Rebane's Ruminations

Ruminations – 28feb17

George Rebane

Litmus test for regaining America’s greatness: Sustained GDP growth exceeding 3% per annum.

NYT claims “Mr Trump will inherit an economy that is fundamentally solid.”  But that fake news is patent nonsense as these pages have maintained for years, and now Mr Nicholas Eberstadt, political economist at the American Enterprise Institute, will explain the matter to you in ‘Our Miserable 21^st Century’.   

NPR this morning equated me with illegal aliens in its latest anti-Trump piece putting all foreign born residents under the wrong-headed umbrella of ‘immigrants’ like in ‘America has always been a nation of immigrants.’  Never mind that my family and I were among the longest and most thoroughly vetted foreigners to be invited onto these shores after WW2, but according to today's persistent and prominent progressive pabulum, we are all the same in their discerning eyes.  And they are fairly certain that the country’s nebbishes will not pick up on the fine points here.  FYI, one out of six legal Americans are foreign born.

My favorite living economist Tyler Cowen of George Mason University just published his latest dissertation, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream, wherein he “explores our desire to become more insulated, comfortable, and accepting of the status quo. Americans now move less, start fewer businesses, marry people more like themselves, and increasingly shop using algorithms that wall them off from the unfamiliar.”

Minimum Wage Massacre:  Wendy’s Unleashes 1,000 Robots to Counter Higher Labor Costs (more here).  The ever butt stupid liberals continue to preach increasing the country’s minimum wage as the received wisdom that we can indeed pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.  (H/T to reader)

A Silicon Valley liberal learned some interesting things from people’s thoughts about Trump.  "I'm Mexican. I support the wall. The people who have stayed have destroyed Mexico, and now they want to get out and cause damage here. We need to protect our borders, but now any policy is like that is called racist. Trump was the first person willing to say that out loud." (more here and H/T to reader)

Sandbox - 25feb17

[One of our daughters is visiting this weekend and we decided to take in the gun show at fairgrounds today.  The entire show fit into the Amaral Center and was very well attended; in fact there were actually too many people there back to back and belly to belly.  But the show itself was a bit sad - not enough shooting hardware.  No major manufacturers showing off their line, the reason being that gun makers are not sending as much of their new stuff to California to be put through the regulatory and testing hoops to make sure they are up to snuff in a state that really wants to confiscate every last gun from civilian hands.  Another sign of the times.  gjr]

Scattershots – 23feb17 (updated 27feb17)

George Rebane

It’s screwing up the short-term that kills you.  Without a successful short-term there is no long-term.

Refugees “dashing for the border” was last night’s report on Fox News showing illegal aliens trudging through northern New York snow to cross our unfenced border with Canada.  They claim to fear being apprehended by our ICE and returned to their native lands.  Well enough, but no one on FN was sufficiently bright to question why their desire to leave the US was written up as a “dash”, as if American authorities were in hot pursuit attempting to catch them before they were pro forma handcuffed by waiting Canadian authorities and whisked away to a hastily established welcoming center for processing.  Why would our feds want to catch a fleeing illegal and start lengthy deportation court proceedings, suffer the political fallout, and then either release them again, or fly them home?  And given Canada's open arms policy, why was no one smart enough to question why our federal government doesn’t advertise and offer free bus service to ALL illegals who want to cross into Canada.  I mean let’s give them an 800 number and offer them curbside pick-up and real comfortable transportation to newly constructed waiting lounges located within a few feet of the open boundary, facilities that provide a warm place where they can refresh themselves with a bit of coffee and a light snack, sweets for their kids, and receive a sincere farewell before they walk across to be welcomed as new immigrants by our northern neighbor.  What could be a more civil and commodious departure?  There is absolutely no need to dash.

[24feb17 update]  Protectionism and isolationism.  In his ‘Confessions of a Free-Trade Lobbyist’ former Caterpillar exec Bill Lane pours some cold water of reality on the White House lovefests with business leaders on creating jobs.  “During my 40-year career at Caterpillar, I don’t recall ever being in a management meeting where the sole objective was creating American jobs. …Mind you, I’ve been in countless meetings where the objective was increasing sales, reducing costs, improving quality, promoting safety or encouraging diversity. There were meetings that focused on embracing innovation or attracting and retaining the best employees. Some meetings were on hiring veterans. Others were about opening foreign markets while trying to keep the U.S. market open. And many were about customers and how our success was linked to theirs. … No boss ever said, ‘Your annual review will only measure the number of U.S. workers added.’ … Business leaders politely clap as the president puts exports at risk. Yet they know ‘Fortress America’ would be a disaster.”

