And you can’t do any of those things without math.”
Tran also loves math. This summer, he studied calculus five hours a day with other high schoolers in a program at Northeastern University.
But Tran and his friends are not the norm. Many Americans joke about how bad they are at math, and already abysmal scores on standardized math tests are falling even further.
The nation needs people who are good at math, employers say, in the same way motion picture mortals need superheroes. They say America’s poor math performance isn’t funny. It’s a threat to the nation’s global economic competitiveness and national security.
Steven Ross Johnson, Public Health Reporter - US News & World Report
Stephan:
When I was a boy old enough to join my parents at the dinner table when there were family guests, most of the talk was about medicine. My father was an internationally recognized anesthesiologist, my mother had been a surgical nurse, one uncle was a cardiologist and head of a major clinic, another was a hospital administrator, two great aunts were famous nurses, one had founded the Frontier Nursing Corp, the other had begun the children’s convalescent movement. One dinner memory from that time has stayed with me over the years. The enthusiasm of that evening’s conversation, and their smiles, when they talked about how penicillin was finally breaking the crisis of syphilis. They thought it would become a minor issue, and it did. Until the poor health care of our present-day illness profit system, and the lack of proper sex education have allowed it to arise from the dead and become a crisis once again. This article describes what has happened. And I want you to pay particular attention to where the problem is worse. Once again, what stands out? Of the worst ten states what do you notice? Except for New Mexico, which is a kind of purple state, all are Red states controlled by Republicans.
A man being tested for an STD Credit: Getty
Rates and cases of major sexually transmitted diseases in the U.S. have been increasing largely unabated, with more than 2.5 million cases of chlamydia, syphilis and gonorrhea reported in 2021, the most recent year for which data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is available.
That amounts to a combined rate of 762.7 cases per 100,000 people in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, an increase of 6% over 2020’s rate of 721.6 per 100,000, according to a U.S. News analysis of the data. Between 2020 and 2021, the rate of total syphilis cases in the U.S. – including all stages of the infection, congenital syphilis and syphilitic stillbirth – rose by 32%, CDC figures show. The rate of chlamydia cases increased 4%, while the rate of gonorrhea infections rose 5% over the same period.
Officials have expressed particular concern about a rise in congenital syphilis, which occurs when a mother passes a syphilis infection to her baby while pregnant and can result in the infant’s […]
Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan:
There is a very important trend going on in the United States and I only very rarely hear anyone talking about it. If you live in a Republican controlled state you are much, much, more likely to be murdered. Here are the top 10 states with the most gun deaths:
1. Mississippi – 28.6 per 100k
2. Louisiana – 26.3 per 100k
3. Wyoming – 25.9 per 100k
4. Missouri – 23.9 per 100k
5. Alabama – 23.6 per 100k
6. Alaska – 23.5 per 100k
7. New Mexico – 22.7 per 100k
8. Arkansas – 22.6 per 100k
9. South Carolina – 22 per 100k
10. Tennessee – 21.3 per 100k
What do you notice about this? Of the top 10 gun death states, with the exception of New Mexico, they are all Red states. And now Texas has become a state where a significant percentage of the population are going around armed. Read this article and ask yourself, how would I feel having dinner with my wife and children in a restaurant in some town in Texas and notice that half the people in the room with me and my family are armed, and there is an argument going on at the next table that is getting kind of heated. Would you be comfortable? Or as someone goes by with a Glock on their hip, and your 10 year old daughter turns to you or your wife and asks, “Mommy did you see that man has a gun.” What would you say to her in response?
Hector Rosales, 59, poses for a portrait at his home Aug. 2 in New Braunfels. Credit: Matt McClain / The Washington Post
NEW BRAUNFELS, TEXAS — To live in Texas is to live surrounded by guns.
Each morning, men here strap guns inside suits, boots and swim trunks. Women slip them into bra and bellyband holsters that render them invisible. They stash firearms in purses, tool boxes, portable gun safes, back seats and glove compartments.
Neighbors tuck guns into bedside tables, cars and trucks. They take guns fishing, to church, the park, the pool, the gym, the movies — even to protests at the state Capitol. The convention center hosts gun shows where shoppers peruse AR-15s and high-capacity magazines outlawed in other states. Texas billboards offer an endless stream of advertisements for ammunition, silencers and other accessories.
It has been legal here to openly carry long guns like rifles for generations. But Texas’s gun-friendly attitude isn’t just a relic of the Old West and ranching: Many restrictions on handguns were loosened only recently. Two […]
The Republican Party recognizes that they are a minority and the basis of a functioning democracy they cannot win. So what to do? Destroy democracy. Literally, threaten and scare the election workers away. Scare the teachers away. scare the librarians away. Destroy or incapacitate the institutions in society that foster democracy. The corporate media just doesn’t seem to get what is going on. They are still covering politics like sports, two teams fairly playing a game only one can win, but each follows the rules.
‘It will get worse’: DOJ ramp up ‘punishments’ for threats of violence against election workers Credit: Lyonstock/Shutterstock.
Since the turmoil of the 2020 election, where numerous county election departments faced recalls, vote challenges and even threats of violence, more than half of Americans in the Western United States are served by new election officials — because so many experienced ones have left.
And those election officials who left — often because of harassment — took with them more than 1,800 years of combined experience, leaving new civil servants with a steep learning curve to support complicated voting processes, often with little federal support, according to a new report from bipartisan political reform group Issue One.
“This exodus of election officials isn’t happening in a vacuum and isn’t happening out of the blue,” said Michael Beckel, research director for Issue One. “There has been a concerted and coordinated campaign of harassment against many election officials.”
Issue One researched 11 Western states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming — and […]
