Olga Lautman: Trump Sells Out Ukraine to Aid His Friend Putin

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2026 //
0

Trump has demonstrated again and again that laws mean nothing to him; alliances mean nothing to him. All that matters is his inflated ego and the chance to get richer.

A few days ago, he brazenly abandoned the brave Ukrainians who have battled the powerful Russian nation to a standstill.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. has passed stern laws sanctioning any country that does business with Russia. The first sanctions law passed in 2022, not long after Russia’s launching of the first ground was in Europecsince 1945.

The second law imposing sanctions on trade with Russia was passed only a month ago to honor the late Senator Lindsey Graham, who despised Putin and supported Ukraine. Trump now dishonors his good friend Lindsey Graham.

Trump ignored those laws when he announced his intention to buy diesel fuel from Russia. Ukraine and out European allies were shocked by Trump’s brazen reversal of U.S. policy. It’s no secret that Russia will receive billions of dollars from the US, which will help pay for its war against Ukraine. It will also help pay for Russian shipment of weapons to Iran.

Most puzzling is that Trump is getting only enough diesel fuel for a few weeks at most. The first shipment, “300,000 tons,” will satisfy our diesel needs for half a day. The shipment amounts to 2.5 million gallons. American consumption of diesel fuel is 4 million gallons daily.

He assumes he can hoodwink American farmers with his deal with Putin. This might help him in the midterm elections.

Olga Lautman, a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), describes how quickly Trump switched sides:

Victoria Deineko holds her daughter Mia while standing in front of a multi-story residential building damaged in a Russian missile strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026. Evgeniy Maloletka/AP Photo

It is rare to see a country switch sides so dramatically during a war, but here we are, watching Trump abandon Ukraine as it fights for its survival and instead assist Russia. And as Russia continues bombing Ukrainian cities, homes, and hospitals, killing civilians, Ukrainian officials say they went two nights in a row without the advance warnings they normally receive from the United States before Russian ballistic missile attacks. During the latest wave of Russian attacks, six people were killed and approximately 600,000 Ukrainians were left without electricity.

As if that weren’t bad enough, reports began coming out of Ukraine overnight that Elon Musk’s SpaceX had suddenly restricted Ukraine’s military StarShield satellite service, leaving Ukrainian officials blindsided. StarShield operates under a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense, and the sudden 100-mile-per-hour speed limit imposed on military terminals disrupted Ukraine’s ability to intercept Russian drones, carry out reconnaissance, and maintain communications.

Ukrainian troops were also having problems staying connected even when moving below the new speed limit. Drone operators were losing live video feeds or having to slow their drones down, leaving them more vulnerable to Russian attacks. Ukraine’s 7th Air Assault Corps said several missions had to be canceled because of this. Ukrainian presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov confirmed the restrictions and said that he did not believe the timing was a coincidence, considering Trump’s recent threats against Ukraine. Musk later posted on X that StarShield is controlled by the U.S. government and that decisions about restrictions are made by the military and ultimately Trump. By Wednesday evening, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry reported that the connection was working better, although the speed limit had not been lifted.

Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski was among the first to react as reports came out about the restrictions, taking aim at Musk. “Hey, big man, are you playing politics with your products again? As your European customers, we are watching you,” he wrote on X. Poland continues to help pay for Starlink services used by Ukraine since the full-scale invasion.

Sikorski is right to call this out publicly. Why would any country want to spend billions buying American weapons or depend on American technology if the U.S. can decide when and how it can be used? And this is yet another reason America’s allies are paying close attention to what is happening in Ukraine, wondering whether they could be next.

The restrictions come just days after Trump announced a deal with war criminal Putin to ease sanctions on Russian diesel and allow the U.S. to buy Russian fuel, giving Moscow another source of revenue to fund its brutal invasion. As Ukrainians were dealing with the sudden SpaceX restrictions, Putin’s bagman Kirill Dmitriev announced earlier today that the first contracts for Russian diesel sales to the U.S. could be signed within days. Speaking at Russian Energy Week, Dmitriev said that the U.S. and Russia were communicating almost every hour to work out the logistics of resuming shipments.

Trump’s decision to reopen Russian diesel sales has drawn opposition from some in Congress. Twelve U.S. senators, including six Republicans (just six), warned that the deal would provide Putin with more money to finance his invasion. Some lawmakers also questioned whether this deal violates U.S. sanctions laws.

And while Trump is making deals with Putin, he has also lashed out at Zelenskyy, demanded elections in Ukraine, and threatened to cut off intelligence and military assistance unless Kyiv stops striking Russian oil refineries. After two nights without the usual missile warnings and the sudden StarShield restrictions, Ukrainian officials have every reason to question whether they can still trust the United States.

It’s also interesting how Trump keeps demanding elections from Ukraine but has no such demands for Putin, who has ruled Russia for more than 25 years, while jailing and assassinating opponents. And the double standard doesn’t end there, because Russia continues bombing Ukraine’s power plants and other energy infrastructure, while Trump demands that Ukraine stop attacking Russian oil refineries.

This is all happening as Russia helps Iran target American forces and interests in the Middle East. According to recent U.S. intelligence assessments, Russia and China have been supplying Iran with satellite imagery for targeting and components for weapons. But Trump dismissed the reports, even though they came from his own intelligence agencies. In a Truth Social post, he called people raising concerns “Radical Left Morons and Lunatics,” claimed that any Russian or Chinese assistance was minimal, and added, “I don’t believe they are at all.” So Trump is dismissing his own intelligence agencies’ findings about Russia helping Iran while easing sanctions on Russian diesel and threatening to cut off intel sharing to Ukraine.

And the blame for what is happening does not stop with Trump. Republicans in Congress who have remained silent or defended his decisions bear full responsibility. There are a handful of Republicans who have objected to Trump’s fealty to Putin, but far too many others have either supported his treatment of Ukraine and his attacks on European allies or refused to challenge him. One man could not carry out such a dramatic reversal of American policy without the backing of his party, which has allowed him to continue making concessions to Russia even as Moscow threatens the security of European allies.

None of us should be surprised, of course. We have watched Trump worship Putin and defend Russia for more than a decade, even siding with Moscow over American intelligence agencies. But watching him ease sanctions on Russia, threaten to cut off military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine, and oversee new restrictions on StarShield while Russia continues bombing Ukrainian cities is infuriating. This is no longer just about Trump abandoning Ukraine or pressuring Zelenskyy into a peace deal. He has put the U.S. in the position of assisting and funding Russia’s genocidal war while actively undermining Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. Trump has picked a side, and it’s Russia.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, International, Trump

Texas: Judge Refuses to Reinstate 92 Voting Locations Cut in Tarrant County

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2026 //
2

Voter suppression is active in Texas. In Tarrant County, where the city of Fort Worth is located, the Republican members of the county election commission voted to close 92 polling places. Many are located in districts that are black, Hispanic, or low-income. The vote of the commission was 3-2 to cut the number of polling places, with three Republicans outvoting two Democrats.

