Displaying the most recent of 90425 posts written by

Ruth King

EDUCATION, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Biden Ain’t for the Kids On education issues, trouble looms if Biden becomes president. by Larry Sand

By on November 21st, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/20/biden-aint-for-the-kids/

At the risk of stating the obvious, the country’s political future is murky. If Joe Biden withstands the onslaught of ballot fraud challenges and becomes POTUS 46, it’s anyone’s guess as to how he will govern. Or for how long. As a dementia-riddled man with no cures for the ailment on the horizon, his decisions will most likely be made by a cadre of handlers, advisors and cabinet members. And in the not-too-distant future, he will likely cede the reins to Vice-President Kamala Harris. But for now, I will briefly examine the educational direction Biden plans to take, and it ain’t pretty.

The first troubling sign came when the Biden-Sanders Task Force was created before Biden became the Democrats’ candidate. This motley crew included former National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen García, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a proud socialist. This spend-happy, anti-school choice group advised Democrats to triple current Title I funding for disadvantaged students, “fully fund” the federal law for students with disabilities and kill the popular D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.

All the above and so much more is now on the table. His Secretary of Education could very well be one of the aforementioned union leaders, replacing Betsy DeVos, who bore no love for the unions and top-down D.C. decision making. I doubt Weingarten will be the one, as she would have to give up two-thirds of her $600,000 a year salary, and what amounts to a job for life to accept the position. Eskelsen García, on the other hand, was termed out as NEA boss earlier this year and is now a free agent. The position could also to go Elizabeth Warren, who as a former Harvard professor with progressive cred, would fit the bill as the anti-Betsy. But any of the three candidates (and anyone else) would have to get the blessing of the (probably Republican) Senate.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Elite Schools Are the Most Problematic on Speech:By Samuel J. Abrams

By on November 21st, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/20/elite-schools-are-the-most-problematic-on-speech/

Northwestern University is in the midst of significant protests and violence surrounding the “NU Community Not Cops” movement, which intends to march every day until the school abolishes its university police. University president Morton Schapiro has condemned the violent student activity, which has disrupted businesses and local neighborhoods, defaced property, and violated laws and university standards. Students have “moved well past legitimate forms of free speech,” Schapiro says, rightly.

This is no isolated incident, however. Disruptions and violent incidents often appear to be more common at elite schools – not just Northwestern but others such as USC, UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, and Claremont McKenna College, to name a few.

Thanks to the new 2020 College Free Speech Rankings from RealClearEducation, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and research firm College Pulse, empirical evidence confirms this suspicion. The rankings are based on the largest study of student attitudes about speech to date, sampling some 20,000 students. It turns out that students enrolled in the country’s most elite schools are appreciably more willing to shut down speech and expression with which they disagree than the overwhelming majority of college students at non-elite schools.

These tendencies appear to have some correlation with general political views. Almost three-quarters (71%) of those students in the most prestigious universities (the top ten schools, based on U.S. News rankings) identify as liberal, with only 15% calling themselves conservative. The numbers look notably different as school ranking levels decline.

At schools ranked between 50 and 99 on the U.S. News scale, 51% of students are liberal, compared to 26% conservative. Conservative students are much harder to find at Harvard, in other words, than at the University of Minnesota. Forcomparison, 28% of Americans in general presently identify as conservative.

Continue reading →
ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

Sidney Powell claps back at Tucker Carlson By Andrea Widburg

By on November 21st, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/sidney_powell_claps_back_at_tucker_carlson.html

You have to decide whether to believe the Fox News personality or the lawyer who fought the federal government on General Flynn’s behalf — and won.

After Trump’s legal dream team held a press conference to give an overview of the allegations about massive election fraud, the media, from CNN down to Fox went on the attack. Even Tucker Carlson attacked Sidney Powell for allegedly failing to produce evidence supporting her claims against Dominion. By Friday, Powell explained why she didn’t appear on Tucker’s show — and what she said didn’t reflect well on everyone’s favorite conservative analyst.

