Maybe they have lost their relevance to you because you’re a person with different politics than the party you associate with. There are still a great amount of traditional liberals and conservatives, although I have yet to meet anyone who is down the line in agreement with every position of their labeled ideology. I am coming to the mind that most people are auto pilot voters and vote for the party of their fantasy and the two parties positions are fought out on the margins by about 20% of the voters. Basically, what I’m saying is the activists are taking the rank and file for a ride in both parties and when the rank and file wakes up, watch out if you’re a Trump or Bernie type because this country can be put back to its rights very quickly with broad common sense.
Actually traditional conservatives in the United States are the ones since the early 1800s strongly supported public education both at the K-12 and university level. They believed it was the best way to move people out of poverty and allow them to better themselves. Traditional conservatives classrooms should teach a core curriculum of reading, writing, history, science, and math which would enable students to be employed in professional or skilled fields. It was only in recent decades where liberals misused classrooms to push a political agenda rather than educating students that indoctrination became a problem.
Actually the two extremes of "auto-pilot" voters is at approximately 30% each while the middle represents about 40%.
She will dress up funny or undress up funny and play any role at the Washington Post that Jeff Bezos wants. Amazon Prime has saved the Washington Post from going under- not the reporting of "highly respected journalists." Not doubt before long, you will get a "free" online subscription to the Post with your Amazon Prime membership and the subscription rate will suddenly soar due to the "excellent reporting." You want fries with that?
Nonsense. The establishment republicans, ie big business country club republicans in the Bush/McCain/Romney mold, are hugely unpopular now with the base. Republican voters see they have been lied to by their leaders and played for fools. Why do you think they supported Trump? The "Conservative Inc" crowd, eg AEI, National Review, Weekly Standard, etc pull single digits on their own. I know you would like a return to the days of respectable "principled" conservatives who were content to lose graciously but that ship has sailed.
Yeh sure. Let's make every city like Chicago and Detroit to show the glory of the Dem Plantation. You want to talk about the education system in Chicago? Didn't think so. Trump needs to declare martial law in all the Dem Plantations.
Let's walk through the lengthy list of cities in the U.S. where education is administered by left-wing Democrats and take a look at the educational results.
Let's also take a look at the education "miracle" in Washington D.C. All the “success” of the D.C. school system was a complete fraud… DC's public schools go from success story to cautionary tale https://www.boston.com/news/politic...ools-go-from-success-story-to-cautionary-tale As recently as a year ago, the public school system in the nation's capital was being hailed as a shining example of successful urban education reform and a template for districts across the country. Now the situation in the District of Columbia could not be more different. After a series of rapid-fire scandals, including one about rigged graduation rates, Washington's school system has gone from a point of pride to perhaps the largest public embarrassment of Mayor Muriel Bowser's tenure. This stunning reversal has left school administrators and city officials scrambling for answers and pledging to regain the public's trust. A decade after a restructuring that stripped the decision-making powers of the board of education and placed the system under mayoral control, city schools in 2017 were boasting rising test scores and a record graduation rate for high schools of 73 percent, compared with 53 percent in 2011. Glowing news articles cited examples such as Ballou High School, a campus in a low-income neighborhood where the entire 2017 graduating class applied for college. Then everything unraveled. An investigation by WAMU, the local NPR station, revealed that about half of those Ballou graduates had missed more than three months of school and should not have graduated due to chronic truancy. A subsequent inquiry revealed a systemwide culture that pressured teachers to favor graduation rates over all else — with salaries and job security tied to specific metrics. The internal investigation concluded that more than one-third of the 2017 graduating class should not have received diplomas due to truancy or improper steps taken by teachers or administrators to cover the absences. In one egregious example, investigators found that attendance records at Dunbar High School had been altered 4,000 times to mark absent students as present. The school system is now being investigated by both the FBI and the U.S. Education Department, while the D.C. Council has repeatedly called for answers and accountability. "We've seen a lot of dishonesty and a lot of people fudging the numbers," said Council member David Grosso, head of the education committee, during a hearing last week. "Was it completely make-believe last year?" School Superintendent Hanseul Kang promised Grosso a "new accountability system" to prevent these kinds of abuses. The interim chancellor, Amanda Alexander, told the committee the estimated graduation rate for 2018 would end up just over 60 percent, a drop of more than 10 percentage points now that the attendance rules are being properly enforced. The chancellor's office runs the public school system while the Office of the State Superintendent of Education oversees both the public schools and Washington's robust charter school system. Repeated efforts to interview both Kang and Alexander for this story were unsuccessful. While the attendance scandal was still fresh, a new controversy engulfed the top public school official. Chancellor Antwan Wilson was forced to resign in February after revelations that he skirted his own rules to place his daughter in a prestigious high school while skipping a 600-student waiting list. The Wilson scandal speaks to some of the unique dynamics and pressures of the D.C. school system. Parents who don't like their local "in-bound" school can apply to any public school in the city through a complex and highly competitive lottery process. One local columnist dubbed the school lottery system "an academic Hunger Games." Most recently in the headlines has been one of the jewels of the school system, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, alma mater of comedian Dave Chappelle and musician Me'Shell Ndegéocello. In May, an internal audit alleged that more than one-quarter of Ellington students were fraudulently coming in from neighboring Maryland or Virginia. Students from outside Washington can attend city schools if they pay tuition, but the investigation alleges widespread residency fraud with parents faking Washington addresses to avoid those fees. Ellington parents have sued, claiming they're being railroaded by an administration eager to prove strong oversight and repair its reputation. The issue is working its way through courts. The brutal year for Washington schools doesn't seem to have hurt Mayor Bowser as she runs for re-election. Bowser, campaigning on the improved economy in the capital, has no significant opposition in the all-important Democratic primary Tuesday as she seeks a second term. The issue of the school system was the only down note in Bowser's otherwise triumphant State of the District speech in March. Bowser could only acknowledge "significant bumps in the road," and promise rapid changes. Defenders of the school system point out that independent measurements such as the National Association of Educational Progress test have shown consistent improvement that shouldn't be lost in the controversy over graduation rates. Critics view the problems, particularly the attendance issue, as an indictment of the entire data-driven evaluation system instituted a more than a decade ago when then-Mayor Adrian Fenty took over the school system and appointed Michelle Rhee as the first chancellor. Rhee's ambitious plan to clear out dead wood and focus on accountability for teachers and administrators landed her on the cover of Time magazine holding a broom. But now analysts question whether Rhee's emphasis on performance metrics has created a monster.
Of course. It was better if they could just moan that the schools needed more resources and hide the rampant corruption and incompetency that infect every aspect of DC government. The school system has two insurmountable problems. One, they serve a population that largely has no use nor aptitude for education. Two, the school system has long been seen as a source of well-paying, no work patronage jobs. These factors doomed Michelle Rhee. The first factor could be changed by dropping the myth that the bulk of these students are really capable of being educated. The focus of the system should be vocational education, eg welding, plumbing, auto mechanics,etc. The few students with college abilities could be placed in private or church schools at government expense. It would be far cheaper and actually beneficial to all involved, rather than pretending to be running a functional school system with students who have so little interest that they skip school over half the time.