May 25, 2023

Thursday, May 25, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Live Butterflies were released to commemorate the massacre of children in Uvalde one year ago yesterday.

Watch. 👇

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Joe is always busy.

Touch to watch.👇

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Kamala is always busy.

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Chief Justice Roberts decided to address ethics and the Court.

Remember he has claimed the right not to talk with Congress. He is a man out of touch with the American people.

Touch to watch.👇

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Did you wake up to this 👇 Vanity Fair headline yesterday? I did.

There is nothing else to say.

Report: Ron DeSantis Will Formally Announce His 2024 Bid With Elon Musk, Because Apparently David Duke Wasn’t Available | Vanity Fair.

Then, came the launch. DeSantis was the laughing stock of the internet yesterday.

My favorite DeSantis photo from his failed launch. 👆 This graced the AP coverage. Don’t you love the look on his face - a true leader!

As the AP described it, “DeSantis’ unusual decision to announce his campaign in an online conversation with Twitter CEO Elon Musk ultimately backfired. The audio stream crashed repeatedly, making it virtually impossible for most users to hear the new presidential candidate in real time.”

From Twitter.

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“I had not thought death had undone so many.”*

*Eliot’s The Wasteland. Yes, it is a world with more damaged people than we suspect.

Such a cool reply. 👇

One more thing.

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Why do some hate us and our children so? (sayeth Jews, Blacks, LGBTQ, and more).

This 👇 prophesies a rough Pride Month ahead.

Parents plan boycott over Pride Day at L.A. school - Los Angeles Times.

Outraged conservative parents at an L.A. elementary school say they plan to keep their children home on the school’s Pride Day to protest the school teaching students about gay parents.

A group of parents at the North Hollywood kindergarten-through-5th-grade Saticoy Elementary School launched an Instagram page about a week ago calling out the school’s administration and urging other parents to keep their children home on June 2, the day the school plans to hold its Gay Pride and Rainbow Day assembly, according to the page.

“Keep your kids home and innocent,” says a flier posted by the group, Saticoy Elementary Parents. “Videos will be shown to the students including one where it says, ‘some kids have 2 mommies, some have 2 daddies’. This has caused outrage among parents.”

“We said no to COVID-19 vaccines and it’s now over. It was a hard fought battle and we won! Now it is time to say stop grooming our children,” the group wrote in another Instagram post.

It is not clear how many parents may participate in the boycott but a protest has been scheduled at the school at 8 a.m. on June 2.

The school’s principal, Maria Awakian, who has been a target of the parents’ ire, declined to comment when reached by The Times on Wednesday.

In a statement, the Los Angeles Unified School District said it remains committed to “creating a safe and inclusive learning environment that embraces the diversity of the communities we serve.”

“As part of our engagement with school communities, our schools regularly discuss the diversity of the families that we serve and the importance of inclusion,” the statement said. “This remains an active discussion with our school communities and we remain committed to continuing to engage with families about this important topic.”

The protests come as part of a national conservative movement against discussing sexuality in grade school. The movement includes concerns among some parents over trans students using bathrooms that don’t adhere to the gender they were assigned at birth.

The parental backlash at Saticoy Elementary is happening at the same time the Dodgers are facing objections from conservative Catholics over the baseball team’s decision to invite a drag group known as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to its LGBTQ+ Pride Night.

The Dodgers uninvited the group, then reinvited them when the decision outraged pro-drag Angelenos.(LA Times).

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The home state of Hubert Humphrey and Paul Wellstone moves the nation forward, toward electing the winner of the popular vote.

Minnesota joins alliance to elect president by popular vote, adding new momentum to campaign.

Democratic Gov. Tim Walz has signed a law adding Minnesota to a multistate compact that would elect the president according to the national popular vote, making it the second state in just the last month to take action that would bring the compact closer to fruition.

The new law also enacted numerous changes to make voting easier and elections fairer in Minnesota, including expanding in-person early voting. It comes on the heels of two other laws Democrats recently passed to significantly enhance access to voting after they regained control over state government last year.

This latest law adds Minnesota's 10 Electoral College votes to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, under which member states would give their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Importantly, the compact would only come into effect once states with a majority of electoral votes have joined.

As shown on the map [accessible here] (click here to enlarge), the 17 current members with Minnesota's addition now have 205 of the 270 electoral votes needed to activate the compact, and Democrats have a tough-yet-real path to approving the compact in several more states so that it could take effect by 2028.

To that end, Nevada Democrats just passed a constitutional amendment that would add their six electoral votes to the compact. The move is the first step in a multi-year effort that will require lawmakers to pass the same measure again in 2025 before sending the amendment to voters in 2026.

Democrats could also join before the next elections in two other states where they currently wield power: Michigan will try to join later this year, and Maine may do so next year. If those three states were to add their combined 25 electoral votes to the compact, that would leave the alliance just 40 votes shy of taking effect.

With Republicans usually (though not always) opposed to the idea of electing the president by the popular vote, Democrats will likely need to win control of state government in several states currently in Republican hands to make up the rest. The path to doing so runs through five more states where Democrats could realistically win power in time to activate the compact by 2028:  Arizona, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, or Wisconsin.

These eight states have 82 electoral votes, more than the 65 needed following Minnesota's entry into the compact, so Democrats don't have to run the table. But they've already made progress in Wisconsin, where progressives just flipped the state Supreme Court. An upcoming lawsuit could see the court replace the GOP's gerrymanders with fairer districts, which is an essential outcome needed for Democrats to win future majorities there.

