Daily Archives: August 2, 2022

The year was 1984. President Ronald Reagan was cruising to reelection. Van Halens 1984 was second on the Billboard charts. George Orwells 1984 hadnt yet become an instruction manual. Top Gun, inspired by a 1983 article titled Top Guns and published by California magazine, was then but a gleam in Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimers eyes, though it would go on to become a classic tale of how reckless men are a testament to Americas greatness in the face of Soviet aggression.

Life was good, particularly after Reagan had successfully battled both Jimmy Carters stagflation and the malaise it brought on. Mullets were a hot hairstyle for men. For women, it was ozone-depleting bouffant bangs teased toward the heavens with massive amounts of hairspray. Gen X kids were off starting fires, sneaking into drained pools to skateboard, and otherwise engaging in all kinds of shenanigans about which our parents had very little clue. Joe Biden was merely a senator.

Today, mullets are back, if not the bangs. Top Gun: Maverick, the long-awaited sequel to the original, is making money hand over fist. Joe Biden, first elected to the Senate in 1972, is still in the swamp, this time as the ostensible leader of the free world and heir to Jimmy Carter. Russia is being belligerent. Stagflation and malaise again rule the day.

In other words, life is not so good right now, but as Mark Twain never said, History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. And in the couplet that is Top Gun to Top Gun: Maverick, there is hope.

When Top Gun was released in May of 1986, it was not an immediate success. At the time, Tom Cruise, the anhedonic real-life iteration of Dorian Gray, was not yet the superstar he is today. The movie was competing with a raft of other stellar films including Ferris Buellers Day Off, Back to School, Aliens, Big Trouble in Little China, and the early Marvel Cinematic Universe entry Howard the Duck, just to name a few.

But Pete Maverick Mitchell quickly inspired legions of fans with his rakish good looks and indifference toward remaining alive and pushed the movie to the summers top spot. To say women wanted to be with him while men wanted to be him is an understatement. Following the movies success, applications to the United States aviation forces increased by 500 percent.

Rewatching it ahead of Top Gun: Maverick, however, I was reminded that the critics complaints had some merit. The original movie is kind of a chick flick, which helps explain why my wife was so anxious to see Maverick during its opening weekend. I opted to grill while she went with our oldest. It would be a few weeks before I would take her to her second viewing and realize the folly of my thinking.

If the original was a chick flick, though, Maverick is the action-packed sequel for the dudes. But being a movie that appeals to the opposite of dudettes is not what makes it such a movie for the times. Instead, its that after watching it, you come out of the theater ready to pump your fist and shout about Americas greatness. Sure, its all nonsense and, spoiler alert, Maverick would have died in the opening sequence had it been real, but the film makes no apologies. It doesnt equivocate or attempt to explain why its okay to cheer for the good guys. Its just ridiculous and reckless Americans being ridiculous and reckless, inviting us along for the ride, and saying, This is who we are and what we can do.

In 2022, thats a bold choice. Its not cool to celebrate America because systemic this and institutionalized that. And there arent a lot of things to cheer about at the moment, particularly when it comes to our national mood, soaring prices, and energy shortages. In those lights, though, Maverick could also be a harbinger that the pendulum is about to swing in the other direction, much as it did in the fabled decade during which the first installment was released.

For as David Lee Roth sang on Jump, the first single from 1984s 1984, And I know, baby, just how you feel/You got to roll with the punches and get to whats real. And while none of us would have chosen the punches were currently rolling with, the chance for history to rhyme is looking good.

Having said that, though, its not time to get out the hairspray and tease those bangs back toward the heavens, ladies. While we may take inspiration from the past, weve got to live for the future.

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'Maverick' And Why We May Be Close To A Return To The '80s - The Federalist

Teachers unions are pushing a radical Marxist-inspired agenda that is destroying public education in America.

Over the past several years, the left has aggressively infected the minds of the youngest children with the tenets of critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology, while academic excellence has been shoved to the back of the bus. As a result, public schools are hemorrhaging students.

In my home state of Minnesota, 2022 marks the second consecutive year the states public school system has lost thousands of students, the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota think tank, reported in February. Why should parents in Minnesota or any other state keep their children in public schools?

In 2021, the Minnesota Department of Educations statewide test results showed another drop in the number of students meeting or exceeding grade-level criteria. Overall, reading scores fell 7 percent, math scores dropped 11 percent, and science scores shrank 8 percent.

