Scott Boehmer

Category: Politics

  • Federal Cuts, Local Impact

    As a small, local example of the impact of how the Trump administration is recklessly cutting down the federal government, the school district my daughter attends has suddenly lost millions of dollars that helped it to attract teachers to work in the district’s highest-need schools.

    The U.S. Department of Education announced last month it was canceling $600 million worth of “divisive teacher training grants” across the country, including $11.78 million for Wake County Public Schools (WCPSS) to implement Project LEADERS (Leveraging Employee Advancement to Develop Excellence and Reach Success). 

    According to WCPSS, the grant helped hire 133 new teachers across the system’s 24 highest-need schools since January 2024, leading to a 40 percent reduction in teacher vacancies in those schools.  

    …

    The Department of Education characterized the grants it canceled as promoting critical race theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and anti-racism. In the case of Wake County Public Schools, the money covered $1,500 hiring bonuses, $2,500 retention bonuses, training sessions, and tuition assistance for beginning teachers.

    Chloe Courtney Bohl

    A Teacher Reflects on the Impacts of Federal Funding Cuts to Wake County Schools (Indy Week)

  • A Government against Free Speech

    Despite claiming to be defenders of free speech, the government is using control over research funding and ICE as tools to attack the practice. Its treatment of Columbia University and the students there who protested against Israel’s war against Gaza is a clear sign of how far the administration will go to punish those who say things they dislike and why universities should resist those efforts rather than trying to fight free speech on campus.

    Trump is following Putin’s, Xi’s, and Orban’s playbook. First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you.

    Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with.

    Intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.)

    Then focus on independent sources of information: the media and the universities. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews.

    Then go after the universities.

    Last week, Trump threatened in a social media post to punish any university that permits “illegal” protests. On Friday he cancelled hundreds of millions in grants and contracts with Columbia University.

    Robert Reich

    The universities are next (Robert Reich)

    Again and again, Columbia has shown a willingness to throw students, faculty, free speech, and academic freedom under the bus in acquiescence to a right-wing, pro-Israel narrative that treats support for Palestinians as an affront to Jewish safety.

    For all Columbia’s appeasement, President Donald Trump’s Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced last week that it would cancel $400 million in federal grants and contracts to the university.

    Natasha Lennard

    Columbia Bent Over Backward to Appease Right-Wing, Pro-Israel Attacks – And Trump Still Cut Federal Funding (The Intercept)

    This is exactly what happened to Mahmoud Khalil on Saturday night. Khalil, who graduated from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December, has a green card. His wife, who is eight months pregnant, is an American citizen.

    Immigration agents appeared at his apartment building and told him he was being detained. He now appears to be in a detention facility in Louisiana.

    Khalil did nothing illegal. He has not been charged with a crime. He expressed his political point of view — peacefully, non-violently, non-threateningly. That’s supposed to be permitted — dare I say even encouraged? — in a democracy.

    Robert Reich

    The Trump regime will arrest some of you in the middle of the night because you spoke your mind (Robert Reich)

  • Empathy

    Empathy, the ability to understand another person’s feelings and point-of-view, is essential to civilization. We should all be very skeptical of anyone who presents it as a flaw because what they’re really asking us to do is dehumanize those they view as adversaries.

    The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.

    Elon Musk

    Elon Musk wants to save Western civilization from empathy (CNN)

  • Deleting ‘Justice’, ‘Dignity’, and ‘Respect’

    “Justice.” “Dignity.” “Respect.”

    Those words are now considered red flags by the Army as it does a wide-ranging scrub of the massive amount of digital content the service has created online over the years — a purge that is leading to the removal of images and videos featuring women and minority soldiers from official platforms.

    The deletion of photos, video and other content is part of an order by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that all the military services eliminate online material not allowed by the Trump administration. Hegseth has pushed to eliminate any trace of diversity efforts, which has included policies and programs — and now media — that recognizes women and troops with minority backgrounds.

