If anyone was wondering if President-elect Donald Trump was going to stop being Donald Trump and become simply another cog in the great establishment wheel, his nominee for secretary of education should have ended that speculation.
Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee, is a proponent of school choice and is given credit for establishing the first charter school in Michigan, which now has 275.
The public education system and teachers unions have fought school choice tooth and nail. It seems backward, but proponents of public education believe that rich people should have school choice but middle class and poor people should not.
Rich people can choose which school they want their children to attend but people who don’t have the economic means to pay private tuition, or to pick up and move to a better school district, are forced by the education bureaucracy to send their kids to whatever school the education bureaucrats decide.
Rich people like President Barack Hussein Obama and his wife, Michelle, and Bill and Hillary Clinton can afford to send their children to the very best schools in the country, but people who are not rich are forced to send their kids to failing public schools.
Charter schools are one aspect of school choice, and it’s easy to see why the education bureaucrats hate charter schools – because charter schools are public schools without the bureaucracy.
A local school board runs the charter school, not some faceless group in Raleigh or Washington, DC. Decisions for charter schools are made at the school level.
If the immensely expensive education bureaucracy did anything other than provide high paying jobs for administrators then charter schools should all be failures, since they don’t benefit from the vast education bureaucracy, but charter schools in state after state have proved successful.
DeVos is also in favor of school vouchers, where public money is used to help pay the tuition at private schools.
If anything, school vouchers are hated by the education bureaucracy even more than charter schools. It’s also understandable because if parents have a choice between sending their children to a failing public school or a successful private school, parents who care about their children are going to choose the better education opportunity for their children.
The public education bureaucracy realizes that the more school choice there is the more people are going to realize that the public education system is failing and depends on forcing parents to send their kids to failing schools.
With the federal Department of Education backing school choice, the entire public education bureaucracy will be turned on its head. It is possible that instead of simply figuring out how to preserve their high paying jobs, public education bureaucrats will have to start figuring out how to educate children.
DeVos is pretty much a choice out of left field since she has no experience in the public education bureaucracy but a lot of experience in the school choice movement.
It will be vastly entertaining to see what she can do, since the public education bureaucracy is going to fight her with everything it has. However, it is tough to fight with your boss or with the person who controls the purse strings.
It’s also worth noting that DeVos is a billionaire, so she doesn’t need the job nor is she likely to use the job to become a high paid lobbyist since even high paid lobbyists aren’t anywhere close to her tax bracket. In other words, she is serving because she wants to make a difference not because she is making a living.
*****
If there was ever any doubt that the big name national news organizations predict what they think will happened rather than what will happen, the Trump election proves it hands down. Reuters gave Hillary Clinton a 90 percent chance of winning, The New York Times gave Hillary an 85 percent chance of winning and The Huffington Post gave Hillary Clinton a 98.2 percent chance of winning.
Really, you could get better predictions by going down to the local coffee shop, bar, pool hall, gym or anywhere that people gather and asking the first three people you see.
How could you be much wronger than being 98.2 percent wrong? I didn’t know how wrong the pollsters were, but I knew they were wrong because they had Hillary Clinton winning North Carolina.
A brief look at history is all anyone needed to be confident that Hillary Clinton was not going to win North Carolina.
In fact, I wonder who the pollsters polled. Did they simply call Democratic Party headquarters and asked them who they were voting for?
Did they ever once call anyone in Randolph or Moore counties, or did they only call folks in Durham and Orange counties? I don’t know but I suspect they called more people in cities than in the rural areas.
But if you think about it in terms of popularity, it becomes more obvious. Who is more popular, Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton? I think you can be 98.2 percent right by saying that Bill Clinton is more popular, yet Bill Clinton never carried North Carolina. If Bill Clinton can’t carry North Carolina, how in the world is his socially challenged wife going to carry the state?
Here is another telltale sign that Hillary Clinton was never going to carry North Carolina. When Donald Trump came here and spoke, he sounded like Donald Trump, a New Yorker who had come down here to win our votes. When Hillary Clinton spoke, she sounded like someone who had been practicing her Southern accent on the way down in the plane so that – what?
I never have understood why some politicians do that. Is it that they believe we will be fooled into thinking they are from around here or, what I think is more likely in Hillary Clinton’s case, she thinks we are too dumb to understand her if she doesn’t put on a fake Southern accent.
*****
Politico referred to Donald Trump as “the accidental victor.” Is that because they were so far wrong in predicting the outcome of the election?
So because the editors at Politico can’t talk to anyone who is not an elitist snob and had no idea that Trump was winning, he is the “accidental victor”?
