School wars: The Left vs. Immigrants, Muslims
A federal court ruled last week that parents have no “fundamental right” to opt their kids out of education that conflicts with their religious beliefs — shocking Montgomery County, Md. parents, “the majority of them Muslim and Ethiopian Christians,” reports Bethany Mandel at The Free Press. In February, the county public schools announced that “all classrooms would be adding ‘LGBTQ-inclusive texts approved for instructional use,’” including a Pride book “aimed at children aged 3 to 5,” and parents couldn’t opt their kids out. “The issue has united people across the faith spectrum in Maryland and beyond, including Muslims, Catholics, Ethiopian Christians, and Latter-Day Saints.” It’s “a test of the left’s tolerance of immigrants and diversity” in an “infamously deep-blue county” — and a new Coalition of Virtue is “actively recruiting Board of Education candidates.”
Pollster: How Republicans See Trump
Left or right in US politics, “most partisans” are “feeling quite certain that their own team will prevail in the upcoming election,” argues Kristen Soltis Anderson at The New York Times. So “most Republicans seem confident that their candidate — even Donald Trump, especially Donald Trump — would defeat Joe Biden handily in 2024.” His 2016 win despite experts’ insistence then that “Trump would never set foot in the White House” leads to “Republicans’ skepticism of claims that Mr. Trump is a surefire loser” now. In a focus group of GOP voters, half of them “interested in seeing a strong competitor to Mr. Trump within the party,” “not a single participant” thought Trump “— or any Republican, really — would lose to Mr. Biden.” Polls show that just 9% of GOP voters see Trump as a “long shot” to beat Biden; more than 60% think he’s a “sure bet.” And only 14% “of Republican primary voters who are considering a Trump alternative said they were doing so because they worried Mr. Trump couldn’t win.”
Media watch: Covering for Biden
Major media have “embarked on a Biden-Keeping Operation”: to protect the prez, notes The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker. For years “supposedly independent media organizations” have been “suppressing anything that undermines him” in a “journalism of omission.” E.g, many outlets “devoted more space to debunking the Sleepy Joe story” of Biden supposedly snoozing in a Maui public meeting “than they did to recording the numerous verbal gaucheries Mr. Biden visited on the bereaved and homeless people of” Hawaii. And it “shifted to outright suppression” in the October 2020 drive to discredit The Post’s Hunter Biden’s laptop scoops. “Let’s hope we have enough of a free market in information in the U.S. today to ensure” the effort fails.
Conservative: ‘Joe the Plumber’s Prescience
The Federalist’s David Harsanyi mourns the late Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, a k a “Joe the Plumber,” who “became a minor political celebrity” in 2008 by confronting Barack Obama. Events proved Joe right, as Obama became the “first post-war president to openly justify executive overreach for the sole purpose of working around the duly-elected lawmaking branch of government.” And ObamaCare was “the first time consequential national reform had been instituted by a single political party, without any buy-in from half the country.” Now “legislators not only applaud but beseech presidents to ignore their own branch of government and act unilaterally.” That “is Obama’s legacy.”
Eye on NY: Migrant Mess = Albany Crisis, Too
“The influx of foreign migrants to New York could cost the state $4.5 billion more than expected next year,” warns the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin about Gov. Hochul growing concern. Atop a “$9 billion budget gap in the fiscal year beginning next April 1” comes “an extra $1 billion in migrant-related costs, on top of $2 billion already allotted”; the shortfall may grow to $15 billion. NYC’s migrant-linked “financial problems risk becoming state government’s — and state taxpayers’—problems.” So expect “next year’s budget” negotiatons to be “the most difficult and acrimonious since the Global Financial Crisis.”
Compiled by The Post Editorial Board