A reminder to every sports station that is making fun of the Tim Tebow signing, not only did he keep in shape thanks to his baseball career (where he made it to the AAA level) but everyone seems to forget that in his only season as a starter he went 7-4 as a starter with a .500 record in the playoffs and then was never given a starting job again.
They’ll never forgive him for his public Christianity.
The Democrat panic over the audits in Texas and other states is making a better argument for the steal of election than anything I can say.
In fairness however the democrats aren’t trying to win arguments they’re trying to enforce obedience.
I see the Golden Globes will not make it to TV this year.
Eventually when you shoot only for an easily outrages niche market the number of people willing to put up with you will shrink to a point where it isn’t worth the cash.
That’s where the woke news divisions are heading
There are already talks of gas lines and soon product shortages over the disruption of a pipeline due to a hack. Two thoughts leap to mind.
There should ALWAYS be a manual override
Normal people will suddenly find out what the Green decision to stop pipelines will cost.
This type of thing will cost the Democrats any state or federal election they can’t steal
Oh One other thing about the gas lines and the lack of goods that this pipeline thing will produce. It’s a sneak preview of the effect of any actual non-cold civil war will produce.
It’s something the urban left and those who are pushing this should consider, granted those who are paying for all this stuff would consider it a feature rather than a bug but those getting paid will quickly discover that it doesn’t matter how much you have in a bank account if you don’t have easy access to food or water.
SHREVEPORT – Year-round school. A lot of districts do it, but I am not a fan.
Louisiana’s (new) Superintendent of Education is proposing year-round school in our state. I know that there are a couple of schools in our local district that are already doing this, elementary schools mostly, but as a teacher, I must tell you, I don’t think I’d like this.
Here’s the thing. I need that summer to recharge. While most people are under the impression that teachers get “three months off” or “all summer off,” of course that is not the case. I am about to retire after twenty-five years in the classroom, and I can assure you that I’ve never ever had three months off, and I’ve never had a summer where I wasn’t required to do some sort of professional development.
Every five years or so we have some sort of curriculum change that requires professional development…training…inservice; new technology, new gradebook software, new this, new that…all of it requires PD. Time taken out of your “summer.”
As rewarding as it is, teaching is exhausting work. And really, this isn’t the post where I want to defend the position that teachers are underpaid for what they do, and that yes, we knew what we got paid when we went into the profession. That is for another day.
But year-round school? Nope. Glad I won’t be there for that.
Kids need the break too, you see. Yes, indeed, some of them need school all the time; their life at home might be terrible and maybe they aren’t getting meals and maybe they don’t get enough supervision and sometimes the electricity and water aren’t even turned on.
Schools have become the place to catch all of these issues that are neglected at home. We feed our students breakfast and lunch, teach them sex education, breast cancer awareness and self-examination; we do vision and hearing checks, we help seniors sign up for Financial Aid. We provide jackets and clothing for kids in need and sometimes we pay an electric bill. Schools are now social support service providers and while I love kids and will help any child in need every single time, we have to wonder if this is the job of the school.
Are we losing sight of education?
Most opponents of year-round school suggest that kids need time to be with their families, to go on vacation, Disneyland! Most of the kids I teach can’t even dream of going to Disneyland and have never been on a family vacation; some are homeless and live in hotels. Most of my high school aged students work and they work hard, long hours.
When we shut down for Covid, our kids were working. They didn’t log onto Google classroom every day to do math problems and watch YouTube documentaries; they took advantage of the time to work, make money, pay bills.
Not all of them, obviously, but a lot of them. I know this for a fact.
And so as I consider the proposal of year round school, I am conflicted. I think about these kids; they need some down time, too. They are working, they are trying to survive, they are trying to finish school. Where’s the downtime? Teachers need to recharge, too, and a lot of teachers depend on summer jobs to supplement their salaries.
Schools can provide everything else. Can’t we provide a few weeks with no school?
Robert Stacy McCain as a man with six children and five grandchildren is very good at reproductive math and yesterday he shared some with the public.
from the day a girl reaches menarche, she has a fixed number of potential reproductive opportunities — in a healthy female, 12 cycles a year for about 25 years from ages 15 to 40, or roughly 300 lifetime chances to become pregnant. If she does not become a mother as a teenager (and middle-class America adamantly believes that teenage motherhood is the worst of all possible fates), this means her reproductive opportunities are reduced to about 240 — 12 menstrual cycles per year for about 20 years. Thus, every year that she delays motherhood represents a reduction in her total fertility.
This biology and math and biology and math don’t give a damn if you are work or want to blame the patriarchy or anything else. The simple truth is that the longer you wait to have children the less likely you will have them.
Now given that the people least likely to have children seem to be those who have embraced the world of the woke this is likely very good news for society and also explains the great need for the left to begin stealing elections in earnest because it’s hard to vote the dead when they haven’t been born and the future belongs to those who show up.
