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Summertime means camp, and The Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures is offering weekly sessions for children to learn and have fun.

The Tucson museum which is dedicated to preserving and promoting the art of miniatures is hosting multiple week-long summer camps through its education department from either 9 a.m. to noon or 1 to 4 p.m. from June 5 through June 30.

The camps will incorporate hands-on STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics) concepts in an exciting setting for kids ages 6 to 12 to create, build and explore. The cost is $175 per child.

We want them to have fun, and then we try to weave in some educational components that they can take with them, said Director of Education Djamila Jean-Charles. We also want them to learn some practical tools, like sculpting, and (foster) a greater appreciation for exploration and creativity. Just opening up the space so they can get their hands dirty.

New to this years camp series, sessions will be organized into beginner and advanced levels. The former is geared toward children who have less arts and crafts or camp experience, may need additional assistance using certain craft supplies and tools, and require further guidance on their project.

Advanced camps are for those who have taken previous classes, camps or workshops; are able to work independently; feel comfortable using a variety of tools; and need less guidance while creating their project.

Each camp is limited to 20 participants to maintain a quality experience.

The museums summer camps, according to Jean-Charles, each explore a different theme through which kids will learn practical and academic skills.

Sessions focus on creating an imaginary world based on a childhood book, movie or game such as Hayao Miyazaki films, or the Confessions and Guilty Pleasures games.

Some of this summers camps include The Mad Hatter Tea Party, which will focus on entomology, gardening, natural dyes and chemistry; while children participating in the Mini Mushroom Go Cart session will learn about basic mechanical concepts, electronics and fungi.

All materials and supplies are provided for the kids to complete each project.

Typically, we do work with recycled materials. We just want the kids to get a sense of what they can use at home and then also use during camp and what they can create with it, Jean-Charles said. But for example, for our Minecraft Garden (camp), hopefully well get a chance to work with (technology nonprofit) We Care Tucson. So theyll provide computers so kids can actually make some three-dimensional models and we can 3D print here at the museum.

This summers instructors are Adair Steig, a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at the University of Arizona; Augustine, an entomologist with five years of experience in entomology and ecology educational outreach with K-12 students; and Tasha Burr, a teacher and educator who is also a member of Tucson Miniature Society and Miniature Club Casita.

Children should arrive at camp dressed in comfortable clothing for play, as well as appropriate snacks labeled with their name and a bottle of water.

The museums annual summer camp series, which has been held for nearly a decade, is one of several events that its education department hosts throughout the year. Children can also enjoy camps during spring and fall break, and Minis for All monthly DIY mini projects for at-home creation.

Its just more exploration for the art of miniature making, but trying to make it palatable for the kids Jean-Charles said. We try to just focus on making tiny things.

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Museum of Miniatures offering educational summer camps | Special ... - Tucson Local Media

Opinion

Rupert Murdoch, the Koch network and other rightwing power brokers know the monster they created is now out of control

The indictment of Donald J Trump has not driven a wooden stake through his heart. He has risen, omnipresent and ominous again, overwhelming his rivals, their voices joined into his choir, like the singing January 6 prisoners, proclaiming the wickedness of his prosecution. As he enters the criminal courthouse to pose for his mugshot and to give his fingerprints, evangelicals venerate him as the adulterous King David or the martyred Christ.

Trump does not have to raise his hand to signal to the House Republicans to echo his cry of WITCH-HUNT. He owns the House like he owns a hotel.

I keep him up on everything that were doing, says Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who serves as one of his agents over the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy. Nine of the 25 Republicans on the House judiciary committee and 11 of the 26 on oversight have endorsed him. Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, has pledged her allegiance. Jim Jordan, who refused to honor a subpoena from the January 6 committee, now issues flurries of subpoenas as chair of the Orwellian-named subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, to obstruct investigations of Trump, and not incidentally into Jordans and other House Republicans roles in the insurrection. But not even a subpoena to the New York district attorney, Alvin Bragg, or any other prosecutor, could command the tide of indictments.

