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JULY 7,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT:

TRUMP IS NO QUITTER – FROM FOX:   Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced that he will lead a lawsuit over alleged censorship against Twitter, Facebook and Google – three tech companies that removed him from their platforms after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters.  The lawsuit will be a class-action, with Trump as the lead plaintiff, claiming that he's been censored by the companies. He spoke about the legal action from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. 
"I stand before you this morning to announce a very important... development for our freedom and freedom of speech," Trump said. "In conjunction with the America First Policy Institute, I'm filing, as the lead class-action representative, a major class-action lawsuit against the big tech giants, including Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as their CEOs."  "There is no better evidence that big tech is out of control than the fact that they banned the sitting president of the United States earlier this year," Trump added. "If they can do it to me they can do it to anyone."   One key point here is the lawsuit's claim that the people of the United States were damaged by not being able to read the comments of their president, a powerful argument.  This could be a very interesting, and important, lawsuit. 

RON RISES MORE – FROM NEWSMAX:   Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis remains focused on his 2022 reelection campaign, but if former President Donald Trump opts out of a 2024 presidential election run, surging popularity has the Florida governor positioned as a GOP primary front-runner.  DeSantis garnered the plurality of support in a 19-candidate field in a survey conducted last month by Echelon Insights. He was a 7-point favorite at 21% over the runner-up, former Vice President Mike Pence (14%).  While DeSantis leads those who received votes in the poll, it should be mentioned "unsure" actually led the poll's non-Trump candidates at 26%.  Registered Republicans and registered voters who lean Republican were asked: "If Donald Trump does NOT seek the Republican nomination for President in 2024 and the presidential primaries were being held today, for whom would you vote?"
1 Ron DeSantis 21%.
2 Mike Pence 14%.
3 Donald Trump, Jr 7%.
4 Nikki Haley 6%.
5 Ted Cruz 6%.
6 Mitt Romney 4%.
7 Marco Rubio 3%.
8 Tim Scott 2%.
9 Tucker Carlson 1%.
10 Greg Abbott 1%.
11 Kristi Noem 1%.
12 Rick Scott 1%.
13 Liz Cheney 1%.
14 Chris Christie 1%.
15 Mike Pompeo *%.
16 Larry Hogan *%.
17 Tom Cotton *%.
18 Ben Sasse *%.
19 Josh Hawley *%.
20 Someone else 2%.

Look, it's awfully early, but one has to be impressed by DeSantis's rise, and how he has conducted himself as governor.  He will need a big re-election victory next year, which he will certainly have if he keeps up his current run.  At the same time, he can hit a bump.  We note the depth of the Republican field.  The party has a good supply of presidential candidates.  Compare please with the opposition.  Maybe they can draft John Kerry.

July 7, 2021       Permalink

SOME PROGRESS, MAYBE? – AT 11:37 P.M. ET:   Teachers unions may be recognizing that they're becoming some of the most disliked organizations in America.  They're hard left, and they just adore Critical Race Theory.  But maybe an instinct for self-preservation is appearing, as they contemplate the start of the school year and confrontations with an increasingly angry army of mothers.   From Epoch Times: 

The nation’s largest teachers’ union has quietly taken down a series of adopted and proposed resolutions from its website, including one that calls for the organization to defend the teaching of Marxism-rooted critical race theory (CRT) in public schools.

The National Education Association (NEA), which represents more than 3 million employees in public education, previously showed on its website resolutions proposed during its 100th Representative Assembly. As of the morning of July 6, three days after the online convention concluded, visitors could use the website to track the status of those proposals, including whether they were approved, denied, or referred to a committee.

On Tuesday afternoon, however, a number of those agenda items disappeared from the NEA’s website. Their pages now redirect visitors to the 2021 assembly home page instead.

Among the now-hidden approved resolutions was Business Item 39, which would cost the union at least $127,600 to advance a pro-CRT agenda. According to the plan, the NEA would share and publicize information about “what CRT is and what it is not,” dedicate a “team of staffers” to assist union members who “want to learn more and fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric,” and provide a study that critiques “power and oppression” in American society, including “white supremacy,” “cisheteropatriarchy,” and capitalism.

The measure would also affirm the NEA’s opposition to attempts to ban CRT or the New York Times’s highly controversial “1619 Project,” which recasts American history on the claim that the United States was founded, and remains today, a racist nation.

In addition, the measure called for an “accurate and honest” teaching of “unpleasant aspects of American history,” and described CRT as an appropriate framework for educators to address those topics.

“The Association will further convey that in teaching these topics, it is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory,” it said.

Another erased resolution, classified as New Business Item 2, essentially called for NEA to “research” into organizations that are pushing back against efforts to indoctrinate American children with CRT, such as The Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based conservative think tank that has been hosting vocal CRT opponents. It was passed with an initial annual budget of $56,500.

COMMENT:  We hope that even some of the approved actions will quietly disappear, and that teachers will go back to being teachers, not simply spreaders of Marxist propaganda.  If that doesn't happen, American parents will likely take the necessary action at the polls, especially in local school-board elections.

