Shock: Huge Bipartisan Support For School Choice — I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/24/will-school-choice-be-the-winning-issue-in-2024-ii-tipp-poll/

It’s been said we live in one of the most divisive and bitterly antagonistic political eras in our nation’s history. That’s certainly true for some of the public debates over tough issues we face today. But data from the latest I&I/TIPP Poll show there’s one policy issue about which both major parties have near total agreement: school choice.

Fed up with substandard public schools and feeling trapped, Democrat and Republican voters heartily support greater school choice by more than 2-to-1, according to April’s online I&I/TIPP Poll. The survey, taken March 29-31 from a national sample of 1,365 adults, has a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points.

Specifically, we asked voters the following question:

“This week, Florida enacted an education savings account (ESA) policy for all K-12 students “regardless of race, income, background, or zip code.” ESAs allow parents to withdraw their children from public districts or charter schools and receive a deposit of public funds into government-authorized savings accounts. Families can use the ESA funds to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, homeschool curriculum, online learning, special-needs therapy, and more. Generally speaking, how would you describe your support for this education reform?”

Support was surprisingly strong. Overall, 58% of all Americans back the Sunshine State’s new law, while just 25% oppose it and 17% are “unsure.” And a whopping 82% of parents with children under 18 support the law. Only 12% oppose it.

Antony Blinken and the ‘made men’ of the Biden administration by Jonathan Turley

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3963743-antony-blinken-and-the-made-men-of-the-biden-administration/

Secretary of State Antony Blinken would really, really prefer to talk about grain in Ukraine this week. But many people are less interested in what Blinken is doing as secretary of state than in what he did to become secretary of state. 

This week, Blinken was implicated in a political coverup that could well have made the difference in the 2020 election. According to the sworn testimony of former acting CIA Director Michael Morrell, Blinken – then a high-ranking Biden campaign official – was “the impetus” of the false claim that the Hunter Biden laptop story was really Russian disinformation. Morrell then organized dozens of ex-national security officials to sign the letter claiming that the Hunter laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Morrell further admitted that the Biden campaign “helped to strategize about the public release of the statement.”

Finally, he admitted that one of his goals was not just to warn about Russian influence but “to help then-Vice President Biden in the debate and to assist him in winning the election.”

Help it did. Biden claimed in a presidential debate that the laptop story was “garbage” and part of a “Russian plan.” Biden used the letter to say “nobody believes” that the laptop is real.

In reality, the letter was part of a political plan with the direct involvement of his campaign, but Biden never revealed their involvement. Indeed, over years of controversy surrounding this debunked letter, no one in the Biden campaign or White House (including Blinken) revealed their involvement.

Of course, the letter was all the media needed. Discussion of the laptop was blocked on social media, and virtually every major media outlet dismissed the story before the election. 

That was also all Biden needed to win a close election. The allegations that the Biden family had cashed in millions through influence peddling could have made the difference. It never happened, in part because of Blinken’s work. 

Once in power, Blinken was given one of the top Cabinet positions. He was now one of the “made” men of the administration.

He was not alone. The 2016 election was marred by false allegations of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. Unlike the influence peddling allegations made against Biden, the media ran with those stories for years. It later turned out that the funding and distribution of the infamous Steele dossier originated with the Clinton campaign. The campaign, however, reportedly lied in denying any such funding until after the election. It was later sanctioned for hiding the funding as legal expenses.

Biden’s Second-Term Mistake Age is only one of the reasons the President shouldn’t run again.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-second-term-mistake-23dd7cbe?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

The White House is whispering that next week President Biden will announce his intention to run for a second term, though the polls say that even most Democrats hope he doesn’t. The public understands what Mr. Biden apparently won’t admit: that electing an octogenarian in obvious decline for another four years could be an historic mistake.

No doubt it’s hard to walk away from the Oval Office after working for five decades to get there. Flying Marine One home for the weekends beats Amtrak. The chance to pull the levers of power is intoxicating, and that’s also true for the advisers who have pushed him in such a sharply progressive direction in his first term. They know Mr. Biden will lead wherever they want him to go.

But asking the country to elect a man who is 80 years old and whose second term would end when he is 86 is a risky act that borders on selfish. It’s impossible to know Mr. Biden’s real physical and mental state because the White House goes to great lengths to hide it. But his decline is clear to anyone who isn’t willfully blind. He rarely holds a press conference, and his words are as scripted as possible to avoid embarrassing stumbles that he nonetheless continues to make.

