EDUCATION Comments turned off

Federal Student-Aid Applications Down in 2020, Signaling Potential Drop in College Enrollment By Zachary Evans

Posted By on December 5th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/federal-student-aid-applications-down-in-2020-signaling-potential-drop-in-college-enrollment/

The number of high school seniors applying for federal student financial aid for college has dropped significantly since the previous year, signaling that college attendance may remain low during the 2021–2022 school year.

Schools and students have struggled to adapt classes during the coronavirus pandemic, with many institutions implementing hybrid remote and in-person learning. This combination has been more difficult to implement in rural areas, where college and high-school students are less likely to have Internet access.

The first two months of the cycle for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) saw a 17 percent decrease in applications compared with the same period last year, according to Education Department data analyzed by the nonprofit National College Attainment Network. High schools with high minority populations have submitted 22 percent fewer FAFSA forms when compared with last year, and high schools with a high number of low-income students have submitted 20 percent fewer applications.

“To still see double-digit percent decreases from last year is alarming to me,” NCAN data director Bill DeBaun told the Journal.

Overall, 24.3 percent of U.S. high school seniors completed the FAFSA by November 27, while 29.3 percent submitted the application in 2019 by the same date.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Trump Won His Other Campaign — to Destroy Media Credibility . By Larry Elder

Posted By on December 5th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/12/03/trump_won_his_other_campaign_–_to_destroy_media_credibility_144775.html

“For four years, major media, along with their Democratic comrades, banded together to bring down Trump. They appear to have succeeded. But as to Trump’s campaign to expose the media’s blatant, often vicious anti-Republican bias so that much of America will never again trust it, Trump won. Huge.”

Convinced that President Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection, the media suddenly became less hysterical. Just like that, the media, at least to some degree, rediscovered concepts such as fairness and perspective, AWOL the last four years. 

Two weeks after the election, New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof haltingly, grudgingly and reluctantly, admitted that yes, Trump was right. Banning in-person school education to fight COVID-19 was and is bad policy. Kristof wrote: “Some things are true even though President Trump says them. Trump has been demanding for months that schools reopen, and on that he seems to have been largely right. Schools, especially elementary schools, do not appear to have been major sources of coronavirus transmission, and remote learning is proving to be a catastrophe for many low-income children.” Kristof, of course, could not acknowledge Trump’s correct judgement without the “somethings are true even though Trump says them” snark. But remember, this is The New York Times, a paper that has not endorsed a Republican for president since 1956. Little steps.

Kristof even took a Trump-like swipe at Democratic-run cities. And, whether inadvertently or not, he made the case for K-12 vouchers for inner city kids: “So Democrats helped preside over school closures that have devastated millions of families and damaged children’s futures. Cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., have closed schools while allowing restaurants to operate. … School closures magnify these inequities, as many private schools remain open and affluent parents are better able to help kids adjust to remote learning. At the same time, low-income children fall even further behind.”

BOOKS, CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

Terresa Monroe-Hamilton: A Review of “Abuse Of Power: Inside The Three-Year Campaign To Impeach Donald Trump” by Fred Lucas

Posted By on December 5th, 2020

https://www.trevorloudon.com/2020/12/book-review-abuse-of-power-inside-the-three-year-campaign-to-impeach-donald-trump/?

I have officially found a new author that I am adding to my ‘favorites’ list. His name is Fred Lucas. He has written a superb book entitled: Abuse of Power: Inside The Three-Year Campaign to Impeach Donald Trump. If you want the truth about what went on during the witchhunt to impeach Trump, this is the book. I can’t recommend it enough and I personally believe everyone should get a copy.

Just as I strongly suspected, President Trump’s enemies had a plan in place to remove him even before he was inaugurated. Leftists could not stand the way the election turned out and how Hillary Clinton lost, so they implemented a strategy to bring a sitting president down in a soft coup. That coup had many facets, but the impeachment angle was one of the key elements of their plan. The hit job culminated in an election-year impeachment trial.

In the beginning… of the impeachment, per Lucas:

“And I document this in there that one of the first actions taken was [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren actually put forward a Senate bill on emoluments saying that Trump would be committing a high crime or misdemeanor if he did not divest all of his business holdings immediately. That bill went nowhere, but it was sort of symbolic.”

“From that point on, you had [Rep.] Maxine Waters pushing forward … what she called the “Impeach 45” movement. It had like a whole host of liberal nonprofits such as Tom Steyer, John Bonifaz, who ran this group Impeach Donald Trump Now.”

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Supreme Court and the Electoral Coup Scott S. Powell

Posted By on December 5th, 2020

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/the_supreme_court_and_the_electoral_coup.html

It’s out in the open for everyone with eyes and ears, not only here in the United States but around the world.  The November U.S. Presidential election produced a fraudulent result — appearing to deliver a defeat for extraordinarily popular and remarkably successful incumbent President Donald Trump and a victory for extraordinarily unimpressive Democrat challenger Joe Biden. 

Trump drew crowds of 35-40,000 and more at every rally. Biden couldn’t attract more than a few dozen at his public meetings — none of which could be called rallies. Biden’s handlers decided on a basement strategy early on, recognizing that a discharged and failing battery was no match for the orange energizer bunny.  Additionally, why take the risk of gaffes in public appearances when you know that the fix is in with upcoming multilevel vote fraud.  First, a refresher and some background.

Donald Trump was elected President in 2016 as an outsider, the candidate whose “Make America Great Again” platform included draining the Swamp and taking on corruption in Washington. 

Prior presidents had generally accommodated Washington corruption, and it naturally grew over time.  A major contributing factor that compelled Trump to run was that under the Obama administration corruption became egregious. First Amendment rights were violated in new ways with surveillance conducted on select media reporters who criticized Obama, and with muzzling of some 160 patriotic conservative groups by Lois Lerner in her position as director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the Internal Revenue Service.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Pennsylvania – Don’t Assume Alito Giving Until 12/9 To Respond To Emergency Application Means He’s Letting It Die On the Vine William A. Jacobson

Posted By on December 5th, 2020

https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/12/pennsylvania-dont-assume-alito-giving-until-12-9-to-respond-to-emergency-application-means-hes-letting-it-die-on-the-vine/

More likely, Alito’s action means he and some other Justices take the matter seriously, and plan to rule on the merits once the opposition is submitted.

On December 1, 2020, we covered an emergency application for injunctive relief sought to halt any further actions by Pennsylvania to certify the election, Pennsylvania: Emergency Injunction Sought From SCOTUS To Halt Any Further Certification Actions.

See that post for background on the case, and my admittedly pessimistic assessment.

Another Emergency Application, substantially similar, was filed yesterday, December 3. That made no sense to me, why would they file twice?

I spoke to an attorney handling the case, and the explanation is that the first filing took place prior to a stay being sought from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which issued the decision at issue. Out of concern that the US Supreme Court might deny the stay on the procedural ground that a request had not been made to the state court, the attorneys waited for the PA Supreme Court predictably to deny the stay, and then refiled on December 3.

According to the Supreme Court docket, Justice Alito, who covers the Third Circuit, gave Pennsylvania and the other Respondents until next Wednesday to file responses.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Front line medical workers exhausted Diane Bederman

Posted By on December 5th, 2020

https://dianebederman.com/front-line-medical-workers-exhausted/

I watch NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt. During the pandemic he has introduced us to many “essential” front line health care workers who share their stories with us. Holt, like so many in main stream media, seems to be using the plight of health care workers to take us down a path to submission where we give up all the hard won freedoms bequeathed to us.

Many front line workers are exhausted. They tell us about their exhaustion. One told us that her children cannot come and hug her when she comes home. She has to shower first. One ICU doctor shared his mental distress, the trauma of so many sick people and those who die.

Odd.I don’t remember Lester Holt interviewing the men and women of the armed forces on a daily basis so they could share their angst when in war. No one seemed too concerned about their lives. Their fears. Their exhaustion. Their mental health. I assume when soldiers volunteered during peace time, many had no idea that war would be coming. But when it did, they went to war.

Dear essential health care workers, you signed up to care for sick people. And a pandemic arrived. And you are serving.

These medical people, who have such angst, are still alive. True, some health care workers, sadly, have died in the line of duty, unlike non-essential people who have taken their lives because their livelihood was taken away – so that health care workers would not be overwhelmed. Non-essential people lost their jobs, their businesses, their families, their dignity.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The New Middle East By David Pryce-Jones

Posted By on December 5th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/12/17/the-new-middle-east/

From Israel to the Gulf States to Iran, the troubled region is changing

‘Normalization” is the rather cumbersome jargon for what seems to be happening in the Middle East. For the time being, it’s to do with expectations. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have signed peace treaties with Israel. At the signing ceremony in the White House, the Arab foreign ministers looked like officials going about their business. The expression on the face of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was beatific.

For the Arabs, it is taboo to normalize anything with Israel. The sole exceptions are Egypt and Jordan, which signed peace treaties to mitigate their wartime losses. When Islamist soldiers then assassinated the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian treaty pretty much fell by the wayside. More to the point, the peace process known as the “Oslo Accords” had been negotiated in secret, and in 1993 a party was held on the White House lawn to mark that at last the Palestinians were coming to terms with Israel. Yasser Arafat signed for the Palestinians, but the ink was hardly dry on the page before he gave orders for an intifada, which translated into violent civil disobedience and cost hundreds of Israelis their lives. That’s not going to be repeated; times have changed, the look on Netanyahu’s face plainly signified. Bahrain and the UAE are too insignificant to be independent actors and too marginal to be harmed if normalization goes wrong. They are testing the waters. A grand reversal of alliances is getting under way.

