"As if more evidence were needed about the tragedy of black education, Rachel Jeantel, a witness for the prosecution in the George Zimmerman murder trial, put a face on it for the nation to see. Some of that evidence unfolded when Zimmerman's defense attorney asked 19-year-old Jeantel to read a letter that she allegedly had written to Trayvon Martin's mother. She responded that she doesn't read cursive, and that's in addition to her poor grammar, syntax and communication skills.
Jeantel is a senior at Miami Norland Senior High School. How in the world did she manage to become a 12th-grader without being able to read cursive writing? That's a skill one would expect from a fourth-grader. Jeantel is by no means an exception at her school. Here are a few achievement scores from her school: Thirty-nine percent of the students score basic for reading, and 38 percent score below basic. In math, 37 percent score basic, and 50 percent score below basic. Below basic is the score when a student is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at his grade level. Basic indicates only partial mastery.
It's not just Florida's schools. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, nationally most black 12th-graders test either basic or below basic in reading, writing, math and science. Drs. Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom wrote in their 2004 book, "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning," "Blacks nearing the end of their high school education perform a little worse than white eighth-graders in both reading and U.S. history, and a lot worse in math and geography." Little has changed since the book's publication.
Few Americans, particularly black Americans, have any idea of the true magnitude of the black education tragedy. The education establishment might claim that it's not their fault. They're not responsible for the devastation caused by female-headed families, drugs, violence and the culture of dependency. But they are totally responsible for committing gross educational fraud. It's educators who graduated Jeantel from elementary and middle school and continued to pass her along in high school. It's educators who will, in June 2014, confer upon her a high-school diploma...."
"...Drexel University history and political science professor George Ciccariello-Maher disapprovingly says that the reaction to Jeantel's court performance "has been in terms of aesthetics, of disregarding a witness on the basis of how she talks, how good she is at reading and writing." Harking back to Jim Crow days, he adds: "These are subtle things that echo literacy testing at the polls, echo the question of whether black Americans can testify against white people, of being always suspect in their testimony. It's the same old dynamics emerging in a very different guise." Then there's Morgan Polikoff, assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California, who says: "Cursive should be allowed to die. In fact, it's already dying, despite having been taught for decades."
"That's the kind of educational philosophy that accounts for much of our nation's educational decline."
"...The educational system and black family structure and culture have combined to make increasing numbers of young black people virtually useless in the increasingly high-tech world of the 21st century. Too many people believe that pouring more money into schools will help. That's whistlin' "Dixie." Whether a student is black or white, poor or rich, there are some minimum requirements that must be met in order to do well in school. Someone must make the student do his homework, see to it that he gets a good night's sleep, fix a breakfast, make sure he gets to school on time and make sure he respects and obeys his teachers. Here are my questions: Which one of those requirements can be achieved through a higher school budget? Which can be achieved by politicians? If those minimal requirements aren't met, whatever else is done is mostly for naught.
I hope Rachel Jeantel's court performance is a wake-up call for black Americans about the devastation wrought by our educational system."
"First there was no mention of a muezzin when the mosque was inaugurated; then on Fridays only; then three times a day, now five times a day." — Interview in Die Zeit
A Turkish mosque in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia has begun sounding public calls to prayer from an outdoor loudspeaker system mounted on the roof of the edifice.
The mosque is one of a growing number of Islamic institutions in Germany (and other parts of Western Europe) publicly calling the Muslim faithful to prayer -- five times a day, seven days a week -- with cries of Allahu Akbar ("Allah is Greater").
Observers believe a precedent has now been established, and that many of the other 3,000 mosques in Germany will soon begin jumping on the muezzin loudspeaker bandwagon.
The sonorous prayer calls (known as adhan in Arabic) can be heard from great distances when amplified through electric loudspeakers; some German towns and cities are actually beginning to evoke the sounds and images of the Islamic Middle East.
The latest "muezzin event" involves the Fatih Camii Mosque in Wipperfürth, a factory town situated 40 kilometers (25 miles) north-east of Cologne, which, on June 21, began publicly calling the Muslim faithful to prayer during a formal "muezzin-induction ceremony" attended by local and foreign dignitaries, including the Turkish consul, Mustafa Kemal Basa.
The Fatih Camii Mosque -- run by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Islamic Affairs (DITIB), a branch of the Turkish government that controls over 900 mosques in Germany -- received municipal approval for a muezzin publicly to call Muslims to the mosque for prayer five times a day after Mayor Michael von Rekowski said he wanted to show the world that Wipperfürth "takes pride in being an intercultural and interreligious community."
