Ohio Has a New Universal Voucher Program, and the Problems Are Already Starting

This is important to understand what the goal of the right is.  The goal is to destroy public education, and instead force public taxpayer funds, the public treasury, to be diverted to private businesses and religious institutions.  They want to give religious organizations, church affiliated schools that discriminate against LGBTQIA tax dollars of people they discriminate against, so they can indoctrinate public schools kids with their churches doctrines.  Here are some quotes.  There is more in the article at the link above.  Hugs.  Scottie

That means it will be difficult to discern whether the spike in EdChoice scholarships came from parents looking to leave public school or those whose children already attend (private schools).”  One serious problem here is that the voucher expansion is to be paid for out of the school foundation budget that also pays for the state’s public schools.

 

In Iowa, 40 percent of more than 17,000 applicants to the state’s new universal education savings account program have left public schools, while the remaining 60 percent were not enrolled in public schools before applying…. The gap is even wider in Florida, where 69 percent of roughly 122,000 new applicants… were already in private schools before applying…. Another 18 percent are children entering the K-12 system for the first time as kindergarteners….”

 

“Northeast Ohio Catholics have been thrust into the national debate about LGBTQ rights after the diocese released its policy…. for churches and 79 elementary schools and five high schools. It includes bans on students and staff from undergoing gender-affirming care; their use of new pronouns or first names; and the use of restrooms or other facilities different than their ‘God-given biological sex.’ Church and school staff must notify parents if their child may be transgender. Students and staff cannot display LGBTQ pride flags or other symbols. Students cannot attend dances or mixers with a date of the same sex.” Most of these Cleveland Catholic diocesan schools accept EdChoice Expansion vouchers from the state of Ohio.

 

But the larger injustice exposed here is even more distressing. More and more students under the state’s new universal school voucher expansion will be using public tax dollars to pay tuition at Catholic schools in greater Cleveland which are now—seemingly with impunity—explicitly discriminating against a specific class of students whose rights are protected under Title IX of the Constitution of the United States.

The UN Urges Israel To Stop As They Verge On A Ground Invasion Of Gaza

Israel-Gaza: Some People Have Lost Their Minds

The Rational National points out in his normal reasonable way that holding the view that there is a difference in the worth of a Palestinian child and an Israeli child makes no sense.  He also points out many incidents of Israeli soldiers killing Palestinian people, reporters, and children over the last year that received no news coverage.  The video is done without sensationalism, which I appreciate.  Hugs.


Breaking down the latest from the conflict, including what’s making me go crazy, a good clip from MSNBC, and where major Israeli media is correctly putting the blame.

Harvard Students Doxxed Following Anti-Israel Statements

WTF !!!!   This is wealthy Jewish supporters doxing young adult students just for exercising free thought!   It is entirely an attempt to stop any expression of support for anything but the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip.   Texas requires teachers to sign a pledge to Israel.  It is not being done by Jewish people, it is being done by evangelical Christians to get to their end time.    Hugs.

♫ WHEN THE CHILDREN CRY ♫

Recently when I was at a very low moment emotionally in my life, I asked Jill to consider this song for one of her music posts.   She agreed and wrote a wonderful post around it.   While the song fills many spots emotionally as Jill wrote it was the songwriters / band’s attempt to address food shortage and war affecting children.   I think in memory of the children lost on both sides of the Israeli / Palestinian conflict I would like all of us to revisit Jill’s post and again listen to the words of the song, really please listen to them.  Have to go, I am crying too hard to continue.   Hugs

Israel in Palestinian Gaza: Revenge is more satisfying than Peace

https://www.juancole.com/2023/10/palestinian-revenge-satisfying.html

(Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Over the years, the United States has endowed Israel with more than $150 billion in assistance, making it possible for the Jewish state to maintain its occupation, its ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of the land, its unremitting seizure of territory, and its settlement project, the latter of which has intentionally and drastically diminished any possibility a fair peace could ever be negotiated between the parties.

Prominent Israelis have referred to Palestinians as donkeys, crocodiles, cockroaches, snakes, psychopaths and serial killers, animals, not human, not entitled to live, shrapnel in the buttocks, they deserve to have their heads chopped off, etc., etc.1 Convinced of the truth of these slurs, Jewish settlers, protected by Israeli soldiers, have made it a practice of entering Palestinian villages where they poison wells, cut down olive trees, physically assault villagers, teach their children to throw stones at Palestinian children coming home from school, and deface buildings, mosques, and churches with slogans such as “Death to the Arabs” and “Jesus is a monkey?”

