The Biden White House and congressional Democrats are willing to heavily compromise on making the Child Tax Credit permanent, but Republicans are refusing to come to the table. Ana Kasparian discusses on The Young Turks.
“Democrats haven’t gotten any traction so far in their efforts to expand a cash subsidy for parents, a move that would dramatically reduce child poverty.
Adding child tax credit benefits to a year-end spending bill would require significant GOP support, and Republicans seem unenthusiastic.
“The country frankly doesn’t have the time or the money for the partisan, expensive provisions such as child tax credit,” said Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), the top Republican on the House committee that oversees taxes.”
Because of 7 books out of 5,800 the bigots forced the library to close. As one person said nothing would be good enough until all LGBTQI+ was erased from the library and by association the community. And it is religiously driven with one woman demanding “For each book promoting the LGBTQ lifestyle, there should be a book on display that discusses how God created and designed people as either male or female from birth, for life.”
These people won’t tolerate other views and will not accept that their religion doesn’t run the country. They won’t accept that other people have as much say in public life as they do. They want a society based on what they think the 1950s or maybe even the 1850s were like. They are demanding that all of society stop advancing since 2,500 years ago when their holy book was written. I remind everyone that first they are coming for my people, next who will they come for? Maybe you and how you live that they disagree with? Hugs
Several intolerant Iowa citizens have come together to sabotage their own community by bullying the single library in the town into closing.
The Vinton Public Library has faced opposition from certain community members for not supporting their narrow worldviews for years, and a Pride book display this year seemed to be a bridge too far for those folks.
One resident, Brooke Kruckernberg, openly accused the library of having a “liberal agenda” at a city meeting in March, citing “the staff hiring decisions and the books that have crept in our children’s section of the library” as unacceptable points of contention.
”I don’t believe the library is representing our town well with hiring a majority of staff who are openly a part of the LGBTQ community,” she stated.
The recent resignation of openly gay interim director Colton Neely, the latest in a string of departures from the library, was the final straw causing the library to close due to lack of personnel.
Among the previous employees the community has also lost to intolerance is former director Renee Greenlee, a nationally recognized and beloved librarian.
Greenlee received the I Love my Librarian award from the American Library Association — an honor only extended to ten people across the country annually.
Following her resignation in May, several local citizens spoke out at a city council meeting, chastising the community for chasing off such an accomplished and lovable figure.
“She’s a gem and shame on us for losing this,” stated Vinton council member Tami Stark
At the meeting in March, Kruckernberg’s mother also spoke up, stating, “For each book promoting the LGBTQ lifestyle, there should be a book on display that discusses how God created and designed people as either male or female from birth, for life.”
Greenlee later explained that, in reality, only 7 of the 5,800 children’s section materials involved queerness whatsoever. On the other hand, Christianity and Christian themes were featured in 173 Children’s books.
Sadly, the reality and bare numbers of the situation weren’t enough to assuage the queerphobic community members’ protestations. Clearly, they wouldn’t be happy until queerness was erased from the library shelves — and staff — entirely.
The library has recently been announced to reopen the coming Monday under entirely new leadership, but the fate of LGBTQ+ materials on the shelves under this new direction is yet to be determined.
At a recent city meeting, librarian Molly Rach warned Vinton residents of the direction the city’s climate has taken.
“This community has now run out two highly qualified, highly credentialed library directors in less than two years,” she stated. “This library is indeed going to suffer, but not because of diverse books or staff members who identify as LGBTQIA+, but because you are going to have a hard time finding anyone who’s willing to put up with being targeted by community members for simply doing their job.”
Former President Donald Trump arrives to speak at an event at Mar-a-Lago, Friday, Nov. 18, 2022, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
COPYRIGHT 2022 THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Donald Trump’s business attracted so much scrutiny during his time in office that it would be easy to conclude that all information about its foreign entanglements must be out by now. It is not. Buried in a heap of recently released financial paperwork sits a surprising revelation: Donald Trump had a foreign creditor he failed to disclose while running for president in 2016 and after assuming office in 2017.
The documents, compiled by the Trump Organization and obtained by the New York attorney general, show a previously unreported liability of $19.8 million listed as “L/P Daewoo.” The debt stems from an agreement Trump struck to share some of his licensing fees with Daewoo, a South Korean conglomerate that partnered with Trump on a project near the United Nations headquarters in New York City.
