Former California state senator Gloria Romero has defected to the Republican Party, telling reporters, “In this Capitol behind me, I served as both Senate Democratic Caucus chair and the Senate majority leader. But today I say goodbye. Adios! I’ve had enough.” The move follows Romero’s memo to her party in 2021. There are no academic or legal arguments against school choice, only political arguments. “I’ll just be blunt,” Romero wrote. “I’ll call it the abject stupidity of the Party elites who have embraced the vilest expressions of woke-ism and an abdication to the promise of education as the key to the American Dream that still matters to so many, particularly Latinos and African Americans, and the commitment to ensuring the public safety for all.” Despite the rhetoric, Romero’s recent defection is more about education than politics. In 2022, Romero joined Ric Grenell of Fix California to endorse the Education Savings Accounts Act of 2022. “As a proud Democrat who has dedicated my life to fighting against an entrenched education bureaucracy so that all California children can have all the opportunities afforded to our ruling class,” Romero proclaimed, “I proudly join with Ric and Fix California to give parents control over their children’s destiny.” The measure failed to qualify for the ballot, not the state’s first setback for school choice. The 1993 Proposition 174 required the state to provide a voucher for every school-age child equal to at least 50 percent of government per-pupil funding for K-12 schools. The vouchers could be redeemed at independent schools and the measure limited regulation of schools accepting vouchers. California’s teacher unions charged that the measure would lead to “witch schools,” Ku Klux Klan schools and such, and take away funding from government schools. Republican governor Pete Wilson opposed the measure, which failed to pass by a 70-30 margin. Students remained the captives of a bloated education establishment, and the problem was not limited to California. Not Just California’s Schools Schools in Washington D.C. are among the most dysfunctional and dangerous in the nation. Politicians such as Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama sent their children to elite private schools such as Sidwell Friends, but for inner city parents the only alternative is the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, run by Congress. Federal education bureaucrats and teacher unions oppose the program but Obama’s incoming education secretary Arne Duncan did them one better. The Harvard sociology grad rescinded scholarships already awarded to 216 families for the upcoming school year. Like the southern segregationists of old, Duncan stood in the schoolhouse door blocking both escape from dysfunctional government schools and entry to the independent schools the parents wanted. As the Washington Post lamented, “nine out of 10 students who were shut out of the scholarship program this year are assigned to attend failing public schools.” The vast majority of the students are black, so if their parents thought Duncan’s actions were racist it would be hard to blame them. The federal Department of Education Duncan headed dates only to 1978 and was Jimmy Carter’s payoff to teacher unions for endorsing his run for president. The top-heavy department did nothing to improve the quality of education, an outcome confirmed by the 1983 A Nation at Risk report. The failure marked by that report continues, now abetted by the woke junk thinking that Gloria Romero decries. The brave reformer may boast new allies, but she won’t get any help from the federal education department, which Democrats love, and which Republican presidents Reagan, Bush, and Donald Trump failed to eliminate. Government Monopoly on Schools In government monopoly education, taxpayer dollars must trickle down through multiple layers of bureaucratic sediment before they reach the classroom.  The system remains a collective farm of mediocrity and failure. There are no academic or legal arguments against school choice, only political arguments and the powerful teacher unions and politicians who wield them. There is little hope for reform until parents gain the freedom to choose the schools their children attend, government or independent, as a matter of basic civil rights. Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. READ MORE from Lloyd Billingsley: Should the People With All the Power Have All the Guns? California Makes Theft a Crime Again The post California Democrat Defects Over School Choice appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

While the Biden-Harris administration just approved $1.3 billion in aid to Egypt, a legacy of the Egypt-Israel peace agreement from 1979, Egypt continues to broadcast hatred against the Jewish state. Rather than finding ways to support Egypt-Israel peace and the Abraham Accords more broadly, Egyptian political figures and state-run media carry water for Hamas in defaming Israel, supporting jihad and genocide against the Jewish state, and opposing normalization with Israel.  State-Run Media Spews Hate Egypt’s media continues to defame Israel. In the government-sponsored Al-Ahram, Egyptian journalist Sa’id Shalash criticized the “slaughter” of Gazans by the “the barbaric Zionist-American-Western aggression,” and claimed that the reason that ISIS or similar organizations did not fight back against Israel is because those groups are created by the U.S. and Israel. “Israel’s continued existence will be a constant threat, so either the Arabs survive or Israel does — there is no other option.” Egyptian journalist Muhammad Hassan Al-Banna from the government-run daily Akhbar Al-Yawm similarly wrote that “[v]iolence and terrorism are an American-Israeli product,” and accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “bloodshed that kills women, children, and elders, destroys homes over people’s heads, banishes over two million Palestinians from their lands to the desert and kills them with starvation and American weapons, ammunition, and bombs.” Praise for Terrorism Egypt’s media also continues to glorify terrorism. Dr. Ibrahim Al-Baha, a columnist for the Egyptian state daily Al-Ahram, wrote warmly of “the heroic Palestinian warrior, who is not afraid of death and fights with determination, thinking only of victory or martyrdom,” while calling the Israeli soldier a “coward” and the Israeli army the “laughingstock of the entire world.” On state-run Al Qahera News TV,  Assistant Secretary-General of the Arab League Hossam Zaki stated that the Arab League no longer considers Hezbollah a terrorist organization. And such praise for terrorism naturally leads into praise for Palestinian statehood and the subsequent genocide of the Jews. Journalist Atef Zaidan of the state-run daily Akhbar Al-Yawm stated that the Al-Aqsa Flood [i.e., the October 7 attack on Israel] will be the most important and influential juncture in the history of the Palestinian struggle.… [for] it has turned the dream of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital into something much more attainable than it was in the past…As for the Zionist occupation state, its fate is to disintegrate and cease to exist.  Egyptian media also continues to oppose normalization of relations with Israel. Egyptian author and former MP Youssef Al-Qa’id stated on the Egyptian TV show Ten TV  that, In my view, any dealings with Israelis constitute treason … I disdain any cultural or ideological heritage coming from the [Israeli] entity.… They [i.e., Israelis] are the enemies of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and we should raise our children on this. I believe that the Israeli enemy comes before any other enemy and confronting it should be the primary mission of this generation our generation. This will only be completed with the annihilation of the state of Israel. Farouk Gouida, a columnist for the state-run Al-Ahram daily, similarly opposed normalization with Israel, and that “Israel’s continued existence will be a constant threat, so either the Arabs survive or Israel does — there is no other option.” On state-run CBC TV, host Qaswaa Al-Khalali said: “We should teach all the future generations, all our children, to hate Israel, to hate the Zionist entity, to hate the occupying authority, to hate this enemy, to hate these gangs who turned themselves into a state, into an entity.” Calls to End Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty And Egyptian public figures and media also explicitly call for the ending of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. Tarek El Khouly, the Deputy Chairman of the Egyptian House of Representatives’ Foreign Relations Committee, in an interview on BBC Arabic, called the Egypt-Israel peace treaty “a strategic choice, as part of its political maneuver to regain Egyptian lands at the time,” and that “[a] downgrading of the level of diplomatic relations is plausible.”  Given the evidence, it is more than reasonable to question Egypt’s commitment to peace in the Middle East. At the very least, the Biden-Harris administration must lean hard on Egypt — including with the threat of withholding aid — to reduce or eliminate Egypt’s hateful rhetoric towards Israel. READ MORE from Steve Postal: UK Parliament Gets Its Own Pro-Palestinian Squad The Palestinian Authority Is Jihadist Too The post Despite $1.3 Billion in US Aid Egypt Endorses Hamas appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

BREAKING: Donald Trump *was* the intended target of the shots fired at Trump International Golf Club according to CNN. Agents opened fire on a man who was at the Trump International Golf Course after they saw what appeared to be a gun according to the NYP. "Officials believe… pic.twitter.com/06JKTXeMO6 — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 15, […]

from Bannons War Room: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Cristina Laila, The Gateway Pundit: Another ‘coincidental’ Secret Service failure that led to the attempted assassination of President Trump. New details about the so-called security breakdown that led to an assassination attempt against President Trump during his Butler, Pennsylvania in July have been leaked to the Washington Post. According to WaPo, Secret Service agents […]