Tag: Blithe Spirit

The good and the bad, emphasis on Trib and Sun-Times

Rope-a-dopey Obama feds have tiger by tail

Not the first time, needless to say, but this one’s a doozy.

The objection made by many people opposed to establishing a right of the transgendered to use the bathroom or shower of their choice is not so much about the occasional transgendered person using a facility.

It is that by making someone’s gender choice unquestionable, you are actually saying that anyone, at any time, can use the facilities of the other gender, and if challenged, can simply claim to be transgendered.

So any middle aged man who wants to shower with the girls’ soccer team at the local community college will now have a federal right to do so.

And if anyone asks him to leave, they will be violating his legal rights. (Some have argued that social norms will keep people in line in bathrooms; but it seems hardly worth commenting on the uselessness of social norms when the underlying policy is meant to destroy social norms.)

Gender choice out of bounds for discussion. (Just live with it, young ladies taking shower.) 

The bloke makes the claim, no one dare stop him. (DOJ is on his case in the flash of a towel ping, ACLU providing the court case.)

Social norms? Forget about them! Right now!

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

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.