Sunday, May 10, 2015

Mother Dies in Laguna Beach Car Crash on Mother's Day

This crash is getting national attention, at ABC News, "2 Young Children Lose Their Mom in Mother's Day Car Crash":

A 31-year-old woman driving with her two children on Mother's Day was killed after her car collided with another car in Laguna Beach.

The woman was driving with her 8-year-old and 5-year-old at 12:30 a.m. Sunday when a car traveling in the opposite direction sideswiped her, causing both cars to spin out of control, Capt. Jason Kravetz said. The woman, from Mission Viejo, had to be cut out of the car and was taken to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead. Her children were treated at a hospital for minor injuries and released to family.

"For an unknown reason, one of the two veered out of its traffic lane," Kravetz said. "We don't know which one it is."

The driver of the other car, an 86-year-old man from Laguna Woods, is in extremely critical condition. His car flipped over a couple times before landing on its wheels. His wife, who was also in the car, didn't suffer serious injuries.
More.

Mark Halperin's 'Painful' Interview with Ted Cruz

Oh boy.

It's going to be a long election season. Sheesh.

From Rubin Navarette, at the San Jose Mercury News, "Halperin interview of Ted Cruz was painful":

SAN DIEGO -- Imagine the following pep talk that a young Ted Cruz might have gotten from his father, Rafael, about 35 years ago.

"My son, I was tortured in a jail cell in Cuba, but I managed to come to the United States and build a life so that you could live your dreams. I grew up speaking Spanish, but I made sure you spoke English so you could go far. If you study hard, you can attend great universities. You can clerk for the chief justice of the Supreme Court, become a great trial lawyer and argue nine cases before the high court, get elected to the U.S. Senate, and someday run for president.

"Then, after all the family's efforts and sacrifices, one day, you can go on an interview program and be asked by a smug and clueless white journalist if you're authentically Cuban."

Watching Mark Halperin of Bloomberg Politics interview Cruz recently, I wasn't just uncomfortable. I was actually nauseated.

As a journalist, I felt embarrassed for Halperin. As a Hispanic, I felt like I was watching a college fraternity have fun with racial stereotypes, like when staging a "border party" where people show up in serapes and fake mustaches. And as someone who doesn't adhere to a party line to the point where I've been accused of being a "coconut" (white on the inside, brown on the outside), I was furious enough to -- as Sarah Palin once said approvingly about Cruz -- chew barbed wire and spit out rust.

The online interview show that Halperin co-hosts on BloombergPolitics.com is called "With All Due Respect." But there was nothing respectful about the line of questioning. It started off innocently enough with Halperin asking the 2016 GOP presidential candidate about whether he thinks Hispanics will vote for him. He also mentioned a speech that Cruz had given to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and gave Cruz the chance to explain his argument that Republican economic policies help Hispanics.

Nothing wrong with that. But then Halperin made it personal, and the interview careened into a ditch. He told Cruz that people are curious about his "identity." Then, the host asked a series of questions intended to establish his guest's Hispanic bona fides. What kind of Cuban food did Cruz like to eat growing up? And what sort of Cuban music does Cruz listen to even now?
Well, there you go. Identity politics. One of the many things that makes leftists so unpleasant to be around. They're terrible people.

Fausta has more, "Identity politics: Halperin interviews Ted Cruz, expects Ricky Ricardo":
I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, and, if I had $5 for every liberal idiot who looks at me and says “You don’t look Puerto Rican”, etc., because I don’t fit the Liberal template of what a Lateeeno/Lateeena should be like, this blog wouldn’t need to carry ads.

Frankly, by now I expect to consistently encounter discrimination and bigotry from Liberals. It’s in their mindset – identity politics is their lifeblood.
Racist hatred is the lifeblood of identity-mongering leftists. Again, these are just terrible people.

Via Memeorandum.

Saturday, May 9, 2015

British Pollsters to Conduct 'Independent Inquiry' After Polling Debacle in General Election 2015

I was at work, but I saw a few folks on Twitter (especially Louise Mensch) debating the accuracy of the final exit poll predicting a big win for the Tories. Too tired, I didn't even blog Thursday night, but I did check the results at the British newspapers throughout the evening. David Cameron's party shocked the political establishment. Louise Mensch was imploring her partisans against gloating. Numbers guru Nate Silver issued a major wake-up call on the state of elections surveys.