[27feb17 update]  Transgender phollies.  The Washington Post reports (here) that a high school girl on the way to becoming a boy (kids don’t have their plumbing modified until they achieve age of consent) has won the girls state wrestling championship in Texas.  However, this high schooler "whose transition from girl to boy began two years ago and now includes testosterone injections, won (that) championship."  Controversies about the victory aside, a ‘brave new world’ question, or is it a conundrum?, occurred to me.  What if the young intact female who ‘identifies’ as a male also now declares that ‘he’ is gay and throws a lip on another boy?  Since homosexualism is the new norm to be tolerated under pain of law, how will these ‘gender identification’ vs ‘sexual orientation’ issues be resolved, especially if they arise during the transition phase when the physiology is still a work in process?  And, of course, this question will just as easily arise going the other way.  Oh what tangled web we weave … .

OK, you got that?  Now let’s leave The Washington Post and meander over to The Blaze covering the same championship but getting the gender change all turned around.  The Blaze reports (here) on the young person as s/he “transitions from female to male”, pumped with body altering hormones that supposedly gave s/him unfair advantage wrestling other ‘stock model females’ still sporting their original factory equipment.  No matter, the confusion will ultimately be sorted out and my above question still stands – inquiring minds want to know.

Mexico meddles in America’s internal affairs while the progressives fiddle or worse, they actively support the Mexicans.  Union columnist George Boardman writes an excellent article (here) about the whole affair in today’s paper.  But when he talks about ‘The Wall’ Mr Boardman appears to let the perfect become the enemy of the good – no wall will stop them all, and it probably will not be a wall at all that goes the whole way from the Pacific to the Gulf.  Most are beginning to understand that it is the porosity of our entire border – crossed by legal and illegal entrants – that is the problem to be solved.  Mr Boardman concludes that gaining control of our alien entry problem is an “issue (that) has nothing to do with racism (we already have the most diverse population in the world) or preserving our Eurocentric traditions, or any of the other guilt trips apologists for illegal immigrants like to lay on the rest of us. It's about retaining the core values of America and controlling our own destiny.”  And here I thought we all were agin furriners meddling in our internal business; not only agin, but downright agitated enough to call for congressional investigations to get to the bottom of such monkey business.  Has anyone heard of any such investigations about Mexico's role in these doings? - or better yet, investigations of patriotic Hispanic Americans acting in league with a foreign government as it conspires to violate our federal laws?

The Benedict Option

George Rebane

America can afford to care for its poor, but not the world's poor.

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 22 February 2017.]

Our world is going through an historical upheaval - possibly the penultimate one for humankind.  The salutary effects of western capitalism and colonialism have awakened peoples whose indigenous cultures gave no signs of being on the cusp of technological breakout, industrialization, or aggregation into modern nation-states, let alone exploring new forms of governance that recognize individual fulfillment based on new concepts of liberty and self-determination.

Today western civilization, after many centuries, is coming full circle as it rapidly sheds its former exceptionalism by relinquishing its culture bit by piece while elevating those it formerly taught to become its new teachers.  In this progress, we of the west have come to worship the new gods of diversity and inclusivity.  What we now belatedly realize is that these new gods are more jealous and demanding of sacrifices than is the God of our fathers.  These sacrifices require us to abandon who we were, how we thought, what we valued, and the traditions that defined us.

