Author: hankkalet

The New York Times today offers what should be a cautionary tale for supporters of the Opportunity Scholarship Act. The legislation, which has been assigned to the Senate Education Committee, would allow corporations to take a 100 percent credit against their corporate tax bill for donations they make to the state’s scholarship fund for low-income students. The money could then be used by the students to attend a private school.

In Georgia, the Times reports, the money is being funneled to the families of the donors. The Georgia situation “is just one example of how scholarship programs have been twisted to benefit private schools at the expense of the neediest children.”

Spreading at a time of deep cutbacks in public schools, the programs are operating in eight states and represent one of the fastest-growing components of the school choice movement. This school year alone, the programs redirected nearly $350 million that would have gone into public budgets to pay for private school scholarships for 129,000 students, according to the Alliance for School Choice, an advocacy organization. Legislators in at least nine other states are considering the programs.

While the scholarship programs have helped many children whose parents would have to scrimp or work several jobs to send them to private schools, the money has also been used to attract star football players, expand the payrolls of the nonprofit scholarship groups and spread the theology of creationism, interviews and documents show. Even some private school parents and administrators have questioned whether the programs are a charade.

The program is being sold as revenue neutral, but it is built on a fund that allows corporations to pay less in taxes, which in turn means that there will be less money flowing into the state’s tax coffers.

The scholarship program, like most school choices plans, is a gimmick designed not to fix public education — and urban schools, particularly — but to create the illusion that we are doing something. If we were serious about fixing schools, we would ensure they were fully integrated by race and class and funded adequately.

From The Tent City Project:

The Denver City Council voted 9-4 to impose an urban camping ban last week — a move “that specifically targets homeless people sleeping on the streets and one that critics say simply criminalizes homelessness.”

Critics point out that the city’s shelters already are overburdened, that there is no way to house everyone living on the streets. Instead of finding ways to expand housing opportunities, the city is looking to chase the homeless from public view.

My Progressive Populist column is live on the Progressive Populist site. It’s on the president’s snail’s-pace withdrawal from Afghanistan.

When capital punishment makes the news, it rarely is because something happens to prove its utility or necessity. In fact, the death penalty hits the headlines only when the argument for it is undercut — a telling trend that should lead the United States to join the rest of the civilized world in banning executions.

Today’s news that a Texas execution carried out in 1989 most likely sent an innocent man to death fits with this trend.

From The Huffington Post:

Carlos De Luna was executed in 1989 for stabbing to death a gas station clerk in Corpus Christi six years earlier. It was a ghastly crime. The trial attracted local attention, but not from concern that a guiltless man would be punished while the killer went free.

De Luna, an eighth grade dropout, maintained that he was innocent from the moment cops put him in the back seat of a patrol car until the day he died. Today, 29 years after De Luna was arrested, Liebman and his team published a mammoth report in the Human Rights Law Review that concludes De Luna paid with his life for a crime he likely did not commit. Shoddy police work, the prosecution’s failure to pursue another suspect, and a weak defense combined to send De Luna to death row, they argued.

“I would say that across the board, there was nonchalance,” Liebman told The Huffington Post. “It looked like a common case, but we found that there was a very serious claim of innocence.”

Was De Luna innocent? I don’t know. But given the questions tht should have been raised, it appears to me that his guilt was sufficient entry in doubt to have spared his life.

This is the point. The system does an awful job of protecting the accused and there is no way — and can be no way — to prove guilt beyond doubt. That makes capital punishment morally unsupportable.

It’s time to stop tinkering with the machinery of death.

There is plenty to criticize from the left about the limitations of President Obama’s endowment of marriage equality.

Yes, he did the political calculus. Yes, his endorsement comes late in the game. Yes, it lacks any practical, legislative oomph.

But, and this is important, it carries massive symbolic weight. The first black president becomes the first sitting president to support gays’ and lesbians’ right to marry.

Frank Bruni, in a column on nytimes.com, describes the “emotional importance” of the president’s statement to Robyn Roberts.

I find myself thinking about all the teenagers and young adults out there who cower in silence because they worry about being ostracized if they speak the truth about their sexual orientation. I think about the ones who are bullied, even the ones who contemplate taking their own lives.

And I think about what it will mean to them to hear the president say what he did today, not because they’re focused on marriage but because they’re buoyed by any and every reassurance that there’s nothing wrong with them, nothing inferior about them. Today their president gave them that reassurance.

I think about how it would have felt to me when I was 16, and fearful, and often deeply, deeply depressed, to hear a president say what ours did today. I can’t imagine it. In the three decades since, our country has traveled an enormous distance, and today is a poignant and compelling marker of that.

And this is what it is about.