At the request of the mayor, leaders of the Wipperfürth mosque met with representatives of the Protestant and Catholic churches in town to "integrate" the timing of the Muslim prayer calls into the traditional schedule for the ringing of church bells. Although many non-Muslim townspeople are opposed to the muezzin, local clergy say they are pleased with the "peaceful coexistence between religions and culture" in the town.
The mosque in Wipperfürth is one of several in Germany to obtain municipal approval for public prayer calls.
The Turkish-run Central Mosque in the northern German town of Rendsburg, situated 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Hamburg, has been calling Muslims to prayer since 2010, when Social Democratic Mayor Andreas Breitner authorized the muezzin to issue prayer calls through three loudspeakers mounted on the top of two 26 meter (85 foot) minarets attached to each side of the mosque. Prayer calls are permitted between 6AM and 10PM.
The German newspaper Die Zeit reported that Rendsburg was engaged in a "holy war" after a local citizen's group gathered nearly 1,000 signatures opposing the muezzin. The group, which goes by the name "No Public Prayer Calls" [Kein öffentlicher Gebetsruf], had argued that the construction of the mosque was more than sufficient to guarantee the Muslims their constitutional right to free speech, and that the subsequent demands for a muezzin publicly to call the faithful to prayer was excessive. Moreover, the group argued that the Koran makes no mention of the need for muezzin, making the position superfluous.
According to one woman interviewed by the newspaper, there was no mention of a muezzin when the mosque was inaugurated in October 2009; "But then it was proposed that a muezzin should call the faithful to prayer on Fridays only. After that it was three times a day, and now it is five times a day. The prayer calls last for three minutes and the content is a bit much, especially since we are told that 'Allah is the greatest,'" she said. (The adhan, which consists of 15 verses, some of which are repeated several times, lasts for about three minutes.)
Opponents of the muezzin also pointed to the fact that the mosque adheres to Milli Görüs, a neo-Ottoman political-religious Islamist movement that calls for the "establishment of a national-religious Turkish empire." Although Milli Görüs has been monitored by German intelligence for anti-constitutional activities, the group operates freely throughout Germany..."
"Back in North Rhine-Westphalia, the Turkish-run Kuba Camii Mosque in Eschweiler, a city situated along the German-Belgian-Dutch border and about 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Cologne, obtained municipal approval in December 2012 to begin publicly calling Muslims to prayer.
The first such public prayer call took place on Friday, January 11, 2013, amid considerable fanfare. The call to prayer, which was described as an "historical event," was attended by myriad dignitaries, including the Turkish consul, Mustafa Kemal Basa, and the Turkish attaché, Tayfun Keltek.
The Turkish imam of the Kuba Camii Mosque, Bahri Ciftci, declared: "May the public prayer call be a symbol of a tolerant, intercultural and interreligious common coexistence."
During the ceremony, the mayor of Eschweiler, Rudi Bertram, said, "Tolerance must be practiced on a daily basis. We are all responsible for ensuring that there is a co-existence.""
"In today's Turkey, Christian communities confront two inter-related threats: First, they are suppressed by all-encompassing state restrictions on internal governance, education, houses of worship, and wider property rights, and the denial of legal status. They are in practice barred from operating seminaries and directly owning property. Largely through its Directorate of Religious Foundations, the state supervises and tries to control all Christian activity."
The book continues: "Second…social hostilities against Turkey's religious minorities run high. Such bigotry is reinforced by the official attitude of suspicion toward Christians. It is difficult even to have a frank national discussion about the plight of Christians in Turkey; those who have tried…can face charges for insulting Turkishness."
"On Monday, June 24, 2013, the U.S. Senate passed a cloture motion (which ends debate) on the Schumer-Corker-Hoeven Amendment to the Gang of Eight's horrifying illegal alien amnesty bill - mislabeled "immigration reform."
The true purpose of this amnesty proposal is to capture future votes for the Democratic Party. Those who do not acknowledge that blatantly obvious fact either suffer from some debilitating mental illness or are working for the other side.
On rare occasions, even the Left admit the objective. Eliseo Medina, the honorary Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, and International Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), said in 2008:
...If we reform the immigration laws, it puts 12 million people on the path to citizenship and eventually voters. Can you imagine if we have ...even two out of three, if we get 8 million new voters... we will create a governing coalition for the long term, not just for an election cycle.
The "governing coalition for the long term" refers of course to the "permanent progressive majority" Democrats have fantasized about for decades.