Sandbox - 21feb17

[334 comments and counting in the last sandbox.  I think we've had a sea change in the sandbox debates participation.  gjr]

Stupid is as stupid does

George Rebane

Victor Davis Hanson makes it clear that California will quickly join the third world if it ever succeeds in seceding.  The Oroville Dam fiasco is a good yardstick for reflecting on the state of our state after decades of Democrat control that now is becoming more radical by the month.  Businesses will see no reason for staying as profitability is punished and perverted to gratuitous programs for unhampered migration across our borders.  In ‘The Oroville Dam disaster is yet another example of California’s decline’ Hanson writes –

A new generation of Californians — without much memory of floods or what unirrigated California was like before its aqueducts — had the luxury to envision the state’s existing water projects in a radically new light: as environmental errors. To partially correct these mistakes some proposed diverting storage water for fish restoration and  re-creating of wild rivers to flow uninterrupted into San Francisco Bay.

Indeed, pressures mounted to tear down rather than build dams. The state — whose basket of income, sales and gas taxes is among the highest in the country — gradually shifted its priorities from the building and expansion of dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, bridges and highways to redistributionist social welfare programs, state employee pensions and an enormous penal archipelago.

California currently hosts a third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Over one in five Californians lives below the poverty line. One in four Californians was not born in the United States. These social transformations pose enormous political challenges and demand that infrastructure and schools grow commensurately to meet soaring populations.

Instead, California is eating its own seed corn.

This what dumbth on steroids looks like.  (H/T to reader)

Hot time in the ol’ Town Hall tonight

George Rebane

As members of Congress head home for their scheduled recess this coming week, the hard or Alt-Left is preparing a hot time for all Republicans who plan to hold town hall meetings with their constituents.   These radicalized socialists have gone a long way to organize their more placid yet compliant Democrat cohorts to do everything possible to disrupt those meetings.  Forming into groups with labels such as Indivisibles and Organizing for Action, they will attempt to execute the directions laid out in their new protest manual (here) and prevent Republican MoCs from having a dialogue about new legislation (e.g. replace/revise Obamacare) with the voters. (covered here)

The hard Left is now organizing in the hustings and in the Deep State where they have held sway for decades.  All this organization is paid for by big Agenda21 money sources like George Soros and coordinated by the now outed leftwing government bureaucrats who have labored diligently to stunt and stifle the America that truly was the world’s exceptional nation-state.  (more here)

The Right is belatedly attempting to counter these demonstrations by calling for conservatives and those who voted for Trump to hold their own rallies and show up at these town hall meetings to make their supportive voices heard.  We will keep an eye on how much of all this makes it into factual versus fake news.

Public Service Nostrum:  We always look for markers, attributes, etc that support reliable identification of people of the Left from those of the non-Left.  A recent one to (re)emerge is ‘If you think the formation of a White Caucus in Congress is on its face reprehensible and racist, then you are a leftwinger.' (more here)  Now wasn’t that easy?

Ruminations – 17feb17 (updated 20feb17)

George Rebane

‘We are not a democracy’ is again patiently explained by Ms Cindy Hren in today’s Union.  Numerous times in history has the Left led the least-read into social cesspools as they followed banners screaming ‘Democracy Now!’  They know not for what they wish.

Climate change hysteria abating?  Am I not monitoring the correct news channels?  Because it seems that the voices of preventable manmade global warming are becoming shriller as they are crowded onto the back benches of public concerns.  There appears to be a growing tide of comprehensible information today that illuminates the doubtful, deficient, and doctored climate data, highlights the missing or mangled climate science touted by self-made ‘scientists’, and finally exposes the malformed, misused, and politically manipulated models predicting our certain doom unless the objectives of Agenda21 are adopted quickly and globally.

It continues to amaze me that johnnie-come-latelies like Hawking and Musk are credited by the media as being some kind of AI visionaries when they are nothing of the kind.  However, their recent epiphanies, added to their celebrity status, are helping to awaken our politicians to something of which we professionals have been warning them for over 20 years.  Bottom line – let them promote and bask in their ‘new insights’; we will all benefit if we address systemic unemployment sooner than later.

President Trump’s new US policy of getting our Arab ‘allies’ to police their own rogue nations and fanatical ragheads is a refreshing change.  And he understands that we should help them militarily only when our national interests are directly threatened – e.g. attempting to blockade the Strait of Hormuz or again attacking Israel.  Our relationship with Russia should be conducted strictly on a Skinnerian behaviorist (q.v.) basis to operationally condition their actions on the world stage.  Today Russia has no idea of how it could benefit by normalizing its domestic policies within its current borders so as to invite foreign investment to develop its natural resources, harness its considerable intellectual capital, and hold Islam at bay.  Russia’s deteriorating demographics demand alliances with similar cultures to oppose real enemies along its entire southern border from Vladivostok to (now) Sevastopol.  A weak and collapsing/fragmenting Russia serves no American interests.  Our new president seems to understand that.