With its United Nations security council veto, the United States shields Israel from accountability to international law, thereby giving it a green light to continue and even accelerate these crimes against humanity.

Hamas’s October 7 surprise breach of the Israel-Gaza border, followed by its killing, injuring, and hostage-taking of soldiers and civilians is horrifying. American media has been following the tragedy for hours daily and has been overwhelmingly sympathetic to Israel, rarely, if ever, mentioning the motivation behind Hamas’s assault, which are the generations of persecution, humiliation, and character assassination Israel has levied against its Palestinian subjects; never enunciating that it shouldn’t have come to this; not once admonishing Israel for prioritizing its lust for Palestinian land over the lives of its own citizens.

At the same time, the media has been interviewing Israeli citizens who, outraged at Hamas’s actions, likewise make no mention of the motivation behind the actions. Neither have they expressed a hint of empathy or a measure of self-reflection upon the role their attitudes may have played in the dehumanization of the Palestinian people who, for decades, have endured essentially the same horrors these Israelis are now having to endure.

On October 9, Hamas threatened to kill a Jewish hostage every time Israel bombs a civilian building without first giving its residents time to flee. Justifiably horrified and quick to excoriate Hamas, the Israelis I’ve watched have said nothing about Israel’s habit of bombing residential buildings. As prominent Israelis throughout its history have admitted, their nation always targets civilians. The implications behind the following admissions are as horrifying as Hamas’s pronouncement:

Ze’ev Schiff, Israel’s most respected military analyst (by all sides of the military spectrum): “the Israeli Army has always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously . . . the Army . . . has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets . . . [but] purposely attacked civilian targets.”

General Yigal Allon with the approval of Ben-Gurion: “There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction   If we accuse a family – we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included. Otherwise, this is not an effective reaction. During the operation there is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty.”

During Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), Deputy Prime Minister Eliyahu Yishai urged the IDF to “bomb thousands of houses, to destroy Gaza.”

During Operation Pillar of Defense (November 2012), Ariel Sharon’s son Gilad: “They will pay the price and will remember the same for a long time. We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.”

Israel’s past assaults on Gaza, which human rights organizations have documented in detail, are further testaments to Israel’s contempt for a defenseless civilian population.

The reaction from every American lawmaker I‘ve seen is that Hamas, not Israel, must pay for its crimes. How? By giving more weapons to Israel so it can kill even more families. That is exactly what the United States intends to do, despite its hollow assurances, past and present, that it seeks peace between the two parties; despite knowing that years of military assistance have sustained both Israel’s illegal occupation and the violence it perpetrates upon ordinary people.

In keeping with the past, and vowing to “crush and destroy” Hamas, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu warned that every Hamas member was “a dead man.” In keeping with his fellow lawmakers, President Biden condemned Hamas’s attack, again without acknowledging either its seeds or that Israel wrote the rules of the game and that Hamas is playing by those rules. Aware of the thousands of Gazan civilians, including a disproportionate number of children, whose lives Israel has snuffed out in previous operations, Biden said, “terrorists purposely target civilians, kill them.” Yes, they do Mr. President. As of the early morning of October 12, over 1,000 Gazans, mostly residents, have been killed, and 5,000 injured. Whole neighborhoods and refugee camps have been blown to smithereens, more than 120,000 displaced. And Israel has yet to commence its inevitable ground invasion. Fortunately, I’ve not seen any reports that Hamas has made good on its threat.

Israel has cut off the delivery of all fuel, food, water and medical supplies. If its assault doesn’t end soon, Gazans who survive the bombings could starve, freeze to death, or die from a lack of medicine and medical treatment. This is genocide, the Final Solution, all because “terrorists target civilians.”

The only way to stop this cycle is for the US to resist its habit of resorting to physical punishment, concede that arming Israel so it can do to Palestinians what it always does will only inflame hostilities, and demand that Israel break the cycle of violence and negotiate a fair peace. Or, at the very least, treat its subjects not as snakes and cockroaches but as human beings. Otherwise, America and Israel’s message to the world will continue to be that revenge is more satisfying than peace—the lives of Israelis and Palestinians be damned.