I have no idea what went wrong other than the pollsters got lousy samples, which underrepresented conservatives. Some of the articles I've read suggest that Tory voters were shy and refused to state their real voter preferences. I always doubt such stories, especially in this case, since there's no shame in voting for the incumbent party. It wasn't a race issue like that of the much-hyped "Bradley effect." So I suspect that the "independent inquiry" that been proposed by the British Polling Council will basically be going back to the drawing board on basic methods. The group might do well to examine institutional left-wing biases among pollsters, a situation so serious that Survation, a market survey research firm, refused to publish a poll on the eve of the election showing the Tories holding a 37-to-31 percent lead.

In any case, here's the New York Times from this morning's paper, "British Election’s Other Losers: Pollsters":
LONDON — The Labour leader Ed Miliband may have stumbled badly in the British election, but there was another big loser on Thursday night: the pollsters who were far off the mark and failed to see the outright majority won by Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative Party.

Before the election, nearly every poll showed the race as a near-tie that would result in a hung Parliament and force complex negotiations to form a coalition government. In the last days of the campaign, a survey by Ipsos/MORI, a widely respected pollster, forecast that the Conservatives would win 36 percent of the vote and the Labour Party 35 percent. On Thursday, The Guardian reported a poll by ICM putting Labour at 35 percent and the Conservatives at 34 percent.

A consortium of researchers from the University of East Anglia, the London School of Economics and Durham University aggregated national polling and online surveys, and in its final projection on Thursday forecast that the most likely outcome would give the Conservatives 278 seats in Parliament and Labour 267.

The final result, with the Conservatives securing a majority and projected to win as many as 331 seats, only added to an intensifying debate in the United States, Britain and elsewhere about the accuracy of polling, the problems of getting accurate samples in the era of the iPhone when voters can no longer be reached as easily by traditional means like landlines and the fracturing of politics making it harder to predict voter behavior.

In Britain’s case, weeks of assumptions built around the consistency of pre-election polling gave way to a sense of shock among even veteran Westminster watchers when broadcasters unveiled the results of their exit poll right after the polls closed on Thursday night. The exit poll accurately predicted, within a few seats, the final outcome, but it was initially greeted with deep skepticism by party leaders and some voters.

Paddy Ashdown, a former leader of the Liberal Democrats, pledged to “publicly eat my hat” after the first exit polls suggested that his party would see its parliamentary ranks slashed by 10 members. “I have been offered 10 hats on Twitter tonight,” he told Andrew Neil of the BBC, “not all of them politely, I have to say.”

As the poor performance of the Liberal Democrats became more clear, Mr. Ashdown’s hat went viral on Twitter, with a fake account attracting more than 12,000 followers, and manipulated images of his eating a hat proliferated on social media.

The failure to accurately predict the result was reminiscent of recent elections in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won a clear victory after pre-election polls showing the rival Zionist Union in the lead. Analysts attributed Mr. Netanyahu’s surprise comeback to an 11th-hour political offensive, including a pledge that there would be no Palestinian state.

Writing in The Guardian, Alberto Nardelli, the news organization’s data editor, said there was no simple explanation to what went wrong with the polling.

“It could be simply that people lied to the pollsters, that they were shy or that they genuinely had a change of heart on polling day,” he said. “Or there could be more complicated underlying challenges within the polling industry, due, for example, to the fact that a diminishing number of people use landlines or that Internet polls are ultimately based on a self-selected sample.”

Peter Kellner, the president of YouGov, a leading survey firm, told The Daily Telegraph that the pollsters had erred, attributing the results to the capriciousness of voters rather than to statistical lapses.

“What seems to have gone wrong is that people have said one thing and they did something else in the ballot box,” he was quoted as saying by The Telegraph. “We are not as far out as we were in 1992, not that that is a great commendation.”

He was referring to the British general election of 1992, when pollsters predicted a hung Parliament, only to see the Conservatives win an outright majority.

Later in the day, YouGov issued a mea culpa, though it declined to draw firm conclusions on what went wrong. “For any polling company, there inevitably comes a time when you get something wrong,” it said in a statement. “Every couple of decades a time comes along when all the companies get something wrong. Yesterday appears to have been one such day.”

Such was the concern over the failure of the pre-election polls to get it right that the British Polling Council announced Friday that it would set up an independent inquiry to determine what had gone wrong.

