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Dolly Parton Has Spent 30 Years Sending Free Books To Kids Across The US And World To Improve Literacy

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Dolly Parton is a country music legend who’s become a major figure in the fight to improve literacy throughout the US and the world. Within the past three decades, she’s worked through her book giveaway program, Imagination Library, to provide free books to various areas throughout the nation.

One of the biggest initiatives that initially pushed Parton to start this program was the fact that she grew up rather poor, and her own father never had the opportunity to learn to read. As the fourth child of 12, Parton stated that her father “was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known,” but was often embarrassed by the fact that he couldn’t read, according to the Associated Press. 

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There are currently 21 states where all children under the age of 5 can register to have books mailed to their home monthly. Missouri and Kentucky were recently added to that last, and to celebrate, Parton made stops in both states to tell the story of her father and promote the work of Imagination Library. 

Unfortunately, Parton’s father, Robert Lee Parton, passed away in 2000, but his legacy lives on through the initiatives of Parton’s giveaway program. 

“In the mountains, a lot of people never had a chance to go to school because they had to work on the farms. They had to do whatever it took to keep the rest of the family going,”  Parton said at the Folly Theater in Kansas City, Missouri. 

Parton initially launched the program in 1995, and at the time it was only operating in a single county in her home state of Tennessee. As of today, through the program over 3 million books are sent out each month. Throughout the past 30 years of the program, more than 240 million kids in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Australia have received books. 

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Missouri as a state covers the full cost of the program, and most of the other states provide money through a cost-sharing model. 

“The kids started calling me the ‘book lady.’ And Daddy was more proud of that than he was that I was a star. But Daddy got to feeling like he had really done something great as well,” Parton said. 

At an event on Tuesday in Kentucky, Governor Andy Beshear and Dolly Parton announced that the Imagination Library will be able to help children in all 120 counties. They also stated that more than 120,000 children in the state are enrolled in the program; that’s about half of all the preschoolers in Kentucky.

“It’s really a great way to teach children when they’re very young to learn to love books and to learn to read,” Parton said during the event.

Parton’s goal is to see the program implemented in every state in the US. The program does have a presence in all of the states currently, however, 21 of them have official legislation that guarantees kids under 5 can enroll.

“That was kind of my way to honor my dad, because the Bible says to honor your father and mother, and I don’t think that just means, ‘just obey.’ I think it means to bring honor to their name and to them,” she stated.

No Justice No Peace Sign

Grand Juror On Breonna Taylor Case Claims Homicide Charges Were Never Offered

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A grand juror in the Breonna Taylor case has spoken out against claims made by Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron, stating that the jury was never offered homicide charges to consider against the officers involved in the killing of Taylor. 

The grand juror made the anonymous comments after a Louisville judge allowed the panel’s members to speak publicly about the secretive proceedings. The juror didn’t file suit to speak publicly, however, until Cameron announced that no officers would be directly charged for the shooting death of Taylor during a botched narcotics raid that wasn’t even meant to occur at Taylor’s residency. 

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Instead, the grand jury only charged one officer out of the four with endangerment of Taylor’s neighbors due to the fact that some of the dozens of bullets fired hit her neighbors home; but no charges were made for the bullets that hit Taylor. The grand juror claims that when the jury asked about bringing other charges against the officers, they were told “there would be none because prosecutors didn’t feel they could make them stick,” according to the statement. 

Cameron has also been quite adamant about not allowing the grand jurors to speak about the proceedings, but didn’t appeal the judges ruling either. This could likely be because on September 23rd when Cameron announced the results of the grand jury investigation that resulted in one endangerment charge, he claimed that prosecutors “walked the grand jury through every homicide offense,” a claim that has now been refuted. 

Cameron also claimed that the “grand jury agreed” that the officers who shot Taylor were justified in their returning fire after Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s boyfriend, shot at the officers who barged into their home without any warning or announcement that they were law enforcement. The gun Walker had was legally owned as well. 

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However, the grand juror also refuted these claims and stated that the “panel didn’t agree that certain actions were justified, and grand jurors did not have homicide charges explained to them. The grand jury never heard anything about those laws. Self defense or justification was never explained either.”

Kevin Glowgower is the grand juror’s attorney, who claims that his client’s biggest discrepancy with the Kentucky attorney general is the way that the results were  “portrayed to the public as to who made what decisions and who agreed with what decisions.”

Beyond the statement posted on Tuesday the grand juror has no intention of speaking out further about the cases proceedings. Cameron has only acknowledged that his prosecutors didn’t present homicide charges due to the fact that the two officers who shot and killed Taylor were justified in returning fire after Walker shot them. 

