“Nevada’s Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak vetoed legislation Thursday to commit Nevada’s six electoral votes to a group of states agreeing to elect the president by popular vote.
Assembly Bill 186 would have joined Nevada to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, (NPVIC), which is an agreement between states to pool their electoral votes and voting results together into one aggregate pot.
“Once effective, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact could diminish the role of smaller states like Nevada in national electoral contests and force Nevada’s electors to side with whoever wins the nationwide popular vote, rather than the candidate Nevadans choose,” Sisolak said in a statement obtained by the Nevada Independent.”
—————-
““As Nevada’s governor, I am obligated to make such decisions according to my own conscience. In cases like this, where Nevada’s interests could diverge from the interests of large states, I will always stand up for Nevada,” Sisolak added.”
An interesting change in tactics. Do the right thing, or face the consequences.
On June 10th, the United States will impose a 5% Tariff on all goods coming into our Country from Mexico, until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP. The Tariff will gradually increase until the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied,..
“President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he intends to place a tariff on all Mexican goods until the country helps curb illegal immigration to the United States.
In a series of tweets, the president revealed the “big league” announcement on immigration that he teased Thursday morning.”
“On June 10th, the United States will impose a 5% Tariff on all goods coming into our Country from Mexico, until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP,” Trump wrote. “The Tariff will gradually increase util the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied, at which time Tariffs will be removed.”
The White House followed the president’s tweets with an official presidential statement announcing the decision.
“Should Mexico choose not to cooperate on reducing unlawful migration, the sustained imposition of Tariffs will produce a massive return of jobs back to American cities and towns,” the president stated, arguing that Mexico has passively allowed a mass influx of illegal immigrants continue to the U.S., despite an ability to stop them.
Trump is invoking executive authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose the tariffs, following the national emergency declaration he made in February to help gather funding for the southern border wall.
The president has previously accused Mexico of failing to properly enforce immigration laws, thus allowing some of the highest levels of illegal immigration to the U.S. in a decade. This year, he has started booting asylum seekers back to Mexico to wait there while their cases are adjudicated, which has become known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy.
If Mexico fails to adequately curb illegal immigration by the president’s judgment, the 5% tariff will be increased by five percentage points each month, hitting a maximum of 25% in October.”
“Despite Mueller’s ridiculous insinuations and morphing of the rule of law yesterday, one thing was clear. He didn’t want to go to war with Bill Barr and Mueller was sure to not accuse him of anything.
Now it looks like there’s a bit of a further walk back from the former special counsel. The media’s takeaway was originally to foam at the mouth over the idea that Trump would have been charged with a crime if he weren’t President. Honestly, I can’t blame them for running with that line because Mueller’s obfuscation of words and clear insinuations painted that picture perfectly for them.
That appears to not be true though, as it looks like Bill Barr got ahold of him and has him clarifying matters now. This per a joint statement from Barr and Mueller’s respective offices.
Attorney General Barr’s office and Special Counsel clarify on OLC guidance re: charging a sitting president. Both say no discrepancy. pic.twitter.com/OVsjHGdzVi
In other words, Mueller is now saying “wait, wait I never said Trump would have been charged if he weren’t President, only that the fact that he was President is why I didn’t bother to answer the question.”
It’s still a weak kneed answer in my humble opinion. If that is what he meant, he could have specifically clarified that at the presser to quell the storm. Instead, his weasel language gave the entirely of the media and Democrat party the green light to claim that the OLC opinion is all that stopped Trump from being charged. He threw chum into the water and it’s really hard to interpret his actions as anything other than intentional.”
“In the end, the by-the-book Robert Mueller wildly departed from the book.
He invented an extraconstitutional legal standard for his obstruction investigation and acted, at the very least, in violation of the spirit of the special counsel regulations.
His departing act was a public statement meant to influence the public debate in a manner inappropriate for a prosecutor, in part because the public report he wrote that was inappropriate for a prosecutor failed to achieve clarity despite its hundreds of pages.