Different people age at different rates, but the risk of an accelerated decline for Mr. Biden is considerable. The chance that he could serve a full second term is hardly assured.

This means Americans could be voting for his running mate to take over in a second term, which as of now would be Vice President Kamala Harris. Mr. Biden would be running on a vow to serve a complete term that he knows he might not be able to keep. At the very least, he owes the country more than a Rose Garden repeat of his Wilmington basement campaign strategy from 2020.

Joe Biden and the 51 Spies of 2020 We’re now learning that his campaign helped gin up the disinformation about Hunter’s laptop.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-and-the-51-spies-of-2020-hunter-laptop-new-york-post-russia-disinformation-73072839?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Why is public trust in American institutions, including the press, in free fall? One reason is the revelation last week that the Biden for President campaign helped to organize the open letter that spread disinformation about Hunter Biden’s famous laptop computer on Oct. 19, 2020.

The House Judiciary and Intelligence committees released portions of a deposition transcript exposing the origins of the statement from 51 former U.S. spies declaring that Hunter’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The admission came from Mike Morell, former deputy CIA director under Barack Obama. The letter served its political purpose of giving the media and Joe Biden the opening to dismiss the New York Post’s laptop scoop as Russian disinformation. (The letter and the names of the 51 signers can be read nearby.)

It turns out the Biden campaign was behind the letter. Mr. Morell told Congress under oath that he received a phone call from Antony Blinken on Oct. 17, 2020—three days after the Post published emails from Hunter’s laptop. Mr. Blinken was then a senior adviser to the campaign and is now secretary of State.

According to a letter the House committees sent to Mr. Blinken last week, Mr. Morell said the call was “couched as simply gathering Morell’s reaction to the Post story,” yet it “set in motion the events that led to the issuance of the public statement.”

Committee question to Mr. Morell: “Prior to [Mr. Blinken’s] call, you—you did not have any intent to write this statement?”

Mr. Morell: “I did not.”

The letter says Mr. Morell also “explained that the Biden campaign helped to strategize about the public release of the statement.” Mr. Morell says he then contacted an aide to former CIA director John Brennan to say “the Biden campaign wanted the statement to go to a particular reporter at the Washington Post first and that he should send the statement to the campaign when he sent the letter to the reporter.”

Another Crisis in Spookdom by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19591/another-crisis-in-spookdom

In other words, the overall effect of the secret reports was to confirm what everyone assumed to be true at the time. The intelligence analyst started from an already established assumption and then tried to confirm it.

Since then we have witnessed numerous examples of that bizarre method. Right to the end, Washington’s Kremlin-watchers couldn’t envisage the Soviet Empire falling like a house of cards. They focused on Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, in other words, repeated what they had read in the newspapers. An avalanche of “top secret” reports was produced on individuals who were to become embarrassingly irrelevant figures in the blink of history’s eye.

The same intelligence community reported Russia’s saber-rattling over the Crimean Peninsula as mere gesticulation by President Vladimir Putin in the context of the power struggle in Kyiv, presumably to endorse President Barack Obama’s decision not to enter a fight with the Russians. When Putin did invade and occupy the peninsula in 2014, Obama tried to weasel out of a tight corner by declaring that Russia was a “regional power” and that its actions on its own were not a US “national security concern”.

The intelligence community tailored its “top secret” reports to suit Obama’s naïve analysis, effusively giving Putin the green light for his second invasion of Ukrainian territory over a year ago. The same reports overestimated Russia’s military power, ignoring the fact that much of its weaponry consisted of antiquated hardware inherited from the Soviet era.

The intelligence community got it right when it predicted Putin’s invasion last year. But that prediction did not result in Washington decision-makers shaping policies to deal with the crisis.

Maybe decision-makers would have done better to read the newspapers, rather that the “top secret” memos they received and ignored.

Two weeks after a massive leak of supposedly secret US government documents, the Biden administration seems to be still unable to explain what happened let alone suggest ways of avoiding a remake of the tragi-comic incident. On closer examination, this may not be surprising, as there is still no credible account of what happened when WikiLeaks published 700,000 secret documents almost 13 years ago. However, focusing on the policing aspects of these incidents may divert attention from other more pertinent issues regarding the classification of secret documents and the use made of them by decision-makers.