The Dallas Morning News reported:

Tarrant County will not be required to restore nearly 100 polling places that county officials cut, a judge ruled Tuesday, dealing a setback to voting rights advocates and minority groups weeks before a high-stakes midterm election.

District Judge Patrick Gallagher did not provide a reason in his one-page decision, handed down after a day of testimony from voters and county officials.

The ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed earlier this month that argued the cuts disenfranchise Tarrant County voters, with the heaviest burden falling on Black and Hispanic communities. 

Four women — city councilwoman Deborah Peoples, former city councilwoman Kathleen Hicks, and retired judge Maryellen Hicks, who are all Black, and Fort Worth ISD trustee Camille Rodriguez, who is Hispanic — filed the suit. 

“Tarrant County is eroding the right to vote,” Susan Hutchison, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told the judge Tuesday.

After the ruling, attorneys for the plaintiffs noted the judge denied the request but did not dismiss the lawsuit outright as requested by the county. That means the case could return to court, albeit after the election. The judge also did not weigh in on whether the cuts were discriminatory.

“We have to redouble our efforts to make sure everybody votes,” they said in a statement.

Tarrant County officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Dallas Morning News.

The four women told the judge Tuesday they worried the cuts would mean longer commutes and waits to cast a ballot and lower voter turnout on Election Day, particularly in low-income and minority neighborhoods.

For example, in 2022, the 76103 ZIP Code, a predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhood in East Fort Worth, had three polling places. All three were cut this November. [Emphasis added]

In the 76115 ZIP Code, which is largely Black and Hispanic in south Fort Worth, four of the five polling places were cut. [Emphasis added.]

Maryellen Hicks, 77, said she has mobility issues and worries she will be unable to stand in a long line. Her longtime voting site was among those cuts. Asked where she planned to vote, Hicks replied, “I have no earthly idea, quite seriously.”

Tarrant County Election Administrator Clint Ludwig, who drafted the list of polling placesto cut, acknowledged that he did not assess how the reductions would affect Black and Hispanic or low-income voters, who are less likely to have reliable transportation. He also testified that he did not seek input from Black or Hispanic organizations about the reduction.  

Ludwig said he considered several factors, such as site availability, previous voter turnout, distance from other polling places and handicap accessibility.

The elections official repeatedly said it would be impossible to add polling places at this point, although he did say the county keeps five to 10 back-up options that could be added if necessary. 

Early voting starts Oct. 19, and Election Day is Nov. 3.

County commissioners voted last month 3-2 over the objections of dozens of residents to cut 92 Election Day voting sites, from 316 in 2022 to 224 on Nov. 3. It also cut early voting sites from 50 to 47.

Yet Ludwig said he expects roughly 40% more voters this year than in 2022.

Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare and commissioners Matt Krause and Manny Ramirez, all Republicans, voted for the proposal. Democratic commissioners Alisa Simmons and Roderick Miles voted against the proposal. O’Hare and Simmons are both running for county judge.

Republicans said the move saves money and improves efficiency. O’Hare called the plan sensible and said that “no Tarrant County voter should feel they don’t have enough time to vote.”

Categories Democracy, Elections, Injustice, Texas

The Sordid Voucher Scam Cheats Everyone But Billionaires

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2026 //
0

I have written about the devastating consequences of vouchers for years and the fact that they are promoted by billionaires and rejected whenever they are put to a statewide vote. So it is very satisfying that The New York Times, the newspaper of record, published this sharp opinion piece by Jessica Grose, a regular contributor. No both sides here; vouchers are a scam that billionaires love and that most public school parents loathe.

Jessica Grose wrote:

“I’ve been voting Republican my whole life. I’m superconservative,” the Pine Tree superintendent, Steve Clugston, tells the camera in an Instagram reel. “I’m going to tell you what: When Greg Abbott sold us out to the billionaires and sold out our schools, I’m done with his leadership.” In the Texas governor’s race, Clugston is voting for Abbott’s Democratic opponent, State Representative Gina Hinojosa.

The Pine Tree public school district is in the bright red small city of Longview in East Texas, between the big cities of Dallas and Shreveport, La. A majority of its 4,400 students are economically disadvantaged. When I caught up with Clugston on Friday, hours before the Pine Tree football team trounced its opponents under the lights, he was at his farm. “My wife’s a teacher. My daughter’s a teacher. My son-in-law’s a teacher. Both my sisters are teachers. My brother-in-law’s a retired superintendent. So I’d say education’s kind of in our blood,” he told me over the phone.

Clugston told me he’s sick of his fellow Texas conservatives straying from their principles of fiscal common sense and straight talk; he even attempted a run for the Texas State Senate as an independent conservative. He is particularly appalled by Texas’ voucher program, known as Texas Education Freedom Accounts, which went into effect this year. This program puts state money in accounts for Texas families to use outside the public school system: up to nearly $10,500 for children enrolling in private school, up to $30,000 for children with disabilities and up to $2,000 for those who are home-schooled.

The State of Texas has no say over the curriculum taught at the institutions that accept vouchers, and participating schools can discriminate against applicants for any number of reasons, including religion and disability status. Texas’ vouchers are universal, which means anyone can apply for them, regardless of financial means, though poorer students have been prioritized.

Around 70 percent of this year’s voucher recipients already were enrolled in private schools or were home-schooled. Vouchers are costing the state about a billion dollars this year alone and could ultimately cost $4.4 billion annually. While funding for vouchers comes from a budget that is separate from the public school pot, the state’s funding for public schools has not kept up with inflation.

Texas public schools are projected to lose $227 million just this year as they shed head count, according to The Houston Chronicle. More public schools may close as a result of vouchers siphoning that money away from them. In Clugston’s opinion, vouchers are “abillion-dollar giveaway program for the rich, and we’re going to have no accountability in it. Zero.”

Hinojosa has made saving public education central to her campaign for governor, and it is what got her started in politics. Her child’s school was on the brink of closure, and she describes her political trajectory as concerned parent to local school board member to Texas House member. If elected, Hinojosa has vowed to “end the voucher scam.”

I have long been frustrated at the way both parties barely talk about K-12 public education, despite plunging test scores and post-Covid woes. But the reason politicians don’t talk more about education is that votersdon’t care about it. What makes Hinojosa’s message on schools effective beyond irate public school parents and educators is that she ties the passage of vouchers to larger themes plaguing Republicans in the age of President Trump: corruption and the outsize power of billionaires.

