Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

A potential solution to a statewide teacher shortage issue has education leaders feeling as though Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration is undermining the qualifications of classroom instructors.

Last week, the Florida Department of Education announced that military veterans, as well as their spouses, would receive a five-year voucher that allows them to teach in the classroom despite not receiving a degree to do so. It's a move tied to the $8.6 million the state announced would be used to expand career and workforce training opportunities for military veterans and their spouses.

"There are many people who have gone through many hoops and hurdles to obtain a proper teaching certificate," said Carmen Ward, president of the Alachua County teachers union. "(Educators) are very dismayed that now someone with just a high school education can pass the test and can easily get a five-year temporary certificate."

On June 9, the Florida Legislature passed a bill that gave the approval for military members, both former and present, and their spouses to teach. Reserve military members count, as well.

Teacher candidates must have a minimum of 60 college credits with a 2.5 GPA, and also must receive a passing score on the FLDOE subject area examination for bachelor’s level subjects.

Veterans must have a minimum of 48 months of military service completed with honorable/medical discharge. If hired by a school district, they have to have a teaching mentor.

Alachua County school board members expressed their distaste for the new law at a recent workshop where the details were presented.

Tina Certain said she feels like the bill lowers the bar for educators.

"It's not that I'm against the service that veterans provide to our country," she said. "I just think that to the education profession, we're lowering the bar on that and minimizing the criteria of what it takes to enter the profession."

Certain also made clear that she doesn't want the district to push those teachers all to lower-performing schools on the east side of Gainesville.

Another school board member, Rob Hyatt, while expressing his frustration, appeared to be more optimistic.

"Unfortunately, we, like all other school districts, are experiencing a very real shortage," he said. "I think that this legislation is a reaction to the fact … I have confidence in our HR department to make the best out of this."

The Alachua County public school district currently has more than 60 teaching vacancies. Since the law passed, no veterans or spouses have applied to the school district for a job, spokeswoman Jackie Johnson said.

"But if someone were to contact us expressing interest in the program, we would help them with the process for earning the state certification," Johnson said. "If they were successful, they would then be eligible to apply for a job with the district, as would anyone with a valid certification."

Ward, however, feels it's the wrong approach to the issue, saying that more support and better pay would close the vacancies.

"There's an assumption that if you were a student, that you are also qualified to be a teacher," Ward said. "That's not necessarily the case and so it's just highly concerning because we've always had a high standard for educators in the public school system."

I see.

So this is really about you projecting your own insecurities onto me.

I have no problem with allowing any of those things you mentioned. It's you that's afraid, whining about right that have been here centuries somehow going away. Good luck with that.

In about 60 AD, Boudica, a Celtic queen in East Anglia, led a nearly successful battle against the Roman Empire, seeking to preserve her daughters' rights to inherit, a right they held under pre-Roman systems, but which the Romans prohibited.

Ted Anderson, a precious metals seller, was hoping to rustle up some business for his gold and silver dealership when he started a radio network out of a Minneapolis suburb a couple of decades ago. Soon after, he signed a brash young radio host named Alex Jones.

Together, they ended up shaping today’s misinformation economy.

The two built a lucrative operation out of a tangled system of niche advertisers, fund-raising drives and promotion of media subscriptions, dietary supplements and survivalist merchandise. Mr. Jones became a conspiracy theory heavyweight, while Mr. Anderson’s company, the Genesis Communications Network, thrived. Their moneymaking blueprint was reproduced by numerous other misinformation peddlers.

Mr. Jones eventually drifted from his dependence on Genesis, as he expanded beyond radio and attracted a large following online. Yet they were closely tied together again in lawsuits accusing them of fueling a bogus narrative about the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Mr. Jones was found liable by default in those cases. Last month, the plaintiffs’ lawyers dropped Genesis as a defendant. Christopher Mattei, one of the lawyers, said in a statement that having Genesis involved at trial would have distracted from the main target: Mr. Jones and his media organization.

The move freed Genesis, which says on its website that it “has established itself as the largest independently owned and operated talk radio network in the country,” from the steep penalties that most likely await Mr. Jones. But the cases, soon headed before juries to determine damages, continue to shed light on the economics that help to drive misleading and false claims across the media landscape.

The proliferation of falsehoods and misleading content, especially heading into the midterm elections this fall, is often blamed on credulous audiences and a widening partisan divide. Misinformation can also be hugely profitable, not just for the boldface names like Mr. Jones, but also for the companies that host websites, serve ads or syndicate content in the background.

“Misinformation exists for ideological reasons, but there is always a link to very commercial interests — they always find each other,” said Hilde Van den Bulck, a Drexel University media professor who has studied Mr. Jones. “It’s a little world full of networks of people who find ways to help each other out.”

