Is this school better? You're not allowed to know.

I visited the Detroit Auto Show this afternoon. My purpose was to talk to representatives of the various car companies to ask if they have an electric car that meets my needs. My needs are straightforward. I want a car. Not an SUV or a truck. A car. And it doesn’t need to be very big. I want one car. I don’t have space for two. I want an electric car with a sufficient range to visit by brother on one charge. He lives about 275 miles away. The trip is short enough that I don’t want a lengthy recharging stop halfway through. Any farther than that and I’ll likely stop for a meal and could include a charge. The bad news is car companies are not there yet. The good news is they’re getting close. Several said they have vehicles with a 300 mile range or close to it. Alas, most of these vehicles are SUVs and bigger than I want and costing much more than I want to pay. Stellantis has a nice little electric car, but it gets only 150 miles on a charge. Jon Paul Sydnor is a writer for Street Prophets, a progressive Christian community on Daily Kos. He recently wrote that concepts of God matter and he proposed a progressive concept of God. The post discusses a lot of theology, most of which is of no interest to me (and likely to you). However, this is one idea that is interesting and is related to conservative Christianity.

Christian theologians, following Plato, have insisted that since only imperfect things can develop or increase, and God is perfect, God cannot develop or increase. Divine development would imply divine imperfection. ... Intentionally or accidentally, this concept of God condemns change. If God is immutable—static and unchanging—then to be static and unchanging becomes our highest ideal. If God is immutable, then by implication that which is must take priority over that which could be. All change becomes decline. Divinized immutability reinforces social rigidity, preserving entitlement and preventing reform. Such stasis was never the intention of the Hebrew prophets or Christ Jesus.

Eli Hager, in an article for ProPublica posted on Kos, discussed the school voucher program in Arizona. The example in the story was Title of Liberty, a private Mormon school in Mesa that went out of business. It’s source of income was voucher payments through the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. There were some reasons why this particular school failed. But there were other reasons related to the way Arizona set up their voucher program. Some of them: The law that created the ESA provided zero transparency into a school’s finances, or academic quality. Parents has no information on whether this school was better than that school (or any good at all), had a solid or shady past, and was financially healthy enough to stick around for the entirety of their child’s education. Public schools in Arizona are tightly regulated and their performance is known. That’s not true of charters. Schools that take public money yet have no public accountability is baffling to many educators and parents. The vouchers benefit the rich, who could afford the tuition anyway. They don’t benefit the poor mainly because high-quality private schools don’t exist in their neighborhoods. Parents who send their kids to private schools can speak at public school board meetings and vote in school board elections. Public school parents cannot attend the board meetings of a private school. Defenders of vouchers say the American education should be a free market of options. But if the quality of a school is a secret a parent can’t make good purchasing decisions. A parent needs quality assurance. The No Child Left Behind law, a big legislative achievement of Bush II, was big on transparency and accountability. Schools had to prove they were educating kids up to state standards. The same standards applied to schools accepting vouchers. About 2017-2020 studies “found that larger voucher programs had produced severe declines in student performance, especially in math.” The declines were blamed in part on overregulation, which prompted no regulation and secrecy. Is the school you’re considering for your child better? You’re not allowed to know. Oliver Willis of Kos discussed why Republicans are so eager to blame various people for the Los Angeles fires and their severity. Willis includes several examples of their accusations. Their tirades aren’t just about the fire and they’re not new. California is frequently targeted because it is highly Democratic.

Over the decades, conservative politicians and right-wing media have frequently used California as subject of scorn and derision because of the state’s liberal politics. California has embraced many progressive policies on the environment, gender equality, LGBTQ+ equality, and racial equality, while also being the home to the entertainment industry and much of the tech industry. When something bad happens in California, conservatives flock to the issue to use it as “proof” that liberalism and the Democratic Party are also bad.

In the case of the fires the severity can partly be blamed on conservatism and their climate change denial. Willis also reported that this time Republicans aren’t content to lay blame. They’re now talking about politicizing the fires. There is talk to link relief funds to a plan to raise the federal debt limit. I’m not sure if this is good or bad. With the way the government is spending money (to soon be made worse by renewing tax cuts) the debt limit has to be raised. Not doing so means a government shutdown. Also, because of the House Freedom Caucus Republicans on their own don’t have enough votes to raise the limit. So enticing Democrats to vote for the increase by throwing in wildfire aid might be good. But it is also bad because it sets a precedent. If done once there will be a next time. And next time the pairing may not be with raising the debt limit, but with such things as tax cuts for the rich, or efforts to remove LGBTQ books from school libraries, or authorization to invade Greenland. I also remember that a big reason why the nasty guy wants the debt ceiling raised is so he can extend tax cuts to billionaires. That’s bad. But he is going to do that anyway. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Edward Helmore of The Guardian:

The politicization of the Los Angeles fires could be showing signs of intensifying. To opposing political factions, the ruin of parts of Los Angeles offers an inviting but deadly tableau on which to lay out their contrary agendas. To Democrats, the intensity with which the fires took hold, propelled by the late-season Santa Ana winds, is evidence of climate change that some Republicans deny as a political hoax. To some Republicans, including Trump, the fires are evidence of mismanagement under Democrats’ racial- and gender-equity drives. ... Warren Davidson, an Ohio representative, called on Friday for federal disaster relief to be withheld from California unless the state reforms its forestry management practices.

And from Parker Malloy of The New Republic:

The same people who spent years telling us climate change isn’t real are now trying to blame the fires on the fact that the L.A. Fire Department’s chief is a woman. Never mind that Kristin Crowley worked her way up through the ranks for 22 years. Never mind that the department’s leadership is still predominantly male. The right has found a way to combine their favorite bogeymen: diversity initiatives, California governance, and climate science. ... This is the playbook we’re going to see for every climate disaster going forward. Rather than acknowledge the role of climate change, rather than have honest discussions about infrastructure and emergency preparedness, the right will search for ways to blame their cultural grievances. Everything becomes evidence of their preferred narrative: Hydrant failures become proof of Democratic mismanagement, female leadership becomes proof of “woke” politics gone wrong, and the actual causes get buried under an avalanche of manufactured outrage.

In the comments of a second pundit roundup is a cartoon by Mike Luckovich. It shows a person at the base of a devastated hillside crawling for help. A person labeled “GOP” says, “You want aid? Put on this MAGA cap.” And exlrrp posted a meme:

Over a MILLION acres of wildfires in Texas last year. Funny that it wasn’t blamed on poor water resource management, black or female firefighters or [Gov.] Greg f---ing Abbott.