Vouchers failed in the Texas Legislature multiple times, with rural Republicans tending to side with Democrats to block the measures. In rural areas “school choice,” even with vouchers, tends to be a mirage. There are few private schools, and public schools are often the biggest local employers and the heart of small-town life; nearly every Texan I spoke to for this newsletter said the reverence for “Friday Night Lights” is real.

When Abbott couldn’t get vouchers passed the honorable way, he decided to primary Republican state legislators who opposed the policy. He took $12 million from Jeff Yass, a pro-voucher Pennsylvania billionaire, got most of his preferred candidates into office and got vouchers passed in 2025, as The Washington Post noted.

The outcomes for students participating in voucher programs in other states have been decidedly mixed, but Yass doesn’t give a rip. “If the mother or the parent wants the kid to go from one school to another, who the hell is anyone to tell them not to?” he told The Post. “I don’t care what the studies say.”

Yass isn’t the only billionaire who meddled in vouchers in the Lone Star State. The religious Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris and Dan Wilks have also poured money into pro-voucher candidates over the years. As The Texas Tribune explains, “Dunn is also the founder of Midland Classical Academy, a private school that offers its approximately 600 K-12 students a ‘classical education from a biblical worldview,’ according to its website.” (It’s worth noting that many of the elite, popular and highly ranked private schools in Texas refused to accept vouchers this year.)

Some voucher proponents claim that Texas offers more choice to underprivileged children in underperforming schools. But the data we have on other states with universal voucher programs, like Arizona, suggest that they are redistributing money to the highest income and most educated ZIP codes in cities and suburbs. An Arizona ABC station found that parents were spending their voucher money on everything from trampoline parks to ski tickets.

In Iowa, which has a universal voucher program for private schools that’s similar to Texas’, the Democratic candidate for governor and the current auditor, Rob Sand, has made a similar connection among vouchers, special interests and corruption. “The current school voucher program is an open invitation to waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars,” he explains on his campaign website.

Sand lists his voucher stance under the headline Accountability for All, where he also talks about protections for whistle-blowers and banning stock trading by politicians. By doing so, he is saying that you don’t have to care about what’s going on in the classroom to be outraged that a New York-based company called Odyssey, which manages his state’s voucher program, allegedly got a sweetheart deal for the work. As auditor, Sand found that the company “more than doubled its rate less than a month after signing their no-bid contract, costing taxpayers an additional $2.7 million.” (Odyssey, which has ties to Yass, also administers the voucher system in Texas.)

Whatever you think about public schools, it is difficult not to seethe at the fundamental unfairness of voucher programs that give money to schools that don’t have to educate all students. The Texas Observer found that of 291 private schools approved for voucher funds from the state, over 90 percent were religious or faith-based schools, “more than 100 of those schools require or prioritize for admission students of the same faith and more than 60 have a written policy that discriminates against L.G.B.T.Q.+ students, the schools’ own data shows.”

Though the Texas vouchers prioritize students with disabilities, The Observer also noted that most of the private Texas schools they analyzed lack special education services. A Dallas Morning News analysis found that thousands of students with disabilities returned state money, in part because private schools rejected them or didn’t even respond to their applications.

Some educators I spoke to in Texas and Iowa told me that they’d already seen students ricocheting back to public schools because their private or home-school experience wasn’t all it was chalked up to be. Another outrageous part of this legislation is that Texas public schools are still required to do the disability testing for families that choose vouchers, and it’s straining their limited resources.

When put to a public vote, school vouchers have been unpopular; they’re perennial losers on the ballot. It’s maddening that ideologically motivated billionaires, who probably never sent their own children to public schools, have been able to push this policy through.

According to the latest New York Times/Siena University polling, Hinojosa was up by four points, and Sand was up by 11. Texas is obviously the tougher battle, but after spending the week talking to parents there, I’m cautiously optimistic. Rebekah Baus, who described herself as a conservative Christian and lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area with her husband and two kids, told me she is so upset about the state of public school policy that she doesn’t know which way she is voting.

The State of Texas, Baus said, is trying to pretend “our public school system is failing, but in the reality, we’re failing our public school system by not funding them properly.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Closing schools, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Iowa, Privatization, School Choice, Support for public schools, Texas, Vouchers

Melania Trump Threatens to Sue Blogger and Destroy Her

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2026 //
8

The blogger known as “JoJo from Jerz” has an incredible, frightening story to tell. She has a large following on social media, and she uses it to say what she thinks about Donald and Melania Trump. She doesn’t like them.

Not long ago, she got a letter from a government attorney threatening to sue her for defamation. This is, of course, an outrage because the First Amendment protects her right to criticize the President, his policies, and his very public wife.

But the threat was clear. A lawsuit would bankrupt her, cause her to lose her home, and ruin her life. The federal government has unlimited resources; it can destroy your life simply by engaging in litigation. At some point, the ordinary citizen runs out of money.

I learned about the situation while reading Dean Obeidallah’s post, where he gave the background and explained that JoJo is Joanne Carducci, a single mother of two children.

Dean wrote:

I wasn’t surprised to hear that Donald and Melania have been threatening lawsuits against Joanne Carducci—better known as JoJoFromJerz—in an effort to silence her criticism. Carducci has millions of followers between X, Facebook, Threads, Substack and more. But what the Trump crime family didn’t count on is the type of fighter JoJo is and how people would rally to support her!

I spoke to JoJo about her ordeal that she only went public with in her Substack post on September 26, 2026, titled, “Be Best. Be Quiet. Or Be Bankrupted.” It was jaw-dropping to read how the Trumps—apparently led by Melania—had their lawyers send letters to JoJo threatening to sue her for criticizing Donald and the so-called “First Lady.” (In Trump’s case, Melania is far from the first lady—she’s more like the 100th!)

Having read Dean’s introduction, I then opened JoJo’s September 26, 2026, post, where she described the nightmare of being threatened by the Trumps, but most especially by Melania.

Jojo wrote:

For the first half of this year, Melania Trump was doing everything in her power to get me to shut up.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about this. I didn’t know how to talk about it. And if I’m being fucking honest, I’m scared to talk about it right now.

But I’m sick and tired of carrying it around, and I need to put it down.

And watching my fucking feed turn into a propaganda pageant for that self-anointed patron saint of women has exhausted whatever restraint I had left.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know something was happening earlier this year. I was trying to keep doing my work while worrying about my children, our home, my livelihood, and whether telling you what was happening could cost us everything.

Here’s what I didn’t tell you.

