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DECEMBER 11,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT: 

HOW ABOUT TEACHING ENGLISH? – OVERNIGHT, FROM THE MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE:    ST. CLOUD — Move over, Spanish and French. St. Cloud public schools next year will be offering Somali and Ojibwe to all students as elective languages.  "It just makes sense for us to have it," said Lori Posch, executive director of learning and teaching for St. Cloud schools. "We want to see our students represented in our courses."  The move comes after the St. Cloud school district this fall introduced what is thought to be the first native Somali language course in the state — and possibly the nation — for secondary students.  Some students who are immigrants or refugees have limited or interrupted formal education. The native Somali course is meant to bolster writing skills in those students' native language and, at the same time, build school skills and other language skills.  "Somali for native speakers was designed for students who didn't have a lot of English," Posch said. "Somali as a world language will be more of an introduction to kids that maybe hear parents speaking it — but to be honest, we have a lot of interest already from our non-Somali community in taking that class as a world language."  About 60% of the nearly 9,700 students in St. Cloud schools are students of color. That's a drastic change from a decade ago, when about one in four students were students of color.  About 41% of St. Cloud students are Black and 25% of students speak Somali as their primary language at home.   I seem to have heard this tune before.  It was called bilingual education, and it failed miserably in California.  Teach the kids the language of their new country, and make them excellent at it.  Then have them study other international languages.  Native languages can be picked up at home.

December 11, 2021       Permalink

CAN'T GET AWAY FROM POLITICS – OVERNIGHT:  You'd think that Joe Biden, who got into politics about the same time that Thomas Jefferson did, would know by now that there's a time and place for trying to advance your political agenda.  But Joe just doesn't get it.  From Fox: 

President Biden on Saturday addressed the fatal weather that ravaged parts of the South and Midwest and used the tragedy to further his own beliefs on climate change.

While speaking to reporters and virtually assessing the tornado damage from Wilmington, Delaware, Biden was asked whether he "could conclude that these storms and the intensity have to do with climate change."

"All I know is that the intensity of the weather across the board has some impacts as a consequence of the warming of the planet and climate change," Biden said. "The specific impact on these specific storms, I can't say at this point."

"I'm going to be asking the EPA and others to take a look at that," Biden added. "The fact is that we all know everything is more intense when the climate is warming. Everything. And obviously it has some impact here, but I can't give you a quantitative read on that."

Biden's remarks follow a series of deadly storms and tornadoes which swept across Kentucky, Illinois, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Missouri overnight and resulted in multiple injuries and the deaths of nearly 100 Americans.

Along with the storms came an extreme amount of catastrophic damage. As of Saturday morning, more than 200,000 customers remain without power in Tennessee and Kentucky…

…In November, Biden claimed climate change is "an existential threat to human existence as we know it" at the United Nations' COP26 conference and apologized for former President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.

COMMENT:  Hey Joe, how about taking care of all those Americans who were ripped up by the tornadoes and forgetting for a moment your political program.   One of the biggest raps against this administration is that it has lost touch with the American people, and the rap is correct.  There seems very little human contact or human feeling.  All is politics, but that's not how individual Americans think.

December 11, 2021       Permalink

DECEMBER 10,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT:

OUR SO-CALLED BASTIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION – FROM COLLEGE FIX:   Journalist Abigail Shrier spoke to Princeton University students at a private event on Wednesday, discussing everything from free speech and academic freedom to gender ideology and parental rights.  The talk was held at an off-campus venue, the location of which was revealed solely to RSVP’d guests just a few hours before the event due to “threats and harassment” organizers said were leveled against Shrier and student groups co-hosting the lecture.  That along with Princeton’s remaining coronavirus restrictions necessitated the heightened security measures, Adam Hoffman, publisher of The Princeton Tory and a student organizer of the event, said in his introduction of Shrier.  But the talk did represent the start of a recommitment “to the relentless pursuit of the truth,” Hoffman said, adding that he hoped his peers’ scare tactics would no longer suppress open debate at the Ivy League institution.  Shrier’s talk was co-hosted by The Princeton Tory, the Princeton Open Campus Coalition, and Public Discourse, the journal of the Witherspoon Institute, where the event was held.

December 10, 2021      Permalink

THE POSSIBLY BRIGHT FUTURE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY – OVERNIGHT:  The party is doing well right now, thanks largely to the excesses and obnoxiousness of the opposition.  But how does it stay well, and soar?  From Josh Hammer at American Greatness:

Trump’s victory was primarily propelled by a white working-class revolt, but the emergence during his presidency of a deeply censorious and anti-American left—epitomized by the Democrats’ outrageous conduct during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation battle and the destructive “1619 riots” last summer—opened the door for a broader working-class, pro-America political coalition. By Election Day 2020, that multiethnic, working-class conservative coalition had begun to take more definite shape. Trump lost a nail-biter of an election, but the GOP made massive inroads in crucial black and Hispanic communities, such as Florida’s Miami-Dade County and the heavily Mexican counties dotting Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.

Now over a year removed from the 2020 presidential election, as Joe Biden’s poll numbers plummet and frantic Democrats gird themselves for a 2022 midterm election shellacking, data continues to trickle in supporting the emergence of a “Somewhere”-centric, multiethnic, working-class Republican coalition. In Texas, where former Democratic Representative Beto O’Rourke lost to incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz by less than three points in 2018, a new Quinnipiac University poll finds Republican incumbent Governor Greg Abbott, up for reelection in 2022, leading challenger O’Rourke by a whopping 15 points. Abbott outright leads O’Rourke among Texas Hispanic voters, 44 to 41, and Texas Hispanics disapprove of Biden’s job performance by a massive 27-point margin.

A new Wall Street Journal national poll evinces much the same trend. On a generic Republican versus Democrat ballot, the WSJ poll shows Hispanics evenly split 37 to 37. Nationally, Hispanics disapprove of Biden’s job performance by 12 points, and they support Biden over Trump in a hypothetical 2024 presidential rematch by a razor-thin 44 to 43 margin. Nor, of course, is the GOP’s good news with Hispanic voters limited to Texas; in Florida, the state’s growing conservative-leaning Cuban and Venezuelan populations make Republican incumbents Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio heavy favorites for reelection next fall.

If the trendlines continue, the Democratic Party could end up as a parochial regional party with extremely limited statewide appeal outside the Northeast and the West Coast. But the trendlines are not guaranteed to continue; the onus is now on Republican leaders to ensure the party’s new coalitional inroads are nurtured, not squandered.

The woke Left’s dramatic cultural excesses, especially on such issues as policing, critical race theory and gender ideology, have already paid some handsome dividends for the GOP—just look at Virginia Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin. And because the Left has overstepped so much on bread-and-butter cultural issues, the temptation will be strong for the Right to exclusively focus on that fertile terrain.

This would be a mistake; the Right can and should aggressively fight the culture war with the aim of victory, but it must not lose sight of the economic issues that helped propel Trump’s insurgency and the subsequent emergence of the GOP’s multiethnic, working-class coalition. That coalition is deeply discomfited by the wokesters’ anti-American cultural assault, but it is also turned off by the old Republican guard’s dogmatic commitment to laissez-faire absolutism. Immigration restrictionism, trade pragmatism, total disentanglement from China and the prudential use of antitrust against the Big Tech giants and other woke corporate miscreants must become part of a standard “common good capitalism” Republican economic repertoire.

COMMON:  Read the rest.  What we have today is a Democratic Party that is losing, not necessarily a Republican Party that is winning.   The author wants to put the Republicans on a winning path, and he is correct.

December 10,  2021     Permalink