Issues of Concern by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19182/issues-of-concern

Hamas is an enemy [of Israel], but it is a much weaker enemy than Iran, which is determined to go ahead and develop nuclear weapons with the sole objective of destroying Israel… Hamas is extreme in its ideology, which is radical Islam. They have absolutely no desire to resolve this conflict with Israel in the ways that Western leaders hope and expect — which is settling the conflict by accepting what we have been calling a two‑part state for a very long time. That is not the objective of Hamas. The objective of Hamas is to destroy the State of Israel.

The Palestinians are unfortunate to have, on the one hand, a leader who is corrupt and really does not care very much about average Palestinians and may even want the conflict to continue so that he can continue to cash in on international handouts from the EU, America and others; then on the other hand, there is Hamas. This terrorist deadly group, also does not care about Palestinian lives. That is where the problem lies…. Both Hamas and the PA are deeply cynical: if they wished to increase the well-being of the average Palestinian, they would pursue peace…. One has to ask if peace with Israel is in their interest….

Hamas is an enemy, but it is a much weaker enemy than Iran, which is determined to go ahead and develop a nuclear weapon with the sole objective of destroying Israel.

In terms of foreign policy, it is important to realize that the threat of radical Islam, it may have faded away from the desks of policy‑makers in the United States…but it has not gone away…. If anybody is paying attention, Islamists remain a force to be reckoned with in Africa: think of Somalia, the Sahel (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger), the Lake Chad Basin (Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Niger), Mozambique, and Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood and sympathetic groups are very much active on American soil, in the UK, and in many other Western countries. Their front organizations pretend to be humanitarian, charitable, educational or religious organizations. In its world view…the Brotherhood is not that different from that of violent groups such as Al‑Qaeda or ISIS. Where they differ is on the tactics to get there. Their activities are just coated in a language that is appealing to the leadership… and especially appealing to Westerners, often including support for “democracy”. It is time that we expose the Muslim Brotherhood for what it is.

[A]ny human being who is suffering, regardless of their color, regardless of their geographical location, whatever language they speak, awakens your compassion, your empathy, and your sympathy. I hope that we can do that — so an African, or an Arab, or anyone from any part of the world will feel empathy with a white person who is suffering and the other way around. That is where the message of common humanity is powerful. That is the only way to defeat these ideologues who are trying to divide us.

What we are seeing happen to women in Islamic communities in Western countries, as well as in majority-Muslim countries, is what has been happening for decades. Everyone has been looking away. There are a number of Muslim women, individuals, who were able to escape their families. The oppression really comes for these women… from their own families, from brothers, fathers, husbands, cousins, nephews…. It’s just that there is this constant struggle within the West of trying to undermine the values that are the tools of emancipation and dismissing them as white supremacy, or colonialist, or ethnocentric.

Now, there are women who really want no trouble at all, they just want to emancipate themselves from this straight jacket. They want to go to school. They want to work. They want to pursue a profession of their choosing. They want to live like the average European woman or American woman — fend for themselves and control their own destiny. Those are the women that are often regarded as abnormal by those around them. their immediate environment…. We can help them by empowering the women who want to emancipate themselves… their right to autonomy in their life.

What if you have hundreds of thousands of young men who come from a society with the opposite norms, and they come into various parts of Europe…? They just come, they are shocked, and then they act — and people react. It is a huge problem. There have been lots of journalists, commentators, scholars who have been warning European leaders for decades about this collision of values….They have all been ignored or demonized as racists and xenophobes.

Parts of Paris, parts of Marseille are now completely locked in with this confrontation between what they call Islamist separatism, which for decades they pretended did not exist. Many French intellectuals were trying to sound the alarm for decades and were demonized. They continue to be demonized. If you look at some of the entrenched Islamist groups in France, the ideology is hostile towards the civil Republic just as the ideology of Hamas is hostile to co-existence with Israel. They reject the French Republic as much as Hamas rejects the Israeli government. They call it a parallel society. It is like having an alien state within the state…. [T]he objective of the leadership of that infrastructure is to create these parallel states.

With the Internet now, there are opportunities for women that we did not have before. Where we can connect like‑minded people with like‑minded people. It is just that there is this constant struggle within the West of trying to undermine the values that are the tools of human emancipation and dismissing them as based on white supremacy, or as colonialist or ethnocentric.

