Miscellaneous Items From My Writer's Notebook

#CFT, which represents roughly 120,000 educators, is lobbying for $2.7 million in state funds for a three-year pilot program that would incorporate labor history in civics, economics, and history classes, along with simulations like those run by the DePaul Center. A 2011 study of four popular textbooks found that coverage of the labor movement was "narrow and sometimes  seriously misleading." (Source: Caroline Creston, "Teaching Class Solidarity," "The Nation," April 2, 2018.)

#President Trump has said that "Some countries have a very, very tough penalty -- the ultimate penalty. And by the way, they have much less of a drug problem than we do." Trump has a well-established pattern of emphasizing harsh and punitive law enforcement, rather than treatment, in response to the opioid crisis.

#"On the face of it, the  idea that Google is discriminating against white men is laugh-out-loud funny," said Joe Nocera in "Bloomberg.com." The company's 2016 diversity report revealed  just two percent of staff were black, and three percent Hispanic, and that the leadership team was 76 percent male and 68 percent  white.

#More Mike Pompeo sayings: As a Kansas congressman, Pompeo said: "Americans had worshiped other Gods and called it multi-culturism." "We'd endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle." He said a "threat to America" was caused by people who deeply believe that Islam is the way. He also said that Muslims "abhor Christians." All Muslims were "potentially complicit" in acts of terror collectively, and he wanted to declare the Muslim Brotherhood to be a "foreign terrorist organization."

#Last month, U.S. District Judge John Bates labeled as "unlawful" Trump's decision to rescind the Obama-era rule protecting young illegal immigrants, and said the government should accept new applicants. Bates stayed the ruling for 90 days to allow the government to provide a better legal argument. He ruled that "DACA's recission was arbitrary and capricious" because the Department filed adequately to explain its conclusion that the program was unlawful.

#Last summer, a federal judge in the District of Columbia ruled that cuts in the DHS budget to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program were unlawful. The Trump administration had notified 81 organizations that their funding for the sex-education program would end in 2018, not in 2020, as originally planned.

#The Associated Press has identified 30 publicly reported gun-related incidents involving  adults at schools since 2014. Incidents included guns going off by mistake, guns being shot by curious students, and guns being left in various locations.