[Update] The Left’s fake news factory was in full swing today since their nationwide general strike of immigrants was an unqualified bust.  Their union schools are hyperventilating that “we have to protect our families and our children” from the ongoing massive ICE “sweeps and round-ups” of ‘immigrant families’.  The leftwing schools are handing out propaganda leaflets and instructions to children on what they should do when the nasty ICE people show up at their door.  ICE denies that any of these Gestapo tactics are being used, especially against illegal aliens who have no criminal records.  ICE reports that this month they have arrested 680 criminal aliens.  This is not unusual since during Obama’s administration they arrested 2,900 in September 2011, 3,100 in April 2012, and 2,059 in March 2015 without the lamestream raising a peep.  Today we are led to believe that anti-illegal alien pogroms are sweeping the land with screaming parents and children being separated and hauled away to deportation detention camps.

[18feb17 update]  Voice of America has laryngitis.  VoA is one of many government sponsored organs and institutions that have quietly been subverted by our leftwing Deep State.  The international broadcaster was formed to disseminate American values, republican governance, and capitalist enterprise to populations government by leftwing autocracies and theocracies - in short, it was our ideological trumpet to the world.  But in the intervening years it has now become an "irrelevant" music station on the putative theory that it was MTV that 'brought down the Wall'.  Robert Riley, former VoA director who now directs the Westminster Institute, gives us the background of how the rot is quietly spreading. (here) 

The Orville Dam fiasco demonstrates again that if there is a problem, then government is guilty until proven innocent.  It appears that the regulators and state poobahs in charge of dams maintenance have been their old selves - imperialistic, full of hubris, and unbelievably ignorant.  Now our Democrat betters will still not build additional reservoirs to store water in the wet years, and are having trouble using the state's 'rainy day fund' ($8B) to finance fixing our infrastructure.  Moonbeam is hoping that Trump will get the folks in Ohio to pay for it.

[20sep17 update]  Our own Reinette Senum has started her own blog - The Foghorn Express - and it's about time.  On it she promises to feature "STORIES, HYPOTHESIS & POSSIBILITIES BEYOND THE FOG".  I sincerely hope that she will offer more than one hypothesis, or if not, it will be a real humdinger to keep us occupied for some time.  It will be interesting to see how my friend Reinette will manage her commenters according to the standards that she has set.  In any event, Welcome Reinette!, the Left does need a courageous if not coherent outlet to expand on their ideas for local living that will accept a variety of responses ranging from the thoughtful to, yes, even the 'craven'.  RR is proud to add you to Our Links.

Sandbox - 16feb17

[Many apologies for having closed the 12feb17 sandbox without opening a new one - I really did mean to do that instantly, but somehow it fell through the crack with all the other debates going on below my subsequent posts.  Mea culpa.  That said, all I ask is that if there's a recent topical post on a given subject/issue, then please enter your relevant comments into its comment stream.  Much grass.  gjr]

Are we ready for an economic liftoff?

George Rebane

Are we ever!  Heritage just released its 2017 Index of Economic Freedom (more here) for the nations of the stuck in the middle of a muddle of countries that can’t seem to get their act together.  (Top ten shown)  For us it is doubly troubling because however our burgeoning socialist population has been taught to think otherwise, Calvin Coolidge’s abbreviated dictum – ‘The business of America is business’ - must be observed today more than ever.  (H/T to reader for the heads up)

Instead, the US economy has been purposely kept in the doldrums during the Obama regime, not because we didn’t know how to kick it back into gear, but only to serve a globalist ideology (cf Agenda21) which calls for the US to be reduced to economic and military peerage with other second world countries.  Woefully short on successes in his domestic and foreign policies, Barack Obama nailed his economic and military goals for the country.