The problems we have been seeing in Europe is that the punishment and the legal frameworks — prosecuting, sending people to prison, fines, and other corrections they have in place — for whatever reason, do not seem to make an impression on some of the perpetrators. When I talk to men who have come to Europe, they say that what would make an impression on them is to be sent back to the country they came from. One of the reasons why, is that the families have invested so much in these young men to send them to Europe. For them to be sent back, the families are going to be met with shame and embarrassment that their child was sent back.

Also, a number of the men who are coming from Syria, Iraq, even as far as Bangladesh and Pakistan, or Somalia and Eritrea have entrenched prejudices against European women that reflect their societies of origin. They look at white women, and they see them from Hollywood, they see them in pornographic movies, and they think when they go to Europe, that is what they are going to encounter. They have an inaccurate picture. Women, they think, are going to have sex with them readily. Then the reality hits, and they see that this is not the case, then they use force and act in groups, and do not understand why they are being punished when the women are out and about. The women are in the parks. Women are going to work, they are dressed as they please. The men are very confused by that.

Now, if we take in hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Muslims, do we sit back and say, well, you can continue to treat women as you like, it is your prerogative, it is none of our business — even though you now want to build a future within our societies?

Do we say, there are red lines that you cannot cross, and we are going to uphold our norms and values, and particularly, our laws? For me, integration or assimilation means that you uphold those laws, and values, and norms, and that you tie credible consequences to those who refuse to abide by the laws.

Where I grew up, I was raised to believe that unless you had almost your entire body covered, you were regarded as naked. When I first encountered women in parts of Germany and the Netherlands who were in tank tops, and shorts, and mini-skirts, and out and about during the day and all hours of the night I thought this was crazy. It was a revolution; it was shocking…..

I have colleagues, professors who are terrified of publishing papers, of giving lectures, of sharing their views, for fear of being fired, canceled, shamed. It is really horrific. Many of them are just speaking the truth.

Hamas is extreme in its ideology, which is radical Islamist. They have absolutely no desire to resolve their conflict with Israel in the ways that Western leaders hope and expect — which is settling the conflict by accepting what we have been calling a two‑part state for a very long time. That is not the objective of Hamas. The objective of Hamas is to destroy the State of Israel. Keeping the conflict going is, in a way, beneficial to them as a group even if it hurts normal people.

The Garland, Blinken, and Morell Morass  It is possible that both Garland and Blinken will have to answer for their alleged malfeasance. Both might easily be impeached and forced from office. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/22/the-garland-blinken-and-morell-morass/

Doubtless your mother used to tell you to count your blessings. It was good advice. Your situation may be bad. In the case of the United States, things indisputably are bad, and worsening. You know that. But look on the bright side. Merrick Garland, the first American Gothic attorney general of the United States, is a partisan horror show, withholding real protection from Supreme Court justices who are threatened by violent criminals even as he stigmatizes as “domestic terrorists” parents who criticize their local school boards and orders the FBI to conduct dawn raids on critics of the regime. He is a horrible man and a dangerous partisan hack, the very instantiation of the two-tier application of the law that has made such a mockery of justice during Biden’s tenure. 

But look on the bright side. Garland will soon be gone. And remember, he almost made it to the Supreme Court. Obama nominated him in the waning days of his administration. But Donald Trump had other ideas and—let’s give credit where credit is due—Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made sure that Garland’s nomination got lost when Republicans held the majority. I am no fan of McConnell’s, but I try to remember to say a little prayer for him whenever I list my intentions. By scotching Garland’s ascension to the Court, McConnell did the country a huge favor. 

I say Garland will “soon” be gone. Most of my readers will assume I mean on or about January 20, 2025, when the next Republican president assumes office. 

It might take that long. But recent developments have me wondering whether he might make his congé even earlier.

A few days ago, it was reported that an unnamed, senior IRS special agent was seeking whistle-blower status in connection with the ongoing investigation of First Son Hunter Biden, who has serious tax problems. 

According to a letter from the agent’s lawyer to several House and Senate committees, the agent laid out multiple examples of “preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject [i.e., Hunter Biden] were not politically connected.” The agent’s allegations also “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee” and “involve failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case” against Hunter Biden.