The number of illegals in this country is repeatedly cited as 11 million. This is almost certainly an underestimate. In reality the number is 20 to 30 million or more, according to a 2007 study in Social Contract. Bear Stearns estimated about 20 million in 2005. When amnesty passed in 1986, official estimates were 1.2 million illegals. There were actually 2.7 million - more than double. Within ten years, INS estimated the illegal population had grown to 10 million. It is delusional to believe the number has only increased by another 1 million in the 17 years since. Furthermore, when amnesty passes, the newly-legal aliens will invite their relatives to come, further inflating that number through chain migration.
Herein lies the real reason Democrats are slavering for this amnesty bill to pass and are tickling themselves pink that there are Republicans stupid and gullible, (or corrupt) enough to help them realize their dream. And make no mistake, an increase of 30 million in the Democrat Party voter base will guarantee Democrat majorities in the U.S. House, Senate and Presidency for the foreseeable future.
Despite the impossibly bizarre belief by some Republicans that amnesty will make illegals "like us," a high level Congressional source recently acknowledged to me that passage of this bill will spell the end of our Republic and that we literally have only weeks to stop it. Despite House Speaker John Boehner's somewhat ambiguous assurances, this bill is likely to get a vote in the House.
The original Gang-of-Eight bill was really bad, as became readily apparent quite quickly. The overtly fraudulent Schumer-Corker-Hoeven Amendment was offered as a fig leaf to reassure fools that the original bill -- which already promised in-and-of-itself to enhance border security - would actually enhance border security. But in reality it makes things worse. The amendment:
* Legitimizes illegal immigration: Section 2302 says if you overstay your visa in the future you can still apply for a green card and become a citizen. It is permanent lawlessness... They cannot do that legally under current law!
* Has no requirement to deploy technologies: The Corker amendment would give the Secretary of Homeland Security full discretion as to how technology would be deployed, or whether it would be deployed at all.
* Has no fencing requirement: Similarly, building a fence is left to the discretion of DHS. (Note: since a fencing law, with money attached, passed years ago, and has been blithely ignored by the Obama administration, the amendment simply codifies Obama's open defiance of current law.)
Increases fees on visas for legal immigrants, but keeps the same low fees and fines for those applying for amnesty - favoring illegal over legal immigrants.
Under the Schumer-Corker-Hoeven amendment, the American taxpayers are on the hook for $38 billion. (The Gang-of-Eight claims the bill is fully funded by immigrant fees).
* Delays promised hiring of 20,000 new Border Patrol agents until somewhere between 2017 and 2021.
The Schumer-Corker-Hoeven Amendment, by the way, is one of the factors that convinced Bill O'Reilly to support this legislation. Bill reminds us of P.T. Barnum's timeless adage, "there's a sucker born every minute," but only on Fox News does one get a prime-time show, and only in the U.S. Senate do they get hailed as "moderates."
In a conference call Monday evening, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said that most people don't realize this bill operates in tandem with Obamacare and amounts to de facto affirmative action for illegals. He said that Obamacare will raise the cost of American citizen or legal immigrant workers by roughly $3,000, but the amnesty bill exempts illegals . This creates an incentive to fire legitimate employees or reduce them to part-time status and replace them with illegals.
He added soberly that if American people do not stand up now, no senator or group of senators has the clout to stop this thing from passing..."
"Here’s Williams’ roadmap out of poverty: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits."Four years ago in this space, I was anticipating an increase in Islamic-conversion rates in the likes of Amsterdam and Rotterdam:
Let's say you work in an office in those cities: One day they install a Muslim prayer room, and a few folks head off at the designated time, while the rest of you get on with what passes for work in the EU. A couple of years go by, and it's now a few more folks scooting off to the prayer room. Then it's a majority. And the ones who don't are beginning to feel a bit awkward about being left behind.
What do you do? The future showed up a lot sooner than you thought. If you were a fundamentalist Christian like those wackjob Yanks, signing on to Islam might cause you some discomfort. But, if you're the average post-Christian Eurosecularist, what's the big deal? Who wants to be the last guy sitting in the office sharpening his pencil during morning prayers?
Funny how quickly it all happened. There was the woman on reception, but she retired. And the guy in personnel who used to say, sotto voce, that Geert Wilders had a point. But he emigrated the year after Wilders did.
