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The new federal Education Freedom Tax Credit will soon allow parents, including parents earning $500,000 a year or more, to send their children to private schools at public expense. In fact, many of them already send their children to private schools, and they will now be reimbursed by federal tax dollars.

It’s also likely to backfire on the religious right. They better hope that the kids skip the assigned reading, much less actual discussion and debate about it in class. As many an ex-evangelical can tell you, direct exposure to what the Bible actually says is often the first step to walking away from Christian fundamentalism altogether.

Last month, The Washington Post reported on a whistleblower disclosure from senior Social Security Administration executive Jeremiah Schofield, filed with Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. It describes a plan, devised by Elon Musk’s DOGE and the Department of Homeland Security, to enter nearly 2.7 million living immigrants into the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File, the database used by banks, employers and agencies to confirm who has died. To be marked dead is to be severed from wages, banking and all social benefits.

Don’t expect members of my profession to track down the story. We’re too busy listening to Donald Trump berate NATO, lie about his investments, revive the Red Scare and call Iranian leaders “scum,” while at the same time declaring we’ve defeated Iran in a war everyone believes we shouldn’t have started in the first place. (For those keeping track, Trump has claimed he has ended the conflict close to 40 times. I can’t count how often he’s “completely obliterated” the Islamic Republic’s military, even though they keep firing missiles and sending drones against us.)

Despite his own warnings, Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years, including in May’s runoff that made him the Republican nominee for U.S. senator, according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

It’s also likely to backfire on the religious right. They better hope that the kids skip the assigned reading, much less actual discussion and debate about it in class. As many an ex-evangelical can tell you, direct exposure to what the Bible actually says is often the first step to walking away from Christian fundamentalism altogether.

The former president worried that a new deal with Iran will be far worse than the one that was in place until 2018

James Talarico has been found guilty of quoting Jesus. The sentence he uttered, according to right-wing media, was “demonic” and “blasphemous,” exposing him as a “fake Christian.” Talarico is running for the U.S. Senate in Texas on a platform The New Yorker recently described as basically the New Testament. One Newsmax host accused him of using fake Bible passages.

James Talarico has been found guilty of quoting Jesus. The sentence he uttered, according to right-wing media, was “demonic” and “blasphemous,” exposing him as a “fake Christian.” Talarico is running for the U.S. Senate in Texas on a platform The New Yorker recently described as basically the New Testament. One Newsmax host accused him of using fake Bible passages.

The investigation examined potential criminal violations of the Clean Water Act by the multistate mining operations largely run by Justice’s son, Jay, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.

Pulte’s grandfather, at one point one of the wealthiest men in the world, built a Fortune 500 company and gave tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to charity before his 2018 death. He was also friends with Doug Coe, died in 2017 after decades leading the secretive, controversial Fellowship Foundation that built and sustained a global right-wing network including dictators, lobbyists, and corrupt millionaires largely united against labor, LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.

But I stuck with MAGA. The fear of losing my community terrified me. For the better part of a year, I spent myriad sleepless nights wrestling with my conscience.

A CBS spokesperson rushed to the defense of the network’s censorship apparatus, giving statements to industry trade publications like Variety and Deadline, claiming that CBS Studios had actually financed and secretly produced the public-access episode in collaboration with Monroe Community Media. “As is our regular practice, we send copyright notices to unauthorized websites that post copyrighted content from CBS and our network/studio talent,” the spokesperson asserted, insisting the copyright enforcement was simply routine intellectual-property protection.

A few months after their friendship began, in a November 2016 email included in the FBI files, Epstein sent Chopra a link to a Daily Mail article about a “troubled woman” who claimed that she had been assaulted by Donald Trump when she was 13 years old, at a party hosted by Epstein. (The article reported that those allegations had not been substantiated, and that the woman’s lawsuit against Trump was dismissed.)

Hemorrhaging cash and in bankruptcy court, Spirit Airlines is on the brink of liquidation. The nation’s largest budget airline has been struggling for years and has been forced to drastically downsize by selling planes and cutting routes. With the federal government reportedly close to stepping in with a $500 million bailout plan, Trump apparently wants to buy it outright and run it.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can’t seem to leave John Dehlin alone. Church leadership excommunicated this former graduate of Brigham Young University in 2015, charging him with apostasy for allegedly claiming the Book of Mormon is “fraudulent” and a work “of fiction.” Dehlin believes his support of same-sex marriage and women’s equality in the church was also a major factor in the decision, a position the church disputes. In 2017, a major leak of internal church documents showed that LDS leadership shared a PowerPoint presentation accusing multiple people and organizations of “leading people away from the gospel.” Dehlin, who also has a doctorate in psychology from Utah State University, was on the list.

