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education and schooling folly general freedom

School Choice Reform at Last

How to get school choice reform? Keep fighting.

Last year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Republican, worked with families and school choice activists to pass school-choice legislation.

SB1 would have given parents who want to take their kids from public to private schools $8,000 a year for tuition, textbooks, and other expenses: taxpayer money that parents would have been able to spend as they saw fit instead of being forced to let public schools get it regardless of performance.

The educrats and their allies were opposed. “Public dollars belong in public schools. Period,” was the comprehensive argument of the Texas Democratic Party chairman.

With his own party constituting a majority of lawmakers in each legislative chamber, it seemed that Governor Abbott and families could have won anyway. The state senate did pass school-choice legislation. As it turned out, though, too many Republican lawmaker in the house were on the anti-choice team.

Which Republicans? The ones that Abbott and other friends of school choice targeted in this year’s primaries. They spent millions of dollars backing challengers who support school choice. And the governor appeared at campaign events to criticize incumbent Republicans who oppose it.

The net result? Of the current 21 anti-school-choice GOP representatives, only six to ten will be returning to the legislature in 2025. (The exact number won’t be known until runoffs on May 28.)

The elections may thus bring enough of a change in the state legislature to let school choice happen for parents and their students in Texas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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folly political challengers

Pied Pipers, Again

In 2015, the Hillary Clinton campaign exhibited the hubris for which politicians have been associated since the dawn of civilization. 

Instead of relying on a strategy of promoting Hillary herself, Clinton insiders plied what they called “Pied Piper candidates,” Republican hopefuls who, they theorized, would shift mainstream candidates further “right,” thus making the ultimate winners unpalatable to enough general election voters to win Hillary the election. There were three they identified: Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Donald Trump. 

We know how this worked out.

In California, Democrats are returning to hubristic form.

The serpentine Adam Schiff, who is running to fill the slot formerly occupied by Senator Diane Feinstein, has directed $11 million in the primary “to elevate a GOP candidate,” according to The Washington Post

“The ads argue that Republican Steve Garvey — a congenial former pro baseball player for the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres who voted twice for Donald Trump but won’t say if he will do so again — is too conservative for California and highlight his recent surge, in an apparent effort to consolidate support for him on the right.”

The idea is to boost Garvey with Republican primary voters in hopes that Garvey takes the second of two spots available for the November election under California’s Top Two system, becauseSchiff’s people think Garveyis easier to defeat than liberal Democrat “Rep. Katie Porter, whom Schiff and his backers would prefer to avoid facing come November in this left-leaning state.”

But can this strategy really work in California? The ads portray Garvey as more Trumpian than he probably is, and recent polling suggests that Schiff and Garvey are now neck-and-neck.

A review of the Clinton metaphor, “Pied Piper,” shows how slippery the strategy can be. The “Pied Piper of Hamelin” is a cautionary tale

The Democrats’support may go the way of rats and children.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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crime and punishment folly too much government

Ban These Energy Bans

Several bills pending in the Colorado legislature target the state’s oil industry.

State Senator Kevin Priola, responsible for two of the bills, says he’s acting to stop climate change. To prevent the mass extinction of species, he claims.

One of his proposed statutes would outlaw new oil wells in Colorado after 2030. Another bill would, among other things, outlaw fracking from May through September unless drillers use special hard-to-get electric equipment. The same bill would also direct an agency to reduce the number of vehicle miles traveled.

Another lawmaker’s bill would make it harder to produce new wells.

Priola explains that since 50,000 wells already operate in Colorado, his legislation would not much impair production. But Dan Haley, president of Colorado Oil & Gas Association, observes that the highest production of oil wells comes in their first 18 months. Within two years of the 2030 ban, then, the state’s oil industry would sharply decline.

We’re seeing this more and more. Bans and plans to ban gas-powered lawn mowers, gas-powered cars, gas, coal, oil. Lawmakers working to shut down civilization. Not all at once, but via ever faster and bigger Interim Steps.

Don’t they see that they too will be harmed when things are no longer permitted to function? Do they imagine that if they achieve all their industry-killing dreams, all the food, clothing, shelter, transportation, communication will continue just as smoothly and abundantly as ever?