I didn't know the half of it. The other day, Arnoud van Doorn, the producer of Wilders's anti-Islamic film Fitna, announced that he'd converted to Islam — or "accepted Islam," as they say — and made a pilgrimage to Medina to repent and ask for Allah's forgiveness. There's a lot of it about. Tony Blair's sister-in-law has converted. So has Gitmo guard Terry Holdbrooks, who was touched by the way the detainees "wake up each day and smile," and Katherine Russell, the "all-American girl" from Rhode Island who married Tamerlan Tsarnaev and whose parents were "very supportive" of their daughter's decision to "accept Islam" and retreat beneath the veil and stayed "very supportive" right up until their son-in-law blew up the Boston Marathon. The two men who butchered Royal Fusilier Lee Rigby on the streets of London were also converts, British-born sons of Nigerian Christians. Captured by the cameras with, literally, blood on their hands, they reminded me of another convert, the British comedian Omar Brooks. Mr. Brooks's best-known surefire side-splitting showstopping gag is that the attacks on the World Trade Center "changed many people's lives." Comic pause. "Especially those inside." It brought the house down!
A few years back, in a debate at Trinity College in Dublin, he was asked what Mohammed's message to non-believers was and replied, with disarming honesty, "I come to slaughter all of you. . . . We are the Muslims. We drink the blood of the enemy." I thought of Omar Brooks for the first time in years as I watched his two blood-soaked coreligionists stagger about Wellington Street bragging about what they had done in the name of "almighty Allah." I wouldn't have been surprised to see them drinking blood had the constabulary taken any longer and left them with another 20 minutes to show off for the cameras. On the other hand, the Medway Messenger in Kent reported a prompt police response to an outbreak of octogenarian Islamophobia:
"An 85-year-old woman has this afternoon been arrested after abuse was hurled at Muslims outside Gillingham Mosque. The pensioner was handcuffed and taken away in a van by officers attending the Canterbury Street mosque for Friday prayers."
Oh. That's helpful. If you yell at a mosque, the coppers are already inside. If you deface a London war memorial with Islamic slogans, there's none in sight, and even the ubiquitous British CCTV cameras are apparently of no use in identifying the perpetrators. The day after Drummer Rigby's murder, a march in support of the "Help for Heroes" military charity ended in a five-hour standoff between marchers and police, ending with the arrest of Lee Cousins for "mocking the Islamic prayer ritual" by getting down on his hands and knees outside the pub. He was fined 600 pounds — or just shy of a thousand bucks.
"Terrorism's great achievement isn't hijacking jetliners, but hijacking the debate," wrote George Jonas in Canada's National Post. "Successful terrorism persuades the terror-stricken that he's conscience-stricken." Which is why, in the decade after 9/11, Western governments ramped up Islamic immigration instead of slowing it to a trickle; and their citizens were "very supportive" of those who converted in record numbers, instead of mourning the wholesale abandonment of their inheritance; and their community-outreach enforcers dragged those who disrespected the Prophet into court for ever more footling infractions, instead of obliging Islam to adjust to core Western values like freedom of expression. Meanwhile, Islamic self-segregation intensified. The "War on Terror" was always an evasion, for "terror" doesn't easily encompass, say, demands for segregated swimming sessions or even the nightly car burnings in Stockholm. It does, however, accurately capture the response of Sweden's "center-right" government, bleating about doing more to alleviate "social exclusion." We now expect European leaders to sound like battered wives — like Katherine Tsarnaev.
Sweden's foreign-born (i.e., overwhelmingly Muslim) population has increased from 10 percent to 15 in the last decade. Where will it be a decade hence? The Canadian author Doug Saunders, refuting theories of a "Muslim tide," says that Europe's Islamic population will peak at about 10 percent, and more likely stabilize around 7. Right now, 10 percent of Britons under 25 are already Muslim, which means one day Britain will be 10 percent Muslim — at least. And the octogenarians who yell outside the mosque will be gone.
And then there will be silence, and submission.
"A few weeks after 9/11, when government was hastily retooling its 1970s hijacking procedures for the new century, I wrote a column for the National Post of Canada and various other publications that, if you’re so interested, is preserved in my anthology The Face of the Tiger. It began by noting the observation of President Bush’s transportation secretary, Norman Mineta, that if “a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach, Florida” and “a Muslim young man” were in line to board a flight, he hoped there would be no difference in the scrutiny to which each would be subjected. The TSA was then barely a twinkle in Norm’s eye, and in that long-ago primitive era it would have seemed absurd to people that one day in America it would be entirely routine for wheelchair-bound nonagenarians to remove leg braces before boarding a plane or for kindergartners to stand patiently as three middle-aged latex-gloved officials poke around their genitals. Back then, the idea that everybody is a suspect still seemed slightly crazy....
