George Rebane

The local League of Women Voters presented a get together on ‘Fake News’ at Sierra College last night.  It featured Brooke Binkowski, Managing Editor of snopes.com and Randall ‘Fink’ Finkelstein, NC Scooper editor, both supposed experts on the topic.  It was a real jaw dropper.  Jo Ann and I had never attended a more lame, information free, and sophomoric presentation as we witnessed last night.  The LWV used to be a real heads up organization and source of non-partisan voter information before its joining the progressives.  No more.  The clear political implication was to obliquely point to the Republican Party and, of course, Trump (never leave him out) as the fount of fake news, which, by the way, no one was able to define – sort of like pornography.

About half an hour into the thing, people of the Right and Left started walking out, as people realized that no one on stage knew what they were talking about.  We greeted Reinette Senum, who sat behind us, and saw her with some friends quietly get up and leave during an unbelievable sequence with Ms Binkowski, a certified feather-head.  (Ms Senum’s ascerbic post on the evening is on her Facebook page.)  And we still don’t have any idea why Mr Finkelstein was invited to participate.  Full disclosure – it pains me to admit that we were not the first to leave.  

Economic migrants vs refugees, as discussed before in these pages, there is a real difference between those two cohorts who today are literally invading developed countries, including the US.  A new book, Refuge by Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, presents recent research on the social devastation the legal and illegal entry of such people cause when a country’s immigration policy falters, and national interests are superseded by advocates of globalism.  The case made by the authors is that “activists often fail to draw a line between refugees and economic migrants.  The result can be catastrophic for host countries.”  National columnist Jason Riley expands on this as he treats ‘Congress’s Chance to Do Its Job and solve the Dreamers’ Dilemma’.  And here is some editorializing on the whole topic when we don’t do the right thing from the gitgo.

[7sep17 update]  The Trump Derangement Syndrome is both ubiquitous and pervasive, overwhelming members of both parties.  Note the president now gets dunned when he does and does not work with Democrats.  Reaching across the aisle to get the Harvey aid package and government funding continuing resolution going got him Bronx cheers from all sides.  The Dems are celebrating that they finally got a chance to beat the political crap out of The Donald (note also the local lefties in these comment streams), and some Repubs are grumbling that the CR wasn’t long-lived enough.

‘States Lower Bar for Teachers’  The bar for teaching already hit the ground some years back, and the profession (as has been pointed out here by RR and readers) already fills its ranks from the lowest quartile from academe.  To make things worse, teacher salaries reflect their skills, and are in a vicious cycle with drawing the dimmest bulbs into the field.  One reason for such budget tightening has been the government itself (remember where to look first if there’s a problem) by requiring schools to pad their administrative offices with expensive staff to support all kinds of mandated programs that have nothing to do with the national interest of producing a capable workforce and cadre of intelligent voters– goals that go contrary to all progressive political agendas.  It would be easy for school districts to pay more and attract a better class of teachers if they could just fire at least half of their non-classroom administration staffs and redistribute the saved monies for teacher salaries.  And the kicker to all this bar lowering (more here) is that the poorest kids in the poorest neighborhoods get hurt the most (more here).

Crabb torpedos Navy.  Our cartoonist extraordinaire and consummate RR critic Bob Crabb skewered the US Navy’s tin can fleet with a great piece of serendipity incorporating the fleet’s recent foibles on the high seas with his ongoing saga of Altarctica.  Filched from the pages of the 7sep17 Union, it is copied here for your pleasure.

Progressive Pap, that’s the best name I can think of for a new category under which we can collect the flood of new laws, regulations, codes, school curricula, etc that continues to inundate us, no matter how hard the administration works to roll some of that crap back.  Here’s one from north of the border.  In many provinces of Canada there are now new laws that make it illegal to leave totally capable kids at home alone.  Ontario sets the record with 16 as the cutoff age of ‘alone at home’.  All this in spite of the crime stats showing that kids home alone today are safer than they were when we stayed home alone.  (I was regularly left home alone when I was four.  And so were other kids whose parents had to work, run errands, etc.)  Today kid coddling has become the latest progressive enterprise that ratchets back our freedoms.  (more here)

[8sep17 update]  The Party of the Peehpul is how the Dems play themselves for the feather-lights.  Now comes truly unbelievable news about how a Democratic administration in the party’s flagship city New York conducts what should be an easy part of its business.  Mayor DeBlasio has instated a byzantine and draconian system to assure that only the well-to-do progressives can play, and the rest of the city’s residents can go pound sand.  It costs more than a pretty penny to play in addition to the hassle and the poorly run courts when you finally arrive.  And get this, the same progressives are attempting to shut down the tennis that private clubs leasing city facilities and offer free play for the local folks.  Allysia Finley gives another brief but telling summary of government run amok in her ‘Tennis Anyone? Not Without a Permit’.

[10sep17 update]  ISIS terrorism advances to a new level, so claim Catalan authorities in Barcelona following the recent deadly attack.  According to NPR, what concerns Spanish authorities, and now police all over Europe, is that the terrorists were well integrated into their small town of Ripoll north of Barcelona.  They all were well-known and liked in their community, and gave no hint of radicalization before they struck.  The only thing they had in common was that they were all Muslims and attended the mosque of an imam who is now suspected of being their mentor for terror.  The concern is that ISIS is perfecting a new approach to world terrorism that recruits literally impossible to detect young Muslims with no previous history or hint of any jihadist sentiments – a new face of taqiyya.