“The final opinion polls before the election were clearly not as accurate as we would like, and the fact that all the pollsters underestimated the Conservative lead over Labour suggests that the methods that were used should be subject to careful, independent investigation,” it said in a statement. It said the independent inquiry would “look into the possible causes of this apparent bias, and to make recommendations for future polling.”
More.

Also at the BBC, "Election 2015: Inquiry into opinion poll failures," and "Election results: How did pollsters get it so wrong?"

And at the Independent UK, "Election results: What went so wrong for the pollsters – and how did the exit poll get it right?"

No, There's No 'Hate Speech' Exception to the First Amendment

Leftists bitching about "hate speech" are simply attempting to shut down speech with which they disagree.

They're ghoulish reprobates and totalitarians.

See Eugen Volokh, at the Washington Post:
I keep hearing about a supposed “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, or statements such as, “This isn’t free speech, it’s hate speech,” or “When does free speech stop and hate speech begin?” But there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Hateful ideas (whatever exactly that might mean) are just as protected under the First Amendment as other ideas. One is as free to condemn Islam — or Muslims, or Jews, or blacks, or whites, or illegal aliens, or native-born citizens — as one is to condemn capitalism or Socialism or Democrats or Republicans...
Continue reading.

Perhaps the idiots at the New York Times should read the Volokh Conspiracy:



Vintage World War II Planes Fly Over Washington D.C.

At the Washington Post, "Photos: Arsenal of Democracy Flyover salutes World War II veterans," and "Meet the 19 WWII planes of the D.C. flyover."



More video at CNN, "WWII-era warplanes flyover Washington monuments," and "Come aboard one of the B-25 bombers that flew over Washington D.C."

Mel Gibson Surprises Fans, Tom Hardy with 'Mad Max: Fury Road' Premiere Appearance

Pretty cool.

At Us Weekly.

'Martin Luther King picked some of the cities he went to precisely in order to provoke, and bring out the racists and show what kind of violent people they are, so the world could see what is wrong with Jim Crow...'

At Pat Dollard's, "Alan Dershowitz: 'There’s No Difference' Between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Pamela Geller."

Friday, May 8, 2015

Death Threats Against Pamela Geller

Here's more of that compassionate "love and inclusiveness" leftist hypocrites are always prattling on about. F-king murderous ghouls.

At Atlas Shrugs, "You’ve got mail!":
My emailbox is a microcosm of this terrible war on freedom. Hundreds of notes and letters in support of our work in defense of freedom, and then there are these:

You've got mail! photo Screen-Shot-2015-05-04-at-10.33.00-AM_zpswgohwwbm.png

'Waiting for the other shoe to drop...'

Heh.

From Michael Ramirez, at IBD:



Memorial Service for NYPD Officer Brian Moore

"Grimly familiar."

At NYT, "Thousands Honor N.Y.P.D. Officer Brian Moore in a Grimly Familiar Ritual":

Brian Moore was born blue.

His father was police. His uncle and his cousins were police.

On Friday, nearly a week after he was fatally shot while on patrol in Queens, Officer Moore was laid to rest surrounded by a sea of blue.

As the funeral procession made its way through the streets of Seaford, N.Y., on Long Island, with uniformed officers escorting the hearse carrying Officer Moore’s body, thousands of men and women lined the streets in silence.

They offered a final salute to one of their own.

When Officer Moore joined the New York Police Department five years ago, it was like he was signing up for the family business. At his funeral, that family grew by tens of thousands at what was expected to be one of the largest police funerals in the New York City area in decades.

“We are united today as a family,” Msgr. Robert J. Romano, the Police Department’s chaplain, said during the homily. “A family of blood. A family of blue and the American family.”

Monsignor Romano said that the hundreds in the church, the thousands of people outside and millions of people around the country were mourning alongside those closest to Officer Moore...
More.

PREVIOUSLY: "NYPD Officer Dies After Being Shot in Face by Black Thug With Long Rap Sheet."

Louise Mensch Flies to Britain to Vote in #GE15

She's such a lovely political junkie.

Corby, her former constituency, returned to the Conservative fold yesterday as well, which brought tears to her eyes, apparently.



Threat Level Raised at U.S. Military Bases

At CNN, "ISIS activity prompts threat level increase at bases."



ADDED: At Instapundit, "THE “PANIC” HAS APPARENTLY NOT EXTENDED TO THEM OFFERING PROTECTION TO PAM GELLER: ABC News is running a story today about how the FBI and the rest of the homeland security apparatus is in a state of near “panic” in the aftermath of the Garland shooting."