Trump eliminated the debt five-and-a-half months into his tenure as president, according to the documents. He seems to have acted with some urgency to wipe the liability off his balance sheet. From 2011 to 2016, the documents show that the balance stayed static at $19.8 million. Paperwork capturing Trump’s financial picture as of June 30, 2017, five months into his presidency, appears to show that the balance had dropped to $4.3 million, $15.5 million less than it had been a year earlier. Trump got rid of the debt altogether shortly after that. “Daewoo was bought out of its position on July 5, 2017,” the documents say, without specifying who exactly paid off the loan.
Although the debt appeared on the Trump Organization’s internal paperwork, it did not show up on Trump’s public financial disclosure reports, documents he was required to submit to federal officials while running for president and after taking office. Trump’s former chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, told the New York Times in 2016 that his boss disclosed all debt connected to companies in which Trump held a 100% stake on the documents. That was not true.
There is a chance that Trump’s omission may have been legal, nonetheless. Although officials have to list personal loans on their financial disclosures, the law does not require them to include loans to their companies, unless they are personally liable for the loans. The Trump Organization documents do not specify whether the former president, who owned 100% of the entities responsible for the debt, personally guaranteed the liability, leaving it unclear whether he broke the law or merely took advantage of a loophole.
There’s little doubt that if the world had known about the debt while Trump was president, it would have sparked conflicts-of-interest concerns, perhaps heightened by Daewoo’s historical ties to North Korea. (In the mid-1990s, the firm was the only South Korean company permitted to operate a business inside the country.) Most people as rich as Trump would not be heavily influenced by a $20 million loan. Regardless, the fact that the former president managed to keep the debt secret for so long underscores how weak the government’s ethics safeguards are, how difficult they are to strengthen—and how easily Trump could barrel through them again as he runs for president again in 2024.
Trump’s relationship with Daewoo dates back at least a quarter century. In 1997, the Korean firm signed a deal to partner with Trump on a black skyscraper near the United Nations named Trump World Tower. That project was successful enough that Daewoo continued to do business with Trump, using his name on six properties constructed in South Korea from 1999 to 2007.
At some point—it’s not clear exactly when or how—Daewoo also became Trump’s creditor. The debt reflected on the Trump Organization’s documents appears to have started with a principal of $25 million. Records indicate that the liability was connected to Trump ventures in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Brazil, Florida, Arizona, Canada and Chicago.
None of this was apparent on disclosure reports that Trump, whose representatives did not respond to requests for comment, filed with the Office of Government Ethics. “If someone does not disclose a loan, OGE has no way to know,” says Walter Shaub, who ran that agency when Trump took office. Don Fox, who also once headed the office, adds:“The system is kind of predicated upon people actually following a law because they want to follow the law.”
Trump repeatedly butted heads with ethics officials. In one instance, the agency reached out to the Department of Justice, after Trump failed to disclose a $130,000 liability owed to his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who had paid hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels on behalf of his boss. Cohen ultimately turned against Trump and testified on Capitol Hill, bringing documents with him that shed greater light on the president’s finances—and even hinted at the possibility of a second undisclosed liability.
“The system is kind of predicated upon people actually following a law because they want to follow the law.”
After reviewing Cohen’s documents, Elijah Cummings, a Democrat who chaired the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, asked Trump’s accounting firm for additional materials. Reviewing those materials might have allowed lawmakers to identify loopholes and potentially draft legislation to close them. The accounting firm, Mazars, refused to turn over documents without a subpoena. Cummings’ committee supplied one, and Trump sued to block it.
In a worldthat operates at a faster and faster clip each year, the American legal system moves like it’s stuck in a different century. After losing in U.S. district and appeals courts, Trump filed an emergency application with the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay to stop the subpoena. The nation’s highest tribunal granted Trump’s request and then, in July 2020, a year after Cummings first subpoenaed for the documents, sent the matter back to a lower court for reconsideration.
Reviewing the case for a second time, a U.S. appeals court reached a split decision in July 2022—more than three years after the Oversight Committee issued the subpoena, over two-and-a-half years after Cummings passed away and more than one-and-a-half years after Trump left office. The court ruled that Trump’s accountants had to turn over some documents, but it is unclear what exactly the Oversight Committee has received so far—it still has not revealed anything about the Daewoo debt.
