"There was a brief buzz in the media after former Vice President Joe Biden told a Black man that, if he didn't vote for Biden, he wasn't really Black. But this was more than just one of Biden's many gaffes.

"What really showed how much Biden took the Black vote for granted was his announcement that, when he is president, he would have 'a teacher-oriented Department of Education' and charter schools would not receive 'a penny of federal money.'

"Some of us think schools should be student-oriented. And official statistics show that students in charter schools in Harlem and other low-income minority communities in New York City pass the statewide mathematics tests at a rate more than 6 times the rate at which traditional public school students, housed in the same buildings, pass the same test.

"Why then is Biden against charter schools? Because the teachers unions are against charter schools. And, unlike Black voters, teachers unions -- with millions of members who vote and millions of dollars to donate as political campaign contributions -- do not automatically give their support to either political party, without getting something big in return.

"A majority of the students in charter schools are either Black or Hispanic, and they usually live in low-income communities. So teachers unions' opposition to charter schools is directly in conflict with the interests of low-income minority students. But low-income minority students do not vote, and their parents do not donate millions of dollars to political campaigns. ...

"While the hard facts are on the side of the charter schools, the rhetoric and the politics favor the unionized traditional public schools. Everything depends on how many of the facts reach how many minority group parents, and how many other people who still believe that schools should serve the interests of the students, rather than the interests of teachers unions.

"The stakes could not be higher for minority youngsters, for whom a decent education is often their one best chance for a better life."

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"Today's far left is not interested in winning debates with better arguments. It prefers to shut down debate altogether. It doesn't try to win the contest, it just harangues the referees to stop the game.

"If leftists don't like an op-ed, they want it unpublished. If they don't like a tweet, they want to track down the author and get him fired. If they don't like a tenured professor, they throw around Orwellian accusations that his or her ideas make them feel unsafe.

"This hostile culture is getting results. According to one brand-new survey, it is only far-left Americans who do not feel compelled to self-censor their views because of a hostile climate. Everyone but the far left feels the threat. And 50 percent of self-identified strong liberals say that simply contributing to the GOP presidential candidate ought to be a fireable offense for a business leader.

"In this country?"

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"'[H]e shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.' The Constitution says that's the president's job, but we're not hearing much about that from the chattering classes.

"We hear plenty of bloviating from the media-Democrat complex, dutifully masquerading the rioting in Portland as 'mostly peaceful protest.' And there is no shortage of faux outrage over President Trump's purported trampling on state sovereignty by dispatching federal agents to address the mayhem. ...

"The Constitution says the president shall perform this obligation. We're not talking about an option or something he may do or not do as he sees fit. It is a solemn duty. It is what being the chief executive is all about.

"The president has two principal, closely related responsibilities: to provide for national security and to see that the laws are enforced.

"The latter duty very much includes the protection of federal property and the execution of laws Congress has constitutionally enacted to address violent crime. ...

"Federal law enforcement agencies may and routinely do take investigative and enforcement action within the territorial jurisdiction of the states.

"They need not provide notice to, much less a request for permission from, the state government and its police agencies."

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"Joe Biden signed the death warrant for his campaign last week, even if he doesn't know it. The joint manifesto he released with Bernie Sanders is 110 pages of radical far-left policies -- from a job-killing $2 trillion climate agenda to eliminating cash bail and dismantling border protection.

"It betrays the working-class voters Biden claims to represent and destroys any pretense that he is a 'moderate.' ...

"Biden's campaign vehemently denies that he supports defunding the police. But in an interview with activist Ady Barkan on digital media site NowThis News last week he said, 'Yes, absolutely,' when asked if 'we can redirect some of the [police] funding?'

"Redirecting 'some' funding away from police is a euphemism for defunding police, at least partially.

"It tells you he has common cause with the anti-cop wreckers. So does the fact a Biden campaign staffer derided police as worse than 'pigs' in tweets which also used the hashtag #Defundpolice."

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"The New York Times is standing by a February 2017 report alleging that Trump associates were in communication with Russian intelligence officers, even after the release of an internal FBI memo that identified numerous inaccuracies in the story.

"'We stand by our reporting,' New York Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy told her own paper for its report on the newly released documents.

"Attorney General William Barr declassified two documents this week related to the FBI's investigation of the Trump campaign. One released Friday is a 57-page memo of interviews that dossier author Christopher Steele's primary source conducted with the FBI in January 2017.

"The second is former FBI official Peter Strzok's annotation of a Feb. 14, 2017, report that said four American officials claimed that authorities had intercepted communications and call logs of Trump advisers speaking with Russian intelligence.

"'This statement is inaccurate and misleading as written,' Strzok wrote in reference to opening paragraph of the Times story. 'We have not seen evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with [Intelligence Officers].'"