... Along the way, alas, Secretary Mineta’s dream of a world in which “a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach” and “a Muslim young man” are subject to equal scrutiny has not come to pass. The Vero Beach gran’ma gets a lot more attention than the guy from the Yemeni madrassah, especially if she’s made the mistake of attending a tea-party meeting or two. The other day the Boston Globe ran a story on how the city’s police and other agencies had spent months planning a big training exercise for last weekend involving terrorists planting bombs hidden in backpacks left downtown. Unfortunately, the Marathon bombers preempted them, and turned the coppers’ hypothetical scenario into bloody reality.
What a freaky coincidence, eh? But it’s the differences between the simulation and the actual event that are revealing. In humdrum reality, the Boston bombers were Chechen Muslim brothers with ties to incendiary imams and jihadist groups in Dagestan. In the far more exciting Boston Police fantasy, the bombers were a group of right-wing militiamen called “Free America Citizens,” a name so suspicious (involving as it does the words “free,” “America,” and “citizens”) that it can only have been leaked to them by the IRS. What fun the law-enforcement community in Massachusetts had embroidering their hypothetical scenario: The “Free America Citizens” terrorists even had their own little logo — a skull’s head with an Uncle Sam hat. Ooh, scary! The Boston PD graphics department certainly knocked themselves out on that.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was training in Dagestan, posting terrorist videos on YouTube, and getting fingered by the Russians to the FBI. Who did nothing.
If you had the misfortune to be blown up by the Tsarnaev brothers, and are now facing a future with one leg and suddenly circumscribed goals, like those brave Americans featured on the cover of the current People magazine under the headline “Boston Tough,” you might wish Boston had been a little tougher on Tamerlan and spent less time chasing the phantoms of “Free America Citizens.” But, in fact, it would have been extremely difficult to track the Tsarnaevs at, say, the mosque they attended. Your Granny’s phone calls, your teenager’s Flickr stream, and your Telecharge tickets for two on the aisle at Mamma Mia! for your wife’s birthday, and the MasterCard bill for dinner with your mistress three days later are all fair game, but since October 2011 mosques have been off-limits to the security state. If the FBI guy who got the tip-off from Moscow about young Tamerlan had been sufficiently intrigued to want to visit the Boston mosque where he is said to have made pro-terrorism statements during worship, the agent would have been unable to do so without seeking approval from something called the Sensitive Operations Review Committee high up in Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. The Sensitive Operations Review Committee is so sensitive nobody knows who’s on it. You might get approved, or you might get sentenced to extra sensitivity training for the next three months. Even after the bombing, the cops forbore to set foot in the lads’ mosque for four days. Three hundred million Americans are standing naked in the NSA digital scanner, but the all-seeing security state has agreed that not just their womenfolk but Islam itself can be fully veiled from head to toe.
We’re told that universal surveillance has prevented all kinds of atrocities we can never hear about — an answer straight out of Orwell. Yet oddly, in the ones we do hear about, the perps are hiding in plain sight (Major Hasan with “Soldier of Allah” on his business card), the intelligence services do nothing (the Pantybomber known to the CIA but still permitted to board the plane), and the digital superstate is useless (the Tsarnaev photo rang no bells with the facial-recognition software, but was identified by friends who saw it on TV).
And thus, the bozo leviathan blunders on. Big Politically Correct Brother sees everything . . . and nothing."
"...For as long as Hillary Clinton has been on the national scene, she has left a path of destruction and wreckage in her wake that is both impressive and terrible to behold. She is a testament to the extent of damage that can be done by one person determined to conquer everything before her in the quest for unlimited power and self-gratification. The only prize left to her in American politics is the presidency, which she has always felt is hers by right. Indeed, she would have attained it were it not for the upstart community organizer, a fellow admirer of Saul Alinsky, who spoke in volumes but said nothing.
While such determination comes at a staggering cost, we should remind ourselves that the bill is never paid by Mrs. Clinton or her equally arrogant husband. It is paid by the country. Before we ask yet again for the check, perhaps we should remind ourselves of exactly who this woman is who will soon attempt to seduce the country, and her history as the object of an absurd and undeserved degree of national affection.
Before accompanying her husband to the White House as our first co-president, Mrs. Clinton was working hard on becoming the person we now know her to be. As with her husband, the goal has always been the attainment of power masquerading as public service. Setting an example for the Obamas to emulate, the Clintons put self-absorption and personal victory before all else. The Clintons have always served themselves, and nothing else.