The president and the first lady of the United States of America were threatening to sue me.

Me. A single mother of two in New Jersey.

At first, the letters were about things I’d said about both of them, although mostly her, but over the next several months it became entirely about Melania. She wanted me to retract what I’d said and apologize, and when I wouldn’t, another letter would come, another accusation of defamation, another demand for money I didn’t have, until this woman’s wounded feelings had become something I had to consider every time I thought about my family’s future.

A prominent attorney who wasn’t able to help me told me I should do everything they asked because otherwise they would ruin me.

They would take my home.

And I don’t know how to explain what those words do to you when you’ve already had to rebuild your life from scratch, when the home somebody is telling you to be afraid of losing is the place you made out of everything you managed to save of yourself. There wasn’t some other fortune underneath us. There was this house, my work, and two children who depended on me to make it enough.

I cried every day for months, but I kept going because I had to keep going, because I didn’t have a choice, because my kids need me and their lives don’t stop to indulge two petulant narcissists who can’t stomach being criticized. There’s still dinner and soccer and baseball and laundry and life—the life I’ve worked so hard to make ordinary for them. They get to have that. They get to need things and forget things and go on being children without having to make room for whatever the first lady thinks she’s entitled to take out of their mother.

And I never told them. They still don’t know.

I didn’t want to scare them, didn’t want to give them a reason to look around their own home and wonder whether they would get to keep it, so I kept it from them, even as this constant background noise ran underneath everything else: two of the most powerful people in the world, with all their money and lawyers and access to the levers of power, had targeted me. 

My livelihood. My family. The life I was right there in the middle of trying to live. And I couldn’t make the enormity of that fit with how ordinary we were, how little we had to spare, how much damage they could do without it costing them anything they would miss.

She was swinging a fucking wrecking ball at a mosquito, and my children lived in the building.

For months, I told only the people closest to me and some incredible, heroic human beings—elected officials, people you might recognize from television—who showed up when I needed help. I sat on the rest because I was scared, and I hate that for me, but I fucking hate it for my country, too. I was afraid to tell you what the president and first lady were doing because I didn’t know what telling you might make them do next.

She never had to set foot in our house to make her presence felt in every room.

That’s the brutal, grotesque, fucking disgraceful truth.

And let’s be clear about what I do: I have never intentionally lied about her. When I’m talking about what these people say and do, I’m working from my understanding of the truth, what I can see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears. But a hell of a lot of my work is mockery and ridicule, because I’m a satirist and they’re public figures, and I have a right to point at the ridiculous fucking spectacle they’re making of this country and laugh.

They don’t have to like it. That couture-clad, cash-cushioned control freak was trying to turn free speech into a luxury item and price me out of my own fucking voice.

I don’t need to make shit up. With these two, the problem has never been a shortage of material.

Matt Platkin, New Jersey’s former attorney general, helped me for free, spending hours on the phone with me, giving his time and expertise at considerable personal cost, shepherding me through something I could never have begun to navigate alone. And he listened to me. He advised, explained, helped me understand what I was facing, but the decisions stayed mine. I still cry when I think about the sheer luck of somebody that good showing up in the middle of something that ugly, when I needed help I couldn’t afford and didn’t know how to find.

He’s an extraordinary fucking human being, and I owe him in ways I’ll never be able to adequately express, let alone repay.

Having him beside me felt like somebody putting a hand beneath a box I’d been holding so long my arms had started to shake. I still had to decide where to go with it, but I could finally take a breath without being afraid I’d drop everything. I kept returning to Timothy Snyder’s first lesson in On Tyranny: “Do not obey in advance.”

This is the beginning of her post. Please open and read it all.

It shows how thin-skinned the Trumps are, how ruthless they are, and what true courage looks like.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Courage, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Grit, Injustice, Trump

Defying Federal Judge’s Order, Trump Cuts Down Hundreds of Trees in D.C. on Public Golf Course

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2026 //
5

Donald Trump is busy setting the world on fire, but his real concerns are remodeling the White Hiuse and the District of Columbia. He likes to defy environmental reviews and yo make irreversible changes.

One of his plans involves turning a public golf course in D.C. into a championship course. A federal judge ordered him not to make any changes without getting it cleared by her.

A “furious” federal judge excoriated the Trump administration Monday morning for cutting down hundreds of trees at East Potomac Golf Links, the historic course eyed for redevelopment by President Donald Trump, telling government lawyers they had cost their credibility by ignoring her repeated warnings to give notice before work continued.

Over the weekend, his team cut down 430 trees. Another 300 will be cut down. The judge is furious.

Trump thinks he is a king and doesn’t need permission. Fortunately for him, he’s surrounded by sycophants who do whatever he tells them.

Rick Maese of The Washington Post reported:


Government lawyers told U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes at an emergency hearing that approximately 430 trees were removed Saturday and that another 299 are still targeted for removal. Reyes ordered the government to stop cutting down trees until at least 2 p.m. Tuesday, by when she hopes to hear testimony from another administration official involved in the tree removal.

Reyes says she had been reluctant to issue a temporary restraining order in the case. But, she added, “I have no faith that the government isn’t going to cut them down unless there’s an order in place not to do so.”

Violating her order “by two seconds” would prompt contempt proceedings, the judge said.
“I am thoroughly unamused right now,” Reyes said as the hearing began. “I do not know how I could have made it any plainer. I did not want what happened to happen.”

At one point, Justice Department attorney Marissa Ann Piropato told Reyes that government lawyers “did our best” to keep the court apprised of any construction work at the course.

“No, you did not do your best,” Reyes responded, her voice rising. “You did your absolute worst.”
The hearing followed an emergency request filed late Sunday by preservationists seeking to stop the National Park Service from removing additional trees at the historic public golf course.

The D.C. Preservation League and two golfers allege that the administration is racing ahead with irreversible work while avoiding the environmental and historic-preservation reviews required for the president’s proposed transformation of East Potomac into a championship-level course.

Categories Trump

John Thompson: Why Are Oklahoma Republicans Bullying Their Muslim Neighbors?

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2026 //
1

John Thompson, historian and retired teachers in Oklahoma, questions the outbreak of bigotry towards Muslims, starting at the tip.

He writes:

Gov. Kevin Stitt recently ordered the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety and the Oklahoma Office of Homeland Security to determine whether the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) or any of their members, or the Muslim Brotherhood are a terrorism or public-safety threat. His order also directed state public safety leaders to advocate for federal action to designate the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as Foreign Terrorist Organizations under federal law.

The Tulsa World reported that CAIR responded by saying it and the Muslim Brotherhood do not share any organizational ties. And, CAIR is an “American civil rights and advocacy organization unaffiliated with any ‘offshoot, chapter, or agent of any foreign movement, organization, political party or government.’”