A hallmark of the Trump era is that the norm-defying president goads everyone appalled by him to violate norms. The retired Marine and former G-man would seem least likely to fall prey to this dynamic, but here we are: He has put on a master class in how a prosecutor shouldn’t behave.
First and foremost, Mueller ditched the presumption of innocence, a bedrock of the American legal system. In the normal course of things, all of us are considered innocent unless a jury finds us guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Mueller switched this around. Rather than finding conclusive evidence of Trump’s guilt, he had to find conclusive evidence of his innocence. Because he didn’t find this exculpatory evidence, he deemed Trump “not exonerated,” a standard heretofore unknown to the American system.
As he put it in his news conference, in surely one of the more gobsmacking utterances ever made by someone from a Justice Department podium, “If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”
If this standard had been applied to any person other than Donald Trump, it would have been widely denounced and the American Civil Liberties Union would be crusading to keep it from ever emerging again in any context in America.
It is profoundly inimical to due process as understood under our Constitution and puts the burden of proof on the accused—exactly what our system seeks to avoid.”
Trump brings up Air Force Academy graduate Parker Hammond who battled cancer throughout his time at the academy. “Get up here Parker! They love you!” pic.twitter.com/edamUx2UCL
— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) May 30, 2019
The feds have investigated & indicted 4 marriage fraud cases over the past two months. But @ilhanmn still gets a pass after 3 yrs of unanswered questions. WHY? Revoke Ilhan Omar's Marriage Fraud Immunity Card==> https://t.co/oxoHVItOWz
“If you are not a member of the Democrats’ protected class of bitter loudmouths who hate America, you can be investigated and prosecuted for marriage fraud. The headlines have been filled with recent crackdowns.
In Texas last week, 96 people were indicted on federal charges of conspiring to defraud our immigration system by arranging phony unions between American citizens and sham spouses in Vietnam.
In Bridgeport, Connecticut, three men pleaded guilty to participating in fraudulent marriages with noncitizens and sponsoring them for green cards under false pretenses.
At Fort Bragg in North Carolina last month, two soldiers and two African immigrants were indicted by a grand jury related to a scheme involving an entire ring of service members who attempted to match female soldiers with foreigners from Ghana and Nigeria. They each face between 15-35 years in federal prison and $250,000 in fines each.
In Alabama, an Indian national pleaded guilty to arranging 80 fake marriages using U.S. citizen recruits to bail out Indian foreign nationals who had overstayed their visas or Student Exchange Visitor Program requirements.
You wouldn’t know it from the radio silence of Democratic leaders regarding radioactive Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s long-festering and bizarre bigamy scheme (which she still refuses to address), but marriage fraud is a federal felony. As the Department of Homeland Security makes clear, it is a serious crime — not a victimless, harmless infraction — that “weakens our nation’s security and makes us less safe.”
————-
“Investigations dating back to 2016 by blogger Scott Johnson of Power Line (which recently celebrated 15 years in the blogosphere), David North of the Center for Immigration Studies, Alpha News reporter Preya Samsundar and PJMedia.com reporter David Steinberg have determined that the outspoken Somalian Muslim refugee likely married her own brother named Ahmed Elmi in 2009 for some unknown ill-gotten gain while still informally married to the man she calls her husband and father of her three children, Ahmed Hirsi.After a Somalian website floated questions about the marriage arrangement with Elmi and Johnson’s initial reporting broke into the local news, Omar sought to divorce Elmi. Her use of $6,000 in state campaign funds, some of which went to pay a personal divorce lawyer, is currently under state investigation.
Social media posts, photographic evidence and publicly available biographical data strongly suggest that Elmi (now living in London) and Omar are siblings with the same father. Many of the pair’s Instagram and Facebook comments to each other have been deleted. Omar’s staff and lawyer have rebuked questions about the arrangement as “categorically ridiculous and false” and suggested that truth-seekers in the matter are “people who do not want an East African, Muslim woman elected to office.” For good measure, Omar has decried “Trump-style misogyny, racism, anti-immigration rhetoric and Islamophobic division.”
