Archive for July, 2020

Report from Louisiana: Back to School, Part II

Posted: July 27, 2020 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,

By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – Over the past few weeks I have read everything I can get my hands on about reopening schools, about Covid-19, about teacher anxiety, about parent anxiety, about the disparity of internet access across rural America, and all of the other problems that are coming with the new school year.

Copious amounts of reading and research, and I still don’t have any answers.

This much I know:

Most teachers are freaking out about having to return to in-person classes in a few weeks. Some teachers are just ready to get back to the classroom, Coronavirus be damned.

School systems don’t have any real idea how to do this. There’s no blueprint. Some places have the virus more under control than others, and that has to play into whatever the plans for your district are.

Poor kids and rural kids don’t have the same internet access that suburban middle class or wealth kids do. This makes virtual schooling a challenge.

We need schools open for childcare so parents can work. No, wait, schools are for learning! And sources of food, and socialization! No! Wait!  What are we doing?

So. Much. Confusion.

And so many variances in our plans. In my school district, we are currently scheduled to go with an A/B-day hybrid model with kids coming on alternating Fridays. Parents uncomfortable with this can also opt for a virtual only option. Teachers will have kids in the room every single day.  Students will get on the bus, with or without a mask, sit two to a seat, get breakfast in the cafeteria, take it to their classroom and eat. THEN we will take temperatures.

How many people will have been exposed at that point if a student is carrying the virus?

Teachers are worried about supplies: are there enough thermometers? Do they work? Are there enough supplies for cleaning the classroom all day long? (We have to sanitize between every group that comes in).  What happens when there is an exposure, or an outbreak? New CDC guidelines say you don’t really have to quarantine for 14 days. In fact, you could be back at school before your positive test even comes back. Do we trust the CDC guidelines, now?

Everything has become so political.

So, look. At this point, after all this reading, after all of this ever changing research, I’m going to do what I should have resolved to do in the very beginning and save myself a lot of time. I’m going to protect myself. I’m going to wear my mask, keep my area wiped down, stay six feet away from everyone, all of the time, and take any other measures I deem necessary to protect myself.

I have that right.

There is absolutely nothing I can do about my district’s plans; they never asked for my input, after all. So all I can do is take care of myself. I’ll take care of my students the best I can, but if I don’t have the supplies, I will be limited in what I can do. I hope we have them.

At this point, all we can do is try to survive. I can’t read any more about best practices (we don’t have any), or try to keep up with changing sanitation measures.

I think we will probably be in session long enough to get Chromebooks out, kids accustomed to virtual platforms, classes set up, and then back home for 100% virtual schooling. I give it two weeks.

God knows, I hope I am wrong.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport and is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

The Left’s Southern Article of Faith Collides with the Data. (updated and bumped)

Posted: July 27, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized

(Note, this post was originally posted on Aug 17th 2017. However the subject came up during my appearance on fault lines radio this morning so I thought I’d repost and bump it so listeners could see the actual post and data I was referring to.)

If you are even slightly a leftist such as the folks I covered on the Boston Common this weekend one of the things that you believe without question is that the only reason why the GOP has control of legislatures in the south is because of a backlash over the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965.
This has been an article of faith for years and it’s quite handy when you want to explain away uncomfortable electoral defeats. Why woo voters when you can simply cry “racism”.

It’s an easy to sell argument, after all the pre 1964 south was called the solid south for a reason. Through 1892 no former slave state (including border states) voted for a GOP presidential candidate. No state of the old confederacy voted GOP post reconstruction till Tennessee voted Harding 1920. Through 1955 when the fight for civil rights started looming large the GOP only managed to take states in the old confederacy two more times once when Eisenhower after winning World War to managed to take Texas, Tennessee, Florida, Virginia and once in the Herbert Hoover landslide of 1928 that added North Carolina to that list.