Community-Policing Helps Inoculate City of Fresno from Radical Left's Anarchy and Violence

A great piece.

And Fresno's mayor is Republican Ashley Swearengin.

At the Washington Post, "In Fresno, a community-policing ethos builds ties between officers and residents."

Tina Fey May Be the Last Woman to Strip Down for David Letterman

On his late-night show, of course.

Watch, at CNN, "Tina Fey strips for Letterman."

David Cameron Makes Victorious Return to No. 10 Downing Street

I'm really happy about this. It reaffirms my belief in basic human decency, if not innate intelligence. Sheesh.

Cameron's not perfect --- indeed, his frequent politically correct kowtowing to the forces of Islamic jihad is cringeworthy --- but at least conservatism will rise to see another day in Britain.

At London's Daily Mail, "Cameron makes a victorious return to No 10 as he promises to make 'Great Britain Greater' -- TOGETHER WE'LL MAKE GREAT BRITAIN GREATER STILL: Cameron hails shock Tory outright majority as Miliband, Clegg and Farage all QUIT. SNP wins near clean-sweep of seats in Scotland."


Nick Clegg Resigns as Liberal Democrat Party Leader

At the Guardian UK, "In farewell speech to party members, Clegg describes election result as ‘the most crushing blow to the Liberal Democrats since our party was founded’."

And video at Sky News, "Nick Clegg Quits as Lib Dems Leader."

Nigel Farage Resigns as UKIP Leader

Another one bites the dust.

At the Guardian UK, "Nigel Farage quits as Ukip leader but may return after break."

Plus, video at Britain's Channel 4 News, "Nigel Farage resigns as Ukip leader."

Ed Miliband Resigns as Labour Party Leader

A huge political earthquake out of Britain yesterday. The Tories held on to power despite all kinds of polls showing a Labour juggernaut. I can't stand Ed Miliband, whose father was an unrepentant British communist, so this is great news.

At the Guardian UK, "Miliband steps down after admitting scale of election defeat had taken him and his staff by surprise."

Yeah, well, the polls were all f-ked up, so he's not alone in that.

More at Memeorandum.

ADDED: Video, via Sky News, "Ed Miliband Resigns As Labour Leader."

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Stop the Islamization of America

Buy Pamela Geller's book, Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance.

Also, Freedom or Submission: On the Dangers of Islamic Extremism & American Complacency.

I'm teaching all day. More blogging tonight.

A Rubicon Moment for Free Speech

From Amanda Foreman, at the Wall Street Journal, "Charlie Hebdo and a Rubicon Moment for Free Speech":
By awarding Charlie Hebdo the Freedom of Expression Courage prize, PEN has also shown its willingness to lead by example and from the front. That leadership is more important than ever.

If human-rights organizations, starting with PEN, fail to affirm the indivisibility of free speech, that failure will not lead to more peace and harmony in the world. It will lead to the reverse as vigilantes from all sides interpret such weakness as an invitation to impose their own order. The shootings in Copenhagen in February, and in Garland, Texas, last weekend—both involving Islamists targeting events they deemed insulting to their religion—are two examples of how some would like to see the “debate” unfold.

For those who believe in freedom of expression, the moment has come to make the choice between its defense or abandonment against a murderous movement that believes democratic values are subordinate to religious sensibilities. At the end of the evening on Tuesday, I spoke with Jean-Baptiste Thoret, Charlie Hebdo’s film critic. “There are just two options facing us all,” he said, “and we have to take a side.”
 RTWT.

Online Jihadist Who Supported #Garland Attacks Used to Work for Amnesty International.

*SMH*

At Instapundit, "MORE MORAL ROT IN THE NGO WORLD."

David Cameron to British Voters: 'Don't do something you'll regret...'

The polls are now open. This is from last night.

At Telegraph UK, "David Cameron tells voters as they go to the polls: Don't do something you'll regret":
Prime Minister makes final appeal for voters to back Conservatives before polling stations open.

David Cameron has urged the British public not to "do something you'll regret" as voters head to the polls for the closest general election in a generation.

With the final round of opinion polls showing Labour and the Conservatives neck and neck, the Prime Minister uses a Telegraph interview to urge voters to reflect in the "solemn quiet" of the polling booth before casting their ballot.

Mr Cameron says that the 2015 general election will "define this generation" with major constitutional and economic issues at stake for the country.

