Portside

The experience of other countries suggests Betsy DeVos' voucher vision falls flat. Research led by an Indiana University professor confirms what school voucher critics have long argued: Voucher programs receive public funding yet discriminate on the basis of religion, disability status, sexual orientation and possibly other factors. Democratic political participation requires access to information, engagement in discourse and electoral activity to be effective.

The State of California's elected officials are exploring ways to combat President Trump's Executive Order cutting off funding to sanctuary cities. National legal experts say that Trump's sanctuary cities order is unconstitutional because, at its core, the order is an attempt to commandeer state and local officials in violation of the 10th Amendment.

Last Friday, Donald Trump made his first visit to the Pentagon where he spoke of signing an order to begin "a great rebuilding of the armed services of the United States." This will mean a massive surge in federal dollars pouring into the abyss of the Pentagon, which has shown itself quite capable of absorbing such moneys in the past and seems to lack the slightest ability to account for what's done with them. (The Pentagon has never even managed to pass an audit.)

The creation of the UN in 1945 was a victory for the spirit of pacifism, an affirmation of multilateralism, a beautiful progressive idea. This idea must be maintained in face of the pipe dream of unilateralism.

It may only take 3.5% of the population to topple a dictator – with civil resistance

Political language, like poetry, is rarely uttered without intention. When Trump said, unconvincingly in his speech, that “we are one nation, and their pain is our pain,” I knew that the They was Us, this separate America, which he continually labels and addresses as Other.

This first of two projected volumes of a new biography of the South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee takes his story to the end of 1968. It offers some surprises about this significant, and some would say underrated, politician.

Theodore Melfi’s film about black women mathematicians is now the biggest movie in America — just in time to teach us crucial lessons for a Trump presidency. So what’s to be done? Hidden Figures offers a crystal-clear answer: Resist.

We got this; Extreme vetting; Net nightmare; Merger mania; Info lockdown

When McGarvey, claiming to speak for all the trades, kowtows to a president who launched his political career attacking the legitimacy of the nation’s first black president and stereotyping Hispanics as “rapists and murderers,” he undermines the work and the morale of dedicated activists and potential members, the future of the U.S. labor movement.