"Amazingly, the bill became law on the 11th anniversary of 'Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day,' a holiday created by Free-Range Kids and once considered so wacky—so dangerous..."

"... that it was splashed across the pages of The New York Daily News.... HB 567 enjoyed bipartisan support, sailing through the Texas Senate unopposed, and winning the House with a vote of 143 to 5. The statute enshrining childhood independence is part of a bigger children's services bill ensuring Texans that the state will not intervene and remove kids from their homes unless the danger is so great and so likely that it outweighs the trauma of entering the foster care system.... In other words, it prevents poverty from being mistaken for neglect.... 'If the mom misses that bus, she gets to work late and loses her job. How does that help the child, if now she can't pay her rent? So she leaves her child home alone for 15 minutes.' .... [T]he bill also helps folks who choose not to helicopter parent, like Austin mom Kari Anne Roy, whose case made headlines in 2014. Roy was at home while her six-year-old played within view of the house for about ten minutes. A passerby marched him home and called the cops...."

From "Texas Becomes Third State To Pass Free-Range Kids Law/'You had the most right-wing members of the legislature signed on with most left-wing members'" (Reason).

ADDED:  I haven't written much on the topic of "free-range" children, but let me quote something I wrote last year:

When I walk (or drive) around my neighborhood and beyond, I often think or say out loud, "Where are the children?" Are they inside looking at big and small screens? Are they chauffeured to adult-run activities? It's so sad! Even in the 80s when my sons were little, the neighborhood had kids outdoors, playing randomly with each other. But back in the 1950s, when I was little, the neighborhood was a constant festival of kid-dom. So much active, inventive play. It was endless. Nobody wanted our parents to scoop us up and take us anywhere. The place was completely alive and completely kid-scale, and none of it had anything to do — as far as we could tell — with preparing for a prestigious and remunerative career. I can't imagine any parents barging in and trying to leverage things for the advancement of their offspring. We were, to ourselves, on our own.

Ah, I see — I was reacting to an article questioning whether "expensive activities" for kids were a rip-off. 

Today's article, about the Texas law, is about the economics of childcare too, but it focuses on relieving low-income families of the burden of accusations of child neglect. The older article was about whether high-income families should be seeking to buy extra advantages for their children. The "free-range" idea works from both ends of the economic divide to equalize the life of children. 

If children are left alone to be self-reliant and to invent their own modes of playing, then rich and poor kids might have very similar lives. More or less. 

Could we all — from both ends of the political divide — agree on that? 

Of course not! We must disagree. We cannot have political peace. How would we live in political peace? The adults don't know how to play well together, even those of us who grew up in free-range American utopia.

"But she wasn’t interested in a rational discussion. She interrupted me mid-sentence, launching into a monologue about John Bolton..."

"... the former Ambassador to the United Nations and a fellow at AEI (and subsequently National Security Advisor to President Trump). Bolton, my friend insisted, was a loathsome, hateful, racist, neo-conservative warmonger. The list went on and on until eventually she said that he looked like a walrus with a moustache. You could tell by his physiognomy, she explained, that he was a psychopath. 'But what about the policies?' I responded, trying to redirect the conversation away from personalities. The more she spoke, the more I recognised her broad disposition as something I had experienced earlier in my life. Her attitude was almost entirely tribal. Two things, in particular, stood out: an almost blind hatred of a particular group (Republicans); and secondly, the use of deeply personal attacks on individual researchers to justify that hatred."

From "Tribalism has come to the West/Hostile and polarised, today's America reminds me of my Somalian clan" by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who worked at AEI at the time of that conversation).

I'm not even going to take the trouble to look for the center between these manifestly silly extremes.

These are the top 2 headlines at Real Clear Politics right now:

"Democrats have bollixed up every sexual harassment scandal I’ve covered."

"Joe Biden truncated the Hill-Thomas hearings in the name of comity. The Clintons had henchmen smear Lewinsky. Democrats vainly hammered Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh on sexual misconduct, hoping to stop judges they opposed on ideological grounds. Now, some Democrats are feeling regret over forcing out Al Franken, and for all those statements by prominent Democrats about how we must start with the presumption that women are telling the truth — an absurd standard.... 'Probably enough Democrats feel it no longer makes sense to hold your own side to serious ethical standards if Republicans won’t, so it’s possible to tough out things like this,' Ron Brownstein, a senior editor of The Atlantic, told me. 'I wouldn’t look at this as evidence that #MeToo is losing momentum; it’s more the sense that a red-blue cold war is gaining momentum. I think there’s less and less willingness to unilaterally punish your own side. Why take your own piece off the board if they won’t?'"