President Trump has his work cut out to rebuild the shambles he inherited.  The biggest problem that the US has to solve is how to reconfigure our economy so that the 70-90 million (and growing) systemically unemployed will remain as a socially stable cohort of Americans who can be supported by the rest of us.  Hint for the lightly read:  The last thing we need now is to import unskilled people from cultures that have declared their hatred for America.

Also troubling is that our strong suit, technology development by entrepreneurial start-ups, is being discounted by other competing countries whose students have a different attitude about studying STEM subjects.  Germany is beginning to wake up and its government is finally promoting such start-ups.  For example, today Berlin’s commercial real estate rentals are hard to get and in great demand by start-up companies in a manner similar to the south-of-Market-St high tech boom that San Francisco has enjoyed.  We are already feeling the impact of these overseas young people with fire in their bellies.  (more here)

Nevertheless, America is ready for a big change.  The investment world led the anticipatory fervor by putting its money in play during the 2016 election year.  One very visible indicator of this is that the market capitalization of the SP500 companies increased by a phenomenal 25% in one year, from $16T to $20T.  That’s how you spell ‘anybody but Obama’.

All this is more supportive evidence that the socialists, led by their money mavens like the internationalist Soros, cannot afford to have President Trump and the Republicans succeed during the next four years.  America clearly voted for a radical change in November, and were that kind of success to happen, it would give the most obvious lie to everything that our socialists have been preaching for the last eight years, and also all that they have been rioting against and ‘disrupting’ since the votes were cast.

Mexico’s Interference in US Intensifies (updated)

George Rebane

There is a big difference between yearning to be free and yearning to be more regulated; freedom and regulations sit on opposite ends of a seesaw.

The one-sided assault on Trump and the Republicans continues to build.  Among the many assymetries are the claims the Russians materially influenced the election in favor of Trump, and how dastardly is such interference in another nation’s affairs.  However our Lefties raise nary an eyebrow with the years-long interference by Mexico in our internal affairs.  This enterprise is now picking up to a fever pitch with the Mexican government filing suit in our courts against the administration, with their 2018 presidential candidate on a US tour denigrating our president, and with thinly disguised and wealthy Mexican funded, pro-Reconquista organizations MALDEF and La Raza doing everything they can to roil the Hispanics - legals and illegals - living here.  (samples here and here)

[update]  Here's more perspective on our idiotic immigration and illegal aliens policy from Ann Coulter who reminds of what happened in days gone by which has been conveniently forgotten by the Left.

Ruminations - 13feb17 (updated 14feb17)

George Rebane

Americans have always been told to keep their powder dry; well, the Democrats want you to let government take over that job.

Systemic unemployment, in conjunction with the Singularity a much discussed issue on these pages over the years, is now beginning to draw the attention of more and more analysts, commentators, and media outlets.  A reader and correspondent picked up this piece from PJ Media that acknowledges (here) that the disappearing jobs (even for the middle class) will not be replaced by new jobs to re-employ the growing cohort of the permanently redundant.

[update]  Mr George Boardman, our intrepid columnist in The Union, today echoes (here) the liberal line that longtime school choice advocate and now SecEd Betsy DeVos is “unqualified” for her new job; so unqualified in fact that progressive punks physically denied her access to a school she was scheduled to visit.  But the real question for Mr Boardman is ‘If DeVos is an unqualified SecEd, what did all her qualified predecessors accomplish for America’s public education during the preceding decades?’  Take your time.

[14feb17 update]  A passing note on retired Gen Flynn’s resignation.  He did the right thing to resign.  And he did the right thing to talk to his Russian contacts as a member of the duly elected incoming president’s team – such a conversation was neither a first in our history nor a violation of the Logan Act.  And he was unbelievably foolish to lie to VP Pence about the affair; it was for that that he had to go.

Sandbox - 12feb17

[The Oroville dam will be our biggest news for some days/weeks to come.  Will anyone take stock of the agencies that are supposed to be in charge of dam maintenance and reservoir management?  And how will the Left's resistance to the building of more reservoirs on the Sierra rivers to permit better management of water during dry years, and reduce stress on existing dams during wet years like the one we're having?  gjr]

The Assault on Our Polity Intensifies

George Rebane

The Alt-Left appears now to have fully commandeered the operations and direction of the Democrat Party (here).  As reported in ‘Where Now Democrats?’ where their how-to manual, based on outright lies about the Tea Party, is their new playbook being exercised across the land.  The recent shoutdowns of Congessmen McClintock (CA) and Chaffetz (UT) are just two of the more nationally reported incidents.  The more local ones are just too numerous to report.

