Brian Kemp exercised unconstitutional authority over localities and undermined their right to "Home Rule" and the ability to take action to prevent the spread of a deadly virus.

The NRSC has taken hundreds of thousands from Occidental/Anadarko Petroleum, the company responsible for the 2017 Firestone home explosion. The claim that Gov. John Hickenlooper did not levy a fine against Anadarko is false. An 18M fine was levied against Anadarko after a nearly three-year investigation into the tragedy initiated by Hickenlooper's administration. The NRSC is using donations from Occidental/Anadarko to finance an ad making false claims about the response to the Firestone home explosion over the objections of the survivor of the tragedy. This almost incomprehensible act of hypocrisy and malice toward the victims of negligence by the oil and gas industry cannot be allowed to stand. The NRSC must take this ad down and apologize to Erin Martinez.

OUR SURVIVAL DEPENDS UPON SCIENCE NOT PARTISANSHIP. THIS VIRUS CARES NOT WHETHER ONE IS A REPUBLICAN, DEMOCRAT OR ANYTING IN BETWEEN. IT IS AN ORGANISM BEST UNDERSTOOD BY THE WOMEN AND MEN OF SCIENCE AND MEDICINE. MEANWHILE OUR POLITICAL EMISSARIES ARE STYMIED IN POSTURING AND PARTISANSHIP. WE ARE A COUNTRY ADRIFT. NOW IS THE TIME TO LET SCIENCE AND MEDICINE BE OUR GUIDE, BEFORE ITS TOO LATE. IF WE DO NOT RAISE OUR VOICES NOW, WE MAY NOT BE ABLE TO LATER.

Parents, students, teachers and school employees want to be back in brick and mortar schools as soon as it is safely possible. We are calling on you, our county commissioners to shut down all non-essential businesses immediately to slow the community spread of COVID. We are calling for a substantial increase in testing and contract tracing. We are calling for maximum transparency on COVID data, including which local child care centers are dealing with a COVID outbreak. We are calling for a carefully measured reopening that does not begin until we have 14 days of declining cases in a row AND a positivity rate of 5% or less. We are calling for financial and community support for furloughed workers so they can continue to provide for their families during the necessary shut down. We are calling for a moratorium on evictions and rent relief for furloughed workers and affected businesses. We are calling for a county wide limit on all indoor gatherings to 10 people or less. We are calling for adequate PPE protection for our social services workers so that they can continue supporting families and investigating abuse allegations during the shut down. We are calling for adequate PPE for our front line healthcare workers so they can safely take care of our community.

We don’t want to set CITA apart from OHS, adding Osbornes name to the marquee will bring a sense of unity and pride to the school and community.

While high tech companies and corporations are profiting upwards of millions to billions of dollars during the pandemic, CTCs are preparing for the upcoming academic year with furloughs, laying off faculty, and discontinuing tenure tracks. Our CTCs and their faculty, staff, and students deserve better, especially our students of color. While long term investments centering racial equity support our CTCs and students, austerity will only hurt them. Our CTCs have always been pillars of higher education in Washington state, but they are now even more important as our state faces the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic consequences. Currently, 1 in 7 Washington workers are unemployed. As more and more workers are being pushed into unemployment, we need both a strong workforce and support for our most vulnerable communities who are disproportionately affected by the pandemic. CTCs can be the key to recovery for both Washington’s economy and its communities. Investing in CTCs keeps CTC faculty and staff employed while providing the resources needed to train and retrain Washington’s students and workforce. We urge state Senators and Representatives to consider CTC budgets from an equity lens, especially as CTCs provide more accessible resources to Washington’s communities of color. 45% of Washington CTC students are also students of color, and COVID-19 has already had a disproportionate effect on people of color. Systemically racist forces such as redlining, racial housing segregation, and limited resources on reservations contribute to higher rates of infection in these communities. Budget cuts due to COVID-19 would only affect these communities even more negatively. Washington’s CTCs serve 60% of our students while only receiving 40% of the state funding for higher education. Our CTCs already receive less of a share of the state funding compared to private institutions. CTCs are not only an affordable source of education for communities of color as well as low income students, but they also provide the support they need through programs such as TRIO, diversity and multicultural programs, and academic and career counseling. We also know that when budgets are cut at CTCs, diversity programs are cut first. It’s already difficult to attend school, especially as a student of color, and these programs are vital resources for students to find a supportive community while in school. Budget cuts will lead to both the defunding of these resources vital to student success and an increase in tuition, making CTCs even more inaccessible at an especially critical time. Our students need investment now more than ever.