Do you recall the slime that was Whitewater, in which the Clintons dissembled and lied while their former business partners went to jail? Do you remember Mrs. Clinton earning $100,000 in profit in 1979 on a $1,000 investment over the course of only 9 months in volatile cattle futures, about which she knew nothing, thanks to help from a highly placed Tyson Foods connection? Tyson profited handsomely in Arkansas, with state loans and appointments. We are to believe that Clinton studied the Wall Street Journal to achieve a feat against which the odds were one in 250 million. Do you recall the Rose Law Firm billing records that magically appeared in Mrs. Clinton's White House office, years after they had been subpoenaed? Or the death of Vince Foster under rather extraordinary and inexplicable circumstances, and the lies and cover-up that followed? Do you recall that while testifying before congressional investigators as first lady, she answered "I don't know" or "I don't remember" 250 times?
Do you recall Travelgate, in which the Clintons destroyed reputations and careers to reward campaign donors? What about the endless parade of women, long known to Mrs. Clinton and laughably passed off by her as "ministering" to a troubled young woman in the matter of Miss Lewinsky? Nevertheless, when the truth came out, she was entirely happy to exploit the illusion of victimhood for her own martyrdom in the cause of political advancement.
Wherever Mrs. Clinton goes, destruction follows. Of course, like the current president, nothing is ever her fault. She knows nothing. She is the innocent victim of all around her, endlessly bemoaning her fate as the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy that somehow has directed the events of her life even before there was a vast right-wing conspiracy.
Make no mistake: the Clintons, and Hillary Clinton in particular, hold the American public in utter contempt, but especially so their own supporters. How else to explain the countless frauds, crimes, and lies they perpetrate upon their devotees, whose own intellectual honesty is devalued to nothing by their loyalty? And how else besides intellectual dishonesty to rationalize somehow being a Hillary Clinton supporter?"
"...Perhaps no other city in America illuminates the failure of Democratic Party policies more brightly than Detroit. Two stories, separated by only four, days are emblematic. On March 11, former Mayor Kwame Kilpatick was found guilty of 24 of 30 charges leveled against him, including fraud, racketeering and extortion. Four days later, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder appointed attorney Kevyn Orr as the city’s emergency financial manager, in a last ditch effort to avoid what would be the largest municipal bankruptcy in the nation’s history. From 1961 to the present, the tragic history of Detroit itself has been written entirely by Democrats such as these individuals.
It was 1961 when Louis C. Miriani, Detroit’s last Republican Mayor, lost his re-election bid. It was a well-deserved loss. Miriani was a criminal who served 10 years in prison for tax evasion. The victor in the race was Democrat James Jerome Cavanagh, the only elected official to serve on LBJ’s Model Cities task force, a program that emulated Soviet efforts to reconstruct entire urban areas in Eastern European cities. Cavanagh decided that a nine-square mile section of Detroit should follow suit, and he got a new income tax, as well as a commuter tax, through the state legislature to pay for Detroit’s very own “Model City.”
The program became a disaster when residents resisted the command-and-control edicts from Democratic mayors and federal officials, telling people where to live, what to build, and what businesses to open in return for cash, training and healthcare. As a result of such heavy-handedness, a breakdown in civil order occurred, as did the beginnings of Detroit’s precipitous population decline. On July 23, 1967, that decline was accelerated when police arrested more than 80 people at a “blind pig,” a name given to black American after-hours clubs, in the heart of Model City. Outraged residents staged the worst race riot of the 1960s in retaliation, during which businesses were looted and burned. Five days later, LBJ was forced to send in two divisions of paratroopers to restore calm. Over the next year and a half, 140,000 residents, mostly white, fled the city.
Despite such failure, Democratic policies continued to be implemented. Public employee unions were granted high salaries, exorbitant benefit packages, and allowed to implement inefficient work rules and other requirements that raised the cost of doing business in the city. The same Democrat-fostered union mentality took hold in the private sector with a vengeance, to the point where Detroit’s auto industry began moving to right-to-work states in the South in order to survive.
While this economic catastrophe-in-the-making was taking place, Democrats were also undermining the school system. By 2009, Detroit Public Schools (DPS), a system U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called a “national disgrace,” was also put under the control of an emergency financial manager in order to prevent bankruptcy. And 2009 was the year that DPS students turned in the lowest scores ever recorded in the national math proficiency test over its then-21-year history. As of last June, only 1.8 percent of DPS students were considered capable of doing college level work, the achievement gap remained one of the highest in the nation, and 79 percent of residents said they don’t want their child educated by DPS. Moreover, by 2016, the system that had educated approximately 160,000 students as recently as 2000, will be reduced to serving less than 40,000 children.
