Spectator/Stephen Tuttle

Continued from page 3 sell out America? Trump will sell out our country to Russia’s Putin or anyone else that will build another Trump monument, i.e., Trump hotel.

Is your loyalty to the United States or to Trump? You can not hide from the truth. The Republicans are selling out our country by supporting voter suppression across the U.S., e.g., Florida. Texas, Ohio, Michigan, etc. It is time for you to stand up and honor your oath.

Ron Dykstra, Beulah

Learning from the Teacher

My friend Hal has sparked a bit of dialogue about reforming education in his recent column. His small business perspective is not mine, however. My perspective is from being an educator with three university degrees and 49 years as a high school teacher — 35 of which were full-time and split evenly by public and independent school teaching. I then logged over 1,000 days in a wide variety of public high school classes over 14 years.

The key to education is in the classroom. This involves teachers and curriculum (why, what, and how), only part of which this space allows. Most teachers are well trained and very competent. They are there for the love of teaching our youth, despite being paid less than their worth. Benefits help, and retirement benefits are a necessary part of the package. If the legislature doesn’t properly fund the account, don’t blame the teachers.

A really important reform that we must make is classroom size. We are still in the mode of the 1890s, when we sat 30+ to a classroom and drilled immigrant students to make them good citizens. We are far beyond that. As a teacher, you can entertain 30 students at a time, but you cannot engage more than half that number in meaningful education: the life skills necessary to function in the 21st Century.

My most productive teaching/learning experience, for 13 years, involved classes of 15–16 students. Every student was required to enter the classroom every day, having prepared with meaningful homework and ready to be fully engaged for the entire period. Small groups of four could be organized and easily monitored. Problemsolving/critical thinking truly happened, with phenomenal results.

If you really want to improve education, we need to roll up our sleeves and do it.

Fred C., Traverse City

Blame the Rich

The Walton family has a combined net worth of $250 billion. These people are the founders of Walmart and Sam’s Club. This family is the biggest recipient of America’s welfare budget, more than any other family, corporation, or institution in the United States.

Many hundreds of thousands of their employees are paid wages that don’t even support a very modest lifestyle. This is true, especially if you have a family. Many Walmart workers, upon hiring, are instructed as to how to avail themselves of public assistance, to help them survive.

So, in the final analysis, who is receiving this welfare? It is the multi-billion-dollar rich Walton family that are fleecing the U.S. taxpayer of welfare dollars, by the hundreds of millions? We, in essence, are supporting a family worth over $200 billion with our tax dollars so they can continue to amass billions more on the backs of people just trying to survive.

I laugh when I observe displaced anger toward some dude who buys a pack of smokes and a 12-pack with his Bridge card just to escape his reality for a few hours. It’s not him to blame; it’s the billionaires that are bleeding us dry and laughing at us while sunning with their girlfriends on their multi-million-dollar yachts.

Bret P.A., Traverse City

You’ve died and gone to soup heaven!

Soup Trio Combo

Flav

spectator

by Stephen Tuttle

Some Republicans have fallen down and they can’t, or won’t, get up.

This isn’t the party of Lincoln, and it’s not likely Ronald Reagan would be welcome, either. The governing principles that once underpinned the GOP — small government, balanced budget, strong defense, military non-intervention — have been replaced by the singularly destructive Big Lie.

This top-down orthodoxy, the notion that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election but it was somehow stolen by evil-doers now colors virtually everything party leadership does. This flies in the face of reality, requiring ongoing belief in a lie for which there is no supporting evidence and rejecting a truth for which there is a mountain of evidence. It requires a dismissive approach to dishonesty while maintaining loyalty to a lie.

Donald Trump lost the election. There never was any indication or evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities. Politicians refusing to acknowledge that are either so dangerously delusional they should not be in a position to create laws impacting the rest of us, or they’re so coldly cynical their entire public service is a fraud.

The former president’s efforts to subvert the election exposed the claims for the fantasies they were — and exposed his advocates as little more than charlatans. Is this what rankand-file Republicans want?

Is the party really represented by Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lead lawyer in his unsuccessful efforts to get the courts to overturn the election? He’s now being investigated by the Department of Justice for his various activities with Ukraine during and after the 2020 elections.

Is it represented by another of Trump’s lawyers, the QAnon-believing, conspiracyspouting Lin Wood? He’s been asked by the Georgia Bar Association to undergo a mental health assessment.

Or maybe it’s Sydney Powell, another lawyer trying to convince the courts the election was full of all manner of voting horrors for which she had no evidence. Now being sued for defamation by the voting machine companies she claimed had cheated, her defense is that “reasonable” people would not have accepted her claims as fact.

Those Republicans not willing to adhere to the Big Lie of election fraud are summarily punished by the party leadership and the more gullible party members. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming was booted from her No. 3 leadership position because she did not come close to toeing the party line, opting instead to focus on reality. Those voting to oust her say she wasn’t sufficiently on board with the GOP’s direction, despite the fact that she voted with the party and with President Trump significantly more often than her replacement. The real reason was that she voted to impeach Trump, one of 10 Republican members of the House to do so.

The infection has also drifted down to the state level. Unable to extricate themselves from the yoke of the Big Lie, Republicanled state legislatures have been busy. Rather than searching for ways to increase their party’s support, they’ve instead decided to suppress their likely opponents’ support and vote. (Some 361 voter suppression laws have been introduced in 47 states but were dead on arrival in Democratcontrolled states.)

Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Utah, Texas, and Florida have already enacted new laws requiring additional levels of identification, partisan poll watching, restricting early voting, restricting voting by mail, limiting polling places, eliminating drop-off boxes for early ballots, or some combination. Similar bills are now coursing through 26 state legislatures, and all that are enacted will be challenged in court. Those that tend to disenfranchise communities of interest — like racial minorities, the poor, the disabled, or the elderly — will be discarded by local, state, and federal judges.

All of it is being done in direct service to the Big Lie. GOP state legislators the country over are happy to tell us this is all to eliminate irregularities and fraud and restore voters’ confidence in the election system. Never mind that there were no widespread irregularities nor fraud, and the only reason anybody has lost confidence in the election system is because those folks told that lie to their voters early and often and continue to perpetuate it even now.

There was a brief moment immediately after the Jan. 6 insurrection when it appeared national Republican leadership was going to step out of the Trumpian darkness and back into the light of day. But they couldn’t tolerate the sunlight and have led their party right back into the shadows.

Worst of all for Republicans, they are stuck in the past, reliving the same campaign and making the same fraudulent claims over and over though the result never changes. They need to move on from the Big Lie and accept the Big Truth: Donald Trump lost fairly, and it’s time for Republicans to start writing their next chapter instead of trying to rewrite an old one.

The governing principles that once underpinned the GOP — small government, balanced budget, strong defense, military non-intervention — have been replaced by the singularly destructive Big Lie.