The United States Postal Service offers crucial services for Americans nationwide -- including enabling millions to vote safely from home this year. But if Trump’s new postmaster general gets his way, the agency will become so overburdened that it can no longer reliably provide these services. That means voters' ability to cast an absentee ballot during this pandemic will be limited -- potentially disenfranchising countless Americans in November, or forcing them to risk their health at the polls. Since the Postal Service’s founding, USPS workers have been committed to ensuring that every piece of mail gets delivered in a timely, reliable fashion -- and that the mail is picked up from every address every day, even despite staffing shortages. But DeJoy -- a Trump mega-donor with no previous USPS experience -- just implemented extreme new regulations that will inhibit postal workers’ ability to do their jobs. He is eliminating all overtime, cutting all extra trips, and directly instructing mail carriers to leave mail behind at distribution centers -- if delivering it might extend their hours. This will lead to serious delivery delays of everything from life-saving medications to vote-by-mail ballots and 2020 Census forms. And it’s particularly dangerous as we get closer to Election Day -- when there will be a substantial increase in vote-by-mail usage across the country, straining the Postal Service’s now artificially limited capacity. DeJoy claims these changes will cut costs -- but more likely, they’ll put the already beleaguered agency in even deeper financial peril, while also crushing customers’ confidence in the USPS. Instead, our senators need to step up for the Postal Service and follow the House’s lead in passing crucial funding to save it. Right now, we need a massive outcry directed at DeJoy from everyday Americans who rely on the Postal Service. Add your name today.

We would like NFCS to offer free credit recovery for all high school students who require it. COVID-19 has created an extremely difficult experience for all of us, having had to continue to work, support our families, and also learn to be high school teachers, paraprofessionals, etc. Some of us have done this as grandparents on fixed incomes, as parents who have lost employment during this time, as survivors of COVID-19, or just as parents who have been trying to navigate a new terrain of living for which none of us were prepared. Unfortunately, we are now tasked by New Foundations Charter High School to take on the additional burden of paying for summer school for our students who were not successful during remote learning. We applaud the effort of many teachers but as you can imagine, many of our students were, also, not prepared for this event. Our children were conditioned to learning with reliable assistance, with peers, and the shift to remote learning was difficult. Many of us are caregivers for multiple students in multiple grades, of students with disabilities, and people who have had to try and support our kids while trying to sustain our own livelihood. This is why it is extremely disappointing that we are now having to emotionally support our children through the possibility of retention because some of us are not able to afford the cost of summer school. We need you to understand that their inability to pass these courses was not merely a reflection of their academic abilities and effort; any grading of any student during this pandemic was more a grade on a child’s life circumstances than it was on any single child’s academic ability. We ask that New Foundations Charter High School pay the cost of summer school for students who are unable to afford it and reimburse the cost of summer school for the students who were required to pay in order to earn credit. To impose such a financial burden on families during a worldwide crisis is unjust and borderline cruel. Our children could, yes, simply be retained next school year but educators are well aware of the long-term research that links retention to adverse outcomes. Students and families should not be penalized because of a crisis that even our government is struggling to manage. We want nothing more than the best for our students. We are asking that NFCS support us as caregivers with the utmost compassion.

If scientists, doctors, the research community, and public at large do not have the proper information, and proper guidelines based on that information, we are at a greater overall risk of never being able to slow the spread, and needlessly killing tens of thousands additional people. Also, false numbers will impact the decisions of schools to re-open, putting children, teachers, and family members at greater risk. Lastly, at no level should we be lulled into complacency due to false optimistic data. We must trust the data or it is useless.

