Last Call For The Huckster's Daughter

I guarantee you that Arkansas GOP Governor (and former Trumpian Mouth of Sauron) Sarah Huckabee Sanders is going to try to resolve the problems that her public education reform bill creates with her new law shredding child labor laws in the state.

 

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) signed into law this week legislation that rolls back significant portions of the state’s child labor protections.

The law eliminates requirements for the state to verify the age of children younger than 16 before they can take a job.

Sanders believes the provision was “burdensome and obsolete,” spokeswoman Alexa Henning said in an emailed statement. Remaining state and federal regulations are still in effect, she said. Sanders signed the Republican-backed bill on Tuesday.

Federal officials have pledged to crack down on child labor law offenses after regulators discovered hundreds of violations in meatpacking plants and after press reports emerged of children working in hazardous occupations around the country.

The Labor Department fined Packers Sanitation Services, a subcontractor for meatpacking plants, $1.5 million in February for illegally hiring children, some of whom sustained chemical burns after working with caustic cleaning agents.

Other states are also considering loosening child labor protections. A bill advancing in Iowa would allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work certain jobs in meatpacking plants and would shield businesses from civil liability if a youth worker is sickened, injured or killed on the job.

 

As red state "education reforms" close down more and more schools and leave kids without an education, more and more of them are going to end up in meatpacking plants, factories, farms, construction work and more doing, as Dubya famously put it, "The jobs Americans don't want to do." 

Republicans understand full well that "school choice" means not everyone will get into the local magnate school with the swimming pool and media lab and the best teachers.  They understand full well that school funding will be decimated, and "failing" schools closed.

This will leave thousands of kids with no schools to attend. Eliminating child labor laws is the proposed solution. The school to prison pipeline is so 2016.

It's the school to meatpacking plant now.

Are there no workhouses?

Last Call For Ridin' With Biden, Con't

Why I voted for Joe Biden, and why I would continue to do so, is that he's updated his views on race and has realized what Republicans are trying to do, rewriting the entire civil rights struggle out of American history and pretending we're all a "post-racial society". We're not, and everything the GOP does proves that. Biden gets that, and he understands what he has to do.

President Joe Biden on Monday criticized Republican attempts to limit how educators discuss race and systemic discrimination in schools, arguing that teaching these topics isn’t about being “woke” but about acknowledging history.

Speaking at the National Action Network’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day breakfast in Washington, D.C., the president highlighted some of his administration’s recent accomplishments including establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday — which was met with opposition from some Republicans who decried the effort as “identity politics.”

“The idea that we’re supposed to remain silent on the abuses of the past, as if they didn’t occur? That’s not being woke, that’s being honest,” Biden said. “That’s talking about history.”

 

Remember that being honest about America's faults, faults that still exist today, in order to try to improve those issues, is "hating America". 

Biden’s remarks come amid renewed efforts by some Republicans to ban “critical race theory” in schools. Critical race theory is an academic discipline that studies how race has influenced societal, legal and political structures, but the term has been used by Republicans in recent years as a blanket indictment of any discussion of systemic racism or discrimination. Across the country, Republican legislators have pushed bills seeking to restrict how these topics are taught in public schools, including by banning books.

Most recently, newly inaugurated Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) signed an executive order banning “indoctrination and critical race theory” in public classrooms. Sanders, who previously served as former President Donald Trump’s press secretary, defended the ban Sunday on “Fox News Sunday,” arguing teachers “shouldn’t teach our kids and our students ideas to hate this country.”

And in Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is looking to overhaul public universities, beginning with the historically progressive New College in Sarasota where he recently appointed six conservative trustees to the board.

 

Republicans want to take America back to the pre-civil rights era 60's and invent a new America where it never happened. They expect enough people will agree with them, and cast the rest of us into the abyss.

 

Biden at least defends the dvil rights era. Nobody who would ever be nominated in this Republican party for president would ever do so, in fact they would run on the opposite.

Un-Vaccination Nation, Con't

As delta variant COVID cases explode across red states like Florida, Texas and Missouri, and the Biden administration is letting FOX News and other disinformation outlets quietly know they will be sued into oblivion if they continue, suddenly Republicans are having those come to Jesus moments they should have has nine months ago about urging everyone who can to get the vaccine, while still vowing to ban health mandates that would prevent the spread of the virus.