Hey, I’m not the one who bragged last week that Omar, a naturalized American citizen, brought “the perspective of a foreigner” to her role on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. That was Rep. Omar. Perhaps she’ll share her “foreign perspective” on how any other sane nation would handle an elected official who won’t answer questions about possible felony immigration fraud while sitting on a sensitive legislative panel. I’m all ears.”
“Federally Funded Study: Common Core Sunk U.S. Kids’ Test Scores
In several cases student achievement reversed under Common Core, and in every subject studied students would have been better off if states had not adopted Common Core.”
“Researchers the Obama administration funded to assist Common Core’s rollout recently found, to their surprise, that under Common Core U.S. student achievement has sunk (h/t Lance Izumi).
“Contrary to our expectation, we found that [Common Core] had significant negative effects on 4th graders’ reading achievement during the 7 years after the adoption of the new standards, and had a significant negative effect on 8th graders’ math achievement 7 years after adoption based on analyses of NAEP composite scores,” the Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction and Learning (C-SAIL) preliminary study said. “The size of these negative effects, however, was generally small.”
The study found not only lower student achievement since Common Core, but also performed data analysis suggesting students would have done better if Common Core had never existed. The achievement declines also grew worse over time, study coauthor Mengli Song told Chalkbeat, an education news website: “That’s a little troubling.”
Common Core is 640 pages of K-12 curriculum and testing mandates that nearly every state switched to between 2010 and 2013 under heavy federal pressure. President Obama, his education secretary Arne Duncan, and private financier Bill Gates promised the nation that overhauling what students learn and how it is measured would lead to student achievement gains.
It’s not that teachers didn’t work really hard to make Common Core succeed, either. C-SAIL’s report says “More than three quarters (76%) of teachers surveyed, for example, reported having changed at least half of their classroom instruction as a result of the CCSS, and about four out of five mathematics teachers (82%) and three out of four English teachers (72%) reported having changed more than half of their instructional materials in response to the CCSS.” Between two-thirds and three-quarters of teachers also said in surveys that they thought Common Core benefited their students, so while their perception may not match reality it doesn’t appear negative teacher attitudes obstructed Common Core either.
Teachers and schools made massive, good-faith efforts to comply with Common Core. The problem is that those changes didn’t help kids.”
NEW: Attorney General Barr tells @JanCBS he “personally felt” Special Counsel Robert Mueller “could've reached a decision” on obstruction of justice by President Trump.
“I’m going to make the decisions based on the law and the facts and I realize that's in tension with the political climate we live in because people are more interested in getting their way politically." — AG Barr tells @JanCBS
News industry struggles to meet its challenges and find new talent
BY JEFFREY M. MCCALL, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 05/31/19
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
____________________________
American citizens concerned about the current condition of the journalism industry will soon have more to worry about. Indications are the embattled journalism world will have even tougher sledding in the years ahead, and today’s college graduates won’t be part of a cavalry to the rescue.
A democratic nation needs journalism to keep the government and other powerful institutions accountable and to serve as surrogates for the citizenry. The bleak employment picture in the news industry, however, surely discourages the best and brightest young minds from entering the once noble field.
College graduates working in newsrooms earn way less money than college grads in other fields. Add that to the dismal public image of the journalism industry and it is understandable why talented young Americans eschew media careers. No sensible college graduate today wants to take a vow of poverty to pursue a career that friends and relatives look down upon. …
… Media credibility has suffered in part because of the blurring of lines between reporting and commentary. There is a solid place in journalism for analysis, editorializing and advocacy, but audiences increasingly sense those functions have blended into fact-based, non-partisan reporting. When citizens see that merger of reporting and commentary, their confidence in journalism takes a hit and they migrate to “news” outlets that fit with their personal ideologies. …
… The broad marketplace is speaking to the journalism industry and the industry is apparently not listening. News consumers want more objective news of substance that clearly separates factual content from advocacy. Prospective journalism employees seek careers in which they can take pride and earn competitive wages. The big media corporate executives who shoulder responsibility for preserving the nation’s free press functions need to do some soul-searching about how to save the imperiled industry. And the discussions need to include people from outside their corporate towers.
