MN lege: Reproductive rights, so far

Emboldened by Traitor Trump and his Supreme Court picks, forced-birth zealots in state legislatures everywhere are running amok, especially with bans after 20 or even 6 weeks. And of course Party of Trump legislators in Minnesota have to be part of the action.

A Minnesota Senate panel on (March 14) voted to outlaw abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, paving the way for the proposal to advance in the Legislature.

The bill would ban abortions on women who are past 20 weeks in their pregnancy except in cases of possible death or serious physical harm. Risk of substantial and irreversible psychological or emotional conditions would not be included...

House Speaker Melissa Hortman said the issue would be a top campaign point in 2020 and predicted that Democrats would flip nine Senate seats currently held by Republicans.

“There are some members of the Minnesota Senate who are out of touch with their constituents on this issue,” Hortman said. - Pioneer Press

To say the least. And even if something like this somehow got through the House, it won’t get through Gov. Tim Walz, who has been consistently good on this issue. But grandstanding attacks on women making their own decisions are considered a political necessity for just about any elected Republican, and so time and effort have to be wasted, every session.

Democratic Visions: MN SoS Steve Simon on a serious MN Senate fail

This will be on public access channels beginning Monday.

Democratic Visions is produced by volunteers through Southwest Community Television.

Eden Prairie, M'tonka, Hopkins, Richfield and Edina, Comcast CH 15 and Centurylink CH 8111 - Saturdays @ 2pm, Sundays @ 9pm, Mondays @ 10pm, Wednesdays @ 5:30 pm.

Champlin, Anoka, Andover & Ramsey Mondays on QCTV -  Mondays @ 10:30 am, Wednesdays @ 10:30 am, Thursdays @ 1pm, Fridays @ 1pm, Saturdays @ 10:30 am.

Bloomington, BCAT CH 16 and CenturyLink 8216 - Tuesdays @ 2:00pm  & 10pm, Fridays @ 9:30 pm, Saturdays @ 7:30 am & 2:30 pm.

MInneapolis, MTN CH 16 - Sundays @ 8:00 pm, Mondays @ 3:30 am, 9:30 am & 2:30 pm

St. Paul, SPNN CH 15 - Thursdays @ 9pm, Fridays @ 4:00am & 2pm.

MN lege: Education, so far

It’s unclear whether we’ll get any real change for the better in education funding through the Party of Trump-controlled MN Senate. Here’s what they’re about:

A proposal at the core of the differing education policies favored by Minnesota Republicans and DFLers might end up on the table for end-of-session negotiations between Gov. Tim Walz and Senate majority Republicans.

The bill is called the Equity and Opportunity Scholarship Act, and it would allow donations to scholarship foundations to be credited against state income taxes. The foundations would use the money to give private school scholarships to low- and middle-income students.

It is a version of private school vouchers and tax credits that have been used in other states (and to some extent in Minnesota) that have often raise constitutional questions, though the bill’s chief supporter believes the structure of the proposal would allow the program to pass muster with the courts. - MinnPost

A voucher for a few thousand dollars isn’t going to help a typical living paycheck-to-paycheck family be able to make the five-figure tuition at some private school. As always this is just the rich man’s whimpering, groveling political curs of the GOP looking to provide requisite payback. In this case, at the expense of public schools, which in spite of all the obstacles continue to turn out more and more graduates who are just plain too smart to ever vote for a conservative.

Moreover, and as people have been pointing out for a long time now, there is absolutely no evidence that private schools do a better job. Quite the contrary, more often than not.

The EPI report’s findings contribute to a significant and growing body of research showing the negative impacts of school voucher programs on student learning and the public education system.

New America Foundation’s Kevin Carey writes, “a wave of new research has emerged suggesting that private school vouchers may harm students who receive them. The results are startling — the worst in the history of the field, researchers say.”

Carey lays out how recent studies of voucher programs in Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio reveal that students who use vouchers to attend private schools tend to fare worse academically, particularly in math, compared to their peers attending public schools. - Jeff Bryant/OurFuture.org

Thankfully, while Gov. Tim Walz has said he’ll be willing to negotiate on a lot of things, according to the MinnPost article this isn’t one of them.

Rich kid admissions scandal shows walloping corporate media double standard

I went to Stanford, back when the odds of getting in were a lot shorter. I doubt they’d let my sorry butt near the place, now. Anyway, what most strikes me about the admissions scandal that broke yesterday is the play it's getting in corporate media. Front page headlines, top of the newscasts. They know it’s a good hook.

Just because a handful of B (at best) list celebrities are involved? I don’t think so. They know damn well the public is sick of being screwed over by the rich man/woman, and this is a chance to play into that.

