Life, Liberty, Property
By Bob Parks | June 16, 2012 | Black and Right
This whopper deserves all the attention it can get. Again, it shows the ignorance and contempt of the electorate liberals depend on.
In 2010, Democrats gave their website a facelift and whitewash. Click on the screenshot above to see what they used to say about their civil rights history compared to now. [Read more…]
By Daniel Greenfield | June 10, 2012 | Sultan Knish
The real lesson of Wisconsin is that the Republican Party is at its strongest and greatest when it acts as a revolutionary liberation movement, breaking apart the power relationships of the Democratic Party that stifle people’s personal, economic and religious lives.
The Democratic Party has made it its mandate to politicize and collectivize the personal. It has done this to militarize every area of life, to transform all human activities into a battlefield and to bring every area of life under the aegis of its power relationships. These power relationships form its infrastructure, fusing together governmental and non-governmental organizations, to form the true ruling class.
These power relationships act as dams, walling up human energy into organizational structures, they create the mandates that provide power and money to the organizations, which are fed throughout the infrastructure to create a massive cage of bureaucrats, activists and think-tanks that set the agenda, which becomes law, and is then enforced by governments at every level.
By Rush Limbaugh | June 11, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Barack Hussein Kardashian, the Celebrity of the United States, went out for a press conference, impromptu on Friday. A State-Controlled Media reporter said, “What about the Republicans saying that you’re blaming the Europeans for the failures of your own policies?”
OBAMA: The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government — oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, governors or mayors.
RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I think that he meant to say exactly what he said. I don’t see a problem here. The private sector, as far as he’s concerned, is doing fine. If he thinks that the public sector is losing jobs, that’s a problem. If there are fewer government workers, that’s a major problem to Barack Obama. As far as he’s concerned, the private sector’s fine. And as far as he’s concerned, the way he’s been educated and taught, the private sector’s always just gonna be there.
By Robert L. Woodson, Sr. | May 24, 2012 | Washington Times
For decades, it was presumed that having blacks in positions of political leadership on the local, state and national levels would serve as a safeguard to preserve the victories of the civil rights movement and ensure that the people on whose behalf those battles had been fought could benefit from the new opportunities that those victories afforded. But in time, just the opposite has happened. In an era where race has begun to serve as both a shield (rebuffing legitimate criticism as evidence of racism) and a sword (attacking dissenting opinions as racist) many black officials have entered zones of comfort insulated from responsibility. In many cities, monopolies of opportunist leadership have reigned unchallenged for decades.
A case in point is that of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who, along with his cronies, was indicted on 38 charges, in what a federal prosecutor described as a “pattern of extortion, bribery and fraud” by some of Detroit’s most prominent officials. Charges in the indictment include extortion, mail and wire fraud, obstruction of justice, malicious threats to extort money, and bribery.
By Tiffany Gabbay | May 25, 2012 | The Blaze
By Naomi Schaefer Riley | May 8, 2012 | Wall Street Journal
Recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a cover story called “Black Studies: ‘Swaggering Into the Future,'” in which the reporter described how “young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline.” The “5 Up-and-Coming Ph.D. Candidates” described in the piece’s sidebar “are rewriting the history of race.” While the article suggested some are skeptical of black studies as a discipline, the reporter neglected to quote anyone who is.
Like me. So last week, on the Chronicle’s “Brainstorm” blog (where I was paid to be a regular contributor), I suggested that the dissertation topics of the graduate students mentioned were obscure at best and “a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap,” at worst.
By Walter E. Williams | May 22, 2012 | CNS News
Each year, roughly 7,000 blacks are murdered. Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is another black person.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Using the 94 percent figure means that 262,621 were murdered by other blacks. Though blacks are 13 percent of the nation’s population, they account for more than 50 percent of homicide victims. Nationally, black homicide victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, it’s 22 times that of whites. Coupled with being most of the nation’s homicide victims, blacks are most of the victims of violent personal crimes, such as assault and robbery.
The magnitude of this tragic mayhem can be viewed in another light. According to a Tuskegee Institute study, between the years 1882 and 1968, 3,446 blacks were lynched at the hands of whites. Black fatalities during the Korean War (3,075), Vietnam War (7,243) and all wars since 1980 (8,197) come to 18,515, a number that pales in comparison with black loss of life at home.
By Kevin D. Williamson | May 21, 2012 | National Review
This magazine has long specialized in debunking pernicious political myths, and Jonah Goldberg has now provided an illuminating catalogue of tyrannical clichés, but worse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century. Republicans may not be able to make significant inroads among black voters in the coming elections, but they would do well to demolish this myth nonetheless.
By Rush Limbaugh | May 16, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Developments in the Trayvon Martin case, and you’d be hard-pressed to find these developments out there. There have been two dramatic developments in the Trayvon Martin shooting case. According to ABC News, George Zimmerman’s family doctor saw him the morning after the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Here’s what George Zimmerman’s doctor found: A broken nose, two black eyes, bruises on his face and lip, two cuts on the back of his head, and a back injury.
The NBC affiliate in Florida is reporting that the medical director who performed the autopsy on Trayvon Martin found only two injuries on his body: the gunshot wound and broken skin on his knuckles. Welcome to the Duke lacrosse case all over again. Everything Zimmerman said about what happened to him turns out to be true after the media trying to cast him along with the civil rights coalitions of this country, the race-baiters, as abject lies. (interruption) What do you mean, not rush to judgment? It’s been two months. I’m not speculating. I’m telling you what the doctor said. There’s no speculation going on. The doctor is not speculating. The doctor did the exam the day after the incident happened. It’s all been suppressed. Nobody’s reported it. That’s the point. And there wasn’t even any media curiosity about it.
Now, I’m not a forensic scientist, and I don’t guess on matters like this. I don’t have to guess; the facts are here. It’s kind of hard not to connect the dots. Now, all of this information is coming out. You know why it’s coming out? Because we’re in the discovery phase of the Zimmerman trial, where each side has to show the other side what evidence they have. But you really have to wonder here, folks, why none of this came out before in the prosecutor’s charging affidavit. Can we go back to that? The charging affidavit, which, remember Dershowitz at Harvard said it was an embarrassment that wouldn’t survive the first inspection by a judge, but it did. But he said it was pathetic, it was unprofessional.
I happened to report what Dershowitz said and my own affiliate in Jacksonville called the attorney’s office, “What do you think about what Limbaugh said about your charging document?” None of this is in the charging document, or the affidavit. I thought that the state was obligated, or obliged, anyway, to provide all the relevant details in a case to the judge, but apparently I was mistaken. But, anyway, as I said, ladies and gentlemen, the news media seem to be ignoring these developments. I mean they’re out there, touched on a little bit by ABC. But the news that I just gave you has barely been mentioned on the cable news channels. I don’t watch it, but I’m told that MSNBC only got around to reporting this about an hour ago, and they ran a banner at the bottom of the screen that said, “Proof of self-defense? Trayvon Martin family lawyer calls medical report suspicious.”
So the doctor puts out a report, Zimmerman’s doctor, and now MSNBC is saying he might be a liar. And they have to because they gotta cover their own rear ends the way they reported this. (interruption) I don’t know if Zimmerman’s doctor is a white Hispanic, Mr. Snerdley. But you really have to wonder here when the news media began to lose interest in the Trayvon Martin story, ’cause you know they did. They lost interest. They were going 150 miles an hour on this story, and then all of a sudden they dropped it like a hot potato, and you have to wonder why they did that. Was it when they found out that George Zimmerman is actually Hispanic and a Democrat to boot? Was it when Trayvon Martin’s gangsta-like tweets surfaced along with the more recent photos of him with his gold teeth? Maybe the news media is just afraid of whipping up racial… no, they do like to whip up racial strife. But they didn’t even proceed under that rubric. They just dropped this case like a hot potato.
Read the full article here.
