The big deal about the citizen question ...

Trump has announced that he wants the next Census to include a question about whether or not the person surveyed is a citizen. 

This has caused an uproar. 

Critics say it will suppress responses from illegal immigrants.  They point out that the Census is supposed to be a true count of all people residing in the country. It shouldn’t matter if any of those people are here illegally – they’re here. 

California officials have already said they will sue. The mayors of a lot of big cities say they will, too.  Their premise is that it’s discriminatory, and irrelevant. They add that it’s a shameless ploy by Trump and Republicans to fire up the conservative base before the mid-terms. 

So let me clarify why they are so afraid of this question. 

It has absolutely nothing to do with discrimination. Or firing up the conservative base, although it will probably do that as well. 

It’s all about money. In particular, Federal money. And power.  

Ever wonder why big cities want to attract illegal immigrants? Or why California puts out the welcome mat for illegals through sanctuary city policies? 

Headcounts, not citizen counts, are used to determine how much Federal money is allocated. So it actually rewards places with large populations – legal or otherwise – with more money. If, as critics claim, illegals are less likely to respond if asked about their citizenship, then many areas will see their population numbers go down, and Federal funding will also decline.

Now, Trump is saying he wants the citizen question as part of his effort to ensure that only citizens are voting. That’s a valid goal, especially since many blue states – such as California, and soon Pennsylvania – are aggressively trying to avoid policing who is, in fact, voting.  Democrat mayors and governors are working furiously to prevent any attempt to crack down on voter fraud. 

In some cases, they are going to extreme lengths to enable voter fraud.

Chicago's Rahm Emmanuel has approved a “government-issued” (Chicago only) picture ID card anyone can get to bypass any requirement to prove citizenship to vote.  Anyone can simply show a utility bill to get one, and it can be used to register to vote. Geez, I wonder what he’s up to. 

Several states also have “motor-voter” laws that automatically register to vote anyone who gets a driver’s license. Do you think all those states are demanding a passport or birth certificate to get a driver’s license? Go ahead, take a minute to think about that. 

Pennsylvania’s governor – a Democrat of course – is asking his legislature to approve same-day registration to vote. He’s also pushed online registration to get more high-school students registered, and now wants to eliminate the requirement that PA voters give a reason why they need an absentee ballot. Yeah, asking for a reason has kept so many PA voters from getting an absentee ballot. 

Maryland allows municipalities to set their own standards for who is eligible to vote. In this, one of the bluest of blue states, being a citizen is not required in many municipalities. 

Does anyone not see what’s going on here? 

Having lived in Pennsylvania for many years, and worked in downtown Philly for most of those, voter fraud there is already rampant. It’s a running joke in Philly, where people are urged to vote early and vote often. In some areas in Philly, 100% of the votes in some precincts went to Democrats, which is statistically impossible because that presumes no errors at all. In other PA districts there were more votes cast than registered voters.   

PA is not alone in this.  Other, predominantly Democrat, states reported similar weirdness where more people voted than were registered to vote, or more people voted than lived in that district. 

Anyone who believes there is no voter fraud in national elections is a liar or an idiot. 

Or a Democrat. Perhaps all three.   

There’s a very simple answer: a free national identity card for adults, with their birthdate, their picture and thumbprint, and a bar code for scanning. Only one for each citizen. 

Whenever anyone becomes a new citizen by following the proper legal process, they get this card. Whenever someone is born here, they are automatically registered, and on their 18^th birthday they show up with a valid birth certificate and have their picture taken and thumbprint recorded to complete the card. Cards would be renewed every five years in a process similar to getting a new passport; you’d have to turn in the old one to get a new one.     

That would prevent non-citizens from voting, college students from voting multiple times, and seriously curtail voter fraud.  The same card would also verify that someone is eligible for government benefits – that alone would probably save us billions every year.   

I’ve heard all the arguments against a national identity card.  It’s “big brother.” There’s no need for it.  It’s too much of an inconvenience for the poor and minorities. It’s fascist.  Why should anyone have to prove who they are to exercise their right to vote or get benefits … 

All these arguments are bullshit. 

The only reason anyone is opposed to a national identity card is because it would separate who is here legally and who isn’t, and who deserves the rights of a citizen and who doesn’t. 

And of course, who is really who they say they are. 