“My committee is continuing to analyze information we are receiving from Mazars,” Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat who succeeded Cummings as chair of the Oversight Committee, said in a statement. “We are committed to uncovering the full scope of former President Trump’s conflicts of interest so the American people can understand how these conflicts may have influenced key decisions by the Trump Administration—and whether reforms are needed to prevent these serious conflicts in the future.”
It seems unlikely that Congress is going to tighten up disclosure laws anytime soon, however. The former president’s allies won back the House of Representatives last month, and Trump announced another run at the White House shortly thereafter. Republican House members probably will not want to pass a law that could expose their party’s frontrunner for the 2024 presidential nomination. The Democrats have had their time in power, when they could have theoretically changed the laws. Trump, using the courts, managed to run out the clock.
The Recount’s Steve Morris compiled the reactions from multiple CNN correspondents and anchors covering the impending rail workers strike. The coverage focused almost entirely on how expensive it might be for consumers and businesses if the rail workers end up striking, how disruptive it’ll be for the economy, and how it could upend Christmas shopping just a month before the holidays.
This article is about the Covid mask controversy DeathSantis stirred up and pushed. He was trying hard to keep tourism up and working poor parents at their jobs by making sure their kids had a place to go while the parents worked. In places like Florida too many see school as a place to park their kids while they work, when the schools went to remote learning workers had to stay home. Rather than make large spaces available like wealthy areas did to have the kids go to and be spread out leaving the parents free to work, poor people had to have one parent stay home. DeathSantis felt the pain of the employers and business overlords and did everything he could to force schools to stay open with in person classroom learning with no Covid precautions. That would have cost the state money besides DeathSantis and the wealthy parents send their kids to private schools who do use the precautions so what do they care if your kids get sick, your elderly poor get sick and die. So this is the first nail in following science in Florida schools. What will die in Florida schools next? Biology? Chemistry? History most certainly, along with social studies. But enforced right wing Christian ideology will flourish. Hugs
New board members in two GOP-leaning counties essentially sacked their school superintendents over the span of one week.
Conservative school board candidates are in office — and are purging some educational leaders who enforced Covid-19 mandates.| Lynne Sladky/AP Photo
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis put his weight behind dozens of conservative school board candidates across Florida during the midterms. Now they’re in office — and are purging some educational leaders who enforced Covid-19 mandates.
New board members in two GOP-leaning counties essentially sacked their school superintendents over the span of one week. The ousters were spurred by how the superintendents carried out local policies like efforts to support the rights of parents, an issue inflamed by schools imposing student mask mandates last fall in defiance of DeSantis.
And while not tied to the 2022 election, the school board in Broward County earlier this month fired its superintendent through an effort led by five members appointed by DeSantis. All combined, school boards with ties to DeSantis pushed out three superintendents in November alone — and each of them served over districts that implemented student mask mandates.
“We had a wave in school districts that spit in parents’ faces,” said state Rep. Randy Fine (R-Palm Bay), who earlier this year sought to punish schools with mask mandates. “And now the people who did that are gone.”
In Brevard and Sarasota counties, embattled school leaders have faced immediate pressure from newly-installed board members and offered to leave voluntarily rather than risk a vote on their terminations.
The boards in both counties now have conservative majorities who sought a change in leadership immediately after the midterms. Although school boards are nonpartisan posts, lines between Democratic and Republican candidates were drawn in many counties through endorsements from each party as well as outside groups. The newly-elected board members in these cases support parental rights while opposing critical race theory and teaching gender orientation in schools.
DeSantis in particular used his clout to endorse more than two dozen school board candidates during the 2022 election cycle, a rare move for a Florida governor that came with $1,000 cash contributions from DeSantis and other GOP lawmakers. Most of the candidates DeSantis endorsed won their elections and are now transforming the make-up of school district leadership and will have huge influence over policies affecting hundreds of thousands of students in the state.
Both Sarasota and Brevard’s school boards put the superintendents on the chopping block the same day that new members endorsed by DeSantis and conservative organizations like Moms for Liberty were sworn into office.