In the chaotic minutes after news broke that a gunman had attempted to breach security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a familiar pattern unfolded on social media. A chorus of pro-Trump influencers and officials arrived at the same eerily specific and singular conclusion: The country needs Donald Trump’s ballroom.

This would be a monumental step towards committing genocide. If you can strip citizenship for z, y, or z reasons, you can strip citizenship for a, b, or c reasons too. Then, you take those “noncitizens” and put them in a camp. Then you evolve your “solution” to the Jewish Non-citizen Question into a FINAL Solution.

None of this matters to the people who ordered these charges. What the indictment does do, quite effectively, is provide a scaffolding for a broader disinformation campaign. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed on Tuesday that the SPLC was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” And almost immediately, conservative media figures and politicians seized on it as proof of all of their long-standing conspiracies.

The latest incarnation of this belief system arrives in the form of Objection AI, a project that presents itself as a kind of “truth tribunal” for journalism. The program is the brainchild of Aron D’Souza, an Australian lawyer whose most notable professional achievement remains his role in helping orchestrate entrepreneur and investment capitalist Peter Thiel’s legal strategy to secretly bankroll the lawsuit that destroyed Gawker. (After the outlet outed Thiel as gay in 2007, he backed former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan’s successful privacy lawsuit for publishing his sex tape.) The money behind Objection comes from that same ecosystem: investors like Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, a crypto evangelist and prediction-market enthusiast.

n the 2024 election, nearly one in three Americans voted using mail-in or absentee ballots, accounting for some 48 million votes. And despite persistent rhetoric against it, even President Donald Trump votes by mail. Nevertheless, Trump further admonished mail voting while pushing the SAVE America Act, which could radically change how people vote ahead of the midterms. “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” he said to press in Memphis, Tenn., Monday. “I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all.”

The “dumb/smart” video is cringeworthy now, especially since Vance is clearly using kindergarten vocabulary so that Trump, who is seated behind the Resolute Desk next to him, will understand the flattery. But it will look much worse in the future, once all doubt that this war is a massive failure has been removed and the vice president is asked if he still has faith in Trump’s towering intellect.

Lindsey is a slimebag

In February, the Department of Justice joined a lawsuit against Los Angeles Unified School District brought by conservative activists, seeking to use the 14th Amendment to repeal a desegregation policy previously ruled unconstitutional.

Hegseth’s language choices and petulant tone do not demonstrate an ignorance of what rhetorical situations demand of him; instead, they reflect a refusal to be emasculated by such cumbersome norms.

The furious reaction to “My Bed” would recur in the coming decades in response to any number of things done by young women: blogging, activism, making music, dancing, writing for TV. Male antiheroes dominated prestige-cable dramas, outsized and magnetic; their dubious morality and unreliable narration made them figures of fascination, if not outright envy. But as women characters likewise grew weirder, messier and less likable, their very existence was treated as an existential threat: How could women continue to clean up messes if they were the ones making them?

Second verse same as the first

According to the Journal, an intelligence community whistleblower filed a highly-classified complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG), an independent watchdog office, in May 2025. Among the allegations was a claim that Gabbard’s office blocked the proper distribution of the complaint for eight months — including to Congress — for political reasons. Another alleged that lawyers, presumably from the DNI’s Office of General Counsel, failed to refer a potential crime to the Justice Department for political reasons.

I’m surprised that no one has pointed out that since she and her general counsel were subjects of the complaint, Gabbard and her office have a clear conflict of interest in making any determination. This made it clearly inappropriate for them to have played a substantive or even a procedural role in its handling. This is spelled out under a number of different authorities, including executive branch ethics regulations, which cover the DNI, and intelligence community constraints.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty revealed her office’s creation of the Transparency and Accountability Project in a statement on Monday. Per the announcement, TAP allows users to submit photos and videos “of potentially unlawful behavior by federal agents.”

