Cross-posted from skyislandscriber.com.

Lawmakers move Arizona closer to school-voucher option for all students writes Howard Fischer (Capitol Media Services) in the Daily Star.

A Senate panel agreed Thursday to open the door to allowing all 1.1 million students in Arizona schools to use state dollars to attend private or parochial schools, so that parents can choose.

The 4–3 vote by the Senate Education Committee followed hours of testimony from people who already get what lawmakers call “empowerment scholarship accounts,” detailing how they’ve helped their children. Eligible groups include children with special needs, those living on tribal reservations and those who attend schools rated D or F, among others.

Sen. Debbie Lesko, R-Peoria, sponsor of SB 1431, said vouchers save taxpayer money. She said schools get an average of $9,529 a year for each student while a typical voucher is in the $5,200 range.

But Chuck Essigs of the Arizona Association of School Business Officials said that’s misleading. He said the $9,529 figure includes federal aid to schools as well as locally raised dollars for bonds and overrides. Essigs said the actual amount paid in state aid to schools is an average of $1,100 less per student than a voucher for an elementary school child; for high schools the difference is $1,200 per child, he said.

Sen. Steve Smith, R-Maricopa, said there is no danger of a wholesale shifting of funds from public schools if SB 1431 is approved and all students are eligible for vouchers. He cited existing law that limits vouchers to no more than one-half of a percent of all students, a figure that computes to about 5,500 students.

What Smith did not say, though, is that the cap will end in 2019, removing all limits.

The actual cost may be substantially higher. Here are excerpts from the Senate fact sheet for SB1431.

Currently, ADE [AZ Department of Education] estimates there are 3,100 students enrolled in the ESA Program and approximately $46 million disbursed in FY 2017. Laws 2013, Chapter 250, caps the number of new ESAs approved by ADE at 0.5 percent of total public school enrollment through 2019, or approximately 5,500 new students annually.

There is a potential impact to the state General Fund associated with expanding eligibility in the ESA Program. The fiscal impact depends on the participation rate and where the students otherwise would have attended school.

Projecting the average disbursement ($46 million for 3,100 students) to all 1.1 million students shows that the cost to the state could be in the billions of dollars. Lesko is dead wrong in her claims about saving money.

[Scriber’s note: I can’t figure out why the Senate’s fact sheet seems to be at odds with the other per pupil amounts cited by Essigs above. Perhaps someone better schooled in education finance can comment and clarify.]

It does get worse. Lesko thinks hiding standardized test results from the public is good policy.

A key objection [to vouchers for all] has been lack of accountability. Hoping to address that, SB 1431 requires students in grades 3 through 12 who use vouchers to take a nationally recognized achievement test, advanced placement exam or any college admissions test that assesses reading and math.

But the results would not be made public — as they are for public schools — and would be provided only to parents. Lesko said that’s sufficient.

So any evidence that private schools are worse than (or even better than) public schools would not inform legislative actions. That is crappy public policy. Then again, this was never about making informed decisions.

But the bottom line on SB1431 is that it is unconstitutional.

Foes cited the high cost of private schools — some charge more than $10,000 a year — and said the vouchers become a subsidy of state dollars to parents whose children already are enrolled. For everyone else, said parent Sarah Stohr, the concept of school choice is an illusion.

“Single parents like me with no family support in this community have little true choice when it comes to choosing between my job and shuttling my child around town to a school that’s farther from my home,” she testified.

Stohr told lawmakers that if they really care about children, they would “finally choose to fully and adequately fund our public schools so that no parent feels like their neighborhood school isn’t an excellent choice for them.”

Tory Roberg of the Secular Coalition for Arizona said her objections relate to the idea of using tax dollars to help children go to parochial schools, saying it amounts to using public funds “for the purpose of religious indoctrination.”

AZBlueMeanie (Blog for Arizona) weighs on on how SB1431 violates the state constitution: Senate Tea-Publicans advance unconstitutional school ‘vouchers for all’ bill.

… The Arizona Constitution prohibits state funding to private and parochial schools:

Article 2, Section 12: “No public money or property shall be appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, exercise, or instruction, or to the support of any religious establishment.”

Article 11, Section 7: “No sectarian instruction shall be imparted in any school or state educational institution that may be established under this Constitution, and no religious or political test or qualification shall ever be required as a condition of admission into any public educational institution of the state, as teacher, student, or pupil;”

In Cain v. Horne (Cain II), 220 Ariz. 77, 202 P.3d 1178 (2009), the Arizona Supreme Court struck down the legislature’s previous attempt at a “vouchers for all” program as unconstitutional.

Any way you cut it, the vouchers for all push is money laundering in a rather obvious attempt to skirt these constitutional prohibitions against using state funds for private, religious schools. If by statute, A cannot give money to C, then A routes money to B which then gives the money to C. Plug into this formula state funds (A), parents (B), and religious schools (C), and SB 1431 reduces to money laundering.

Cross-posted from skyislandscriber.com

Shooting survivor Suzi Hileman writes an open letter in the _Daily Star_: Dear Rep. McSally: Your gun vote disrespects me, other victims of Jan. 8, 2011. Here it is in full.

Dear Rep. Martha McSally:

Have you forgotten us, your constituents? We’re the ones who were standing on the corner of Ina and Oracle roads on Jan. 8, 2011, talking to our congresswoman, when a young man with an untreated serious mental illness and legal access to a 9mm Glock, and the ammunition to go with it, opened fire.