_____________________________
John F. Kerry, reporting for treasonous, un-American, and ilegal activity!
So John Kerry just left a meeting @ L’Avenue in Paris w/3 Iranians. A friend was sitting next to their table and heard JK blasting @realDonaldTrump. The Iranians had a 5 person security detail and left in diplomatic vehicles. Is he FARA registered? @seanhannity@TuckerCarlsonpic.twitter.com/vVYwDQTPNb
“Today, a stunning report in the Daily Beast reveals the depths to which the sycophantic pro-Iran capitulators of the Barack Obama foreign policy apparatus continue to sink to support the terrorist regime that remains the world’s number one state sponsor of jihadist exportation.
In unusual journalistic fashion, the Daily Beast anonymously quotes many former Obama administration officials throughout the piece — thus lending cover to those who would openly collude with a brazen American geopolitical foe against the interests of the American people.
Per the Daily Beast:
As the Trump administration sent warplanes and an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf, a small group of former Obama administration officials reached out to their contacts in the Iranian government, including Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Their message to Iran: Don’t take Trump’s bait. Stay calm.
Conversations between former Obama officials and Iranian government officials have been ongoing since November 2016. Zarif, who visits the U.S. every year for the U.N. General Assembly in New York, usually meets with lawmakers, think tanks, journalists, and former officials when he is in town.
But the recent round of conversations, which took place over the phone and in person over the last two months, came as lines of communication between the U.S. and Iran, through intermediaries in Europe and elsewhere, deteriorated.
The Daily Beast further noted how the Obama officials seem to have a clear motive: Discerning whether the possibility exists of the U.S. re-entering a new Iran nuclear deal in a post-President Donald Trump world. “Separately, some former Obama officials are trying to keep the roots of the Iran nuclear deal alive by taking the pulse of lawmakers on Capitol Hill to gauge whether they are in favor of restarting talks in the future,” the outlet stated.”
“As the Trump administration sent warplanes and an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf, a small group of former Obama administration officials reached out to their contacts in the Iranian government, including Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Their message to Iran: Don’t take Trump’s bait. Stay calm.
Conversations between former Obama officials and Iranian government officials have been ongoing since November 2016. Zarif, who visits the U.S. every year for the U.N. General Assembly in New York, usually meets with lawmakers, think tanks, journalists, and former officials when he is in town.”
“The patriarchy’s plans to destroy women’s sports continues apace.
Craig Telfer, who now goes by CeCe Tefler, recently took home the women’s 400-meter hurdles national title. Prior to transitioning, Tefler competed against men with mediocre results.
From Let’s Run:
Transgender woman CeCe Telfer, who was born and raised as Craig Telfer and competed on the Franklin Pierce University men’s track and field team during her first three years of college, won the women’s 400-meter hurdles national title at the 2019 NCAA Division II Outdoor Track & Field Championships. Telfer dominated the competition, winning in 57.53 as second place was way back in 59.21.
Prior to joining the women’s team this season, Telfer was a mediocre DII athlete who never came close to making it to nationals in the men’s category. In 2016 and 2017, Telfer ranked 200th and 390th, respectively, among DII men in the 400 hurdles (Telfer didn’t run outdoor track in 2018 as either a man or woman). Now she’s the national champion in the event simply because she switched her gender (Telfer’s coach told us that even though she competed on the men’s team her first three years, her gender fluidity was present from her freshman year).
The fact that Telfer can change her gender and immediately become a national champion is proof positive as to why women’s sports needs protection. Telfer ran slightly faster in the 400 hurdles competing as a man (57.34) than as a woman (57.53), even though the men’s hurdles are six inches taller than the women’s hurdles. Yet when Telfer ran 57.34 as a man, she didn’t even score at her conference meet — she was just 10th at the Northeast-10 Outdoor Track and Field Championships in 2016. Now she’s the national champion.”
Wandering Views 
Finally, a Democrat who gets it and doesn’t seek to disenfranchise voters.