Mr. Jones and Mr. Anderson did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Genesis originated in the late 1990s as a marketing ploy, operating “hand-in-hand” with Midas Resources, Mr. Anderson’s bullion business, he has said. He told the media watchdog FAIR in 2011: “Midas Resources needs customers, Genesis Communications Network needs sponsors.”

Alex Jones and his doom-and-gloom worldview fit neatly into the equation.

Genesis began syndicating Mr. Jones around the time he was fired by an Austin station in 1999, the host said this year on Infowars, a website he operates. It was a complementary, if sometimes jarring partnership — “sort of a marriage made in hell,” Ms. Van den Bulck said.



Mr. Anderson was a regular guest on Mr. Jones's show.

Archived footage shows Mr. Jones, pugnacious and prone to pontificating, broadcasting dire claims about the dollar’s inevitable demise before introducing Mr. Anderson, bespectacled and generally mild, to deliver extended pitches for safe haven metals like gold. Sometimes, Mr. Jones would interrupt the pitches with rants, like the time in 2013 when he cut off Mr. Anderson more than 20 times in 30 seconds to yell “racist.”

Genesis’s roster has also included a gay comedian; a former lawyer for the A.C.L.U.; the Hollywood actor Stephen Baldwin; the long-running call-in psychologist Dr. Joy Browne; a home improvement expert known as the “Cajun Contractor”; and a group of self-described “normal guys with normal views” talking about sports.

But eventually, the network developed a reputation for a certain type of programming, promoting its “conspiracy” content on its website and telling the MinnPost in 2011 that its advertisers “specialize in preparedness and survival.”

Several shows were headed by firearms aficionados. There was a Christian rocker who opposed gay rights and a politician who embraced unfounded theories about crisis actors and President Obama’s nationality. One program promoted lessons on how to “store food, learn the importance of precious metals, or even survive a gunfight.” Jason Lewis, a Republican politician in Minnesota who faced blowback during the 2018 election season after his misogynistic on-air remarks resurfaced, had a syndication deal with Genesis and a campaign office at Genesis’ address.

The ties between Mr. Jones and Genesis began loosening about a decade ago, when Mr. Jones reached a deal to have Genesis handle only about one-third of his syndication deals. Now, about 30 stations include Mr. Jones on their schedules, according to a review by Dan Friesen, one of the hosts of the podcast Knowledge Fight, which he and a friend created to analyze and chronicle Mr. Jones’s career. Of those, more than a third relegated him to late night and early morning. Several stations replaced Mr. Jones with conservative hosts such as Sean Hannity or Dan Bongino.

Mr. Jones’s relationship to Mr. Anderson continued to dim after 2015, when the Minnesota Commerce Department shut down Midas. The agency described Midas and Mr. Anderson as “incompetent” and ordered the company to pay restitution to customers after having “regularly misappropriated money.”

Now, the Midas website redirects to a multilevel marketing company selling the same supplements that populate Genesis’ online shop. The founder of the supplement company has a show syndicated by Genesis and has also appeared on Mr. Jones’s show.

But Mr. Jones has his own business hawking Infowars-branded supplements, as well as products such as Infowars masks alongside bumper stickers declaring Covid-19 to be a hoax. One of his lawyers estimated that the conspiracy theorist generated $56 million in revenue last year.

“The inability to have that sort of symbiotic connection between the gold sales on the radio affiliates really hurt their connectedness,” Mr. Friesen said of Mr. Jones and his former benefactor. “At that point, Alex had a bit more of a need to diversify how he was funding things, and Ted took kind of a back seat.”

But in 2018, the families of several Sandy Hook victims sued Mr. Jones and named Genesis as a defendant as well. The families’ lawyers cited Mr. Anderson’s frequent appearances on Mr. Jones’s shows and said that Genesis’ distribution of Mr. Jones helped his falsehoods reach “hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.”

Mr. Jones, Genesis and other defendants “concoct elaborate and false paranoia-tinged conspiracy theories because it moves product and they make money,” the lawyers wrote.

After the lawsuits were filed, both Genesis and Mr. Jones were rejected for coverage of the liability claims by West Bend Mutual Insurance, which began working with Genesis in 2012, according to court documents. After being dropped as a defendant, Genesis has continued to solicit donations, saying online that its “freedom to speak is held in the balance.”

The litigation demonstrates the increasingly prominent role of lawsuits as a cudgel against those accused of spreading false and misleading information. In 2020, Fox News settled for millions of dollars with the parents of Seth Rich, a murdered Democratic aide, whose death was falsely linked by the network to an email leak ahead of the presidential election in 2016.