But the real power of the Democrats in the south wasn’t in presidential elections where they were outnumbered. It was in the state legislatures, where, with the exception of Missouri which was pretty competitive in the first half of the 20th century A republican speaker of the House in the old south and most of the old slave states (I’m missing data for Delaware) just didn’t exist.

And then came Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson

In 1957 Johnson in an effort “sanitize” himself on civil rights for a presidential run pushed through the first civil rights bill post reconstruction. When he became president after JFK’s murder in 1963 he managed to get the Civil Rights act of 1964 passed doing so with only 8 votes from the old confederacy in the house and none in the senate, he followed that up with the Voting Rights act in 1965 and declaring that he would secure the black vote for Democrats for the next 2 centuries (although he used somewhat different phrasing describing the black vote, employing a word rhyming with “trigger”).

It is at this point that according to our friends on the left that the old solid racist south (including many of the slave holding border states) decided to abandon the Democrat party and started voting GOP

However there is one problem that stands in the way of that argument: The facts.

As Tip O’Neill once said all politics is local and nothing better reflects the feelings of a local electorate than a vote for a state legislator. So if the left’s meme is to be believed it shouldn’t have taken more than a few two year election cycles for a combination of mass defections and outraged old racists to fill the south with GOP speakers in their houses. So let’s take a look at a chart that lists all the old slaveholding states and see how quickly those racist southerners and old segregationists managed to flip their states to their new favorite party.

 

[table id=1 ]

As you can see when the data is presented the left’s article of faith runs smack dab of a factual cliff.

With the exception of a two year period of in Tennessee when a democrat defector gave the GOP the house for one term, No state of the old confederacy elected a GOP house until 1995 and even with that happened in North and South Carolina, North Carolina flipped back to the Democrats the very next election and stayed there until 2011.

Of those states only one other (Florida) joined South Carolina as a solid GOP state in the 20th century five of the states flipped this decade. And think about it. If you believe our friends on the left then Alabama the state where Martin Luther King wrote is famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail and Mississippi the state where the famous case of the murder of civil rights workers dramatized in the film Mississippi Burning took place in the 60’s were so apparently so outraged over the Civil Rights act, the Voting Rights act and LBJ that their voters they waited nearly 2 1/2 generations to vote GOP.

That’s simply not credible.

Now as this is such an article faith for our Democrat friends they will sooner imagine armies of ancient segregationists bussed from Nursing Homes on election day each years than believe the data.

Because there is a much more credible explanation as to why the left is losing the South that’s staring them in the face but that’s a post for later this week.

Update:  Heard back from the Delaware legislative librarian 9/21.  She was out on Friday but when she got back she kindly provided me both house and senate info from 1965 to present that I’ve used to update my table.  Many Thanks

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DaTechGuy will be on DaRadio as Lee Stranahan Guest on Fault Lines Radio Monday 8:15 AM Update (His son’s guest)

Posted: July 27, 2020 by datechguy in media, politics
Tags:

Tomorrow barring my sleeping through alarms I’ll be appearing on Fault Lines Radio as old friend Lee Stranahan’s guest at about 8:15 EST to talk about the Democrats return to 1860 and 1957 in their rhetoric which I discussed here on my podcast and wrote about here on the blog.

You can find the link to the show at @faultlinesradio’s twitter page.

It will be fun.

Update: Apparently Lee’s son Shane hosts this show didn’t realize that

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

will still be fon

After the statues are gone the leftists will come for the parks

Posted: July 26, 2020 by John Ruberry in culture, News/opinion, politics
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
George Washington statue in Chicago’s Washington Park

By John Ruberry

Early Friday morning before sunrise Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s sneaky order to remove Chicago’s two Christopher Columbus statues, one just south of downtown at Grant Park and the other in Arrigo Park in the Little Italy neighborhood, was carried out.

A week earlier a riot, where 49 police officers were injured with 18 of them being hospitalized, broke out at the Grant Park Columbus statue, fireworks and frozen bottles of water were thrown at the cops by the rioters. Amazingly, the media, as far as I can tell, didn’t call this melee a “mostly peaceful protest.” So there is a bit of good news in this story.

