Author: RealClearWire

Commentary: The Promise of Habit-Based Learning

RealClearWire

Something has gone awry in American education. For example, over the past decades, the U.S. has dropped to the bottom of international rankings for developed countries in math. This decline has coincided with education reform, a shift that has emphasized understanding and downplayed practice. Could something that sounds so sensible have possibly been responsible for the drop?

The brain has two major learning systems. One is based on practice, and leads to fast, automatic behavior. This system is not accessible by conscious thought and is the source of intuition. The second system is based on deliberate thought—it is slow but flexible. You are consciously aware and can verbalize what you have learned. These two systems are roughly analogous to Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s “thinking, fast and slow.”

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Commentary: A Republic if You Can Teach It

RealClearWire

President Biden has a civics lesson that he is fond of and regularly repeats. It is about how the United States is unique in the world because of the founding ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

“Unlike every other nation on Earth, we were founded based on an idea,” he notes before adding that “while we’ve never fully lived up” to those principles, “we have never given up on them.”

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Commentary: Europe Shows a Clear Link Between Immigration and Crime

RealClearWire

Violent crime is becoming common in Sweden, shocking residents of the famously placid Scandinavian nation, where horrific acts of violence have become “all too familiar,” according to Common Sense Media, part of a Swedish nonprofit organization.   

Since 2018, Swedish authorities have recorded an estimated 500 bombings, while what they describe as gang shootings have become increasingly common. The country reported a record 124 homicides in 2020 and many residents were shocked in April when violent riots injured more than 100 police officers.  

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Commentary: A GOP Majority Will Pushback on Corporate America

RealClearWire

The results of the 2022 midterms will be dissected endlessly. But among the political ramifications is a very important question for American business executives: With Big Business increasingly involved in political debates (and usually taking sides against Republicans), how will the relationship between the two change under a new GOP House majority?

One answer is that companies should be ready for a wake-up call. This Republican majority will be more populist and less deferential to massive corporations than any that has come to power in the past. Never has the disconnect between executives, employees, and customers been so apparent.

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Commentary: Large Racial Reading and Math Performance Gaps Persist as Children Age

RealClearWire

The dominant response to the recently-released NAEP Report Card on 4th and 8th grade proficiency scores has been to focus on the adverse effects of school closures: declining competencies, particularly for the lowest performing students. What is buried in the report is the continued alarmingly low black student scores on both reading and math sections and their inability to close the racial gap as they move from the 4th to 8th grade.

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Commentary: An American Tradition Is Chronic Anti-Poverty Waste via the Federal-to-Local Distribution Pipeline

RealClearWire

For six years, beginning in 2014, the accounting firm for the Southeast Alabama Community Action Partnership warned administrators that the organization was doing a poor job of managing the millions of dollars in taxpayer money it received annually for its poverty-reduction work, including home energy assistance and foster grandparenting.  

In 2018, a longtime employee filed a federal complaint alleging that the group spent public money profligately on extravagant travel and for other unauthorized purposes, and that it retaliated against employees who questioned its financial practices. 

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Commentary: Department of Health and Human Services Giving $4.5 Million to Train on Implicit Bias

RealClearWire

by Adam Andrzejewski   The Department of Health and Human Services is awarding $4.5 million in grants to public colleges to train maternal health providers in implicit bias. The grant summary states, “the purpose of this program is to address implicit bias among maternal health care providers to reduce health disparities and improve maternal health outcomes,” with public and state-controlled institutions of higher education eligible for the funding.   An HHS press release about the funding specifies that the funds will be used to support community-based doulas, a non-medical professional to support women as they give birth. They don’t deliver babies but give expectant mothers emotional and physical support leading up to and giving birth. The funding, through HHS’s Health Resources and Services Administration, said the money will be used to hire, train, certify, and pay community-based doulas “in areas with high rates of adverse maternal and infant health outcomes.” The HHS said the grant builds on the administration of President Joe Biden and VP Kamala Harris to “address the nation’s Black maternal health crisis.” Many news outlets and medical entities have reported on the high rate of Black mothers dying in or leading up to childbirth, a terrible scourge that…

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Commentary: Majority of American Voters Rightly Concerned About Vote Fraud

RealClearWire

Watching the news, you’d be led to believe that vote fraud doesn’t exist in the United States. Since the election on November 8, news article after news article has simply dismissed any claims of vote fraud as “baseless” (New York Times and CNN) and “without evidence” (NPR, New York Times, and Washington Post). Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is lambasted for “stoking fears on mail-in ballots.” And the news coverage was no different after the 2020 election.

