<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Tonight, in the showroom of the Eugene Hasenfus Resort And Casino, we can expect to hear a great deal about Common Core, an otherwise innocuous set of academic standards that has been inflated by several years of hot air into the greatest threat to American youth\u00A0since comic books were a nickel. There will be a great deal of bellyaching about Common Core in both debates, which is a good thing, because it allows us to point out that nobody&amp;#039;s been more of a hypocritical, opportunistic yahoo on the subject of Common Core than &amp;quot;Bobby&amp;quot; Jindal, absentee governor of Louisiana. He will be participating in the JV contest tonight, which is a good thing for him because few people will see the deep imprint of the knuckles of the federal court that went upside Jindal&amp;#039;s melon for him today. And, as an added bonus, the Court pretty much blew up the entire wingnut case against Common Core, so almost anything you hear about it from anybody on either panel at best will be something of a non-fact. (This is not to say that there aren&amp;#039;t good arguments against CC and its implementation. It&amp;#039;s just that all of them\u00A0can be found on Diane Ravitch&amp;#039;s blog and not on the stage in LA tonight.) Dick said the federal government never endorsed Common Core and did not help create it. That knocks down a charge made by Jindal and other conservative Republicans across the United States. In a recent ad for his gubernatorial campaign, Sen. David Vitter called Common Core &amp;quot;part of Washington&amp;#039;s dangerous plan to take over how we educate our kids.&amp;quot; The U.S. Department of Education offered financial incentives, in two programs, for states to adopt shared mathematics and English benchmarks. That, in Jindal&amp;#039;s view, constituted coercion and federal overreach and violated the 10th Amendment of the Constitution, which reserves certain rights to the states. This, too, is a prevailing talking point among conservatives. Dick, whom President Barack Obama appointed to the bench, disagreed. &amp;quot;The evidence supports the finding that participation in both programs is completely voluntary and not unconstitutionally coercive,&amp;quot; she wrote. The score sheet for the federal government&amp;#039;s Race to the Top grant program &amp;quot;encouraged standards that were &amp;#039;internationally benchmarked&amp;#039; and &amp;#039;college and career ready,&amp;#039; but there was no evidence that the (federal) DOE defined the content of those standards,&amp;quot; Dick wrote. Nothing more clearly illustrates the sad pandering death of Jindal&amp;#039;s career as a national politician than what he&amp;#039;s done with Common Core in Louisiana. In fact, it directly parallels the way he&amp;#039;s gone from a young phenom warning Republicans against being &amp;quot;the stupid party&amp;quot; to where he is today, pitching woo at Jeebusland and demanding that\u00A0we disband the Supreme Court. In Louisiana, Jindal went whole hog on Common Core. Then, when he decided to run for president, and he discovered that The Base had ben driven into one of its periodic frenzies over the new standards, he dove for the exits. By 2014, he had pulled Louisiana out of the Common Core, costing the state&amp;#039;s taxpayers a nice hunk of change, and threatening to sue. He sued. He got buried. Now the taxpayers have to cough up money to pay the state&amp;#039;s legal bills and, he says, the inevitable appeal. I think Governor Jindal might want to think about buying a home outside Council Bluffs. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a37993/bobby-jindals-pandering-common-core/>