In another example, New York City public schools which compose the nations largest school district have already lost about 50,000 students over the past two years and are expected to lose nearly 30,000 more by the time school begins this fall.

Minnesota Education Commissioner Dr. Heather Mueller explained the poor student achievement outcomes thus: The statewide assessment results confirm what we already knew that the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted our students learning and they need our help to recover.

The problem with blaming poor student outcomes in Minnesota on Covid is that the states public schools actually had little to show for decades of increased spending, wrote Catrin Wigfall of the Center of the American Experiment in a July 2020 report titled Allergic to Accountability.

The consistently increased flow of dollars into Minnesotas public schools has not translated into improved student achievement outcomes or more learning, Wigfall wrote.

For insight, look to what the Minnesota Department of Education now values in professional teacher training when it comes to hiring licensed teachers.

In 2021, Minnesotas professional educator licensing and standards board proposed an addition to what proficiency standards for teachers to be licensed. Proposed requirements include:

After shutdowns and the abysmal remote learning results, mask mandates, and a further decline in students academic performance, the response of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) was to go out on strike for more than two weeks in March, cancelling classes once again for 28,000 students.

In addition to demanding increased wages, the MFT stated they are at war against capitalism. At a rally with her union members, Greta Callahan, president of the teachers chapter of MFT, asserted, Our fight is against patriarchy, our fight is against capitalism, our fight is for the soul of our city.

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten told her delegates at their convention in mid-July that the union is working hard on the issues keeping families up at night, from climate change, to accessible healthcare, to the crushing crisis of student debt, to the terrifying safety issues plaguing too many workplaces.

Its highly unlikely that parents who endured teachers union-directed shutdowns, mask mandates, vaccine shaming, CRT, and the new hyper concern with students gender identity have been up nights worrying about climate change.

Instead, many parents are fast coming to the realization that public education as they knew it is a thing of the past.

Its amazing what we accomplished in our public schools and universities when we had little more than classic literature, chalkboards, and chalk in our schools.As centralized education and the teachers unions have gotten bigger and stronger, the quality of education and student performance have declined.

Public schools are no longer the place to send your children to prepare them to succeed in life, or to learn critical thinking skills or high standards of excellence. Nor will they be taught the concept of judging people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

Its time for all Americans to reject the woke agenda that has permeated all aspects of society including public schools. We must find alternative solutions before the damage is irreversible.

Some people still believe we can get our public schools back if we can get control of school boards, eliminate CRT, and the eradicate gender indoctrination fluidity programs. But, even if we are successful in achieving these feats, the DNA within the school systems has been radically altered along with administrators, teachers, and many students.

Its time for parents and local leaders to make decisions that are best for their children. Passing school choice legislation is a starting point. Lets make quality alternative solutions for education broad and accessible.

Kendall Qualls is a former Republican Candidate for Governor of Minnesota and was recently reinstated as President of TakeCharge. He is a former Army officer and healthcare executive. Kendal has been married for 35 years and has five children.

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Public Schools Are Irreversible Cesspools Of Wokeness - The Federalist

Following the Supreme Courts reversal of Roe v. Wade, abortion activists and their friends in the media rushed to attack pro-life states, not by defending abortion itself but by deceiving and distracting. Directly talking about abortion means proponents must answer what (or whom) is being aborted. Abortion activists seek to avoid the question entirely and instead scare Americans into supporting their position by conflating abortion with other issues, the most tragic of which is miscarriage.

Leftists and the corporate media wasted no time in disseminating harmful information about the threat abortion bans pose to women who suffer miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies. Their propaganda campaign is not about saving women; instead, it highlights how they will go to any length necessary to preserve the ability to kill the babies nestled safely within the womb with impunity.

Elective abortion is the termination of a pregnancy by intentionally causing the death of a living unborn child. In a miscarriage, the child passes away naturally. Miscarriage care often involves similar terminology, drugs, and procedures as elective abortions. In a clinical setting, miscarriage is even referred to as a spontaneous abortion. They are differentiated, legally and morally, by intent. If a doctor prescribes mifepristone or uses a D&C procedure to treat a miscarriage, the intent is to remove the deceased childs body. The doctor does not cause the childs death in a miscarriage.

The media likes to point to Texas for their scare campaign because Texas, more than any other state, modeled a post-Roe America by enacting the Texas Heartbeat Act, which took effect in 2021. This law bans elective abortion once the preborn childs heartbeat becomes detectable. However, Texas law is exceptionally clear: Miscarriage treatment does not constitute an abortion.