    Steve Beynon

    Army Deleting Online Content Related to Women, Minorities Using Key Words Like ‘Respect’ and ‘Dignity’ (Military.com)

  • Trump against Zelenskyy

    Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader.

    Kaja Kallas, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy

    EU’s top diplomat: ‘The free world needs a new leader’ (The Hill)

    We are perilously teetering towards a global disaster, one that few seem to fully comprehend. Today’s obscene spectacle in the Oval Office, where the President and Vice President of the United States berated the leader of a sovereign nation fighting for its survival, is not just a diplomatic misstep. It is a stark warning that we are perilously close to the collapse of the post-World War II international order.

    Mike Brock

    This is an Emergency (Notes From The Circus)

    Why did they hammer him? Because they don’t want Americans to view Zelensky as a hero. That view will complicate Trump’s plan to surrender Ukraine to Putin. Trump is ready to give Putin everything he wants. And then carve up the world.

    Make no mistake: Putin’s aggression will not end with Ukraine. By giving in to Putin, Trump is inviting him to invade Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland — and then the rest of Eastern Europe that used to be under Soviet and Russian control.

    Trump wants Canada, Greenland, Panama, and much else.

    Robert Reich

    Today’s disgusting scene (Robert Reich)

    If you want to watch the entire meeting, C-SPAN has it available. If you want to jump to where it goes off the rails, that starts to happen around 38:20 after a reporter asks President Trump a question about how some people see him as too aligned with Putin.

    Full Meeting between President Trump, VP Vance and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in Oval Office (C-SPAN)

  • Society’s Kind of Like a Video Essay

    I thought this was a well-crafted message about the focus on efficiency, not just in government, but as a goal for society as a whole. Is efficiency really what we should be aiming for?

    A Video Essay About Efficiency (Pillar of Garbage)

  • Let’s Play Fair?

    This is a good metaphor for why programs and policies to support groups that have long suffered under bigotry are important. The bigots have been cheating the system for years, so just putting an end to the cheating doesn’t suddenly make the whole game fair. And of course, many people making anti-woke and anti-DEI arguments aren’t actually interested in playing fair at all.

    Whites: 140
    Blacks: 3
    10 Seconds to Go

    A lot of people, most of them white, call affirmative action ”reverse discrimination” and wonder why black people shouldn’t be satisfied with a simple repudiation of discrimination of any kind. With its ruling striking down minority set-asides in city construction contracts, the Supreme Court seems to have decided that affirmative action programs in general violate white people’s right to equal protection.

    But in case a majority of their honors might still have an open mind on the subject, I offer a little metaphor in affirmative action’s defense. It comes in the form of a football metaphor because I have a feeling that the conservative majority on the Rehnquist Court might appreciate a football metaphor. So here goes:

    The White Team and the Black Team are playing the last football game of the season. The White Team owns the stadium, owns the referees and has been allowed to field nine times as many players. For almost four quarters, the White Team has cheated on every play and, as a consequence, the score is White Team 140, Black Team 3. Only 10 seconds remain in the game, but as the White quarterback huddles with his team before the final play, a light suddenly shines from his eyes.

    ”So how about it, boys?” he asks his men. ”What do you say from here on we play fair?”

    Andrew Ward

    The DEI Argument is Stupid. But Here’s How to Win It. (The Rip Current)

  • A Purge of the Military

    Trump announced he was dismissing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown and replacing him with Air Force Lt. Gen. John Dan “Razin” Caine – an extraordinary move since Caine is retired, according to an Air Force official, and is not a four-star general.

    …

    Minutes later, Hegseth released a statement announcing he’d fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the chief of the Navy.

    The removal of the second Black man to serve as America’s most senior general and the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff appears to send a strong signal from an administration that has outlawed diversity and inclusion efforts across the military and wider government.

