Tag Archives: morality

School Choice in Texas

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are optimistic about school choice in Texas.

Texas. Everything is bigger here, but the Lone Star State has yet to prove it on school choice. Declaring ESAs an “emergency” item in his recent state of the state address, Republican Governor Greg Abbott is proposing a $1 billion program—twice as large as the $500 million he proposed in 2023.
The Senate last week passed a bill to provide scholarships of $10,000, with $2,000 for homeschoolers. House lawmakers, including Republicans, tanked ESAs last time around. But after the Governor backed school-choice proponents in the GOP primaries and November election, he has a new legislative majority that gives him a better chance of success. The House will likely take up ESA legislation in coming weeks.

I’m not sanguine at all about the bill. The nominally Republican-majority Texas House continues to be led by a Speaker who was elected by the Progressive-Democrats in the House along with a collection of nominally Republican politicians. It doesn’t matter that the Speaker is a different person than last session; he’s still in the hip pocket of Party, along with the cronies who voted with Party to elect him.

That’s enough to kill the Senate’s bill in the House. Actual Republicans and Conservatives need to be elected in those districts. Much progress was made last November toward replacing weak sister Republicans with those who have the courage of their Conservative convictions; we’ll need to make much more progress, though, in two years.

Blocking CRT in Schools and Teachers’ Feigned Fears

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The Trump administration is moving to deny Federal funding to K-12 schools that have Critical Race Theory in their curricula. Teachers are claiming to be in a panic about that. For instance,

[s]ome New England teachers are worried the new restrictions on teaching CRT could cause teachers to self-censor out of fear that any discussion on race would make them a target of the new administration….

No, those are supposedly grown adults sulking and threatening to throw toddler-level temper tantrums, planning to hold their breaths until they turn blue in the face, if the don’t get their way.

There’s nothing at all in banning CRT indoctrination—which in its overt bigotry insists on racially intrinsic oppressor/oppressee status depending on the skin color of the individual, which further insists that victimhood is inherent in one race or one gender and not at all a frame of mind with an inherent ability to overcome being a victim (including taking coherent effective action in those instances where a person really has been victimized)—that prevents teachers from discussing race, or teaching its effects, with such works as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time or any of Zora Neale Hurston’s writing.

These pseudo-teachers would be no loss at all, were they to carry on their tantrums by quitting teaching altogether.

A Plenty Good Enough Reason

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President Donald Trump (R) is preparing a series of sanctions against the anti-Semitic International Criminal Court and the bigots populating it. Naturally, those…persons…are unhappy. One carefully anonymous official:

The concern is the sanctions will be used to shut the court down, to destroy it rather than just tie its hands[.]

After all, as Ellie Grant wrote at the link,

Such a move, they say, could bring the court to a standstill, severely hindering its access to the services it depends on to function.
One of the most significant risks posed by sanctions would be the disruption of the court’s ability to access banking and payment systems, IT infrastructure, and insurance providers. A complete block on these services, including US-based companies, would apparently cripple the court’s day-to-day operations.

Since this institution spends so much of its time, funding, IT work, and insurance proceeds attacking Israel and the men and women of the Israeli government on trumped up complaints, these are sufficient, and necessary, reasons for applying the sanctions and shutting off, and shutting down, the nakedly biased institution.

DOGE’s Mission

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And the mission of the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress has cutting spending at the top of their lists. Fraud, waste, and abuse has been the empty word chants of politicians from both parties for far too many years.

Now there’s a concrete example of waste, and of waste of a magnitude that it could easily obscure double potsful of outright fraud and abuse.

The federal government reported net costs of $7.4 trillion in fiscal year 2024, but it couldn’t fully account for its spending. The US Government Accountability Office, which is Congress’s research arm, said that the federal government must address “serious deficiencies” in federal financial management and correct course on its “unsustainable” long-term fiscal path.

Absolutely. One way to light a fire under the behinds of the bureaucrats who manage these departments and agencies—from the political appointees nominally in charge on down through middle management—along with those entities and personnel required to report to the former is to cut those department and agency budgets by the amount of unaccounted for spending by each department and agency. In parallel with that, identify by name the personnel responsible for the tracking, and identify by name and entity those responsible for reporting to these trackers, and deal with them, publicly shaming where useful, firing for cause where necessary, and terminating contracts of those responsible for reporting and not doing so or not doing so accurately.

Yes, that includes DoD, which hasn’t bothered to track its own spending well enough to pass an audit in the last too many years. We’re not plussing up our military, we’re not building a combat force, when DoD is losing track of its money and so isn’t spending its money on training, equipment, and logistics.

The incompetence, laziness, and criminality of those responsible for actually spending—and tracking their spending—the monies allocated to them are threats to our national security regardless of the specific spender. So are those not bothering to report accurately and completely up the chain to those trackers. That alone should make the laziness and incompetence involved as felonious as the fraud itself.

Why Some Can’t Have Nice Things

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A canonical example of this is Progressive-Democrat Party-run Chicago and Illinois:

City taxpayers spent $262 million from August 2022 through last month to care for migrants, records show, in addition to $368 million in state and federal grants.

Assuming a naïve estimate of 50% of those grants being from Springfield, that’s nearly half a billion dollars that could have gone—should have gone—toward dealing with Chicago’s homeless—more than 76,000 as of a month ago—supporting voucher and charter schools to improve the abusively undereducated children’s opportunities, (re)creating a market economy so the unemployed and underemployed could get jobs and off the city’s and State’s welfare rolls. That last, too, would release yet more funds for dealing with those homeless, children, and jobs.

All of that is a set of failure conditions that Chicago’s Progressive-Democrat managers are determined to maintain.

An effort to water down Chicago’s sanctuary ordinance failed Wednesday [15 January 2025], 39-11, in a city council vote. Mayor Brandon Johnson [D], a progressive critical of Trump, opposed a proposal that would have allowed police to work with federal agencies on deportation cases for those accused or convicted of gang activity, drug crimes, sex trafficking, or sex crimes with minors.

These wonders would rather have gangs, drugs, and sex criminals roaming the city’s neighborhoods than take care of their own.

This sort of progressive abusiveness is why so many American citizens can’t have nice things.