By Paul Le Blanc @ CNN.com Updated 6:26 PM ET, June 23

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he will nominate Cindy McCain as US ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture, elevating a longtime friend and Republican ally to an administration post.

If confirmed by the Senate, McCain -- the widow of longtime Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, whose relationship with the President spanned decades -- will represent the US in a specialized UN role focused on ending global hunger and expanding access to quality foods worldwide.

"I am deeply honored and look forward the work ahead," McCain wrote in a tweet. The announcement underscores Biden's push for bipartisanship in Washington [....]

Often underserved by traditional schools, Black families are banding together to educate their children, sometimes with an unexpected funding source: the Koch family and other conservative donors.

By Casey Parks @ NewYorker.com, June 14 for June 21 print issue

[....] Black families have only recently turned to homeschooling in significant numbers. The Census Bureau found that, by October, 2020, the nationwide proportion of homeschoolers—parents who had withdrawn their children from public or private schools and taken full control of their education—had risen to more than eleven per cent, from five per cent at the start of the pandemic. For Black families, the growth has been sharper. Around three per cent of Black students were homeschooled before the pandemic; by October, the number had risen to sixteen per cent.

Few researchers have studied Black homeschoolers, but in 2009 Cheryl Fields-Smith, an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s Mary Frances Early College of Education, published a study of two dozen such families in and around Atlanta. Some parents were middle class or wealthy, and wanted more challenging curricula for their children. Others hadn’t attended college and earned less than fifteen thousand dollars a year; one family lived in a housing project.

Most of the parents told Fields-Smith that the decision had been wrenching. Winning access to public education was one of the central victories of the civil-rights movement. Several parents had relatives who saw homeschooling as “a slap in the face” to the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education. Others worried about harming their neighbors’ children, because public schools rely on per-pupil funding from state governments. (In 2020, around seventy per cent of Detroit public-school revenues came from per-student allocations by the state.)

Still, the parents said that they felt as if they’d had no choice [....]

In accepting the grant, Bernita became part of a decades-long political debate. The National Parents Union paid for the grant with money from Vela Education Fund, which is backed by the Walton Family Foundation and the Charles Koch Institute. These groups advocate “school choice”—rerouting money and families away from traditional public schools through such means as charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, and vouchers, which allow public-education dollars to be put toward private-school tuition.

Sarah Reckhow, an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University and the author of “Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics,” told me that the Waltons “have been consistently a key funder of the charter-school movement." [....]

By Matt Egan @ CNN Business, June 14

The National Retail Federation is calling on the White House to address the logjam at US ports that is snarling commerce as the economy swiftly recovers from the pandemic.

"The supply chain disruption issues, especially the congestion affecting our key maritime ports, are causing significant challenges for America's retailers," Matthew Shay, the NRF's president and CEO, wrote in a letter to President Joe Biden on Monday.

The retail trade group warns that these problems have added "days and weeks" to supply chains, led to inventory shortages and added significant transportation and warehousing costs, The NRF warned that these problems threaten the group's recent forecast for retail sales and the broader economy to boom this year [....]

@ LawfareBlog.com, June 14

Editor’s Note: Even before the attempted insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, the threat of domestic extremism was painfully clear, with terrorist attacks, assaults on minorities and other violence eclipsing the threat posed by jihadist groups such as the Islamic State. Recognizing this danger, the Biden administration will soon release a new, unprecedented strategy document for fighting domestic terrorism. Carly Gordenstein and Seamus Hughes of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism detail the numerous changes the administration is already making and argue that these are important steps forward in the fight against domestic extremism.

[Previous Crime News thread HERE, covering June 1 thru 10]

By Hillary Borrud | The Oregonian/OregonLive, June 10

The Oregon House voted 59-1 Thursday to expel Rep. Mike Nearman, the first time it has ejected a sitting representative.

Lawmakers removed Nearman because he let far-right demonstrators, some of whom were heavily armed, into the Capitol on Dec. 21 while lawmakers were holding a special session. The Capitol was closed to the public due to the pandemic and remains so. That means his seat representing a rural district west of Salem will likely sit vacant for the remainder of the legislative session, which must wrap up by June 27 [....]

Democrats gave Nearman unlimited time to speak during the House floor debate on the resolution to remove him. But Nearman, the lone “no” vote against his removal, kept his comments brief and reiterated that “the citizens of Oregon should be able to instruct their legislators” and industry and interest groups should have in-person access to lobby lawmakers.

The 22 other House Republicans, all of whom voted to expel Nearman, remained silent during the floor debate. However, the top leaders of the caucus discussed Nearman’s actions earlier in the day [....]