Oklahoma’s public health infrastructure worked hand in glove with the first Trump presidency’s public health response, complete with the botched unemployment software and rollout as well as preemptively reopening businesses in the spring of 2020. But we might consider something else is going on with the state government’s poor oversight of our public health systems: […]

To say Donald Trump is obsessed with immigrants would be an epic understatement. From the moment he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his 2016 presidential campaign through his 2024 bid to reclaim the White House, The Donald hasn’t hidden his racism and bigotry and devotion to white nationalism. As he prepares […]

It’s official: Oklahoma recorded the nation’s lowest age-eligible voter turnout in the November general election – a Code Red warning that our body politic is on life support, if not in a death spiral. Can anything be done to restore the patient to health? One citizens’ group, Oklahoma United, thinks it has identified the antidote: […]

In a reality where the full spectrum of reproductive healthcare protections has been rolled back or eliminated nationwide by the disastrous Dobbs U.S. Supreme Court decision, Oklahoma legislators still manage to work overtime to reduce women’s rights from every angle possible. When the Oklahoma Commission on the Status of Women picked two of the hardest rightwing state […]

It’s difficult, if not impossible to keep up with state Superintendent Ryan Walters’ antics these days. But we know this much for certain: He’s doing everything he can to dismantle the State Department of Education and straight-jacket Oklahoma’s K-12 schools with his non-stop social media gaslighting and right-wing media appearances in which he uses public […]

If nothing else, the Oklahoma Legislature’s Republican supermajority has proven itself world-class at one thing: virtue signaling. Any piece of legislation they can remotely link to DEI or ESG … anything they can tar-and-feather as “Woke” … anything they think undermines the historical, patriarchal, white status quo … they attack like buzzards feasting on roadkill […]

It took 13 years, but the chickens finally came home to roost for legislative Republicans, who handed Oklahoma governors absolute power over the State Board of Education in response to push-back from Democratic appointees against then-newly minted and wholly unqualified superintendent Janet Barresi. At the time, GOP lawmakers were warned their fit of pique could […]

With the new school year just weeks away, state Superintendent Ryan Walters is busy lobbing one Molotov cocktail after another into Oklahoma’s classrooms in pursuit of his Christian Nationalist agenda. For this week’s Observercast – A Six Gun Or A Fountain Pen – former social studies teacher-turned-state Rep. John Waldron of Tulsa joins us to […]

When lawmakers adjourned sine die late last month, it wasn’t just the end of the 59th Oklahoma Legislature. It was the end of a leadership era, too. Senate President Pro Tem Greg Treat and House Speaker Charles McCall are two of the longest serving top dawgs in their respective chambers in Oklahoma history – Treat […]

If the 59th Oklahoma Legislature is remembered for anything, it will be its preoccupation with 2SLGBTQ+ folks, especially transgender Oklahomans. This session, more than 50 bills were introduced that the American Civil Liberties Union identified as anti-2SLGBTQ+. Fortunately, few got so much as a hearing. What did gain traction was open hate speech – remember […]