While thinking Trump a worthless bloviating blackguard, what of DeSantis?
click to enlarge and read
What proves interesting, using the same search engine, for news limited to "past week" three searches show differing results, for the same staged DeSantis event.
The page in the opening screen capture was the first item returned, third search.
You can check the footer on the capture, or seek out the page itself, but key is the item's second paragraph:
Underscoring that the new law would give Sunshine State families the
option to send children to the school of their choice, the governor put
pen to paper while at Christopher Columbus High School in Miami, an
all-boys Catholic school run by the Marist Brothers. The law
dramatically expands the eligibility criteria of the Florida Empowerment
Scholarship (FES), freeing all Florida parents to send their children
to a school other than one in their zoned public district.
Shameless whoring, or would you call it something else? Parents always have the choice to not utilize publicly funded public schools, via paying tuition for private schooling or taking the time to invest into home schooling. What is new, public money, steered by individual parents, wise or unwise, bigoted or not, but not steered in a fiduciary capacity by publicly elected boards of citizens, into universal schooling.
Instead, public money available to parents favoring whatever backwater thing a parent might prefer over universal public schooling.
This is money paid equally by childless people, as by parents. Parental status is irrelevant to the requirement to pay. The aim of public schools of course is to grow collectively decently able citizens to keep a system of democracy running, decently.
It is not to indoctrinate youth to any creed or privately held belief set, but to seek to achieve uniform levels of adult citizen capability. Whether successful to a large degree or not, it has that public purpose. It is not to coddle individual parents and their biases.
What the man - DeSantis - is doing is best effort to undermine public education, likely because educated people don't like him and vice versa.
Or call it something else, if you'd like.
And there is the gutless intentionally deceptive use by proponents of vouchers in Florida of the euphemism, "Florida’s School Choice Scholarships" to mean nothing beyond plain and simple public money vouchers being made available for private, often religious, competitors of public schools, tarted up in less offensive words.
Major news outlets, in this instance, call it what it is:
"This bill is a major game changer," DeSantis said before signing the legislation. "It's about results."
The
governor speaking at Christopher Columbus High School in Miami on March
27, 2023 before signing HB 1 that expands the state's school voucher
program.
CBS News Miami
But critics of the legislation,
introduced and approved by the Republican-controlled state legislature,
said it would siphon dollars from public schools and minority
communities would be disproportionately affected.
"If he signs, he
takes us back to a growing Jim Crow trend that will impact communities
of color, LBGTQIA+, low- income families and needs to be stopped!"
Debbie Deland, president of Florida Now, said in an emailed statement.
"They will move our youth's minds, hearts, and souls in our richly
diverse state."
DeSantis saying, "It's about results," means "It's about his Presidential ambitions as a tawdry, crass, but predictable measured shot to boost his chances in whatever way he feels he can to get a leg up on Trump."
In effect - Beggaring public education in a State of not too smart locals, and of well-to-do elderly retiree transients from North America's northern latitudes, the "snow birds," who seek comfort in declining years rather than being fired up over keeping democracy's flame strong and universal, i.e., aims of good citizenship seems at Crabgrass to be largely irrelevant to DeSantis, because he views policy as little but taking nakedly ambitious steps toward running against Trump.
From that opening item for this post - his hair is perfect.
_______________UPDATE____________
Yesterday, the day this post was published, Seattle Times carried NY Times op-ed posting titled,
What ‘parents’ rights’ is really about
As expected from source and title, the author was unsympathetic to "Parent's Right" dogma, however dressed and tarted up to look legit, with the op-ed closing:
The culture war that conservatives are currently waging over
education is, like the culture wars in other areas of American society, a
cover for a more material and ideological agenda. The screaming over
“wokeness” and “DEI” is just another Trojan horse for a relentless
effort to dismantle a pillar of American democracy that, for all of its
flaws, is still one of the country’s most powerful engines for economic
and social mobility.