The last round of opinion polls and forecasts from bookmakers suggests that the election will lead to a chaotic result - with Labour and the SNP vying with the Conservatives, propped up by the Liberal Democrats, to form the next Government.

Senior Conservatives privately hope that, as in 1992, the opinion polls are not reflective of the nation's mood and that so-called "shy Tories" or people having last-minute doubts over Labour's credibility could yet swing behind Mr Cameron.

On current polling, the Tories are hopeful of winning at least 290 seats – potentially as many as 300. They require at least 323 seats to claim a majority in the House of Commons and would therefore need the support of at least one other party under this scenario.

he bookmakers narrowly predict that Mr Cameron will remain Prime Minister after the election and discreet game-planning for the Coalition negotiations which may start on Friday have already begun.

Speaking on the final day of campaigning, as he made a symbolic visit to Scotland just hours before the polls open, Mr Cameron made a final appeal for potential Ukip voters - seen as a key group who could yet switch and deliver a Conservative win.

The Prime Minister said that a vote for Nigel Farage's party will “endanger the economy and your family’s security” by allowing a “shambolic” government to take power.

"The future of the country is in your hands. Don’t do something you will regret,” Mr Cameron said.

"Think of the future of our country before you vote. We can stay on a strong path of growth, jobs and success - or we can put it at risk with taxing, borrowing and Ed Miliband propped up by the SNP."
Also, "LIVE: Election 2015: Polls have Labour and Tories tied as Cameron urges public 'don't do something you'll regret'."

Nina Agdal Sunburned

At London's Daily Mail, "Nina Agdal shows off more than just her white bits as she poses TOPLESS to reveal painful-looking sunburn in candid new snap."

PREVIOUSLY: "'The Only Thing Better Than Dessert...'"

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Pamela Geller: 'This Is a War...'

Pamela responds, at Time, "Pamela Geller: A Response to My Critics—This Is a War."

 photo 50f33cd6-537d-4ed8-953a-9f01b0e9ca2f_zpsfocorxxm.png

This morning Drudge linked to the New York Daily News, "ISIS threatens controversial blogger Pamela Geller in message boasting of '71 trained soldiers in 15 different states'."

And ICYMI, from Dr. Helen Smith, "Is Pam Geller the Bravest Woman in the U.S.?"

The left's anti-free speech responses have started to become literally unhinged. It's pretty bad when you hate someone's speech so much that you'd rather see them killed for it. But that's where we are with radical leftists. They'd be cheering Pamela's death had the jihadists been able to get past security to open fire on their targets. Of course, radical leftism is a murderous ideology, so no one should be surprised.

See Hot Air, "Quotes of the day."

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Los Angeles Times Pushes 'Extremist' Moral Equivalence Attack on Pamela Geller in #Garland Jihad Shooting

A particularly odious comparison at today's Los Angeles Times front-page, claiming moral equivalence between Pamela Geller and the Islamic jihadists who attempted a Charlie Hebdo attack in Texas.

I tweeted the photo of the piece this morning, and here's the online article, "Texas attack refocuses attention on fine line between free speech and hate speech":

Pamela Geller is a 56-year-old Jewish arch-conservative from New York, a vehement critic of radical Islam who organized a provocative $10,000 cartoon contest in this placid Dallas suburb designed to caricature the prophet Muhammad.

Elton Simpson was a 30-year-old aspiring Islamic militant from Phoenix who fantasized to an FBI informant about “doing the martyrdom operations” in Somalia and was convicted in 2010 of lying to the FBI about his plans to travel to the volatile eastern African nation.

Their lives intersected Sunday in this small town in north-central Texas, an unlikely venue for a violent collision of cultures. After a Sunday evening shootout outside the contest site between police and Simpson and another man firing assault rifles, both gunmen lay dead in the street. And Geller quickly posted a defiant blog: “This is a war on free speech. ... Are we going to surrender to these monsters?”

The Texas showdown was America’s Charlie Hebdo moment, erupting just four months after gunmen shot and killed 12 people at the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper that had published cartoons of the prophet considered blasphemous by many Muslims. The Garland attack refocused public attention on the fine line between free speech and hate speech in the ideological struggle between radical Islam and the West.

The shooting unfolded just before 7 p.m. Sunday outside the Curtis Culwell Center, a public school building where about 200 people had just heard an impassioned anti-Islamic speech — “The less Islam, the better!” — by Geert Wilders, a right-wing Dutch politician. Wilders said the venue was significant: It was chosen as a defiant response to an American Muslim group that had held a “Stand With the Prophet Against Terror and Hate” conference in January in the same building.

