Common Core Tries to Buy a Senate Seat

Millions of American parents have always heard conservatives complaining about Common Core, but never understood until they had to homeschool their kids in the last few months. Five thousand years of doing math one way are out the window thanks to corporate innovation, greed from textbook publishers, and an interest in having good little automatons who can work for the Fortune 500 without competing against them.

Common Core is so bad that even Disney poked fun at it in Incredibles 2 where Mr. Incredible vents, “Math is math!” The whole concept of Common Core math is ridiculous and states have been throwing it out largely due to parents in revolt.

Well, the Fortune 500 loves Common Core. At its heart is an easily understandable concept. In a highly mobile society, a kid who moves from California to Florida should be roughly at the same place in both places in math and reading. The problem is Common Core devalues fundamentals, ridicules traditional learning, and derisively indoctrinates kids that their parents learned “grandma math,” among other things.

As Common Core rolls back, it is trying to find inroads at the federal level and has a champion running for the Senate. A year ago, President Trump even tweeted favorably of Common Core’s candidate, not realizing just how deep it all went.

Bill Hagerty is Common Core’s candidate and he is running for the Senate in Tennessee. He was Mitt Romney’s finance chair, even backing Mitt Romney against Tennessee’s own Fred Thompson in 2008. Hagerty also was an Al Gore supporter against George W. Bush.

Hagerty served on the board of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which has been one of the leading publishers of Common Core materials. Many parents will be familiar with their awful Common Core mathematics textbooks. Hagerty was well compensated by the company over the years as it continued to expand and push its Common Core materials.

Hagerty is attacking his opponent, orthopedic trauma surgeon Manny Sethi, for Sethi’s wife giving $50.00 to a college classmate who ran as a Democrat for Congress. Hagerty should probably be more concerned about the voters finding out he sat on the board of a company that has aggressively advanced one of the worst American curricula standards in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Tennesee voters should be concerned about the Romney Finance Chair/Al Gore supporting Common Core candidate getting a seat in the Senate.

Georgia Goes to War

Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Governor, is suing Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and the City of Atlanta. The media is really getting this story wrong.

According to the national media, Brian Kemp is suing to stop Atlanta from enforcing mask mandates. That is not really true. The reason for the lawsuit is that Atlanta is demanding businesses shut back down and the city return to phase 1 of the COVID-19 reopening plan.

Yes, the lawsuit mentions the masks as an example of the mayor overreaching her authority, but the legal basis of the suit is Atlanta demanding Georgia busineses within the city shut back down.

I want to be clear that I understate Governor Kemp’s concern on the masks and I disagree with him. I think he should mandate them. But I also want you all to understand the bigger picture here and why he is filing the lawsuit.

Under Governor Kemp’s existing order, the counties and municipalities of Georgia have a number of things they must do. They are to ensure social distancing; reduced capacity at bars, nightclubs, and restaurants; temperature checks for business employees; mask requirements for employees who interact with customers; and a few other requirements.

None of the cities that are demanding masks have actually enforced those mandates. The City of Atlanta, for example, has not only not enforced social distancing and capacity mandates, but has actively turned a blind eye to crowds of unmasked protestors.

Naturally, the virus is spreading again and rapidly. Governor Kemp has always insisted that these mandates need to be enforced before he impose new ones, like mandating masks. The cities have refused while demanding mask mandates. Now, as the virus spreads and Atlanta has expressly refused to enforce existing mandates, the city wants to shut businesses back down.

Governor Kemp had to act.

Frankly, if the cities and counties were enforcing his existing requirements and the virus was still spreading, I think he would go to the next step of mandating masks. But when they won’t even enforce social distancing and reduced capacity at bars, he is not going to turn Georgians into misdemeanor lawbreakers and create a new revenue stream for these cities by targeting people not wearing masks while ignoring everything else.

Those are the facts.

A Brief Word on Masks

I am so damn tired of talking about masks. Just please watch this. I still have clots in my lungs. Let me show you, with a blood oxygen sensor, just how masks impact my lungs.

Erick Erickson @EWErickson

As some of you know, I have lung damage from a massive influx of blood clots into my lungs a while back that should have killed me. I was in ICU for a week and still deal with the effects. My blood oxygen is never 100%. So how does a mask affect me?