Although removal of the statues was called “temporary” by Lightfoot mark my words: If these bronze monuments ever escape from the Raiders of the Lost Ark-type warehouse where they are hidden, they’ll end up indoors in a museum behind bullet-proof glass and proximity alarms.

At my own blog, Marathon Pundit, I called it a victory of the rioters’ veto. The anarchists won–law, order, and tradition were defeated.

Even before the riots and the overreaching COVID-19 lockdown, Chicago and Illinois were losing population. The trickle will become a flood.

Mayor Lightweight believes she has satiated the leftist beast–her base is the far-left by the way. But the regular protests outside her home by that base of hers should serve as a warning. Now that the Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other leftists have learned that riots bring results, they’ll push for more. Power gained, or I should stay seized, is not casually abandoned by usurpers.

City parks may be next.

This is not just a Chicago story. I’m only singling out America’s third-largest city because of my familiarity with it. They same battles will be coming to your woke city and town too.

There are over 600 parks within the Chicago Park District. One of them is named for Columbus. I’d be surprised if a year from now the great explorer’s name will be on it. There’s a Jackson Park on the South Side, where the Obama Presidential Library will be built. That park is named for Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder who forced Native Americans out of the southeast on the Trail of Tears. Chicago doesn’t have an Obama Park. It’s pretty easy to predict what Jackson Park’s new name will be.

About a mile away from Jackson Park is Washington Park, of course our first president. Up until a few months ago I would have told you that changing the name of this park was an absurd notion. In this era of wokeness, it’s not. On the edge of the park is a statue of General Washington on horseback, which was recently vandalized. Washington Park offers the leftists a two-for-one bargain. A park to be renamed and a statue to topple.

Last week Douglas Park, named for Abraham Lincoln’s Democratic rival Stephen A. Douglas, was renamed Douglass Park, in honor of civil rights pioneer Frederick Douglass. The legacy of “the Little Giant” is complicated, through his wife he was a slaveowner and his Kansas-Nebraska Act initiated the carnage of Bleeding Kansas, but as a US Senator he laid the foundation that transformed his adopted hometown of Chicago into the major city it is now. Douglas was a fervent supporter of the Union and Lincoln after the Civil War broke out, which is forgotten because he died in the summer of 1861. Last month I wrote that the Lincoln and Douglas statues on the sites of their famous 1858 debates could be endangered. So far they are safe. But Michael Madigan, the longtime state House speaker and state Democratic chairman, though a statement (Boss Madigan rarely communicates directly with the media), has called for the removal of the Douglas statue on the state capitol grounds.

Douglas is buried in a tomb on the grounds of his former Chicago estate on the South Side. No one, so far, is calling for him to be exhumed but three state legislators want to take down the statue of him, which rests on a 30-foot high obelisk.

Today, I join with my colleagues @RepTarver & @LamontJRobinson to implore @GovPritzker to remove the Stephen Douglas statue from the Neighborhood that I live in & rep. Douglas looked down on black people during his life. We shouldn’t allow it in his death. pic.twitter.com/qDu7n1b5le

— Kam Buckner (@RepKamBuckner) July 14, 2020

Back to the parks. Chicago has two parks honoring Thomas Jefferson, and a Battle of Fort Dearborn Park. That last one refers to what was called the Fort Dearborn Massacre when I was a kid. The battle was between soldiers and Chicago settlers with the Potawatomi.

Will those park names vanish?

When the leftists win the park wars they’ll move on to street names. A tougher fight, yes, as businesses and even run-of-the-mill residents balk at such name changes. But those conflicts are coming to Chicago and many other cities and towns.

Unless ordinary folks stand up, that is. A few have already did so in Chicago Saturday’s Back the Blue march.

That’s a start.

John Ruberry regularly blogs just north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.

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