Retaliation

Kelly Townsend, desperately seeking attention

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Earlier this year, Governor Doug Ducey put the kibosh on some anti-vaxxer bills moving through the Arizona legislature. You may recall that this provoked the very special kind of crazy that is regressive Republican Rep. Kelly Townsend (R-Mesa). Governor Doug Ducey is a communist! State Rep. Kelly Townsend says mandatory vaccinations are ‘Communist’: Signing her post, … Read more

Arizona GOP renews its war on public education

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Last year Governor Doug Ducey was forced into increasing his offer of a one percent pay increase for public school teachers to an incremental twenty percent pay increase over two years in response to the Red For Ed teacher strike in Arizona. Governor Ducey suggested at the time that this was just a down payment on restoring massive cuts to public education since the Great Recession and subsequent years over the past decade. Governor Ducey went so far as to market himself as the “education governor” in his reelection bid.

Now that the election is past, that down payment on public education funding talk is nowhere to be found. In his State of The State address on Monday, “the governor talked mostly about programs and initiatives he’s rolled out before, such as the Arizona Teacher’s Academy and his school safety plan. He did not propose any new funding plans, sticking to his 20 by 2020 plan and doubling down on his promise for no tax hikes.“ What Gov. Doug Ducey said (and didn’t say) about education in State of the State address:

Ducey said he would continue to “hold the line” on raising taxes, signaling a lack of support for any education-related tax increases, possibly like the one state Sen. Sylvia Allen, R-Snowflake, proposed before the legislative session even started.

The governor didn’t address the possibility of finding new revenue streams for education.

He did pledge to keep his promise to raise teachers’ salaries by 20 percent by 2020.

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Tyrant Trump has an ‘enemies list,’ abuses power to retaliate against his critics

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I have been trying to avoid discussing the new season of Celebrity Apprentice: White House Edition with Amorosa Manigault-Newman.

But last night I happened to catch an interview of former CIA Director John Brennan on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell which was scheduled after this tweet yesterday:

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Lawrence O’Donnell wanted to know what Brennan meant by his comment “so dangerous to our Nation.” Watch the interview.

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It would appear that our egomaniacal narcissist Twitter-troll-in-chief “Dear Leader” must have been watching (although he would deny it) or reading his Twitter responses, because today the always vindictive and petty Trump revoked former CIA Director Brennan’s security clearance:

President Donald Trump has decided to revoke former CIA Director John Brennan’s clearance for access to classified information, he said in a statement read by press secretary Sarah Sanders Wednesday.

The courtesy of allowing a former administration official to retain security clearance has been “outweighed by the risk posed by his erratic conduct and behavior,” Trump said in the statement. “Mr. Brennan has a history that calls into question his objectivity and credibility.”

He added that Brennan “has recently leveraged his status … to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations, wild outbursts on the internet and on television, about this administration.”

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White House threatens foreign service officers for their Dissent Channel Memo

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Last week I told you about the Mass exodus at the State Department.

Career foreign service officers who remain at State this week expressed their opposition to President Trump’s executive order for a Muslim travel ban and a religious test for entry into the United States.

Nancy LeTourneau at the Political Animal blog reports, Foreign Service Officers Join the Dissent:

According to the folks at Lawfare, opposition to that order has now been joined by hundreds of foreign service officers and diplomats at the State Department. They’re using the State Department’s Dissent Channel, which was created in 1971 in response to concerns within the Department over the government’s handling of the Vietnam War.

Employees have drafted a dissent memo (which you can read at the Lawfare link above) stating their opposition to the president’s executive order, saying that “the ban” will not achieve its ends, is likely to be counterproductive, and it even offers a more pragmatic way forward. It ends with this:

We do not need to place a blanket ban that keeps 220 million people – men, women and children – from entering the United States to protect our homeland. We do not need to alienate entire societies to stay safe. And we do not need to sacrifice our reputation as a nation which is open and welcoming to protect our families. It is well within our reach to create a visa process which is more secure, which affects our American values, and which would make the Department proud.

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