Follow-up on South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem: The Jefferson County (CO) GOP canceled a fundraising dinner featuring Noem because of death threats and other safety concerns. The group had obtained 300 copies of Noem’s book which she intended to sign. While touting her new children’s book The Princess and Her Pup, Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend tried to give Noem an out by saying “maybe somebody slipped [the story] in and she didn’t see it.” She read it aloud for the audio version.
Some good news for the week:
The stock market rejoiced on Friday with slower job gains, hoping that the Federal Reserve might drop interest rates. The decrease of 175,000 jobs for April continued stable growth and kept the unemployment rate under 4 percent for the 27th consecutive month, last seen from 1967 to 1970 and a longer period from 1951 to 1953. Wages consistently beat inflation for the past year. Deposed Donald Trump (DDT), whose monthly job gains averaged 185,000 while he was in the White House until they plummeted tens of millions after Covid arrived, posted, “HORRIBLE JOB NUMBERS JUST ANNOUNCED.”
Last Monday, Democrat Tim Kennedy won a special New York House election, bringing the party to 213 members, compared to 217 Republicans with five vacant seats. He will finish the term of Brian Higgins who resigned in February to run a performing arts center. Higgins said that Congress is “in a very, very bad place” and “an embarrassment across the country.” Kennedy will need to run in June’s primary and then in November if he wins.
After ProPublica reported that states seized child support for families as reimbursement for the mother receiving welfare, at least six states changed their policies, and others are considering changes. Federal and state governments annually intercept $1.7 billion in child support payments. Shifts have come in New Mexico, Wyoming, Illinois, Michigan, Vermont, and California with Illinois moving all child support payments to families starting in July. California doubled the amount going to families currently receiving welfare, a $44 million net increase. At least six states already “passed through” some or all child support payments to families.
For the first time since the creation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, over 100,000 young immigrants without health insurance will now be eligible to buy affordable health coverage. The new rule goes into effect on November 1, the opening day for the 2025 health insurance open enrollment period. DACA was closed to new registrants in July 2021 when lawsuits began challenging the program.
Student loans of $6 billion for 317,000 people who attended the Art Institutes, for-profit colleges closing the last of dozens of campuses in 2023 because of alleged fraud, will be canceled. AGs from Massachusetts, Iowa, and Pennsylvania previously investigated fraud complaints and sued the for-profit chain. The Education Department found that the chain lied about the success of graduates and employment partnerships helping students find jobs. The Biden administration has approved the cancellation of almost $160 billion in student loans, $28.7 billion for those cheated by their colleges or attending suddenly closed campuses.
Soren Aldaco, an anti-trans detransitioner, has been ordered to pay over $40,000 in attorney’s fees after a judge dismissed her $1 million suit against former doctors who provided hormone therapy. She claimed she was “coerced” into coming out as transgender and transitioning, including a double mastectomy three years ago when she was 19, and accused the doctors and nurse practitioner of ignoring her significant mental health issues. The suit concerning what she described as a botched surgery remains open. Detransitioners like Aldaco are used to block trans healthcare for everyone, but fewer than one percent of patients undergoing gender-affirming procedures regret them. According to a new study, regret rates are higher for people who get tattoos, elective plastic surgeries, and bariatric weight loss as well as have children. Another study found that 97 percent undergoing gender-affirming surgery have increased satisfaction with their lives.
Almost two years after Roe v. Wade was overturned, 65 percent remain opposed to the Supreme Court ruling whereas 34 percent approve.
Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters wants Christian chaplains to replace school counselors, and the state House voted for a bill to do that. The state Senate may not pass the bill after the Satanic Temple (TST), a recognized religion, announced plans to put its Ministers into the state’s public schools. Walters wrote:
“Satanists are not welcome in Oklahoma schools, but they are welcome to go to hell.”
The former executive director Fred Wellman of the Republican anti-MAGA Lincoln Project responded:
“Hahahaha!!! You are an idiot. How did you not see this coming? Satanists, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Pastafarians…come one come all! After all you’re not trying to establish Christianity as the state religion are you? We had a whole ass revolution about that. There are history books about it…oh…right. Not your thing. What a fool.”