Ultimately, then, the “parents’ rights”
movement is not about parents at all; it’s about whether this country
will continue to strive for a more equitable and democratic system of
education, or whether we’ll let a reactionary minority drag us as far
from that goal as possible, in favor of something even more unequal and
hierarchical than what we already have.
Jamelle Bouie is a New York Times opinion columnist writing about politics, history and culture.
And, as noted earlier, the "parental rights" assault on public education also is about the right of every childless parent to see his/her tax payments to NOT go toward private, unaccountable operations and parties for an "education" replete on one level with the toxic elitism of boarding and prep schools, and on another level replete with religions indoctrination into belief systems some like and others fear, or at least question as to whether such indoctrination is in any sense "education" rather than propagandizing young minds into strait-jacketed dogma of a patriarchial and dogmatic hierarchical nature that many believe to be conterproductive to widespread liberty of thought as well as anathema to those valuing freedom from religion.
Being taxed to support somebody else's agenda of religious bias is, ultimately, a burden the nation's founders well understood from centuries of European history of death and mayhem prior to the Enlightenment, and one those founders collectively wished to suppress and avoid in a land founded upon the value of individual liberty and upon freedom of a society to be all it could be, absent false impositions.
Smiling well combed and expensively dressed political operatives may posture, but they should not convince. An ignorant minority might be convinced, but that is why we have public education, so the majority might see through intentional rhetorical deception toward the guiding goal of maintaining us as a free and happy national majority of people wanting fairness in government action.
Where subsidizing non-majority ways of indoctrination with a history of oppression and strife is unfair and burdens the common good, education can teach ways to organize and to resist.
__________FURTHER UPDATE__________
While DeSantis' antics in Florida gained Crabgrass attention, a parallel dog and pony show went on in the U.S. House, with my Rep., Tom Emmer (unfortunately) whipping the dog (or was it the pony), to get a GOP majority to pass a "Parents Bill of Rights" gimmick thing where it will die on the shelf in the Senate.
Rather than doing real business with a chance of something, this symbolic dumb bill was instead invested with time and effort by over-paid individuals (paid to work, not to fritter and posture time away on DOA show-off stuff).
The most dishonest headline about the vain show? Rupert's:
Democrats believe parents don’t have the right to raise their own kids
Dems will shelf the stupid show-bill because Parents, individually, do not have any right to dictate limits, ways and means of conducting public education in America.
That, we all know too, despite the Emmer whipped idiocy.
Educators set education policy, much as Physicians set medical community standards. Educators know what they are doing. Would that Emmer did.
Actually, Emmer knew well what he was doing - demagogiing for the hell of it.
Knowing the show-off crap would not make a difference, possibly also knowing it was a damned bad idea too, but that's a guess.
The most honest commentary on the dog/pony show? Breitbart, coincidentally in mid-item:
While the whipping work was a weeks-long effort, the momentum for parents bills of rights traces back to 2021.
During that year, a confluence of issues, including school
administrators implementing draconian coronavirus policies, infusing
critical race theory into curricula, and forcing transgender ideology on
young students, spurred heated school board meetings nationwide and
ultimately contributed to now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) winning an underdog gubernatorial campaign in Virginia.
The new bill would, for instance, require parents to
be made aware of a child seeking to use a pronoun or bathroom that did
not align with their sex.
Much effort; because Youngkin used it to pole vault into the Gov Mansion in VA so it must be a size that fits all; and dumb as the bathroom bill mania and trans-hate.
That being a good summary, stop there.
Only other thing to note - tail end of Breitbart's coverage -
The five Republicans who voted against it were Reps. Matt Rosendale
(MT), Matt Gaetz (FL), Andy Biggs (AZ), Mike Lawler (NY), and Ken Buck
(CO).
Emmer during an appearance on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Saturday
said of the legislation, “House Republicans are actually governing, and
we’re governing and the Democrats are turning their backs on parents
and students.”
First paragraph, not enough incentive was offered to five of the flock to make a difference. Second paragraph, proves what a dumb fuck Emmer can be when he really works at it.