By Jeffrey T. Kuhner | May 10, 2012 | The Washington Times
President Obama has made it official: He now supports same-sex marriage. It is his latest onslaught on traditional America. Mr. Obama has made history. He is our first commander in chief to openly embrace legalizing homosexual and lesbian unions. He has crossed a cultural watershed, paving the way for the eventual triumph of the homosexual agenda. Rather than being a victory for “civil rights” or “marital equality,” Mr. Obama’s decision puts America on the path to moral disintegration. We are one step closer to becoming like secular, post-Christian Europe.
For years, Mr. Obama claimed his position was “evolving.” Facing re-election and under growing pressure from liberal interest groups, especially the powerful homosexual lobby, he finally capitulated. His decision was not based on principle, but cynical politics. Mr. Obama needs the gay and lesbian vote to win in November. Immediately upon his announcement Wednesday, Hollywood donors opened their checkbooks. Millions were pumped into the Obama campaign coffers; the liberal base has been energized, and the cultural left is hailing Mr. Obama as the Martin Luther King of our time. The president believes it is an electoral masterstroke.
Instead, he has made a big mistake. Same-sex marriage is opposed by most Americans. On Tuesday, North Carolina became the 31st state to vote for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. The referendum was not even close: More than 60 percent of voters supported Amendment One. The liberal media, such as the New York Times, consistently portray anti-gay-marriage advocates as bigots.
This is nonsense. Most Americans are neither intolerant nor bigoted. Rather, they understand that marriage is the basic institution of society. For thousands of years in the West, it has had a privileged role. Marriage solidifies the bonds between a man and a woman, laying the foundation for raising children in stable families. It is the glue that binds a functioning, viable social order. Marriage is the natural unit that enables society to perpetuate itself from one generation to the next. This is not hate; it’s common sense.
Read the full article here.
By Jerry A. Kane | May 12, 2012 | Canada Free Press
For thirty years the ACLU and its atheist hordes have been in state and federal courts vigorously marginalizing Christians and uprooting public memorials and symbols of the nation’s Christian heritage. Any cross, crucifix, sculpture, statue, figurine, or carving that could trigger memories of America’s Christian founding has been targeted for eradication from the public sphere.
The Framers wrote the Bill of Rights to restrict the powers of the federal government, which means the First Amendment was intended to protect religion from an intrusive government, and not the government from religion.Even though over two-thirds of the American public believes the First Amendment erects a “wall of separation between church and state,” the truth is the Framers of the Constitution never entertained such a notion. For three decades now, rulings by the courts ordering the removal of Christian symbols from public property have violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
The First Amendment begins with the words, “Congress [i.e. the federal government] shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” The Framers didn’t want the federal government establishing a “state church” (as England and some European Countries had at the time) or interfering with the free exercise of religion. The First Amendment kept the federal government from interfering with the people’s right to establish their own churches and denominations and worship freely.
“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. … Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”—Thomas Jefferson The suggestion that Christian symbols displayed on public property could amount to a violation of the Establishment Clause would be laughable to the Framers.
The concept of a Judeo/Christian God or nature’s God was embraced by the Founders:
Fifty-two of the 55 Framers of the U.S. Constitution were members of established orthodox churches in the colonies:
Congregationalist-7
Deist-1
Dutch Reformed-2
Episcopalian-26
Lutheran-1
Methodist-2
Presbyterian-11
Quaker-3
Roman Catholic-2
In fact, the Framers enshrined the concept of the Judeo/Christian God and nature’s God in the Declaration of Independence:
When …it becomes necessary for one people to …assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them …
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights …
We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America … appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies …
And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
At the time the First Amendment was written, several states were dominated by churches, e.g., Connecticut was Congregationalist, Massachusetts was Puritan, Virginia was Baptist, and Pennsylvania was Quaker. The people in those states chose the religion they preferred, and they didn’t want the federal government imposing any particular sect or denomination on their states.
It’s safe to assume that when the Framers wrote the First Amendment, they understood that:
As Mark Levin writes in Men In Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America,“the Declaration of Independence … is an explicit recognition that our rights derive not from the King of England, not from the judiciary, not from government at all, but from God. … Religion and God are not alien to our system of government, [sic] they’re integral to it.”
If the Framers intended the Establishment Clause to erect a “wall of separation” between the Judeo/Christian God and nature’s God and government, they would have included the “separation of church and state” notion in the First Amendment or would have at least introduced and discussed it at the first Constitutional Convention. But not one of the Framers ever mentioned it. None of the Congressional Records of the discussions and debates of the 90 Founding Fathers who framed the First Amendment contains the phrase “separation of church and state.” The phrase is not found in the Constitution, the First Amendment, or in any of the notes from the Convention.
The idea of a “wall of separation” between church and state surfaced in 1947 when the Warren Court lifted the “wall of separation” phrase from a letter written by President Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut. Jefferson used “wall” as a metaphor to address the Baptists’ concerns about religious freedom, and to clarify for them that the federal government was restricted from interfering with religious practices. Jefferson’s letter explained that the First Amendment put restrictions only on the government, not on the people.
The truth is the current “separation” doctrine is a relatively recent concept and not a long-held constitutional principle. The Warren Court took Jefferson’s “wall of separation” phrase out of context and reinterpreted the First Amendment to restrict people instead of government. And now some 65 years later, 69 percent of the American people believe the First Amendment actually contains the “separation of church and state” phrase.
In his dissenting opinion in the 1985 ruling against silent prayer in public schools, Chief Justice William Rehnquist decried how the Warren Court’s “wall” notion undermined the Framers’ original intent of the First Amendment:
“There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the Framers intended to build the ‘wall of separation’ that was constitutionalized in Everson. But the greatest injury of the ‘wall’ notion is the mischievous diversion of judges from the actual intentions of the drafters of the Bill of Rights. [N]o amount of repetition of historical errors in judicial opinions can make the errors true. The ‘wall of separation between church and state’ is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.”
Read the full article here.
By Kimberley A. Strassel | May 10, 2012 | Wall Street Journal
Here’s what happens when the president of the United States publicly targets a private citizen for the crime of supporting his opponent.
Frank VanderSloot is the CEO of Melaleuca Inc. The 63-year-old has run that wellness-products company for 26 years out of tiny Idaho Falls, Idaho. Last August, Mr. VanderSloot gave $1 million to Restore Our Future, the Super PAC that supports Mitt Romney.
Three weeks ago, an Obama campaign website, “Keeping GOP Honest,” took the extraordinary step of publicly naming and assailing eight private citizens backing Mr. Romney. Titled “Behind the curtain: a brief history of Romney’s donors,” the post accused the eight of being “wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records.” Mr. VanderSloot was one of the eight, smeared particularly as being “litigious, combative and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement.”
About a week after that post, a man named Michael Wolf contacted the Bonneville County Courthouse in Idaho Falls in search of court records regarding Mr. VanderSloot. Specifically, Mr. Wolf wanted all the documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot’s divorces, as well as a case involving a dispute with a former Melaleuca employee.
Mr. Wolf sent a fax to the clerk’s office—which I have obtained—listing four cases he was after. He would later send a second fax, asking for three further court cases dealing with either Melaleuca or Mr. VanderSloot. Mr. Wolf listed only his name and a private cellphone number.
Some digging revealed that Mr. Wolf was, until a few months ago, a law clerk on the Democratic side of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He’s found new work. The ID written out at the top of his faxes identified them as coming from “Glenn Simpson.” That’s the name of a former Wall Street Journal reporter who in 2009 founded a D.C. company that performs private investigative work.
The website for that company, Fusion GPS, describes itself as providing “strategic intelligence,” with expertise in areas like “politics.” That’s a polite way of saying “opposition research.”
When I called Fusion’s main number and asked to speak to Michael Wolf, a man said Mr. Wolf wasn’t in the office that day but he’d be in this coming Monday. When I reached Mr. Wolf on his private cell, he confirmed he had until recently worked at the Senate.
When I asked what his interest was in Mr. VanderSloot’s divorce records, he hesitated, then said he didn’t want to talk about that. When I asked what his relationship was with Fusion, he hesitated again and said he had “no comment.” “It’s a legal thing,” he added.