And, the Oklahoma Voice reported that Pauline Jones, a political science professor at University of Michigan added, “There’s a paper trail of trying to undermine CAIR,” but no evidence tying CAIR to terrorists. Such anti-Muslim efforts create “fear that’s nonsensical.” 

Moreover, Oklahoma State University’s Stephen Nemeth, an expert on international relations and terrorism, “said while ordering an investigation ‘sounds menacing,’ it’s more of a ‘convenient bogeyman.’” And, “It’s probably just a way to kind of gin up maybe some activism or voter interest.” 

CAIR’s Oklahoma Executive Director Veronica Laizure-Henry told NPR:

Throughout CAIR’s long history in Oklahoma, our civil rights organization has worked to protect the Constitution’s guarantees of free speech, religious freedom and equality under the law. We have also pursued justice for all people, including Oklahoma Muslims impacted by hate. … Our successful civil rights work in Oklahoma is exactly why Gov. Stitt is targeting our organization with debunked conspiracy theories. We look forward to continuing our civil rights work in Oklahoma and proving once again that the Constitution is stronger than any politician’s bigotry.

Moreover, the Oklahoman responded to Stitt’s call for “both the Oklahoma Legislature and the federal government to declare CAIR a terrorist organization” by reminding him of the “Oklahoma Standard,’” that calls for “kindness and inclusion.”

Yes, what we are seeing is a battle between the best and the worst of our state.

The Oklahoman also explained how the Interfaith Alliance of Oklahoma weighed in:

“The Interfaith Alliance of Oklahoma is deeply concerned about Governor Stitt’s executive order regarding Muslim organizations,” the organization said in a statement. “The executive order was issued without any evidence of what is being accused, and such unfounded claims are harmful to our Muslim neighbors.”

And it recalled how Gov. Kevin Stitt “showed commendable leadership when, in 2021, he welcomed nearly 2,000 refugees from Afghanistan after the city of Kabul was taken over by the Taliban.”

As the Oklahoman also reported, when “Imad Enchassi, senior imam of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City” learned of Stitt’s order, he said, “I could feel a chill going from the tip of my head to the bottom of my toes,” and “Our governor has a good relationship with us — he knows us and we know him. It was a slap in the face.”

In 2019, Stitt’s visited with Muslims during CAIR-OK-sponsored Muslim Day at the Capitol.  In 2023, Stitt pulled out of CAIR-OK sponsored Ramadan Iftar “due to wildfires raging in multiple areas of the state,” but a “CAIR-OK leader read Stitt’s planned remarks that the governor’s office sent to be shared with Oklahoma Muslims and others who attended the event at the Oklahoma History Center.”

And, the Oklahoman has reported about the ways that anti-Muslim bigotry has a long history, and how it’s exploding.  

Former state Sen. Mike Mazzei [R] who is running for governor,  had previously run against so-called “Sharia Law” and so-called Muslim terrorists. And he has been endorsed by Donald Trump. On the day when Mazzei and Trump spoke in Durant, Mazzei doubled down on his promise to prosecute CAIR.

Granted, such racism predates  today’s Trumpists, but there is a long history of many Oklahomans standing by their neighbors, while others commit to cruelty.

For instance, my former neighbor Mauree Turner was the nation’s first Black, non-binary, Muslim to be elected to a state legislature. But, as National Public Radio explained, Rep. Turner:

Was censured and removed from legislative committees. There had been a demonstration in the capitol against anti-trans measures with some scuffling between protesters and police. Afterwards, a protester went to Turner’s office to rest. Republican legislators accused them of “harboring a fugitive.”

 In 2017, I wrote about Ramadan Iftar with Our Elected Officials which “was a wonderful antidote to the worries that go along with life in our Red state. As usual, the diverse audience shared laughter and an opportunity to discuss where we go from here. In attendance were a dozen current or former state legislators, two school board members, a city councilman, and two candidates for governor.” 

As always in these interfaith gatherings, “the most humorous exchanges occurred when Iman Imad S. Enchassi and reform and conservative rabbies shared the stage and engaged in delightful banter.” This time, however, a Christian pastor was equally hilarious “when riffing off a classic CAIR/OK punch line.” When Executive Director Adam Soltani is told to “go back to where you come from,” he responds No!, he is not going back to Kansas.”

During its “2017 Legislative Wrap-Up,” CAIR led a discussion, which addressed the “surrealistic behavior” of so many members of the party that controls two branches of the Oklahoma government, and led to the conclusion, “We have to laugh together to protect our sanity – as we work together to save our public institutions.”

But, then, CAIR recognized the session’s “first disgrace,” a bill which passed out of a House committee which would “require a woman to get the written consent of the fetus’s father before obtaining an abortion.” The second was the effort to shrink the budget deficit by turning students who are identified as English Language Learners over to ICE for possible deportation.

Then, its public affairs coordinator said:

During the interim session, we will be planning community meetings on issue areas and helping you stay connected with your elected officials, even when they are not at the Capitol. We will continue to support and promote policies that maximize religious freedoms, Constitutional protections, and work towards eliminating inequality in Oklahoma. We look forward to your help making a more equal Oklahoma for all.

So, why are Gov. Stitt and Sen. Mazzei attacking an organization which they must know is an exemplar of the Oklahoma Standard? And, why are so many Republicans still making vicious attacks on their neighbors?

We know that a diverse range of Oklahomans will defend CAIR. But, will we be able to defeat the fear mongering of the state’s super majority of legislators?

Categories Bigotry, Ethics, Oklahoma, Religion

Marc Elias: No Doubt! Trump Lost the 2020 Election.

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2026 //
3

Marc Elias is a leading lawyer in defense of democracy. He has won numerous federal and state cases in defense of voting rights. In this post, Elias refutes The Big Lie.

By Marc Elias · Democracy Docket founder

This weekend, in an interview with Ted Koppel on CBS’s Sunday Morning, Steve Bannon confirmed what I have been saying for years: “The core belief of the MAGA movement is [Trump] won the 2020 election.”

When confronted with the fact that Trump and his allies lost more than 60 court cases challenging dddddddssstsdtsrsrssssssssssrsrrerzzfzzrz sadp the election results, Bannon resorted to a familiar GOP tactic. He falsely suggested that the cases were thrown out on technicalities: “We can go debate this another time, but we didn’t have standing. We never even got into court.”

Even worse, Koppel told viewers that Bannon was “technically correct; they didn’t have standing. They couldn’t find a judge who thought they had a significant case worth hearing.”

