All purpose news and politics thread part VII: News & Politics Total Landscaping

[useridgoeshere]

Red Lobster going under will be bad news for Biden in November (according to a future NYT article, I'm sure).

[Jack Dracula]

The GOP went all in on the “culture war” and if there is a sizable shift in voting demographics than I guess it was a smashing success.

Most Latinos and African Americans are still very religious and socially conservative. So voting against legal abortions, LGBTQ rights, and stopping immigrants from entering the country could be appealing despite Trump openly embracing white nationalism.

There is a huge swath of the Latino population who are very anti-immigrant and have bought into the “immigrants bring more crime to the country” talking points that the GOP has pushed.

According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 47% of Latinos believe the migrant situation at the US-Mexico border is increasing crime, while 47% believe it has no effect, and 6% believe it is decreasing crime. 59% of Latinos aged 50 and older believe the migrant situation is increasing crime, while 42% of those aged 18–49 believe the same.


The most concerning thing about the latest election polls is that Trump’s support was under reported in both 2016 and 2020. Some chalked it up to MAGA voters not trusting traditional institutions and refusing to participate in polling.

If that is still the case Biden (and democracy) is in serious trouble.

Many immigrants have a very strong work ethic as well and the idea of “welfare” rubs them the wrong way.

[Iron Maiden]

Johnson needs to kiss the ring after working with Dems for the good of the country or else Trump will see him booted after he doesn't have to sleep through his trial.

Even 10 years ago I couldn't have imagined this would be the reality in which we live.

The only thing that will save the GOP is the day when Trump kicks the bucket. Unfortunately there are quite a few that would try take his place. It will be like Game of Thrones.

[Username taken]

The GOP went all in on the “culture war” and if there is a sizable shift in voting demographics than I guess it was a smashing success.

Most Latinos and African Americans are still very religious and socially conservative. So voting against legal abortions, LGBTQ rights, and stopping immigrants from entering the country could be appealing despite Trump openly embracing white nationalism.

There is a huge swath of the Latino population who are very anti-immigrant and have bought into the “immigrants bring more crime to the country” talking points that the GOP has pushed.

According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 47% of Latinos believe the migrant situation at the US-Mexico border is increasing crime, while 47% believe it has no effect, and 6% believe it is decreasing crime. 59% of Latinos aged 50 and older believe the migrant situation is increasing crime, while 42% of those aged 18–49 believe the same.


The most concerning thing about the latest election polls is that Trump’s support was under reported in both 2016 and 2020. Some chalked it up to MAGA voters not trusting traditional institutions and refusing to participate in polling.

If that is still the case Biden (and democracy) is in serious trouble.

If there's one of part of the culture war that really resonates among African-American and Hispanic voters, it's illegal immigration.

I think Biden's team (and perhaps the democrats as a whole) have underestimated just how much opposition these groups of voters have to illegal immigration. Moreso when said illegal immigrants appear to be getting a substantial number of benefits.

I don't know what political calculation Biden's team was making but the lack of a counter-narrative regarding the border crisis has really hurt them. Again, I don't know how this will affect the vote because this is Trump we're talking about but it's a problem that's irked a lot of minority voters.

[skyvolt2000]

If there's one of part of the culture war that really resonates among African-American and Hispanic voters, it's illegal immigration.

Moreso when said illegal immigrants appear to be getting a substantial number of benefits.

And HOW many of those folks use said illegals to work on their houses?
Why are none of them MAD at companies who HIRE them over legal folks?

I hear the narrative of "illegals are taking jobs from black folks."

I fire back "How many of YALL are actually applying for those jobs? Because I keep hearing how some of those jobs are BENEATH them to have."
Nobody wants to talk about that part of the races.

I also remind those folks "those illegal kids they bring are going to PUBLIC schools. Guess what they bring in FUNDING to said schools."
I am sure if we remove the illegals from some GOP public schools in Texas-they won't like the fact of how many folks they would have to get rid of.

If the illegals are getting benefits-GOP might want to look at WHO they really started under in Texas.....
HINT it wasn't Democrats since they haven't held the governor house since 1995.