As stated in the Texas Health and Safety Code, a procedure is legally considered an abortion if it is done with the intent to cause the death of an unborn child of a woman known to be pregnant. The definition further clarifies that [a]n act is not an abortion if the act is done with the intent to remove a dead, unborn child whose death was caused by spontaneous abortion.

This means that if a procedure is done to remove a deceased child who passed away by spontaneous miscarriage, there was no intent to end that childs life, and it is therefore not defined as an abortion. Additionally, under Texas law, removing an ectopic pregnancy is not considered an abortion. Texas law also does not prohibit removing a living child with the intent to provide treatment to the child or to save a mothers life, such as in an early induced delivery or a C-section.

Claims that miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy treatments are prohibited in states where elective abortion is banned or restricted are not only legally incorrect but also cause confusion among medical practitioners, policymakers, and pregnant women.

If the unfounded and blatantly false hysteria continues to proliferate, especially with the corporate media as the biggest accomplice, dangerous confusion can occur among pregnant women and physicians. We know the abortion-at-all-costs crowd wont let a little truth stand in their way of a useful narrative, so pro-lifers and the medical community must fill the gap.

National and state medical associations from the American Medical Association to the state-specific chapters such as the Texas Medical Association not only have a powerful lobbying presence in our legislatures but also have a responsibility to release guidelines and clarifications for practitioners when new legislation impacting the practice of medicine goes into effect. Unfortunately, these organizations have not used their vast financial and institutional resources to push back against the false narrative that has spread like wildfire in the pro-abortion media.

Instead of being silent or adding fuel to the fire, these organizations should pointedly educate the medical providers regarding their respective state laws. State legislatures across the country have anticipated these circumstances and included explicit provisions. Equating tragic situations such as miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies with elective abortion peddled by Planned Parenthood and radical leftists is despicable.

Miscarriages are incredibly heartbreaking to expectant families. Ectopic pregnancies are tragic and terrifying experiences, catching women and families by surprise, accompanied by very complex feelings. The emotional, physical, and psychological turmoil inherent in such instances deserves to be respected and acknowledged for what it is: an absolute tragedy.

These tragic situations do not deserve to be the rallying cry of woke leftists who demand abortion on demand for whatever reason, paid for by taxpayers, through all nine months of pregnancy.

Emily Cook is the General Counsel of Texas Right to Life.

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Abortion Activists Are Lying To Scare Americans - The Federalist

Kansans head to the polls Tuesday to vote on the proposed Value Them Both constitutional amendment that seeks to overturn the Kansas Supreme Courts decision in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt that declared that the state constitution guarantees a fundamental right to abortion. Many Kansans may not realize, however, that the votes they cast on Tuesday may have been heavily influenced by out-of-state abortion apologists who contributed a whopping 71 percent of the $6.54 million spent by the lead group campaigning against the amendment.

The proposed Value Them Both amendment passed the Kansas House and Senate in January 2021 by the two-thirds threshold required under the state constitution to place the proposal on the ballot for the citizens of Kansas to decide. The amendment would overturn Hodes holding that a state constitutional right to abortion exists by adding to the Kansas Bill of Rights a section defining the propriety of abortion regulation, stating:

Because Kansans value both women and children, the constitution of the state of Kansas does not require government funding of abortion and does not create or secure a right to abortion. To the extent permitted by the constitution of the United States, the people, through their elected state representatives and state senators, may pass laws regarding abortion, including, but not limited to, laws that account for circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, or circumstances of necessity to save the life of the mother.

At the time of the Hodes decision, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey remained the law of the land under the federal Constitution. Pro-life Kansans nonetheless responded to the opinion by pushing for the Value Them Both amendment for two reasons.

First, the Kansas Supreme Courts Hodes opinion created a so-called right to abortion even broader than the then-controlling right established in Roe and tweaked in Casey a state constitutional right so expansive it would guarantee a right to taxpayer-funded abortions.

Second, pro-life Kansans wanted to ensure that if the Supreme Court overturned Roe and Casey, its legislature would regain the right to regulate abortions. While opposition to the amendment by Kansass supposedly pro-life Democrat lawmakers initially delayed the state legislatures approval of the Value Them Both amendment, early last year, the proponents of the amendment garnered the votes necessary to put the proposal on the August primary ballot, which occurs tomorrow.