Koppel may have meant that the cases failed because they lacked merit. But what he said is simply wrong.

Trump and his allies found plenty of judges willing to hear them out, in many cases through hours or even days of testimony and argument. Those judges listened, weighed the evidence and ruled against them.

I know, because I was the lawyer who helped Joe Biden defeat those cases one by one.

Correcting the record matters as we approach another election in which Trump and the GOP are once again spreading lies. So let me put this one to bed, once and for all.

In 2022, a group of prominent conservatives reviewed every one of the 64 cases that Trump and his allies brought in the six key battleground states. The group included former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, former Republican Sen. John Danforth and retired federal appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig, along with two other retired federal judges and another former Republican senator.

Their conclusion was stark: “Donald Trump and his supporters have failed to present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results significant enough to invalidate the results of the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Most importantly, their report directly rebuts the claim Bannon is making today: that Trump never got his day in court. “Of the 64 cases brought by Trump and his supporters,” they wrote, “twenty were dismissed before a hearing on the merits, fourteen were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before a hearing on the merits, and 30 cases included a hearing on the merits.”

In other words, fewer than one-third of the cases were dismissed by a court before reaching the merits. In another 14, Trump’s side walked away rather than test its claims in front of a judge.

Trump’s problem was never a lack of opportunity. As the report’s authors put it, “Joe Biden was the choice of a majority of the Electors, who themselves were the choice of the majority of voters in their states.”

Consider the record.

In Arizona, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and the state Republican Party went to court claiming that Election Day votes for Trump had been wrongly thrown out. Over a six-hour hearing, the claim that thousands of voters had been disenfranchised fell apart. The campaign narrowed its case to a handful of ballots and the judge dismissed it.

In Wisconsin, Trump requested recounts in Milwaukee and Dane counties, the state’s two largest Democratic strongholds. The recounts increased Biden’s lead.

Trump then lost in federal court and before the state’s conservative-majority Supreme Court.

The federal judge, whom Trump himself appointed, found that Trump had standing, held a daylong hearing, and ruled against him anyway: “This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits.”

When the Trump campaign asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to throw out more than 221,000 absentee ballots, the conservative court refused. As one justice noted, the president “failed to point to even one vote cast in this election by an ineligible voter.”

In Nevada, Trump’s electors filed and litigated a full election contest, with evidence submitted by both sides. They alleged everything from a vote-buying scheme to illegal voting to malfunctioning voting machines in Clark County. In the end, the judge found that they had failed to prove their allegations “under any standard of proof.” The Nevada Supreme Court unanimously affirmed.

In Michigan, the Trump campaign’s lawsuit over ballot counting rested on a poll watcher’s account of what someone else had told her. The judge rejected it as “inadmissible hearsay within hearsay.” In another Michigan case, a judge heard evidence on claims of fraud at Detroit’s TCF Center and found the plaintiffs’ version of events “incorrect and not credible.”

In Georgia, every ballot was counted three times, including a full hand count. There, one of the Trump campaign’s first lawsuits fell apart within a day. It concerned just 53 absentee ballots in Chatham County. County election officials testified that the ballots had arrived on time, and the judge dismissed the case at the end of the hearing.

Then there is Pennsylvania, where Rudy Giuliani appeared in court himself. He told the judge there was “widespread, nationwide voter fraud.” But under questioning, he admitted, “This is not a fraud case.”

In dismissing the lawsuit, the judge wrote that the campaign had offered “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations.” On appeal, a Trump-appointed judge wrote for a unanimous panel: “Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

Many of these cases were reviewed by appeals courts or state supreme courts with Republican-appointed or conservative majorities. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up any of them.

The Big Lie survives because reporters fail to push back on claims like Bannon’s. The lie that Trump won the 2020 election is a disease, and every suggestion that Trump never had his day in court helps it spread.

Over the past six years, that disease has infected our politics and our culture, and it has bred new conspiracy theories along the way. It drove insurrectionists to storm the U.S. Capitol. And it helped Trump win a second term, and with it a second chance to undermine our democracy.

To fight back, we must correct the record — not just for the past but for the future.

Categories Arizona, Elections, Fraud, Lies, Trump

Students Pay the Price for Failing Voucher Programs Where Education is a Fiction

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2026 //
0

Bruce Baker has written a sterling article about the real price of voucher programs. Who pays? Students.

Universal voucher programs like those of Arizona and Florida provide little, if any, educational benefit to students. They attend schools where teachers need not be certified or experienced. Their curriculum is non-existent. Their standards are phony.

The state pays for them not to get an education. The same may be said of home schooling, where in many cases uneducated parents are sharing their lack of an education with their children.

The result of this negligence is that these young people will earn less money over their lifetimes and have limited opportunities because of their mediocre or non-existent education.

The parents and the state are stigmatizing children by giving them a voucher.

The infamous federal report called “A Nation at Risk” warned about “a rising tide of mediocrity.” Today’s vouchers and home schoolers are responsible for “a rising tide of failure.”

Baker writes:

Back in January 2013, I wrote about three Kansas judges who saw right through the state’s claim that deep funding cuts would cause no harm. The Shawnee County District Court panel in Gannon v. State of Kansas (decision, p. 188) put it this way:

Simply, school opportunities do not repeat themselves and when the opportunity for a formal education passes, then for most, it is most likely gone. We all know that the struggle for an income very often – too often – overcomes the time needed to prepare intellectually for a better one.

If the position advanced here is the State’s full position, it is experimenting with our children which have no recourse from a failure of the experiment.

The Kansas experiment was a legislature cutting school budgets and betting that nobody would be hurt. That was bad enough. But at least in Kansas, the children were still in schools. There were still teachers, curricula, and test results that a court could look at.

A decade later, Arizona and Florida are running a different experiment. They hand public money to parents, place few limits on how it is spent, and ask almost nothing about whether the child learned anything. If that experiment fails for a particular child, who answers for it? Who does the 18-year-old sue?

The new experiment: money out, no questions asked

Arizona’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, expanded to all students in 2022, now serves more than 100,000 children and is expected to cost over $1 billion a year. Florida followed in 2023 with universal eligibility and a homeschool ESA, the Personalized Education Program (PEP), worth roughly $8,000 per child.

Consider what the statutes actually require of the parent. Under A.R.S. § 15-2402, the Arizona parent signs an agreement to use “a portion” of the money to provide instruction in reading, grammar, mathematics, social studies and science. That is the whole of the academic obligation. Then comes the remarkable part, subsection I: a signed agreement “constitutes school attendance” for purposes of the state’s compulsory attendance law. The contract is the education, as far as the state is concerned.