I think it would be more appropriate to refer to the editorial staff at Politico as the “accidental editors” since they obviously are so into navel gazing that they don’t have much time for going out and finding the news.
How can you get 306 electoral votes and over 62 million popular votes and be the accidental victor?
They are going to insult Donald Trump every chance they get no matter what he says or does.
*****
I am a huge fan of the Electoral College. It works really well at keeping elections honest, or at least more honest.
And without the Electoral College, no candidate would care about North Carolina. The candidates would spend all their time campaigning in the big cities, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, San Antonio and so on, not in Greensboro, High Point, Winston Salem or Fletcher, North Carolina.
The Electoral College makes us little people big people, and it points out a huge divide in the country. To see the divide you only have to look at map of what Trump won and what Hillary Clinton won. The map by counties is better than the state map, and the map of where Republicans won congressional districts may be the best.
The divide in this country is enormous. You have the Northeast and the West Coast where Democrats rule, and the rest of the country, with some exceptions like Illinois. But when you look at a map you can see why so many pundits were wrong – everyone they knew was voting for Hillary Clinton, everyone in their neighborhood.
*****
The country has survived over seven years of President Obama and it will no doubt survive another six weeks. But the statement that Obama made at the death of Fidel Castro made me so very glad that Obama won’t be representing me in the White House anymore.
Castro was a brutal communist dictator who killed thousands and managed to destroy the economy of one of the richest countries in Latin America.
Cuba had problems before Castro took power, but nothing like the problems that Castro brought. There is a reason why so many Cubans left Cuba to come to the US with only the clothes on their backs, and it wasn’t because Castro was a benevolent ruler.
Obama didn’t say anything about Castro. From reading what Obama said you would never know that Castro had killed thousands of people. But then again it could be worse. Obama could have praised Castro, and at least he didn’t do that.
It does make you wonder how we ended up with a president who has behaved in office as if he has more respect and admiration for America’s enemies than he has for America’s friends.
I’d be willing to bet that President Donald Trump doesn’t give a bunch of old DVDs to any head of state who comes visiting.
*****
Even Obama’s judicial appointments are ruling that Obama has usurped too much power. Too little too late, but it is interesting that Obama has gone too far even for his own people.
A judge appointed by Obama has ruled that the new overtime regulations that set a specific salary level as the only test for whether an employee is eligible for overtime is not legal.
Of course, private and government employers have already spent millions coming up with systems to keep track of hours, and in some cases some employees got an unscheduled raise because it was cheaper in the long run.
The thing that Obama and his minions have never figured out is that making rules like the overtime rule takes money out of the economy. The money that companies spent on trying to figure out the most efficient way to comply with the law is gone. That money can’t be used for new equipment, new employees, expanding operations, hiring consultants or profits for the owners. It is wasted.
Even government agencies that don’t have to worry about making a profit do have to pay their bills. It is money that was wasted and that money came from us, the taxpayers.
But the truly marvelous aspect of so many of Obama’s mistakes is that Trump can erase them with his pen, just like Obama instigated them with his. Much of what Obama did was by executive order, which means no vote of Congress, but they became law because the president said so. Trump can unsay-so and make many of the worst Obama regulations go away.
*****
Politics is where silly people come to play when they have been thrown out everywhere else. But still, for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein to raise money to ask for a recount is really too silly even for politics. I mean, if the count was off by only 95 percent she would still lose. How much time can it take to recount her 12 votes, or whatever she got. Even if the counters have to take off their shoes to count over 10, it can’t take more than a few minutes.
The whole thing is just a sad scam on Americans who should know better but don’t. It is actually a way for Hillary Clinton to challenge the count without having to challenge the count. Stein raised millions of dollars in a few days. She didn’t raise that much during her entire campaign.
You can’t blame Stein. She is raising money, and with the campaign over, who knows where that money will go. I doubt if it is returned to the donors.
*****
As I’ve written, I miss The New York Times. But once The Times decided to become a propaganda machine for the Hillary Clinton campaign, I could no longer support it any more than I could make a contribution to the Hillary Clinton campaign.
So it’s sad that the old New York Times is gone. But what is much worse is that it has taken journalism as we know it along with it. It wasn’t simply that The New York Times worked overtime to help get Hillary Clinton elected president. The New York Times is a leader in the liberal mainstream media parade, like the bandleader in The Music Man. Those 76 trombones have no idea where to go, not to mention the 110 cornets close at hand, if the bandleader isn’t there to lead them.
