Four pieces by Quin Hillyer at Liberty Headlines — a site for news aggregation, not really opinion. Click on the headline of each, to see the full story.
Sen. Flake says NAFTA is a good deal: Attorney General Jeff Sessions isn’t the only Republican office holder President Donald Trump has been agitating against – not by a long shot.
One of them, at least by inference, is fighting back, in this case by pushing back against one of the policy positions most closely associated with this president.
Trump is known to be trying to recruit a primary opponent in 2018 for U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, who was reluctant to support Trump’s candidacy last year and who disagrees with Trump on immigration policy. Former state Sen. Kelli Ward, who has aligned herself in support of the president, has already announced a challenge to Flake.But rather than shrink from the conflict, Flake is doubling down, without even mentioningTrump by name. The issue is NAFTA – the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico……
Theory: McCain actually ‘took one for the team’: An interesting theory is making its way around the cyber-politico-world, namely that John McCain’s vote last week against the Senate’s health-policy bill was less a matter of abandoning his team than it was of “taking one for the team.” There’s almost no way to prove the theory one way or another. But its very plausibility – once the theory is explained and understood – provides the lesson that sometimes votes in Congress are not always what they seem to be…..
Cursive makes a comeback, against Common Core: Longtime critics of the Common Core educational standards increasingly can sign their names to policy successes on one major front of their battle. For at least six years, one of many criticisms of the Core was that it deliberately de-emphasized cursive writing (sometimes called writing “in script”) in favor of teaching “keyboard skills.” Just as with the controversial mathematics-instruction methods pushed by Common Core, the Core’s preference for technology over handwriting basics is another example of the standards’ emphases on things trendy and newfangled ahead of the tried and true. Proponents of cursive now are successfully fighting back, with Arizona, Louisiana and Alabama this coming academic year joining at least 11 other states once again requiring or at least promoting cursive writing as part of their schools’ curriculum…….
Some leaks hurt nation more than Trump’s lies do: The release of transcripts of President Trump’s January conversations with the leaders of Mexico and Australia led to two inescapable conclusions, according to observers across the political spectrum. The conclusion of lesser importance, believe it or not, was that Trump again was caught in an incontrovertible lie. The conclusion of greater importance, one to which even some of Trump’s harshest critics attest, is that the leaking of the transcripts was probably criminal and is certainly dangerous to American security………
