Eye on ’24: Christie’s Just Helping Trump
New Hampshire is “the rare state where anti-Trump Republicans” are “thick on the ground,” reports New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore, and where Chris “Christie has focused his campaign all along,” thereby “exploiting one early state’s peculiar political culture to give himself one sunny spot in an otherwise bleak landscape of abject defeat.”
Yet “Christie is nowheresville outside New Hampshire,” so it’s “likely to be the high point and perhaps the end point of Christie 2024.”
If he “threw in the towel,” Nikki Haley or other non-Trump candidates could grab the 11% he’s pulling there and “make an actual race of it in the Granite State.”
Does he want “his 2024 legacy to be helping grease the skids for an easy Trump win in the state where the former president is most vulnerable to an upset”?
Supply-sider: Biden’s China Denial
President Biden’s blather about “a stable relationship” with China, fumes Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow, ignores “the elephant in the living room,” namely: “China’s worldwide strategy is aimed squarely at upending America’s influence and its commitment to democratic values.”
Central to the prez’s foreign-policy failings is that “he avoids a realistic picture of the world scene.”
E.g.: “Biden refuses to acknowledge that China’s U.S.- sanction-breaking oil imports from Russia and Iran are financing two major wars against the United States.”
If Trump policies had continued, US oil production “would be somewhere around 15 or 16 million” barrels per day, and “the world oil price would be something around $40 a barrel,” so “we wouldn’t particularly care whether China was buying oil from Iran or Russia — it would just be a drop in the bucket.”
As for “climate cooperation”: “In 2022, China permitted an average of two new coal-fired power plants per week.”
From the right: Randi’s Homeschooling Assist
“What’s behind the increase in homeschooling,” tweeted American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten, and with her usual “lack of self-awareness,” snarks Mary Katharine Ham at Reason, she cited “gun violence,” plus the lack of “anti-bullying programs” and “services for special needs students.”
In truth, “Weingarten deserves much of the credit.” She advocated school-closure policies that hurt special-needs students — who experienced “steeper declines in test scores and graduation rates than their peers.”
The homeschooling surge “during the 2020 school year has not dropped off, attracting enthusiasts from diverse racial and income backgrounds.”
Parents found “they had the power to fix some of the problems the pandemic posed.”
In choosing to homeschool, they’re “reaching for the very opposite of credentialed institutionalism in an attempt to educate their children.”
Cartoonist: Speaking the Truth in the Funnies
“I stand by the cartoon — and I stand by my critics’ right to condemn it,” declares Michael Ramirez at Newsweek after The Washington Post pulled his work depicting Hamas leader “Ghazi Hamad and his human shields” from its “editorial website amid an internal outcry.”
“Critics of my cartoon are using an accusation of racism as a device to ‘cancel’ the truth — the overwhelming empirical evidence that Hamas uses civilians, both Palestinians and Israelis, as human shields.”
How “ironic that those who criticize the cartoon for overgeneralizing and stereotyping cannot seem to distinguish between a known terrorist group and Palestinians.”
Well: “Sometimes, the truth hurts.”
Campus watch: Bring on the Donor Revolt!
“The donor revolts at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and elsewhere are the long-overdue wake up calls that their faculty and administrators needed,” thunder Michael B. Poliakoff & Steven McGuire at RealClearPolitics.
“The disingenuous administrators and faculty who run our elite academic institutions have had their chance to govern autonomously. We see where they have led us”: to schools “unable to give a full-throated condemnation of a terrorist attack on Israeli civilians of monstrous savagery.”
The “people inside” higher ed “have shown little interest in starting the process” of change. So “trustees, donors, and alumni” must “intervene and give these institutions the gift of reform they so urgently need.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board