That young man was not on a national watch list, as the ruling to which you object would have placed him.

Your vote told me that doesn’t bother you.

That seat you hold? It belonged to U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Her shooter was described by his prison psychologist as “among the most disturbed individuals I have treated in my 23 years of work with this population.”

Your vote says that a meaningful background check is too much to ask in order to keep me safe as I participate in civic dialogue.

Sen. Chris Murphy, whose district includes the Sandy Hook Elementary School families in Connecticut, speaks loudly and eloquently about sensible gun legislation. I had hoped that you would be sensitive to the issue, too.

You represent me; your vote disrespects my experience. But it’s more than just me and mine; it’s you and yours, and you don’t seem to care. We had a way to fix this, and you just voted to remove it.

This vote strikes at the heart of what happened to Tucson, because rest assured, this happened to our whole town.

Your vote cuts through that connection like a sabre. It hurts.

It separates us from one another, and most important, it separates us from you.

For surely, if you had a heart, you could have explained to the leadership of your party that while you agree with the policy, you can’t, in good conscience, tell your constituents that you will do nothing to protect them from exactly what happened to them, that this is a deeply personal issue, an issue that has a profound resonance in your district, and that your ultimate loyalty is to us, your voters.

It’s not as if they needed your vote. 235–180 was the final tally. Would 234–181 have been so hard to live with?

Editors note: Suzi Hileman is a survivor of the Jan. 8, 2011, attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords by a young man with an untreated mental illness, which was known to the authorities but never included in a useful background check. Six Tucsonans were shot to death that morning and 13 were wounded. Hileman lives in Tucson.

I imagine some of you will want to react to McSally’s vote – one among the 100% Trump votes she has cast. Here is your chance. McSally is holding a telephone town hall today at 1:00 MST. (h/t Miriam Lindmeier)

Cross-posted from skyislandscriber.com.

What Trump’s “running war” with the media is all about

Here is some past history that should inform the present: The Press in the Third Reich: Establishing Control of the Press

When Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, the Nazis controlled less than three percent of Germany’s 4,700 papers.

The elimination of the German multi-party political system not only brought about the demise of hundreds of newspapers produced by outlawed political parties; it also allowed the state to seize the printing plants and equipment of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties, which were often turned over directly to the Nazi Party. In the following months, the Nazis established control or exerted influence over independent press organs.

Here, now, in America we have effectively eliminated our “multi-party political system.” If we tread in the footsteps of the Third Reich, control of the press will soon follow.

Already American media is controlled by just six corporations: “almost all media comes from the same six sources. That’s consolidated from 50 companies back in 1983.” So American media ownership is following the same pattern as in the Third Reich example.

Here is another case study from the present by the Huffington Post: Putin’s Press: How Russia’s President Controls The News. “Russia may soon lose some of its last free media.”

After Putin came into power in 2000, he established control over the three main TV stations. In 2001 and 2002, he took control of the two biggest TV channels, ORT (now First Channel) and NTV. The state broadcaster, RTR (now Rossiya 1), was already under his control.

During his subsequent year in power, Putin moved more and more outlets under his influence until he controlled most of the major mainstream media. He appoints editors and general directors, either officially or unofficially. …

… Where will this situation lead? Most likely, honest journalists will have to quit their positions. I’m sending my deepest condolences to colleagues. They are not the first ones though, they are one of the last ones.

So what is happening here and now? Robert Reich reposting at billmoyers.com tells us Trump’s Seven Techniques to Control the Media. “Tyrants always try to suppress a free press; here’s Trump’s playbook.”. For the sake of brevity I’ll list them but you can read the details in Reich’s post.

Democracy depends on a free and independent press, which is why all tyrants try to squelch it. They use seven techniques that, worryingly, [now President] Donald Trump already employs.

Berate the media.
Blacklist critical media.
Turn the public against the media.
Condemn satirical or critical comments.
Threaten the media directly.
Limit media access.
Bypass the media and communicate with the public directly.

Historically, these seven techniques have been used by demagogues to erode the freedom and independence of the press.

The word “media” comes from “intermediate” between newsmakers and the public. Responsible media hold the powerful accountable by asking them hard questions and reporting on what they do. Apparently Trump wants to eliminate such intermediaries.

Discredit first, disinform second

Scriber boils all this down to two steps.

Discredit: “to give people reason to stop believing someone or to doubt the truth of something”

Disinform: Disinformation is intentionally false or misleading information that is spread in a calculated way to deceive target audiences.[1][2][3] The English word, which did not appear in dictionaries until the late–1980s, is a translation of the Russian дезинформация, transliterated as dezinformatsiya.[1][2][3] Disinformation is different from misinformation, which is information that is unintentionally false.[4] Misinformation can be used to define disinformation — where disinformation is misinformation that is purposefully and intentionally disseminated in order to defraud.[5] (See the Wiki entry for the citations.)

Evidence for Scriber’s two-step analysis follows.

Steve Bannon carries Trump warfare against the media

New York Times breaking news: Trump’s Chief Strategist Says News Media Should ‘Keep Its Mouth Shut’. The architect of Donald Duck Double-speak fires shots at the press.

Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s chief White House strategist, laced into the American press during an interview on Wednesday evening, arguing that news organizations had been “humiliated” by an election outcome few anticipated, and repeatedly describing the media as “the opposition party” of the current administration.