It’s like the census question Trump wants. The only people opposed to it – and a national identity card – are those gaming the system for their own purposes.   

Diminishing astonishment and our political environment …

Years ago I posed my theory of the Point of Diminishing Astonishment. 

In short strokes, the PODA is about human nature and how we recognize meaningful change. When we see enough of something, we start subconsciously diminishing its importance; it becomes just more of the same -- the new normal -- and our tendency is to ignore it. To then move the needle and get our attention, that something has to increase at least a whole magnitude, but preferably exponentially.  A mere incremental increase doesn’t do it. 

The original basis for my theory had to do with technology – more specifically modem speed, first, and then CPU processing speed (an extension of Moore’s Law). Nobody got too excited when either of those stepped up incrementally; they had to double or triple or more to get attention.

Then that became the new floor for expectations. Anything less was inconsequential.

However, practical limits eventually come into play. There is a point when no matter what you do it simply won’t make much of a splash. You’ve hit the ultimate PODA for that. 

What does that have to do with today’s political environment?

Plenty, I believe. Especially when it has to do with Trump.  

The latest “bombshell” is that he’s a skirt-chasing weasel. No! Really??? 

For many years before he ran for office, Trump enjoyed his playboy persona. His dalliances with stars and celebrities were widely covered by local New York media. His affairs, his infidelity to wives and girlfriends, and his very public divorces over those infidelities were constant fodder for gossip columnists.  The front pages of NY media loved to show his latest trophy date.  

The fact that Trump likes women – a lot – and considers himself a modern-day Casanova who beds every woman he can is not news. To be surprised at that now is like being startled to learn Charlie Sheen has drug and alcohol issues, or that the Pope’s a Catholic. 

Yet it’s big news today that Trump never changed.

At least to media types. 

The rest of the public is more “meh.” Mainly because they’ve seen it so many times before.  Only the players change – now it’s a former Playboy playmate, a former porn star, and so what? Before it was dozens of others.  Is anybody surprised?

But how is Melania dealing with it? Probably the same way his first two wives did. Unhappy, for sure, yet shocked? – I doubt it. They knew who and what he was when they married him.

That’s the stunner for the media. Where’s the outrage?

Not just about his infidelity, but about everything Trump does.  From not being a traditional Republican, to fighting with his own party, to attacking his own Attorney General, to attacking Special Counsel Mueller, to forcing out his own appointees, to maybe starting a trade war, to saber-rattling with North Korea, to thumbing his nose at our alleged allies and neighbors, to overturning treaties, to moving our embassy to Jerusalem – they are aghast. 

He tweets. He taunts. He threatens. He insults.  And the media are shocked. 

I don’t know why they would be. He was doing all that from the moment he started his run for office. It may be a key reason why he won.

He’s just continuing the same stuff as President. What’s new?  

For most people, absolutely nothing. They’ve seen all this before, going on for almost two years now. By now, they’ve accepted it as the norm, even if they don’t always like it.

They’ve reached the Point of Diminishing Astonishment concerning Trump.       

I have to admit I’m getting there, too.   

By relentlessly pounding Trump over everything – and I mean everything – hour after hour, the media have inadvertently raised the bar so high now it’s almost impossible to find anything that will be perceived as earth-shaking anymore.

Trump should thank them.    

Politicizing school children …

I read about plans to have a nationwide walkout by school children to protest guns.

One preteen was quoted as saying they wanted people to show more kindness to each other and there should be no more guns so “people don’t suffer.”

Then a reported million kids walked out of school – along with thousands of their teachers – to attend rallies against guns.  In some cases, public schools provided buses to bring their students and teachers to these rallies.

The media predictably gushed over all this: here were students as young as first grade marching in unison to mark their opposition to the NRA, lax gun control, and guns in general. Some kids chanted “hey, hey NRA, how many kids did you slay today?” They held signs demanding that Congress ban assault weapons, legislate universal background checks, and more.

The media, liberals, and anti-gun groups were thrilled.  They described it as a “grassroots” movement by children for sensible action on guns. 

In some ways it was more of an Astroturf movement. Behind the scenes all this was organized in part by MoveOn.org, The Women’s March, a Bloomberg-funded group, Planned Parenthood, and of course sympathetic teachers and school administrators.

