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Homelessness Can’t Be Solved with Fines and Arrests

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By John Tharp & Maria Foscarinis / OtherWords 

When San Diego resident Gerald Stark’s rent increased and he couldn’t afford another apartment, the retired union pipefitter moved into his RV.

But because he lacked an address, San Diego law made it almost impossible for him to park his RV legally. Soon the city confiscated it, leaving him out on the streets.

There, he was ticketed for violating another law prohibiting sleeping in public. Faced with thousands of dollars in fines and fees he was unable to pay, Stark lived every day in fear of being arrested — for simply trying to survive.   [Read more…]

How the Wealthy Destroy Public Schools, One Gift at a Time

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By Jeff Bryant / Campaign for America’s Future

News about wealthy folks giving millions to education draw both praise and criticism. But two new reports by public education advocacy groups reveal the real impact rich people have on schools and how they’ve chosen to leverage their money to influence the system.

The first report, “Confronting the Education Debt” from the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, examines the nation’s “education debt” – the historic funding shortfall for school systems that educate black and brown children. The authors find that through a combination of multiple factors – including funding rollbacks, tax cuts, and diversions of public money to private entities – the schools educating the nation’s poorest children have been shorted billions in funding.

One funding source alone, the federal dollars owed to states for educating low-income children and children with disabilities, shorted schools $580 billion, between 2005 and 2017, in what the government is lawfully required to fund schools through the provisions of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESSA) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).   [Read more…]

Trump on 60 Minutes: “I’m President and You’re Not”

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By Mark Sumner / Daily Kos

In a lengthy interview broadcast on Sunday evening, Leslie Stahl presented Donald Trump a long series of questions. Though she occasionally got answers—many of them unrelated to what was asked—and many of those answers were deeply laced with equal parts ignorance and arrogance, the most horrifying part of the whole event was how familiar it all seemed. 60 Minutes with Donald Trump seemed much like every other minute with Donald Trump. And that’s a problem.

In all the questions she asked, Stahl discovered … nothing, really. Trump hates the press. We knew that. Trump is ready to claim that he knows more about science than the scientists. We knew that. He says he understands the military better than his generals. We knew that. When pressed on any issue he resorts to attacking the “unfairness” of the press rather than provide a straight answer. We knew that.

Though the interview did serve as a reminder of Trump’s readiness to pretend to knowledge he doesn’t have, his utter inability to admit the truth even when caught in an obvious lie, and his horrifying incoherence in attempting to describe even the simplest facets of policy, there was perhaps just one moment that broke through.   [Read more…]

How Bad is Congressman Duncan Hunter? Let Us Count the Ways…

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By D. Weisman / Escondido Grapevine,

Duncan Hunter was named filthiest grifter in Congress by the non-partisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), but his son Duane — who started going by the same Duncan Hunter name to fool voters in 2008 — seems to have outdone his father.

After three decades of like-father-like-son criminal grift, voters in California’s 50th Congressional District finally, at long last, have a legitimate opportunity to throw out the bum(s).

Vote for Ammar Campa-Najjar as if your life depended on it because it does.

Number one reason to vote against Hunter is his 60-count federal indictment for the criminal grift of illegally using at least $250,000 in campaign funds for personal expenses.
  [Read more…]

Four Ways Trump Is Dead Wrong on Medicare-for-All

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Lies from Trump are nothing new, but these outright falsehoods about our healthcare system must not go unchallenged.

By Robert Weissman / Common Dreams

Note: USA Today published an op-ed by President Donald Trump including numerous falsehoods about single-payer health care.

Lies and deceptions from Trump are nothing new. Lies and deceptions from Trump about Medicare-for All are new, so it’s worth correcting his USA Today column attacking such a system.   [Read more…]

Senator Diane Feinstein Latest Target of Trump Rally’s “Lock Her Up” Chant

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“It’s not just an assault on norms, the rule of law, and due process they claim to love, it’s a downright creepy attempt at intimidating women.”