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” Mr. Bannon said during a telephone call.

“I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

The scathing assessment — delivered by one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted and influential advisers, in the first days of his presidency — comes at a moment of high tension between the news media and the administration, with skirmishes over the size of Mr. Trump’s inaugural crowd and the president’s false claims that millions of illegal votes by undocumented immigrants swayed the popular vote against him.

Mr. Bannon, who rarely grants interviews to journalists outside of Breitbart News, the provocative right-wing website he ran until last August, was echoing comments by Mr. Trump this weekend, when the president said he was in “a running war” with the media and called journalists “among the most dishonest people on earth.”

During a call to discuss Sean M. Spicer, the president’s press secretary, Mr. Bannon ratcheted up the criticism, offering a broad indictment of the news media as biased against Mr. Trump and out of touch with the American public. That’s an argument familiar to readers of Breitbart and followers of Trump-friendly personalities like Sean Hannity.

You don’t really think that Bannon would stop at that. There is lots more in the Times’ report about Bannon’s campaign to discredit the media.

Dishonest Donald continues the endless stream of lies

The second step is disinformation, the technique perfected by Trump’s friend in Moscow.

Greg Sargent (Washington Post/Plum Line) reports that Trump just gave a remarkable new interview. Here’s a tally of all his lies.

1) Trump repeated his false claim that there was rampant voter fraud in the election, and when pressed on the fact that his claim has repeatedly been debunked, Trump said: “No it hasn’t. Take a look at the Pew reports.” The Pew report that Trump is citing did not show what Trump claims it did. The author of that report has repeatedly stated this in numerous interviews.

2) When ABC pressed Trump on the fact that the author of the Pew report undermined his claims, Trump claimed, somewhat unintelligibly, that this author was “groveling.” This is not even remotely true. In fact, the author told The Post’s fact-checking team last night that he stood by his claim that the report did not say what Trump says it did.

3) Trump said this about all of the people who he falsely claims voted illegally in the election: “Those were Hillary votes. And if you look at it they all voted for Hillary. They all voted for Hillary. They didn’t vote for me. I don’t believe I got one. Okay, these are people that voted for Hillary Clinton. And if they didn’t vote, it would’ve been different in the popular.” There is no way Trump could possibly know this even if those illegal voters existed, which they don’t.

4) Trump said this about his glorious victory: “I had a tremendous victory, one of the great victories ever. In terms of counties I think the most ever or just about the most ever. When you look at a map it’s all red. Red meaning us, Republicans.” The context here was the size of Trump’s victory, but there is no reasonable metric by which his margin was either tremendous or one of the greatest ever. Trump lost the popular vote by nearly three million, and the size of his electoral college win was down toward the bottom in historical terms.

5) Trump said this about the size of the audience for his inaugural speech: “When I looked at the numbers that happened to come in from all of the various sources, we had the biggest audience in the history of inaugural speeches.” This is absurdly false, no matter what angle you examine it from.

6) Trump said this about immigration: “We have to stop people from just pouring into our country.” This is not exactly a lie, since “pouring in” is not a precise statement, but it leaves an enormously misleading impression. People are not by any reasonable metric “pouring into our country.” The number of undocumented immigrants in this country has been stable for years. As for Trump’s suggestion that we have failed to “stop” this alleged “pouring in,” experts have said that the flow of illegal immigration has fallen in recent years, and that border security matters less than economic and demographic trends in determining that flow in any case.

7) Pressed by ABC on the fact that Obamacare repeal could mean at least 18 million people lose insurance, Trump said: “Nobody ever deducts all the people that have already lost their health insurance that liked it. You had millions of people that liked their health insurance and their health care and their doctor and where they went. You had millions of people that now aren’t insured anymore.” This is not quite a lie, but it is a flagrant distortion. First there’s the claim that, in measuring the impact of Obamacare, “nobody ever deducts” all of those who supposedly “lost” their insurance. This is silly. One of the most widely cited metrics for measuring the law’s impact comes from Gallup, which measures the uninsured rate. Gallup has found that since Obamacare went into effect, that rate has fallen by more than six percentage points. Thus, it’s also a distortion to suggest that the law has left millions uninsured.

Bannon discredits, Trump disinforms. Trace the history: Hitler, Putin, Trump.

Cross-posted from the original Wednesday January 25th post at skyislandscriber.com.

Scriber is on vacation through Thursday. Unfortunately he cannot escape the news. It’s one holy s#!t moment after another.

I have come to believe that, amidst all the turmoil and disorder being created by Daffy Donald, the most immediate threat to our democracy is that poised by Trump’s war with the press. The single most potent thing authoritarian regimes do is to seek and obtain control of information and that means controlling the press.

We already know – or should know – that Trump is actively seeking to destroy the credibility of the independent, free press. If you have doubts, check out the now notorious rant by Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, reported among other sources by the Washington Post and spoofed by Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker. Listening now (Wednesday, Jan 25) to Good Morning America, Trump doubles down on his false claims about winning the election because of voter fraud. Basically he is telling the big lie and Spicer goes before the White House press corps and claims to have evidence. But the only evidence cited is what Trump believes.

Robert Reich identifies Trump’s Two-Step Strategy To Take Over the Truth.

Donald Trump is such a consummate liar that in coming days and years our democracy will depend more than ever on the independent press – finding the truth, reporting it, and holding Trump accountable for his lies.