Fusion dodged my calls, so I couldn’t ask who was paying it to troll through Mr. VanderSloot’s divorce records. Mr. Simpson finally sent an email stating: “Frank VanderSloot is a figure of interest in the debate over civil rights for gay Americans. As his own record on gay issues amply demonstrates, he is a legitimate subject of public records research into his lengthy history of legal disputes.”
Read the full article here.
By Eileen F. Toplansky | April 28, 2012 | American Thinker
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary to ensure that a President, who has led the country to near ruin and who is working to discard the basic principles upon which this Great Country rests, be peaceably removed it is incumbent upon us that we submit the reasons to the people.
Without any in-depth research or vetting about his background, Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States. There were voices of caution who early on exposed Obama’s connections to former terrorist Bill Ayers, anti-American vilifier Reverend Wright, crook Tony Rezko, and anti-Semite Rashid Khalidi, but they were laughed at as the people allowed themselves to be demagogued on hope and change. Evidence continues to suggest that Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate is, indeed, a forgery. This would make his presidential eligibility suspect.
Thus, the American people are at a critical watershed moment in our history. The facts are in; Obama’s ideology and core principles are now public and exist for all to see. We can no longer claim ignorance; we can no longer be naïve; we can no longer deny what is patently before us. The record of this current president is a “history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these United States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”
Mr. Obama has “given himself the powers to declare martial law[.] It is a sweeping power grab that should worry every American.” Thus, “Barack Obama is very dangerous, the apotheosis of an insidious strain of authoritarianism that destroys from within.” In a statement published on December 31, 2011, Mr. Obama states that “[t]oday I have signed into law H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012.” Though he claims that he has “signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists,” it was Mr. Obama who “demanded the removal of any and all protections for US citizens and legal residents.”
And like King George III, Obama has now established the distinct possibility of placing “[s]tanding armies without the Consent of our legislatures” — although sadly, in this case, the Senate passed this unwholesome disgrace. King George III would be pleased.
In fact, Mr. Obama sees fit to bypass the “pesky” Constitution whenever it suits him, thus ignoring limited-government tenets which were at the core of the Founding Fathers’ belief system. Thus, the NDAA detention mandate allows indefinite military detention not just to foreigners; now “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”
In fact, should Mr. Obama be re-elected to a second term, “our rights to speech, religion and property, and to privacy in our persons and homes, will be transformed.” Mr. Obama has already “hectored Christianity on matters of conscience.” Through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as ObamaCare, Mr. Obama is forcing Catholic institutions to pay for insurance covering contraceptives. Why, when “religious liberty was weighed against access to birth control, did freedom lose?” — a clear intrusion into the first of the five protections of the First Amendment. Bishop Daniel Jenky has likened President Obama’s health care policies to the attacks on the Catholic church by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin of yesteryear. Dare we go down that totalitarian road again?
The onslaught against free speech has been heightened because of the “cooperation between [Mr. Obama] and the OIC or Organization of Islamic Cooperation.” The “Obama administration stands ‘united’ with the OIC on speech issues,” thus silencing Arab reformers and anyone who makes any allegedly negative remarks about Islam. The “repressive practices” of the OIC member-nations speak volumes about their restrictions on free speech. Hence, “the encroachment of de facto blasphemy restrictions in the West threatens free speech and the free exchange of ideas.” That an American president would threaten this most fundamental right is yet another resounding reason why he needs to be removed from office.
In December of 2009, Nat Hentoff, a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights, asserted that “[i]f congressional Democrats succeed in passing their health-care ‘reform’ measure to send to the White House for President Obama’s signature, then they and he are determining your health decisions[.]” Thus, “these functionaries making decisions about your treatment and, in some cases, about the extent of your life span, have never met you[.] Is this America?” Hentoff concludes his piece with the revelation “I’m scared and I do mean to scare you. We do not elect the president and Congress to decide how short our lives will be.”
Thus, we still hold “these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles … as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” We do not declare violent revolution but do demand the secure right to change the government through the ballot box.
But even this fundamental right is being seriously eroded as the Department of Justice openly and arrogantly dismisses genuine cases of voter intimidation with nary a word of concern by Barack Obama. Although there is visual proof and evidence of threats to the voting public as well as exhortations of death threats to a man on trial, Attorney General Eric Holder turns a blind eye.
By his selective indifference, Mr. Obama has created a racially divisive atmosphere in America. He continues to promote this hateful attitude wherein the civil rights progress made in this country for all its citizens is ignored. Surely, Mr. Obama has “excited domestic insurrections amongst us” as he engages in racial division, class warfare, and phony gender wars. If Mr. Obama is, indeed, so interested in the rights of women, then why does he support Islamic sharia law, which demands second-class status for women? These diversions serve to stir up resentments; unfortunately, they are successful in obfuscating the shameless actions of this 44th president.
Mr. Obama is not content with taking the country down the path to “European socialism.” His centralized control of the health care industry, his increases in entitlement programs, his redistribution of capital — in fact, his sweeping regulations that give the government new authority to control the entire financial sector — are reminiscent of Karl Marx’s 10-Point Agenda, and although communism was unknown in 1775, the signatories of the Declaration knew of the absolute power of the monarchy and would see through the oligarchic nature of this “ism.”
Amazingly, Mr. Obama has assured Russian leaders (who have gained their power through rigged elections) that American concessions are coming their way, but they [the Russian leaders] must wait because he is seeking re-election and he dare not tell his own people of his true intentions. What credible reason would a loyal American president have for weakening American and allies’ defense systems? During the open microphone conversation between Obama and Medvedev, a puppet of KGB Putin, the world learned whose interests Obama was truly serving. Surely, this is “enough to chill friends and allies, democrats and dissidents, all over the world.”
Furthermore, Obama has “obstructed the Administration of Justice[,]” instead pitting one group against the other through “waivers.” If ObamaCare is so laudable, why extend waivers in the first place? In fact, it is yet another example of how manipulative Mr. Obama is when he tries to make the people “dependent on his will alone.”
Mr. Obama has ignored the laws of our country to impose an arbitrary and capricious rule of law by outside forces. He finds it more expedient to pit the federal government against an American state which is trying only to enforce federal immigration law. To this end, Mr. Obama has seen fit to “subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution[,]” which was so clearly enumerated in the Declaration of Independence as reason to reject King George III. By issuing a Universal Period Review (UPR), the first of its kind, Mr. Obama has given the United Nations the right to dictate to Arizona. Thus, the “stakes for our national sovereignty have just been raised.” Despotic countries of the United Nations have now been empowered to dictate how Americans should conduct themselves. Is this not reminiscent of King George III “waging war against us”?
Moreover, the Obama State Department ordered the “suspension of routine border inspection procedures in order to whisk (Muslim Brotherhood) Islamists into our country. Thus, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party did not have to go through the normal procedures of inspection. Recall that the Muslim Brotherhood’s mission statement is “Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, Jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu akbar!” Negotiating with the Muslim Brotherhood is akin to negotiating with the dictator Hitler. It is appeasement all the way. Why does the Obama administration cavort with such people? Does this not make him unfit to defend the interests of America?
Read the full article here.
By R.B. Parrish | May 4, 2012 | American Thinker
“A prosecutor … may receive absolute immunity from suit for acts violating the Constitution in order to advance important societal values.” -Elena Kagan, Solicitor General, 2009
After the Civil War, Congress passed several civil rights laws, including one allowing anyone whose said rights had been violated to sue those responsible, especially if these had been acting “under color of law” — that is, as part of law enforcement.
Naturally, judges, prosecutors, and police have hated that provision ever since, and the courts have done their best to bleed it of meaning.
In 2009, Elena Kagan, then-solicitor general, argued before the Supreme Court that prior to trial, a defendant has no right not to be framed, because false evidence does no real harm until it is actually used in court.
