What is Real?

Today I read incredulously that Americans by a large margin oppose Common Core national learning standards.  The study also found Americans haven't got a clue as to what Common Core Standards are.

And to make things worse, they also support Charter Schools even though subsequent questions in the survey show they don't know what they really are.

In short they are forming opinions that shape public policy, we are a democracy remember, that are based on erroneous information and ignorance.

Who is to blame?  FOX NEWS.

Many right leaning people, if not all of them, get ALL of their information from Fox.  They listen to that blather for 24/7.

And they are getting lied to all the time.

Recently we had a person from the Probation Department speak to the SIR club I belong to (Sons in Retirement).  She was trying to explain AB 109 and associated legislation that seeks  to reform California's unconstitutional penal system.  The law is complex and seems to be working, but the crowd was having none of the detailed explanation the presenter gave.

No, the "common perception" was that felons were being dumped into the country and running amuck in the community.  The county sheriff is an avowed conservative and hasn't helped, using the "issue" (which is the law) to explain away his department's deficiencies and failures.

And, conservatives in the crowd never asked questions about how California got  into such a fix:  overcrowding its prisons with "get tough on crime" and the war on drugs.

Both of these "programs" are reactionary public policies that were passed after the sixties and seventies, most racist in background, that were aimed at incarcerating every African American in the state!

And to some extent, it succeeded.  It also succeeded in bankrupting the state.

But not a word about that from the right wingers in the elderly crowd

No, conservatives never say they are sorry.

Their "think tanks" never analyze their policies and implementation.  They never fine tune their ideological mistakes.

Fox News says that getting tough, not allowing any rehabilitation, throwing people in jail forever, solitary confinement, and arresting people for drug addiction works.

It doesn't.

California is a perfect example.  Redding today is less safe than every before BECAUSE of  the conservative infatuation with determinate sentences, harsh treatment of mentally ill prisoners, incarceration of people of color at unprecedented rates.

Of course, progressive policies, like the Affordable Care Act, have been subjected to a microscope of criticism and reaction finding every minute detail that can be attacked.  Recently a conservative court found a problem in one sentence of the Act that implied a state could not offer subsidized insurance plans if it had refused to establish a state exchange.  That legal nit picking goes against the entire essence of the thousands of words the act includes.

In short, conservatives don't play by the same rules they subject progressive public policy to....they cherry pick, and NEVER subject their policy to scientific scrutiny.

Tax cuts and tax increases are another good example.  Cons will vote for tax cuts, but all have taken a pledge to NEVER vote to increase taxes.  For California this meant years of tax cuts, and starving the "beast", which meant wholesale cuts to education, that led to more incarcerations which led to prison overcrowding which led to AB 109.

See, the cons now say, AB 109 is flooding our community with felons.  The lady patiently explained ALL of the felons were homegrown, the law expressly calls for release under parole (after the sentence if served by the way) in the home county of the felon!  That's right, they are not dumping them here, they lived here!

Of course, the released felons have no education, no rehabilitation, because the cons cut that out long ago; so they wind up homeless, desperate and often commit crimes of opportunity to stay alive.

See, the cons say (who caused this mess) we "need to get tough on them", build more prisons, cut education and other social programs...and the United States begins to look like a Gulag.

What is real?  It sure isn't the crap that Fox dishes out.  It sure isn't in a political movement that refuses to be accountable for their political policies that backfire.

What is real?