[aja_christopher]

I also remind those folks "those illegal kids they bring are going to PUBLIC schools. Guess what they bring in FUNDING to said schools."
I am sure if we remove the illegals from some GOP public schools in Texas-they won't like the fact of how many folks they would have to get rid of.

If the illegals are getting benefits-GOP might want to look at WHO they really started under in Texas.....
HINT it wasn't Democrats since they haven't held the governor house since 1995.

[aja_christopher]

"Greg Abbott’s Authoritarian Power Grab of Houston’s Public Schools"

"The Texas governor wants to make a big name for himself in the conservative movement, and students are being left behind.

On March 15, the Texas Education Agency, or TEA, confirmed to the public that it plans to forcibly remove the Houston Independent School District’s democratically elected superintendent and board of trustees in June, effectively seizing control of its 276 schools and nearly 200,000 students. The decision came after four years of protracted legal battles, during which time test scores in Houston ISD schools improved overall, but the move ticked along to a different clock: By coincidence, it happened to dovetail nicely with Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s “Parent Empowerment Tour”—a series of speaking engagements at wealthy Protestant private schools where he’s touted the supposed “educational freedom” offered by school vouchers and cast fears about “the woke agenda.”

Even as campaign platitudes like “school choice” seem to imply a certain amount of local control, Abbott’s move has signaled that he’s willing to thrust his administration into possession of his state’s largest school district. If this sounds eerily similar to Ron DeSantis’s war on “woke” initiatives, that’s because it is. In fact, it’s a running joke among some Texas state Capitol insiders that if you want to know what policies Greg Abbott will likely enact, you should study the front pages of The Miami Herald. But whether the two governors are competing for the affection of their Republican constituents isn’t as important as—they’re both often quick to say—the kids.

Carlos Alvarado is a 17-year-old junior at Furr High School, a large, gated complex caught in an elbow chokehold between Interstate 10 and U.S. Route 90 on Houston’s far east side. The school, which received a C rating from TEA based on attendance, dropout rates, and economically disadvantaged “risk factors,” is responsible for around 1,100 students, nearly 80 percent of whom are Hispanic and 18 percent are Black. Sometimes, Alvarado told me, the school bus just doesn’t show up. “Even though I live seven minutes away from my high school, I don’t have a bus to go to school all the time.” He said his English class has around 35 students, but only 24 desks. When students are absent for whatever reason—the bus doesn’t show up, or they have to choose work over school to help out their families—sometimes everyone present is able to sit at their own desk.

A 2015 state law says that if a school district has a campus with a failing TEA-anointed grade for five consecutive school years, the commissioner is required to appoint a board of managers or close the campus. But it was only one school—the historically Black Phillis Wheatley High School, about eight minutes from Furr along I-10—that hit this benchmark in 2019. Furr and Wheatley are both surrounded by charter schools, which The Texas Observer reported has resulted in a decline in enrollment. Today, Wheatley has a C rating, the same as Furr’s, but the wheels were already in motion, and now the takeover is imminent....

Student and teacher labor combined produces the data used to allocate billions of dollars in Texas. For as long as there have been conflicts in Houston ISD, students have organized to remind people of that fact. After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision outlawed segregation in schools, Houston’s leaders dragged their feet, only integrating one grade per year. To reach court-ordered integration numbers in the late 1960s, Houston ISD categorized Hispanic students as “white” and siphoned them into majority-Black schools. By 1970, its schools were finally desegregated, at least in an official sense, but Houston’s neighborhoods and economy were still the most segregated of any major American city at the time....

For decades afterward, the Houstonian status quo bickered over keeping education tax rates low, and school board trustees denied the true extent of the district’s segregation. (In 1987, the Houston Chronicle reported that the high concentration of Hispanic classrooms was “caused more by demographic makeup than lax desegregation efforts.”) They were trying to tamp the gaping wound with so many Band-Aids. In the mid-1990s, as the charter school movement began to gather steam nationally, then-superintendent and future education secretary to the Bush administration Rod Paige ushered in sweeping changes that would later be the model for the 2001 nationwide No Child Left Behind Act. Paige took the carrot-and-stick approach loved by austerity hawks: Principals were subject to one-year “performance contracts” modeled after the private sector, which removed due process and tenure rights from their job descriptions, and private schools were contracted to take in hundreds of students to deal with “overcrowding.”