Smartmatic and Dominion sued Fox News and other conservative outlets and figures last year after the election technology companies were targeted by unsupported claims about voting fraud and are seeking billions of dollars in damages. When Smartmatic and Dominion were still threatening legal action, several of the outlets broadcast segments that tried to clarify or debunk conspiracy theories about the voting systems companies.

“It seems to be, for the first time in a long time, a very tangible route to actually holding people accountable for the harm they’re causing and the ways in which they’re profiting off that harm,” said Rachel E. Moran, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington.

Genesis told the court in a filing last year that it that it was merely accused of being “a distributor of radio programs — the radioland equivalent of the paperboy — not the author, not the publisher, not the broadcaster.” The filing argued that the company “does not have a brain; it does not have memory; it cannot form intent.”

Lawyers for the families responded that the network should be “treated in the same manner as a newspaper or the publisher of a book” with a high degree of awareness of “the hoax narrative that Genesis repeatedly broadcast to vast audiences, over multiple years.”

Donald Trump's tenure as the 45th president of the United States began with his inauguration on January 20, 2017, and ended on January 20, 2021.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) a worldwide pandemic on 11 March 2020.

The US unemployment rate was unchanged at 3.6 percent in June of 2022, the same as in the previous three months, remaining the lowest since February 2020 and in line with market expectations. The number of unemployed people decreased by 38 thousand to 5.912 million, while employment levels fell by 315 thousand to 158.111 million. Meanwhile, the labor force participation rate edged down to 62.2 percent in June fom 62.3 percent in May.

The highest rate of U.S. unemployment was 24.9% in 1933, during the Great Depression. Unemployment remained above 14% from 1931 to 1940.1 It remained in the single digits until September 1982 when it reached 10.1%. During the Great Recession, unemployment reached 10% in October 2009. In 2020, it reached double digits again at 14.7% in April when the U.S. was dealing with a pandemic and recession.2

The Federal Reserve uses expansionary monetary policy to lower interest rates.3 ​Congress uses fiscal policy to create jobs and provide extended unemployment benefits.

The unemployment rate typically falls during the expansion phase of the business cycle. The lowest unemployment rate in modern history was 1.2% in 1944.

Unless you drive an electric vehicle, you’ve probably noticed that your fill-ups are taking a larger bite out of your monthly budget recently. On June 22, the national average for the price per gallon of regular gas was $4.96, according to AAA’s gas price tracker. The good news? That’s slightly down from $5.01 a week prior, and it’s the first time in months that prices have fallen below $5. The bad news? It’s still well above the $3.07 per gallon national average seen the same time in 2021.

If you’re in the market for a new car, you’re well aware that vehicle prices are up due to the ongoing inventory shortage — but is a gas shortage driving up prices at the pump?

The answer is straightforward: No.

According to AAA spokesperson Andrew Gross, “there is no gas shortage.” Gross noted in an email to Cars.com that “the U.S. has plenty of gasoline. However, the price is high because oil is the main ingredient, and it’s costly right now. For every $4.94 you pay for a gallon of gas, oil accounts for $3. Federal and state taxes are about 50 cents.”

Ted Cruz was a dual citizen. He got so much flak for it that he dropped his Canadian citizenship. Can anyone point to one example where a U.S. lawmaker with dual citizenship actively worked to advance the interests of his other country? I've never known it to be a problem and it certainly hasn't been a factor in our arriving at where we are today.

On Friday, Axios began to publish a deeply researched and important series by Jonathan Swan, explaining that if former president Trump retakes power, he and allies like his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), and head of Trump’s social media network Devin Nunes are determined to purge our nonpartisan civil service and replace it with loyalists. In a normal administration, a new president gets to replace around 4000 political appointees, but most government employees are in positions designed to be nonpartisan. Trump’s team wants to gut this system and put in place people loyal to him and his agenda.

When he campaigned for the presidency, Trump promised to “drain the swamp” of officeholders who, he suggested, were just sucking tax dollars. Once in office, though, Trump grew increasingly angry at the civil servants who continued to investigate his campaign’s ties to Russia, insisting that figures like former FBI director Robert Mueller and former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, were Democrats who wanted to hound him from office. (They were, in fact, Republicans.)

Trump’s first impeachment trial inflamed his fury at those he considered disloyal. The day after Republican senators acquitted him on February 6, 2020, he fired two key impeachment witnesses: U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the top expert on Ukraine at the National Security Council. Ironically, Vindman had testified in the impeachment hearings that he had reassured his father, who had lived in the Soviet Union and was worried about Vindman’s testifying against the president, not to worry because in America, “right matters.” Trump fired Vindman’s twin brother, Yevgeny, at the same time, although he had nothing to do with the impeachment.