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Commentary: GOP Botched Early-Voting Ground Game

RealClearWire

Two days before Brian Kemp bested Stacey Abrams by more than seven percentage points in their closely watched rematch, the Georgia governor did something unusual for a Republican candidate in the 2022 midterms: He expressed confidence about where he stood and cited early voting as a top reason.

“We’ve also had record turnout for early voting, which ended this Friday. It’s been an incredible turnout, and we feel good about things,” Kemp told Trey Gowdy, the former congressman and host of Fox News’ “Sunday Night in America.”

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Commentary: To America’s Permissive Addiction ‘Fix,’ Critics Just Say No

RealClearWire

After nine years as a homeless drug addict in Los Angeles, Jared Klickstein finally checked himself into a drug treatment center. Unlike the program he had gone to six years before, which had hot tubs, acupuncture, and trips to the beach, this one, in North Hollywood, was deadly serious about personal responsibility. Clients kept a strict schedule. They did chores. They scrubbed toilets. “No hot tubs,” Klickstein said. 

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Commentary: Climate Amnesty Will Not Happen

RealClearWire

“Let them eat cake,” famously attributed to Marie Antoinette by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, has become universal shorthand for a monarch’s total disregard for her famished citizens stealing and wreaking havoc in the streets to survive. World leaders are making the same faux pas this week at their opulent stay in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, for COP27, the United Nations’ climate change conference.  

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Commentary: In the Left’s New Tack on Abortion, Pro-Lifers See a Miscarriage of Facts

RealClearWire

Democrats have run hard on abortion this election cycle. Since the Supreme Court in June overturned the Roe v. Wade ruling finding a right to abortion in the U.S. Constitution, Democrats have spent $320 million on midterm campaign ads favoring abortion rights, 10 times the $31 million they’ve spent on ads related to inflation, which was consistently rated as voters’ top concern.  

They have used those ads and public appearances to advance a legal interpretation of abortion as including miscarriages and other problem pregnancies to suggest –– misleadingly, abortion foes say –– that under Republican restrictions women would run afoul of abortion law for the care they receive for common but serious and even life-threatening prenatal complications.  

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White House Defends TikTok Outreach Amid Bipartisan Security Concerns

RealClearWire

On August 9, 2021, Benito Skinner, the Millennial Generation comedian known online as “Benny Drama,” posted a video on TikTok of his day-in-the-life experience as a White House intern, photocopying, making unrequested nail appointments for then-Press Secretary Jen Psaki, and generally making a mess.

All of it was for laughs, but there was a reason the Biden administration invited him into the West Wing. They wanted Millennials and members of Gen Z to hear a public health message from the TikTok influencer: “We need to get shots in the arms of every single American.”

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Commentary: The State of Political Polling in America

RealClearWire

Two years ago, 14 public opinion polls queried Maine voters about their preference in the campaign between incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins and Democratic challenger Sara Gideon. Every one of those surveys had Gideon ahead, by margins ranging from 1 percentage point (Bangor Daily News) to 12 points (Quinnipiac). When the election returns rolled in, however, none of them were close. Collins prevailed handily, beating Gideon by 8.6%.

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Commentary: Trust Teachers to Make Their Own Decisions Regarding Union Membership

RealClearWire

American’s respect for teachers is high coming out of the pandemic, according to a new EdChoice poll — placing them among doctors and members of the military as some of the most respected professionals in the country.

A whopping 70 percent of Americans respect the men and women who teach our children — yet across the nation, teachers are prevented from making their own decisions when it comes to key aspects of their job: their membership in a teachers’ union.

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Commentary: Democrats Face Historic Headwinds in Tuesday’s Midterm Elections

RealClearWire

Regardless of all that wispy smoke Democrats and their allies in the news media are blowing, key polls suggest Republicans are still likely to win back control of the House of Representatives in Tuesday’s midterm elections and have a better than even chance to take over the Senate.

Historically, one of the strongest indicators – perhaps the strongest indicator – of how a party will do in midterm elections is the job approval rating of the incumbent president. Parties of presidents who are down in the polls usually lose congressional seats. Parties of presidents up in the polls generally gain seats in the midterms.

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Commentary: Social Media Companies Continue to Profit from Self-Harm Content

RealClearWire

The web’s earliest days were marked by optimism that the digital world would be an unfettered force for good. It would sweep away censorship and oppression, connect the planet, and empower anyone, anywhere, to be heard by the world. Over time, however, the web’s darker byproducts have become more apparent, with companies’ own research confirming the harms that social media, in particular, is having on teens. A recent report sheds light on Twitter’s role in promoting adolescent self-harm like cutting – and the company’s seeming inability to stop it.

