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DECEMBER 12,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT:

NEVER-NEVER LAND – FROM FOX:    New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed Sunday that the city is "much safer" now than it was when he took the reins eight years ago, despite a recent surge in murders.
"Eight years I’ve been mayor, index crimes, major crimes in New York City down 11% over eight years. And we did it bringing police and community closer together," de Blasio said on "Fox News Sunday."  "The bottom line is that there is today in New York City, a much safer city than we were eight years ago."  While major crimes are down overall, murders skyrocketed last year and have remained high so far in 2021.  There were 318 murders in 2013, but that number shot up to 437 last year and there have been 443 murders so far in 2021, according to NYPD data.  Blas will be gone in two and a half weeks, and maybe he can find employment in Cuba.  He has been a terrible mayor.  We look forward to Mayor Eric Adams, a former cop, who takes over January 1st.  Adams has national ambitions, and I doubt if he'll show much loyalty to the nut wing of the Democratic Party.  I hope I'm right.

December 12, 2021       Permalink

A FUTURE PRESIDENT? – OVERNIGHT:  Republican Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida continues his creative, fast-paced term, and will be up for re-election next year.  His record has earned him the right to be considered a major contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.  From the New York Post: 

Now that the New York City Council has generously granted noncitizens the vote, it should be obvious why President Biden has laid out the welcome mat to migrants at the southern border.

Today’s illegal migrant is tomorrow’s Democratic voter, goes the calculus, and pesky formalities like citizenship just delay the glorious process.

Fittingly, one of Mayor de Blasio’s last acts of vandalism against the city will be to sign this abomination into law.

Cue Gov. Ron DeSantis, who plans to deport illegal migrants flown secretly into Florida from the southern border by the Biden administration.

Destination: Delaware, the president’s home state, or Martha’s Vineyard, Barack Obama’s holiday paradise.

“If you sent [them] to Delaware or Martha’s Vineyard, that border would be secure the next day,” DeSantis said Friday.

To that end, he allocated $8 million in last week’s state budget to fly the migrants back to elite Democrat enclaves, including Washington, DC.

It was a masterful piece of trolling, but with a serious purpose that other states should emulate.

After all, we know from open-source flight maps that “Biden Air” has been secreting illegal migrants all over the country, not just sending them to White Plains, but to Jacksonville, Fla., Alexandria, Va., Chattanooga, Tenn., Long Beach, Calif., and other destinations far and wide.

If the federal government is intent on keeping the southern border open and refuses to notify states when it dumps a new bunch of unvetted, unvaccinated migrants on their doorstep, it is up to governors to stand up for their communities and stop their services being overwhelmed by the influx.

Ever since the Post revealed that charter planes packed with illegal migrants were being secretly flown from border towns in Texas and Arizona into Westchester via Jacksonville, DeSantis has been on the warpath.

Unlike New York authorities who ignored the story, DeSantis snapped into action and enacted laws to “protect Floridians from the Biden Border Crisis.”

“You’re having 200,000 people illegally enter every month. That’s a medium-sized American city every month coming in illegally,” he said.

One of the smartest measures he announced last week was a crackdown on companies and nongovernmental organizations that facilitate illegal immigration into his state.

COMMENT:  I'd love to see him in the White House.  He's a man of action, and the action seems well calculated.  He will, of course, be called a racist, but that charge won't stick. 

The only element holding back DeSantis is Donald Trump.  If Trump runs, he could probably have the Republican nomination.  But those developments are way off.  DeSantis's first job is to get re-elected governor in 2022.  Current polling shows him in reasonably good shape against any leading Democratic prospect.

December 12,  2021     Permalink 

DECEMBER 11,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT: 

HOW ABOUT TEACHING ENGLISH? – OVERNIGHT, FROM THE MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE:    ST. CLOUD — Move over, Spanish and French. St. Cloud public schools next year will be offering Somali and Ojibwe to all students as elective languages.  "It just makes sense for us to have it," said Lori Posch, executive director of learning and teaching for St. Cloud schools. "We want to see our students represented in our courses."  The move comes after the St. Cloud school district this fall introduced what is thought to be the first native Somali language course in the state — and possibly the nation — for secondary students.  Some students who are immigrants or refugees have limited or interrupted formal education. The native Somali course is meant to bolster writing skills in those students' native language and, at the same time, build school skills and other language skills.  "Somali for native speakers was designed for students who didn't have a lot of English," Posch said. "Somali as a world language will be more of an introduction to kids that maybe hear parents speaking it — but to be honest, we have a lot of interest already from our non-Somali community in taking that class as a world language."  About 60% of the nearly 9,700 students in St. Cloud schools are students of color. That's a drastic change from a decade ago, when about one in four students were students of color.  About 41% of St. Cloud students are Black and 25% of students speak Somali as their primary language at home.   I seem to have heard this tune before.  It was called bilingual education, and it failed miserably in California.  Teach the kids the language of their new country, and make them excellent at it.  Then have them study other international languages.  Native languages can be picked up at home.

December 11, 2021       Permalink

CAN'T GET AWAY FROM POLITICS – OVERNIGHT:  You'd think that Joe Biden, who got into politics about the same time that Thomas Jefferson did, would know by now that there's a time and place for trying to advance your political agenda.  But Joe just doesn't get it.  From Fox: 

President Biden on Saturday addressed the fatal weather that ravaged parts of the South and Midwest and used the tragedy to further his own beliefs on climate change.

While speaking to reporters and virtually assessing the tornado damage from Wilmington, Delaware, Biden was asked whether he "could conclude that these storms and the intensity have to do with climate change."

"All I know is that the intensity of the weather across the board has some impacts as a consequence of the warming of the planet and climate change," Biden said. "The specific impact on these specific storms, I can't say at this point."

"I'm going to be asking the EPA and others to take a look at that," Biden added. "The fact is that we all know everything is more intense when the climate is warming. Everything. And obviously it has some impact here, but I can't give you a quantitative read on that."

Biden's remarks follow a series of deadly storms and tornadoes which swept across Kentucky, Illinois, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Missouri overnight and resulted in multiple injuries and the deaths of nearly 100 Americans.

Along with the storms came an extreme amount of catastrophic damage. As of Saturday morning, more than 200,000 customers remain without power in Tennessee and Kentucky…

…In November, Biden claimed climate change is "an existential threat to human existence as we know it" at the United Nations' COP26 conference and apologized for former President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.

COMMENT:  Hey Joe, how about taking care of all those Americans who were ripped up by the tornadoes and forgetting for a moment your political program.   One of the biggest raps against this administration is that it has lost touch with the American people, and the rap is correct.  There seems very little human contact or human feeling.  All is politics, but that's not how individual Americans think.

December 11, 2021       Permalink