Bill Crawford bemoans the Koch Brothers influence on politics, bless his heart
A foundation Charles Koch created (now defunct) spent millions over decades to fund groups advocating the Koch agenda, including conservative state-based think tanks affiliated with the national State Policy Network, e.g., the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. The Koch network has continued funding the State Policy Network and its affiliated American Legislative Exchange Council of which Mississippi Speaker of the House Philip Gunn is a board member. School choice advocate Empower Mississippi is the latest link in this network.
The Charles Koch Foundation has spent millions to push Koch thinking onto college campuses, including Mississippi State University. In 2015, the university announced formation of its Institute for Market Studies to be funded with nearly $2.5 million of Koch money over six years. Since then, MSU associate professor Claudia Williamson, co-director of the Institute, has been an active voice for economic policies aligned with Koch thinking.
The Mississippi chapter of Americans for Prosperity has risen in power to dominate thinking on many legislative issues. The chapter has strongly touted Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves for promoting its agenda. It is expected to play a dominant role in next year’s legislative elections.
GRANT CALLEN – School choice is not a new entitlement. But PreK is.
Choice proposals transfer decision-making power to parents and subscribe to the conservative principle that people closest to a problem are the best people to fix it.
Many happily choose traditional public schools, but that choice is largely reserved for those who can afford it. Low-income families who lack the resources to move to neighborhoods with better schools or pay for private school tuition are often trapped in a school someone else chose for them.
School choice levels the playing field, promoting equality of opportunity for all.
“It is probably the No. 1 problem the citizens are talking about today,” says state Sen. Willie Simmons, a Democrat who chairs the chamber’s Highways and Transportation Committee. #msleg #mspolitics https://t.co/Ls6NdVSH15
— msroadbuilders (@msroadbuilder) June 1, 2018
#MS03 candidate Bitzi Tate mentioned in WAPO article
Katherine “Bitzi” Tate, a former high school teacher vying for the Republican nomination in Mississippi’s 3rd Congressional District, is running on a platform of radically shrinking the government’s role in public schools. She believes the federal government and the courts have overstepped their bounds in the classroom, with moves such as banning prayer in public schools and mandating racial integration.
A Christian, she wants to allow states to reintroduce prayer and Bible instruction to public schools. As a teacher, when she gave lessons on evolution, she encouraged her students to write “theory” in the margins of their textbooks, and she would teach them creationism from the Bible.
Bill Minor’s heir apparent – another anti-Trump screed from Clarion Ledger fave Ray Mosby
Reason is the antibiotic to the infection of propaganda, so like all others before them, today’s propagandists, Donald Trump chief among them, employ appeals to emotion, tapping into contemporary white America’s resentments, angers and fears. This, in turn, injects fuel into the kindred phenomenon of negative partisanship—the now solidly GOP voters’ antipathy toward the other party, an antipathy reflected by their failure to even call that party by his proper name (“Democrat” not Democratic) and to label its members such charming things as “libtards,” an epithet which is disgustingly offensive on more levels than can even be quickly listed.
What is important to know, however, is that the use of “libtard” today is no different whatsoever than was the use of “Jap” in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Both are references to an enemy.
Propaganda is the language of war and the half of America that may have not recognized that yet, would do well to wake up to the fact.
Editor