But when you get into wealth and politics, they’re a whole lot less eager to tell it like it is. How often does the wealth of Congress - and therefore the fact that a large majority thereof, especially in the Senate, from both parties, have little incentive to really change a status quo that has been very good for them - make big headlines? And that affects most people’s lives a lot more than who gets into Stanford or Yale.

Of course plenty of people are giving the plutocracy the attention it deserves, on progressive websites and in books. (Here's a relevant item I happen to have ready to hand.) But those are still not where most people get their information.

MN-05: Do Rep. Ilhan Omar's Dem critics know Israel probably helped Trump win? - Update

This has been around for a while, but I’m thinking a reminder may be useful.

Much ink has been spilled on the role of the Russia-backed Internet Research Agency’s engaging in disinformation tactics to help the Trump campaign. The intelligence firm and thirteen individuals connected to it are the targets of an indictment brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in February (2018). The indictment finds fault with the IRA for “posing as U.S. persons and creating false U.S. personas, operated social media pages and groups designed to attract U.S. audiences” and then using those assets to spread disinformation designed to interfere in the election. But a little known private Israeli intelligence firm may well have done precisely the same thing...

The New York Times was the first to report on a meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Erik Prince and George Nader in August 2016 that included Joel Zamel, the founder of PSY-Group, an Israel-based private intelligence firm that sold social-media manipulation services. The meeting was in part to pitch PSY-Group’s proposal to use “thousands of fake social media accounts to promote Mr. Trump’s candidacy on platforms like Facebook.” - Just Security

Those who insist that the current Israeli government was wholly uninvolved in the above may as well keep their heads in the sand.

Addendum: I'm adding a link to an article by someone who was there for Rep. Omar's speech.

Attacks on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar are rising. One of the first Muslim women elected, Omar is also black, an African immigrant, a former refugee from Somalia, and wears her hijab in the halls of Congress. She is under attack from the leaders of her own party for anti-Semitic statements she never made, for anti-Jewish prejudice she never expressed, for hatred of Jews she doesn’t hold. And the Democratic Party leadership is considering a resolution whose early text, at least, while not mentioning Omar by name, is clearly aimed at accusing her of precisely those things, despite the fact—ignored by the Speaker of the House and other top officials—that she never said or believed any of those words. - The Nation

Update: Those who sought a high-profile public shaming of Rep. Omar for telling it like it is have been forced to back down.

Young progressives are the future of the Democratic Party. In fact, they’re its present, when it comes to actually winning elections. And they want, among a lot of other things, for the party’s DC establishment to get its collective nose out of AIPAC’s stinkin’ butt. Now.

It’s no surprise that Minnesota’s corporate “news” media is trying to play this for all it can. (This is no fun to type, but I must regrettably include MPR and TPT with that. In recent years, they’ve become in many ways every bit the false equivalence-mongers that the state’s overtly for-profit media have long been.) They tried the same thing with another African-American Muslim in 2018. What better way to appeal to their own old, white, right-leaning base? But, electorally, it didn’t work with Keith Ellison, and it won't work for 2020.

Does farcical "summit" mean Trump is giving up?

Some time ago I predicted that Donald Trump will likely quit the U.S. presidency by June 21. Two points:

- People whose intelligence and judgment I respect have responded to that with skepticism. Indeed, friendly derision.

- When it comes to my overall record of political prognostication, events have proved me wrong, more often than not.

Having said that, and getting back to the title of this:

But, as it turns out, while Kim claims to be sold on the concept of denuclearization, he’s not so keen on the actual process. He wants to retain elements of the nuclear program, including some covert parts, as well as his missiles and nuclear warheads, in exchange for which the U.S. will end all sanctions. Desperate as he is for good news to offset the searing testimony of the guy he calls a “rat” and who calls him a “racist” and a “con man,” even Trump knows he couldn’t sell Kim’s conditions to the most adoring of his base. “Sometimes you have to walk, and this was just one of those times,” he said. 

But why didn’t he and the rest of the delegation know this would be what was on offer from Kim? 

Usually, before a summit is announced and the big dogs are called in to sign an agreement, the diplomats have worked out most of the details, or at least have a good idea where any remaining sticking points are likely to be and have game plans for dealing with them. Shouldn’t they have known and conveyed to the White House that Kim wanted all the economic sanctions gone but without surrendering all the elements of Pyongyang’s nuclear capabilities? - Daily Kos

Trump is not smart, at all. But even the most primitive, single-celled life forms are able to sense when something is really, really wrong, and when it's time to desperately seek to "get out of Dodge," and so can he.

You may have seen recent suggestions that Trump’s personal wealth is hugely overestimated. I, personally, have long been of the opinion that there has never been a time when an honest, legitimate accounting of Trump assets minus Trump liabilities would have yielded a positive number, up to and including the present day. We’ll find out someday if I’m right or wrong about that one, too.