Between the motion of Trumps first indictment and the act of the last Republican primary, more than a year from now, on 4 June 2024, the shadow will fall on the only party with an actual nomination contest. Trumps pandemonium will only have an electoral valence for the foreseeable future in its precincts. His damage to the constitution, the national security of the United States and the rule of law will be extensive, but his most intense and focused political destruction will be circumscribed within the Republican party.

From the report of every new indictment to its reality, Republican radicalization will accelerate. Every concrete count will confirm every conspiracy theory. Every prosecution and trial, staggered over months and into the election year, from New York to Georgia to Washington, will be a shock driving Republicans further to Trump. Every Republican candidate running for every office will be compelled to declare as a matter of faith that Trump is being unjustly persecuted or be themselves branded traitors.

Profession of the holy creed of election denial has already been broadened to demand profession of the doctrine of Trumps impunity. Every Republican attempting to run on law and order will be required to disavow law and order in every case in which Trump is the defendant. Trumps incitement to violence will not have an exception of immunity for the Republican party. Beginning in the Iowa caucuses, the confrontations may not resemble New England town meetings. If Trump were to lose in the first tumultuous caucuses, can anyone doubt he will claim it was rigged? Was January 6 a preliminary for the Republican primaries of 2024?

The death watch of Trump is a cyclical phenomenon. After each of his storms, the pundits, talking heads and party strategists on all sides emerge from their cellars, survey the latest wreckage and check the scientific measurements of the polls to give the all clear sign that the cyclone had passed. When Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, thoughtful analysts assured that Trumps time was gone, he would fade away and his comeback in 2024 was an impossibility, just not going to happen. Everyone should relax. Then came January 6. When Trumps endorsed candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, a gaggle of election deniers and conspiracy mongers, were ignominiously rejected, last rites were pronounced. Trump was dead again.

We want to make Trump a non-person, Rupert Murdoch said after the January 6 insurrection. Trumps image was virtually banished from his bandbox of Fox News. He would be airbrushed out of the next episode of history.

The best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter, wrote Emily Seidel, chief executive of the Koch networks Americans for Prosperity, in a memo.

On 5 February, the Koch dark money syndicate held a conference of its billionaire donors and key activists at Palm Springs, California, to lay the groundwork for the dawning of the post-Trump age. There it was decided to swing its enormous resources behind the candidacy of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who they had originally cultivated as one of their Tea Party hothouse congressmen.

The wishful thinking that Trump would magically disappear, however, ignored the omens of Liz Cheneys purging, the victories of his candidates in the midterm Republican primaries over blanched normies, and the corrupt bargain that McCarthy was forced to make to secure his speakership. The implacability of Trumps political bases attachment was discounted.

Murdoch, Koch et al should have grasped the dangerous fluidity of the extremism they stoked, financed and organized for decades, which metastasized into Trump. Their approach to Trump was not dissimilar to that of Vladimir Putin, treating him as their useful idiot. Putins purpose was and is to use Trump to destroy Nato and the western alliance, and as an agent of chaos within the US of a magnitude that no KGB agent could have recruited during the cold war.

The Koch network contentedly used Trump to pack the courts with Federalist Society stamped judges, deregulate business and thwart policy on climate change. But despite delivering those goods, Trump was ultimately uncontrollable. The problem with Trump was not his wildness and lawlessness. They were willing to tolerate him so long as his administration produced for them. Trumps foibles were the cost of business. His liability was that he was not their kind of Republican, at heart a laissez-faire free market libertarian. Trump hated international trade and opposed slashing entitlements, particularly social security and Medicare, which they have long tried to hobble and privatize. In 2018, he tweeted his contempt for the Globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles I never sought their support because I dont need their money or bad ideas. They love my Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judicial picks & more. I made them rich. But his worst debit for them was that he lost. With DeSantis, they thought they could finally move on. Without Trump, they could wipe the slate clean, restore the past and return to the glory days when the Tea Party militants besieged town hall meetings to shriek against Obamacare. The undercurrent of the oligarchs romance with DeSantis is a strange nostalgia.