As Covid-19 cases spiral out of control, we’re reminded every day of the very real stakes of this painful, awful virus, and the abject failure of Donald Trump and his apologists in Congress. Among the California congressional delegation, the most irresponsible, anti-science, Trumpian voice has been Rep. Tom McClintock (R-04). In early June, as Covid-19 cases and deaths were beginning to escalate, McClintock urged people to file complaints with the Department of Justice against city and state public health directives. Then, on the cusp of the spike in cases we’re seeing across the country, McClintock said “(experts) substantially overstated the severity of COVID-19.” To top it off, when told by Rep. Jerry Nadler (NY-10) to wear a mask during a congressional hearing, McClintock replied that “I consider masks much more effective at spreading panic and much less effective at stopping a virus." The stakes are too high for ideologues like McClintock to continue misleading the public with dangerous misinformation. For those like McClintock who disparage government action to stem the spread, there is an imperative to take personal responsibility, starting by wearing a mask to protect others. Tell Tom McClintock to stop lying about Covid-19, and wear a mask As Bob Dylan sings, “to live outside the law, you must be honest.” In the case of Covid-19, being honest means acknowledging the danger of the disease, and the effectiveness of measures to confront it -- like wearing a mask. While ignoring the severity of the disease and peddling misinformation, McClintock voted twice to deny relief to Americans who have been harmed. The first time was out of supposed concern for people who might “game the system” to get paid emergency leave or food aid for seniors, while saying nothing about Trump family-connected businesses gaming the system to take millions intended for small business relief. McClintock objected to helping people the second time because he said it would add too much to the debt, while staying silent about the mushrooming annual deficits caused by his vote in 2017 to slash corporate tax rates. Unfortunately, McClintock’s practice of putting ideology before health, science, data, common sense and the common good is his standard operating procedure. In the case of Covid-19, lying about the facts and common-sense protective measures -- like wearing a mask -- means more people dying. Tell McClintock to be part of the Covid-19 solution and wear a mask. Thank you for taking action!

It’s a matter of public health

400 plus years of racial oppression. Black codes. Jim Crow laws. Texas’ convict leasing system. Black lives matter. Brown lives matter. Trayvon Martin. Philando Castile. Eric Garner. Pamela Turner. Michael Brown. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. George Floyd. No justice. No peace. All our words and images being cried-out in the streets worldwide among protestors, asking for an end to institutional systemic racism. Undeniably, racial disparates have existed for too long in the streets of Texas in the form of police brutality and misconduct. This has also led to, and amplified, disproportionate sentencing of black and brown minorities in the criminal justice system, and has caused Texas to lead the national race in mass incarceration. Adding insult to injury, many inmates have been inappropriately labelled “violent offenders,” when actually many were too young, and thus could potentially outgrow delinquent behavior. Tough-on-crime prosecutors, who often used illegal and deceitful tactics to obtain convictions, never gave them a viable chance. Instead the court’s mentality was overbearingly: “Lock them up, and throw away the key.” Right now, the barbarically outdated attitude is evident. Amid a pandemic, Texas officials have refused to grant “compassionate release” to any of its offenders in a coldhearted effort to unrelentingly warehouse offenders. Meanwhile, mothers and families are crying-out (to unsympathetic official ears) for the lives and welfare of their loved ones -who were sentenced to time, not a COVID-19 related death sentence. In these unprecedented times, the words “I CAN’T BREATHE” ring loud and true for the stifling oppression inmates and their families have yet to find relief from. Rightfully, they want-what we all should want – the removal of the institutional systemic “knee” from their loved ones’ necks. Afterall, the law should apply equally. Needless to say, there are plenty of good “people” in TDCJ that should have been permitted to return to society many years ago. It’s, therefore, high time to level the playing field, and open the political playbook to repeal and replace laws that have adversely and largely impacted black and brown minority communities. Inarguably, our elected, legislative officials can no longer be allowed to hold seats of passiveness or indifference amid these tumultuous times. Prison reform actions, which finely terminates mass incarceration, must began NOW!