It has long been common knowledge that Saudi Arabia and Israel are holding confidential talks. That is extraordinary enough. The Saudi Arabian public has a perception that Jews are as pernicious a people as any in the wide world. Learned imams appear on Saudi television to recite the age-old anti-Semitic fantasies, Hitler’s Mein Kampf is in the bookshops, and Jews are not allowed to enter the country. The supposition is that participants in these confidential talks are considering the conditions that might oblige Israel to intervene in a strictly Muslim struggle for supremacy between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken the Islamist position against the infidel Christians and the Jews. Iran de­vised the anti-American war cry “Death to the Great Satan” and the corresponding anti-Israeli war-cry “Death to the Little Satan.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The War on the Electoral College Has Only Just Begun How a Democrat-driven vote ‘compact,’ a key court ruling, and the Georgia Senate races could converge to decide its fate. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on December 5th, 2020

/https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/the-war-on-the-electoral-college-has-only-just-begun/

How a Democrat-driven vote ‘compact,’ a key court ruling, and the Georgia Senate races could converge to decide its fate.

T he people of the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and elsewhere have spoken. By majority vote, they have chosen Joe Biden over Donald Trump. Isn’t it outrageous to suggest that the vote of the people of those states should be cast for someone other than the candidate preferred by the millions of voters in these states?

Well, yes, it is. And like a number of commentators, I’ve said so time and again (see, e.g., here), even though this means Biden, the candidate I oppose, will be sworn in as the 46th president of these United States at high noon on January 20, 2021. That is how our system works. The candidates run their campaigns, we vigorously debate their merits, then we vote. The underlying assumption is that whichever side loses resolves to do better next time, but in the meantime — in the absence of some compelling demonstration of material fraud — we collectively honor the result.

You want to condemn President Trump for cavalierly undermining those assumptions, and the stability and tranquility they promote? You’ll get no argument from me. But let’s not pretend that Trump is the first to promote the radical, politicized notion that the candidate who wins a state’s election should not get that state’s electoral votes.

Progressives beat him to it, long ago.

As we discussed back in July, a growing group of states dominated by left-wing Democrats has for years been cobbling together the so-called National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). The compact’s member states agree that they will award their state’s electoral votes not to the candidate who won the state’s popular election but to whichever candidate won the popular vote nationwide. The point, in other words, is to do away not only with the state’s popular election, but also with the Electoral College and our Constitution’s 233-year-old election process.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tucker Carlson: Meet Patrick Gaspard, George Soros’ man in Biden’s would-be Cabinet A closer look at the man who could be the next Labor Secretary

Posted By on December 5th, 2020

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-patrick-gaspard-george-soros-biden-cabinet

After a lifetime of serving the Democratic Party, Joe Biden has no fixed beliefs. He can’t have any; the party has changed too much.

Joe Biden became a Democrat back when Democrats represented America’s working-class wage earners, heavily Catholic and concentrated in the big cities and industrial states. Democratic voters of that era tended to be populist on economic matters –they liked Social Security and Medicare — but they were basically conservative on social questions. They believed in biology, and most of them got married and went to church.

That’s the world Joe Biden grew up in. His “Joe from Scranton, son of a coal miner” shtick is a relic from that era. He still whips it out occasionally at events, but only for nostalgic reasons. After all, 1962 seems like yesterday. But in fact, it was a long time ago. That Democratic Party has been extinct for decades.

The modern Democratic Party no longer represents wage earners. It is now funded almost exclusively by Silicon Valley and the finance establishment, the billionaire class. Its foot soldiers don’t work in factories. They’re community organizers. They’re members of interest groups that have coalesced around a specific race or sex or sexual orientation.

None of these groups exist for the benefit of the United States. They exist only for their own benefit. Their purpose is very clear: To leverage our political system in order to collect as much money and as much power as they can for their own members and for their members alone. This is called identity politics and it is the most divisive way possible to run a government.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Recounts Needed to Settle Dominion’s Role, and the Election Roger Kimball

Posted By on December 5th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/recounts-needed-to-settle-dominions-role-and-the-election_3589395.html

He said, she said. …. turns out that your opinion about Dominion Voting Systems depends not only on who you are but when you’re asked.

If you zip way back to December 2019, then, if you are Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, or Amy Klobuchar, you are very worried about their security.

Back then, these high-minded public servants wrote letters warning that these widely used voting systems were “prone to security problems.” “We are particularly concerned,” they wrote, that “voting machines and other election administration equipment, ‘have long skimped on security in favor of convenience.’”

That was in December of last year—the good old days when NBC, for example, warned about “Chinese parts” and “hidden ownership” of the machines.

“Chinese manufacturers,” they noted, “can be forced to cooperate with requests from Chinese intelligence officials to share any information about the technology and therefore pose a risk for U.S. companies,” not to mention “the concern of machines shipped with undetected vulnerabilities or backdoors that could allow tampering.”

As I say, that was a year ago.

Today, post-Nov. 3, 2020, you don’t hear the Democrats worrying out loud about the security of the machines that counted (not to say manufactured) the votes that led to Joe Biden’s apparent victory.