Trumps announcement on 18 March that he would be arrested and charged in New York three days later, born of a combination of panic and seizing an opportunity for grift, was not a deliberate strategic masterstroke, though it had that effect. In February, DeSantis led Trump by 45% to 41% in the Yahoo/YouGov poll. In the poll taken just after Trump said he would be arrested, Trump shot into the lead 47% to 39%. After he was indicted, he left DeSantis in the dust, 57% to 31%.

Trump had already sent Murdochs and Kochs presumptive candidate reeling. DeSantis has positioned himself as a cultural warrior but Trump smashed into his vulnerable flank. Before he adopted his gay bashing and race- and Jew-baiting persona, DeSantis was a cookie-cutter Tea Party congressman who voted several times to cut social security and Medicare. When Trump slammed him for his votes in early March as a wheelchair over the cliff kind of guy, DeSantis renounced his position, saying he would not mess with social security. Even before the indictment, Trump had Il Duce of the Sunshine State dancing like Ginger Rogers backwards in the Cuban heels of his cowboy boots. Trump has not relented. The day after he was indicted, his Make America Great Again political action committee broadcast an ad ripping DeSantis: President Trump is on the side of the American people when it comes to social security and Medicare. Ron DeSantis sides with DC establishment insiders The more you see about DeSantis, the more you see he doesnt share our values. Hes not ready to be president. On the right that Trump has made, national socialism beats laissez-faire.

DeSantis reacted to Trumps indictment by stating that he would not extradite him from Florida to New York, which nobody had asked him to do. His empty gesture as a two-bit secessionist would be in defiance of the constitutions article IV extradition clause. Between the emotion and the response falls the hollow man. His rhetorical lawlessness in tribute to Trump only enhanced Trumps pre-eminence over him.

If anyone should have known better, it was Murdoch. His media properties now veer from slavishly outraged defense of the accused Trump on Fox News (Witch-hunt!) to trashing him in the New York Post (Bat Hit Crazy!) to puffing DeSantis in the Times of London, not widely read in Iowa or New Hampshire. The ruthless operator has been outplayed. Murdoch, who takes no prisoners, is Trumps prisoner.

Murdoch profitably buckled in for the Trump ride all the way to January 6. His decision not to jump off for the crash has now landed him in his biggest scandal, thrusting him in the middle of the Trump debacle with a January 6 trial of his own. After the 2020 election, following the lead of Trump and his attorneys, Fox News broadcast that Dominion Voting Systems had changed or deleted votes to help steal the election. The Fox chief executive, Suzanne Scott, wrote in an email shutting down the fact-checking of Trump falsehoods: This has to stop now this is bad business the audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. On 5 January, the eve of the attack on the Capitol, Murdoch discussed with Scott whether the network should report the truth: The election is over and Joe Biden won. He said those words would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen. Scott told him that privately they are all there but we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers. On 12 January, Murdoch emailed the Fox board member Paul Ryan that he had heard that the Fox host Sean Hannity has been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers.

Fox was terrified of its own audience, the Trump base it had whipped up day after day, fearful it would defect to a more pro-Trump site, Newsmax or One America News Network. Instead of broadcasting the facts, its executives ordered conspiracy theories and lies be aired to satisfy voracious demand. Murdoch admitted in an email that Trumps claims of voter fraud were really crazy stuff. But the show must go on. Dominion is now suing Fox News for $1.6bn for defamation.

Much of the material in the discovery documents reads like dialogue from a bad French farce.

I hate him passionately, wrote a histrionic Tucker Carlson about Trump. Murdoch told Scott about Giulianis and the others lies: Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear. On 21 January 2021, Murdoch called Trump increasingly mad. Murdoch wondered, after serving as Trumps chief enabler, The real danger is what he might do as president. Quelle surprise!