But Trump’s strategy is to denigrate and disparage the press in the public’s mind – seeking to convince the public that the press is engaged in a conspiracy against him. And he wants to use his tweets, rallies, and videos to make himself the only credible source of public information about what is happening and what he’s doing.

It is the two-step strategy of despots. And it’s already started. It was officially launched the first full day of the Trump administration.

Step 1: Disparage the press and lie about them.
Step 2: Threaten to circumvent the press and take the “truth” directly to the people.

Reich concludes: “Trump and his advisors – Steven Bannon, formerly of “Breitbart News” as well as Spicer and others – understand that if a significant portion of the public trusts Trump’s own words more than they do the media’s, Trump can get away with saying – and doing – whatever he wants. When that happens, our democracy ends. ”

Check out Reich’s post for the evidence for each of his two steps.

What protections can the press invoke in defense against the dark arts of Trumpian dishonesty and disparagement? Apparently damn few according to the authors of this op-ed in the NY Times, Don’t Expect the First Amendment to Protect the Media. (RonNell Andersen Jones is a law professor at the University of Utah. Sonja R. West is a law professor at the University of Georgia.) Here are snippets.

When President Trump declared on Saturday that reporters are “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” it was not the first time he had disparaged the press. Nor was it out of character when, later that same day, his press secretary threatened “to hold the press accountable” for reporting truthful information that was unflattering to Mr. Trump. Episodes like these have become all too common in recent weeks. So it’s comforting to know that the Constitution serves as a reliable stronghold against Mr. Trump’s assault on the press.

Except that it doesn’t. The truth is, legal protections for press freedom are far feebler than you may think. Even more worrisome, they have been weakening in recent years.

It is primarily customs and traditions, not laws, that guarantee that members of the White House press corps have access to the workings of the executive branch. Consider the Department of Justice’s policy of forcing reporters to reveal confidential sources only as a last, rather than a first, resort. Journalists have no recognized constitutional nor even federal statutory right for such protection. It’s merely custom.

This is why we should be alarmed when Mr. Trump, defying tradition, vilifies media institutions, attacks reporters by name and refuses to take questions from those whose coverage he dislikes. Or when he decides not to let reporters travel with him on his plane, or fails to inform them when he goes out in public. Or when he suggests he might evict the White House press corps from the West Wing and have his administration, rather than the White House Correspondents Association, determine who gets allowed to attend briefings.

We cannot simply sit back and expect that the First Amendment will rush in to preserve the press, and with it our right to know. Like so much of our democracy, the freedom of the press is only as strong as we, the public, demand it to be.

By all means march. March for civil rights. March against bigotry. March for health care. But don’t forget to march in defense of a pillar of our democracy – the freedom of the press. The freedom to ask questions of our elected officials and their responsibility to provide truthful answers. Your freedom rests on it.

Cross-posted from skyislandscriber.com.

Betsy DeVos is the prime example of an X/antiX cabinet pick.

Trump’s pick for Education Secretary failed to do her homework reports Steve Benen (MSNBC/MaddowBlog) thus demonstrating her complete lack of qualifications for a cabinet post. Her inability to answer Senators’ questions on topics related to public education is mind-boggling even if not surprising.

Benen quotes NBC news:

DeVos refused to promise that she would not privatize or strip funding from the public schools she would oversee if confirmed.

Asked bluntly by Sen. Patty Murray of Washington whether she would commit to keeping funding for public schools intact, DeVos dodged the question.

Benen continues with additional examples.

Over and over again, Democratic senators pressed the Education nominee on questions she must have known were coming, but DeVos was nevertheless woefully unprepared for each of them.

In one especially cringe-worthy exchange, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) asked about the Individuals with Disabilities Act, which DeVos didn’t realize is an existing federal law. “I may have confused it,” the nominee conceded.

Soon after, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) asked about her opinions on the difference between evaluating education proficiency and growth, one of the more common areas of debate in the field. DeVos rambled for a while, before making clear she had no idea what Franken was talking about.

Asked by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) about guns in schools, DeVos suggested grizzly bears may try to attack children in states in Wyoming, so she’d prefer to leave the matter up to states.

The Washington Post put together a video of “head-scratching moments” from DeVos’ hearing, and it wasn’t a short clip.

There is a certain irony to the developments: Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Education failed to do her homework, and as a consequence, she flunked her big test.

The truth is, DeVos’ nomination is tough to defend on the merits, even looking past yesterday’s hearing. As we discussed when she was first tapped for the position, the Republican activist has spent years crusading against public education and pushing for privatization though voucher schemes.

The New York Times reported in November, “It is hard to find anyone more passionate about the idea of steering public dollars away from traditional public schools than Betsy DeVos.” …

In addition, DeVos’ qualifications as the anti-education nominee have been extensively explored in this blog by your Scriber in Trump picks school choice advocate as education head and The DeVos plan to destroy public education: “any kind of choice that hasn’t yet been thought of”, and by our contributor Linda Lyon in Graham Keegan is “Very Pleased” With DeVos…What a Shock!.

If someone attacks you, that person you might regard, with justification, as your enemy. DeVos’ history of pushing privatization and vouchers, I assert, marks her as public education’s public enemy #1.

Cross-posted from skyislandscriber.com.

Today I offer commentaries that shed light on Trump’s deceptions, not from Trump the Gas Bag but from Trump the Gaslighter.

