Despite getting significant financial assistance from outside parties, Conservative Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel maintains that he is not for sale. Schimel’s opponent, liberal candidate Susan Crawford, has also benefited from outside funding, including a $1 million contribution from George Soros to the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Just this week, an Elon Musk-backed group spent $1.5 million on airtime in Wisconsin to support conservative Supreme Court nominee Brad Schimel over the next few weeks.
Vought, confirmed Thursday in a 53-47 Senate vote, spearheaded a 2023 report by the Center for Renewing America think tank that called for reducing VA disability compensation for veterans who reach Social Security retirement age and eliminating unemployability benefits for these veterans as well.
The report also proposed cutting disability compensation to veterans with ratings lower than 30% and dropping disability compensation for veterans whose health conditions aren’t directly related to military duty.
Elon Musk is the billionaire CEO of the publicly-traded EV company, Tesla. As such, under corporate law, he owes a Duty of Loyalty to Tesla. Notwithstanding this well-established law, Musk is engaged in an array of other corporate endeavors outside of Tesla, including being the CEO of SpaceX, a private rocket company.
President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday tapped Linda McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive who ran the Small Business Administration for much of his first term, to lead the Education Department, an agency he has routinely singled out for elimination in his upcoming term.
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In part because of her recent policy role and her experience as the small business administrator, Ms. McMahon had been discussed as a possible pick to lead the Commerce Department until the role was officially offered to Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street executive and a chairman of the Trump transition team, earlier in the day.
Ms. McMahon will be in charge of overseeing what is widely expected to be a thorough and determined dismantling of the department’s core functions, as Mr. Trump and many of those in his orbit have questioned the agency’s purpose and disparaged its work as overregulating schools on political and ideological terms.
Other than a brief appointment in 2009 to the Connecticut State Board of Education, where she served for just over a year, Ms. McMahon has no experience in overseeing education policy. She would assume the role at a time when school districts across the country are facing budget shortfalls, many students are not making up ground lost during the pandemic in reading and math, and many colleges and universities are shrinking and closing amid a larger loss of faith in the value of higher education.
But the America First Policy Institute has set out a more immediate list of changes it says could be achieved through vastly changing the department’s priorities. Those include stopping schools from “promoting inaccurate and unpatriotic concepts” about American history surrounding institutionalized racism, and expanding “school choice” programs that direct more public funds to parents to spend on home-schooling, online classes or at private and religious schools.
On Friday evening, August 2, Howard Lutnick, the Chairman and CEO of the Wall Street trading house, Cantor Fitzgerald, held a fundraiser populated by the super wealthy at his home in the Hamptons. The bash was to help presidential candidate Donald Trump shore up his sagging campaign coffers. Tickets went for $25,000 each or $50,000 if you wanted a photo with Trump. You could be listed on the program as a host for a mere $500,000. According to Lutnick, the event raised $15 million. According to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records, Lutnick himself was responsible for a third of that amount. He wrote out a check for $5 million to the Trump campaign the Monday after the event.
I’ve been meaning to look into these two, but forgot about it. Maine Policy Institute is already on my Atlas Network list, but I just added the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.
State Policy Network (SPN), American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Koch network, Franklin News Foundation (Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity), Bradley Foundation, DonorsTrust, Cato Institute, Sam Adams Alliance, Donors Capital Fund, etc.
Recent analysis shows that over the past 10 years child labor violations across the U.S. have tripled, reports the Washington Post. Investigators have uncovered an uptick in labor violations in standard work for teens, like fast food-restaurants and other service industries. Multiple instances of minors working in dangerous jobs that federal law prohibits, like meatpacking, manufacturing, and construction, have also been uncovered at increasing rates. Despite that, at least 16 states have one or more bills to weaken their child labor laws. What’s going on?
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While most states have tougher laws than the federal rules, some Republican lawmakers seek to undo those restrictions in their state. These lawmakers are backed in their efforts by restaurant, liquor, and home builders’ associations, who stand to benefit from an expanded low-wage worker pool if the changes pass. Protection stripping legislation for six states was drafted or lobbied for by Florida-based lobbying group, the Foundation for Government Accountability, which fights to promote conservative interests like restricting access to anti-poverty programs. There are some states, like Colorado and Virginia, fighting the trend and enacting legislation to dial up penalties for violations. Rep. Sheila Lieder (D) introduced a bill in Colorado to raise the fines for violators saying that at $20 per offense, the current penalties were not high enough to effectively dissuade employers from violating child labor laws.
Do No Harm, a coalition of anti-trans doctors, nurses, and medical professionals, released a database of all the hospitals and medical centers in the U.S. that provide gender-affirming care for trans youth today.
The organization’s executive director, Kristina Rasmussen, previously was chief of staff to former Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican, and served as president of the Illinois Policy Institute [State Policy Network], a conservative think tank, according to her LinkedIn profile.
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It won a $250,000 award last year called the Gregor Peterson Prize. Its previous recipients include the Center for American Liberty, led by Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer who advised former President Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign and who is representing Cole in her lawsuit against Kaiser Permanente over gender-transition treatments she now says she regrets. The prize was announced in December at a summit held by the American Legislative Exchange Council [State Policy Network], a prominent provider of conservative model legislation.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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