————
https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/30/nevada-governor-vetoes-national-popular-vote/
“Nevada’s Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak vetoed legislation Thursday to commit Nevada’s six electoral votes to a group of states agreeing to elect the president by popular vote.
Assembly Bill 186 would have joined Nevada to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, (NPVIC), which is an agreement between states to pool their electoral votes and voting results together into one aggregate pot.
“Once effective, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact could diminish the role of smaller states like Nevada in national electoral contests and force Nevada’s electors to side with whoever wins the nationwide popular vote, rather than the candidate Nevadans choose,” Sisolak said in a statement obtained by the Nevada Independent.”
—————-
““As Nevada’s governor, I am obligated to make such decisions according to my own conscience. In cases like this, where Nevada’s interests could diverge from the interests of large states, I will always stand up for Nevada,” Sisolak added.”
LikeLike
An interesting change in tactics. Do the right thing, or face the consequences.
————-
https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/30/trump-mexico-tariffs-illegal-immigration/
“President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he intends to place a tariff on all Mexican goods until the country helps curb illegal immigration to the United States.
In a series of tweets, the president revealed the “big league” announcement on immigration that he teased Thursday morning.”
“On June 10th, the United States will impose a 5% Tariff on all goods coming into our Country from Mexico, until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP,” Trump wrote. “The Tariff will gradually increase util the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied, at which time Tariffs will be removed.”
The White House followed the president’s tweets with an official presidential statement announcing the decision.
“Should Mexico choose not to cooperate on reducing unlawful migration, the sustained imposition of Tariffs will produce a massive return of jobs back to American cities and towns,” the president stated, arguing that Mexico has passively allowed a mass influx of illegal immigrants continue to the U.S., despite an ability to stop them.
Trump is invoking executive authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose the tariffs, following the national emergency declaration he made in February to help gather funding for the southern border wall.
The president has previously accused Mexico of failing to properly enforce immigration laws, thus allowing some of the highest levels of illegal immigration to the U.S. in a decade. This year, he has started booting asylum seekers back to Mexico to wait there while their cases are adjudicated, which has become known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy.
If Mexico fails to adequately curb illegal immigration by the president’s judgment, the 5% tariff will be increased by five percentage points each month, hitting a maximum of 25% in October.”
LikeLike
The backtrack. But too late Bob.
https://www.redstate.com/bonchie/2019/05/30/mueller-backtracks-presser-tries-clarify-matters-joint-statement-bill-barr/
“Despite Mueller’s ridiculous insinuations and morphing of the rule of law yesterday, one thing was clear. He didn’t want to go to war with Bill Barr and Mueller was sure to not accuse him of anything.
Now it looks like there’s a bit of a further walk back from the former special counsel. The media’s takeaway was originally to foam at the mouth over the idea that Trump would have been charged with a crime if he weren’t President. Honestly, I can’t blame them for running with that line because Mueller’s obfuscation of words and clear insinuations painted that picture perfectly for them.
That appears to not be true though, as it looks like Bill Barr got ahold of him and has him clarifying matters now. This per a joint statement from Barr and Mueller’s respective offices.
In other words, Mueller is now saying “wait, wait I never said Trump would have been charged if he weren’t President, only that the fact that he was President is why I didn’t bother to answer the question.”
It’s still a weak kneed answer in my humble opinion. If that is what he meant, he could have specifically clarified that at the presser to quell the storm. Instead, his weasel language gave the entirely of the media and Democrat party the green light to claim that the OLC opinion is all that stopped Trump from being charged. He threw chum into the water and it’s really hard to interpret his actions as anything other than intentional.”
LikeLike
Wayward Bob.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/05/29/the-wayward-special-counsel-227029
“In the end, the by-the-book Robert Mueller wildly departed from the book.
He invented an extraconstitutional legal standard for his obstruction investigation and acted, at the very least, in violation of the spirit of the special counsel regulations.
His departing act was a public statement meant to influence the public debate in a manner inappropriate for a prosecutor, in part because the public report he wrote that was inappropriate for a prosecutor failed to achieve clarity despite its hundreds of pages.