While the road to 270 is not easy, it is nonetheless realistic, especially if Democrats win the presidency next year and once again minimize their midterm losses two years later. And even if Republicans narrowly prevail in 2024—especially if they once again win the White House despite losing the popular vote—a 2026 Democratic midterm wave like the one the party enjoyed in 2018 could also help put the compact over the top.
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Take heart! After SCOTUS acts in June, colleges will continue to fight to give diverse communities access to higher education.

Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University are the cases before the Supreme Court which will affect Affirmative Action. The Court’s final decision is expected by June as the court wraps up its work for the 2022 session.  

US colleges game out a possible end to race-conscious student admissions.

WASHINGTON, May 24 (Reuters) - In 1998, the year a voter-approved measure barring the use of race-conscious admissions policies for public colleges and universities in California took effect, the percentage of Black, Hispanic and Native American students admitted at two of the state's elite public schools plummeted by more than 50%.

Those figures for UCLA and the University of California, Berkeley offer a cautionary tale as administrators at schools around the United States await a Supreme Court decision due by the end of June that is expected to prohibit affirmative action student admissions policies nationwide.

That potential outcome in cases involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina has brought new urgency to efforts by schools to maintain or increase racial and ethnic diversity in their student populations, according to interviews with senior administrators at a dozen colleges and universities.

"We cannot afford as a nation to regress on our goals to create an educated and equitable society," said Seth Allen, head of admissions at Pomona College in California. "So it's incumbent on higher education to figure out how to work collectively together to ensure that we're not furthering the enrollment gap among different groups of students."

Many selective U.S. colleges and universities for decades have used some form of affirmative action to boost enrollment of minority students, seeing value in having a diverse student population not only to offer educational opportunity but to bring a range of perspectives onto campuses.

Affirmative action refers to policies that favor people belonging to certain groups considered disadvantaged or subject to discrimination, in areas such as hiring and student admissions.

Schools are exploring numerous options. Administrators said they are drafting strategies to expand their recruitment of diverse applicants, remove application barriers and increase the rate of minority students who accept their admissions offers.

An official at Rice University in Houston said the school will lean on student essay responses to ensure it admits students from diverse backgrounds. The U.S. Air Force Academy will focus on recruiting more students from diverse congressional districts.

The president of Skidmore College in New York said connecting with high school counselors will become "more important than ever" to broaden the school's applicant pool.

Many schools said they already have waived fees, made standardized testing optional and are looking to improve financial aid offers - steps that could help boost minority enrollment.

All of the administrators said their plans could change to comply with the scope of the Supreme Court's reasoning in the Harvard and UNC cases. Some acknowledged that whatever steps schools take to circumvent a ban on race-conscious admissions policies might face legal challenges of their own.

"We're likely to see a whole new generation of lawsuits arise from the new admission standards that will be adopted by colleges and universities," said Danielle Holley, current dean of Howard University School of Law in Washington and incoming president of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

Lawsuits backed by an anti-affirmative action activist accused Harvard and UNC of unlawful discrimination in student admissions either by violating the U.S. Constitution's promise of equal protection under the law or a federal law barring discrimination based on race and other factors.

UNC was accused of discriminating against white and Asian American applicants. Harvard was accused of bias against Asian American applicants. The schools denied these allegations.

GOING LOCAL

Many of the school administrators said they plan to focus resources on recruitment, a part of the admissions cycle they do not expect the court will restrict.

Admissions officers said they were broadening their outreach to high schools and community-based organizations in neighborhoods with lower incomes and educational attainment - places often populated by racial minorities.

Yvonne Berumen, vice president of admissions at Pitzer College in California, said her team might run essay workshops at high schools in those targeted zip codes - postal regions - in hopes of generating applications.

Chris George, dean of admissions at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, said high school data from national organizations like the College Board, which offers information on neighborhood income and housing stability, will help guide which high schools the college sends representatives to visit and the recruitment events they attend.

Community-based organizations that identify local students who show academic promise and help them apply to college will be crucial partners for identifying and recruiting potential applicants from diverse backgrounds, the administrators said.

"They become extensions of our recruiting and admissions team in many ways, and we're seeing each year a bigger and bigger percentage of our students come from those community-based organizations," said Kent Devereaux, president of Goucher College in Maryland.

Administrators at schools located in or near major cities, including Pomona College near Los Angeles and Sarah Lawrence College in New York, said they would hope to draw more students from racially diverse local high schools and take more transfer students from local community colleges.

Colonel Arthur Primas Jr., the U.S. Air Force Academy's admissions director, said his racially diverse recruiting team will continue to visit schools in U.S. congressional districts with heavy concentrations of minorities and will try to encourage more students to seek nominations to the academy from their local members of Congress.

"The Air Force Academy has had a long tradition of actively recruiting diverse candidates," Primas said. "But we're going to have to really be expansive." (Reuters).

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Hillary echoes a recent article In Defense of Dianne Feinstein Not Quitting (No, Really) in the Roundup.

Dianne Feinstein cannot resign without hurting Biden judicial appointments.

Hillary Clinton Says Dianne Feinstein Should Not Resign.

Mrs. Clinton cited Republican obstruction, not Ms. Feinstein’s health: Republicans would refuse to let Democrats fill her seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, she said, preventing judicial confirmations.

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Simply the best. Better than all the rest. Tina dies at 83.

October 11, 1984. One of many RollingStone covers.

Proud Mary.

Touch to watch.👇

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Tributes to Tina tomorrow. For now, I am taking in the enormity of the woman and the enormity of the loss.

See you then.

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