Don’t they think about the day after tomorrow?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability folly national politics & policies

Sympathetically Diminished

“I’m sympathetically diminished.”

That’s how legal analyst Jonathan Turley described President Joe Biden’s “victory lap” over news that special counsel Robert Hur would not charge Mr. Biden with felonies for his “willful” mishandling and disclosure of classified documents. 

You see, in the special counsel’s “searing” 300-plus-page report, one reason for not prosecuting Sleepy Joe is that investigators found our president’s “memory was significantly limited.” In interviews, Biden couldn’t “remember when his son Beau died,” CNN explained, “nor the years he was vice president.”

Sure, it’s hard to testify about past criminal willfulness if one cannot remember the past. 

“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him,” the special counsel points out, “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Ah, our 81-year-old commander-in-chief! Where did I put those nuclear codes?

Mr. Biden is “someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt.”

Yes, I certainly have my own misgivings about our commander’s . . . er, cognitive skills. How can a man incompetent to stand trial possibly be competent to preside over the federal government?

Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer and White House counsel Richard Sauber expressed their own doubts “that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate.”

“Appropriate”?

They claim “a lack of recall” is “a commonplace occurrence among witnesses.”

If not leaders of the free world.

Is our major party choice for president going to be between a sitting chief executive who cannot be charged for criminal conduct because he is “not all there” and one who can be and is being prosecuted, strangely disadvantaged by his pre-octogenarian mental acuity?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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folly ideological culture nannyism

The Wider Conversation

“There can be nothing about us without us.”

That’s the clever slogan of the Disabled Artists Alliance, which last week tweeted a complaint about the casting of Richard III by Shakespeare’s Globe.

They weren’t complaining, as a naïf might suspect, about an actress playing the king.

Oh, no.

“We,” the signed letter explained, “are outraged and disappointed by the casting of a non-physically disabled actor in this role, and the implications this has not only for disability, but the wider conversations surrounding it.”

Michelle Terry, the Globe’s current artistic director, cast herself as Richard. Daring move? An advance for her “gender”? You may find the choice forced, or kind of dumb, but on the London stage it may seem like turnabout as fair play. In Shakespeare’s own time, men and boys often portrayed women and girls on stage. So the acting profession has a long history of making do with less-than-convincing performers in roles. 

The Disabled Artists Alliance wants us to side with disabled actors, as a class, even if, as has been noted, past disabled players of Richard III had not suffered from the precise disability of the historic English king: scoliosis.

The idea is that a disabled actor has more relevant “lived experience” to offer to the role than a healthy actor.

Yet, that’s just one element of the character. Why not look for actors with the same moral defects? There’d be plenty.

Or choose a royal. For the relevant experience.

Isn’t Prince Harry out of work?

Next up: Flat-earthers complain about the name of the theater wherein the scandal occurs: the Globe.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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folly general freedom ideological culture

Comic-Book Isms

“This is crazy,” says Reardon Sullivan, former chairman of the Montgomery County Republican Party.

He means the way Montgomery County has been selling vendor space at a comics convention, MoComCon, being held January 20. The county is charging vendors in a way that has nothing to do with what is being sold but that county officials call “inclusive” (having learned that this adjective transmutes any evil).

If you belong to a favored group, you get a special rate. Nonindigenous straight white males pay $275 per table or, with electricity, $325. But if you’re a woman or favored minority, the price per table is $225 or $250.

Sullivan says that as a black person who grew up in Montgomery County, he finds it “truly insulting to say that a seller who’s black or BIPOC is disadvantaged. All we ever want is a level playing field.” (“BIPOC” is kitchen-sink code for “black, indigenous, and people of color.”)

Sullivan has the right spirit but errs in suggesting that the only thing members of currently favored groups (“we”) want is a level playing field.

One can hope that this is true of most members of these groups.

But if white guilt or white male guilt were the only impetus propelling affirmative action and other forms of race-based or sex-based preferential treatment — if, like Sullivan, all intended beneficiaries regarded such policies as condescending, destructive lunacy — these policies would be dead and buried by now.

As they should be.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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