Cameron said Tuesday that it was his decision “to ask for an indictment that could be proven under Kentucky law. Indictments obtained in the absence of sufficient proof under the law do not stand up and are not fundamentally fair to any one.” 

Breonna Taylor was a Black emergency medical technician who was working on the frontlines of the Covid-19 pandemic when she was shot multiple times in her own home while she was sleeping by white police officers who barged into the home. The officers were raiding the home as a part of an ongoing narcotics investigation, however, the officers didn’t announce their identity upon arrival and didn’t find any drugs in the home either. Her death fueled the already burning fires of racial justice in America, as protests against police brutality in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement have been ongoing since the spring.

Major Democrat Victories in Kentucky, Virginia

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It can be tricky to try to predict the results of a presidential contest based on the results of an off-year election like the one held yesterday in the United States. But while the most recent election was not as consequential as midterm or presidential elections, the results nonetheless gave reasons for Democrats to celebrate and for Republicans to be concerned. In Kentucky, a usually deep red state and home to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is up for reelection next year, Democrat Andy Beshear beat Republican incumbent governor Matt Bevin by a slim margin. And in Virginia, as a likely consequence of a court-ordered redrawing of gerrymandered districts, Democrats won full control of the state’s government, paving the way for major policy changes including a higher minimum wage, stricter gun control laws, and the potential passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment that would ensure men and women are given equal rights under the law throughout the country.

Although Democrats have much to celebrate today, Republicans also saw some noteworthy victories. Perhaps most significantly, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves defeated Attorney General Jim Hood by about five percentage points for the position of Mississippi state governor, and the Republican party also gained some legislative seats in New Jersey. But on the whole, Democrats came out on top yesterday, making substantial gains in states across the country, including electoral victories in Pennsylvania, a state that could potentially be decisive for Trump’s reelection.

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Though Governor Matt Bevin has not yet conceded the race, the results of the election in Kentucky are unambiguous, and major news networks have called the race for challenger Andy Beshear. Bevin’s loss is particularly remarkable because of how it is connected to Donald Trump; Bevin ran his campaign by portraying himself as an ally of Trump’s, and the president even appeared in Kentucky to support the incumbent governor’s reelection. Bevin’s governing style, too, has been compared to Trump’s, as he is known for picking fights with groups who have opposed his policies, including teachers and police in the state. He also attempted to dismantle key provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which proved to be unpopular with Kentucky voters. 

Yesterday’s results show how gerrymandering, when left unchecked, can totally transform the politics of an entire state in favor of the minority party.

As such, several commentators view Bevin’s loss as a rebuke of Trumpism, and have opined that suburban voters are revolting against the GOP in the wake of impeachment proceedings and a deeply unpopular president. However, supporters of the president argue that Bevin was a uniquely troubled candidate, who lost despite Trump’s assistance, and point out that the Republican party overall did much better in the state for more local candidates farther down the ballot. That being said, the news of the upset in Kentucky is certainly cause for concern among Republicans, who normally expect easy victories in the state. The full implications of their loss remain to be seen, but the results certainly don’t give Republicans any cause for optimism in 2020, particularly because of what they mean for Mitch McConnell, perhaps the most powerful figure currently occupying the Senate.

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The most substantial governmental change undoubtedly happened in Virginia, a state where elections for legislative and executive roles are held on off years like this one. Virginia has been in the news lately for the battle over gerrymandered districts which was recently decided by the state’s courts. In Virginia, courts ordered district lines to be completely redrawn after the 2017 election, after which Republicans maintained control of significant parts of the government despite losing the popular vote overall as a result of having drawn electoral maps in their favor, in a process called “gerrymandering.” After Virginia courts ruled that the gerrymandered districts unfairly favored Republicans who drew the maps in question, these maps were redrawn, paving the way for yesterday’s Democratic victory in the state.

Yesterday’s results show how gerrymandering, when left unchecked, can totally transform the politics of an entire state in favor of the minority party, and how court-ordered redrawing of districts can cause election results to line up more closely with popular sentiments. They also suggest that impeachment is not as effective as a rallying cry as Republican strategists have hoped, and that anti-Trump sentiment helps to turn out Democratic voters even in deep red states like Kentucky. Although Virginia went for Clinton in 2016 and winning the state is not essential for Trump’s reelection, the tendency for courts to redraw gerrymandered districts in states like Virginia has ominous implications for the Republican party, who depend on gerrymandered districts to maintain in both state and national positions, and are already beleaguered by rising national support for impeachment and removal of the president from office.