By Julia Conley / Common Dreams

Two days after apologizing to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh “on behalf of our nation” for subjecting him to one Senate hearing and a brief FBI probe into several sexual assault allegations against him before allowing him to be confirmed to his lifetime appointment, President Donald Trump clearly dropped the pretense of defending “due process” as he laughed along as audience members chanted “Lock her up!” after he criticized Sen. Dianne Feinstein in Iowa on Tuesday night.

At Trump’s suggestion during a campaign-style rally in Council Bluffs that Feinstein leaked Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s letter regarding her allegations to the press, the audience erupted in the chant as the president smirked and seemed to enjoy the moment.   [Read more…]

UN Climate Report Warns of Grim Consequences, Shrinking Time Frame for Action

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By Meteor Blades / Daily Kos

A decade, maybe a little more, is all the time we have left for acting to keep global temperature rise to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius over the pre-industrial era, U.N. scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced Monday. That’s 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Since the dawn of the industrial age, global warming has boosted temperatures 1.0-1.2 degrees Celsius.

The good news from the scientists is that the 1.5-degree goal may still be attainable. That’s unlike what most scientists thought when the 2015 Paris climate agreement included 1.5 degrees as an “aspirational” goal. Their view was that it was only realistic to shoot for 2 degrees (3.6 degrees F).

The bad news is we’re nowhere near either of those goals and the consequences of not acting soon are grim. As we have heard from scientists more than once previously, those consequences are happening more immediately than previously thought, according to the draft IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C.    [Read more…]

We Need to Talk About Masculinity

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By Jill Richardson / OtherWords

When we discuss sexual assault, we often talk about women. What should women do to stay safe?

When I was in school, girls were even trained in women’s self-defense. I don’t know what the boys did during those time periods. Study hall?

Ask any woman what she does to prevent sexual assault and she’ll have an answer. She uses the buddy system when walking at night, or she carries pepper spray, or she doesn’t leave her drink unattended when she’s out, and so on.   [Read more…]

Trump Mocks Kavanaugh Accuser; Republican Crowd Chants “Lock Her Up”

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Donald Trump mocked Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at a rally Tuesday night because of course, that’s what one of the worst people in the world would do.

Trump highlighted the things Ford didn’t remember about being sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh—the exact address, the exact date—rather than the things she did remember—being sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh as he laughed, and called into question her recollection of having had one beer rather than acknowledging the widely shared accounts of Kavanaugh as a frequent, sloppy, aggressive drunk.

  [Read more…]

Re-Branded NAFTA: Yes to Big Oil, No to Consumer, Health, Safety and Environmental Protections

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Environmentalists on Monday slammed President Donald Trump’s replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), with Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter warning that it “would enshrine and globalize Trump’s deregulatory zealotry into a trade pact that would outlast the administration and imperil future efforts to protect consumers, workers, and the environment.”

Presented as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), many have noted that Trump’s trade deal, as Bloomberg put it, “looks more like a rebranding than a revolution,” despite Trump’s vows when he was a presidential candidate that he would negotiate a new deal that’s dramatically better for American workers. As experts and campaigners comb through the details of the agreement, environmental activists are homing in on provisions they warn would endanger people and the planet.   [Read more…]

Immigrant Children Carted Off in the Dead of Night to Trump’s Texas Tent Camp

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By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

With detention facilities overflowing due to President Donald Trump’s monstrous immigration policies—which have sent the number of children detained by the U.S. government soaring to a record 12,800—the Trump administration is reportedly carrying out dead-of-night “mass transfers” of children from foster homes and shelters to a crowded Texas tent camp, where they have no schooling and limited access to legal services.

According to the New York Times, more than 1,600 “migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in South Texas.”   [Read more…]

The Unbelievable Cruelty of the GOP’s Kavanaugh Charade

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By Jill Richardson / OtherWords

This past week, my private reality and the public reality playing out on the television have diverged. It’s hard to believe that I live in the same world as Senator Chuck Grassley, the Senate judiciary chair trying to Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court.

When Christine Blasey Ford first alleged Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her — and when talking heads on TV began doubting her veracity, or insisting that the assault was not a big deal — a different conversation began.

It’s a private conversation, one-on-one, mostly. A few of us posted about sexual assault in general or about our own past assaults on our Facebook pages. Then the private messages began.   [Read more…]

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