Last Call For School Of Hard-Right Knocks, Con't

The "Critical Race Theory" panic was always cover for destroying public education, and now we have Republicans openly ordering school libraries to take their collections back to 1950.

School districts from Pennsylvania to Wyoming are bowing to pressure from some conservative groups to review — then purge from public school libraries — books about LGBTQ issues and people of color.

Why it matters: A pivotal midterm election year, COVID frustrations and a backlash against efforts to call out systemic racism — driven disproportionately by white, suburban and rural parents — have made public schools ground zero in the culture wars.

What they're saying: "I've worked for this office for 20 years, and we've never had this volume of challenges come in such a short time," Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, told Axios. "In my former district, we might have one big challenge like every two years," Carolyn Foote, a retired Texas librarian of 29 years, told Axios. " I have to say that what we're seeing is really unprecedented."

Details: The Spotsylvania County School Board in Virginia in November ordered staff to remove “sexually explicit” books from libraries after a parent raised concerns about their LGBTQ themes. “I think we should throw those books in a fire,” school board member Rabih Abuismail said during a meeting. 

That same month, the Goddard School District in Kansas demanded staff remove 29 books from the district’s school libraries. The list included “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood and “The Bluest Eye” by Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison.
The Washington County School District in Utah voted last month to ban “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas and "Out of Darkness" by Ashley Hope Pérez, two novels tackling racism, following parent complaints about profanity. The superintendent cast the deciding vote. 

Texas school districts are scrambling to review and ban some library books after state Rep. Matt Krause, a former candidate for state attorney general, asked school superintendents to confirm whether any books on his list of 850 titles were on their shelves.

By the numbers: The ALA has not yet released a full accounting of its data for banning attempts in 2021, but Caldwell-Stone said the ALA tracked 330 challenges just from September through November 2021 and hasn't tallied all the titles yet. 

In 2020, amid the new pandemic and remote schooling, it cited 156 challenges to library, school and university materials and services, and the targeting of 273 books. In 2019, it tracked 377 challenges to materials and services, and the targeting of 566 books.

The top target both years was "George," by Alex Gino, a novel about a transgender girl. "Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You," by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi was last year's second-biggest target. 

ALA classifies a book as "banned" if a school or library removes it from circulation or if a district outlaws it from lessons.

 

I remember similar book bannings when I was growing up three decades ago, but this time the difference is these bans are being codified into state law, and these books are not coming back, folks. 

And wouldn't you know it, it's always, always books by authors of color about the experiences of people of color in America, and LGBTQ+ books. Always.

Becausde those cultural experiences, viewpoints, and voices have to be eliminated from authoritarian white supremacists Christian Dominionist America, where everything is equal and wonderful as long as you submit to the white guys in charge, right?

Free speech right up until we literally make laws to eliminate it.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

I definitely want to know where this misplaced optimism about Trump facing federal charges is coming from, because I don't believe it for a second.

 

Senate Democrats believe there is a good chance the Department of Justice will prosecute former President Trump for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, which would have major political reverberations ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

Democratic lawmakers say they don’t have any inside information on what might happen and describe Attorney General Merrick Garland as someone who would make sure to run any investigation strictly “by the book.”

But they also say the fact that Garland has provided little indication about whether the Department of Justice has its prosecutorial sights set on Trump doesn’t necessarily mean the former president isn’t likely to be charged.

Given the weight of public evidence, Democratic lawmakers think Trump committed federal crimes.

But Senate Democrats also warn that Garland needs to proceed cautiously. Any prosecution that fails to convict Trump risks becoming a disaster and could vindicate Trump, just as the inconclusive report by former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team was seized upon by Trump and his allies to declare his exoneration on a separate series of allegations.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said “clearly what [Trump] did” in the days leading up and the day of the Jan. 6 attack on Congress “falls in the ambit of what’s being investigated and perhaps is criminal.”

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said it’s up to the prosecutors at the Justice Department whether to charge Trump, though he believes that the former president’s actions on and before Jan. 6 likely violate federal law.

“They have all of the evidence at their disposal,” he said.

Kaine believes federal prosecutors are looking seriously at charges against Trump, although he doesn’t have any inside information about what they may be working on.

“My intuition is that they are” looking carefully at whether Trump broke the law, he said. “My sense is they’re looking [at] everything in a diligent way and they haven’t made a decision.”

“I believe there are federal statutes that are very much implicated” by Trump’s efforts to overturn President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, Kaine added.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said, “I think anybody who it’s proven had a role in the planning of [the Jan. 6 attack] should be prosecuted, not just the people who broke in and smashed the window in my office and others.”

“I think anybody that’s shown to have had a role in its planning absolutely should be prosecuted,” he added. “I mean it was treason, it was trying to overturn an election through violent means.”

Asked whether Trump broke the law, Brown said “I’m not going to say he’s guilty before I see evidence,” but he also said there’s “a lot of evidence that he was complicit.”

 

So we're going on Tim Kaine's gut now. Nice.

Meanwhile the story continues to find the much, much more likely scenario of state charges against Trump to be the actual reality, facing election interference in Georgia and bank and insurance fraud in NY.

Those cases I can see going forward in a limited fashion, but after Robert Mueller, I have no confidence that Merrick Garland will ever charge Trump, and none of you should either.

The Honeymoon Is Burned To The Ground

Gallup's quarterly party preference poll numbers are in for 2021, and white they showed a record-tying nine-point lead for the Democrats a year ago, in fourth quarter of last year it was a five-point Republican lead...also a record-tying number.

On average, Americans' political party preferences in 2021 looked similar to prior years, with slightly more U.S. adults identifying as Democrats or leaning Democratic (46%) than identified as Republicans or leaned Republican (43%).

However, the general stability for the full-year average obscures a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter.

These results are based on aggregated data from all U.S. Gallup telephone surveys in 2021, which included interviews with more than 12,000 randomly sampled U.S. adults.

Gallup asks all Americans it interviews whether they identify politically as a Republican, a Democrat or an independent. Independents are then asked whether they lean more toward the Republican or Democratic Party. The combined percentage of party identifiers and leaners gives a measure of the relative strength of the two parties politically.

Both the nine-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter and the five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter are among the largest Gallup has measured for each party in any quarter since it began regularly measuring party identification and leaning in 1991.

The Democratic lead in the first quarter was the largest for the party since the fourth quarter of 2012, when Democrats also had a nine-point advantage. Democrats held larger, double-digit advantages in isolated quarters between 1992 and 1999 and nearly continuously between mid-2006 and early 2009.

The GOP has held as much as a five-point advantage in a total of only four quarters since 1991. The Republicans last held a five-point advantage in party identification and leaning in early 1995, after winning control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the 1950s. Republicans had a larger advantage only in the first quarter of 1991, after the U.S. victory in the Persian Gulf War led by then-President George H.W. Bush.

 

The country prefers the GOP now more than it did under Shrub and Trump. Biden got six months to fix the problem, the "Afghanistan disaster" came along (which it wasn't) and a tired, sick America is just ready to throw in the towel and let the Republican authoritarians win, being loudly and confidently wrong on everything because I guess if you're white, you figure things can't get any worse for you with the GOP in charge, right? 

The rest of us, well. We know the answer to that. But judging from the news this morning, our media betters absolutely want to blame Biden for Trump's problems, and can't wait to have a dictator in charge.

Democracy is too hard to fight for, you guys. That's where we are right now.