Of the latter, I understand that the Nevada County Republican Women Federated is suddenly getting numerous calls for reservations for their next monthly luncheon on 21 February.  These callers state that their intent to attend that luncheon is just “to find out what your organization is all about”.  That this interest coincides with the scheduled speakers, who are the local area coordinators for Congressmen LaMalfa and McClintock, seems to be more than a coincidence.  We shall see if they follow their handbook and “agree beforehand … on a simple message focused on a current or upcoming issue (and) coordinate with each other to chant this message during any public remarks that your MoC makes.”

But these are just minor leaguers of the Left.  The big guns that are already gearing up to do the real damage are the embedded rogue federal bureaucrats (here) on one end, and the Big Kahuna former-prez Obama on the other end (here).  After the election Obama promised to unite his followers under the network of leftist nonprofits led by ‘Organizing for Action’ so that “we can start cooking up all kinds of great stuff.”  The self-declared anti-Trump federal bureaucrats will be part of the disruptive Fifth Column that Obama is organizing and directing with his hand on the OFA tiller.

Again, I have never seen this kind of political perfidy being carried out by any domestic opposition against a duly elected sitting president.  They are following the now classical teachings of Lenin through Saul Alinsky in how to subvert a government when their desperate means are no longer supported by voters.  Their patriotism is the equivalent of the deeply held religious fervor of the Islamic terrorists.  Both believe they are benefitting mankind in what to the rest of us is a dastardly enterprise.

Bottom line – we have yet to see anything from the Democrats that in the past would have been characterized as the ‘loyal opposition’.  These people are freely admitting that they have relinquished the traditional road to return via the ballot box.

Where Now Democrats? (updated 10feb17)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 8 February 2017.]

A lot has happened on both sides of the aisle in the last couple of weeks.  President Trump is off to a determined if not bumpy start to deliver on his campaign promises, and the Democrats …?  Well, they’re off to an even bumpier start which raises the real question – where are they going?  No one seems to know.  Their only objective is to don the ‘Party of No’ mantle and protest everything until the cows come home.  As a political party, don’t you have to do a bit more than that to have a hope in the 2018 elections; don’t you have to tell the voters what objectives you want to achieve other than throw sand in the gears of the Trump administration?

Right off the top the Democrats have no top, no next generation leaders with ideas that make sense to a country which their old and existing leaders have managed to put into what feels like permanent doldrums cranking along with a screwed up foreign policy, and with even worse domestic policies.  They don’t seem to remember why they lost the last election, starting with the presidency and plunging wholesale into the states and counties.  It is clear that people wanted something different, something that might have a chance of working besides a rehash of the same ol’ same ol’ by the same old crew.

The Democrats are blocking the way to make education great

[Mr Norm Sauer, a retired attorney who lives in Nevada City, is a member of The Union Editorial Board and  a contributor to these pages.  This submitted piece also appears in the 8feb17 issue of the newspaper (here) and has garnered its expected vituperation from the usual suspects.]

Norm Sauer

A topsy-turvy upheaval characterized the start of Donald Trump’s presidency. Everything is in flux not seen since 1932 when Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated and distanced himself from Herbert Hoover. Mainstream Democrats and even Republicans are either infuriated or vexed over the outsider Trump.

Giving President Trump his due, his inaugural speech recognized ‘the forgotten man,’ and reminded us that “… a nation exists to serve its citizens … When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice …”

The media collusion with the Clinton campaign was endemic in the WikiLeaks email disclosures. The complicity destroyed any idea that establishment journalists are disinterested and principled. The press has turned from eight years of obsequiousness to frenzied hostility toward the White House: Senate filibusters are no longer subversive, but vital, and if Trump follows Obama’s example of presidential fiats, he will be considered seditious.

Meanwhile, Democrats remain concerned that Obama’s legacy has destroyed the party. How can they continue to advocate identity politics but capture the irredeemable deplorables that cost them the Rust Belt states? Civil war exists between the party leaders, but it seems lessons have not been learned, nor are Democrats getting the message.