“Fabrication Of Evidence During An Investigation Does Not, By Itself, Violate The Constitution” read one of the subject headings of her brief. And she quoted the opinion of a lower court:
“We do not see how the existence of a false police report, sitting in a drawer in a police station, by itself deprives a person of a right secured by the Constitution and laws.” (Pottawattamie vs. McGhee)
Justice was never so blind as this — but the Supremes, sitting as the very foundation of the legal establishment, didn’t bat an eye to object. Indeed, one might have expected them to sing along in chorus.
It is the prosecutors, according to this point of view, who need to be protected — they are the ones in danger of being sued. Hence, society’s primary interest must be in preserving their “courage and independence.” (What prosecutor will pursue a case if he fears he will be sued afterward?) And if this results in some innocent persons suffering and left without redress, that is just the price we have to pay “in order to advance important societal values” — that is, that same “courage” of our prosecutors.
This month, the Supremes (Rehberg v. Paulk, 9-0) have extended that concept: protection against suits is now affirmed not only for prosecutors, but also for witnesses…and even police officers when they testify. And if those officers lie, it does not lessen the interest society has in preserving the principle (or establishing it anew) that pesky lawsuits must not be allowed to throw a beam into the spokes of justice.
Witnesses “might be reluctant to come forward to testify,” and even if a witness took the stand, the witness “might be inclined to shade his testimony in favor of the potential plaintiff” for “fear of subsequent liability.”
As for police officers:
If police officer witnesses were routinely forced to defend against claims based on their testimony, their “energy and attention would be diverted from the pressing duty of enforcing the criminal law.”
Fair enough. As well:
[A] police officer witness’ potential liability … could influence decisions on appeal and collateral relief[.]
So let the officers lie. If it’s before trial, then no harm, no foul.
How does this play out in the real world? The vast majority of criminal cases never go to trial at all; they are settled with plea bargains.
Read the full article here.
As the media-fueled Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman firestorm rages, a number of black-on-white assaults have been reported in which the assailants have declared “justice for Trayvon” prompted the attack.
But according to former Department of Justice attorney J. Christian Adams, don’t expect to see Attorney General Eric Holder rush to open an investigation.
“There’s a hostility [in the Department of Justice] toward even conceiving civil rights protect everybody,” Adams told WND in an exclusive interview. “People in the Department of Justice are philosophically opposed to this. You are watching it play out in Mobile, with Matthew Owens.”
Adams, the author of “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department,” referred to the story of Owens, a white resident of Mobile, Ala., who allegedly was bludgeoned by 20 blacks who used pipes, paint cans and chairs in the April 21 assault.
WKRG-TV in Mobile reported that one of the alleged attackers stated, “Now that’s justice for Trayvon” as they left Owens beaten on the ground. He has been in ICU since attack.
On April 20, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that two black teenagers in Oak Park, Ill., attacked a 19-year-old because “he was so upset about the Trayvon Martin case that he beat up a man because he was white.”
“If the races were reversed, you’d see Attorney General Holder holding a national press conference. In the eyes of the DOJ, it’s some people, not everybody [who] civil rights laws protect. Whites excluded,” said Adams.
The Gainesville Sun reported that on April 9, a 27-year-old white male was attacked by “five to eight” black males who shouted “Trayvon” before attacking him and leaving him with “permanent disfigurement to the left side of his face.”
And Fox News reported April 5 that a 78-year-old white citizen of Toledo, Ohio, was the victim of a group assault, with the attackers allegedly yelling, “This is for Trayvon.”
Read the full article here.
By Joel B. Pollak | May 1, 2012 | Breitbart
Erin Edmonds, a member of the Harvard Law class of 1991, was a student of Bell’s who became his research assistant and co-author, ghost writing portions of, and editing, Faces From the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, among other works.
The controversial book, which argued that black suppression holds American society together, was criticized at the time for defending Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Edmonds’s classmate, Barack Obama, assigned the introduction to the book to his University of Chicago law students, along with Bell’s writings on the history of civil rights law.
Edmonds, who is an executive vice president of an in-house corporate legal department in her native Utah, spoke to Breitbart News about her experiences with Bell, who called her his “adopted daughter,” as well as about the origins and effects of Critical Race Theory.
Bell was not as conclusive in his views, she believes, as he is often portrayed to be. Rather, she says, “he was really rather tentative,” and came to his radical views by way of disappointment with real-world experiences.
It is important, Edmonds says, to remember the ways in which Bell’s experiences shaped his ideas:
Bell was hired by Thurgood Marshall [who argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court and later became the Court’s first black Justice] when he [Bell] was a local NAACP executive in Philadelphia after graduating from law school. Marshall hired Bell to help with school desegregation cases in the South [to enforce the Brown decision]. It was dangerous, and it was segregated, and it was discouraging to encounter massive white southern resistance. Bell fought through these piecemeal litigative methods, and Iived through the aftermath, and I think he was just profoundly discouraged by the extent to which structural and institutional racism had not budged much. He was careful to point out that to say there had been no progress was ridiculous, but structural racism had not changed much for those who needed it most. After all, whom did the civil rights struggle really benefit most? Upper class and middle class blacks, and middle- and working-class white women. His worry was that he had left the needy behind, and so he tentatively put forward these theories as questions.
After demanding that Harvard hire black female legal scholar Regina Austin, leading a demonstration in April 1990 (where he was introduced by Obama), and taking unpaid leave from Harvard in protest, Bell returned to campus in the fall of 1990 to offer a non-credit seminar, “Civil Rights at the Crossroads.” He had taught it in previous years, and used it as a laboratory for ideas–including his controversial science fiction story, “The Space Traders,” in which white Americans trade their black countrymen to aliens.
The seminar, Edmonds recalls, included a spectrum of left and liberal students–and even some conservatives–from across the Harvard campus. “The Space Traders” was just the beginning:
He wanted to open up our minds away from strategies that had worked for their limited purpose. Far from being a victory lap [after his protest], that course was intended to snap us out of thinking in traditional ways that no longer worked for people like we: civil rights lawyers, poverty lawyers, even conservatives interested in fighting civil rights privately and less [through] state action.
His class was very effective. Through the use of storytelling, Bell captured the attention of people very quickly, and forced them into [using] a different part of their brains. The most powerful [story] was probably “Space Traders.” The universal reaction, even from conservatives, was that it was possible–not likely, or probable, but possible. That horrified us all. Bell, speaking to a rarified audience of mostly legal students who might well be his legatees, said there are intransigent elements of injustice that are left–and wanted this next generation to think about different ways of fighting that injustice.
Edmonds does not recall Obama attending that seminar, but notes that “Barack and Bell, as consummate intellectuals and diplomats who both welcomed dissent with their views, had an enormous amount of respect for one another,” though they did not mix socially. She describes Obama’s decision to introduce Bell at the protest as an example of the respect Obama enjoyed, and his diplomatic skill.
“Obama’s instinct to find common ground was apparent. And it wasn’t forced. I’ll be honest. There were some hardcore neoconservatives at Harvard Law School, and Barack handled them calmly. He listened to them–and there were times I was incensed and said, ‘How can you stand this?’–but he’s a consummate diplomat.”
Obama was in Edmonds’s law school “section,” a subdivision of students who take all of their first-year requirements together. In the annual moot court exercise, Edmonds was dismayed to draw Obama as an opponent– “of 550 people in that first-year class at Harvard Law School, there was exactly one person whom no one wanted to draw”–and she burst into tears.
“He’s very sensitive, and when he saw me, he put his arm around me and he started laughing. I said, ‘That’s not funny.’ And he said, “Erin, you yell back at professors–what are you afraid of?’”
She and her partner lost to Obama and his partner, she says, but at least the Obama team “didn’t wipe the floor with us.”
Besides the five full-year courses that all first year law students take, Edmonds and Obama were also together in at least two other classes–one on racial issues with Professor Randall L. Kennedy. (Edmonds says she believes Obama was also in her classes on corporate law and the law of terrorism, but she cannot be sure. Obama has not yet released his law school transcripts.)
Edmonds describes Kennedy as a protégé of Bell’s who had followed his own path.