The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) warned:
“The state of Oklahoma cannot discriminate against people or groups based on their religious beliefs. Walters’ hateful message shows, once again, that he only believes in religious freedom for Christians and that he is unfit to serve in public office.”
College Pro-Palestinian Protests:
Exactly 50 years after police cleared Columbia University students taking over Hamilton Hall to protest the Vietnam War, New York police cleared a group of students protesting Israel’s war against Gaza from the building. Again, students were vilified for protesting the Israelis’ killing at least 34,000 Gazans and starving hundreds of thousands more to erase any Palestinian state.
Within the past few weeks, Columbia students’ protests have moved across the country to 150 colleges seeking disinvestment in Israel’s military, many with outdoor encampments and civil disobedience. At over 80 of them, police used equipment donated by corporations to surveil the crowds, arrested thousands of protesters, and dismantled the encampments. Indiana University posted snipers prepared to fire on the protesters, and peaceful students and faculty members have been beaten and pinned down. Thus far only pro-Palestinian supporters have been arrested; Israeli war supporters attacking people at the camp have not suffered any repercussions.
Despite statements from President Joe Biden supporting the police crackdowns, some universities have been more rational about approaches to the protesting. Students at schools such as Brown University, Northwestern University, and the University of Minnesota removed or limited the encampments and protests after promises to take steps toward scholarships for Palestinians and divestment from Israel.
A contrast to the police violence at Columbia was the solution at Berkley, another school with a long history of student activism, where student demonstrations experience no arrests or campus disruptions. Berkley permitted a protest area where Martin Luther King gave a 1967 civil rights speech even after a scuffle between the co-founder of a Zionist activist group and a pro-Palestinian protester. The University of California policy is no police involvement except for physical safety of students, faculty, and staff since 2011 when campus police clubbed and jabbed students with batons during an Occupy movement protest.
At UCLA, however, police flattened the UCLA encampment after pro-Israel counter protesters attacked the protesters. Protesters said that the “external security the university hired for “backup” filmed and laughed during the escalating violence as pro-Palestinians “screamed for help.” After counter protesters attempted to dismantle the encampment’s barricade, violence lasted for almost five hours with little or no police intervention even after law enforcement arrived. Counter protesters, many wearing pro-Israel slogans, beat protesters with metal pipes, sprayed chemicals on protesters’ faces, and launched fireworks directly at them. They used genocidal language while attacking protesters, yelling, “Second Nakba!” meaning the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in 1948.
Protesters could be heard yelling, “Do not engage!” No videos show any violence from the protesters or initiating confrontations except for trying to defend their barricades, but they do show counter protesters physically attacking protesters and journalists from the UCLA student newspaper, the Daily Bruin. Los Angeles Jewish and Muslim organizations condemned the attacks. While these protesters are demonized for breaking the rules, history praises Rosa Parks for refusing to sit in the back of the bus and activists for sitting at segregated lunch counters. A history of these protests.
In promoting the school, Columbia brags about its tradition of protesting other than the Vietnam War such as anti-Black racism and the school’s expansion into the surrounding neighborhood with a segregated gymnasium 56 years ago when 150 people were injured from police involvement. Student activists successfully pushed for the creation of a Native American and Indigenous Studies minor. Princeton arrested 136 people for current protests after praising “activism and intersectionality” sit-ins in the 1970s and 1980s opposing South African apartheid and sexism on campus. The University of Minnesota stated they arrested nine protesting students because “tents are not allowed on any university property for any purpose without a permit.”
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the destruction of Gazan refugee camps and cities—”Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat—total annihilation.” Like Netanyahu, Smotrich quoted the biblical tale of Amalek, which God ordered to exterminate, used by right-wing leaders to justify Palestinian murderers. Journalist Mehdi Hasan sarcastically said these comments are deemed acceptable by U.S. officials and the corporate media because he didn’t “say it on a college campus.” An editorial in the Jewish newspaper Haaretz wrote Smotrich should be immediately fired for this statements.
Protests against the Vietnam War were equally unpopular when they started in 1965, but persistence—and the National Guard killing or injuring 13 students at Kent State in 1970—created an increasing awareness regarding the injustices of the U.S. conflict that couldn’t be won. The question is if the U.S. will tire of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s killing and destruction in Gaza.
Nel's New Day 