A Trump advisor told CNN the firings were intended to demonstrate that disloyalty to the president would not be tolerated.

Within days, Trump had put fierce loyalist John McEntee in charge of the White House office of personnel, urging him to ferret out anyone insufficiently loyal and to make sure the White House hired only true believers. McEntee had been Trump’s personal aide until he failed a security clearance background check and it turned out he was under investigation for financial crimes; then–White House chief of staff John Kelly fired him, and Trump promptly transferred McEntee to his reelection campaign. On February 13, 2020, though, Trump suddenly put McEntee, who had no experience in personnel or significant government work, in charge of the hiring of the 4000 political appointees and gave him extraordinary power.

Trump also wanted to purge the 50,000 nonpartisan civil servants who are hired for their skills, rather than politics. But since 1883, those jobs have been protected from exactly the sort of political purge Trump and McEntee wanted to execute.

A policy researcher who came to Trump’s Domestic Policy Council from the Heritage Foundation, James Sherk, found that employees who work in “a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” job can be exempted from civil service protections.

On October 21, 2020, Trump signed an executive order creating a new category of public servant who could be hired by agency heads without having to go through the merit-based system in place since 1883, and could be fired at will. This new “Schedule F” would once again allow presidents to appoint cronies to office, while firing those insufficiently loyal. One Trump loyalist at the Office of Management and Budget identified 88% of his agency as moveable to Schedule F.

Biden rescinded Trump’s executive order on January 22, 2021, just two days after taking office.

According to Swan, Trump has not forgotten the plan. Since the January 6 insurrection, he has called those former colleagues who did not support his coup “ungrateful” and “treasonous.” In a new administration, he would insist on people who had “courage,” and would reinstate the Schedule F plan in order to purge the career civil service of all employees he believes insufficiently loyal to him.

The idea of reducing our professional civil service to those who offer loyalty to a single leader is yet another fundamental attack on democracy.

Democracy depends on a nonpartisan group of functionaries who are loyal not to a single strongman but to the state itself. Loyalty to the country, rather than to a single leader, means those bureaucrats follow the law and have an interest in protecting the government. It is the weight of that loyalty that managed to stop Trump from becoming a dictator. He was thwarted by what he called the “Deep State,” people who were loyal not to him personally but to America and our laws. That loyalty was bipartisan.

Authoritarian figures expect loyalty to themselves alone, rather than to a nonpartisan government. To get that loyalty, they turn to staffers who are loyal because they are not qualified or talented enough to rise to power in a nonpartisan system. They are loyal to their boss because they could not make it in a true meritocracy, and at some level they know that (even if they insist they are disliked for their politics).

Between 1829 and 1881, all but the very highest positions throughout the government were filled by the president on the recommendations of officials in his party, so every change of administration meant weeks of office seekers hounding the president. After the Civil War, the numbers of federal jobs climbed, until by 1884 there were 131,000 people on the federal payroll. Assignment of these jobs was based not on the applicants’ skills, but on their promise to bring in votes or money for their party. Once a man scored a government job, he was expected to return part of his salary to the party’s war chest for the next election.

And then, on July 2, 1881, a man who had expected a government job and didn’t get it retaliated for his disappointment by shooting the president, President James A. Garfield, in the back as he walked up the stairs of a train station in Washington, D.C. The assassin expected that Garfield’s successor, Chester A. Arthur, would reward him with a job.

Horrified, Americans recognized that a government that was for sale by the political party in charge created men who saw government only as a way to make money and were willing to tear the entire system down to get their cut. Even though they hoped no one else would go so far as Garfield’s assassin did, they could see that such a system attracted those who could not get a decent job on their actual merits.

So in 1883, Congress passed and President Arthur signed An Act To Regulate and Improve the Civil Service of the United States, more popularly known as the Pendleton Civil Service Act. It guaranteed the government would have skilled workers by requiring applicants for positions to pass entrance exams, and then protected them from being fired by an incoming president of the opposite party. At first, only a few jobs were covered, but presidents expanded the system quickly. Our government employees became highly qualified, and loyal to the country rather than to a president.

That seems likely to change if Trump gets back into office.

hightor wrote:

Ted Cruz was a dual citizen. He got so much flak for it that he dropped his Canadian citizenship. Can anyone point to one example where a U.S. lawmaker with dual citizenship actively worked to advance the interests of his other country? I've never known it to be a problem and it certainly hasn't been a factor in our arriving at where we are today.

Interesting that dual citizenship is ok in the US given the reputation for intense nationalism.
In Australia, dual citizens are barred from being elected to the national parliament. Not sure about state legislatures.

Ted Cruz wanted to run for the Presidency, the President can't have dual citizenship.