Read the full article here.
By Victor Davis Hanson | April 22, 2012 | PJ Media
I. Power—Always Was and Always Will Be
In my dumber days, between 2001-2008, I used to wonder why the Left relentlessly hammered the war on terror (e.g., renditions, tribunals, predators, preventative detention, Patriot Act, intercepts, wiretaps, Guantanamo Bay) when these measures had not only proven quite useful in preventing another 9/11-like attack, but had been sanctioned by both the Congress and the courts. In those ancient times, I was not as cynical as I am now. So I assumed that Harold Koh and MoveOn.org, though mistaken, were worried about civil liberties, or measures that they felt were both illegal and without utility.
But, of course, the Obama (who attacked each and every element of the war on terror as a legislator and senator) Left never had any principled objection at all. Instead, whatever Bush was for, they were in Pavlovian fashion against. I can say that without a charge of cynicism, because after January 2009, Obama embraced or expanded every Bush-Cheney protocol that he inherited. In response, the anti-war Left simply kept silent, or indeed vanished, or went to work extending the anti-terrorism agenda. Guantanamo Bay, in other words, was a national sin until the mid-morning of January 20, 2009.
II. The Year 4
We are in the year four of our lord, when darkness was made light, the seas gently receded, and the planet cooled. In the space of 24 hours in January 2009 the world was turned upside down: massive deficits were no longer “unpatriotic”; 5% (heck, even 9%) unemployment was no longer to be seen as a “jobless recovery”; $4 plus gasoline no longer would become “intolerable.” Filibusters suddenly became ossified obstructionism. Recess appointments were now quite legitimate; lecturing the media about the myth of objective fairness was salutary. Pay-for-play time with the president was consulting; attacking the “unelected” courts was progressive. Voter fraud was not thugs eyeing polling monitors with clubs, but officials asking voters to present a picture ID—and mentioning any of these inconsistencies or writing about the Trostkyzation of American life was either racism or Palinism.
Around March 2008, the Ministry of Truth had issued new edicts about campaign financing, big Wall Street money, and the supposedly pernicious role of contributions: all bad if Bush trumped Kerry, all now good if Obama trumped McCain. So when Obama became the first candidate in the history of the law to renounce public campaign financing in order to shake down $1 billion, there was silence. The Left never really worried about Big Money, but only if more Big Money went to conservatives than to themselves. (Consider the current shameless money grubbing of Jon Corzine to raise cash for Obama after Corzine’s looting of thousands of individuals’ lifetime investments, or the shrillness over Mitt Romney’s supposed mansion in La Jolla juxtaposed to the prior silence about the Kerry mansions, the multiple Gore residences, or “John’s room,” as in the huge and crass Edwards estate.) What was interesting about Hilary Rosen was not her stupid thoughts on Ann Romney, but her cursus honorum that led to hired-gun riches by parlaying political contacts into commerce.
III. Tongue-tied Presidents
We can play this Orwellian game with almost everything these days. Take presidential cosmopolitanism and the Bush-as-oaf trope. The disdain was not for an inept president, but rather a simple means to destroy an ideological opponent. Why again the cynicism? Because the Left cares little that Barack Obama has no clue where particular islands in the news are and cannot even do political correctness right when he wishes to ingratiate himself to his South American hosts by wanting to trill the “Maldives.” We have a president who can say Talêban, drop the g’s in a black patois, and trill his Spanish words in front of Latin American hosts, but is off 8,000 miles in his geography.
Ditto “corpse-man,” the Austrian language, 57 states, and all the other parochialism and gaffes that remind us not only that it is hard being a president without making gaffes, but that it is especially hard as a conservative president when each gaffe is cited as proof of ignorance.
IV. So What?
What is going on? Two things, really. One, the media believes that the noble ends justify the tawdry means. So if it is a choice between emphasizing the latest Obama embarrassment by digging into the scary Fast and Furious, the “millions of green jobs” Solyndra insider giveaways, the Secret Service decadence, the GSA buffoonery, and the work while getting food stamps con in Washington OR endangering Obamacare and by extension “the children,” or the war to eliminate autism, or the right to breath clean air–well, why would one ever wish to derail all that by weakening a landmark progressive and his enlightened agenda?
Or for you more cynical readers, why would you wish to enervate the present comfortable culture in Washington in which the press and politics are at last one? Or why undermine the first African-American president, who is a constant reminder of our progressive advancement? Or why weaken our only chance some day to have open borders or gay marriage?
Two, the Left has always operated on the theory of medieval penance. We surely must assume that Warren Buffett has never had problems with the ethics of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. or had a company he controls sued by the IRS for back taxes. Why? Because he has confessed his sins, and accepted the faith and paid his tithe to the Church. Ditto a Bill Gates or a rich celebrity like Sean Penn or Oprah. In the relativism of the left, if the one-percenters will simply confess that their class is greedy and needs to pay their fair share—even if they are entirely cynical in the manner of GE’s Jeffrey Immelt and penance is written off as the cost of doing business—then they become exempt from the wages of them/us warfare and the “you want to kill the children” rhetoric.
V. Good and Bad Fat Cats
There is no difference in the way the Koch brothers or Exxon run their empires and the way that GM, GE, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Google do. But the former are enemies of the people, while the latter are protectors who have have confessed to their bishops and agreed to mouth doctrine and thereby obtained penance to make as much money as they want and to spend it as they damn well please. Suddenly in America after 2009 there are good and bad cable networks, good and bad celebrities, good and bad CEOs, good and bad sports teams (ask Lovie Smith), good and bad states, good and bad everything—not adjudicated on the actual basis of behavior, but rather on whether some are willing to go to reeducation camp, admit their errors, and join the effort to clean the air and feed the kids.
Or do any of you believe there are not Google “corporate jet setters,” or Facebook “fat cats,” or GE executives who didn’t know when it was time not to profit, or Microsoft grandees who ignored the point at which they had made enough money? (For that matter, why could not Barack Obama have made $550,000 last year; had he not reached the point where he didn’t need any more cash?)
Read the full article here.
By Chris Francescani | April 25, 2012 | Reuters
The first time the dog ran free and cornered Shellie in their gated community in Sanford, Florida, George called the owner to complain. The second time, Big Boi frightened his mother-in-law’s dog. Zimmerman called Seminole County Animal Services and bought pepper spray. The third time he saw the dog on the loose, he called again. An officer came to the house, county records show.
“Don’t use pepper spray,” he told the Zimmermans, according to a friend. “It’ll take two or three seconds to take effect, but a quarter second for the dog to jump you,” he said.
“Get a gun.”
That November, the Zimmermans completed firearms training at a local lodge and received concealed-weapons gun permits. In early December, another source close to them told Reuters, the couple bought a pair of guns. George picked a Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm handgun, a popular, lightweight weapon.
By June 2011, Zimmerman’s attention had shifted from a loose pit bull to a wave of robberies that rattled the community, called the Retreat at Twin Lakes. The homeowners association asked him to launch a neighborhood watch, and Zimmerman would begin to carry the Kel-Tec on his regular, dog-walking patrol – a violation of neighborhood watch guidelines but not a crime.
Few of his closest neighbors knew he carried a gun – until two months ago.
On February 26, George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in what Zimmerman says was self-defense. The furor that ensued has consumed the country and prompted a re-examination of guns, race and self-defense laws enacted in nearly half the United States.
During the time Zimmerman was in hiding, his detractors defined him as a vigilante who had decided Martin was suspicious merely because he was black. After Zimmerman was finally arrested on a charge of second-degree murder more than six weeks after the shooting, prosecutors portrayed him as a violent and angry man who disregarded authority by pursuing the 17-year-old.
But a more nuanced portrait of Zimmerman has emerged from a Reuters investigation into Zimmerman’s past and a series of incidents in the community in the months preceding the Martin shooting.
Based on extensive interviews with relatives, friends, neighbors, schoolmates and co-workers of Zimmerman in two states, law enforcement officials, and reviews of court documents and police reports, the story sheds new light on the man at the center of one of the most controversial homicide cases in America.
