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Volume XVII Number 11 - March 30, 2018     RSS Feed   

A Periodic Newsletter for Committed Texas Conservatives

In This Issue

A Look At The March For Our Lives Last Weekend

2037: Number Of Delegate Positions For The SD-17 Convention In Harris County

HCRP Leaders Respond To TCR Call For Unity For November With Silence

Rush And Trump Have Discovered Some Important Thoughts We Should All Remember

Fake Crime Statistics Lead to 17 Murdered in Parkland By Bruce Bialosky, Contributing Editor

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Thoughts This Fortnight

A Look At The March For Our Lives Last Weekend

If you followed the fawning major media, the American people are ready to repeal the Second Amendment and have the government seize the weapons of law-abiding Americans.

Not so fast, last week's NBC/Wall Street Journal poll reports that 58% agree that gun ownership increased safety by allowing law abiding citizens to protect themselves. On the other side, just 38%!

As for the marches, does anyone think that in a matter of weeks that high school students put this together? In fact, it was put together and funded by left-wing organizers interested in axing the NRA and defeating Republicans in November and yes, repealing the Second Amendment.

But wait, we all thought it was a march against gun violence, which any law abiding person supports.

In Houston, the march was led by such hyper-partisan leftists as Sylvester Turner, Sheila Jackson Lee and Art Acevedo, who proceeded to lead the march to protest Senator Ted Cruz!

The media, as it does, overestimated the crowd size - saying between 500,000 and 800,000 in DC - but the actual crowd was between 170,000 and 200,000, which by the way is about the size of the annual March for Life, (which the media never publicizes).

From observers in DC, there were signs attacking the NRA and Senator Marco Rubio, BUT missing were signs attacking the officers responsible for the dereliction of duty which led to the Parkland shooting. No signs asking the Broward County Sheriff to resign after ignoring scores of calls about the shooter? No signs asking for the FBI to do its job, which they didn't in the Parkland tragedy? No signs for arming more guards at our schools? No signs to ask why current gun laws on the books are not enforced?

2037: Number Of Delegate Positions
For The SD-17 Convention In Harris County

This is an important number because the number that showed was maybe 250. The average age is 50 and instead of a joint convention at one site for all of Harris County's districts, we had 8 separate ones. It took one candidate 7 hours to cover all the conventions. Good for her, but the better question is why make it so difficult? FYI, this is something the party in Harris County did for 8 conventions in a row, one joint convention starting in 1998. Another good idea dumped by the present leadership.

HCRP Leaders Respond To TCR Call For Unity
For November With Silence

With nothing but hostility, the current out of touch leaders of the HCRP continue their attacks on conservative publications and groups that endorse in our primaries.

The attacks were featured on the party's home page and the misinformation was being passed out at our conventions. The HCRP finally removed the anti-social conservative publications attack piece on slates. But not until new unfounded attacks launched by the Houston Chronicle's (aka The Daily Democrat) Erica Grieder, Sarah Davis and the Quorum Report. Fake news lives in Texas.

What is interesting to this observer is this fact - they would rather continue to trash the groups that endorse than to focus on beating the Democrats in November. No wonder our Harris County candidates are abandoning the Harris County Republican Party and its leadership. Those candidates and officeholders know that this group is out of touch and they would rather trash other Republicans than to go after Democrats. You can't make this up.

So let's tell it like it is, we are one election cycle away from extinction. The last time TCR checked, the Democrats outvoted us in the primary by 12,000 votes, but if you looked at the HCRP newsletter you would think we prevailed easily (hint: they deceptively used the statewide totals, where we did a lot better than the Democrats).

So once again we implore the "leadership" to stop trashing fellow Republican leaders and work to unite our party for November. If you don't, you ought to resign because you will have quit on our party and our candidates in 2018.

Rush And Trump Have Discovered Some Important Thoughts We Should All Remember

TCR Comment: Lessons for conservatives from Rush Limbaugh and President Trump are well thought out and ought to be followed.