As always with all the news nowadays, there’s a back story here: Ever since Rupert Murdoch retired, and his left-leaning sons took over, Fox News has systematically and incrementally been recasting itself as CNN-lite. It kept the big-name conservatives front and center but, in the background, it began to tweak here and there.

Quisling Paul Ryan, a NeverTrumper, joined the Board. Donna Brazile, who helped Hillary cheat during the 2016 campaign, got added to the line-up. Newt Gingrich was censored when he tried to mention how George Soros buys left-wing prosecutors.

And then, on election night, Fox announced, all evidence to the contrary, the Biden had won Arizona. At the same time, it refused to call Florida, Ohio, and Texas for Trump, even though there was no way Biden could win in those states.

Within days, roughly 40% of Fox News’s conservative audience had abandoned it. However, the audience remained loyal to Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, all three of whom seemed to retain their position as conservative stalwarts who were not accepting the Associated Press’s claim that Biden had won. (The entire Democrat infrastructure, from the party itself to Big Tech to the media, seems under the impression that the Founders inserted a clause in the Constitution holding that, when AP calls the election, it’s a done deal.)

Continue reading →
ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Democrats And Media Are Reaping Fruit Of 4 Years Of Anti-Trump Conspiracy Theories By Mollie Hemingway

By on November 21st, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/19/democrats-and-media-are-reaping-fruit-of-4-years-of-anti-trump-conspiracy-theories/

If taking claims to court undermines democracy, how to defend Democrats’ vociferous and repeated claims that Donald Trump stole the election in 2016 with the help of Russia?
A prominent liberal legal academic who spent the last four years pushing outrageous, discredited, and debunked conspiracy theories about Donald Trump stealing the 2016 election said on Fox News Sunday that refusal to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election threatens the country.

“He is undermining democracy because there are millions of people who will believe him even though there is nothing to his arguments and no evidence to back them,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe said of President Trump’s litigation regarding the November election.

As Trump and many of his 74 million voters express concern about the security of the 2020 election, in which many states rushed to expand mail-in balloting while dramatically lowering scrutiny of mail-in ballots, many media figures have condemned their efforts to litigate the results. The Washington Examiner’s executive editor Philip Klein wrote:

Continue reading →
ELECTIONS Comments turned off

FEC Chairman: Trump campaign bringing ‘legitimate accusations’ of election fraud to court The “massive amounts of affidavits that we see in these cases show that there was in fact fraud that took place,” said FEC Chairman Trey Trainor. “And the other side really needs to answer these questions.”

By on November 21st, 2020

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/federal-election-commission-chairman-trump-campaign-bringing-legitimate

The Trump campaign is bringing “legitimate accusations” to court through affidavits of credible witnesses and other evidence used in its challenges to electoral outcomes in various states, Federal Election Commission Chairman Trey Trainor said.

Trainor said his review of evidence, including numerous affidavits claiming voter fraud and a sworn statement by a prominent mathematician flagging up to 100,000 Pennsylvania ballots, met the first level of legal scrutiny under what’s known as motion to dismiss or “Rule 12(b)(6)” of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which would dismiss less credible claims.

Noting the subsequent legal threshold beyond a “motion to dismiss” is the “summary judgment phase,” Trainor said that under this phase, the credibility of witnesses is presumed to be accurate, especially given the caliber of the testimonies Trainor has observed to date.

“When considering a motion for summary judgment, a judge will view all evidence in the light most favorable to the movant’s opponent,” explains Cornell University Law School’s Legal Information Institute website.

“What I would be concerned with, if I were on the other side of these election contests that are going on around the country, is that if you look at the level of evidence that has been provided by these affidavits — hundreds of affidavits that corroborate events that have happened on the ground — in a summary judgment phase of these cases, you have to take the evidence of the plaintiff as being true,” Trainor told “Just the News AM” television show Friday morning.