In the modern context, I have a lot of trouble recognizing the humanity of people who say a five-year-old child is guilty for having elected Hamas. A five-year-old child probably doesn’t know there’s such a thing as Hamas and definitely was not granted a vote. The Israeli public, on the whole, has supported Israeli military violence in Gaza. If they were thinking with any rationality, they would be thinking, those five-year-old survivors, the ones who are not dead but who lost family members, who lost limbs, whose entire neighborhoods were completely destroyed, turned to rubble — what are they going to think in 10 or 15 years about the Israelis?

https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1r974cj/jeffrey_epstein_helped_fuel_the_campus_culture/

Before his death, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was a perfect example of these damaging ideas. He hyped the idea that having “a ton of children” is inherently virtuous, at least for white people. (He was less happy about Black people having a lot of kids.) But Kirk also argued that people should “get married young and have more kids than they can afford” — a message that was no doubt pleasing to his old-fashioned GOP donors who want their daughters to give up their careers and move back to their parents’ suburban neighborhoods. But for actual families, it’s a bad idea, especially as Republicans like Kirk want to simultaneously gut public education and social spending. Growing up in poverty isn’t fun or romantic. It’s stressful and leads to long-term problems for a lot of kids.

One fact about Steve Kangas is indisputable: This proud veteran of years of political argument in Internet discussion forums, and creator of an award-winning Web site devoted to liberal issues, is dead. On Feb. 8, his body was discovered in a men’s room on the 39th floor of a building in Pittsburgh — just outside the offices of conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.

I hope this worthless piece of shit dies soon but I hope it is a slow painful, pathetic death not a merciful quick passing from the shithole this fascist will leave behind in his wake.

The U.S. is in the grips of a historic measles surge, with more than 3,000 measles cases reported in 45 states across the country since the start of 2025. So far, two unvaccinated children have died from the disease. At least 920 people have been infected in South Carolina, and a similar number in Texas. In both states, nearly all infected individuals were unvaccinated.

The U.S. is in the grips of a historic measles surge, with more than 3,000 measles cases reported in 45 states across the country since the start of 2025. So far, two unvaccinated children have died from the disease. At least 920 people have been infected in South Carolina, and a similar number in Texas. In both states, nearly all infected individuals were unvaccinated.

In a heated interview with CNN‘s Dana Bash on Sunday, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino said his agents were the real “victims” in the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis protestor.

After a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it appeared the attack would result in a rare moment of reckoning in American politics — at least for a moment. Even hardline GOP politicians had distanced themselves from Trump, then President Joe Biden was in charge and Congress and the Department of Justice were investigating both the attack and the plot to overturn the 2020 election behind it.

Albany, Georgia’s lone hospital is supposed to treat people regardless of ability to pay. Residents turn elsewhere

Ray Madoff, a Boston College law professor, has written a new book: “The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy.” She recently spoke to Kara Miller, host of the podcast “It Turns Out,” about how the American tax system has changed over the past 40 years, widening inequality. Below is a condensed and edited version of the interview.

That’s because the Trump administration is rewriting the disability eligibility rules, ostensibly to modernize the program, in ways that will make it even harder for aging blue-collar workers like Tincher to get benefits. Hundreds of thousands just like him would become ineligible for aid.

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Religion professor Bradley Onishi, host of the “Spirit and Power” podcast, pointed out to Salon that there is “a long history of the evangelical subculture and the conservative Christian subcultures wanting to find mainstream legitimacy” by grabbing onto any celebrities they can claim are one of them. In the 90s and early 2000s, Onishi noted, evangelicals hyped everyone from U2 and Creed to Jessica Simpson and Katy Perry as “crossover Christian figures” who could sell the larger world on the idea that Christianity is hip and cool.

Capitalism is a scam, and a part of a broader scam culture, a scam tradition.

Capitalism is a scam, and a part of a broader scam culture, a scam tradition.

[When Carter] decided to establish himself as a supporter of disability rights during the 1976 presidential election, he visited Warm Springs to make that promise. After he was elected president, however, Carter often struggled to implement key parts of his agenda, and disability rights was no exception. So disabled people had to step in to do the work that the non-disabled simply couldn’t get done on their own.

Social media right now is an ocean of would-be propaganda for traditional heterosexual marriage. There are “tradwives,” who cosplay submissive housewives on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. They overlap with “family vloggers,” typically conservative Christians with large families who chronicle their daily lives online. The world of Christian right content online is far more interested in the maintenance and promotion of the patriarchal nuclear family than, say, the life of Jesus Christ, who died as one of those “childless cat ladies” Vance hates so much. Billionaire Peter Thiel has even funded a woman’s magazine, meant to compete with Vogue or Cosmopolitan, that positions extremely conservative marriage as the only true path for women’s lives.