Worth Knowing, Probably Not Quite Threadworthy 5/8

[SVPete]

Public School Enrollment Has Dropped, Closing Schools to Follow

https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2026/05/08/public-school-enrollment-has-dropped-closing-schools-to-follow-n3814748

I've noticed these battles playing out piecemeal in places like San Francisco, but school districts across the country are facing the same problem. There are fewer students enrolling in public schools and that means school budgets and staffing are outsized for the job that needs to be done.

Responsible leaders would seek to reduce the size of the staff and the number of schools, but teachers unions and parents often oppose those changes. The result is school districts like the one in San Francisco that delay the inevitable and wind up spending far more than they should be. Many other urban districts are seeing the same dynamic play out.
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There's more than one factor playing into this in big cities. The pandemic led to a lot of people working from home and some of them decided they could do that just as well in the suburbs as in the more expensive city. And families with children may have been especially prone to moving, both because suburbs are often safer and because families that need more space can get it at a better price.

But the big issue is the fertility rate. There are simply a lot less children than there were two decades ago.
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Another factor playing a role is immigration. The huge surge during President Biden's term brought in hundreds of thousands of children who wound up scattered around the US in public schools. Now those numbers are dropping.
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Long term the only solution is closing schools and laying off teachers. But in places like San Francisco, that often doesn't happen until the budget situation becomes dire. SF actually lost control of its budget. In 2024, the state stepped in when the city refused to make changes.
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That was two years ago but efforts to close schools are still ongoing in SF and were making news there just last week.

Some time back in the 70s or 80s, as the surge of high school students from the Baby Boom receded, three San Jose area high schools were shut down. Two have been converted into community centers and other commercial use. The third, a couple of decades later, was reopened with student population growing in the late 90s and the 00s. IOW, shrinkage can be managed reasonably well, but I don't see willingness to be reasonable in many modern educrats, nor with unions.

[SVPete]

CNN Lied About Our Client—Now It’s Before the U.S. Supreme Court

https://townhall.com/columnists/jordan-sekulow/2026/05/07/cnn-lied-about-our-clientnow-its-before-the-us-supreme-court-n2675651#google_vignette

When mainstream media outlets can falsely vilify, smear, and attack public figures with impunity, there is a fundamental problem in the law.

That’s exactly what’s at stake in our case representing Harvard Law School professor emeritus and famed constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz against CNN.

After we took this landmark case to the Supreme Court on behalf of Professor Dershowitz, and after the Supreme Court ordered CNN to respond to our petition, the network finally filed its brief in opposition. Now we’ve filed our reply – and it dismantles CNN’s arguments one by one.
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During the Senate trial, Professor Dershowitz was crystal clear: Actions motivated by personal financial gain – bribery, extortion, kickbacks – would absolutely remain impeachable offenses. However, as soon as he finished speaking, CNN went on air and told its audience the exact opposite. CNN commentators declared that under the “Dershowitz Doctrine,” bribery statutes were “gone” and a president could do virtually anything to get reelected, directly contradicting what he actually said.

Professor Dershowitz sued for defamation, and even the courts that ruled against him acknowledged he had been lied about – but determined that they were bound by a 62-year-old Supreme Court precedent called New York Times v. Sullivan. That’s why we took this case to the Supreme Court.

Here’s the bottom line: CNN cannot dispute the two most critical facts in this entire case. Professor Dershowitz never said a president could commit bribery or extortion without consequence. And CNN’s own commentators told millions of viewers that he had. As Judge Lagoa found, CNN “simply lied about what Dershowitz had said.” The district court agreed: Dershowitz “said nothing of the kind.” Those findings are not in dispute. What CNN is trying to do now is throw up procedural smokescreens to keep the Supreme Court from ever reaching the substance of what happened.
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Sullivan was decided in 1964 – when there were three TV networks and no internet. The media landscape has fundamentally changed. When courts can acknowledge defamation and still rule for the liar, the system is broken. As we’ve said from the beginning, the First Amendment was designed to prevent government censorship – not to give CNN a license to lie about private citizens with impunity.

IMO, the USSC needs to ram down Skews MSM types' throats that the First Amendment does not protect defamation, not under Free Speech, not under Press freedom.

[enslaved1]

The current state of journalism folks   

Thought I cut off the snarky response, but it goes along with the "headline", so I'm not messing around with it right now. 

[ADsOutburst]

Kyle Rittenhouse, who gained fame for opening fire at a 2020 civil rights rally in Wisconsin...

That's... a realy dishonest account of what happened.

Thanks, NBC, for proving you are the news organization for stupid people.