Continue reading →
ELECTIONS Comments turned off

In sworn statement, prominent mathematician flags up to 100,000 Pennsylvania ballots Federal Elections Commission Chairman Trey Trainor says new analysis by professor Steven Miller “adds to the conclusions that some level of voter fraud took place in this year’s election.”

By on November 21st, 2020

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/mathematics-prof-says-sworn-statement-many-56000-gop-ballots-pa-may-be

In a sworn declaration, a respected mathematician says his analysis of election data and phone interviews with Pennsylvania voters raises questions about as many as 100,000 absentee ballots requested in the key battleground state where President Trump and Joe Biden are separated by just about 82,000 votes.

Williams College Professor Steven Miller, a Yale and Princeton trained math expert, said he analyzed Pennsylvania ballot data collected by former Trump campaign data chief Matt Braynard as well as 2,684 voter interviews conducted by a phone bank and found two concerning patterns. One involved possible votes that were not counted, the other ballots that appeared to be requested by someone other than a registered voter.

“I estimate that the number of ballots that were either requested by someone other than the registered Republican or requested and returned but not counted range from 89,397 to 98,801,” Miller said in the sworn statement provided to Just the News. 

File
Miller_DeclarationAndAnalyisPA_GOP_BallotRequestData_2020_Final.pdf

According to Pennsylvania state data for early and absentee ballot requests, there are roughly 165,000 ballots requested in the names of registered GOP voters that had not been counted as of Nov. 16.

Continue reading →
ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Intimidation Tactics Against Trump Lawyers Undermine Justice By Joel M. Zinberg

By on November 21st, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/intimidation-tactics-against-trump-lawyers-undermine-justice/?utm_source=

Two-hundred and fifty years ago, a young lawyer named John Adams risked professional and economic ruin when he defended British soldiers who were accused of firing into a crowd of protesters, killing five of them, in the Boston Massacre. Adams’ representation saved all nine soldiers from murder convictions and execution.

Today, both conservatives and progressives are disregarding Adams’ example and organizing campaigns to intimidate law firms who work for the Trump election effort. These efforts ignore lawyers’ role in our legal system as advocates for clients, including those who espouse unpopular positions, and confuse representation with approval of the clients’ actions or views. Regardless of how one views the Trump lawsuits, bullying the lawyers undermines the fair administration of justice.

The Lincoln Project – a group of Republican Never-Trumpers who campaigned against Trump and other Republican candidates this past election – has been urging lawyers at two firms representing Trump in election challenges (Jones Day and Porter Wright Morris & Arthur) to resign and has been calling on the firms’ clients to change their representation if the firms continue working on the lawsuits. At the other end of the political spectrum, ShutDownDC has organized protests outside offices of Jones Day, Porter Wright and a third firm, King & Spalding, and circulated the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of lawyers at the firms so they can be harassed.

The efforts appear to be succeeding. Late last week, Porter Wright announced it is withdrawing from a lawsuit it filed in federal court in Pennsylvania on behalf of Trump just a few days before, and a Jones Day partner was quoted as saying the firm would refrain from taking on additional election litigation.

Continue reading →
BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Obama’s Simmering Resentment of Benjamin Netanyahu By Jim Geraghty

By on November 21st, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/obamas-simmering-resentment-of-benjamin-netanyahu/?itm_campaign=headline-

In his new memoir, the 44th president continues to blame Netanyahu for his own failure to make peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

T he final chapter of Barack Obama’s third memoir, A Promised Land, begins with an extensive review of the former president’s often-testy relationship with his Israeli counterpart, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Claims that Obama was explicitly anti-Israel or anti-Semitic were always hyperbolic, but his assessment of his dealings with Netanyahu reveals the bristling disdain that fueled perceptions he was not a stalwart or reliable ally of the Jewish state.

