The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Randi Goliath
by Larry Sand
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Top Headlines
"Affordable health care"? Some insurers seek ACA premium increases of 30% and higher. (Paywall — The Wall Street Journal)
Senate confirms Christopher Wray as FBI director in 92-5 vote. (The Washington Times)
Congressional investigation into Wasserman Schultz IT scandal moves forward. (The Washington Free Beacon)
Justice Dept. may look into universities' affirmative action policies. (The Hill)
Attorney general set to block millions in funding to sanctuary cities. (The Daily Signal)
Retired generals, admirals thank Trump for announcing ban on transgender troops. (The Washington Times)
Tillerson and Graham play good cop, bad cop with North Korea. (Washington Examiner)
Apple appeasing Communist Chinese regulators as CEO Tim Cook hits Trump. (The Washington Free Beacon)
South Carolina nuclear plants scrapped, billions invested and lost. (Associated Press)
YouTube announces "limited state" for videos that include "controversial" content. (Hot Air)
Policy: Climate change isn't the end of the world. (Paywall — The Wall Street Journal)
Policy: There really is no "gender wage gap"; there's a "gender earnings gap." (American Enterprise Institute)
~The Patriot Post
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President Trump, Senator Cotton and
David Perdue Introduce The RAISE Act
{theconservativetreehouse.com} ~ Earlier today President Trump introduced a new immigration policy proposal for legal entry into the U.S. known as the RAISE Act. The RAISE Act eliminates the outdated Diversity Visa lottery system... which serves questionable economic and humanitarian interests. The RAISE Act replaces the current permanent employment-visa framework with a skills-based system that rewards applicants based on their individual merits. As a candidate, I campaigned on creating a merit-based immigration system that protects U.S. workers and taxpayers — and that is why we are here today. Merit-based... https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/08/02/president-trump-senator-cotton-and-david-perdue-introduce-the-raise-act/
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New York Congressman Demands
Investigation Into Iranian Funding of US Universities
by Ben Cohen
{pamelageller.com} ~ A New York congressman is urging US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to investigate the funneling of millions of dollars by an Iranian regime-controlled foundation... to Ivy League universities, including Harvard, Columbia and Princeton. “Did this foundation attempt to subvert American academic institutions?” Rep. Dan Donovan (R-NY), who represents the Staten Island borough, asked concerning the donations from the New York City-based Alavi Foundation, which critics say have funded anti-Israel and pro-Iran academics. “We need to investigate this, and universities have to do a better job of vetting their donors,” Donovan said on Tuesday...http://pamelageller.com/2017/08/iran-funding-us-universities.html/
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China Carries Out Flight
Test of Anti-Satellite Missile
by Bill Gertz
{freebeacon.com} ~ China recently carried out a flight test of a new anti-satellite missile that highlights the growing threat of Beijing's space warfare capabilities... The flight test of the Dong Neng-3 direct ascent missile was tracked by U.S. intelligence agencies on July 23 from China's Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Inner Mongolia, in northwestern China, said U.S. defense officials familiar with reports of the launch. The officials said the launch was not successful and the DN-3 appeared to malfunction in the upper atmosphere after the launch at night... http://freebeacon.com/national-security/china-carries-flight-test-anti-satellite-missile/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&utm_campaign=c8e7130349-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_08_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-c8e7130349-45611665
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Decision reached in Sheriff
Joe Arpaio’s criminal trial
by Kat Shepherd
{dennismichaellynch.com} ~ On Monday, a U.S. district court judge found former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio guilty of criminal contempt. According to the decision, Arpaio willfully violated a federal judge’s order to stop racial profiling... The charge originated with a 2011 court order issued by U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow. The order required the Maricopa County sheriff to not racially profile Latinos in his office. Arpaio is reported to have disobeyed the order. Arpaio said that any disobedience was unintentional, but Snow decided Arpaio defied the order to help win his reelection in 2012... http://dennismichaellynch.com/decision-reached-sheriff-joe-arpaios-criminal-trial/.
Stephen Miller Wipes The Floor With
CNN Belligerent Acosta On Immigration
by rickwells.us
{rickwells.us} ~ Fake News CNN’s Jim Acosta is in the press briefings for one purpose and that is to create conflict. He isn’t there to ask insightful, probing questions, or to enlighten their viewers... He’s there to disrupt the proceedings, try to twist the message into something negative and make someone look bad. The person who looked the worst in this exchange, by far, was the belligerent himself. Stephen Miller, President Trump’s senior adviser for policy, held a press briefing for the purpose of rolling out the new immigration RAISE Act to the press, to offer an explanation to the media and thereby to the American people. Miller made an apparent, well-advised attempt to shut out Acosta, not that the rest of the media is much better, ultimately making his the last question he took. Acosta would have been better off if he’d have been skipped over... http://rickwells.us/stephen-miller-wipes-the-floor-with-cnn-belligerent-acosta-on-immigration/
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by Larry Sand
{city-journal.org} ~ It’s hardly news that teachers’ union honchos oppose any type of school choice, especially the kind that lets public money follow a child to a public school. But while making her case recently, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten descended down a rabbit hole.