 

Former White House press secretary and Republican Arkansas gubernatorial candidate Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced in an op-ed that she has been vaccinated against the coronavirus and urged others to do so.

"Like many of you, I have had a lot of misinformation thrown at me by politicians and the media during the pandemic. And, like many of you, I spent a lot of time sorting through it all, trying to make the best decision I could for myself and my family," Sanders wrote in the entry published over the weekend in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. "Based on the advice of my doctor, I determined that the benefits of getting vaccinated outweighed any potential risks."

The fact that former President Trump and his family had been vaccinated, Sanders said, helped her make her decision.

"If getting vaccinated was safe enough for them, I felt it was safe enough for me," she wrote.

Sanders has received Trump's endorsement in the Republican primary in Arkansas and is looking to replace outgoing Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R), who cannot run again due to term limits.

Arkansas is one of several states in the Southeast and Midwest with lower-than-average vaccination rates, as the delta variant of the coronavirus sweeps through the nation.

"I understand that the decision to be vaccinated is deeply personal and not an easy one to make," Sanders wrote in her op-ed. "As the number of covid cases and hospitalizations once again rise exponentially in Arkansas, information is emerging that I hope people will consider."

She concluded her entry with advice for Arkansans still debating the merits of being vaccinated: "Pray about it, discuss it with your family and your doctor. Filter out the noise and fear-mongering and condescension, and make the best, most informed decision you can that helps your family, community, and our great state be its very best."

 

Pretending that the choice to get the vaccine is "deeply personal" is actual condescension, enabling bad actors to continue while jettisoning any semblance of responsibility, and all this after Huckabee Sanders gleefully vowed to never allow a public health mandate again last week if she is elected governor of Arkansas.

 

Besides, we know full well that people are refusing the vaccine literally just to spite Biden and a government they see as illegitimate.

George Grabryan and Mike Melton have been helping people here on the bank of the Tennessee River survive devastating tornadoes, floods and other disasters for decades. Ask any local official in rural Lauderdale County, and they have the two emergency managers’ numbers saved in their phones — just in case.

But Covid-19 has broken those bonds. Despite Grabryan and Melton’s best efforts, only 34 percent of county residents are vaccinated, even as the highly transmissible Delta variant has driven up new infections by 300 percent in the last two weeks. Three people have died, and health officials predict that many more will follow before the summer mist lifts off the cornfields.

Many people here and elsewhere in the Southeast are turning down Covid-19 vaccines because they are angry that President Donald Trump lost the election and sick of Democrats in Washington thinking they know what’s best. State and local public health officials have struggled to combat that deep-rooted obstinance. But they don’t want more on-the-ground help from the White House, fearful it would prolong the current surge — even as the Biden administration has begun approaching southern states with offers to send federal “surge teams” on door-knocking campaigns.

The pushback from both state officials and people who refuse vaccination underscores the extent to which the federal government may never be able to convince rural, conservative populations in parts of the South to get the shot. And it raises questions about how the Biden administration will shape its response to Covid-19 over the next several months as more schools and businesses reopen and Delta spreads.

“To say that politics doesn’t play a part would be wrong,” Melton said. “I think the national figures get people talking about the vaccine and that can sometimes take the wrong fork in the road and go the wrong way.”

Local public health officials and physicians in this part of the country are convinced that they are doing everything they can to save lives — pulling 15-hour days to set up pop-up mobile vaccine units, monitor patients on respirators, and administer rounds of therapeutics. But they can only do so much. They will not go to people’s homes to try and twist their arms, they say, and they do not want federal officials to do so either.

“I don’t know going door to door would help us,” said Karen Landers, an Alabama state health officer based in Sheffield. “People in more rural areas … you’re going on to their property. It might not be the best idea to have them do that because people are protective of their privacy.”

There is precisely nothing that can be done now to convince the bulk of these folks to get the vaccine. It's not going to happen. We'll continue to try to save them and rehabilitate them as victims when they die and infect their family members, leading to more deaths, but at this point I'm tired of being told I have to have sympathy for the people trying to kill me.