The mainstream media gave up independent thought long ago. It follows The New York Times. If The New York Times says that it’s news, then its news. If The New York Times prints lie after lie about Donald Trump and covers up the fact that Hillary Clinton was barely campaigning at all, then the accepted way to cover news is to do just that.
Early in the Trump campaign, one of my questions for people was, have you actually listened to an entire Trump speech or are you basing what you are saying on what you have read or seen on the news. Most of the time the people I talked to were basing their opinion of Trump on what had been reported in the news media, and much of it wasn’t true.
As I wrote during the campaign, if I believed the stuff that I had read about Trump I wouldn’t have supported him either. Fortunately for Trump, he found a way around the media. People may not like it, but tweeting helped Trump a lot more than it hurt him.
During the campaign you had Trump, who everybody knew was sitting down and sending out his own tweets. You knew they were his own tweets because they were driving his campaign staff crazy.
Then in the other corner you had a campaign that was discussing by email what kind of signature to put on tweets supposedly from Hillary Clinton to make people believe that she actually wrote them. The American people may be dumb, but they aren’t that dumb.
Wouldn’t it have been interesting to have read, during the campaign, a detailed investigative report on why Hillary Clinton wasn’t campaigning? Was it because her health was so fragile? That would make sense. It would also make sense that the internal campaign polling showed that Hillary Clinton did better when she was seen less. She is not an inspiring speaker. She does terrible at one-on-one interviews, so what in the world do you do with her?
Maybe her lack of campaign appearances had nothing to do with her health and the whole health thing was a scam because the campaign decided that not campaigning because of poor health was easier to sell to the American people than not campaigning because nobody liked the candidate.
The campaign did do a good job of setting up celebrity interviews where the candidate gets all the questions in advance, but you can only do so many of those. It could be that Hillary Clinton wasn’t attracting crowds or, perhaps better put, it was too difficult to get a crowd in to fill an auditorium and the campaign decided that time could be better spent on more beneficial activities.
At Trump rallies people came for the show. People came to see Trump and many left having decided to vote for him.
It’s hard to believe that any undecided voter went to a Hillary Clinton speech and was convinced by the way she read her speech to vote for her.
Who knows, but it would be interesting to know and I guess when the books start getting published we’ll at least get some views of campaign strategy. It could have been a big behind-the-scenes battle in the Hillary Clinton campaign.
But The New York Times and company chose not to cover the Hillary Clinton campaign in any depth. Really, can you imagine even a candidate much loved by the mainstream media, like President Obama, completely collapsing in public on film and there isn’t any interest by the mainstream media about why the candidate collapsed? Even Obama couldn’t get away with that. But the mainstream media loved Hillary Clinton before they even knew who Barack Obama was. For a presidential candidate to collapse in public and there is no investigation of what caused it is remarkable. For all the public knows Hillary Clinton is a serious heroin addict and she overdosed at the 9/11 memorial service. That explanation, as outrageous as it is, actually makes more sense than a mild case of pneumonia caused her to collapse.
It is so sad because journalism had more than enough problems as it was. Now that the vaunted, well-respected New York Times has fallen to the level of the National Enquirer, we have limited options for news. Nature hates a vacuum, but it will be interesting to see what fills the hole that currently exists in trusted national news outlets.
*****
One of the first rules of politics is that you should never believe your own press releases. For the mainstream media/Hillary Clinton campaign this was tough not to do because, whether the campaign people were reading the mainstream newspapers or the reporters for the mainstream media were reading private emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign, it was all reporting the same facts.
The mainstream media were reporting that there was no way that Hillary Clinton could lose, and the Hillary Clinton campaign kept telling everyone that there was no way Hillary Clinton could lose. So if you happen to be working for the campaign directly or working for a major media outlet and working for the campaign indirectly, all the news was the same.
The result was that everyone believed everyone else. The campaign believed the media, and the media believed the campaign. There was no voice of reason. No one saying that perhaps the thousands attending the Trump campaign rallies really would vote.
If you watched the liberal news media report the presidential election totals on election night, they had no idea what to say. All of their prepared statements were about how Hillary Clinton had been elected despite the divisiveness of the Trump campaign. None of those statements were operative after the polls closed and the results started being reported. It was obvious fairly early in the evening that Trump was going to win.
Now it is being reported that even President Obama called Hillary Clinton and told her that she had to concede. It’s pretty bad when the president who had been out campaigning for you has to call and tell you to buck up and admit defeat, but that is what happened. It would have helped if Obama had called some of the liberal news anchors and told them that they were being ridiculous.