There is no testing requirement for ESA students in Arizona, no curriculum approval, no portfolio, and no evaluator. Even homeschool guides that are friendly to the program say so plainly. The state checks receipts, not learning.

Florida asks slightly more. PEP families must submit a student learning plan and have the child take a nationally norm-referenced test each year, with results sent to the scholarship funding organization (FLDOE PEP FAQ; Step Up PEP Family Handbook). But what triggers loss of funding is failing to take and submit the test, not the score. A child can test at a first-grade level in tenth grade and the money keeps flowing.

That is the experiment. The state funds the choice, defines the choice as compliance, and measures nothing that would tell anyone whether the child is learning.

What the money has bought

Reporters in both states have spent three years documenting what this money buys. Some of it was approved under the rules. Some was flagged as improper only after the fact. All of it was spent from accounts that exist, by law, to educate a child.

Baker here posts a chart that includes tickets to theme parks, video games, pianos, lingerie, jewelry, gift cards, payments to parents, trampolines, kayaks, appliances, paddle boards, LEGO sets, dolls, stuffed animals, surfboards, treadmills, swing sets, and much more. Open the link to see his chart.

In fairness to the programs’ defenders, Arizona’s education department maintains that most purchases are valid and that misspending is a small share of the total. Florida’s administrator, Step Up For Students, requires a statement of educational benefit for theme park tickets and caps them at $500 a year (WFTV). When Florida legislators tried to tighten the list in 2024, families lobbied against it and the restrictions failed.

But “small share” is the wrong frame. Arizona auto-approved purchases under $2,000 — over a million requests and $124 million — to clear a backlog, with plans to audit later. Of 18,000 parents flagged for $10.3 million in banned purchases, only six were referred for prosecution. And every audit is an audit of purchases. None asks the only question that matters to the child: was anyone teaching me to read?

The legal question: who does the 18-year-old sue?

Imagine a young woman turning 18 in Phoenix or Orlando. For a decade, her ESA paid for theme park passes, a television, a trampoline and a lot of LEGO. Nobody ever taught her to read beyond a primer. She has no transcript and no diploma. The state that funded all of it called her “in attendance” the entire time. What are her options?

I’m not a lawyer, and what follows is a policy researcher’s tour of the doctrinal terrain, not legal advice. But the terrain is not encouraging.

1. Sue the parent. Arizona abolished parental immunity in Broadbent v. Broadbent (1995), replacing it with a “reasonable and prudent parent” standard. Florida has never gone that far. So in Arizona, at least, a negligence claim against a parent is not barred at the door. But she would then run into the doctrine of educational malpractice. Since Peter W. v. San Francisco Unified School District (1976), courts have refused to recognize a duty of care for academic outcomes. They cite the lack of a workable standard of care, uncertain causation, and the burden on schools. If courts won’t hold trained, licensed educators to a duty to teach a child to read, a court is unlikely to impose one on a parent the legislature expressly freed from any measurable standard.

A narrower theory may be stronger: misappropriation. The Arizona statute says ESA money may be used “only” for the expenses of the qualified student. A diamond necklace or a family Disneyland trip is not that. A custodial-account or constructive-trust theory, treating the parent as having diverted money held for the child’s benefit, at least fits the facts. But that recovers the misspent dollars, not the lost education. And a judgment against a parent with no assets is worth little.

2. Sue the vendor. The private school, the online program, the tutoring center or the “ESA-approved” camp are private actors. A contract or consumer-fraud claim might reach a vendor that took money and delivered nothing. But a vendor that delivered exactly what was purchased (a ski pass, a paddleboard) did nothing wrong. And educational malpractice bars claims that the instruction itself was inadequate.

3. Sue the state, under the federal Constitution. This is where the Kansas panel’s warning bites hardest. San Antonio v. Rodriguez (1973) held there is no fundamental federal right to education. DeShaney v. Winnebago County(1989) held the Due Process Clause generally imposes no duty on the state to protect a child from harm inflicted by a private actor, including a parent. The one federal appellate ruling to recognize a right to a basic minimum education, Gary B. v. Whitmer (6th Cir. 2020), was vacated when the full court took it up after the case settled. She might argue that the state created the danger by funding the deprivation and deeming it lawful attendance. That theory is untested in this setting.

4. Sue the state, under the state constitution. Both states have education clauses. Florida’s is among the strongest in the country, declaring education a “paramount duty” and requiring a “high quality system of free public schools.” In Bush v. Holmes (2006), the Florida Supreme Court struck down a voucher program for diverting public funds to private schools outside that uniform system. But in Citizens for Strong Schools v. State Board of Education (2019), a divided court held that “high quality” offered no judicially manageable standard. More fundamentally, state adequacy litigation produces prospective, system-wide remedies. It is not a damages action for an individual who already aged out.

5. Ask the state to step in. Ordinarily, a child receiving no education might trigger truancy enforcement or an educational neglect inquiry. In Arizona, that door is closed by statute: the signed ESA agreement constitutes school attendance under § 15-2402(I). When the state does catch misspending, its remedy is to suspend the account or send it to collections. Any money recovered goes back to the state, not to the child whose education it was meant to buy.

So the honest answer to the legal question is: almost none. The 18-year-old is, in the Kansas panel’s words, a subject of an experiment with no recourse from its failure. The difference is that in Kansas, the state was cutting the budget of institutions still obligated to teach her. In Arizona and Florida, the state has written itself out of that obligation and handed the obligation, and the money, to someone the law does not hold to any measurable standard.

Please open the link and finish reading this excellent critique.

Categories Arizona, Education Reform, Florida, Privatization, School Choice, Students, Vouchers

Note to Elite Media: Stop Promoting Rahm Emanuel!

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2026 //
14

Paul Waldman was a reporter for The Washington Post . He now writes a Substack blog. As this article shows, he is a journalist with insight and a long memory. A certain sector of the Democratic elite likes him.

Paul does not. Neither do I.

Back when Rahm was President Obama’s chief of staff, I was invited to meet with the top officials of the Obama administration at the Old Execurive Office Building (next door to the White House). Rahm was there (but strangely, not Arne Duncan), along with Melody Barnes, the chief of the President’s Domestic Policy Council, and Roberto Rodriguez, the President’s education advisor.

I answered a series of questions:

*What did I think of merit pay? It never works.

*What did I think of Common Core? Try it out in 3-5 states and see what happens, said I.

*What did I think of Race to the Top? Not much, said I.

Needless to say, they disregarded all my warnings.

Rahm jumped in to ask, “Why are Catholic schools so much better than public schools?”

I explained that Catholic schools do not have to accept students they do not want and they are free to expel students who persistently misbehave. Even if they never use that power, they have it.