Detroit residents have paid a heavy price for such a dysfunctional system: a mind-blowing 47 percent of Detroit residents are functionally illiterate.
Considering the quality of leaders running the city, Detroit’s descent into ruination should surprise no one. From 1974 to 1993, Coleman Young was mayor. Young may have run as a Democrat, but he was subsequently revealed to be a member of the Communist Party. His brand of “us against them” politics, essentially branding anyone who disagreed with him as “racist,” exacerbated Detroit’s descent into chaos. In 1992, his police chief was convicted of stealing $2.6 million from city taxpayers, even as Young defended him. Michigan’s hard-left U.S. Senator Carl Levin was Young’s chief supporter, serving as Detroit City Council president.
Such corruption was hardly anomalous. In 2006, former Detroit City Council member Alonzo Bates was convicted of putting a relative on the payroll, for which he served a 33-month sentence. In 2009, City Council member Monica Conyers, wife of U.S. House Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), who has represented Detroit for 47 years, pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges and served 27 months in a federal prison. As for former Mayor Kwami Kilpatrick, his corruption wasn’t limited to the aforementioned conviction. In 2008, he agreed to resign and spend 120 days in jail for two felony counts of obstruction of justice. In 2010, he was sentenced to up to five years for violating the terms of his probation stemming from the 2008 conviction.
In 2012, Kilpatrick was also linked to a dubious pension deal involving ex-Detroit Treasurer and Kilpatrick appointee Jeffrey Beasley, who has been indicted by the federal government for taking bribes and kickbacks as part of a corrupt bargain that cost two Detroit pension funds $84 million in investment losses. Last month, two more city officials, pension fund lawyer Ronald Zajac, and Detroit Police and Fire pension trustee Paul Stewart, were also indicted in the widening pension fund bribery scandal. Also in 2012, Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr. retired as the result of a scandal surrounding his sexual involvement with a female officer in the department..."
"...Let us also overlook the excellent treatment received from the IRS by members of the president’s family. Although acting commissioner Steven Miller apologized for the “horrible customer service” conservative taxpayers had gotten, a gentleman by the name of Malik Obama received impeccable, express service when he took the precaution of mailing in his non-profit application from N’giya, Kenya, rather than notoriously slower mail processing centers such as Phoenix and Dallas. Malik, the brother of President Obama, runs the Barack H. Obama Foundation, named for the president’s father. On May 30, 2011, they applied for tax-exempt status, and had their approval signed less than a month later by Lois Lerner herself, and conveniently backdated by Lois to cover the two-and-a-half years the enterprising Malik had already been raking in “tax-deductible” donations from Americans. The Washington address of the Barack H. Obama Foundation appears to be bogus, and it’s not clear whether the funds are being used back in Kenya for anything other than supporting the famously lavish lifestyle of Malik and his twelve wives. Given that the IRS is not shy about asking American conservatives for Facebook posts and lists of who attends their meetings, Ms. Lerner surely would have been within her rights to ask Malik Obama about the “exclusive” photographs currently displayed on the Barack H. Obama Foundation website of a recent meeting in Sudan, one of only four countries the U.S. government designates as a “terrorist state,” and the Foundation’s apparently extensive association with the Sudanese president and blood-soaked genocidal war criminal Omar al-Bashir. Given that the IRS likes to ask conservative taxpayers whether their friends and relatives are planning on running for office, Ms. Lerner might like to ask Malik Obama when his friend President Bashir is planning on leaving office. After another quarter million corpses?
President Obama's half-brother chitchatting with a Sudanese 'Field Marshal'. A rank that high implies direct involvement in the Darfur Genocide, but let that be no problem for Malik Obama and his Barack H. Obama Foundation.
Whatever. Let’s take it as read that, when U.S. taxpayers wind up giving tax breaks to an entity linked to the butchers of Darfur, it’s pure coincidence that the racket turns out to be run by the president’s brother. Let’s accept that Malik Obama just got lucky that his letter landed on the desk of Lois Lerner, and that, when she backdated his application for two-and-a-half years, she’d momentarily forgotten that it’s illegal for her to backdate it more than two-and-a-quarter years. Indeed, let’s take the president at his word that the existence of this shadowy IRS entity working deep within the even shadowier U.S. Treasury planted in deep cover within the shadowiest conspiracy of them all, this murky hitherto unknown organization called “the Executive Branch,” that all this was news to him. What that means then is not that this or that elected politician is corrupt but that the government of the United States is corrupt.