We'll mourn them, of course.

But at some point we have to turn to take care of the living.

Last Call For The Great Former Trumpist Job Hunt

 Donald Trump is political cancer these days, but he's also resume cancer, and his close aides and confidants are now unemployed and remain unemployable.

“There’s a lot of resumé passing and people just wanting to help people land on their feet,” said a former Trump White House official.

It’s not been easy. Tainted by Trump’s reputation, several Trump aides described an increasingly bleak job market with virtually no chance of landing jobs in corporate America and some even having seen promising leads disappear after the rampage at the U.S. Capitol. A second former White House official said they knew of “people who got jobs rescinded because of Jan. 6.” A Republican strategist was blunter.

“They are really f---ed,” the strategist said, pointing to some top officials who stuck with Trump until the bitter end. “The Hill scramble, one of the few places where they’d be welcomed, already happened a month or so ago… They were told over and over to take their hand off the hot stove, and they didn’t want to listen.”

It’s not just the lower- and mid-level staffers getting pinched. Two people familiar with his thinking said Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, who spent seven years in the House of Representatives before joining the White House, was even considering a position at the Trump Organization because of a lack of options.

Faced with these employment hurdles, staffers have circulated an informal directory of plausible job openings among each other. Other Trump officials decided to start their own businesses or transitioned back to Republican offices on Capitol Hill or hired their former colleagues. Former White House director of strategic communications Alyssa Farah, for example, recently tapped a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence to join her new consulting operation, according to a person familiar with the move.

It’s a far different reality from where Trump and his aides had envisioned they would be. A month ago, everything seemed crystal clear: He had lost the 2020 election but would soon launch a juggernaut campaign for the presidency in 2024, and his allies and inner circle would be there to help. Now, the former president’s team is scampering away — willing to leave Washington, in some cases for red states like Texas and Florida, to increase their job prospects — while his own second act is clouded by uncertainty.

One former senior administration official noted that many inside the White House were waiting until after the Electoral College votes were counted to begin their job search in earnest, so as not to step on messaging about Trump’s efforts to challenge the election results. But then, the riots on Capitol Hill upended their plans.

“They looked to that [Jan. 6] as the end of the limbo state people were operating in so they could start moving on to the next thing” the former official said. “But the 6th put a shock to that.”

Crying shame that sticking with your seditionist coup-coup bird of a boss has wrecked your job prospects, huh.

Maybe that $600 will help, yeah?

Meanwhile, some former Trumpists are moving ahead with their own plans to join the only job market that's really left to them: GOP politician. 

Sarah Sanders, Donald Trump’s former chief spokeswoman and one of his closest aides, announced Monday she’s running for Arkansas governor, vying for political office even as the former president’s legacy is clouded by an impeachment charge that he incited the deadly siege at the U.S. Capitol.

The former White House press secretary, who left the job in 2019 to return to her home state, launched the bid less than a week after the end of Trump’s time in office and as the ex-president faces an impeachment trial.

But her announcement reflected how much she expected voters in solidly red Arkansas to embrace the former president, if not his rhetoric.

“With the radical left now in control of Washington, your governor is your last line of defense,” Sanders said in a video announcing her bid. “In fact, your governor must be on the front line. So today I announce my candidacy for governor of Arkansas.”

The daughter of former Gov. Mike Huckabee, Sanders had been widely expected to run for the office after leaving the White House — and Trump publicly encouraged her to make a go. She’s been laying the groundwork for a candidacy, speaking to GOP groups around the state.

Sanders joins a Republican primary that already includes two statewide elected leaders, Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin and Attorney General Leslie Rutledge. The three are running to succeed current Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican who is unable to run next year due to term limits. No Democrats have announced a bid to run for the seat.

 

Doesn't matter that a state's governor has no executive experience in a party that elected Trump, right? Not only do I expect Sanders to win the primary, I expect her to win the governor's race and take her rage out on the Little Rock press corps while lining up regular interview spots on MAGA TV.

She's in the perfect spot to win, still a hardcore Trumpist but far enough away from the failed coup and COVID disaster that she won't be blamed for either when running.

Keep an eye on her. She's going to be dangerous in the years ahead.