Of course, the specific falsehoods Fox recklessly and maliciously broadcast about Dominion were of a piece with those the network has been pumping out for years. That Murdoch is shocked, shocked is worthy of Capt Renault discovering there is gambling in the backroom of Ricks Caf in Casablanca. Your winnings, sir.

The day after Trump was indicted, Judge Eric Davis ruled that the Dominion case would go to trial.

The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that [it is] CRYSTAL clear that none of the [Fox News] statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true, he wrote. That trial will begin in mid-April and will probably last for weeks with major Fox personalities and Murdoch called to the stand. The very bad news is that in Delaware, where the trial will take place, unlike in New York, where the Trump trial will be held, television cameras are allowed in the courtroom. Undoubtedly, Fox will not be airing the humiliation of its stars and executives, but it is certain that CNN, desperate for ratings, and MSNBC will happily fill schedules with a Fox cavalcade.

Foxs propaganda was intimately linked to the January 6 coup, but could not be investigated by the January 6 committee. Murdochs desperate desire to separate himself from Trump will be impossible when Foxs lies for Trump in the subversion of constitutional democracy are on full display. The Dominion trial will provide a necessary complement to the trials of Trump, more than an atmospheric touch of political theater, but bearing on politics moving forward. Murdoch, chained to his service to Trump, will not escape a judgment any more than Trump.

The response of Foxs audience to Fox in the dock will inevitably be to rally around Trump. Murdoch may be finished with Trump but Trump is not finished with him. Murdochs trial will contribute to the tightening of support for his object of contempt.

I am your retribution, Trump promises. He rages against DeSantis and Fox as Rinos Republicans In Name Only, which is to say Republicans. In the courtroom drama ahead, Trump will flail against his host of prosecutors, but his retribution during his battle for the nomination will be levied against the Republican party.

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Every indictment will make Trump stronger and Republicans wilder - The Guardian

After spending about four months in dry dock in the nations oldest seaport undergoing extensive restoration in time for celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, the brig Beaver is scheduled to ship up to Boston on Tuesday, 7 a.m., from Gloucester Marine Railways Corp. on Rocky Neck.

The Beaver, a replica of the original 18th-century brig from whose decks patriots chucked chests of tea into Boston Harbor on Dec. 16, 1773, is part of the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum on Congress Street in Boston.

In November, it was guided by a tugboat to Gloucester and gingerly hauled out of the water at the Burnham Brothers Railway at Maritime Gloucester on Harbor Loop.

There, workers from the Gloucester Marine Railways in conjunction with workers from Back Narrows Boatyard in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, worked on the vessel to get her shipshape, said Don King, general manager of Gloucester Marine Railways.

The vessel previously underwent a major rebuild at Gloucester Marine Railways.

It has been more than 10 years since the Beaver left Gloucester for her new home at the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, said Shawn P. Ford, executive director for the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, in an email on Monday. We look forward to having her back today after her recent visit to the Gloucester Marine Railways. The crew, with their expertise and passion unmatched in New England, has given the Beaver a complete once-over and she is ready to take center stage at the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party this Saturday, Dec. 16, 2023.

The replica Beaver was built as a schooner on the island of Aero, Denmark, in 1908 and was used for freighting and shipping, according to the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museums website.

We are pretty much wrapped up with what is on our worklist, said King on Monday morning. He said the ship would be towed to the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museums facility, with the transit to Boston Harbor early Tuesday morning all timed by the tides.

King said the move is timed with dead low tide after a four-hour journey to Boston so that the ship, which does not have its masts stepped, can fit under the Evelyn Moakley Bridge in Boston. The museum is handling the transit.

He said crews performed work on the aft quarter deck and replaced about 20% of the main deck, as well as did extensive work on the bow. . Work was also done on the pinrails used to secure rigging.