A hallmark of the Trump era is that the norm-defying president goads everyone appalled by him to violate norms. The retired Marine and former G-man would seem least likely to fall prey to this dynamic, but here we are: He has put on a master class in how a prosecutor shouldn’t behave.
First and foremost, Mueller ditched the presumption of innocence, a bedrock of the American legal system. In the normal course of things, all of us are considered innocent unless a jury finds us guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Mueller switched this around. Rather than finding conclusive evidence of Trump’s guilt, he had to find conclusive evidence of his innocence. Because he didn’t find this exculpatory evidence, he deemed Trump “not exonerated,” a standard heretofore unknown to the American system.
As he put it in his news conference, in surely one of the more gobsmacking utterances ever made by someone from a Justice Department podium, “If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”
If this standard had been applied to any person other than Donald Trump, it would have been widely denounced and the American Civil Liberties Union would be crusading to keep it from ever emerging again in any context in America.
It is profoundly inimical to due process as understood under our Constitution and puts the burden of proof on the accused—exactly what our system seeks to avoid.”
LikeLike
https://twitter.com/MrM1S2/status/1134209191835516929
——————
LikeLike
They don’t have the numbers, not even 10% of what’s needed, or the guts to try.
——————
https://twitter.com/FLOrangeQueen/status/1134175007465250818
LikeLike
Curious indeed.
Not to mention the Ewwwwwwwwwww…..!!!!!! factor.
——————
https://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2019/05/29/revoke-ilhan-omars-marriage-fraud-immunity-card-n2546996
“If you are not a member of the Democrats’ protected class of bitter loudmouths who hate America, you can be investigated and prosecuted for marriage fraud. The headlines have been filled with recent crackdowns.
In Texas last week, 96 people were indicted on federal charges of conspiring to defraud our immigration system by arranging phony unions between American citizens and sham spouses in Vietnam.
In Bridgeport, Connecticut, three men pleaded guilty to participating in fraudulent marriages with noncitizens and sponsoring them for green cards under false pretenses.
At Fort Bragg in North Carolina last month, two soldiers and two African immigrants were indicted by a grand jury related to a scheme involving an entire ring of service members who attempted to match female soldiers with foreigners from Ghana and Nigeria. They each face between 15-35 years in federal prison and $250,000 in fines each.
In Alabama, an Indian national pleaded guilty to arranging 80 fake marriages using U.S. citizen recruits to bail out Indian foreign nationals who had overstayed their visas or Student Exchange Visitor Program requirements.
You wouldn’t know it from the radio silence of Democratic leaders regarding radioactive Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s long-festering and bizarre bigamy scheme (which she still refuses to address), but marriage fraud is a federal felony. As the Department of Homeland Security makes clear, it is a serious crime — not a victimless, harmless infraction — that “weakens our nation’s security and makes us less safe.”
————-
“Investigations dating back to 2016 by blogger Scott Johnson of Power Line (which recently celebrated 15 years in the blogosphere), David North of the Center for Immigration Studies, Alpha News reporter Preya Samsundar and PJMedia.com reporter David Steinberg have determined that the outspoken Somalian Muslim refugee likely married her own brother named Ahmed Elmi in 2009 for some unknown ill-gotten gain while still informally married to the man she calls her husband and father of her three children, Ahmed Hirsi. After a Somalian website floated questions about the marriage arrangement with Elmi and Johnson’s initial reporting broke into the local news, Omar sought to divorce Elmi. Her use of $6,000 in state campaign funds, some of which went to pay a personal divorce lawyer, is currently under state investigation.
Social media posts, photographic evidence and publicly available biographical data strongly suggest that Elmi (now living in London) and Omar are siblings with the same father. Many of the pair’s Instagram and Facebook comments to each other have been deleted. Omar’s staff and lawyer have rebuked questions about the arrangement as “categorically ridiculous and false” and suggested that truth-seekers in the matter are “people who do not want an East African, Muslim woman elected to office.” For good measure, Omar has decried “Trump-style misogyny, racism, anti-immigration rhetoric and Islamophobic division.”