But then came Dobbs, in which the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe and Casey and held there is no federal constitutional right to abortion. The Dobbs decision makes the outcome of Tuesdays vote crucial to the question of whether Kansans will now be able to decide on the appropriate regulation of abortion through their elected officials or whether it will be a Midwest abortion haven.

While politicians and pundits see the outcome of Tuesdays vote on the Value Them Both amendment as registering the pulse of the public on abortion policy, the disparity in out-of-state money flooding the airwaves with the deceptive talking points of abortion apologists, and the reality of the actual issue on the ballot, render the outcome less prophetic then billed.

For the period of January 1, 2022, through July 18, 2022, campaign finance reports summarize the source of donations to the two competing campaigns. The Value Them Both Campaign, led by Kansans for Life, Kansas Family Voice, and Kansas Catholic Conference, supports passages of the amendment, while a group calling itself Kansans for Constitutional Freedom heads the anti-amendment campaign.

The anti-amendment campaign group raised $6.54 million during the approximate half-year reporting period, of which 71 percent of the donations came from out of state and only 29 percent came from in-state sources. In contrast, the Value Them Both Campaign received donations of $4.69 million during the same time period, with less than 1 percent of the donations originating from out-of-state and more than 99 percent of the donors residing in Kansas.

One would think Kansas politicians would resent such out-of-state influence, but rather than condemn the outsiders interference in a matter of state law, Kansas Democrat Sen. Cindy Holscher attacked Catholic churches and dioceses in Kansas for donating money to support the Value Them Both Campaign. In a Friday op-ed for the Kansas City Star, titled Kansas Constitutional Amendment on Abortion is a Bailout for the Catholic Church, Holscher argued the church doesnt value them both. No, she wrote, the support for the amendment is the church valuing its bottom line.

Beyond Holschers dizzying logic and nonsensical thesis that Kansas Catholic churches want to ban abortion in their state so they wont lose more pro-abortion parishioners yes, that truly is her argument the Kansas senator completely ignores the donations made by the Planned Parenthood Action Fund ($850,000) and Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes ($492,000) to the Kansans for Constitutional Freedom campaign. Now there you have a money motive.

Even more appalling is the false framing of the amendment Holscher posed in her op-ed, inaccurately claiming that the Legislature currently has the power to pose limits on abortion. To date, there are dozens of restrictions. What the Legislature cant do is ban the procedure, as the Kansas Constitution currently guarantees access. Thats what this amendment is about, contrary to the confusing language that appears on the ballot.

It is not the ballots language that is confusing, however, but rather the spin put on the Value Them Both amendment by Holscher and her fellow Kansas Democrats. As the Democrats know full well, a state constitutional guarantee to abortion access means virtually every law passed by the legislature will be declared unconstitutional by the state courts. Waiting period: struck. Parental notification: struck. Informed consent provisions: struck. But taxpayer funding of abortions to ensure access for poor women that will be required. Conversely, the passage of the amendment merely means that the authority to regulate abortions will be returned to the legislative branch, where it rightly belongs.

Many of the political advertisements funded by out-of-state donors repeat the same false claims about the Value Them Both amendment as peddled in Holschers Friday op-ed. And it is not merely the Planned Parenthood types flooding Kansas with money in the hopes of defeating the amendment. An out-of-state billionaire heiress who promotes left-wing causes contributed 15 percent of the total raised by the anti-amendment group, or $1,000,000. A further 23 percent of the donations to the anti-amendment Kansans for Constitutional Freedom campaign came from liberal super-PACS, including groups that the Atlantic and Politico have classified as leftist dark-money networks, such as the 1630 Fund and the North Fund. North Fund operates an umbrella group for various left-of-center advocacy organizations and has spent millions to promote causes that included opposing a 22-week abortion ban.

With such huge influxes of cash from outsiders, those pushing to defeat the Kansas amendment have been able to blanket the airways with distortions about the legal import of the Value Them Both amendment. And according to Danielle Underwood, the director of communications for Kansans for Life, out-of-state, radical activists and politicians in Washington, D.C., are trying to force their extreme pro-abortion agenda on the people of Kansas. These unwelcome intruders include the Biden administration and far-left congressional members like Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren, Underwood told The Federalist, and they do not represent the people of Kansas or our values.

At this critical moment, Underwood added, Kansans can and must fight back against outside interests aggressive tactics by voting yes on the Value Them Both Amendment. It is the only way to safeguard the common-sense abortion limits we already agree on and show the world our state believes in protections for both women and babies.