1. Be more conservative.

"To beat liberals you can't move toward them. You can't extend a handshake. You can't cross the aisle, because we don't have anything in common with them. The only way to deal with liberals is to be more conservative, to be unabashedly conservative and that they have to be defeated."

2. Ignore mainstream media - a lot of what they put out is fake news.

"Stop watching and consuming mainstream media news. Try it for a week and see if you don't have an altogether, different outlook on your life."

Fake Crime Statistics
Lead To 17 Murdered In Parkland

By Bruce Bialosky, Contributing Editor

In HBO's The Wire (truly a transcendental television experience), there is a story line about an upcoming mayoral election and the concerted effort to manipulate the crime stats before the election to make the existing administration look better. Whether or not this was art imitating life, it replicates how things got started in Broward County, Florida, leading directly to the murder of 17 innocent souls in Parkland.

It seems that every day more revelations come out about the collapse of the system in Parkland that failed to stop the murderer from roaming the halls of a high school with a gun he should never have had an opportunity to legally acquire. Yet the tale of failure starts way before the fated day he entered the school.

This starts with the Superintendent of Broward County, Robert Runcie, who arrived in his position from Chicago where he worked with Arne Duncan. Mr. Duncan went from there to serve as President Obama's Secretary of Education for seven years. Runcie stated, in October 2011, "I arrived in the district and, shortly after that, began to dive into the data on student performance in the district. We quickly recognized that Broward had a high number of arrests, suspensions and expulsions. In fact, the highest number in the state. We realized we were not going to be able to create equitable opportunities for success in our school system if our students are not in school."

Runcie went about redesigning the system to reduce arrests and expulsions. By his own words they identified 13 violations of the code of conduct that were nonviolent, misdemeanor offenses. That is not the case as some of the crimes were violent misdemeanors like what is called "affray." The school system went about erasing these crimes from existing. We all know what happens when individuals are not disciplined for low-level crimes. They often move on to other low-level crimes or more aggressive anti-social behavior.

This policy was installed as told to me by Max Eden of the Manhattan Institute. Mr. Eden has been following this issue from day one and he told me unfortunately he is one of a very small group who has been following this issue in America. Mr. Eden stated that Runcie's policy became a coordinated effort with the police. That includes the now-famous Scott Israel, Broward County Sheriff. In fact, Runcie speaks of the coordinated effort with the community when he refers to eliminating the ‘school-to-prison pipeline'.

Why is it important that so few have been following the issue? Because this policy was soon adopted on a national level. That would be fine if there is specific evidence of this program working, but there is not. First, even though Runcie states there is such data, it was manipulated as it was in The Wire. Second, the adoption on a national level by Secretary Duncan and the Obama administration happened far too quickly. For the program to work as Runcie describes, the interventions with the troubled students would take years to resolve themselves. But that did not stop Duncan. As Runcie stated, "Some of my staff joke that the Obama administration might have taken our policies and framework and developed them into national guidelines."

In 2014, a "Dear Colleague" letter was sent jointly from the Departments of Education and Justice to all public school districts threatening lawsuits over racial discrimination in student discipline. This had the same freezing effect as the Dear Colleague letter sent to colleges in 2011 regarding rape that has now been withdrawn by the Department of Education. Unlike the college letter, the one to school districts has largely stayed under the radar.

How did Broward make it look like matters had improved under their new policy? They were no longer reporting misbehavior and restricting suspensions; thus all the crime statistics fell. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy – no crime reported; everything "improved."

Max Eden stated, "Broward eliminated many internal surveys regarding student behavior." Their own internal annual survey was dispensed with and they began using a bi-annual federal survey. This is key because there was no survey the year after implementation of the Broward policy in 2013 which led to the Dear Colleague letter in 2014. The lack of understanding how retaining the misbehaving students in the classroom had affected the education environment for other students was not available. The 2015 federal survey in Broward reflected a declining safety environment in the schools.

Teachers were no longer reporting incidents because they were afraid of being branded as racist since many of these incidents involved minority students.