Read entire article here.

"Nearly 30% of U.S. voters don't have confidence in November's presidential election being accurately counted and the correct winner being declared, according to a new Just the News Daily Poll with Scott Rasmussen.

"'It's perhaps not surprising, but chilling nonetheless, that a quarter of the nation's voters lack confidence that the votes will be accurately counted and the correct winner of the presidential election declared,' Rasmussen said. 'This year's trend fits with one seen in recent years.'"

"The speech we love needs no protection. The speech we hate does. The government has no authority to evaluate speech. As the framers understood, all persons have a natural right to think as we wish and to say and publish whatever we think. Even hateful, hurtful and harmful speech is protected speech. ...

"Punishing speech is the most dangerous business because there will be no end to it. The remedy for hateful or threatening speech is not silence or punishments; it is more speech -- speech that challenges the speaker."

"There are two key takeaways from the outcome of Tuesday's primaries in Alabama, Maine and Texas.

"First, the big winner of the night was President Trump. Several Trump-backed candidates defeated their opponents and unquestionably benefited significantly from the president's support. The most notable of these was former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville, who defeated former senator and attorney general Jeff Sessions for the GOP nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama. Tuberville will face Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, considered a highly vulnerable incumbent.

"Second, Democratic primary results show the party is deeply divided, complicating the Democrats' path to winning majority control of the Senate and defeating Trump in the November election. ...

"Meanwhile, in Texas former White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson, who was endorsed by Trump, won his primary for a U.S. House seat, beating out Josh Winegarner. Winegarner was endorsed by the outgoing Republican Rep. Mac Thornberry, who did not seek reelection.

"In many ways, the weight of Trump's endorsements in Alabama and Texas signals that the president's current chances for reelection may be stronger than national polls indicate. ...

"Given the clear progressive insurgency within the Democratic Party across the country, there will also likely be greater pressure on the party to embrace left-leaning policies, such as defunding the police, which are unpopular with the general electorate. Doing so could cost the Democrats the presidency, the Senate, and even their current House majority."

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"The National Basketball Association is now blocking fans from customizing jerseys to include 'FreeHongKong,' while allowing a range of gross activist slogans on its merchandise. Through its online store, the league has long let fans create jerseys with personalized messages on the back. In fact, the feature recently become a key part of the NBA's push to allow players to sport activist statements on their jerseys. Today, however, it became clear the NBA doesn't love all protests equally.

"As first pointed out by Twitter users, the NBA store is blocking any fans from making jerseys with popular protester slogan 'FreeHongKong.' This happens despite the site allowing numerous antisemitic and anti-police slogans. Right now, you can make a custom NBA jersey with 'KillCops,' 'F-ck Police,' and 'Burn Jews' among many other objectionable phrases. It appears that supporting a pro-democracy movement, however, is too extreme."

"The only people who might better know the streets of urban America than the cops who patrol them are the crooks who haunt them. What can the criminals tell us now about the state of our cities? The crooks know that the streets and alleys are being returned to them and that the police are in retreat. That is unmistakably the case as crime, particularly violent crime, is exploding all over urban America. I was deputy attorney general the last time we suffered a crime wave of national proportions and had to learn the why of it in order to help lead the response that started the trend going the other way. It is mind-boggling to me to see how we are being condemned to repeat the exercise -- at the cost of many innocent lives, the vast majority of them being black lives.

"The blame for this turnabout is not with the police. Rather it is squarely on the shoulders of elected and appointed officials in local and state government who have abdicated the first responsibility of the offices they hold -- to maintain public order so as to assure their citizens that their most fundamental civil rights will be preserved. Abdication is not a form of neglect, nor is it the result of ignorance, and it is not even a function of just wrongheaded policy choices. Rather, it is the intentional adoption of legislation, directives, and orders that have the effect of crippling the police function and thereby condemning to death, at the hands of criminals, minority citizens of inner-city and gang-infested neighborhoods. This week the Washington Post reported of the July Fourth weekend that 'tragedies struck in urban centers thousands of miles apart, with 65 people shot over the weekend in New York and 87 in Chicago, and homicides climbing from Miami to Milwaukee.'

"The case can be made that this intentional abandonment of the commitment to public safety is genocide because its victims are foreseeably overwhelmingly black and Latino. If this phenomenon were occurring in the white suburbs, we would see a police presence that no one could believe possible. That would be, of course, except in those jurisdictions where the populace has foolishly accepted prosecutors who have bought into 'reimagining' the prosecution function as some fairytale undertaking where every crook gets released right back onto the street and accorded second, third, and fourth opportunities to go out and find new victims."

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