Donald Trump is ‘gaslighting’ all of us explains a CNN commentator. (CNN Editor note: Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist for The Miami Herald and World Politics Review, and a former CNN producer and correspondent. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. Scriber note: h/t Paul McCreary. )

Here are selected snippets.

The questions are endless, and the answers, unless you’re paying very close attention – all the time – can require significant effort to ascertain. Reality is becoming hazy in the era of Trump. And that’s no accident.

The fact is Trump has become America’s gaslighter in chief.

If you’ve never heard the term, prepare to learn it and live with it every day. Unless Trump starts behaving in a radically different way after he becomes President, gaslighting will become one of the words of 2017.

The term comes from the 1930s play “Gas Light” and the 1940s Hollywood movie version (Gaslight) in which a manipulative husband tries to unmoor his wife, played by Ingrid Bergman, by tampering with her perception of reality. He dims the gaslights and then pretends it’s only she who thinks they are flickering as the rooms grow darker.

That’s only the beginning. He uses a variety of truth-blurring techniques. His goal is to exert power and control by creating doubts about what is real and what isn’t, distracting her as he attempts to steal precious jewels.

… more recently the tactical tampering with the truth has become a preferred method of strongmen around the world. Gaslighting by other means was always a common feature of dictatorships, but it has found new vogue as a more subtle form of domestic political control even in countries with varying degrees of democracy.

Now Trump has brought it to the United States. The techniques include saying and doing things and then denying it, blaming others for misunderstanding, disparaging their concerns as oversensitivity, claiming outrageous statements were jokes or misunderstandings, and other forms of twilighting the truth.

He’s just getting started, but compared with the man he admires so much, he’s a rank amateur at gaslighting.

In Russia, the truth became a matter of opinion under a strategy implemented by a clever aide to President Vladimir Putin, Vladislav Surkov. Surkov, who has a background in the arts, orchestrated a kind of political theater in Russia, creating a gauzy façade where no one knew which group was a creation of the government and which wasn’t.

Russia even tried to gaslight US voters, as intelligence agencies concluded, trying to undermine their faith in the democratic process. And when Moscow thought Trump would lose, it planned to promote the view that the election was stolen, under the #DemocracyRIP banner, a plan whose seeds Trump had already planted.

The challenge will be a steep one for journalists and for all Americans, when so much of what comes from the next president has to be checked and double-checked. The first step is to establish when there is a gaslighting operation in progress.

Check.

Then comes the battle to hold on to the facts.

The question is will we, the American people, engage in that battle. Unfortunately, about 45% of the people will not.

The fact is, many people hear only Trump’s version of events, and polls show many people believe even the most obvious distortions of the truth.

And that brings us to the other commentary in the LA Weekly, Gaslight : The Film That Gave Trump’s Favorite Brand of Mindfuckery a Name, authored by April Wolfe. ( April is a filmmaker and lead film critic for LA Weekly. ) Wolfe provides some historical background for the original film including the world’s fascination with another Gaslighter, Adolf Hitler. Here are some snippets.

After Lauren Duca’s Teen Vogue op-ed smartly pointed out the president-elect was in fact gaslighting the entire world — that is, blatantly doing or saying something and then denying he ever did it by calling us absurd to think he did — everyone I know has been using the term “gaslight.” And a few have gone back and looked at this MGM production for its origins: A woman’s new husband repeatedly dims the gaslights in her home, telling her it’s all in her mind, playing off a traumatic incident in her past, so he can search for some hidden jewels in the attic. Essentially, he tries to drive her mad by warping her sense of reality.

Obviously, this is currently apt. But the story of gaslighting goes back further than 73 years and that MGM production or the British production in 1940, to Patrick Hamilton, the man who wrote the play on which the films were based.

Hamilton, like many critical writers of that time, was adamantly anti-Hitler — one of his most famous novels, Hangover Square (1941), is beautifully and explicitly anti-fascist. Though Gas Light is seen as a domestic Gothic drama, which many have rightly gone on to interpret through a feminist lens, what we often fail to miss is that it’s also an allegory for standing steadfast against propaganda from those who do not have your best interest at heart and who seek to hurt you. Hamilton lived through a time when even seemingly good British people found themselves swayed by the adulation of a violent dictator, and watching Nazi sympathizers bloom in that atmosphere must have been a mindfuck. At the same time, Americans also were falling in love with the flashy new fascist, and those Brits who were close to the frontlines were scratching their heads raw. Could they believe what they were seeing? Remember that it took years, multiple British anti-Nazi films (including some from Hitchcock) and the bombing of Pearl Harbor to get Americans to recognize Hitler as the danger that he was.

So as we continue to wake up to the reality that we have been, are and will continue to be gaslit under this new administration, and with new potentially disastrous allies in Moscow who’ve mastered the art of gaslighting, let us remember Patrick Hamilton, his play and the movie that gave us the vocabulary to voice our worries. And let us remember a sentiment I’ve said and will say again and again: Movies can provide us with escapist relief, but they can also deliver unto us a biting and necessary reality.

In the end, we should hope that the guy who walks out on stage on January 20th is Trump the Gas Bag. Unfortunately, the harm that has already been visited on our nation will continue from Trump the Gaslighter. Hold onto the truth if you can.

Here, from the author of that Teen Vogue piece referenced by Wolfe, Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America, are specific recommendations for what you can do.