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Commentary: Early Vote Data Suggests Trouble for Dems in Pennsylvania

RealClearWire

Democrats are getting some warning signs in the mail. Voting data in the key states show that mail-in voting, which traditionally favors Democrats, is down. In-person voting, meanwhile, will likely continue to be dominated by Republicans.

Take, for example, my home state of Pennsylvania. In 2020, there were 1,564,483 ballots cast nine days out from Election Day. As of Sunday, nine days out from the midterm election, there were only 777,309 ballots cast. That’s a drop of more than half. And it is even steeper for traditionally Democratic voting groups like black voters. In 2020, approximately 147,539 black Pennsylvanians had voted at this point; now, it’s only 47,830. 

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Commentary: Biden’s Migrant Policy Worsens Central America’s ‘Root Causes,’ Critics Say

RealClearWire

When Vice President Kamala Harris visited Mexico last year, she cited poverty, crime, and political instability as “root causes” driving millions of migrants to cross the U.S. border. 

But some critics with regional expertise say Biden administration policies, which migrants have interpreted as an invitation to travel north, have severely worsened those root causes, destabilizing large swaths of Central America and Mexico. The torrent of people moving across the region has delivered billions of dollars to the coffers of human smuggling rings and the drug cartels that have taken advantage of America’s overwhelmed border patrol to deliver fentanyl and other deadly substances to the United States.  

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Commentary: With States Hands-Off, Homeschooling Takes Off

RealClearWire

South Dakota epitomizes the rapid growth of homeschooling in America. Guided by the principle that parents, not the government, have the right to determine what and how their kids are taught, homeschooling families have overturned existing rules and batted down attempts over the last decade to impose new ones in many states, including South Dakota. 

What’s left in much of the United States today is essentially an honor system in which parents are expected to do a good job without much input or oversight. The rollback of regulations, coupled with the  ill effects of remote learning during the pandemic, have boosted the number of families opting out of public schools in favor of educating their kids at home.  

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Commentary: Faulty FBI Data Obscures Successful Defensive Gun Use

RealClearWire

With crime such an important issue, Americans depend on the FBI for accurate data. The crime data for 2021 is a mess, with almost 40% of law enforcement agencies around the country not submitting any data to the FBI. In California, 93% didn’t report crime data. In New York, 87% didn’t. Cities are embarrassed by the soaring crime rates, and even when they have collected the data they aren’t transmitting those numbers to the FBI.

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Mehmet Oz Commentary: My Plan to Fix Crime in Philadelphia and Across the Commonwealth

RealClearWire

Much like the inflation crisis created by misguided economic policies, violent crime is running rampant nationwide. Here in Philadelphia, over 400 homicides and 1,000 carjackings have already been reported thus far in 2022 – and those figures are not unique among major cities. Thanks to progressive leaders who refuse to enforce the law, violent criminals are roaming free and American families are left to feel unsafe.

Just last week, Philadelphia’s “Conviction Integrity Unit” earned the praise of John Fetterman. This misguided program, implemented by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, allowed a convicted murderer to be back on the street, and last week he was arrested again for involvement in a second murder. Allowing violent criminals to be let out of prison is a deadly consequence of the soft-on-crime policies that John Fetterman supports.

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Commentary: Democrats Prepare to Lose as U.S. Senate Race in North Carolina Is Too Close to Call

RealClearWire

The 2022 midterms are less than a month away. With Election Day rapidly approaching, races in Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have taken the spotlight, and according to most pundits, control of the Senate comes down to these five states. Conspicuously, political analysts in the Beltway have all but stripped North Carolina, a purple, perennial swing state, and its Senate race between Congressman Ted Budd and state Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley of its toss up status, and Democrats seem prepared to cede the state to Republicans.

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Commentary: Violent Crime Is Driving a Red Wave

RealClearWire

Two weeks before the 2022 midterms, fear of crime is second only to worries over inflation and recession. Both issues – personal security and economic security – affect voters directly. They arise every time voters ride the subway, walk down a dark street, pay the cashier at the grocery, or fill up their truck. That’s why survey after survey says they are the top issues motivating voters this November. That’s bad news for Democrats. Pollsters say Republicans hold huge advantages on the economy, inflation, and crime, the issues that matter most to voters.

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Commentary: Democrats Race to Save a Blue State Gone Purple

RealClearWire

With Election Day less than a month away, Democrats and Republicans are duking it out to secure majorities in Congress. While both parties funnel record-breaking millions of dollars into several traditional battleground states like Pennsylvania and Nevada, Democrats could lose a state they’ve won since the late 1980s – Oregon.