Disproportionate response

Thank you to Ten Bears for the link.   Again it is becoming clear that the Israeli government is using this event to clear out and claim the entire territory of Gaza as Israeli and belonging to the Jewish people only.  The goal of Israel has always been to remove the Palestinians and claim all the land, all the territory as its own.  Hugs


A friend of the blog, a scholar I very much respect, recently wrote to inquire what I considered to be a “disproportionate” Israeli response to the morally abhorrent and strategically indefensible massacre of civilians by Hamas. Isaac Herzog has presented us with a very clear example of what I was talking about:

As Israel engages in a massive air campaign ahead of an anticipated full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Friday that all citizens of Gaza are responsible for the attack Hamas perpetrated in Israel last weekend that left over 1,200 people dead.

“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said at a press conference on Friday. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”

Holding civilians — half of them not adults — collectively responsible for atrocities committed by a democratically unaccountable regime and using this as a justification for destroying neighborhoods with little discrimination, cutting off water and electricity to an entire population, and ordering the 24-hour mass evacuation of over a million people from a tiny land mass with closed borders on both sides — if this isn’t a disproportionate response I’m not sure what would be.

Moral clarity

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/moral-clarity

Thank you to Ten Bears for the link.   At the time I write this the number of Palestinian deaths is over 2,300 which is more than double the number of Israeli deaths caused by the Hamas raids.  Plus the number of Palestinian injured is more than 4 times the number of Israeli’s injured during the Hamas attacks.   Israel has gotten their pound of flesh.  Hugs


There is no moral clarity in wreaking vengeance on innocent people.

Friends,

Today, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stood next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a military base in Tel Aviv and said, “Too often in the past, leaders have equivocated in the face of terrorist attacks against Israel and its people. This is — this must be — a moment for moral clarity.”

Blinken is correct. Moral clarity requires that the world condemn the atrocities committed by Hamas militants as unmitigated evil.  

But this does not render morally justifiable retaliatory airstrikes on Gaza that have so far killed 1,417 Palestinians, including 447 children, and wounded 6,368, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Or the siege of a city of 2.1 million people who have gone days without electricity, water, or food.

The wounded in Gaza needing intensive care now have no beds that can hold them, and the number of injured exceeds the hospitals’ capacities. The International Committee of the Red Cross warns that “without electricity, hospitals risk turning into morgues.”

 

More than 300,000 people in Gaza are now homeless. More than 338,000 have left their homes in search of safety, but border crossings into Israel and Egypt are blocked.

Israeli troops are now moving toward the border with Gaza in preparation for a possible ground invasion. I fear what is to come.

It could prove to be very bad for Israel, as well as for those trapped in Gaza. As Thomas L. Friedman writes,

What Israel’s worst enemies — Hamas and Iran — want is for Israel to invade Gaza and get enmeshed in a strategic overreach there that would make America’s entanglement in Falluja look like a children’s birthday party. We are talking house-to-house fighting that would undermine whatever sympathy Israel has garnered on the world stage, deflect world attention from the murderous regime in Tehran and force Israel to stretch its forces to permanently occupy Gaza and the West Bank.

In his private meetings with Israeli authorities, I hope Antony Blinken is calling for restraint.

Justifiable moral revulsion must never be confused with retribution. There is no moral clarity in wreaking vengeance on innocent people.

Transphobic Heckler Ruins His Own Life – Steve Hofstetter

I wanted to post an update of something I got wrong. The tatted up guy at the end of the video had a VERY different story than the one that was told to me.

Turns out he was not only at the show, he was a fan AND the guy that first got the attention of the police. He was so heated because he is part of the LGBTQ community and had been assaulted previously – so when he saw it potentially happening to a few trans women, he grabbed a cop who was stopped at a light, ran back to the theatre, and got in between the transphobe and the women. He wasn’t trying to escalate as much as he was trying to be the one to take the seemingly inevitable punch. And he left when the cops got there because he was the one who called them over in the first place.

I was told he was a bystander who just hopped in the fray, and I understand why the folks who didn’t know him thought that. In their eyes, he showed up out of nowhere and ran in – but really he was running back to protect folks from sharing the same fate he’d already experienced.

Anyway, my apologies go out to him. And know that if I ever get something wrong in a video, I am happy to correct it.

Israel Attacked…AGAIN! | Armageddon Update | Christopher Titus