Hey, I’m not the one who bragged last week that Omar, a naturalized American citizen, brought “the perspective of a foreigner” to her role on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. That was Rep. Omar. Perhaps she’ll share her “foreign perspective” on how any other sane nation would handle an elected official who won’t answer questions about possible felony immigration fraud while sitting on a sensitive legislative panel. I’m all ears.”
LikeLike
Common core has led to common ignorance.
https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/30/federally-funded-study-common-core-sunk-u-s-kids-test-scores/
“Federally Funded Study: Common Core Sunk U.S. Kids’ Test Scores
In several cases student achievement reversed under Common Core, and in every subject studied students would have been better off if states had not adopted Common Core.”
“Researchers the Obama administration funded to assist Common Core’s rollout recently found, to their surprise, that under Common Core U.S. student achievement has sunk (h/t Lance Izumi).
“Contrary to our expectation, we found that [Common Core] had significant negative effects on 4th graders’ reading achievement during the 7 years after the adoption of the new standards, and had a significant negative effect on 8th graders’ math achievement 7 years after adoption based on analyses of NAEP composite scores,” the Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction and Learning (C-SAIL) preliminary study said. “The size of these negative effects, however, was generally small.”
The study found not only lower student achievement since Common Core, but also performed data analysis suggesting students would have done better if Common Core had never existed. The achievement declines also grew worse over time, study coauthor Mengli Song told Chalkbeat, an education news website: “That’s a little troubling.”
Common Core is 640 pages of K-12 curriculum and testing mandates that nearly every state switched to between 2010 and 2013 under heavy federal pressure. President Obama, his education secretary Arne Duncan, and private financier Bill Gates promised the nation that overhauling what students learn and how it is measured would lead to student achievement gains.
It’s not that teachers didn’t work really hard to make Common Core succeed, either. C-SAIL’s report says “More than three quarters (76%) of teachers surveyed, for example, reported having changed at least half of their classroom instruction as a result of the CCSS, and about four out of five mathematics teachers (82%) and three out of four English teachers (72%) reported having changed more than half of their instructional materials in response to the CCSS.” Between two-thirds and three-quarters of teachers also said in surveys that they thought Common Core benefited their students, so while their perception may not match reality it doesn’t appear negative teacher attitudes obstructed Common Core either.
Teachers and schools made massive, good-faith efforts to comply with Common Core. The problem is that those changes didn’t help kids.”
LikeLike
——————–
LikeLike
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/446119-news-industry-struggles-to-meet-its-challenges-and-find-new-talent
News industry struggles to meet its challenges and find new talent
BY JEFFREY M. MCCALL, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 05/31/19
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
____________________________
American citizens concerned about the current condition of the journalism industry will soon have more to worry about. Indications are the embattled journalism world will have even tougher sledding in the years ahead, and today’s college graduates won’t be part of a cavalry to the rescue.
A democratic nation needs journalism to keep the government and other powerful institutions accountable and to serve as surrogates for the citizenry. The bleak employment picture in the news industry, however, surely discourages the best and brightest young minds from entering the once noble field.
College graduates working in newsrooms earn way less money than college grads in other fields. Add that to the dismal public image of the journalism industry and it is understandable why talented young Americans eschew media careers. No sensible college graduate today wants to take a vow of poverty to pursue a career that friends and relatives look down upon. …
… Media credibility has suffered in part because of the blurring of lines between reporting and commentary. There is a solid place in journalism for analysis, editorializing and advocacy, but audiences increasingly sense those functions have blended into fact-based, non-partisan reporting. When citizens see that merger of reporting and commentary, their confidence in journalism takes a hit and they migrate to “news” outlets that fit with their personal ideologies. …
… The broad marketplace is speaking to the journalism industry and the industry is apparently not listening. News consumers want more objective news of substance that clearly separates factual content from advocacy. Prospective journalism employees seek careers in which they can take pride and earn competitive wages. The big media corporate executives who shoulder responsibility for preserving the nation’s free press functions need to do some soul-searching about how to save the imperiled industry. And the discussions need to include people from outside their corporate towers.