Though the state is all but guaranteed to re-elect longtime Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, there’s a real possibility Oregonians might just elect their first Republican governor in nearly 35 years. Thanks to a well-funded independent spoiler candidate and an unpopular outgoing governor, Democrats are facing a tight race with serious implications as major issues like abortion are tossed to the states.

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Commentary: The War over ‘Transgender’ Kids

RealClearWire

America is in the throes of a cultural and political war over gender ideology, featuring high-profile conflicts over everything from school curricula to athletics to pronouns.  

But among the most explosive battles unfolding within the broader war is that over transgender children. In an inhospitable election year for the left, Democrats, far from being on the back foot, have pushed ahead on this front, including this fall in California, New York, and Virginia with moves to curb parental rights. 

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Commentary: Zero Basis Exists for the Claim That Electric Vehicles Have ‘Zero Emissions’

RealClearWire

As California, New York, and other states move to phase out the sale of gasoline-powered cars, public officials routinely echo the Biden administration’s claim that electric vehicles are a “zero emissions” solution that can significantly mitigate the effects of climate change. 

Car and energy experts, however, say there is no such thing as a zero-emissions vehicle: For now and the foreseeable future, the energy required to manufacture and power electric cars will leave a sizable carbon footprint. In some cases hybrids can be cleaner alternatives in states that depend on coal to generate electricity, and some suggest that it may be too rash to write off all internal combustion vehicles just yet. 

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Commentary: Fetterman’s Record in Braddock Is No Roadmap for Pennsylvania

RealClearWire

Aliquippa, Duquesne, Greenville, New Castle, and Rankin: western Pennsylvania has no shortage of economically distressed municipalities that seem to have been left by the wayside and forgotten. But the town of Braddock got something different: a political figure standing 6-foot-8, draped in gym shorts and a Carhartt hoodie. He promised to turn around a persistent economic depression, and he brought national media attention to the small town, which had seen a population decline from a peak of 20,000 in the 1920s to under 1,800.

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Commentary: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State

RealClearWire

“History doesn’t repeat itself,” said Mark Twain, “but it often rhymes.” This is among the reasons we look to the past, straining as best we can through the deepening fog of time to discern lessons for our own day. Analogies to the events that came before are always imperfect, but nevertheless often useful for understanding our present moment. Thus, only a historical myopia can explain why it’s become so common to describe the events involving the covid pandemic as “unprecedented,” even though pandemics have tended to occur every hundred years or so. This nearsightedness is also perilous given, for instance, the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset Initiative” and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s recent pledge to spend $200 million on developing international biometric-based digital identifications. 

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Commentary: Republicans Find Their Footing on Abortion

RealClearWire

Earlier this week, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio stood his ground on a debate stage at the Lake Worth campus of Palm Beach College. His opponent is seasoned Democratic lawmaker Val Demings, a black congresswoman and former police chief, and the discussion had turned to abortion rights – terrain that Democrats believe favor them and give Demings and other Senate candidates a chance to alter the expected outcome of the 2022 midterms.

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Commentary: Learning All the Wrong Lessons from America’s Energy Crisis

RealClearWire

Self-inflicted wounds create teachable moments, but the architects of America’s current energy crisis are learning all the wrong lessons.

Skyrocketing energy costs are one of America’s harsh post-Covid realities. And with one in four American households struggling to pay for their energy needs before Covid, policymakers should have set their sights on making energy more affordable for more Americans.

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Commentary: America’s Schools Warm to Climate Activism

RealClearWire

Public school districts are adopting curricula on climate change from well-funded progressive groups casting the issue as a threat to life on the planet that students should respond to through activism. 

As of fall 2020, 29 states and the District of Columbia have adopted standards that require science classes to teach human-caused climate change as a peril beyond dispute, according to K12 Climate Action,  a group that is part of the progressive Aspen Institute. 

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Commentary: Rural Backlash Against ‘Renewables’ Surges

RealClearWire

The hype about wind and solar energy keeps colliding with the hard reality of land-use conflicts. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Ohio, where 41 townships have rejected or restricted the expansion of wind and/or solar projects since last November. In addition, at least eight Ohio counties have implemented restrictions on Big Wind and Big Solar over that same time period. 

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Commentary: The Embarrassing Rhetoric on Russia

RealClearWire

The Ukraine-Russia conflict has spurred debate on how to best resolve the crisis. One thing most people can agree on is that nuclear war could happen. In response, most would hope that the risk of nuclear destruction would bring about grounded debate. Unfortunately, the conflict has brought out name calling and baseless allegations. Much of this coming from people currently in charge of policy or who helped shape policy in the past. The juvenile rhetoric on Ukraine-Russia is undermining the debate and could have grave consequences.