I asked Rahm if he had met my son, who had worked on business deals with his brother Ari, who ran a major talent agency.. Rahm said, “Never heard of him.”

He might have said something polite, like “no, but I will ask my brother.” But Rahm is rude, always.

With that, he stormed out of the room.

I understood why people think he is obnoxious.

Then, when he closed 50 Chicago public schools in a single day, I wrote him off as a dunce about education and children.

Waldman writes:

To a certain kind of political reporter, Rahm Emanuel is a compelling figure, a politician of deep wisdom and experience, just the kind of person who ought to be given serious consideration as a candidate for president. And if the voters themselves aren’t all that interested? Well that can change, with a sufficient volume of lengthy profiles and interviews.

And so a campaign has begun to make Rahm happen, engineered by the man himself but with the active assistance of a good portion of the elite news media. The good news is that Rahm is not going to happen, because he represents everything that Democratic voters are eager to reject at this moment.

Rahm is everywhere, whether you asked for him or not

Here’s Rahm being interviewed by CNBC. Here’s Rahm being interviewed by Fox News. Here’s Rahm being interviewed by CBS News. Here’s Rahm being interviewed by Politico. Here’s a big profile of Rahm in the New York Times, which says “he has emerged as a behind-the-scenes force in his party’s push to flip the House this fall.” And going back a few months, here’s Politico saying “His pugilism and his critique of the party’s leftward lurch will create a gauntlet his would-be rivals will have to navigate.” Everyone will have to deal with Rahm, so powerful a presence is he!

Readers under 30 or so might not have a deep familiarity with Emanuel, so the short version is this: He’s had a long list of jobs (campaign operative, fundraiser, White House staffer, congressman, White House chief of staff, mayor of Chicago, Wall Street rainmaker, ambassador to Japan), in which he earned a reputation as, to put it plainly, an asshole. Reporters profiling him will describe incidents of him shouting and swearing at people, or mention that sometimes he has been referred to as “Rahmbo,” but what it comes down to is that he’s an asshole.

That isn’t necessarily disqualifying, even if it should be; lots of politicians are abusive to people around them, as are bosses in a million workplaces. But unlike some of them, Emanuel isn’t a silver-tongued charmer whose charisma will hypnotize voters on the campaign trail.

What is disqualifying, however, is that Rahm’s inclinations run toward caution and centrism, and that is the opposite of what Democratic voters want at this moment. It’s not just about ideology, it’s about a style of politics those voters are absolutely fed up with, one driven by the belief that the way to succeed is to constantly look over your right shoulder, not do anything that might make Republicans too angry, and not just spend your time chasing independent voters but do so by trimming back your ambitions until they’re a shapeless lump of timidity and compromise.

To me, the emblematic Rahm Emanuel moment came in early 2010, when Democrats were struggling to pass the Affordable Care Act. For a brief time they had a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate (though some of those were very conservative Democrats), and as they approached the finish line, needing only to get the two chambers to agree on a single bill, Ted Kennedy died and a Republican, Scott Brown, won a surprise victory to replace him. At that point, Emanuel counseled retreat: throw the big bill in the trash, then try to pass a bill to expand coverage for low-income kids, something far less ambitious but likelier to get bipartisan support. In addition to misreading what Republicans would accept (absolutely nothing, then as now) it amounted to abject surrender. As Molly Ball reported in Time magazine, Nancy Pelosi wasn’t having it:

Pelosi told the White House to rein in Emanuel and get him to stop pestering her members about his “eensy weensy bill.” At a meeting in the Oval Office, Pelosi confronted the subject directly. “Mr. President, I know there are some on your staff who want to take the namby-pamby approach,” she said. “That’s unacceptable.” Obama took her side. They were going to go for it.

She was right, and the ACA passed. If Emanuel had had his way, it wouldn’t have happened.

The problem is not that he believes in nothing, it’s what he does believe in

One might look at where Emanuel is now and say he’s changed, at least a little. In July he went to Israel and gave a speech excoriating Benjamin Netanyahu, and now says the Israeli government should no longer get support from the U.S. taxpayer (though he says they should be free to buy American weapons with their own money if they want, just like other countries). He’s still advocating small-bore policy changes, but ones that are updated for the present moment, like a ban on lawmakers betting on prediction markets and a mandatory retirement age of 75 across the federal government.

I’m sure there will be more to come, as Emanuel tries to present himself as a man for this moment. But while he may evolve a little bit here or there, he’s still the same guy he always was, and that’s the problem. He’s the avatar of a certain kind of Democratic centrist politics, one that yearns to win the votes of Republicans but views progressives with little but contempt. Like many others, he believes that the way to win votes across the center is to engage in some vigorous hippie-punching (Rahm is eager to talk about how awful the DSA is), then present some ideologically denuded, tiny policy ideas under the guise of “pragmatism.”

If he really believed in those policy ideas, that would be one thing. But it’s never been clear that Rahm believes in much of anything. He wants power, but he has never seemed animated by doing much with power; he has never presented a vision of how he’d like government and society to work that goes much beyond “What we have now, but a little better.”

Back in 2020, Democrats had no greater goal than getting rid of Donald Trump, which is the biggest reason Joe Biden got their nomination; he was widely seen as the safest and most electable choice. But this is a very different moment. Yes, they’re desperate to win, and still will be in 2028. But even more, they’ll be drawn to candidates who can sell them on a vision of something deeper, more fundamental, and more lasting.

That’s not who Rahm is, and to his credit (I guess) he’s not trying to pretend it is. Which is why I’m fairly sure that as the primary process goes on, we’re likely to see him coming in 10th or so in all the polls, even as he gets inordinate attention in the news media.

There have been times when his brand of corporate-approved, right-leaning centrism was attractive to voters; in many ways that what his old boss Bill Clinton offered in 1992. But this is not 1992, and Rahm Emanuel is no Bill Clinton. Fortunately.

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Democrats, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm

I’m Off on the Road to Morocco!

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2026 //
22

Yesterday, I took a flight to Casablanca with Brooklyn friends who belong to the same church. They are Catholic, I am Jewish, and we are not likely to encounter many active churches or synagogues. Their annual trips are well-organized, and this is the first time I was available to join them. We will be touring in Rabat, Fez, and Marrakech.

The blog will continue without interruption.

I’ll stay in touch.

P.S. If you are a film buff or as old as I, you may recall that Bing Crosby and Bob Hope made a series of “on the road” movies in the 1940s, all very silly and good fun. My 31-year-old grandson reminded me that we watched “The Road to Morocco” together when he was 7 years old. Now, I’m on the road, but not with Bing or Bob or Dorothy Lamour.

Categories Ravitch, Diane
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