Obama is a careful writer, and he would never risk something as incendiary as an argument that AIPAC controlled or exercised undue influence over U.S. politics, or that its members had “dual loyalty” toward both Israel and the United States. But in his description of the group and its sway, he doesn’t really keep a safe distance from those arguments, either:

Members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful bipartisan lobbying organization dedicated to ensuring unwavering U.S. support for Israel. AIPAC’s clout could be brought to bear on virtually every congressional district in the country, and just about every politician in Washington — including me — counted AIPAC members among their key supporters and donors. In the past, the organization had accommodated a spectrum of views on Middle East peace, insisting mainly that those seeking its endorsement support a continuation of U.S. aid to Israel and oppose efforts to isolate or condemn Israel via the U.N. and other international bodies. But as Israeli politics had moved to the right, so had AIPAC’s policy positions. Its staff and leaders increasingly argued that there should be ‘no daylight’ between the U.S. and Israeli governments, even when Israel took actions that were contrary to U.S. policy. Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election.

Continue reading →
CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Sidney Powell: Will Prove Case ‘Within Next Two Weeks’ in Court By Sandy Fitzgerald

By on November 21st, 2020

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/sidney-powell-maria-bartiromo-election-trump/2020/11/20/id/998020/

Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell Friday claimed her team will be able to prove, in court, all of their claims concerning the election “within the next two weeks,” as “we have more than enough evidence now.”

“We have more evidence now than the present population is imprisoned on,” Powell told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo, while laughing off a statement from Dominion Voting Systems denying the attorneys’ claim that the company’s software was used to pull votes away from President Donald Trump and give them to Democrat challenger Joe Biden, and that the company had ties to Venezuela. 

“All I can tell you is that well, the company might have somehow severed or tried to sever the relationships recently, I don’t know how they are parsing their words, but I can tell you that the company was started with Venezuelan money in Venezuela for the express purpose of rigging elections for Hugo Chavez,” Powell said. 

She also claimed that there were people who were “in the control room” and how they “watched how the votes” were flipped in real time. 

“We have evidence now of information from the systems going to three or four different foreign countries during the time of the election, those countries themselves could have watched the live votes come in and changed at the numbers,” said Powell. “There’s significant evidence of foreign interference from the worst communist countries on the Earth with our election.”

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

COVID-19 Lockdowns Lead to a Failure to Thrive By Julie Kelly *****

By on November 20th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/19/covid-19-lockdowns-lead-to-a-failure-to-thrive/

What in the hell are we doing?

There once was a time, like any other time before the year 2020, when people would have been ashamed to openly boast about abandoning their aging parents during the holidays.

But broadcasting plans to ditch ailing mothers and fathers for Thanksgiving is the latest in COVID-19 fashion. Thanks to more heartless, cruel guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and outlandish orders issued by tyrannical governors of both political parties, families are planning to forego holiday traditions to avoid infecting each other with the virus.

“I already canceled Thanksgiving and Christmas with my 91-year-old mother because I DON’T WANT TO KILL HER,” left-wing pundit John Aravosis declared on Twitter. Dozens of his followers chimed in to announce similar plans. 

Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s education secretary, after disclosing he and his family had contracted coronavirus despite following all the rules since the start, said he had not seen his 85-year-old mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, since last spring. “I’ve been able to do almost nothing with her for six months,” Duncan admitted on CNN. “But there’s nothing worse than having the people you care about contract this virus.”

That is, of course, a preposterous statement. It would be easy to name dozens if not hundreds of “worse” things that could happen to a loved one; for example, slowly withering away in a long-term care facility, isolated from family, desperate for human touch and interaction. But that is exactly what’s happening across the country as most states continue to impose harsh restrictions for nursing home visits. The most prosperous country in the world is allowing its most vulnerable citizens—men and women who defended and built America—to die of Third World causes including “failure to thrive,” a common ailment among children in impoverished nations.

“I’d Rather Die From COVID Than Loneliness”

According to an Associated Press story this week, an estimated 40,000 nursing home residents have died prematurely since March, resulting in a 15 percent increase in “excess deaths” at those facilities. 

Continue reading →