Earth Day has become kind of a joke By Silvio Canto, Jr.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/earth_day_has_become_kind_of_a_joke.html

Fifty-three years ago, The Beatles broke up, and they started Earth Day conveniently on Vladimir Lenin’s birthday.  After all, what a better way to celebrate your hatred of capitalism than to schedule your big festival on commie #1’s birthday?  Anyway, I am not sure how Lenin would feel about all of the predictions about the Earth that were posted since then.  Let’s take a look:

Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”

—Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

—George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”

—Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

—New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

—Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

Getting Off the Roller Coaster to Bondage By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/getting_off_the_roller_coaster_to_bondage.html

Life right now feels like that moment when your roller coaster car begins slowing down near a terrifying peak, and your line of sight finally captures the precipitous plunge lying ahead.  Americans know that what happens next won’t be enjoyable except in that perverse way when abject terror floods the body with adrenaline.  Majorities or near-majorities expect imminent economic disaster, global war against nuclear-armed foes, and civil war here at home.  If that’s “progress,” then it’s long past time to turn the country around.  Yet that’s the thing with roller coaster rides: even if we hit the brakes now before cresting the summit, our downward acceleration is guaranteed — in one direction or another.

It’s not as if the ruling class’s “cult of expertise” provides any comfort.  We have a president who long ago lost his marbles, a vice president who succeeded in the political profession by excelling in the oldest one, a secretary of defense committed to promoting men in dresses, a health bureaucracy pumping citizens full of experimental drugs, a Treasury Department endlessly printing money, a Commerce Department prioritizing inflation-inducing “green” windmills over real economic growth, a homeland security chief dedicated to keeping the nation insecure, and a national police force that treats half the country as “domestic enemies.”  It’s almost as if whoever installed these yahoos into the highest positions of authority wanted obvious “fall guys” for when everything, well, falls down.

The Gateway Pundit recently ran an article reminding readers of an ominous analysis from a private intelligence outfit predicting a seventy-percent decline in America’s population by 2025.  That Deagel Corporation forecast released less than a decade ago shocked a lot of people at the time, but in an age when Farmer Gates and Doom Fauci continue to promise incoming pandemics worse than COVID, the World Economic Forum’s human sacrifice cult insists on widespread energy poverty and famine, and U.S.-NATO plays Russian roulette for fun and profit, apocalyptic population drops no longer seem so unimaginable from the top of this globalist roller coaster.  (Morbid side question: If Deagel’s devastating prophecy proves right, will climate cultists still insist that only global government and micromanaged markets can save the world from destruction?  Arg, of course they will; even after killing off 95% of the planet, A.I. clones of Klaus Schwab, George Soros, and Barack Obama will still be blaming the remaining 5% for “hate” crimes, global warming, and “white supremacy.”  Hustlers can’t ever give up the con.)

Communism Is Liberty’s Mortal Enemy By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/communism_is_libertys_mortal_enemy.html

In a December 26, 1955 article in Time magazine, George Meany of the AFL-CIO warned Americans that

[t]oo many in the free world fail to see the real nature of Communism as the mortal foe of everything that we hold dear, of every moral and spiritual value. Too many are still prisoners of the illusion that Communism is, historically speaking, a progressive system  [or] … extreme liberalism temporarily making bad mistakes. Actually, Communism … is an anti-social system in which there are embedded some of the worst features of savagery, slavery, feudalism and life-sapping exploitation manifested in the industrial revolution of early-day capitalism.

Meany forcefully asserted that

[t]oo many in the free world seem to have lost their capacity for moral indignation against the most brutal inhumanities when they are perpetrated by Communists. It is painful, but we must face the cruel facts of life. It is disturbing to me that many people in our country who call themselves liberals … never find the time to utter a word of condemnation against the Communist imperialist destruction of the national independence and democratic rights of hundreds of millions of people in Europe and Asia.

It was unfathomable to Meany that liberals could not perceive that “communism is the deadliest enemy of liberalism.”

With great prescience, Meany recognized that “[t]he conflict between Communism and freedom is the problem of our time.  It overshadows all other problems.  This conflict mirrors our age, its toils, its tensions, its troubles and its tasks.  On the outcome of this conflict depends the future of all mankind. I pray that … we of the free world can muster the moral courage and total strength to preserve peace and promote the freedom of the men and women of every continent, color and creed.”

In January of 1956, Meany took aim at the American business community when he explained that “[s]omehow or other, many in our American business community are not sufficiently alert to the danger of world Communism[.]”  Meany urged American business “not to let the prospect of monetary profits blur your vision.  Know your enemy.  Don’t help him.”