Free Republic

Oregon’s Democratic governor, Kate Brown, just signed a bill that eliminates the reading and math proficiency requirements for high school graduation in Oregon’s government-run schools. Brown’s spokesman, Charles Boyle, said this will help “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.” Of course I totally disagree with Boyle. This will not help those students. On the contrary, it will hurt them. I support high academic standards for students of all races and ethnicities. I hope the parents in Oregon will remove their children from these abominable, dumbed down government-run schools, and send their children to private...

I am not at all qualified to introduce today’s guest writer, Sergiu Klainerman. I barely eked out a C+ in high school calculus, while Sergiu is a professor of mathematics at Princeton who specializes in the mathematical theory of black holes. He’s been a MacArthur fellow, a Guggenheim fellow and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Mathematics allowed a young Sergiu, who came of age in Ceausescu’s Romania, to escape to a world where right and wrong couldn’t be fudged, and, ultimately, to a life of freedom in the United States. Without math, his life quite literally...

The Seattle City Council unanimously voted Monday to ditch an ordinance allowing police officers to arrest loiterers if they’re suspected of drug dealing or prostitution, citing its racial origins. The rejection of the loitering bill, which reportedly affected black communities at a higher rate, has moved to Democratic Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s desk for final approval before the law is no more. The law has been used to arrest about 300 suspected criminals since 2009, according to The Seattle Times. “These laws were never appropriate, they were wrong when they were enacted and they are wrong now,” said Councilman Andrew...

The Obama administration Wednesday issued new guidelines on classroom discipline, seeking to end the apparent disparities in how students of different races are punished for violating school rules.

Larry Summers, the incoming director of the National Economic Council, predicted Sunday that President-elect Obama would keep the unemployment rate below 10 percent. “I think while we’re going to see substantial job losses, frankly what’s important about the president’s program here is that it is going to contain what would otherwise be just a vicious cycle,” Summers said on CBS’s “Face the Nation”. “People spend less, therefore, others earn less, therefore, they spend less.” Summers said that Obama has received a “terrific response” from Congress on his plan for a massive stimulus to pump money into the economy mainly by...

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards said if he wasn’t elected president, the population of African-American males is likely to either wind up in prison or dead. At an MTV/MySpace.com forum Thursday, Edwards responded to a question about inner-city kids partaking in violence by saying there was no “silver bullet” to fight the problem. “We start with the president of the United States saying to America, ‘we cannot build enough prisons to solve this problem. And the idea that we can keep incarcerating and keep incarcerating — pretty soon we’re not going to have a young African-American male population in America....

You guys have had total rule of the Country for years and years and here we are with $3 a gallon gas, a mess overseas, and crappy jobs here with wages depressed by unchecked illegal immigration. Stop whining about us -- you run the darn country, and you aren't doing jack. You've got about 6 months left before you are thrown out of Congress and we run it, and impeachment proceedings begin against your President. It will happen, too, as though the bluebloods and corporate fat cats who reside here might laugh at $3 a gallon gas, I am sure...