    Hegseth called Franchetti a “DEI hire” in his 2024 book, in which he wrote: “If naval operations suffer, at least we can hold our heads high. Because at least we have another first! The first female member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — hooray.”

    Oren Liebermann and Haley Britzky

    Trump administration fires top US general and Navy chief in unprecedented purge of military leadership (CNN)

    Observers point out how the purging of an independent, rules-based military in favor of a military loyal to a single leader is a crystal clear step toward authoritarianism. They note that Trump expressed frustration with military leaders during his first term when they resisted illegal orders, saying, as then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley did, that in America “[w]e don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator…. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”

    Heather Cox Richardson

    February 22, 2025 (Letters from an American)

  • On the Side of Autocrats and Fascists

    It seems that we now live in an America that is more likely to throw its support behind autocrats and fascists than to align with our long-term democratic allies.

    European leaders should end the isolation of far-right parties across the Continent, US vice-president JD Vance has said.

    The comments mark an extraordinary embrace of a once-fringe political movement with which the Trump administration shares a common approach on migration, identity and internet speech.

    The address stunned and silenced hundreds of attendees at the Munich Security Conference, a forum where top-level politicians, diplomats and analysts had gathered expecting to hear US president Donald Trump’s plans for ending the war in Ukraine and Europe’s defence against a rising Russian threat.

    Mr Vance singled out his German hosts, telling them to drop their objections to working with a party that has often revelled in banned Nazi slogans and has been shunned from government as a result.

    Jim Takersley, Steven Erlanger, and David E. Sanger

    European leaders left in stunned silence as JD Vance harangues them over approach to far right (The Irish Times)

    Mr. Trump’s remarks late on Tuesday, when he sided fully with Russia’s narrative blaming Ukraine for the war, have now fortified the impression that the United States is prepared to abandon its role as a European ally and switch sides to embrace President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

    It was a complete reversal of historic alliances that left many in Europe stunned and fearful.

    Catherine Porter and Andrew Higgins

    Meeting Again in Paris, European Leaders Try to Recalibrate After Trump Sides With Russia (The New York Times)

    Make no mistake. The Trump-Vance-Musk regime is not only undermining democracy in the United States. It is also laying the foundation for undermining democracies around the world.

    Since the end of World War II, liberal democracies have stuck together — led by America. On the opposite side have been authoritarian states, led mainly by the Soviet Union, followed, after the demise of the Soviet Union, by Russia and China.

    But all this is rapidly changing. Both Russia and China have morphed into oligarchies, run by small groups of extraordinarily wealthy people.

    America has also been moving from a democracy to an oligarchy — and is doing so at lightning speed under Trump, Vance, Musk, and their billionaire buddies.

    The new poles of international power are coming to be global democracies versus a global oligarchy. The United States is emerging on the side of global oligarchy.

    Robert Reich

    The Trump-Vance-Musk-Putin plan (Robert Reich)

  • When a President Bribes a Mayor

    In particular, the rationale given by Mr. Bove—an exchange between a criminal defendant and the Department of Justice akin to the Bout exchange with Russia—is, as explained above, a bargain that a prosecutor should not make. Moreover, dismissing without prejudice and with the express option of again indicting Adams in the future creates obvious ethical problems, by implicitly threatening future prosecution if Adams’s cooperation with enforcing the immigration laws proves unsatisfactory to the Department.

    Danielle Sassoon

    Acting US Attorney Danielle Sassoon’s resignation letter (DocumentCloud)

    Even as the Justice Department lets Adams skate—for now—the incident has provided a vivid illustration of precisely why government corruption is so dangerous. A public official who engages in alleged illegal behavior makes themselves susceptible to outside forces that might seek to influence their decision making and subvert the will of their constituents. Usually, that’s a private party or a foreign government. In this case, the person squeezing Adams just happens to be the president of the United States.

    David A. Graham

    The Public Humiliation of Eric Adams (The Atlantic)