There was a time before the sixties when if a man had a solid job and worked hard it was almost impossible for him to fail to get a wife if he wanted one, my advice to young ladies is this. If you don’t want to be old and alone in your forties find a young man who works hard and has a decent job and pursue him, I’d also suggest a man of faith as he is believes there are eternal consequences if he decides to betray a wife.
In these days of insanity the good hard working God fearing men are a premium product and if you choose to listen to society rather than this advice then if you end up alone and lonely or forced to pick from the dregs in the end you will have only yourself to blame.
Last year former president Barack Obama called partisan gerrymandering “a sneaky way for politicians to consolidate as much power as they can. In the end, gerrymandering means that citizens’ voices are being diminished.”
A year earlier the governor of Obama’s home state of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, had this to say after the US Supreme Court decided not to get involved in partistan remaps. “As I’ve said since I was a candidate, I will veto any map that is unfair,” Pritzker said. “It’s the right thing to do. We’re going to have to make sure that here in Illinois we’re not gerrymandering, that we’re drawing maps that are fair and competitive. That’s what’s best for the voters of the state, that they have choices when they go to the ballot.”
Obama and Pritzker are of course both Democrats. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, state Senate minority leader Dan McConchie (R-Hawthorn Woods), pointed out that Obama, while at Illinois’ state capital late in his presidential term, denounced gerrymandering and called for reform. “And this needs to be done across the nation,” the 44th president said, “not just in a select few states. It should be done everywhere.”
Apparently not in Illinois becauses Obama has been silent about stacking the decks in favor of Democrats. The 2010 remap of Illinois congressional and state legislative districts was a travesty of democracy, as was the one after the 2000 Census, both of which were the work of longtime Illinois House speaker and Democratic party chairman Boss Michael Madigan, who was forced into retirement this year as scandals engulfed his inner circle. The state legislature, as mandated by the Illinois constitution, draws new General Assembly and US congressional district maps.
The most blatant gerrymandering from the most recent remap is Illinois’ 4th congressional district, nicknamed “the earmuffs,” which is pictured above.
But a quick look at maps won’t tell the whole story. Illinois three largest cities outside of Chicago, Rockford, Peoria, and Springfield, the aforementioned state capital, are each split between two congressional districts. This is not a case of these cities being too large for one district, the average size of a US congressional district is over 700,000, the largest of these municipalities is Rockford, with just under 150,000 residents.
The current Illinois congressional delegation consists of thirteen Democrats and five Republicans. Mission accomplished, Democrats. That number will change because Illinois, again, will lose a congressional seat. As I’ve remarked before, Illinoisans are voting with their feet by moving out. They are fed up with rampant corruption, high taxes, and an unfunded public worker pension debt crisis that can be solved only by default or hyperinflation. Between the 2010 and 2020 Census counts Illinois lost population–the first time that has ever happened to the Prairie State.
The electoral results are predictable when politicians choose their constituents. Last year 52 of the 118 races for seats in the Illinois House had only one candidate. In the state Senate it was worse–10 of the 20 races had only one person running. The Democrats have veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly.
Twice in the prior decade Republicans led efforts to allow voters to decide to amend the state constitution by having a non-partisan committee draw maps instead of the legislature. Both times what was called the Fair Map Amendment was ruled unconstitutional in a party-line state Supreme Court decision. The lead attorney in the lawsuit to block the amendment had ties to Boss Madigan.
Back to the US Congress. Illinois’ Democratic delegation is lockstep behind House Bill 1, which if made into law, in the process of nationalizing local elections, will mandate independent committees, not state legislators, to take charge of the decennial remaps in all 50 states. But why aren’t Illinois 13 Democratic members of Congress decrying the current remap process here? Because they are phonies, that’s why. Just like Pritzker and Obama.
The current remapping in Illinois is being performed behind closed doors by Democratic members of the General Assembly using preliminary Census data. Hey Pritzker! Are you aware of this news?
Yeah, I know, in 1990 Republicans drew gerrymandered districts. It was wrong then too.
On Fox Chicago’s Flannery Fired Up this weekend, state Rep. Tom Demmer (R-Dixon) told the host, “We should draw fair, straightforward maps that use official [Census] data and give the people of Illinois a real choice in their elections so people are picking their elected officials and not the other way around.”
Tellingly, because Flannery strives to be fair, he had two Republicans on the gerrymandering segment of his program, but no Dems. I’m very confident that Flannery invited a Democrat to appear but they are either too ashamed to defend their non-transparent remapping–or they know it’s indefensible.
One more time for emphasis.
Six days before his election as governor a St. Louis NPR reporter, Jason Rosenbaum, asked Pritzker, “If you’re governor and they send you a map that is obvioulsy gerrymandered against Republicans would you veto it and why?”
Candidate Pritzker’s response? “I will not sign a bill that is gerrymandered,” adding, “I have been for independent maps for a long time.”
John Ruberry regularly blogs from Illinois at Marathon Pundit.
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