There are things you can and should be doing to turn your unrest into action, but first let’s empower ourselves with information. Insist on fact-checking every Trump statement you read, every headline you share or even relay to a friend over coffee. If you find factual inaccuracies in an article, send an email to the editor, and explain how things should have been clearer. Inform yourself what outlets are trustworthy and which aren’t. If you need extra help, seek out a browser extension that flags misleading sites or print out a list of fake outlets, such as the one by communications professor Melissa Zimdars, and tape it to your laptop. Do a thorough search before believing the agenda Trump distributes on Twitter. Refuse to accept information simply because it is fed to you, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. That is now the base level of what is required of all Americans. If facts become a point of debate, the very definition of freedom will be called into question.

… As we spin our newfound rage into action, it is imperative to remember, across identities and across the aisle, as a country and as individuals, we have nothing without the truth.

Above all, remember that truth is our prophylactic protection against Trump’s mindfuckery.

Early hints of details of the governor’s proposal aren’t encouraging to some. For example, a proposed pay raise for teachers was revealed to be a 2 percent pay increase phased in over several years. AEA President Joe Thomas said that minimal investment won’t be enough to keep teachers in classrooms “if it’s going to sound more like a dollar a day.”

Would-be educators attending Arizona’s colleges and university don’t have any reason to consider teaching in Arizona when neighboring states offer salaries $10,000 to $15,000 higher, according to Dick Foreman, president of the Arizona Business and Education Coalition.

Many who do stay in Arizona to teach quickly leave, according to Stephanie Parra, a lobbyist with the AEA.

“I’ve not had any teacher tell me, ‘If I just had another dollar a day, I could make ends meet,” Thomas quipped.

Dana Naimark, president of Children’s Action Alliance, said state lawmakers must realize that every decision they make to fund programs or cut taxes dips into the pool of resources available for schools. AZ Schools Now will focus on raising education funding as a concern when Ducey and lawmakers propose new or expanded tax cuts, and will lobby for their rejection, Naimark said.

“Each tax cut proposal certainly needs to be evaluated on its own merits, but in the big picture, if we cut taxes with no replacement revenue, we are shrinking the funding available for K-12 education,” Naimark said.

Lawmakers also need to revisit funding for private school tax credits, which have grown tremendously since implemented in 2007, one by 20 percent each year, Naimark said.

The cap on corporate tax credit for contributions to private school tuition organizations is now $51.6 million. By 2021, it will balloon to $128 million, according to data provided by Children’s Action Alliance.

Every tax credit claimed is a reduction in tax revenue for public schools, Foreman noted.

“We had big fights for years in the courts about funding inflation for schools at the (Consumer Product Index) level, or at 2 percent. So to have this grow at 20 percent a year is a clear policy statement that we want dollars going into private schools and not public schools,” Naimark said. “I don’t think that reflects the values of Arizona voters and parents and taxpayers and business CEOs.”

A recurring theme among education groups is the need to couple education funding with revenue, specifically ending tax breaks.  It is hard to see how Ducey’s many education proposals can be funded while still cutting taxes each year as he has promised to do.  The numbers just don’t add up.  Here is another report from the Arizona Capitol Times (subscription required), Education community applauds Ducey proposals, but urges end to tax cuts.

Ducey spent a quarter of his [State of State] speech offering a laundry list of proposals to tackle the state’s teacher shortage and direct more resources to low income, rural, and tribal schools.

And while he’s proposing to add and expand public school programs, the governor said he won’t raise taxes to do it. He promised in a part of his State of the State speech on January 9 to lower taxes with his government reforms.

“Now, I’m not promising a money tree. I can’t. There’s no pot of gold, or cash hiding under a seat cushion,” Ducey said. “And unlike Washington, we don’t print money, and we won’t raise taxes.”

School groups, however, also want the Legislature and governor to end tax cuts, intervene on scheduled funding cuts for charter schools, and start the process of renewing a six-tenths of cent tax that has helped fund schools since 2000.

Dana Naimark, executive director of Children’s Action Alliance, which is part of a larger coalition of school groups called AZ Schools Now, said Arizona’s approach to public school funding over the years has been crisis-driven with no long-term plan in place.

Naimark said conversations about school funding at the Legislature have to include conversations about tax cuts.

Realistically, for him to be serious about enacting some of his most important proposals, like increasing the funding of schools, raising teacher pay and expanding full day kindergarten, the cost would begin at $100 million and move upwards toward $400-800 million. Meanwhile, most budget projections agree the governor has about $24 million in loose money to play with — the rest is accounted for—with lots of places those dollars can be spent. I suppose Ducey could free up a few more dollars with draconian cuts to other government agencies. But $100 million? $400 million? $800 million? Hardly.

Cross-posted from http://www.skyislandscriber.com.

Last week the New Yorker explored the plan to break public schools that is laid bare by Trump’s choice of Betsy DeVos to head the Department of Education. I’ll go along and focus on public education and the threat of choice for the sake of choice. But take heed: as the author points out, putting an enemy of public ed at the head of the education department is an example of the Trumpian implementation of the X-antiX formula. Many of the rest of his cabinet picks, including the recent pick for OMB fit the formula for a given agency X, choose antiX to lead destroy it.

