Sunday Reads

What the kicker about this only 13 states allow teachers to strike at all, and these protests are in red states where striking by public employees is certainly not allowed or extremely rare.

Asking Republican legislators to “stop cutting taxes” is a demand many of its objects would consider outrageous, even unnatural. But this collision is a reminder that GOP claims that tax cuts at the state as well as the federal level would pay for themselves by generating sustained economic growth have once again proved faulty, with public education being the primary victim of chronic budget shortfalls.

While Republican pols in Arizona and Oklahoma, like their counterparts in West Virginia, are backpedaling furiously and trying to prevent or resolve strikes, the conflict may go too deep for an easy resolution. In Arizona, for example, the Republican governor and legislature are engaged in a radical experiment in “portable” education funding giving parents unprecedented freedom to use public dollars for private schools (led, as it happens, by the GOP candidate in a congressional special election next month) that could pose an existential threat to public education in the state. In Kentucky, teacher grievances are mostly focused on the pursuit by Republican governor Matt Bevin and the GOP legislature of another big conservative cause: public pension “reform,” which in this case meant serious reductions in benefits and a complete revocation of teacher pension security. That the “reform” was whipped through the legislature suddenly after being attached to a sewer regulation bill did not improve its aroma.

In Kentucky, for example, many teachers don't pay into Social Security, and if they have in other jobs, they are fucked over with the WEP and the GPO, like yours truly for having worked in Nevada.
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This in a nutshell is why the Koch-backed GOP is desperate to destroy everything that is important in this country.  The numbers are against the GOP long-term unless it is willing to do a complete turnaround.  Not gonna happen.
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A former president notes the public wants an idiot and a "jerk" in the White House.
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Obit:  Noted muckraking journalist Robert Parry, 68, died in January.  He died of undiagnosed pancreatic cancer. He was known for his work on Iran-Contra and other stories.
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