Take, for example, the hearing vetting Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education.

DeVos, a billionaire from Michigan, has endeavored as a dedicated philanthropist for 30 years to fulfill the goal that all parents, and primarily low-income parents, have the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their children so that all children have the opportunity to fulfill their God-given potential. She is a natural champion for the voucher-based policies Trump has promoted to help poor families afford to send their children to private schools.

My watching her being vetted in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee was instructive of political divide. While each Republican senator focused on the best interests of America’s children, the Democrat senators expressed no such concern.

In an effort to appease teachers union bosses, the Democrats were tripping all over themselves to smear DeVos, each attack more bizarre than the next. An example is Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who questioned whether DeVos had ever run a bank: “Do you have any direct experience running a bank? Have you ever managed or overseen a trillion-dollar loan program?”

DeVos politely answered no, and pointed out that neither of President Obama’s Education Secretaries, Arne Duncan and John King, had ever run massive banks either.

Now, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) promises for himself and all Senate Democrats not to vote for DeVos based on an over-the-top claim that she would “single-handedly decimate our public education system if she were confirmed.”

In discussing the state of public education in America, U. S. News & World Report offered a bleak and candid assessment: “In urban school districts across the country,” an education reporter wrote in 2015, “student performance is flat, poor, and minority students are experiencing staggering inequalities, and the picture is especially troubling for black students.”

Is this the status quo Schumer and the Democrats want to protect? Why do they stand in front of the doors of failing schools to keep minority and other children in? Sadly, Democrats know where their bread is buttered, and as long as teachers’ union bosses keep doling out cash to Democrats, they will continue to treat America’s students as second-class citizens.

President Trump and DeVos represent a new way of thinking. It is time to stop playing politics with our nation’s children, especially minorities and those of low income.

Consider that many sectors in our economy are moving away from old business models and trending toward more personalization, service, and flexibility. People who pick up an iPhone, summon an Uber, or order concert tickets online don’t understand why they can’t choose from a menu of school options. As technology has become ubiquitous, we have been trained to expect more choices and more options.

This trend toward individualism and choices has collided with the traditional district public education system and the powerful teachers unions that fund the Democrat Party. The education choice movement should consider vouchers, tax credits, education savings accounts, home schooling, charter schools, and private schools.

We should all work together for reform that does something big and bold to help our nation’s greatest treasure — the next generation. Let us all work together to make an American education great again.

Sandbox - 6feb17

[Mr George Boardman, our beloved compatriot debater and member of The Union's considerable cadre of leftwing columnists, has again declared his true colors in today's 'Who's behind Calexit?' Therein he presents a pernicious conspiracy theory, blaming the whole movement on those dastardly conservatives.  "It appears to me that Calexit is being funded and supported by shadowy forces that are less interested in ridding California of its tormentors than makings the rest of the U.S. permanently red. That’s why Breitbart News and Infowars haven’t exposed this threat to the American Way of Life."  Calexit a threat to the American Way of Life??!!  Aside from that little bit of humor, my real question for our readers is what possible "Observations for(sic) the center stripe" can Mr Boardman hope to offer?  Perhaps he can expand on both claims.  gjr]

‘Pausebuster’ busted – lamestream laying low

George Rebane

The corrupt ‘science’ (it does not deserve the name) behind the global warming hysteria is unraveling by the day, and the lamestream media is doing everything it can to hide the reports and the devastating supporting facts.  Today the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology issued a press release corroborating the reports now emerging that NOAA’s so-called Pausebuster paper, intended to show that there has been no temperature pause over the last 20+ years, is a deliberately perpetrated, politically motivated fraud based on crapola for data and worse for its processing.

You can read the initial break of the story on the Powerline blog here and then the House press release here.  This report was timed to impact the most recent Paris circus on climate change and was considered a success in keeping the hysteria going and growing.  It will be acknowledged as possibly the most influential fake news story fabricated in the last two years.  And the Left is doing its damndest to keep the low-information sheeple from getting the news.  Readers in California, and in our neck of the woods, don’t have to go far to listen to the bleating of progressives who don’t have a clue about the science, data handling, and computer processing that they are told to worship on the altar of Consensus Science – Hallelujah!