Kansas voters may not recognize the outside influences in play, however, but if they take the time to actually read the proposed amendment before marking their ballots tomorrow, theyll realize that the no side of the debate has been lying to them for the last year-and-a-half. Or Kansas voters can instead learn the truth the hard way when, once the amendment has been defeated, abortion activists turn to the state courts to start striking the current abortion regulations on the books and obtain taxpayer-funded abortion. Conservative Kansans will then learn what so-called abortion access really means.

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that the reporting period during which the anti-amendment group raised $6.54 million was approximately a half-year, not one-and-a-half years.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist's senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prizethe law schools highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Out-Of-State Dems Dump Millions Into Kansas Election Because Abortion Is On The Ballot - The Federalist

I have led the fight in the Senate to hold Big Tech platforms such as Google accountable for their manipulation and use of machine learning that unfairly censor communications from political campaigns and rob the electorate of their options. Our latest demands for transparency and fairness apparently spooked Google. But instead of moving to treat all political emails the same and filtering Republican versus Democrat communications as they are now, the tech giant has proposed a pilot program in the form of an Advisory Opinion, currently with the Federal Election Commission.

This proposal would eliminate all spam filter algorithms for participating candidates and organizations. While this proposal may appear to be in the best interest of all political emails, Gmails current deliverability practices have disincentivized Democratic campaigns from joining the program due to the increased chance of unsubscribes. Further, Google has created a loophole in the program allowing them to change the rules whenever its convenient to them, requiring participants to adhere and comply with no exception.

Let me be clear: Googles pilot program is the wrong approach. We should have the expectation that if a voter signs up for a Republican campaigns email, they should receive those emails in their inbox.

I know political bias in Silicon Valley better than most; as someone who was branded a terrorist by an engineer at Google and whose pro-life campaign video was removed by Twitter for being inflammatory, Ive learned when to laugh it off and when to stand my ground. This is a case of the latter.

Email is the norm for how we conduct business, stay in touch with friends and family, learn about sales from our favorite retailers, and receive updates from political campaigns and organizations. Millions of Americans have signed up to receive emails from political candidates through campaign websites, petitions, surveys, or events, signaling their interest in receiving updates and information from the campaign trail.

But this is unfortunately not how its been playing out. Though email communications have been normalized on campaigns for several election cycles and email use continues to grow globally, the disparity between Democratic and Republican email inboxing has reached a breaking point this year. Google, the most dominant email provider, has been a particularly bad actor. Unfairly gatekeeping inboxes and censoring the voices of hundreds of conservative candidates, committees, and causes by sending their emails to spam or, worse, failing to deliver messages. A recent study by North Carolina State University found that nearly 80 percent of emails sent by conservatives ended up in spam folders.

Meanwhile, the Democrats had a banner year in 2020, with the Democratic National Committee flaunting best practices and recommendations by emailing a list of dormant email addresses, and instead of triggering spam filters, reactivating 875,000 supporters. In a Substack post written a month after the 2020 election, the DNC Mobilization Team bragged they sent every single emailable inactive at least two emails and reactivated millions of supporters who accounted for 16% of our online fundraising revenue in the last quarter of the election. These levels of engagement and activity are unheard of.

Its clear that the liberal elites in Silicon Valley are once again placing their thumb on the scale, manipulating communications that could lead to consequential outcomes. When a conservative supporter goes to a Republican website to sign up to receive emails, we should be confident that they will get the emails they signed up to receive. But even after consultation with top email specialists to achieve and execute best practices, Republicans still cannot guarantee that to be the case. This is shameful and wrong.

Its absurd, isnt it, that in 2022, Big Tech elites have made the practice of delivering an email from point A to point B so complicated and polarized?

Conservatives are not asking for the ability to send unsolicited emails in an unchecked manner. We believe in the protections used to defend consumers against malicious attacks, bad actors, and unwanted communications. We are simply asking that Google treat Republican emails the same as those of our Democratic counterparts, and to make transparent the rules used to place emails in inboxes.

When I ran for Senate, I vowed to the people of Tennessee that I would never back down from a fight. I never thought one of those fights would be about something as simple as email, but this just demonstrates how out of control Silicon Valley and the liberal elites are and why this fight is more important than ever. If email is under attack now, whats next?

Marsha Blackburn is a United States senator from Tennessee.

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Google's Solution To Its Campaign Email Problem Is A Phony Fix - The Federalist