There seems to be ever more evidence for that. Every day brings revelations that the IRS conservative crackdown went way beyond the Tea Party. McClatchy Newspapers reports that a woman known only as “Ms. Richards” in the Cincinnati office of the IRS told Coalition for Life of Iowa that their application for nonprofit status could only be approved if they signed a letter promising not to picket in front of Planned Parenthood. Mark Drabik, a military veteran, became politically active and started giving to conservative groups only to have the IRS challenge his church donations. Catherine Engelbrecht founded True the Vote to protect ballot integrity, and within a few months her family’s business, farm, and personal taxes had all attracted IRS audits. Hundreds and hundreds of groups were consigned to the purgatory of “pending” — a term for IRS customers not as favored as Malik Obama can stretch leisurely from six months to ten to twenty to thirty, and beyond. When the most lavishly funded government on the planet comes after you, eventual guilt or innocence is irrelevant: The process is the punishment..."
"...Sweden riots expose ugly side of Multiculturalism and Immigration." That would be an accurate title for an article describing the wave of mayhem unleashed by vulgar, violent immigrants in the suburb of Husby, north of Stockholm.
The rioting is yet another example of tribalistic behavior on the part of bitter, entitled immigrants who have been unwisely welcomed into Western nations. But that's not how Reuters saw things.
"Sweden riots expose ugly side of 'Nordic model'" is the slanderous title chosen by Reuters to describe an uprising of ungrateful third-world immigrants.
In case we in America haven't caught on yet, perhaps we should take note. If the ultra-tolerant Swedes, with their giant welfare state and generous asylum policy, can't manage to satisfy the demands of third-world immigrants, then perhaps no one can.
But what is this "Nordic model," whose ugly side has been exposed? It is the "Swedish model of welfare," according to the anti-white, anti-Western hacks writing for Reuters.
That's right: when mobs of criminal immigrant youths attack police and burn cars, their behavior is the fault of the European nation that gave the immigrants a home. That home supported their lifestyle, provided education and health care, and paid the immigrants to simmer in baseless hate.
The belligerent mobs are supposedly angry that police shot a man who was threatening police by swinging a machete at them. The politically correct call this behavior "wielding a machete." The machete-swinger is of unknown nationality, but he lived in the suburb of Husby, which is predominantly Muslim immigrant.
The Reuters reporters, who evidently despise Swedes and will obediently recite any insult made about the Swedish people, have this enriching perspective to offer:
Conversations with residents of this immigrant neighborhood soon bring tales of fruitless job hunts, police harassment, racial taunts and a feeling of living at the margins that are at odds with Sweden's reputation for openness and tolerance.
Could it be that those residents are not telling the truth? Could it be that their victim mentality, like the victim mentality of so many groups in Western societies, has led them to exaggerate the scope of discrimination and concoct fairy tales of oppression? Might there even be a fundamental conflict between the values of many Muslim immigrants and the values of a secular European state? These possibilities seem not to have occurred to the Reuters journalists, who wrote this apology for violence:
Riots that began in Husby have spread across Stockholm over the last four nights in scenes reminiscent of London in 2011 and Paris in 2005- outbursts with their roots in segregation, neglect and poverty.
There we have it: the bitter fruit of white nations. "[S]egregation, neglect and poverty." The immigrants have not found opportunity, broad freedoms, or the chance to live and think as they please and or rise according to their training and talent. Instead, all the immigrant finds are "segregation, neglect and poverty."
We aren't supposed to even think that the Swedish immigrants are segregated because they are Muslim and because many hate gays, women's uncovered faces, alcohol, and even service dogs for the blind. It couldn't be that "neglect" is an idiotic term to describe the relationship between a society and immigrants; only helpless people and dependents can be neglected. All others are supposed to have enough free will and human decency to make a go at life without being coddled. And last, but certainly not least, we are never supposed to question the values or behavior of anyone who lives in "poverty."
In fact, Western nations are horrible if they don't turn immigrants into white-collar professionals by the second generation:
Metros and trains out of Stockholm center late at night are full of exhausted-looking Arabic or Spanish speaking immigrants returning home from menial jobs. Even second generation immigrants struggle to find white collar employment.
These largely Muslim immigrants, egged on by the feral press, feel that they are entitled to faster career progression and an easy path to affluence. Never mind that the immigrants are better off in Sweden than they could ever be in their native countries of Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia...."
