News & Brews October 14, 2024
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Judge says Cornel West will not be on Pa. ballot
The AP reports, “A federal judge has turned down Cornel West’s request to be included on the presidential ballot in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, expressing sympathy for his claim but saying it’s too close to Election Day to make changes.” In his order, however, the judge expressed “‘serious concerns’ about how Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt is applying restrictions in state election code to West.” Specifically, the judge wrote, “The laws, as applied to him [West] and based on the record before the court, appear to be designed to restrict ballot access to him (and other non-major political candidates) for reasons that are not entirely weighty or tailored, and thus appear to run afoul of the U.S. Constitution.”
Everyone is coming to Pa. this week (politically speaking)
Trump, Harris, Vance, and Walz are all slated to be in Pa. this week as polls continue to confirm, reconfirm, and show yet again (!) that this race is pretty much a dead heat. The Post-Gazette reports that Harris will be in Erie today for her 10th Pa. visit. Across the state, Trump will be in Oaks for a town hall this evening. Walz will make a few stops in western Pa. tomorrow. And Vance has a rally in Williamsport on Wednesday. Election Day is in 22 days, so it seems safe to say there’s still time for many more visits!
More details on Shapiro’s taxpayer-funded ‘summer camp’
Back in July, I shared the story of Gov. Shapiro’s questionable use of taxpayer dollars to host a so-called “Democracy Summer Camp” for social media influencers. The event was invitation only, and at the time, the suspicion was that invitations had focused on Democrat influencers, making this taxpayer-funded event essentially a Democrat campaign event. Well, turns out the suspicion was correct. The Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) reported earlier this month that it “obtained a list of 43 influencers the governor’s office invited to attend the publicly-funded training and, upon review, none of the influencers favored Republicans and roughly 70% had an explicitly liberal social media presence.” Not surprisingly, Shapiro’s office did not respond to DCNF’s request for comment.
Judge rules in favor of parents on opting out of gender identity teaching
A federal judge in Pa. recently ruled that the Mt. Lebanon School District in Allegheny County violated parents’ constitutional rights by not giving them the option to opt their young children out of gender identity teaching. The case stemmed from mothers of three first-grade students who said one of the school’s first-grade teachers, “herself a mother of a transgender child, read aloud to six- and seven-year-old students books that discussed gender transitioning.” The teacher also “explained to her students that sometimes ‘parents are wrong’ and parents and doctors ‘make mistakes’ when they bring a child home from the hospital.” You’ll recall that a few years ago, Pa. Democrats opposed curriculum transparency legislation.
Report: Kids catching up in cities with school choice
A new report from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI, hardly a ‘conservative’ think tank) found “that over the last decade, low-income students in large districts that aggressively expanded public school choices have started to catch up to their peers statewide — and performance levels are rising in both charter and district-led schools.” Call us not at all shocked by this finding. PPI’s Tressa Pankovits “says the report refutes often-cited claims that charters drain district schools of the best students and resources, to the detriment of those left behind. Instead, she argues, the increasing enrollment in charter schools creates ‘a positive competitive dynamic,’ and that the report’s findings should bolster policymakers’ confidence in the potential for fixing underperforming schools for all students in low-income communities.”