I don’t have anything against organized protests. I was part of some when I was in college.  However, it was usually against something very specific, with a very specific goal.  I don’t think that was the case with the recent student walk out. 

I seriously doubt many of the young participants knew much beyond what they’d been told in school or on social media. I suspect they didn’t know much about the 2^nd Amendment, our current gun laws, or that previous bans on assault weapons accomplished nothing. Or that the NRA has been in the forefront of promoting background check legislation for years.

Or that the 17 deaths at Parkland were more the result of a systemic failure by school administrators, local mental health and child services professionals, the FBI, and local law enforcement to do their jobs and get a clearly disturbed teen off the streets and into treatment.  There were ample warnings and evidence this nutjob was going to try to kill a lot of people long before he did. But for whatever reason, perhaps fear of getting involved, all those entities fell down on the job.    

That’s a lot tougher to grasp than political talking points to promote an agenda. Ignoring, or hiding, those realities behind bumper-sticker slogans is disingenuous. 

And using children as puppets to advance political goals of adults is a disgrace.  Spare me the crap about how great it is for children to be politically active. If school children started an anti-abortion protest, or marched against illegal immigration, or in opposition to assault weapons bans, the same forces now cheering on political activism by school children would be appalled.  

The children would be dismissed as uninformed and misguided, too young to know any better. Any adult who urging them on would be called a monster.

We all know this.  And all of which would also be true.

Promoting political activism by young school children – whatever the cause – in simply wrong, especially when it’s guided by adult authority figures. School children don’t always have the ability to see when they are being manipulated and used for someone else’s agenda.     

More to the point, whoever in our public schools is teaching young children to become politically active ought to be fired. Kids should be learning English, Math, Science, History, and yes, Civics – that long-abandoned subject that informed kids about the Constitution, how our representative form of government works, and their responsibilities as citizens when they became adults.  

It should not be the role of teachers to propagandize their political beliefs on school children. That should never, ever, be tolerated. 

Yet that’s what’s happening every day. 

Whether it’s teaching that climate change is exclusively man-made is proven science, that gender is a matter of choice not biology, that self-esteem is more important than learning to read and do math, how the traditional concept of a nuclear family and its social benefits is fundamentally bigoted, or how awful we are as a nation compared to others, that’s what’s being taught.

Opinions – which all those are – should never be taught as facts.        

We’re talking about school kids, after all. They may not be able to see the difference. 

The critical reasoning skills of today’s children aren’t that refined. Kids aren’t always aware when they’re being fed propaganda and opinions and not absolute facts. It’s bad enough many rely on misinformation and half-truths on social media.  Yet they also tend to accept whatever teachers tell them without question, and that’s not always the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Or that there are often multiple sides to a story.  On climate change. On the flexibility of gender.  On the value of self-esteem over everything else.  On the relative merits of the traditional nuclear family.  And how we as a nation compare to others.     

I would never accept teaching Creationism and Divine Intervention as the one and only way to explain the various species on the planet. Or that there are only four elements – Earth, Wind, Fire and Water – in place of Science. 

At the same time, it’s equally wrong to teach children to blindly believe a political and environmental agenda that appears to be intentionally one-sided.

Somewhere along the line teachers and school administrators became the high priests of what school children should believe and how they should act.  Perhaps this was because so many parents abrogated their own responsibility to shape the beliefs of their children.  So it was left to teachers and school administrators to fill the void. 

This has been a terrible mistake.  It’s allowed some in our public-school system – not all of course – to seize the opportunity to promote their own agenda and create a new generation of like-minded students to think and believe as they do. 

That’s the unstated, albeit real, goal of many of those pushing school children to become politically active; however, only to support causes they want them to support. They do this by presenting only one political perspective. One set of “facts.” And then their pupils are encouraged to reject anything that conflicts with their teacher’s worldview, which is mostly a progressive liberal perspective. 

So when you see young children holding signs opposing deportation of illegal immigrants, in favor of the rights of transgendered people to use the bathrooms of their choice, or, in this case opposing guns, look carefully beyond their earnest faces and apparent enthusiasm.   

Behind every one is typically someone using them to advance their own agenda.

Usually a teacher.  Or an organized special interest group. 

To them school children are photogenic pawns.  Bait for the media. 

It’s wrong to use children this way.