Month: May 2016

Zuckerberg’s Facebook a playpen for lefties?

Facebook “curates” its “trending” items, guiding the news absorbed by “roughly 1.6 billion users worldwide, of whom 167 million are in the United States.”

In effect, these curators exercise gate keeping powers which amount to political news-making powers that are transmitted to Facebook’s audience. Even the New York Times published an article this week with a headline saying that the social press “finds new roll as news and entertainment curator.”

Source: Where There’s Smoke of BiasThere Could Be Fire For Zuckerberg’s Facebook – The New York Sun

Those Illinois redistricting blues . . .

. . . are being challenged by non-aligned citizens, as we know. 

The Ruling Party is opposed to this. It kept such a proposal off one ballot and wants to do it in another, each time deploying an ad hoc group represented by the party’s lawyer, while denying its own involvement.

Constitutional issues are arguable in the matter, but the party has a very big stake here. Drawing electoral district boundaries is a monopoly they have gotten used to.

The system seems blatantly undemocratic — hermetically sealed office-holders deciding whom if anyone they will run against. As such it was raised as an issue at a town hall meeting described in my Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters.

A softball question had just been answered at the mid-July, 2013 meeting at the Oak Park Library. Then . . .

A Certified Public Accountant shifted tone considerably, urging [Sen. Don] Harmon to “do something about corruption in our very corrupt state.” He specified “gerrymandering” and complained, “The way it’s set up, candidates know they will win,” continuing at length in this vein.

“Each of us is vulnerable in a primary,” Harmon said. When an opponent surfaces, he might have added. Lilly, appointed in 2010, had run unopposed in primary and general elections in 2012 and would do so again in 2014. Harmon had run unopposed in the general every year but one since he was elected in 2002.

He was to be opposed in the 2014 primary, by a Galewood man with public-employee-union background, whom he defeated handily. He was unopposed in the general, though briefly threatened by a last-minute Republican opponent who thought better of it after a week and withdrew for “personal reasons.”

A candidate needs money to answer nominating-petition challenges, which led to the withdrawal for lack of funds of a credible [primary] candidate seeking to oppose Congressman Danny Davis in 2014, for instance.

Rep. Camille Lilly wound up this meeting with a request.

She closed, telling the questioner, “Give us a call.” This while giving no telephone number or email address or even street address, which for what it’s worth was a few blocks inside Austin, one of the city’s highest-crime-rate neighborhoods.

This location was symptomatic of her low-profile, virtually nonexistent approach to representing mostly white, well-policed Oak Park, not to mention other communities in a long meandering (gerrymandered?) line moving northwest as far as Franklin Park, eight miles from her office.

The long meandering line (her district) was stark evidence of the state’s 2010 redistricting by the Ruling Party to make sure black and other Democrat office-holders are elected with at most token opposition. In another of these meetings, Harmon explained such redistricting as a civil-rights imperative, citing federal law in the matter.

He was apparently referring to the requirement to “remedy a violation” of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. If there was such a violation in Illinois districts in 2010, nobody talked about it. But for the senator, it provided respectability to Ruling Party redistricting.

Illinois Blues is available in paperback and non-Kindle ebook and as a Kindle book.

 

Tough call for Sen. Harmon . . .

. . . as he himself explains.

But it could have been much tougher.

I mean, he could have voted with the Republicans against the new school-funding bill, which passed (easily) on party lines a week ago.

Sure. And I’m the Easter bunny, as TV news man Len O’Connor used to say at the close of one of his “biting commentaries.”

Anyhow, the state funding of public schools arises in my Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters.

It was at a four-legislator forum at Oak Park’s Percy Julian middle school, on a balmy night in October, 2013.

The legislators were there at the invitation of the parent teacher organization, introduced by the district superintendent and questioned by parent members of the district’s Committee for Legislative Action, Intervention and Monitoring (CLAIM).

An interesting evening all in  all, with Harmon on hand plus Sen. Kimberly Lightford and Reps. LaShawn Ford and Camille Lilly.

School funding came up well into the meeting, when a CLAIM member . . .

. . . raised the long-standing hot-button issue of state funding of public schools in general, setting up a haves-vs.-have-nots give and take.

Lightford complained that the formula for allocating school funding — $4 billion in 2013 — was based on forty-to-fifty-year-old poverty figures. She was to co-sponsor a bill two years later that sought to alter that formula, taking from the wealthier districts and giving to the poorer ones. Nothing had come of it when this book was published. [Yes, but . . . ]

“Is it fair?” she asked, that Oak Park gets as much as it does, “considering its lower-than-average poverty rate?” State aid (to Oak Park schools) “may be” less, she said. Which was sufficiently ambiguous for the occasion. Then she launched into numbing detail about the process of deciding how funds are apportioned.