Among the points that can be made in favor of Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s billionaire nominee for the position of Secretary of Education, are the following: She has no known ties to President Vladimir Putin, unlike Trump’s nominee to head the State Department, Rex Tillerson, who was decorated with Russia’s Order of Friendship medal a few years ago. She hasn’t demonstrated any outward propensity for propagating dark, radical-right-leaning conspiracy theories, unlike Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s designated national-security adviser. She has not actively called for the dismantling of the department she is slated to head, as have Rick Perry, Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary, and Scott Pruitt, the nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

That the absence of such characteristics should bear noting only underlines the dystopian scope of Trump’s quest to complete his cabinet of cronies. On the other hand, DeVos has never taught in a public school, nor administered one, nor sent her children to one. She is a graduate of Holland Christian High School, a private school in her home town of Holland, Michigan, which characterizes its mission thus: “to equip minds and nurture hearts to transform the world for Jesus Christ.”

To bring this down to earth, substitute “50 million school children” for “world” and you have essential DeVos.

How might DeVos seek to transform the educational landscape of the United States in her position at the head of a department that has a role in overseeing the schooling of more than fifty million American children? As it happens, she does have a long track record in the field. Since the early nineteen-nineties, she and her husband, Dick DeVos, have been very active in supporting the charter-school movement. They worked to pass Michigan’s first charter-school bill, in 1993, which opened the door in their state for public money to be funnelled to quasi-independent educational institutions, sometimes targeted toward specific demographic groups, which operate outside of the strictures that govern more traditional public schools. …

As a board member of Children First America and the American Education Reform Council, and later as the chair of the American Federation for Children, DeVos lobbied for school-choice voucher programs and tax-credit initiatives, intended to widen the range of institutions—including private and religious—that could receive funding that might otherwise go to both charter and traditional public schools. In a 2013 interview with Philanthropy Magazine, DeVos expressed her ultimate goals in education reform, which she said she saw encompassing not just charter schools and voucher programs but also homeschooling and virtual education: “That all parents, regardless of their zip code, have had the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their children. And that all students have had the best opportunity to fulfill their God-given potential.”

So how well does all that work?

… How have such DeVos-sponsored initiatives played out thus far in her home state? Earlier this year, the Detroit Free Press published the results of a yearlong investigation into the state’s two-decade-long charter-school initiative—one of the least regulated in the country. Almost two-thirds of the state’s charter schools are run by for-profit management companies, which are not required to make the financial disclosures that would be expected of not-for-profit or public entities. This lack of transparency has not translated into stellar academic results: student standardized-test scores at charter schools, the paper found, were no more than comparable with those at traditional public schools. And, despite the rhetoric of “choice,” lower-income students were effectively segregated into poorer-performing schools, while the parents of more privileged students were better equipped to navigate the system. Even Tom Watkins, the state’s former education superintendent, who favors charter schools, told the newspaper, “In a number of cases, people are making a boatload of money, and the kids aren’t getting educated.”

As the Republican nominee, Trump campaigned on a platform of educational reform, proposing to assign twenty billion dollars of federal funds to a block grant aimed at opening up school choice. The assumption is that productive competition between schools will result. “Competition always does it,” Trump said in September, as if he were speaking about air-conditioner factories rather than academic institutions. “The weak fall out and the strong get better. It is an amazing thing.”

… through her past actions, and her previously published statements, it is clear that DeVos, like the President-elect who has chosen her, is comfortable applying the logic of the marketplace to schoolyard precincts. She has repeatedly questioned the value of those very precincts’ physical existence: in the Philanthropy interview, DeVos remarked that, “in the Internet age, the tendency to equate ‘education’ with ‘specific school buildings’ is going to be greatly diminished.”

Scriber actually agrees with the latter quote. The internet is a powerful transformative agent. Consider as one example, the Kahn Academy, featured in this 2011 Wired article, How Khan Academy is changing the rules of education. However, this melding of technology and education is an entirely separate set of issues from DeVos’ push for public funding of private (including religious) schools.

The New Yorker author, Rebecca Mead, sums up:

Missing in the ideological embrace of choice for choice’s sake is any suggestion of the public school as a public good—as a centering locus for a community and as a shared pillar of the commonweal, in which all citizens have an investment. If, in recent years, a principal focus of federal educational policy has been upon academic standards in public education—how to measure success, and what to do with the results—DeVos’s nomination suggests that in a Trump Administration the more fundamental premises that underlie our institutions of public education will be brought into question. In one interview, recently highlighted by Diane Ravitch on her blog, DeVos spoke in favor of “charter schools, online schools, virtual schools, blended learning, any combination thereof—and, frankly, any combination, or any kind of choice that hasn’t yet been thought of.” A preëmptive embrace of choices that haven’t yet been thought of might serve as an apt characterization of Trump’s entire, chaotic cabinet-selection process. But whether it is the approach that will best serve current and prospective American school students is another question entirely.

Trump himself, I point out, is an example of the X-antiX formula. He will shortly be appointed by the American people to head a government much of which he despises and intends to diminish.

Yes, I am, damn it. I am in the educational elite. My degrees are from land-grant universities which were created to move America ahead by establishing educational institutions that would benefit the peoples of the various states. I returned to teach and do research in one such institution for the better part of my academic career. So, of course, I say: I am elite. And it enrages me that our country has now stooped so low as to devalue facts, the means to make them as such (research), and the institutions charged with enabling that knowledge (public education).

The [Morrill act][wiki] says about land-grant colleges:

without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life. (my emphasis)

In other words, our predecessors in Congress saw education as the way to create the American Dream. Trump and his minions are out to reverse that process. The reason why is that Trump and Putin know the value of having uneducated serfs at the base of the economic ladder.