He said he had two people working full time on the vessel, and as many as six working at once on the ship at certain times.

It created a lot of work for us, King said.

Once the ship is back in Boston, it will have its new masts stepped and new bowsprit installed.

King said the reason the work was done at the historic marine railway at Maritime Gloucester, instead of on Rocky Neck, was because the Gloucester Marine Railways had been booked solid. Maritime Gloucester let Gloucester Marine Railways use its railway for the job. The Beaver was brought over to Rocky Neck last Wednesday.

At least five people could be seen working on the ship Monday afternoon. One was painting the bow, another was welding.

King said the reason the ship was not transited back to Boston right away was because a week was needed for the boat to soak up to insure the hull was watertight after she was refloated.

Things went extremely smooth, King said, and it was pretty tight, especially for a 100-year-old-plus hull.

Ethan Forman may be contacted at 978-675-2714, or at eforman@northofboston.com.

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Tea Party brig shipping up to Boston | Local News | gloucestertimes ... - Gloucester Daily Times

JACKSON, Tenn. A tea party was held in the Hub city for a great cause.

The first ever Women in Rotary Tea Party was held on Saturday at the First United Methodist Church.

This was held in support of International Womens History Month and to raise funds for hygiene packs for girls at local high schools. The members will be putting the hygiene packs together to distribute all across West Tennessee.

Many women were in attendance for support including a large number of business leaders.

I was so excited when I was asked to participate, because I am a womens advocate 100 percent. This is a great way to bring women together, said Margaret Taylor, Rotary Club Member.

Several rotary clubs across West Tennessee came together to make this event such a success.

According to Jackson Old Hickory Rotary Club president, Shelley Hayes, women were not always invited to be rotary members. There was a vote in 1989 to allow women into the club.

Women are still playing catch-up to the gentlemen in the club, but we are super excited to get together. Rotary International started an Empower Girls Initiative last year, really to support the needs of girls, Hayes said.

Hayes expresses that they really wanted to do something in March to celebrate women and their history in the rotary clubs. She says that they would like to make this an annual event.

Hayes would like to thank everyone who made the first Rotary Tea Party such a success. She says that it felt empowering having so many female rotary club members in attendance.

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Tea party held in support of women across West TN - WBBJ TV - WBBJ-TV

Tea Party appeals to seniors to protect themselves by attacking other beneficiaries of federal spending are going to make a comeback. Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

In the partisan-messaging battle over the federal budget, Joe Biden seems to have Republicans right where he wants them. Beginning with his State of the Union Address in early February, the president has hammered away at GOP lawmakers for plotting to gut wildly popular Social Security and Medicare benefits. This has driven Republicans into a defensive crouch; they can either pretend their proposed cuts arent really cuts or forswear them altogether. Its a message that Democrats would love to highlight every day until the next election, or at least until Republicans figure out a better response than lies, evasions, and blustery denials.

But as Ron Brownstein points out in The Atlantic, there is a logical path Republicans could take to counter Democrats claims that GOP policies threaten popular retirement programs. Its based on pitting every other form of federal domestic spending against Social Security and Medicare, and on making Democratic support for Big Government and its beneficiaries a political problem among seniors:

Republicans hope that exempting Social Security and Medicare [from cutbacks they are demanding for raising the federal debt limit] will dampen any backlash to their deficit-reduction plans in economically vulnerable districts. But protecting those programs, as well as defense, from cutswhile also precluding tax increaseswill force the House Republicans to propose severe reductions in other domestic programs potentially including Medicaid, the ACA, and food and housing assistance.

Will a Republican push for severe reductions in those programs provide Democrats with an opening in such places? Robert J. Blendon, a professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, is dubious. Although these areas have extensive needs, he told me, the residents voting Republican in them are generally skeptical of social-welfare spending apart from Social Security and Medicare. We are dealing with a set of values here, which has a distrust of government and a sense that anyone should have to work to get any sort of low-income benefit, Blendon said. The people voting Republican in those districts dont see it as important [that] government provides those benefits.