Hat tip to RR reader, fellow blogger, and compatriot Russ Steele for the timely heads up on this.

Scattershots – 2feb2017 (updated 5feb17))

George Rebane

More signs of our times.  SESF Executive Director Russ Steele and I along with our brides attended a robotics competition last Sunday at the Folsom campus of Intel Corporation.  One of the teams competing was from Nevada Union HS, and we were there to root for the home team.  They did quite well, but I’ll let Russ fill you in on the details since he is preparing a piece on the event.  SESF has been deeply involved in STEM education of our county’s youth.  SESF writes and funds the annual TechTests and TechTestJrs merit exams, give seminars on taking tests, and run the TechMentor program for special students.  But nationwide things are not looking all that good, since our K-12 school systems turn out overwhelming numbers of kids who can’t read, write, or reason (more here and H/T to a reader for this latest heads up).

The leftwing mobs protesting free speech on campuses are growing more brazen as witnessed at UC Berkeley yesterday.  Now violence is becoming the norm with fires, rocks, and broken windows as the campus police stand by helplessly not certain whether to enforce the law or run and hide.  One of my current books has been Der Führer (1944) by Konrad Heiden, a detailed history of the rise of Adolph Hitler and National Socialism in prewar Germany.  Today’s headlines reflect mirror images of how our radical (or is it normal?) Left dispatches its ideological opponents similarly to how the SA brown shirts shut down opposition to the Nazis even before they were known as Nazis.

Today one of NPR’s daily hit pieces on Trump featured a Democrat senator opposing Judge Gorsuch for being "out of the mainstream" since he is not a supporter of Roe v Wade.  Mainstream?  Yes, as the litmus test the senator cited that 80% of Americans support RvW.  Someone should inform the beltway sequestered politician that 99.9% of RvW supporters have no clue as to what that law actually provides for, and what factors comprise its deceptively named ‘women’s healthcare’ issue.

Media Structured Chaos

George Rebane

• Trump’s temporary travel ban created “chaos” caused by demonstrators.
• Europe’s leaders castigated Trump while they build walls to keep Muslims out.
• No one brought up the president’s constitutional obligation to secure the country nor quoted the specific US Code that enables him to lawfully do exactly what he did that also duplicated bipartisan 2015 Senate legislation.
• Gov Moonbeam kept Vietnamese out of California because we already had “too many strange and poor immigrants.”
• President Carter had bans on Iranian immigrants.
• ‘American values’ have historically included constitutional exclusionary laws for people permitted to enter the country (I and my family were subjected to such laws in effect when we immigrated).

The Fourth Estate outdid itself over the last four days fomenting what it reported as “chaos” at the country’s airports that erupted as a result of President Trump’s order to stop travel from seven terror breeding countries.  The travel ban is temporary and could have been implemented with more warning.  But it was another campaign promise delivered.

The hiatus is supposed to let Homeland Security improve their ability to filter terrorists before they land on our shore.  But suddenly our president living up to his constitutional obligation to secure America by acting to the letter of established law has now been deemed to violate America’s “values”.  And the outrage was duly expressed by pre-organized sign carrying mobs bussed in to clog airports’ boarding gates and baggage areas – i.e. the reported chaos was not created by the legitimate traffic and operations at the airports.

To the unread this was supposed to be the chaos caused by the presidential order, and all lamestream outlets, abetted by Fox News, carried videos of the screaming hordes.  Even former President Obama lauded all the good folks out there protesting the new president’s policies.  The entire circus came off so well that one might even think it was orchestrated.  According to government tally, the actual count of detainees during the weekend was about 110 out of over 300,000 travelers coming to the United States.

Sandbox - 1feb17

[This morning on NPR they had a Dem senator telling us why the Dems didn't show up at another committee hearing to vet one of President Trump's cabinet nominees.  He said they had to do it because "we have few remaining levers to pull" to exert their influence in Congress.  No one asked nor did he wonder why the Dems wound up with so few levers in Congress, in the governors' mansions, in state legislatures, ... .  It was as if the Dems had nothing to do with this act of God.  But I know the real answer - the goddam voters didn't check all those polls (as cited here) before casting their ballots. gjr]