Please Defund New York!

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  • I live in New York City. The City government in New York — and to a lesser extent, the government of New York State — are currently in severe financial distress as tax revenues have plunged in the aftermath of the coronavirus and of state-imposed economic lockdowns.

  • Both the City and State governments are loudly demanding bailouts from the federal government to cover all their financial shortfalls.

  • Do you think that, as a New York City resident, I would want the federal government to meet these demands and bail out the City and State?

  • Absolutely not! They shouldn’t get one additional dime of federal taxpayer money.

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Biden Tries To Play Both Sides Of Green Energy Politics

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  • Do you think that Joe Biden has signed on to the Green New Deal?

  • Do you have the idea that Biden is fully committed if he becomes President to doing away with fossil fuel energy and replacing it with the wind and sun as quickly as possible?

  • Where could you possibly have gotten those ideas? More on that later in the post.

  • Certainly in the past couple of weeks you might have gotten exactly the opposite impression.

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Portrait Of The Biden Voter

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  • Over at Instapundit, Professor Glenn Reynolds is often the master of the pithy phrase that captures the essence of the political moment.

  • Yesterday Reynolds wrote that, while the Democrats are trying to make everything in this election (and in life) about race, “Trump’s making clear that it’s about people who are constructive, productive, and generally happy, vs. people who are destructive, parasitic, and generally miserable, and that that difference transcends things like race.”

  • Have things really gotten so bad that the entire Democrat/Biden campaign has become the coalition of the “destructive, parasitic, and generally miserable”?

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Does Anyone Know What “Defund the Police” Really Means?

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  • In cities across the country, it has been a summer of continuous protests, many of which have escalated to riots, arson, and looting.

  • The protesters chant to defund the police, but as many of the protests have turned violent, police departments in affected cities have been overwhelmed with calls for assistance.

  • So should protesters’ demands to “defund the police” be taken literally?

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Progressive Racism In Practice: The Case Of School Discipline

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  • What is “racism,” and what is “anti-racism”?

  • This is one of those subjects on which I just see the world completely the opposite from the vision of the current crop of woke progressives. The woke progressive program calls for things like diminished law enforcement, increased state handouts and social service programs, and even “reparations,” as the “anti-racist” remedies for racism.

  • By contrast, in a. post in April 2019, I wrote that these same sorts of things only provide evidence of:

the utter contempt in which the self-anointed elites of our country hold members of minority groups, most particularly African Americans. Somehow, these elites — or at least some very substantial number of them — have decided that African Americans are not capable of accepting personal responsibility in life or of being treated like adults.

  • For today, let’s consider how this issue plays out in the context of student discipline in public K-12 schools.

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The Battle Lines Are Drawn On Public Education

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  • In a post a week ago, co-blogger (and daughter) Jane remarked that the school shut-downs resulting from the ongoing pandemic provided a golden opportunity for disruption of the monopoly unionized public school model.

  • If schools wouldn’t re-open, perhaps the vast taxpayer funds at issue (or some substantial portion thereof) could simply be redirected to the parents to be used to educate their children as they see fit? Who could even object to that?

  • Well, make no mistake, the people running the show right now think that they have a sufficient lock on the situation that they can keep getting paid full dollar, provide little or no actual education for the money, and at the same time prevent any competitive alternatives from gaining a toehold.

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