And so Republicans will very likely return to the messaging they embraced during the Obama administration. Back then, self-identified Tea Party conservatives constantly tried to convince elderly voters that the real threat to their retirement programs stemmed not from GOP budget cutting, but from Democratic-backed Big Government spending on younger people and minorities, with whom many conservative voters did not identify. Then as now, a partisan budget fight and the threat of a debt default of government shutdown let Republicans frame funding decisions as a competition between groups of beneficiaries, rather than a debate over abstract levels of taxing or spending.

The big opening shot in this campaign was Sarah Palins wildly mendacious but highly effective September 2009 Facebook post claiming that the Affordable Care Act would create death panels that would eliminate Medicare coverage for seniors or disabled children deemed socially superfluous (the barely legitimate basis for the attack was an Affordable Care Act provision to allow Medicare payments to physicians discussing end-of-life treatments with patients).

Soon Republicans would come up with slightly more substantive claims that Obamacare threatened Medicare. In 2011, House GOP budget maven Paul Ryan, whom Democrats hammered for his proposals to partially privatize both Social Security and Medicare, claimed that Obama administration projections of health cost savings in Medicare represented a shift of resources from Medicare to Obamacare. By 2012, when Ryan became Mitt Romneys running mate, Ryan was campaigning with his mother in tow, claiming that Republicans wanted to protect her from raids on her retirement benefits by the redistributionist Democrats.

Romney and Ryan didnt win, of course, but they did win the over-65 vote by a robust 56-44 margin, a better performance in that demographic than Trump registered in 2016 or 2020. As Thomas Edsall explained in The New Republic in 2010, the Tea Partyera Republicans understood they had to mobilize their federal spending constituents against alleged competitors:

Republicans understand that one axis of the resource war will be generational. All of their vows to defend Medicare are coupled with attacks on Obamas health care reform. They implicitly portray Democrats as waging an age warcreating a massive new government program that transfers dollars to the young at the expense of the elderly. Republicans have cleverly stoked the fear that Obama is rewarding all his exuberant, youthful, idealistic supporters by redistributing resources that are badly needed by the old.

In a 2024 campaign in which Democrats are going for the jugular with seniors, a reprise of the GOPs 2012 Medicare counterattack, dishonest as it was, might make sense.

During this years budget skirmish in Congress, House Republicans are expected to take a claw hammer to domestic spending outside Social Security and Medicare, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reports:

This spring, House Republicans are expected to release an annual budget resolution that calls for large health care cuts, and Medicaid and the Affordable Care Acts (ACA) marketplace coverage are likely to be prime targets. House Republican leaders are calling for cutting the deficit and making the Trump tax cuts permanent, while saying they will shield certain areas of the budget (Medicare, Social Security, and military spending) from cuts. To do all these things at once, it is highly likely they will propose cuts in health programs that provide coverage to millions of people.

The House GOP has also already called for deep cuts in nondefense discretionary spending, including food stamp and nutrition programs. Its likely the GOPs state-based crusade against woke public education will lead to a renewal of ancient conservative demands to deeply cut or kill the U.S. Department of Education. Maybe those representing energy-producing areas will go hard after EPA or the Department of the Interiors programs. Almost certainly, the GOP as a whole will embrace across-the-board cuts in federal employment or federal employee benefits under the guise of draining the swamp. Any and all such cuts can also be rationalized as necessary to avoid reductions in spending for Social Security, Medicare, and national defense, not to mention tax increases.

Whatever formula they adopt, theres little doubt Republicans will find ways to present themselves the true defenders of Social Security and Medicare, just as many of them will always keep scheming for ways to damage or destroy these vestiges of the New Deal and Great Society, which they hate deeply. Biden seems committed to his effort to make seniors fear the GOP, and its the only way Republicans can hit back at him.

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How the GOP Will Counter Biden's Social Security Attacks - New York Magazine