Like many Republican politicians today, Paige often touted the merits of school choice, denigrated teachers unions, and made a point of emphasizing personal responsibility over real material factors that often affect education. In 2004, it came out that some of the key statistics that made Paige’s “Texas miracle” in Houston so attractive—low dropout rates, sky-high test scores—were, in fact, largely the product of cooked books. But the carrot-and-stick rationale remains, and it continues to play out at schools like Wheatley and Furr, further affecting education in the still largely segregated areas of the city...."

https://newrepublic.com/article/1712...ott-power-grab

[Username taken]

And HOW many of those folks use said illegals to work on their houses?
Why are none of them MAD at companies who HIRE them over legal folks?

I hear the narrative of "illegals are taking jobs from black folks."

I fire back "How many of YALL are actually applying for those jobs? Because I keep hearing how some of those jobs are BENEATH them to have."
Nobody wants to talk about that part of the races.

I also remind those folks "those illegal kids they bring are going to PUBLIC schools. Guess what they bring in FUNDING to said schools."
I am sure if we remove the illegals from some GOP public schools in Texas-they won't like the fact of how many folks they would have to get rid of.

If the illegals are getting benefits-GOP might want to look at WHO they really started under in Texas.....
HINT it wasn't Democrats since they haven't held the governor house since 1995.

The bolded is very true.

[aja_christopher]

US House Speaker Johnson to join Republican parade at Trump hush money trial

This is so embarrassing. They all have to show support and sit at Trump's trial on hush money payments to a porn star. Good thing they don't have anything better to do like you know their jobs working for the American people or anything.

[shooshoomanjoe]

Biden is sending $1B in weapons to Israel, despite claiming he was going to hold the weapons if the IDF goes into Rafah. Why is he playing both sides.

[Robotman]

And HOW many of those folks use said illegals to work on their houses?
Why are none of them MAD at companies who HIRE them over legal folks?

I hear the narrative of "illegals are taking jobs from black folks."

I fire back "How many of YALL are actually applying for those jobs? Because I keep hearing how some of those jobs are BENEATH them to have."
Nobody wants to talk about that part of the races.

I also remind those folks "those illegal kids they bring are going to PUBLIC schools. Guess what they bring in FUNDING to said schools."
I am sure if we remove the illegals from some GOP public schools in Texas-they won't like the fact of how many folks they would have to get rid of.

If the illegals are getting benefits-GOP might want to look at WHO they really started under in Texas.....
HINT it wasn't Democrats since they haven't held the governor house since 1995.

People also don’t place any of the blame on the corporations hiring illegal aliens.

If someone is desperate, their family is starving, and they’re in fear of their own government and then an American company offers them a job (illegally) what the hell do you expect them to do?!?

Even if it is jobs that “no one else wants” they are still dangling a paycheck in front of desperate people who will do any job because their situation is life or death.

Unfortunately it’s America and we’re told regulation of business is evil. So we say it’s all the immigrants’ fault while looking the other way while Tyson Foods, Dole, etc. continue to offer them jobs.

Can you imagine what food prices would be without immigrants doing the backbreaking labor of picking produce and doing godawful tasks on industrial farms?

Meet the workers who put food on America’s tables – but can’t afford groceries

[Malvolio]

Biden is sending $1B in weapons to Israel, despite claiming he was going to hold the weapons if the IDF goes into Rafah. Why is he playing both sides.

Because he has to play both sides. That's how politics works. If he really did cut Israel off completely, he would get hit from centrists. It's a no win situation.

[Gray Lensman]

Because he has to play both sides. That's how politics works. If he really did cut Israel off completely, he would get hit from centrists. It's a no win situation.

Sadly, THIS. Politically, no matter what he does, he loses. Maybe even the election.

[Robotman]

Sadly, THIS. Politically, no matter what he does, he loses. Maybe even the election.

Yeah, Biden is screwed either way. He’s already lost the youth vote but if he goes hard against Israel he could piss off the moderates.

Unfortunately the only winner in this horrible situation may be Trump.

[Zelena]

Sadly, THIS. Politically, no matter what he does, he loses. Maybe even the election.

Biden has nothing to gain to look hesitant. Whatever he feels, believes… he has to show his convictions.