The 28-year-old insurance-fraud investigator comes from a deeply Catholic background and was taught in his early years to do right by those less fortunate. He was raised in a racially integrated household and himself has black roots through an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather – the father of the maternal grandmother who helped raise him.
A criminal justice student who aspired to become a judge, Zimmerman also concerned himself with the safety of his neighbors after a series of break-ins committed by young African-American men.
Though civil rights demonstrators have argued Zimmerman should not have prejudged Martin, one black neighbor of the Zimmermans said recent history should be taken into account.
“Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. I’m black, OK?” the woman said, declining to be identified because she anticipated backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly in the eyes. “There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood,” she said. “That’s why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin.”
“MIXED” HOUSEHOLD
George Michael Zimmerman was born in 1983 to Robert and Gladys Zimmerman, the third of four children. Robert Zimmerman Sr. was a U.S. Army veteran who served in Vietnam in 1970, and was stationed at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, in 1975 with Gladys Mesa’s brother George. Zimmerman Sr. also served two tours in Korea, and spent the final 10 years of his 22-year military career in the Pentagon, working for the Department of Defense, a family member said.
In his final years in Virginia before retiring to Florida, Robert Zimmerman served as a magistrate in Fairfax County’s 19th Judicial District.
Robert and Gladys met in January 1975, when George Mesa brought along his army buddy to his sister’s birthday party. She was visiting from Peru, on vacation from her job there as a physical education teacher. Robert was a Baptist, Gladys was Catholic. They soon married, in a Catholic ceremony in Alexandria, and moved to nearby Manassas.
Gladys came to lead a small but growing Catholic Hispanic enclave within the All Saints Catholic Church parish in the late 1970s, where she was involved in the church’s outreach programs. Gladys would bring young George along with her on “home visits” to poor families, said a family friend, Teresa Post.
“It was part of their upbringing to know that there are people in need, people more in need than themselves,” said Post, a Peruvian immigrant who lived with the Zimmermans for a time.
Post recalls evening prayers before dinner in the ethnically diverse Zimmerman household, which included siblings Robert Jr., Grace, and Dawn. “It wasn’t only white or only Hispanic or only black – it was mixed,” she said.
Zimmerman’s maternal grandmother, Cristina, who had lived with the Zimmermans since 1978, worked as a babysitter for years during Zimmerman’s childhood. For several years she cared for two African-American girls who ate their meals at the Zimmerman house and went back and forth to school each day with the Zimmerman children.
“They were part of the household for years, until they were old enough to be on their own,” Post said.
Zimmerman served as an altar boy at All Saints from age 7 to 17, church members said.
“He wasn’t the type where, you know, ‘I’m being forced to do this,’ and a dragging-his-feet Catholic,” said Sandra Vega, who went to high school with George and his siblings. “He was an altar boy for years, and then worked in the rectory too. He has a really good heart.”
George grew up bilingual, and by age 10 he was often called to the Haydon Elementary School principal’s office to act as a translator between administrators and immigrant parents. At 14 he became obsessed with becoming a Marine, a relative said, joining the after-school ROTC program at Grace E. Metz Middle School and polishing his boots by night. At 15, he worked three part-time jobs – in a Mexican restaurant, for the rectory, and washing cars – on nights and weekends, to save up for a car.
After graduating from Osbourn High School in 2001, Zimmerman moved to Lake Mary, Florida, a town neighboring Sanford. His parents purchased a retirement home there in 2002, in part to bring Cristina, who suffers from arthritis, to a warmer climate.
YOUNG INSURANCE AGENT
On his own at 18, George got a job at an insurance agency and began to take classes at night to earn a license to sell insurance. He grew friendly with a real estate agent named Lee Ann Benjamin, who shared office space in the building, and later her husband, John Donnelly, a Sanford attorney.
“George impressed me right off the bat as just a real go-getter,” Donnelly said. “He was working days and taking all these classes at night, passing all the insurance classes, not just for home insurance, but auto insurance and everything. He wanted to open his own office – and he did.”
In 2004, Zimmerman partnered with an African-American friend and opened up an Allstate insurance satellite office, Donnelly said.
Read the full article here.
Special-interest groups have injected the issue of race heavily into the high-profile Florida death of Trayvon Martin and the pending trial for suspect George Zimmerman. In fact, a recent poll revealed 6 of 10 say “race activists” are exploiting the tragedy.
But there apparently will be no more comment from the White House on the trend, as Press Secretary Jay Carney declined to allow Les Kinsolving, WND’s correspondent at the White House and the second-most senior reporter on the beat, to inquire.
At the daily briefing today, nearly two dozen reporters were not allowed to ask any questions, including Kinsolving. Instead, CNN was given seven and CBS and Fox six each.
Kinsolving wanted to ask if the president had any response to columnist Walter Williams’ recent revelation about how race is an issue only some of the time.
“Does the president have any response to Dr. Williams’ as he did about the death of Trayvon Martin?” Kinsolving wanted to ask. He also wanted to seek comment about a Kansas City child who was murdered by attackers who said, “You get what you deserve, white boy.”
The columnist talked about a Tulsa, Okla., case where “a white couple suffered a home invasion by Tyrone Woodfork, a 20-year-old black man. Ninety-year-old Bob Strait suffered a broken jaw and broken ribs in the attack. His 85-year-old wife, Nancy, was sexually assaulted and battered to death..”
Williams, whose writing focused on media dishonesty and race hustlers, also explained in Kansas City, Mo., “two black … youths doused a 13-year-old boy in gasoline and set him on fire, telling him, ‘You get what you deserve, white boy.’”
He also cited a Knoxville, Tenn., case where “a young white couple was kidnapped by four blacks. The girl was forced to witness her boyfriend’s rape, torture and subsequent murder before she was raped, tortured and murdered.”
“None of those black-on-white atrocities made anywhere near the news the Trayvon Martin case made, and it’s deliberate,” Williams wrote. “Editors for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune admitted to deliberately censoring information about black crime for political reasons….”
Barack Obama, meanwhile, was among the first to link the Martin case to race, saying even as the case developed that if he’d had a son, he’d look like Martin.
Williams noted the violence is itself a tragedy.
“Even if the president and his liberal allies in the media and assorted civil rights hustlers don’t care much about blacks murdering whites, what about blacks murdering blacks?” he noted. “During a mid-March weekend in Chicago, 49 people were shot, 10 fatally, including a 6-year-old black girl, making for more than 100 murders this year. Philadelphia isn’t far behind, with murders clipping along at one a day since the beginning of 2012.”
He said only white-on-black crime fits the political narrative at hand, and so only that gets attention.
Read the full article here.
By Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) | April 21, 2012 | Breitbart
For more than a century, our tax laws have recognized that such voluntary associations – non-profits, we call them today – should not be taxed, because their proceeds are devoted entirely to improve our communities through education, advocacy, and civic action. Section 501 of the Internal Revenue code recognizes them today, and civic groups like Move.org, the League of Conservation Voters, the ACLU, the National Rifle Association and various taxpayer groups have always been included in this definition.
We don’t apply a political test to these civic groups – we recognize the fundamental right of Americans to organize and to pool their resources to promote whatever causes they believe in – left or right. Indeed, whatever their political persuasion, these civic groups perform an absolutely indispensible role in our democracy by raising public awareness, defining issues, educating voters, promoting reforms, holding officials accountable and petitioning their government to redress grievances. Abolition, Women’s Suffrage, the Civil Rights movement – all would have been impossible without them.
In order to be recognized as non-profit groups, these organizations must register with the IRS – a purely ministerial function that has, in the past, been applied evenly and without regard to their political views.
At least until now.
It seems that Tea Party groups are now being treated very differently than their counterparts on the political Left. For the last two years, many have been stone-walled by the IRS when they have sought to register as non-profits and most recently, they have been barraged with increasingly aggressive and threatening demands vastly outside the legal authority of the IRS. Indeed, the only conceivable purpose of some of these demands could be to intimidate and harass.