_____________________________
LikeLike
John F. Kerry, reporting for treasonous, un-American, and ilegal activity!
—————–
https://www.dailywire.com/news/47903/obamas-pro-iran-echo-chamber-still-secretly-talks-josh-hammer
“Today, a stunning report in the Daily Beast reveals the depths to which the sycophantic pro-Iran capitulators of the Barack Obama foreign policy apparatus continue to sink to support the terrorist regime that remains the world’s number one state sponsor of jihadist exportation.
In unusual journalistic fashion, the Daily Beast anonymously quotes many former Obama administration officials throughout the piece — thus lending cover to those who would openly collude with a brazen American geopolitical foe against the interests of the American people.
Per the Daily Beast:
As the Trump administration sent warplanes and an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf, a small group of former Obama administration officials reached out to their contacts in the Iranian government, including Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Their message to Iran: Don’t take Trump’s bait. Stay calm.
Conversations between former Obama officials and Iranian government officials have been ongoing since November 2016. Zarif, who visits the U.S. every year for the U.N. General Assembly in New York, usually meets with lawmakers, think tanks, journalists, and former officials when he is in town.
But the recent round of conversations, which took place over the phone and in person over the last two months, came as lines of communication between the U.S. and Iran, through intermediaries in Europe and elsewhere, deteriorated.
The Daily Beast further noted how the Obama officials seem to have a clear motive: Discerning whether the possibility exists of the U.S. re-entering a new Iran nuclear deal in a post-President Donald Trump world. “Separately, some former Obama officials are trying to keep the roots of the Iran nuclear deal alive by taking the pulse of lawmakers on Capitol Hill to gauge whether they are in favor of restarting talks in the future,” the outlet stated.”
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Yes folks, this is actual collusion with an adversarial foreign govt.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/team-obama-tells-iran-dont-escalate-dont-take-trumps-bait
“As the Trump administration sent warplanes and an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf, a small group of former Obama administration officials reached out to their contacts in the Iranian government, including Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Their message to Iran: Don’t take Trump’s bait. Stay calm.
Conversations between former Obama officials and Iranian government officials have been ongoing since November 2016. Zarif, who visits the U.S. every year for the U.N. General Assembly in New York, usually meets with lawmakers, think tanks, journalists, and former officials when he is in town.”
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https://twitter.com/Southfive/status/1134435072176734208
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This is just so wrong, on so many levels.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/05/transgender-woman-wins-ncaa-womens-track-tournament/#more-284823
““Transgender Woman” Wins NCAA Women’s Track Tournament
Ranked 390th when he competed against other men”
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“The patriarchy’s plans to destroy women’s sports continues apace.
Craig Telfer, who now goes by CeCe Tefler, recently took home the women’s 400-meter hurdles national title. Prior to transitioning, Tefler competed against men with mediocre results.
From Let’s Run:
Transgender woman CeCe Telfer, who was born and raised as Craig Telfer and competed on the Franklin Pierce University men’s track and field team during her first three years of college, won the women’s 400-meter hurdles national title at the 2019 NCAA Division II Outdoor Track & Field Championships. Telfer dominated the competition, winning in 57.53 as second place was way back in 59.21.
Prior to joining the women’s team this season, Telfer was a mediocre DII athlete who never came close to making it to nationals in the men’s category. In 2016 and 2017, Telfer ranked 200th and 390th, respectively, among DII men in the 400 hurdles (Telfer didn’t run outdoor track in 2018 as either a man or woman). Now she’s the national champion in the event simply because she switched her gender (Telfer’s coach told us that even though she competed on the men’s team her first three years, her gender fluidity was present from her freshman year).
The fact that Telfer can change her gender and immediately become a national champion is proof positive as to why women’s sports needs protection. Telfer ran slightly faster in the 400 hurdles competing as a man (57.34) than as a woman (57.53), even though the men’s hurdles are six inches taller than the women’s hurdles. Yet when Telfer ran 57.34 as a man, she didn’t even score at her conference meet — she was just 10th at the Northeast-10 Outdoor Track and Field Championships in 2016. Now she’s the national champion.”
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