Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Attorney General Merrick Garland today announced federal prosecutions of the four current and former Louisville police officers involved in the police murder of Breonna Taylor.

The U.S. Justice Department said Thursday federal charges have been filed against four former and current Louisville police officers in the apartment raid that killed Breonna Taylor in 2020.

The Justice Department on Thursday charged the four Louisville Metro Police officers -- Joshua Jaynes, Kyle Meaney, Kelly Goodlet, and Brett Hankison -- with civil rights offenses, unlawful conspiracy, unconstitutional use of force and obstruction of justice.

Jaynes, who was fired in January 2021 for lying on the search warrant that led to the raid that killed Taylor, is already in FBI custody, his attorney, Thomas Clay, told the Louisville Courier-Journal.

During a press conference Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the federal civil rights charges are for the officers' alleged falsification of the affidavit used to get the search warrant on Taylor's apartment. Her apartment was targeted by mistake.

"The federal charges announced today allege that members of the place-based investigations unit falsified the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant of Ms. Taylor's home, that this act violated federal civil rights laws and that those violations resulted in Ms. Taylor's death," Garland said at the Justice Department.

 

Hopefully this means all four of these monsters will be caged.

 

Breonna Taylor was murdered by LMPD.

 

Remember her name.

 

Black Lives Still Matter.

We Don't Need No Education, Con't

Republicans targeting teachers as "groomers" and other disgusting attacks on education itself has resulted in a "catastrophic" teacher shortage, especially in red states controlled by Republicans. This is of course being done on purpose, as Republicans are trying to get rid of public education anyway.

Rural school districts in Texas are switching to four-day weeks this fall due to lack of staff. Florida is asking veterans with no teaching background to enter classrooms. Arizona is allowing college students to step in and instruct children.

The teacher shortage in America has hit crisis levels — and school officials everywhere are scrambling to ensure that, as students return to classrooms, someone will be there to educate them.

“I have never seen it this bad,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association, said of the teacher shortage. “Right now it’s number one on the list of issues that are concerning school districts ... necessity is the mother of invention, and hard-pressed districts are going to have to come up with some solutions.”

It is hard to know exactly how many U.S. classrooms are short of teachers for the 2022-2023 school year; no national database precisely tracks the issue. But state- and district-level reports have emerged across the country detailing staffing gaps that stretch from the hundreds to the thousands — and remain wide open as summer winds rapidly to a close.

The Nevada State Education Association estimated that roughly 3,000 teaching jobs remained unfilled across the state’s 17 school districts as of early August. In a January report, the Illinois Association of Regional School Superintendents found that 88 percent of school districts statewide were having “problems with teacher shortages” — while 2,040 teacher openings were either empty or filled with a “less than qualified” hire. And in the Houston area, the largest five school districts are all reporting that between 200 and 1,000 teaching positions remain open.

Carlton Jenkins, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District in Wisconsin, said teachers are so scarce that superintendents across the country have developed a whisper network to alert each other when educators move between states.

“We’re at a point right now, where if I have people who want to move to California, I call up and give a reference very quick,” he said. “And if someone is coming from another place — say, Minnesota — I have superintendent colleagues in Minnesota, they call and say, ‘Hey, I have teachers coming your way.’ ”

Why are America’s schools so short-staffed? Experts point to a confluence of factors including pandemic-induced teacher exhaustion, low pay and some educators’ sense that politicians and parents — and sometimes their own school board members — have little respect for their profession amid an escalating educational culture war that has seen many districts and states pass policies and laws restricting what teachers can say about U.S. history, race, racism, gender and sexual orientation, as well as LGBTQ issues.

“The political situation in the United States, combined with legitimate aftereffects of covid, has created this shortage,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “This shortage is contrived.”

 

Republicans are driving teachers out of the profession, along with librarians, professors, instructors and educators. Republicans want angry parents and taxpayers to see how much of a "failure" schools and libraries and colleges are so that they can justify shutting them down.

 

If all the voters are uneducated, obnoxious Dunning-Kruger buffoons, they elect the same to run the country. Republicans want to keep 75% of non-college voters and they can win election after election by convincing stupid people to remain stupid. 

And in a lot of states, it's working.

Josh Hawley's Scandal-navian Adventures

While reductive fools like Kentucky's own GOP Sen. Rand Paul had the grace to vote "Present" in yesterday's 95-1 Senate vote ratifying NATO membership for Sweden and Finland, the lone "No" vote was Missouri dipstick GOP Sen. Josh Hawley, and even his own caucus is happy letting him since in the corner with the dunce cap on to stew in his "principled loss".

The resolution backs Finland and Sweden joining NATO. The House approved a resolution in a bipartisan 394-18 vote last month that formally supported the two Nordic countries joining the military alliance. All opposition in the House came from the Republican Party.

Hawley’s vote against the resolution did not come as a surprise. He had announced his intent to vote against the resolution earlier this week, outlining his opposition in an op-ed published by The National Interest.

He said he does not believe the U.S. should expand its security commitments in Europe, because America’s “greatest foreign adversary” is China.

Hawley argued that growing the country’s security commitments in Europe would make Americans less safe.

“Finland and Sweden want to join the Atlantic Alliance to head off further Russian aggression in Europe. That is entirely understandable given their location and security needs. But America’s greatest foreign adversary doesn’t loom over Europe. It looms in Asia,” Hawley wrote.

“I am talking of course about the People’s Republic of China. And when it comes to Chinese imperialism, the American people should know the truth: the United States is not ready to resist it. Expanding American security commitments in Europe now would only make that problem worse—and America, less safe,” he added.

The Missouri Republican elaborated on his stance in remarks on the Senate floor Wednesday, arguing that adding Finland and Sweden to NATO is not in the national security interest of the U.S.

“Finland and Sweden want to expand NATO because it is in their national security interest to do so, and fair enough. The question that should properly be before us, however, is, is it in the United States’s interests to do so? Because that’s what American foreign policy is supposed to be about, I thought,” Hawley said.

“Expanding NATO will require more United States forces in Europe, more manpower, more firepower, more resources, more spending. And not just now but over the long haul. But our greatest foreign adversary is not in Europe. Our greatest foreign adversary is in Asia. And when it comes to countering that adversary, we are behind the game. I’m talking, of course, about China. The communist government of Beijing has adopted a policy of imperialism,” he added.

Paul voted “present” on the resolution shortly after the Senate defeated his amendment to the measure in a 10-87 vote. Nine Republicans joined him in supporting the addition.

The amendment sought to emphasize that Article 5 of the NATO treaty does not supersede Congress’s control over declaring war.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday delivered remarks in support of the resolution and wished those opposed to the measure “good luck” in finding a “defensible excuse” for their “no” votes.

“If any senator is looking for a defensible excuse to vote ‘no,’ I wish them good luck. This is a slam dunk for national security that deserves unanimous bipartisan support,” McConnell said.

“There’s just no question that admitting these robust democratic countries with modern economies and capable interoperable militaries will only strengthen the most successful military alliance in human history,” he added.

 

Even if Hawley is right about China being a bigger threat than Russia right now (which he's ludicrously not, given the fact that Russia is in an open shooting war with Ukraine and has been for six months, I thought that American exceptionalism meant that we could do more than one thing, given the fact we spend more than the total GDP of Switzerland on just the friggin' Pentagon every year.

No, when even Mitch thinks your position is indefensible given the fact the US has ratified Albania, Croatia, and in the last five years, North Macedonia, and Montenegro joining NATO, Hawley knows he doesn't have a leg to stand on.

So he should sit down and shut the hell up.