Writes Maureen Dowd in "Cuomo Discovers #MeToo Means #HimToo/Democrats agonize over the fate of a falling star" (NYT).

I kept the Brownstein quote in my excerpt not because I think he's sharp and getting it right. I kept it because it is such ripe bullshit, and I thought you might enjoy a laugh.  He wouldn’t look at this as evidence that #MeToo is losing momentum? Well, I sure as hell would.

Now who's saying the Nazi imagery was unintentional?

I'm reading "CPAC’s ‘Nazi Rune’ Stage Designed By A Liberal Company Which Has Worked For Biden, MSNBC"(National Pulse): 

The company – Design Foundry – told Forward it “had no idea that the design resembled any symbol, nor was there any intention to create something that did.”... The statement comes days after mainstream media outlets and left-wing Twitter activists slammed the conference for intentionally designing a stage to depict a Nazi rune, as outlets ran stories like “Nod or blunder? No CPAC 2021 apology for a stage shaped like a white supremacist symbol” and “CPAC veers into neo-Nazi fantasy: Was it deliberate? That hardly matters.”

That last one, saying the deliberateness "hardly matters," was in Salon, here.  Does it still hardly matter when you could accuse this design firm of branding CPAC as Nazis?

"So dogmatic was the dictate that we all stay at home that any attempt to question or even balance it... was deemed immoral."

"Those who questioned state-mandated lockdown and stay-at-home orders, let alone left their homes to actually protest against them, were condemned as sociopaths who were willing to sacrifice the lives of old people for economic prosperity or the trivial, troglodyte desire to go to Applebees. Oftentimes those protesting lockdowns were vilified as white nationalists or at least driven by white racialist sentiments.... How is it remotely within the scope of the expertise of epidemiologists to pick and choose which political protests should be permitted and/or encouraged and which ones banned and/or denounced? Those are plainly political judgments, not scientific ones, and the shoddy, glaring conflation of them is nothing less than a manipulation, an abuse, of public health credentials. For scientists to purport to dictate which citizens can and cannot safely choose to leave their house — based not on health judgments but on their political ideology — is repressive, and certain to erode the credibility of their profession. Yet this is exactly what they are doing: explicitly and shamelessly.... At the very least, it is vital that we have the same health and legal standards apply to all citizens and all political ideologies when it comes to the right to leave one’s home, protest or engage in other legal activities. And at least as importantly, we need to understand whether public health experts were too restrictive in their advocated measures at the start of the pandemic, are being too lax now, or somehow can reconcile the radical shift in their posture on scientific rather than political grounds."

From "The Abrupt, Radical Reversal in How Public Health Experts Now Speak About the Coronavirus and Mass Gatherings" by Glenn Greenwald (The Intercept).

"Red and Blue America Aren’t Experiencing the Same Pandemic/The disconnect is already shaping, even distorting, the nation’s response."

From the perspective of Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic:

A flurry of new national polls released this week reveals that while anxiety about the disease is rising on both sides of the partisan divide, Democrats consistently express much more concern about it than Republicans do, and they are much more likely to say they have changed their personal behavior as a result. A similar gap separates people who live in large metropolitan centers, which have become the foundation of the Democratic electoral coalition, from those who live in the small towns and rural areas that are the modern bedrock of the GOP.....

If the virus never becomes pervasive beyond big cities, that could reinforce the sense among many Republican voters and office-holders that the threat has been overstated...

“There’s a long history of conservatives demonizing the cities as sources of disease to threaten the ‘pure heartland,’” says Geoffrey Kabaservice, the director of political studies at the libertarian Niskanen Center and the author of Rule and Ruin, a history of the modern Republican Party.....

“This is something we’ve gone through a while here among Republicans,” Kabaservice says. “The feeling increasingly is that experts and the media are all part of this elite class that is self-dealing and is looking down on less-educated and less-fortunate people, and [that] they can’t be trusted to tell the truth.” He adds, “That dynamic … has been reinforced” by the emergence of the “conservative media ecosystem,” which unstintingly presents “elites” as a threat to viewers....