Category: Blithe Spirit

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.

 

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.

Now I know what Orwellian means

Chi Public Schools have new guidelines for how you must talk or face consequences:

According to the new guidelines:

the intentional or persistent refusal by students or school staff to respect a student’s gender identity (for example, intentionally referring to the student by a name or pronoun that does not correspond to the student’s gender identity) is a violation of these Guidelines, the Student Code of Conduct, and Comprehensive Non-Discrimination, Title IX and Sexual Harassment Policy.

CPS warns that “violations will result in appropriate consequences for offending staff and students.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/12/chicago-students-now-required-to-adopt-transgender-newspeak/#ixzz48YwKw5kC

This do beat all.

Micro-aggression at St. Ignatius

At the end of a story by Sun-Times’ Mitch Dudek, we find quite a good statement from Todd Stroger, whom Dudek asked about a teacher’s using the N-word in a history class:

Todd Stroger, former Cook County Board president and a 1981 Ignatius graduate, said using the N-word in an instructional setting is appropriate.

“I kind of relate it to when the Jewish people talk about the Holocaust, they say: ‘Never Forget.’ I think this is kind of the same instance for African-Americans in America,” he said.

“But you get some people who are trying to be smart alecks, and some people who are so naive and immature they don’t get it,” Stroger said.

Stroger stopped short of saying he experienced racism at the school. “There will always be people who are insensitive. … There was always somebody who would say something out of bounds, just trying to get your goat.”

“But I’d go back to high school at St. Ignatius in a heartbeat, if my wife would let me,” he added.

Not bad at all. Nice job by Dudek too.

Trump-style candidate our only hope . . .

Meaning, if it weren’t he, it would have to be another “vulgar, abusive, nasty, rude, boorish and outrageous” candidate who “is also saying what he thinks and, more important, teaching Americans how to think for themselves again.”

We’ve lost the habit, said Paul Johnson in the April 19 issue of Forbes, even the ability to do so, having succumbed to a virulent social disease, namely

“political correctness” . . .  one of the most dangerous intellectual afflictions ever to attack mankind. The fact that we began by laughing at it–and to some extent, still do–doesn’t diminish its venom one bit.

PC . . . appeals to pseudo-intellectuals everywhere . . . . Any empty-headed student with a powerful voice can claim someone (never specified) will be “hurt” by a hitherto harmless term, object or activity and be reasonably assured that the dons and professors in charge will show a white feather and do as the student demands.

. . . [T]here isn’t a university campus on either side of the Atlantic that’s not in danger of censorship. The brutal young don’t even need to impose it themselves; their trembling elders will do it for them.

It’s insidious,

. . . usually the anonymous work of such Kafkaesque figures as civil servants, municipal librarians, post office sorters and employees at similar levels . . . the revenge of the resentful underdog.

It’s “triumphant” here, which is “remarkable, because America has traditionally been the home of vigorous, outspoken, raw and raucous speech.”

From the early 17th century, when the clerical discipline the Pilgrim Fathers sought to impose broke down and those who had things to say struck out westward or southward for the freedom to say them, America has been a land of unrestricted comment on anything–until recently.

Now we are “inundated with PC inquisitors, and PC poison is spreading worldwide in the Anglo zone.”

Enter Trump.

No one could be a bigger contrast to the spineless, pusillanimous and underdeserving Barack Obama, who has never done a thing for himself and is entirely the creation of reverse discrimination.

The fact that he was elected President–not once, but twice–shows how deep-set the rot is and how far along the road to national impotence the country has traveled.

National impotence, senility.

Under Obama the U.S.–by far the richest and most productive nation on earth–has been outsmarted, outmaneuvered and made to appear a second-class power by Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

America has presented itself as a victim of political and economic Alzheimer’s disease, a case of national debility and geopolitical collapse.

The non-Trumps?

None of the Republican candidates trailing Trump has the character to reverse this deplorable declension.

The Democratic nomination seems likely to go to the relic of the Clinton era, herself a patiently assembled model of political correctness, who is carefully instructing America’s most powerful pressure groups in what they want to hear and whose strongest card is the simplistic notion that the U.S. has never had a woman President and ought to have one now, merit being a secondary consideration.

The world needs a scare.

The world is disorderly and needs its leading nation to take charge and scare it back into decency. Donald Trump fits the bill.

Other formidable figures, including Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, have performed a similar service in the past. But each President is unique and cast in his own mold. Trump is a man of excess–and today a man of excess is what’s needed.

The whole argument made by the prolific journalist and popular historian Johnson is clearly based on a keen appreciation of how bad things are which I share.

For his editor (of Standpoint) son Dan Johnson, by the way, the Donald Trump solution is not recommended.