It started with an event on “school vouchers and racism” hosted by the AFT and the Center for American Progress, a leftist research and advocacy organization financially supported by both the AFT and the National Education Association. CAP had just released a report claiming that educational vouchers were born in the effort by Southern states to resist racial integration after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education ruling. In what segregationists termed “massive resistance,” Virginia’s Prince Edward County closed its public schools in 1959, and then gave vouchers to white families, which were used to pay tuition at segregated private schools. This ugly case represents the “sordid history of school vouchers,” as CAP sees it—conveniently overlooking the G.I. Bill, the country’s first significant voucher program, which was signed into law in 1944, 15 years before Prince Edward County’s gambit.
Taking the podium just a few days after the release of the CAP report, Weingarten declared that the ideas and proposals of school-voucher advocates were “only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” She described the powerful teachers’ unions as “defenders of America’s public education system,” locked in a “David versus Goliath battle, and in this battle, we are all David.”
Weingarten’s outrageous comments did not sit well with school-choice advocates. Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, called Weingarten’s speech “not just ill-advised hyperbole, it is a deeply offensive, highly inflammatory insult to all the parents and people—of all races, backgrounds, and regions—who have worked to bring options, opportunities and reforms to an education system that has failed them for generations.” Kevin Chavous, founding board member of the American Federation for Children, said that Weingarten’s comments “spat in the face of every African-American and Hispanic child who’s trapped in a school that doesn’t serve him or her well.”
While Weingarten cites the segregationists of Prince Edward County, she declines to mention labor unions’ own racist history. As Herbert Hill wrote in Commentary in 1959, in various industries “trade unions practice either total exclusion of the Negro, segregation in the form of ‘Jim Crow’ locals, or ‘auxiliaries’, or enforce separate, racial seniority lines which limit Negro employment to menial and unskilled classifications. . . . In the South, unions frequently acted to force Negroes out of jobs that had formerly been considered theirs.” Racism in unions was historically a much greater factor than it has ever been in the voucher movement.
Weingarten also ignores the popularity of private-school choice among minorities, the ostensible victims of these supposedly racist voucher programs. She is mum on the latest report from EdChoice’s Greg Forster, who regularly surveys the empirical research on private-school-choice programs. “Ten empirical studies have examined school choice and racial segregation in schools,” he writes. “Of those, nine find school choice moves students from more segregated schools into less segregated schools, and one finds no net effect on segregation. No empirical study has found that choice increases racial segregation.” Think Progress, a progressive news site associated with CAP, reports that American public schools are more segregated now than they were in 1968.
Indeed, government- and union-run schools are much more segregated than the voucher schools that Weingarten disdains. “Less recognized, but equally pernicious, is the structural segregation all across America, where zoned school systems maintain racial and economic segregation,” writes Peter Cunningham, who worked at the Department of Education during the liar-nObama administration. Cunningham also pointed out that New York City, where Weingarten formerly ran the teachers’ union, has one of the nation’s most segregated school systems.
Weingarten engaged in a telling Twitter exchange with her nemesis, Education secretary Betsy DeVos. “@BetsyDeVosED says public $ should invest in indiv students,” Weingarten wrote. “NO we should invest in a system of great public schools for all kids.” DeVos fired back: “They have made clear that they care more about a system—one that was created in the 1800s—than about individual students. They are saying that education is not an investment in individual students. They are totally wrong.” Weingarten and her cronies are more interested in keeping the government-union duopoly in place than in educating children. Protecting the system takes priority.
Responding to critics of her speech, Weingarten held her ground. “The negative reaction to the speech has been completely ideological, with personal invectives thrown at me, which reinforces my point that no amount of facts or evidence will sway voucher proponents from their agenda to starve public schools to the breaking point, then criticize their deficiencies and let the market handle the rest, all in the name of choice,” she said.
Weingarten has reason to be worried: with a pro-school-choice education secretary and looming Supreme Court decisions that could eradicate forced unionism and eliminate laws that states have used to thwart vouchers and other privatization programs, teachers’ unions face a considerable loss of power.
What Weingarten and her allies consistently overlook is that wealthy people will always have school choice. Parents of means can afford to move to an area with a superior public school, or they can send their kids to a private school. Poor parents don’t have these options, primarily because teachers’ unions fight furiously to prevent educational choice. It is no small irony that the organization howling loudest about racial inequality in education campaigns against the one policy that has been shown to ameliorate it.