Harmon ignored her allegation of unfairness — no need to ruffle feathers — but agreed that the formula is “complicated.” He took note also of the long-standing teacher pension subsidy for non-Chicago school districts — featuring highly publicized retirement bonanzas for suburban administrators — as further complicating the matter.

Which it does, according to the Illinois Policy Institute, who had said in May, 2012, that for many years “these fat pensions had a massive, and now dire, impact on state education finances.”

Lilly observed that she would “like to put on the table a corporate round table,” meaning God knew what, and He was excluded from this gathering in a public school. In any case, as often happened in these forums, no one asked.

Illinois Blues is available at Amazon as Kindle and at Lulu.com as paperback or non-Kindle ebook.

 

Propaganda by Chi Trib for transgender bathrooms

Front Page Chi Trib Saturday 5/14 quotes affirmation for opening up bathrooms and locker rooms in schools and gymnasiums:

“By affirming transgender students and guaranteeing them these rights, we’re not denying anyone else’s rights. And sometimes I think that gets missed.”

— Jennifer Leininger with the Gender and Sex Development Program at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago.

She also called the federal directive “groundbreaking.”

It’s a ukase, isn’t it? The boy president running wild in his last year in office, flashing his pearly whites ear to ear, having his way with pen and telephone.

And the Trib socks it to us on a Saturday morning in May. Page One, story of the day, complete with four-column, above-the-fold shot of real, live transgender poster boy, a handsome lad shown here.

Alex Singh

“Not denying anyone else’s rights,” says the sex-development specialist, ignoring the right to privacy argued by bathroom originalists — the cornerstone of abortion rights, by the way, for what that’s worth.

Behold cultural Marxism, everything up for grabs, life is flowing like a river, never the same, keep the bourgeois enemy on his toes. What Obama and his uber-promoter Axelrod had in mind it seems ages ago by “hope and change”?

And there’s uproar from right and left at Trump’s vagueness and populism. O. and A. paved the way.

The Lurie woman’s quote fits this story, with its impressionistic argument — heavens, just reporting a social phenomenon, you know — one school official after another telling us they are already doing what Obama has ordered under threat of cutting off funding if they don’t do. Federal money, federal control.

In the story’s 1,300 words, there’s reference in a few lines to Palatine parents’ suit claiming ‘”intimidating and hostile” environment for students who share the locker room with the transgender student.’ That’s it for anything to counter the theme. Privacy is nowhere mentioned.

It’s an obvious, amateurish piece, a recounting of bullet quotes gathered by suburban reporters acting on orders.

Getting it right, we trust, and why not? They looked around and found these blokes, with nary a mumblin’ word of dissent.

And the whole story placed to count! Assuming so much, hitting readers over coffee with its multiple-point type blaring “Many schools ahead of transgender decree,” playing readers.

Trib columnists Huppke and Zorn  have chimed in to approve the great bathroom decree, or at least pooh-pooh objections. Readers expect that. But to deliver a front-page headline story that argues without declaring its intentions? Stuff it, please.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Ryan had a meeting . . .

. . . and The Disruptor did some listening, to good effect.

Here’s the key point: Mr. Trump is not going to give up his economic populism or his America-first foreign policy. He has represented himself as the voice for the ailing American middle class.

He is a disrupter. He will always be the outsider. And when elected he will follow through in Washington. Count on it.

The “disruptor” tag was given him by Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the GOP House leadership member from Washington state, in an NBC News interview with Luke Russert.  Larry Kudlow is delighted, likening him to the

many fabulous tech companies that disrupted the economy (Microsoft in its heyday, the all-powerful Amazon, and a laundry list that’s too long for this column).

Such disruptors

create winners and losers, but overall are remarkably positive for the country, middle-class folks, the economy, jobs, and wages.

Kudlow says:

Hats off to McMorris Rodgers for being the first member of the Republican leadership to understand that Mr. Trump, the ultimate outsider, is going to be a disruptive force when he gets to Washington. That’s a good thing. It will finally relaunch America in a positive direction.

New Gingrich calls Trump “someone to kick over the kitchen table.” Called him that in February, in fact, and more recently, in his admirable laid-back manner, on Fox Business channel.

more more more to come in this fascinating race for the big white house on Pa. Ave.