Read the full article here.
By docmedina | April 20, 2012 | The Intel Hub
A police officer walks into a middle school classroom. No, this is not the opening line of a joke, this actually happened at a local school and maybe happening in a school near you.
The police officer proceeded to tell the class that, disrupting the class was a felony and she would have no problem arresting a kid, taking them directly to jail, and not even calling the kids’ parents.
This from an officer said to have expressed her desire for something to happen at school since she misses patrolling the street.
Another interesting point is that this teacher had, only a few months back, covered The Constitution and Bill of Rights in her classes. The same teacher then brought in a uniformed officer to tell kids their rights would be trampled if they dared disrupt the class.
During my time in school it was not uncommon that a class would have 36 students, some of them unruly, to one teacher. Yet, I don’t remember a teacher ever calling an officer in to handle their classroom for them.
What of the officer attempting to help the ineffective teacher? We the people delegate our power to a select few public servants to keep order in our community. We trust these individuals to be of good character and sound judgement.
Threatening school kids with violating their civil rights, seems to be outside the scope of what these “officials” (public servants) are paid to do.
Read the full article here.
Liberals have leapt on the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida to push for the repeal of “stand your ground” laws and to demand tighter gun control. (MSNBC’S Karen Finney blamed “the same people who stymied gun regulation at every point.”)
This would be like demanding more funding for the General Services Administration after seeing how its employees blew taxpayer money on a party weekend in Las Vegas.
We don’t know the facts yet, but let’s assume the conclusion MSNBC is leaping to is accurate: George Zimmerman stalked a small black child and murdered him in cold blood, just because he was black.
If that were true, every black person in America should get a gun and join the National Rifle Association, America’s oldest and most august civil rights organization.
Apparently this has occurred to no one because our excellent public education system ensures that no American under the age of 60 has the slightest notion of this country’s history.
Gun control laws were originally promulgated by Democrats to keep guns out of the hands of blacks. This allowed the Democratic policy of slavery to proceed with fewer bumps and, after the Civil War, allowed the Democratic Ku Klux Klan to menace and murder black Americans with little resistance.
(Contrary to what illiterates believe, the KKK was an outgrowth of the Democratic Party, with overlapping membership rolls. The Klan was to the Democrats what the American Civil Liberties Union is today: Not every Democrat is an ACLU’er, but every ACLU’er is a Democrat. Same with the Klan.)
In 1640, the very first gun control law ever enacted on these shores was passed in Virginia. It provided that blacks – even freemen – could not own guns.
Chief Justice Roger Taney’s infamous opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford circularly argued that blacks could not be citizens because if they were citizens, they would have the right to own guns: “[I]t would give them the full liberty,” he said, “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”
With logic like that, Republicans eventually had to fight a Civil War to get the Democrats to give up slavery.
Alas, they were Democrats, so they cheated.
Read the full article here.
By Clarice Feldman | April 15, 2012 | American Thinker
From time to time the U.S. is engaged in its popular, charming pastime, following criminal cases. Once the special hobby of retirees who flooded the courthouses, since cable TV and the Internet, anyone can participate in these modern versions of morality plays. The latest episode is the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman one, a story that shows how a media rife with malpractice and incompetence, a black grievance industry supported by a corrupt Attorney General , and a special prosecutor in a difficult re-election fight can twist facts and put to jeopardy a man already cleared of wrongdoing despite the lack of persuasive, dispositive new evidence sufficient to meet the state’s burden of overcoming a claim of self-defense.
A. Media Malpractice
American Thinker has already published a short course on how media malpractice turned an ordinary, everyday incident into a nationwide racial dispute.
More detailed day by day breakdowns of the media’s manipulation of the facts in the case, were made by Tom Maguire on Just One Minute. Here are some of the running accounts:
NBC and MSNBC were the worst offenders, but no major news outlet was spared the ignominy of sloppy reporting, sometimes followed by subtle, unannounced corrections of the record, and often simply perpetuating the false accounts when the facts they reported were proven untrue.
Here’s a typical analysis by Tom based on a video NBC and MSNBC played of George Zimmerman’s appearance at the Sanford, Florida police department soon after the shooting:
If NBC’s non-investigation of five appearances of the bogus Zimmerman 911 edit isn’t enough, let’s poke at this mystery – what “enhanced” police video did MSNBC air last month, what did it really show, and where is it now?
Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler called this out on April 4 but we can illustrate it with a screenshots. Over to Bob:
Last Thursday afternoon, MSNBC played videotape of Zimmerman’s apparent injuries which was much more “enhanced,” much more clear. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 3/30/12. Martin Bashir referred to this tape as “an extended and newly released surveillance video” which showed “new angles, never seen before, of George Zimmerman being brought into the Sanford police station.” This suggested that MSNBC had received a second tape from the Sanford police video system-that this was not the same old tape others had aired before. Bashir’s tape did provide a much clearer look at the back of Zimmerman’s head. It seemed to show a rather large goose-egg style bump on the back of his head, with a rather clear abrasion atop it.
This tape is much more “enhanced” than the ABC tape. And it has now disappeared.
He linked to a March 30 post which included this:
What videos does NBC have in its archives, and which are authentic? Inquiring minds want to know.
Read the full article here.
By Bob Unruh | April 13, 2012 | WND
There always have been those few who have launched diatribes over the dictatorial actions of any given U.S. presidential administration, over civil rights, foreign affairs, the economy, the draft or a dozen other topics – even though the Constitution was written specifically to prevent the collection of too much power by one branch of government.
Now, again, there are words like “egocentric megalomaniac” being ascribed to the White House, and warnings about detention camps and government surveillance of its citizens.
But where previous generations of warnings emanated from lone wolves with their fax machines in dusty spare rooms, the current alarms are being issued by the likes of Investors Business Daily, First Amendment authority Nat Hentoff, New York Times best-selling author Robert Ringer and their equals.
“A second term free of electoral restraints [for Obama] may be a frightening prospect,” IBD wrote in a commentary in the last week. “This is, after all, a president who has said he can’t wait for Congress to act and will govern by executive order and regulations if necessary. He has questioned the Supreme Court’s ‘unprecedented’ review of Obamacare.”
The publication pointed out that the Obama administration already is in contempt of court – in a court dispute over its ban on oil drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
When U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman ruled that the Obama Interior Department unconstitutionally imposed an offshore drilling moratorium, the agency “simply established a second ban that was virtually identical.”
“Judge Feldman was not amused. ‘Each step the government took following the court’s imposition of a preliminary injunction showcases its defiance,’ Feldman said in his ruling. ‘Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the re-imposition of a second moratorium …. provides this court with clear and convincing evidence of its contempt,’” the editorial said.
The issue recently was brought into the headlines by comments from Judge Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News analyst who said, “I think the president is dangerously close to totalitarianism. A few months ago he was saying the Congress doesn’t count. The Congress doesn’t mean anything. I am going to rule by decree and by administrative regulation. Now he’s basically saying the Supreme Court doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter what they think. They can’t review our legislation.
“That would leave just him as the only branch of government standing,” Napolitano said.
His comments came after statements from Obama that the U.S. Supreme Court wouldn’t take the “unprecedented” action of actually overturning the Obamacare law, even though that is exactly what courts do when justices determine the legislation is unconstitutional.
“I think he [Obama] has some problems with understanding the Constitution, or accepting limitations on his power,” said Napolitano. “Look, they’re equal branches of government, but with respect to what the law means and what the Constitution means, the court is superior to the president.”
His comments came recently on Neil Cavuto’s program, when the discussion turned to the U.S. Supreme Court’s discussion of the unconstitutionality of Obamacare and Obama’s verbal attack on the court shortly after the oral arguments.
Here are Napolitano’s comments:
Read the full article here.