July 7, 2021       Permalink

JULY 6,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT: 

NO LOSS FOR NORTH CAROLINA – FROM PJ MEDIA:  Nikole Hannah-Jones, founder of the discredited “1619 Project,” has rejected a tenured position at her alma mater, the University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill. Instead, she will join Ta-Nehisi Coates, a former columnist at The Atlantic, at one of America’s most prestigious Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Howard University. Hannah-Jones argued that the controversy over her hiring and tenure had more to do with racism and sexism than her outright lies about American history.  “It’s pretty clear that my tenure was not taken up because of political opposition, because of discriminatory views against my viewpoints and, I believe, because of my race and my gender,” Hannah-Jones told Gayle King on CBS This Morning, the Raleigh News & Observer reported.  “It has to be made clear: I went through the official tenure process and my peers in academia said that I was deserving of tenure,” the 1619 Project founder argued. “The board members are political appointees who decided that I wasn’t.”  In the immortal words of the great philosopher Jerry Lewis, "Bad looks you can change, stupid is forever."

FLEEING THE SCHOOLS – FROM EPOCH TIMES:   Public school enrollment in 2020–2021 fell by 3 percent nationally compared to a year earlier, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), with pre-K and kindergarten jointly seeing a sharp 13-percent drop.  The stark numbers represent the biggest year-over-year decline in enrollment since the start of the century, with the drop concentrated among the youngest learners, the NCES figures show.  Pre-K saw a 22-percent decrease, kindergarten enrollment fell by 9 percent, grades 1–8 experienced a 3-percent drop, while grades 9–12 saw enrollment rise by 0.4 percent. The figures are preliminary, with the final results expected next spring.  NCES Acting Commissioner Peggy Carr said in a statement cited by K-12 Dive that the figures are “preliminary but concerning,” adding that the enrollment drops were “widespread and affected almost every single state and every region of the country.”   The agency’s enrollment figures reinforce the view that the pandemic-related disruptions drove many families to switch to private schools or homeschooling.  I think it goes well beyond the pandemic.  Parents are increasingly outraged by what is being taught to their children.  Why wouldn't they seek alternatives?

July 6, 2021      Permalink

THE PROBABLE NEW MAYOR OF NEW YORK – AT 11:45 P.M. ET:  Eric Adams, the African-American borough president of Brooklyn, and a former captain in the NYPD, has been declared the winner of the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City.  This is important because New York influences the nation, and the New York Democratic Party influences the party nationally.  From National Review: 

Eric Adams was pronounced the winner of New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday after preliminary final numbers showed the centrist won 50.5 percent of the vote.

The Associated Press called the race for Adams after the results showed he narrowly defeated former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia by 8,426 votes. Garcia received 49.5 percent after eight rounds of voting.

Adams, a former police captain, beat out a crowded field in New York’s first major race to use ranked-choice voting.

If elected, Adams would become the city’s second black mayor. As Democrats outnumber Republicans by 7-to-1 in New York City, according to the AP, Adams will be the likely victor of the general election.

The results come two weeks after voting in the primary ended, on June 22. While early returns showed Adams in the lead, tens of thousands of absentee ballots had to be counted and rounds of tabulations had to be done under the ranked-choice system in which voters ranked up to five candidates for mayor in order of preference.

Candidates with too few votes to win were eliminated and ballots cast for them were redistributed to the other candidates based on voter preference until only two were left.

However, the new voting system was marred by an error made as votes were being counted on June 29, when elections officials inadvertently included 135,000 old test ballots in the count. The incorrect vote tallies were posted for several hours before officials acknowledged the error and took them down.

On Tuesday, Adams noted in a statement that “there are still some very small amounts of votes to be counted” but said that “the results are clear: an historic, diverse, five-borough coalition led by working-class New Yorkers has led us to victory in the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York City.”

“Now we must focus on winning in November so that we can deliver on the promise of this great city for those who are struggling, who are underserved, and who are committed to a safe, fair, affordable future for all New Yorkers,” he said.

The 60-year-old moderate Democrat who served in the NYPD for 22 years created waves during the campaign as a vocal opponent of the “defund the police” movement.

“We’re not going to recover as a city if we turn back time and see an increase in violence, particularly gun violence,” Adams said following a shooting that wounded three people, including a 4-year-old girl in Time Square in May.

“If Black lives really matter, it can’t only be against police abuse. It has to be against the violence that’s ripping apart our communities,” he said the night of the primary.

COMMENT:  Clearly, crime has become the number one issue in New York, and in many other cities as well.  Adams was the only candidate who took a clear crime fighting position.  New York Democrats are more left than center, but occasionally act sane.  It's a rarity, but it does happen, and it has happened in this race.  Even liberals want safe streets.

In the November election Adams will face Curtis Sliwa, founder of an anti-crime group called the Guardian Angels.  Sliwa, who is pretty well known in New York, won the laughable Republican primary against an opponent whose name I cannot remember.  Neither can anyone else.  The GOP has written off New York City, and will probably make a routine endorsement of Sliwa and leave it at that. Unless something dramatic happens, I don't think Sliwa has much of a chance.

Adams, though, could become a national figure – a black law-and-order guy, although with enough liberalism to make him respectable amongst the tofu and wine crowd. 

July 6, 2021       Permalink