Document wrEv5qy0p4JQ1ME8RyMY7NqeJ

Message From: Sent: To: Subject: Americans for Limited Government [media@limitgov.org] 4/20/2018 1:30:37 PM Abboud, Michael [/o=ExchangeLabs/ou=Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)/cn=Recipients/cn=b6f5af791al842fladcc088cbf9ed3ce-Abboud, Mic] If California is the future, the future does not look good The middle class is fleeing, and the politicians seem intent on keeping them out April 20, 2018 Permission to republish original op-eds and cartoons granted. If California is the future, the future does not look good In a Twitter post attacking President Trump, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) tweeted "California represents the future. " After looking at the stats, it is hard to see what type of future California has. People are no longer going west to live the California dream. The middle class is fleeing, and the politicians seem intent on keeping them out. Things are bad and getting worse in California, but there may be some small rays of hope. Charter schools continue to show the need for school choice Charter schools are transforming American education. For the country's most at risk students, charter schools are playing a critical role in building educational opportunities for students. As the Department of Education expands charter school use, studies proving their effectiveness have begun pouring into academia, proving that school choice is the best path toward educational advancement. Timothy Daughtry: Look Around You: Do You Still Think America Won the Cold War? Does it still look like we won the Cold War? The Soviet Union might have died in 1991, but the intellectual and moral virus that killed it - The Marxist worldview - has spread to the United States and is wearing away our defenses against socialist tyranny. if California is the future, the future does not look good Sierra Club v. EPA 18cv3472 NDCA Tier 7 ED 002061 00002760-00001 . . v ismtmmim PiiM m ia r Mi umM tmmasaMts.siiy> By Printus LeBlanc In a Twitter post attacking President Trump, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) tweeted "California represents the future." After looking at the stats, it is hard to see what type of future California has. People are no longer going west to live the California dream. The middle class is fleeing, and the politicians seem intent on keeping them out. Things are bad and getting worse in California, but there may be some small rays of hope. California's education system is a disaster. According to statistics released in September, not even half of California students are proficient in English with only 1 out of 3 being proficient in math. What makes this worse, these numbers broke a positive trend stopping two-years of slight improvement. California is also ground zero for the poverty crisis. When people think about California, they usually think of beaches, movie stars and money, but a closer look tells a different story. Recently released data shows California has the highest poverty rate in the country, 20.4 percent, beating out states snobby Californians look down upon like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. Homelessness is an epidemic in California. California accounts for 12 percent of U S. population, the largest in the nation, but it also holds 25 percent of the homeless in the country according to a report from HUD. It is so bad in California if you combined the total homeless population of the Texas and Florida and doubled it, you still would not approach California numbers, even though the combined total population totals of Texas and Florida would surpass California by 8 million. Sierra Club v. EPA 18cv3472 NDCA Tier 7 ED 002061 00002760-00002 The most surefire way to tell California is not the future, is to look at the U Haul pricing. Renting a U haul truck to leave California is astronomically more expensive than renting a truck to move into California. A recent survey shows it cost 1,600 percent more expensive to rent a truck to go from San Jose to Las Vegas than it is to go from Las Vegas to San Jose. To go from San Jose to Austin it will cost $4,320, but only $1,053 in reverse, a 400 percent difference. This is a pure measure of supply and demand in the moving market, and the exodus from the capital of the Silicon Valley doesn't bode well for the formerly golden state. To back up U Haul pricing, the Legislative Analyst's Office of the California Legislature's Nonpartisan Fiscal and Policy Advisor, produced a report detailing migration to and from California between 2007 and 2016. For the first time in its history, California is losing its population. Between 2007 and 2016, 5 million people moved to California while 6 million moved to other states for a net loss. As bad as it seems for California right now, there might be light at the end of the tunnel. It seems the silent majority in California have had enough and are starting to make their voice heard. The president of San Francisco Travel, the city's visitors bureau, Joe D'Alessandro's is now sounding the alarm. His job is being made more difficult because the conditions of San Francisco are atrocious. The progressive paradise has turned into an open sewer. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle D'Alessandro stated, "The streets are filthy. There's trash everywhere. It's disgusting." He continued, "I've never seen any other city like this -- the homelessness, dirty streets, drug use on the streets, smash-and-grabs." It may have seemed like the entire state was onboard with the idea of turning the state into a sanctuary state, but a slew of localities have recently taken action against the state government including Orange and San Diego County which have combined with a dozen other counties in the state to join a DOJ lawsuit against California's sanctuary law. President Donald Trump noted the uprising in a tweet on April 18, stating, "There is a Revolution going on in California. Soooo many Sanctuary areas want OUT of this ridiculous, crime infested & breeding concept." California is past its glory days. It is no longer the promise land in the west, but the progressives may have finally stepped over the line. It took generations of progressive lunacy to ruin the golden state; it'll take a few generations of hard work to get it back to even. Printus LeBlanc is a contributing editor at Americans for Limited Government. Charter schools continue to show the need for school choice Sierra Club v. EPA 18cv3472 NDCA Tier 7 ED 002061 00002760-00003 By Natalia Castro Charter schools are transforming American education. For the country's most at risk students, charter schools are playing a critical role in building educational opportunities for students. As the Department of Education expands charter school use, studies proving their effectiveness have begun pouring into academia, proving that school choice is the best path toward educational advancement. The biannual National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) has released their 2017 National Report Cards assessing achievement across American schools through controlled variables. On a national level, charter schools appear to be even with non-charter schools, but John Valant of the Brookings Institute explains there is a clear reason why. In his March 2016 article, Valant explains charter schools are often clustered in urban areas and use a lottery system to take on a district's most poor and underserved students. This allows them to show particular growth in America's most needed areas. This is further illustrated by the NAEP report, which showed on the district level, charter schools far outperform traditional schools. In America's most diverse cities, charter schools are leading the way. In Atlanta, with 19 percent of schools now being charter schools, charter school students produce average math test scores that are 17 points higher than their non-charter school counterparts. Similarly, in Los Angeles, charter school students score on average 28 points higher on math test scores. In Cleveland, Ohio's most diverse county, charter school students score on average 18 points higher than their non-charter counterparts on reading exams. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin's most diverse county, charter school students outperform non-charter school students on reading test scores by 14 points. The Center for Public Education fact sheet on charter schools attests this is due to diverse teaching staffs that can teach free from excessive state and federal regulations. With the ability to craft entire Sierra Club v. EPA 18cv3472 NDCA Tier 7 ED 002061 00002760-00004 curriculums around student success, charter schools are able to experiment different methods of success. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has seen these positive impacts first hand in her home state of Michigan. Findings from a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan compared students who received admittance into a charter school system through a lottery with those who also applied for the lottery but got denied in order to measure school success. While transitioning students showed the smallest progress, by the time charter school students graduated they displayed higher scores in both math and reading. But this was by far the greatest impact. In these Michigan charter schools, teachers are 47 percent more likely to be viewed as mentors than administrators. Principles observe teaching roughly 9 hours per day versus roughly 2 hours in traditional schools, due to administrative tasks. While teachers are paid less in charter schools, they are 20 percent more likely to receive performance bonuses. Charter schools encourage the entire administrative staff to work for and with students, thus creating a holistically stronger learning environment. Last September, Secretary DeVos decided to allocate significant funds toward charter school development. Across the country, for our most at-risk students, those funds are paying off. But states do not have to wait federal intervention, they are already proving that once broken free from centralized control, particularly in urban areas, charter schools are providing better opportunities for the nation's most at risk students. Natalia Castro is a contributing editor at Americans for Limited Government. ALG Editor's Note: In the following op-ed from Townhall, Timothy Daughtry opines on how we defeated the USSR, but the virus that created the USSR has spread to the U S. specifically on college campuses: Townhall Look Around You: Do You Still Think America Won the Cold War? By Timothy Daughtry American teenagers march in the streets to gut or eliminate the Second Amendment, and our youth are increasingly comfortable with socialism. Conservative speakers are harassed and physically threatened on college campuses. According to many in positions of power, any difference in achievement or earning among various social groups is assumed to be evidence of discrimination or oppression of one group by another, and assumed to be grounds for governmental intervention. Our national borders are being worn away despite popular demands for border security. Much of what passes for news is filtered and packaged to support the leftist agenda. Does it still look like we won the Cold War? Sierra Club v. EPA 18cv3472 NDCA Tier 7 ED 002061 00002760-00005 The Soviet Union might have died in 1991, but the intellectual and moral virus that killed it - The Marxist worldview - has spread to the United States and is wearing away our defenses against socialist tyranny. It is not necessary to find hordes of card-carrying communists in order to recognize the threat of Marxism in American culture and politics. Worldviews - including our views of government and political issues - are not so much the product of conscious deliberation as of cultural immersion, and so it is possible for people to learn to see society and politics through a Marxist lens without ever realizing it. And the importance of cultural immersion was the great insight of the Cultural Marxists beginning in the 1920s. Marxist intellectuals such as Antonio Gramsci realized that the deep values of JudeoChristian culture stood in the way of enlisting people in violent revolution. It was hard to enlist people in a violent struggle of class against class if their worldview saw people as morally responsible individuals and not as faceless members of an economic or demographic class. National identity and patriotism stood in the way of uniting Karl Marx's "workers of the world" to overthrow the capitalist system. Belief in God and timeless principles of right and wrong stood in the way of the materialist worldview and its moral relativism. And so Gramsci and other Marxist writers envisioned a "long march" through the cultural institutions of the West, beginning with the universities. The primary tactic was Critical Theory, the relentless assault upon the intellectual and moral foundations of Western culture. If Marxist ideas about economics, the family, religion, and society in general could gain dominance in the universities, those ideas would eventually follow graduates into other cultural institutions such as public education, the news media, and entertainment. The Frankfurt School in Germany attracted numerous intellectuals to the cause of Cultural Marxism, and many of them fled to America's universities as Hitler rose to power in the 1930s and `40s. While America's international policy was to confront and contain communism around the world, the intellectual and moral assumptions of the Marxist worldview were taking hold in many of our universities. The left's cultural strategy did not require conscious conversion to Marxism as a political theory. Repeated exposure to the assumptions and implications of the Marxist worldview and the enforced absence of contradictory frames of reference were sufficient. Most Americans have never heard of Marxist intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse, but his 1965 treatise on Repressive Tolerance provided the justification for intolerancetoward any views that stood in the way of the Marxist liberation agenda. The impact of his thinking can be seen in campus speech codes and harassment of conservative speakers on today's college campuses. Disagreement with today's left is simply defined as hate speech, and hate speech is simply not to be tolerated. Argument - and minds - closed. Click here for the full story. Americansfor Limited Government 10332 Main Street # 326None Fairfax Virginia 22030 United States Sierra Club v. EPA 18cv3472 NDCA Tier 7 ED 002061 00002760-00006 This email is intended for abboud.michael@epa.gov. Update your preferences or Unsubscribe Sierra Club v. EPA 18cv3472 NDCA Tier 7 ED 002061 00002760-00007