In ten days, France is having its presidential election. There’s been some drama since the last time we talked about it–the center-right candidate, Francois Fillon, has been wracked by scandal after it emerged that he paid members of his family for work they never performed. This weakened him, and created an opening for Emmanuel Macron to move into second behind Marine Le Pen. In the meantime, Jean-Luc Melenchon has been making a run in the polls from the left, pulling about even with Fillon for third. Fillon openly advocated for more austerity in France, raising the retirement age, and eliminating the 35-hour workweek, all policies which would not have been great for workers, to put it mildly. But Macron is hardly an inspiring alternative, and I’m less excited about Melenchon than I’d like to be. Here’s why.
Author: Benjamin Studebaker
Bernie Sanders is Right to Oppose Gorsuch
Today US Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) announced his intent to support efforts to filibuster Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination:
Sanders has made the right call. Here’s why.
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We Must Normalize Trump to Beat Him
Since President Trump’s inauguration, it’s become popular to demand that we not normalize Trump’s presidency. Politically, this means constantly drawing attention to all the things that Donald Trump does that separate him from past presidents. To that end, the left has focused on a suite of character and corruption-oriented issues:
- Trump’s tax returns
- Trump’s possible ties to Russia
- Trump’s tweets and style of communication (rude, bigoted, or post-fact)
- Trump’s conflicts of interest (nepotism, lack of blind trust, Ivanka involvement)
- Trump’s history of screwing people over (Trump University, bankruptcies, cost of Trump Tower security & Mar-a-Lago trips)
- Trump’s untruthful or corrupt henchmen (Spicer, Kushner, Conway, Bannon, Flynn, Sessions, etc.)
This is all a mistake. To beat Trump we need precisely the opposite approach–we must treat Trump as just another establishment Republican president and attack his administration for failing to help the people it promised to protect. Here’s why.
A Radical Proposal for Kindergarten and Pre-K
In our schools, we are often trying to accomplish two conflicting goals at once:
- We want our quickest students to maximize their potential–this means we want them to be in classes that move at their pace.
- We don’t want our slower students to be dismissed and devalued, so we are reluctant to separate them from the quicker students and put them in remedial classes where they may be given a low priority.
If we put fast students and slow students in the same age group together, the class will either move at a pace that’s too slow for the quick kids or too fast for the slow kids. If we separate them, educational resources tend to flow disproportionately to the kids who are already at an advantage, as they tend to have the most involved parents.
I have a suggestion to get around this problem while at the same time resolving public policy disputes about state support for expanding Pre-K education.
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What’s Next for the Healthcare Debate After Trumpcare
Trumpcare has been defeated, and it went down meekly, failing even to receive a vote in the house. But this is not over–ever since Obamacare was passed, the Republicans have taken a variety of low-profile steps to weaken the law and make it less effective. Their hope now is that if they wait, the damage they’ve inflicted and continue to inflict on the system will cause it to unravel, giving them an opportunity to try again.
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Benjamin Studebaker 