By Tony Lee | April 12, 2012 | Breitbart
Touré, one of the most prominent members of the media who has tried to exploit the Trayvon Martin tragedy to push his political agenda, Carlos Velez-Ibanez, a liberal professor of transborder studies, and José Antonio Vargas, a liberal ex-reporter and illegal immigrant who now is a prominent founder of an organization whose objective is to have a “conversation” about immigration, made up the panel, which FOX News’ Juan Williams, another liberal, moderated.
The panelists, in their comments and biases through which they saw America, revealed the wide reach of the legal discipline known as “Critical Race Theory,” which teaches students to see essentially all institutions in America as being the product of a white power structure that has to be systematically disassembled. Derrick Bell was the godfather of Critical Race Theory and, as Breitbart.com revealed, President Barack Obama was one of his many acolytes.
As the Trayvon Martin case begins to go to trial and the Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in immigration and affirmative action cases, the left will continue to use these events to attempt to start national dialogues on race. Of course, such dialogues will have subtle — and not-so-subtle — undertones that paint Republicans as intolerant and bigoted. And this will not be by accident, as the panel revealed, for even if those in the liberal media and intelligentsia did not formally take any classes on “Critical Race Theory,” they have been influenced by its tenets and have internalized them.
Exhibit A: Touré
Touré again tried to exploit the Martin case by saying it is about the “ability for us to exist as one America” because “we are very much two Americas, separate and unequal.”
“It is a scar on the American soul, an extraordinarily important moment in American history, and some people are not even recognizing that,” Touré continued. “We are angry this is happening and this is continuing to happen to our young boys.”
Touré said people ask him, “some black boy got killed in Florida and this is a major moment in American history?”
Touré answered that the Martin case is such a moment because it represents “the continued dehumanization of Trayvon and, by association, all black men.”
Speaking about white privilege, Touré said that he was frustrated with whites on the subject, noting that ones he spoke to kept telling him, “I don’t know what you are talking about — show it to me, or prove it to me.”
Touré, whether he knew it or not, was parroting a “Critical Race Theory” tenet that says an absence of specific examples of racism does nothing to disprove that America is a nation based on a power structure that perpetuates white privilege.
Touré then said other whites he spoke to claimed to have no power or privilege; he mockingly said their mindset was, “clearly it must not exist because I have nothing.”
Touré then noted that whenever blacks received rights in America, those rights were then creatively taken away. In the case of Jim Crow following emancipation, Touré was correct.
But Touré took it two steps further.
He referenced an academic hypothesis that after the civil rights bills of the 1950s and 1960s were passed, America tried to restore Jim Crow through other, more creative means by purposely incarcerating blacks. Touré then said that the rise of Obama will lead to another period where rights will be in danger for minorities.
Touré cited the “rise of voter ID laws” as an example of minority rights being in danger, even though voter ID laws are colorblind. He then said that the recent tragedy in Tulsa, Oklahoma — in which gunmen who individually were prejudiced shot and killed five blacks — was proof of whites being angry at blacks in general.
Read the full article here.
Hat Tip: The Daily Caller
By Shelby Steele | April 6, 2012 | Wall Street Journal
Two tragedies are apparent in the Trayvon Martin case. The first is obvious: A teenager—unarmed and committing no crime—was shot dead. Dressed in a “hoodie,” a costume of menace, he crossed paths with a man on the hunt for precisely such clichés of menace. Added to this—and here is the rub—was the fact of his dark skin.
Maybe it was more the hood than the dark skin, but who could argue that the skin did not enhance the menace of the hood at night and in the eyes of someone watching for crime. (Fifty-five percent of all federal prisoners are black though we are only 12% of the population.) Would Trayvon be alive today had he been walking home—Skittles and ice tea in hand—wearing a polo shirt with an alligator logo? Possibly. And does this make the ugly point that dark skin late at night needs to have its menace softened by some show of Waspy Americana? Possibly.
What is fundamentally tragic here is that these two young males first encountered each other as provocations. Males are males, and threat often evokes a narcissistic anger that skips right past reason and into a will to annihilate: “I will take you out!” There was a terrible fight. Trayvon apparently got the drop on George Zimmerman, but ultimately the man with the gun prevailed. Annihilation was achieved.
If this was all there was to it, the Trayvon/Zimmerman story would be no more than a cautionary tale, yet another admonition against the hair-trigger male ego. But this story brought reaction from the White House: “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon,” said the president. The Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, ubiquitous icons of black protest, virtually battled each other to stand at the bereaved family’s side—Mr. Jackson, in a moment of inadvertent honesty, saying, “There is power in blood . . . we must turn a moment into a movement.” And then there was the spectacle of black Democrats in Congress holding hearings on racial profiling with Trayvon’s parents featured as celebrities.
Manhattan Institute fellow Heather MacDonald on civil rights activists’ exploitation of race in the Trayvon Martin tragedy
In fact Trayvon’s sad fate clearly sent a quiver of perverse happiness all across America’s civil rights establishment, and throughout the mainstream media as well. His death was vindication of the “poetic truth” that these establishments live by. Poetic truth is like poetic license where one breaks grammatical rules for effect. Better to break the rule than lose the effect. Poetic truth lies just a little; it bends the actual truth in order to highlight what it believes is a larger and more important truth.
The civil rights community and the liberal media live by the poetic truth that America is still a reflexively racist society, and that this remains the great barrier to black equality. But this “truth” has a lot of lie in it. America has greatly evolved since the 1960s. There are no longer any respectable advocates of racial segregation. And blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites.
Read the full article here.
By Cardinal Lawyer | April 2, 2012 | Breitbart
First-year law students, mandatorily assigned to the class, stop attending the class, moonlighting instead at other sections of the same course being taught by other professors.
As an administrator, what do you do? To reasonable people, the course of action is obvious–you simply tell the visiting professor to stop it, and to stick to the curriculum.
But you don’t do that. Why not?
The answer is obvious, but complex: because you know you will be called a “racist” by activists, and you will do anything to avoid that. So you try to tiptoe around the problem, and you make it worse.
That’s one legacy of racialist Derrick Bell, when he was invited to teach at the home of political correctness, Stanford Law School, in the 1980’s.
The success of radical leftists in taking over administrative control of various institutions–the media, higher education and public worker unions–was partly based upon their tactic of accusing their opponents of being racist.
The truth is, it worked very well for a long time, and often still does. Human nature is to give in to avoid being called racist; it’s just not worth it for ordinary people doing everyday jobs–they didn’t sign up for that kind of harassment. The left knows it, and exploits it.
That partly explains how the left has used an intimidating culture of fear to turn institutions into bowls of milquetoast. It’s a decades-old legacy of ordinary people backing down again and again, giving in to the radical Left.
In the universities, the Marxist/collectivists didn’t call themselves “communists” or “socialists;” they used the brand name of “Critical Studies.”
Buried in Derrick Bell’s resume is an instructive episode showing how the racial intimidation of the “Critical Studies” race baiters helped move the Leftist’s agenda.
Bell–who died last year–objected to neutrality and color-blindness in the Constitution. Bell wanted race to become a permanent weapon of the left–in short, he was a race warrior and wanted constant racial strife.
To justify his race war, he argued that the existence of slavery at the time of the U.S. Constitution rendered that agreement unenforceable against blacks. He reasoned that the Constitution was fatally illegitimate, and could never be fixed–not by the Civil War or the resulting anti-slavery amendments, nor by the Civil Rights amendments. To Bell, the Constitution was merely a tool to keep the black race down–permanently. It was government of the racists, by the racists and for the racists.
And because it’s illegitimate, it does not have to be obeyed. That’s the intellectual justification. Got it?
Read the full article here.
"One man with courage is a majority." ~Thomas Jefferson
By Jonathan S. Tobin | August 11, 2012 | Commentary Magazine As John wrote earlier today, liberals are convinced that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate offers them a golden opportunity to savage the Republicans about the Wisconsin congressman’s budget plans. Predictably, the New York Times delivered one of the first such salvos in its editorial posted […]
By Vanderleun | August 10, 2012 | American Digest [From 2008. Only the names have been changed because the target has changed.] This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it’s a fall, not […]
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