Matters are even worse than originally reported by Eden. Paul Sperry, noted author and investigative journalist, reported just this week that Runcie and his team spent extensive school resources mainlining individuals of school age who had been convicted of violent misdemeanors and/or felonies back into the school system.

As Sperry wrote: "Cassandra Evans, Broward County's chief juvenile probation officer, has issued a general warning that juveniles transitioning out of secure detention have a high recidivism rate. This population is highly at risk of reoffending within the first 45 days [of release]."

The entire program has been shrouded in secrecy and statistics are not available as to how the program has worked. Parents were not made aware their children could be sitting in class next to a convicted felon just released from detention through the efforts of their tax dollars.

Everyone wishes that these students would become functional within the system and move on to college and a successful life as members of society. History shows that will not be the case. Runcie apparently does not believe that the program is something residents of the county can appreciate that is why he has hidden it from them.

This Broward policy spread throughout the country. Eden told me the suspension rate in Washington, DC, decreased by 40%. Principals stopped even reporting suspensions to cook the numbers.

One of the people impacted by this new policy was the murderer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Because of the new reporting (or non-reporting) system, the murderer had 21 incidents at the school that were not referred to the police. The police then were called to his home 39 times. Not once was this person taken to the police station and charged with anything and kept overnight. If just once he had been, he would not have passed his background check and he would never have been able to acquire a legal weapon of any kind.

Long before the failures of the FBI and the sheriff's department that have been so broadly reported, this incident could have been stopped -- but Superintendent Runcie set off on his social engineering. Given the opportunity he would certainly talk about all of those who have benefited from his program.

Here is the problem with that. Every time people speak of issues like gun control, they will point to "if we can just save one life." Here 17 lives were lost because of a failed social policy that has spread throughout the country. Unfortunately, the current Department of Education has not reversed this letter like they did with the Dear Colleague letter to colleges on Title IX. It is our understanding the matter is currently under review.

Quite evidently if the Parkland murderer had not acquired a long gun to kill the people at the high school, he would have acquired illegal weapons or built a bomb or driven a vehicle into a crowd of students. He was a ticking time bomb that was left to fester by a school system and local law enforcement and thus never dealt with through the legal system.

This weekend, students from Parkland fanned out across the country to preach gun control and speak at gun control rallies. Their ignorance of the policies that were put in place by social engineering bureaucrats that directly led to this massacre hovers over them as they preach of false gods.

The question becomes: Since the implementation of these policies and the issuance of the Dear Colleague letter to public school systems, how many other ticking time bombs are out there ready to explode?


Bruce Bialosky is the founder of the Republican Jewish Coalition of California and a former Presidential appointee. You can follow Bruce on Twitter @brucebialosky.


TCR on the Air

Red, White & Blue featuring TCR Editor Gary Polland and liberal commentator David Jones on Fridays at 7:30 pm on PBS Houston Channel 8, replaying Saturday at 6:30 p.m. on Channel 8, Monday at 11:30 pm on Channel 8.2 and on the web at www.houstonpublicmedia.org.

Upcoming show:
03-30-2018: Free Speech Vs. Public Safety On College Campuses with two University of Houston Policy Debate team students, Jackson Bartling and Katherine Polkinghorne.

About Your Editor

Gary Polland is a long-time conservative and Republican spokesman, fund-raiser, and leader who completed three terms as the Harris County Republican Chairman. During his three terms, Gary was described as the most successful county Chairman in America by Human Events - The National Conservative Weekly. He is in his twenty-first year of editing a newsletter dealing with key conservative and Republican issues. The last sixteen years he has edited Texas Conservative Review. As a public service for the last 15 years, Gary has published election guides for the GOP primary, general elections and city elections, all with the purpose of assisting conservative candidates. Gary is also in his 15th year of co-hosting Red, White and Blue on PBS Houston, longest running political talk show in Texas history. Gary is a practicing attorney and strategic consultant. He can be reached at (713) 621-6335.

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