Sarasota board members called Superintendent Brennan Asplen’s job into question at a meeting Tuesday night specially called to discuss his contract. After fielding about four hours of public comment, mostly in support of the superintendent, board members vented criticisms over student performance in reading, how he handled masking students and a perceived lack of transparency from Asplen.
Understanding he may not have a job much longer, Asplen offered up his resignation on Monday night — the day before the board met to weigh his ouster. But the superintendent also fought at the meeting to keep his job by attempting to punch holes in the critiques from board members.
“I have a feeling I’m going to be fired after tonight because I just can’t hold this back,” Asplentold the board from as a preface.
Asplensaid that some of the board’s comments were “ridiculous” given that he had been at the school since 2020, a timeframe that included the Covid-19 pandemic. And yet despite the coronavirus uprooting education, Sarasota earned “A” grades from the state both years. The superintendent also claimed he was being shut out by board members since the election and noted that he enacted a mandatory student masking policy for only three weeks, and that was due to Sarasota’s board voting 3-2 in favor of the mandate.
“You have to get the politics out of this school district,” Asplentold the board. “This school district could be No. 1, but we shoot ourselves in the foot every single time. We are getting in our own way all the time.”
It was clear after Asplenaddressed the board that a separation would be imminent. Board members said they felt the relationship with the schools chief was “adversarial” and beyond repair. Many of the claims by Asplenwere “not accurate,” according to new board chair Bridget Ziegler.
“I am very concerned,” said Zeigler, who was endorsed by DeSantis and co-founded Moms for Liberty. “I don’t know how respectfully we build a relationship where we are functioning together for the right reasons with mutual respect.”
One Sarasota board member, Thomas Edwards, noted the similarity between the pushes to remove school leaders in Florida and elsewhere in the country, including in Berkley County, South Carolina, where a newly-elected school board fired a superintendent. Edwards suggested a possible political motive behind the move and lobbied for Asplen to be granted a chance to fix issues spelled out by the board.
“Whatever rationales I’m going to hear tonight, I really have to throw out the window. Because we just have to — all of as a community — look at the tealeaves,” Edwards said.
But Edwards fell short of reaching the majority of the board, including the members endorsed by DeSantis and other conservatives, who voted 4-1 to move forward with negotiating a separation agreement with the schools chief.
The local teachers union in Sarasota planned a rally in support of Asplen ahead of the meeting Tuesday and dozens lined up to speak on his behalf. But local organizers in Brevard County didn’t demonstrate when its superintendent, Mark Mullins, was pushed out last week.
Instead, the Brevard Federation of Teachers contented that Mullins’ ouster could lead to positive changes within local schools. Union leaders claim that district officials did too little to quell student discipline issues and lingering teacher vacancies facing the county.
“Students verbally and physically abuse teachers and staff, and there will be no end in sight unless meaningful systemic changes are made,” union leaders wrote in a statement Monday on social media.
Similar to Sarasota, the leadership shift in Brevard was aided by new board members. Discussions to split with Mullins came at the suggestion of Megan Wright, who was backed in her race by DeSantis and installed on the board and elected vice chair about four hours before triggering the change.
Elsewhere in Florida, new board members endorsed by DeSantis are also scoring leadership roles. In Lee County, for example, new board members Armor Persons and Sam Fisher, both endorsed by DeSantis, were elected as chair and vice chair of the school board, as reported by the Fort Myers News-Press.
With at least three superintendent jobs opening in Florida, these new-look school boards are now facing the critical task of finding new leaders.
Teachers union leaders are staying optimistic that these board members will be focused on supporting educators and staff in local schools, said Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union. And in choosing a new superintendent, they hope board members will pick candidates who are aligned with the community and not only DeSantis.
“Firing is the easy part,” Spar said. “The hard part is finding the right person.”
This is inhumane and deliberate terrorism. The children’s hospitals running in the dark the only lights flashlights or the occasional desk top light. They are trying to hurt the people, make them so scared they will give up, force them to choice to either freeze to death or give into Putin. The west needs to stop this. We have the air systems to stop these missiles, but we wont use them because we want them only operated by us, OK so send the Nato forces in to run them. This is about people, look around you, this is about your neighbors, the little kids, the old people, the workers, those struggling now to find food, water, and stay warm enough to live. Hugs
Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Wesley Clark (ret.) tells CNN’s John Berman what Russia may be hoping to achieve in their latest attacks against Ukraine.
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