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Commentary: Liberal Arts Colleges Are More Liberal than Universities

RealClearWire

Students often approach me to share the experiences they are having with other faculty on campus. They talk of being deeply uncomfortable asking questions in seminars and share with me how intimidated they are to challenge their professors. They often have real difficulty in sharing views that may run against the progressive, even Marxist, ideas that tend to dominate my campus.

I have been a professor at Sarah Lawrence College—one of the nation’s more elite and politically active campuses—for over a decade now. Liberal activism and ideological infusion into classes have become standard here and at many other liberal arts schools.  

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Commentary: Connecting ‘Energy Inflation’ with ‘Climate Extremism’

RealClearWire

In the approaching 2022 midterm elections, American voters will have the opportunity to decide whether oil industry executives are really to blame for high energy prices—or if it’s instead the political class that needs a shakeup. 

In a new report for Real Clear Energy, Joseph Toomey, a career-management consultant, makes a persuasive case that the energy inflation now victimizing American consumers and taxpayers is the result of deliberate public-policy choices made here at home. Even as President Biden vilifies energy companies, the evidence is overwhelming that the current regime in Washington is beholden to climate extremism at the expense of affordable energy, Toomey argues. 

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Commentary: The Pro-Life Movement Charts a New Path

RealClearWire

For a half-century, anti-abortion protestors have traveled from across the country to Washington for the March for Life, an annual demonstration that starts on the National Mall and traditionally ends at the steps of the United States Supreme Court.

Now, for the first time in 50 years, the route will change. Organizers say they will start in the same place, but they won’t march to the high court. “It is more important that we finish at the U.S. Capitol,” Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life Defense and Education Fund, which has organized the march since 1974, told RealClearPolitics. Noting that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, the question has been returned “to our elected officials and to the people through their elected officials.”

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Commentary: Lawsuit to Block Student Loan Bailout Can Set Stage for Solving Debt Crisis

RealClearWire

“Here’s the thing. People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not…. [H]e does not have that power. That would have to be an act of Congress.”

Is this the perspective of a conservative legal analyst? A Republican politician? Nope. Those are the words of none other than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, explaining to reporters last year why President Biden doesn’t have the authority to end student debt.

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Commentary: The Monopoly Hiding in Plain Sight

RealClearWire

With persistent inflation and growing concerns over a recession, pundits, policymakers, and the president have expressed concern about an alleged lack of competition lurking in the dark corners of the U.S. economy. As President Biden himself said, “capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism, it’s exploitation.” From Big Tech to baby food, both sides of the aisle are on the lookout for monopoly power. But sometimes the best place to hide is in plain sight.

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Commentary: Race-Baiting, Critical Race Theory Still High on Teachers Unions’ To-Do List

RealClearWire

If you think teachers’ unions were discouraged to learn that nearly two-thirds of American adults hold an unfavorable view of Critical Race Theory (CRT) or that their own outspoken advocacy of the curriculum has proved to be political Kryptonite, you’re either overestimating their concern for what anyone else believes or underestimating their determination to turn schools into liberal indoctrination centers.

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Commentary: Mark Kelly Is Too Far Left for Arizona

RealClearWire

The U.S. Senate election in Arizona this year is not simply a choice between a Democrat and a Republican: It’s a choice between a dangerous, far-left radical in Mark Kelly, who does not represent the voters of his state, and Blake Masters, a patriotic America First conservative who will represent the people of Arizona in Washington.

When Mark Kelly first ran for the Senate in 2020, he labeled himself as a moderate who would continue the Arizonan tradition of “political mavericks” representing the state in the upper chamber of Congress. He largely rode into Congress by building a larger-than-life persona for himself from his time as an astronaut, and he also leaned heavily on sympathy votes as a result of the assassination attempt on his wife, former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

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Commentary: The Trans Movement’s New Trotskyist

RealClearWire

The Stonewall Riots of 1969 saw New York City police officers lose control of their attempt to shut down the mafia-run Stonewall Inn, inadvertently ushering in an era of gay actvisim. Today, those early leaders of the gay rights movement might be better off leaving street activism to the next generation, but Fred Sargeant must have missed that memo.

Last month, Sergeant was assaulted at a pride march by radical trans activists and sent to the ER. His thought crime was simply holding a sign that read, “gay, not queer,”and criticizing the march’s sponsor for claiming that the word gay, “erased the breadth of sexual orientations and gender identities within the LGBTQ+ umbrella.” Sargeant’s “outdated” views got him on the receiving end of the trans mob’s wrath. 

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