Here are excerpts from a report comparing the Obama and Trump cabinets so far with respect to their educational qualifications, The Difference In Education Between Trump & Obama’s Cabinets Is Staggering (h/t Michele Manos).

While there are no educational or professional restrictions barring our citizens from serving the public as part of a presidential administration, traditionally Presidents opt to choose the highest-qualified men and women for important positions, while usually being well-learned themselves. No longer is that the case. Trump and his administration are without a doubt the most wildly unqualified team to ever darken the door of the White House.

It’s called kakistocracy.

It should ring all sorts of alarm bells when you realize that the most educated man on the Trump staff is the sole black man, Dr. Ben Carson, who is a skilled surgeon but whose religious extremism clouds his muddled judgment. Trump himself will be the first president in 25 years to not have a graduate degree of any kind, and his proud ignorance has already become a major source of contention in national security circles.

The rest of his team is largely horrendously unqualified to run the departments they have been given control of. Here are a couple of what I think are the most egregious examples.

The new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has billions of dollars but just a bachelor’s degree from Calvin College. The current Secretary of Education, John King Jr., “has a B.A. from Harvard, a master’s degree and doctorate from Columbia, and a law degree from Yale.”

The Department of Energy will now be run by former Texas Governor and Dancing With The Stars washout Rick Perry, who famously couldn’t remember the name of the department he wanted to abolish and will now run. Perry has a bachelor’s degree in Animal Science from Texas A&M and failed his college chemistry courses. He will be replacing Ernest Moniz, who is a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist with a PhD from Stanford University.

Trump has staffed his administration with the wealthy and the connected, rewarding megadonors and appointed GOP sycophants to run departments they want to abolish.

That is what dictators do.

The smoothness and talent with which our nation was guided over the past eight years has all been taken for granted; now we shall truly see what happens when the captain of the Titanic and all of his mates are drunk at the wheel.

According to the Arizona Capitol Times (subscription required), AZ State Senator Steve Farley is thinking about running for governor.

State Sen. Steve Farley is considering a run for governor in 2018, the first Democrat to publicly express interest in challenging Gov. Doug Ducey in his reelection bid.

The Tucson lawmaker, who’s spent 10 years in the Legislature, said he hasn’t made a final decision yet, but is seriously considering a run against Ducey. He said he won’t make any decisions until after the 2017 legislative session is over.

Farley said Ducey’s education and tax policies are among the driving factors leading him to consider challenging the governor.

“I’ve seen up close his priorities over the last couple of years, what he’s done or not done. I think that it’s been proven pretty clear to most people no matter which side of the aisle they’re on that simply more corporate tax giveaways aren’t the recipe for success for our economy or for our people. It’s got to be investment in our education system,” Farley said. “And while he may think funding 70 percent of inflation for our public schools is solving the whole problem, that’s not the case.”

Here is why Scriber thinks Farley would be an excellent governor. Following are excerpts from Steve’s “Farley Report” – an email that you too can subscribe to. I’ve selected two topics.

On education and our work force

It’s been more than a year since the special session that placed Proposition 123 on the ballot, the measure that finally forced the majority and the Governor to pay 70% of inflation funding for our public schools, something we thought we forced them to do 16 years ago. Not 100% of inflation, 70%. That was just enough to raise us from last in the country in state support for K–12 to somewhere around 48th or 49th.

But it is most emphatically not enough to make a real difference for our kids and our economy. Even Governor Ducey spent a lot of time before the 123 election admitting that it was “just a start”. He promised to get right to work on enacting a Step Two for education funding.

Since we passed 123, we haven’t heard a peep from Governor Ducey about that step two. In fact, he just released a self-aggrandizing “Year In Review” which all but declares the education funding crisis solved. In it, he even brags about a “a $28 million investment in Joint Technical Education Districts [JTED] to help students learn what they’re passionate about and prepare them to succeed in post-secondary education.”

Governor Ducey fails to say that the previous year he signed the budget that cut $30 million from JTED, a move that set them on a path to destruction, and earlier this year he resisted all attempts to restore the funds until he was forced to relent by a strong bipartisan majority.

It’s time to stop messing around with this. We must prioritize teacher recruitment, training, and retention, as well as immediate upgrades in classroom resources like technology, curriculum, tutoring and teacher aides, and we must start now with what little money we have left in our budget, given that $4 billion a year in corporate tax cuts have been drained from our general fund by the majority since 1996.

Our state tax system needs REAL reform

Then we need to have the guts to finally tackle the monster that is our sales tax code. As Farley Report readers know well, we bleed more than $12 billion each year from loopholes that have been placed in law over the past decades, never to be examined ever again. Some are defensible, and some are even good for us as a society. But many, many more are nothing but special-interest giveaways engineered by corporate lobbyists in order to save their clients millions of dollars, and they do nothing to help our economy in general.

Here’s a place to start: If we charge sales tax on securities brokerage, financial portfolio management, and investment advice — which tend to be used by only by those like our Governor who can easily afford to pay it without even noticing — we can gain another $185 million per year that can be invested in educating the entrepreneurs and the workforce of the future so that we ALL can thrive in the upcoming decades — including those at both ends of the pyramid.

To subscribe to the Farley Report, contact Steve at sfarley@igc.org.