Conservative: We’ve Normalized Left’s Violence
Conservative Ben Shapiro spoke last week at UC Berkeley “without the mayhem we’ve become accustomed to seeing at such appearances,” thanks to $600,000 worth of police security, notes Megan McArdle. Still, she asks, “how relieved should we be that this is what it takes to maintain order in the face of … a speech?” In the name of opposing Donald Trump, we’ve “instead normalized a lot of other things, bad ones. Like public disorder. Like persistent, pervasive anxiety that often looks like mass hysteria.” After all, “it’s not as if Antifa is a crack team of investigators who can stop crimes before they happen. The only things they can stop, and the police cannot, are things that aren’t crimes: notably, people exercising their First Amendment rights.”
Education beat: Tweaking Public Confidence in Charters
Mene Ukueberuwa at National Review finds it “alarming” that a new poll shows “public support for charter schools has declined by more than 10 percentage points just in the past year, with the rising doubts spread evenly across party lines.” Charter advocates should take this “as an urgent call to rebut the slander” being heaped by left-wing advocacy groups, and to “address the deficient policies” that have “held back their success in some regions.” Two of the latter: a reluctance in some areas to close under-performing schools and the fact that independent schools do not perform as well as those in an established network. In the long run, he suggests, “expanding the practices that boost charter schools’ performance will be more important for sustaining [their] popularity than merely squashing thin left-wing criticisms.”
Culture critic: Mower Boy Sends Best Kind of Message
Only “someone with a heart of stone could frown” on the story of 11-year-old Frank Giaccio, who got his wish to mow the White House lawn, says Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist. That someone, it turns out, is former New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse, who tweeted that the heartwarming episode was “not sending a great signal on child labor, minimum wage occupational safety.” Says Hemingway: “Kudos to Frank — who wore solid shoes, protective eye gear and ear plugs — for learning to spend his adolescence wisely and productively” by mowing lawns to earn money. Because “the bigger problem is that too many kids are not being given opportunities to develop work habits, engage with different generations, or learn basic life skills.”
From the right: Obama Strikes Gold on Wall Street
Barack Obama has shown yet again that he beat Hillary Clinton in 2008 because “he’s the smart one,” says Becket Adams at the Washington Examiner. Case in point: Unlike Clinton, Obama “waited until after his White House ambitions were fed before joining the extremely lucrative Wall Street speaking circuit.” Still, it’s “remarkable that the man who routinely scolded” Wall Street “is now giving six-figure speeches to bankers, and it hasn’t even been a year since he left the White House.” A spokesman insists the former president delivers addresses that are “true to his values.” No problem, says Adams — what’s “amusing” is that this “contrasts his political savvy to
Clinton’s lack thereof.” Did Hillary “really think no one would ask about her lucrative speeches to Wall Street bankers? Talk about self-inflicted wounds.”
Foreign desk: Trump Can Save Palestinian Statehood
This is “not the time to fashion a Mideast deal,” says Jackson Diehl at The Washington Post, but “the time for one has not run out,” though it is “probably years away.” And though Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry blamed Israeli settlement expansion, a “revelatory” new project now documents that of 600,000 settlers beyond the Green Line, only 94,000 are outside Israel’s border-like barrier. If the Palestinians accepted the deal proposed in 2008 by then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, “only 20 percent of current settlers would find themselves on the wrong side of the border.” The “good news” is that neither side “wants to say ‘no’ to Trump.” So “a wise US policy would aim at preserving that option until Israeli and Palestinian leaders emerge who can act on it.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann