Democratic mayoral race didn't even TOUCH on fixing the public schools
If there's one thing the Democratic candidates for mayor don't want to talk about, it's getting better results out of the city's public schools.
Even though the Department of Education, now burning more than $40 billion a year and over $33,000 per student, is easily the biggest item in the city budget and still growing even though enrollment is declining.
To be fair, one candidate did want to talk about the schools, but hedge-fund exec and philanthropist Whitney Tilson never got traction, perhaps because he alone refused to kow-tow to the United Federation of Teachers.
Otherwise, 'I give the mayoral candidates a D or an F grade across the board,' said Ray Domanico, co-author of a damning Manhattan Institute report on education in the mayoral race.
Of course, most of the field are die-hard progressives who'll never question the anti-excellence 'equity' agenda, nor cross the self-serving UFT.
The worst of them, Zohran Mamdani, actually calls for ending mayoral control of the DOE and so guaranteeing that voters can't hold anyone accountable for failing schools.
This, when just 33% of the city's fourth graders scored proficient in math last year and 28% in reading, numbers that don't get any better in the higher grades.
Supposedly less-radical Andrew Cuomo did try to stand up to the teachers unions as governor, but got his hat handed to him.
He's since publicly denounced his own past positions and even embraced a core priority of the mayor he once held in utter contempt, calling to ramp up Bill de Blasio's 'community schools' initiative.
In all, Cuomo's education platform panders shamelessly to the UFT and its hatred of charter schools — the only part of the public-school system that offers real educational opportunity in most of the city.
No one in the race dares call for a return to Bloomberg-era policies: expanding charters while opening more good regular public schools and doing top-down reorganization of failed ones.
Nor will they breathe a word about chronic absenteeism, a huge post-COVID problem.
More than a third, 34.8%, of Gotham students — about 300,000 public school kids —missed at least 10% of the 180-day school year in 2024, up from 26.5% in 2019.
That's a disaster, but the candidates won't even talk about it
Maybe the fall campaign will see candidates talking about doing better for New York's kids, but it's beyond damning that the topic is taboo in today's Democratic Party.
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Atlantic
3 hours ago
- Atlantic
The Only Iran Hawk Is Trump
By carrying out air-strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites last night, Donald Trump showed the fundamental error of American political ornithology: There have never been Iran hawks and Iran doves. There have been only doves. Every prior U.S. president, including Trump himself, has refrained from attacking Iranian territory, even in response to killings and attempted killings of Americans, not only abroad but also on American soil. Whether this dovish approach was wise is debatable; that it was anomalous among American policies toward hostile countries is not. Imagine if Venezuela relentlessly plotted to kill Americans, in locations around the world—and tried to acquire a weapon that would safeguard its campaign of violence for generations to come. Other countries have not been so bold as Iran, and if they had been, the response might have looked like what Iran saw last night in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. At a press conference, Trump said the nuclear sites were 'completely and totally obliterated.' Also beyond debate are the results of that dovish policy, up to yesterday. Some of those results were positive. The United States and Iran were not at war, and American forces in the Middle East were not all at high alert for reprisals. But Iran had gone metastatic. It had, with impunity, set up armed proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, and Iraq, and less overt forces around the world. What other country does this? What other country does this without rebuke? The best argument against attacking Iran's nuclear program has always been that the attack will not work—that it would at best set the program back, rather than end it, and that Tehran would respond by building back better, in a deeper bunker and with greater stealth. An enrichment facility capable of producing a nuclear weapon need not be large, perhaps with the size and power needs of a Costco or two. The Obama-era nuclear deal secured unprecedented access for monitoring Iran's known nuclear sites. The demolition of those sites means that any future ones will be unmonitored, remaining a secret from outsiders for years, like China's was. Think of the cavernous chemistry lab built below the laundry-processing plant in Breaking Bad, but churning out uranium-235, not blue meth. If any other country is thinking about going nuclear, it will learn the lesson of last night and start with the Breaking Bad approach, or better yet scrap its plans completely. From the perspective of nonproliferation, Trump's strikes could be good news, in the obvious sense that countries that desire nuclear weapons now have more reason to think their centrifuges will be destroyed before they produce enough material for a bomb. Up to now, most countries that have persevered have eventually succeeded in going nuclear. The most notable counterexamples were Iraq, whose so-called 'nuclear mujahedin' (as Saddam Hussein later called them) had their enrichment plant at Osirak bombed by Israel in 1981; and Syria, which built a secret plutonium-producing nuclear reactor only to have it destroyed, again by Israel, in 2007. If the strikes last night worked (and it is far too early for anyone, including Trump, to say), Iran will join the small club of nations whose nuclear ambitions have been thwarted by force. 'There will be either peace,' Trump said at his press conference last night, 'or far greater tragedy for Iran.' What might peace and its alternatives look like? Trump did not say, as the Iran dove George W. Bush might have, that peace is conditional on the overthrow of Iran's theocracy. Trump has always seemed open to Iran's continued rule by any authoritarian or scumbag or religious nut who is willing to keep to himself and maybe allow the Trump family to open a hotel someday. So peace could conceivably still take many forms, some of which will disappoint Iranian democrats and secularists. The alternative to peace, which Trump promises will draw such a tragic reply, can take both immediate and longer-term forms. The immediate form is continued Iranian strikes against Israel and the expansion of those attacks to include U.S. bases in the region. (The logic of international law, for what little it is worth, would seem to permit retaliation against military targets—but not hospitals, apartment buildings, or other civilian infrastructure—of both Israel and the United States.) It would at this point be foolhardy for Iran to increase such attacks, rather than ending them or tapering them off. But no one familiar with Iran's history would expect it to limit its reply to conventional strikes, or to prefer them to the irregular forms of attack that it has practiced avidly for more than 40 years. A barrage of ballistic missiles, the regime understands, may invite a tragedy for Iran. But what about the mysterious disappearance of an American from the streets of Dubai, Bahrain, or Prague? Or the blowing up of a hostel full of Israelis in Bangkok? Or cutting the brakes of some American or Israeli diplomat's car in Baku? Small acts of harassment, such as these, force Iran's enemies to make hard choices about how to retaliate. The difficulty of those choices are part of the reason for past presidents' consistent reluctance to attack Iran. Do you attack Iran after the death of one U.S. Marine? How about two? How much proof of Iranian involvement in a diplomat's car crash will it take to trigger a renewed state of war? Iran's history suggests that under normal circumstances, it knows the level of provocation that will keep an American president from responding with direct force. Its estimations seem to have failed it for Trump (and Benjamin Netanyahu), but in the past and in the future, one can expect that it will, like a niggling spouse from hell, know the precise limits of its adversaries' patience. The point of the prolonged pressure, staying a smidge under the threshold of renewed hostility, is to drive Iran's adversaries mad, to tire them out, and to convince them to leave the region out of sheer stress and weariness. Ironically Trump's foreign policy is, or was until yesterday, proof that this strategy is effective. Trump came to power as an isolationist in trade and a bring 'em home skeptic of U.S. military action abroad. In his first term he fired John Bolton, a tireless advocate of regime change. In his second he appointed Tulsi Gabbard, high priestess of weary isolationism, as a top adviser. Trump said that he would escalate American attacks 'if peace does not come quickly.' It is possible that peace will come quickly, and Iran's government will survive in humiliated form. It is also possible, under those circumstances, that the peace that comes quickly will again be illusory, and Iran will revert to tactics short of war, so it can wait out Trump's term, and let another dove take his place. In that case, the Middle East and beyond will be a scarier place to be an American than it was a few days ago.
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Brother and sister compete for Florida state Senate seat in a sibling showdown
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Hamilton Spectator
4 hours ago
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Democrats are at odds over response as Trump announces the US has entered Israel-Iran war
After nearly two years of stark divisions over the war in Gaza and support for Israel, Democrats seemed to remain at odds over policy toward Iran. Progressives demanded unified opposition before President Donald Trump announced U.S. strikes against Tehran's nuclear program but party leaders were treading more cautiously. U.S. leaders of all stripes have found common ground for two decades on the position that Iran could not be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon. The longtime U.S. foe has supported groups that have killed Americans across the Mideast and threatened to destroy Israel. But Trump's announcement Saturday that the U.S. had struck three nuclear sites could become the Democratic Party's latest schism, just as it was sharply dividing Trump's isolationist 'Make America Great Again' base from more hawkish conservatives. Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, noted that in January, Trump suggested the U.S. could 'measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.' 'Today, against his own words, the president sent bombers into Iran,' Martin said in a statement. 'Americans overwhelmingly do not want to go to war. Americans do not want to risk the safety of our troops abroad.' Sen. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, said the U.S. entering the war in Iran 'does not make America more secure.' 'This bombing was an act of war that risks retaliation by the Iranian regime,' Welch said in a statement. While progressives in the lead-up to the military action had staked out clear opposition to Trump's potential intervention, the party leadership played the safer ground of insisting on a role for Congress before any use of force. Martin's statement took a similar tact, stating, 'Americans do not want a president who bypasses our constitution and pulls us towards war without Congressional approval. Donald Trump needs to bring his case to Congress immediately.' Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine called Trump's actions, 'Horrible judgement' and said he'd 'push for all senators to vote on whether they are for this third idiotic Middle East war.' Many prominent Democrats with 2028 presidential aspirations had been silent on the Israel-Iran war , even before Trump's announcement — underscoring how politically tricky the issue can be for the party. 'They are sort of hedging their bets,' said Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state who served under Democratic President Barack Obama and is now a strategist on foreign policy. 'The beasts of the Democratic Party's constituencies right now are so hostile to Israel's war in Gaza that it's really difficult to come out looking like one would corroborate an unauthorized war that supports Israel without blowback.' Progressive Democrats also are using Trump's ideas and words Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., had called Trump's consideration of an attack 'a defining moment for our party.' Khanna had introduced legislation with Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., that called on the Republican president to 'terminate' the use of U.S. armed forces against Iran unless 'explicitly authorized' by a declaration of war from Congress. Khanna used Trump's own campaign arguments of putting American interests first when the congressman spoke to Theo Von, a comedian who has been supportive of the president and is popular in the so-called 'manosphere' of male Trump supporters. 'That's going to cost this country a lot of money that should be being spent here at home,' said Khanna, who is said to be among the many Democrats eyeing the party's 2028 primary. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who twice sought the Democratic presidential nomination, had pointed to Trump's stated goal during his inaugural speech of being known as 'a peacemaker and a unifier.' 'Supporting Netanyahu's war against Iran would be a catastrophic mistake,' Sanders said about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Sanders reintroduced legislation prohibiting the use of federal money for force against Iran, insisted that U.S. military intervention would be unwise and illegal and accused Israel of striking unprovoked. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York signed on to a similar bill from Sanders in 2020, but so far was holding off this time. Some believed the party should stake out a clear anti-war stance. 'The leaders of the Democratic Party need to step up and loudly oppose war with Iran and demand a vote in Congress,' said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama aide, on X. Mainstream Democrats are cautious, while critical The staunch support from the Democratic administration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for Israel's war against Hamas loomed over the party's White House ticket in 2024, even with the criticism of Israel's handling of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Trump exploited the divisions to make inroads with Arab American voters and Orthodox Jews on his way back to the White House. Today, the Israel-Iran war is the latest test for a party struggling to repair its coalition before next year's midterm elections and the quick-to-follow kickoff to the 2028 presidential race. The party will look to bridge the divide between an activist base that is skeptical of foreign interventions and already critical of U.S. support for Israel and more traditional Democrats and independents who make up a sizable, if not always vocal, voting bloc. In a statement after Israel's first strikes on Iran, Schumer said Israel has a right to defend itself and 'the United States' commitment to Israel's security and defense must be ironclad as they prepare for Iran's response.' Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., said 'the U.S. must continue to stand with Israel, as it has for decades, at this dangerous moment.' Other Democrats have condemned Israel's strikes and accused Netanyahu of sabotaging nuclear talks with Iran. They are reminding the public that Trump withdrew in 2018 from a nuclear agreement that limited Tehran's enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions negotiated during the Obama administration. 'Trump created the problem,' Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., posted on X. The progressives' pushback A Pearson Institute/Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from September 2024 found that about half of Democrats said the U.S. was being 'too supportive' of Israel and about 4 in 10 said their level of support was 'about right.' Democrats were more likely than independents and Republicans to say the Israeli government had 'a lot' of responsibility for the continuation of the war between Israel and Hamas. About 6 in 10 Democrats and half of Republicans felt Iran was an adversary with whom the U.S. was in conflict. ___ Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Linley Sanders, Will Weissert and Lisa Mascaro in Washington contributed to this report Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . 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