Randi Goliath
{city-journal.org} ~ It’s hardly news that teachers’ union honchos oppose any type of school choice, especially the kind that lets public money follow a child to a public school. But while making her case recently, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten descended down a rabbit hole.
It started with an event on “school vouchers and racism” hosted by the AFT and the Center for American Progress, a leftist research and advocacy organization financially supported by both the AFT and the National Education Association. CAP had just released a report claiming that educational vouchers were born in the effort by Southern states to resist racial integration after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education ruling. In what segregationists termed “massive resistance,” Virginia’s Prince Edward County closed its public schools in 1959, and then gave vouchers to white families, which were used to pay tuition at segregated private schools. This ugly case represents the “sordid history of school vouchers,” as CAP sees it—conveniently overlooking the G.I. Bill, the country’s first significant voucher program, which was signed into law in 1944, 15 years before Prince Edward County’s gambit.
Taking the podium just a few days after the release of the CAP report, Weingarten declared that the ideas and proposals of school-voucher advocates were “only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” She described the powerful teachers’ unions as “defenders of America’s public education system,” locked in a “David versus Goliath battle, and in this battle, we are all David.”
Weingarten’s outrageous comments did not sit well with school-choice advocates. Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, called Weingarten’s speech “not just ill-advised hyperbole, it is a deeply offensive, highly inflammatory insult to all the parents and people—of all races, backgrounds, and regions—who have worked to bring options, opportunities and reforms to an education system that has failed them for generations.” Kevin Chavous, founding board member of the American Federation for Children, said that Weingarten’s comments “spat in the face of every African-American and Hispanic child who’s trapped in a school that doesn’t serve him or her well.”
While Weingarten cites the segregationists of Prince Edward County, she declines to mention labor unions’ own racist history. As Herbert Hill wrote in Commentary in 1959, in various industries “trade unions practice either total exclusion of the Negro, segregation in the form of ‘Jim Crow’ locals, or ‘auxiliaries’, or enforce separate, racial seniority lines which limit Negro employment to menial and unskilled classifications. . . . In the South, unions frequently acted to force Negroes out of jobs that had formerly been considered theirs.” Racism in unions was historically a much greater factor than it has ever been in the voucher movement.
Weingarten also ignores the popularity of private-school choice among minorities, the ostensible victims of these supposedly racist voucher programs. She is mum on the latest report from EdChoice’s Greg Forster, who regularly surveys the empirical research on private-school-choice programs. “Ten empirical studies have examined school choice and racial segregation in schools,” he writes. “Of those, nine find school choice moves students from more segregated schools into less segregated schools, and one finds no net effect on segregation. No empirical study has found that choice increases racial segregation.” Think Progress, a progressive news site associated with CAP, reports that American public schools are more segregated now than they were in 1968.
Indeed, government- and union-run schools are much more segregated than the voucher schools that Weingarten disdains. “Less recognized, but equally pernicious, is the structural segregation all across America, where zoned school systems maintain racial and economic segregation,” writes Peter Cunningham, who worked at the Department of Education during the liar-nObama administration. Cunningham also pointed out that New York City, where Weingarten formerly ran the teachers’ union, has one of the nation’s most segregated school systems.
Weingarten engaged in a telling Twitter exchange with her nemesis, Education secretary Betsy DeVos. “@BetsyDeVosED says public $ should invest in indiv students,” Weingarten wrote. “NO we should invest in a system of great public schools for all kids.” DeVos fired back: “They have made clear that they care more about a system—one that was created in the 1800s—than about individual students. They are saying that education is not an investment in individual students. They are totally wrong.” Weingarten and her cronies are more interested in keeping the government-union duopoly in place than in educating children. Protecting the system takes priority.
Responding to critics of her speech, Weingarten held her ground. “The negative reaction to the speech has been completely ideological, with personal invectives thrown at me, which reinforces my point that no amount of facts or evidence will sway voucher proponents from their agenda to starve public schools to the breaking point, then criticize their deficiencies and let the market handle the rest, all in the name of choice,” she said.
Weingarten has reason to be worried: with a pro-school-choice education secretary and looming Supreme Court decisions that could eradicate forced unionism and eliminate laws that states have used to thwart vouchers and other privatization programs, teachers’ unions face a considerable loss of power.
What Weingarten and her allies consistently overlook is that wealthy people will always have school choice. Parents of means can afford to move to an area with a superior public school, or they can send their kids to a private school. Poor parents don’t have these options, primarily because teachers’ unions fight furiously to prevent educational choice. It is no small irony that the organization howling loudest about racial inequality in education campaigns against the one policy that has been shown to ameliorate it.
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