Security had been intense, with officers from local police, SWAT teams, a bomb squad and school security, along with FBI and other federal agents waiting for trouble, and it came: The two men pulled up and opened fire but were quickly shot and killed by a Garland police officer firing his service handgun.

“He did what he was trained to do and did a very good job,” Garland police spokesman Joe Harn said. “He probably saved lives.”

Harn said of the gunmen, “Obviously, they were there to shoot people.” He said they wore some form of body armor, and police found ammunition — but no explosives — in their car.

In Phoenix on Monday, police searched Simpson’s home. A federal law enforcement source said Nadir Soofi, 34, identified as the second gunman, was Simpson’s roommate.

The cartoon contest was organized by Geller as a rallying point for cartoonists and conservatives united in their belief that verbal attacks on radical Islam are a form of free speech.

Geller has posted bus ads and billboards condemning Islam. In 2010, the same year the FBI was investigating Simpson’s vows to fight “kafirs,” or nonbelievers, Geller cofounded American Freedom Defense Initiative, also known as Stop Islamization of America. The organization, considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, hosted the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon contest, offering $10,000 for the best cartoon of the prophet.

“We know the risks,” Geller wrote in a blog promoting the event. “This event will require massive security.”

Police said the gunmen drove a sedan up to a police car blocking access to the conference, jumped out and opened fire with assault rifles. A school security guard was wounded in the leg...
Still more at that top link.

As Pamela always says, "truth is the new hate speech."

Actually, there's no such thing as hate speech. As the FIRE notes, "“Hate speech” is not a category of speech recognized under current constitutional law. It is merely a convenient way to pigeonhole speech that some people find offensive."

Yeah, well, Muslims and regressive leftists don't like being called out with the truth. Hence, as soon as shots rang out virtually the entire media establishment and the left's terror-enablers blamed Pamela for the attack. It's an enormous perversion of reality, but this is the nature of the war we're in. Obviously, the reporters at the Times are down with a sick moral equivalence that smears a freedom fighter who calls Islam for what it is --- a political ideology seeking to eliminate all opposition, using any means necessary, including murderous jihad. Ironically, our mass media overlords truly believe that genuninely speaking your mind, quoting the words of the jihadists themselves, and courageously standing up for your right to do it, is extremism. It is, according to the Times, exactly the same as launching an armed attack on peaceful citizens attending a political convention about drawing cartoons. It's so absurd it's to die for.

More at Memeorandum.

In the Mail: Carly Fiorina, Rising to the Challenge: My Leadership Journey

I've started reading Ms. Fiorina's new book.

She's got a great story. And her presidential campaign promises the most stinging criticisms of Hillary Clinton of the season.

At the New York Times, "Carly Fiorina Announces 2016 Presidential Bid, Citing Years Leading Hewlett-Packard." Also at Memeorandum, Mark Haperin, "The Definitive H&H Carly Fiorina Scouting Report."

More at CBS News San Francisco, "Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina Makes Presidential Run."

Pick up a copy of her book at Amazon.

Carly Fiorina photo 11128056_10206951015036857_9072737723061276988_n_zpstcjyb1cz.jpg

National Offend a Feminist Week

At the Other McCain, "Feminists Chase ‘Avengers’ Director Off Twitter, Because … Gender Theory?"

BONUS: Robert and I stood with Pamela Geller back in 2010, at the Los Angeles event to promote her book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America.



Sorry, Charlie Hebdo

At the Wall Street Journal, "Western writers abandon their support for free speech":
Je suis Charlie. French for “I am Charlie,” the phrase became a global expression of solidarity and resolve after Islamist gunmen murdered 12 people at the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

In a terrifying copycat attack Sunday in Garland, Texas, two men with assault rifles attempted to gun down people attending an event satirizing Muhammad with cartoons. A single police officer managed to shoot and kill both gunmen before they got inside the event. With some 200 people in the building, the potential for another politicized mass murder was great.

On Monday authorities said one of the gunman, Elton Simpson of Phoenix, had been under surveillance for years because of interest he’d shown in joining jihadist groups overseas. He was found guilty of making false statements to the FBI, but a federal judge ruled there wasn’t enough evidence that Mr. Simpson’s activities were “sufficiently ‘related’ to international terrorism.”

Against this backdrop we have the extraordinary—almost comical—irony of some of America’s bien pensant intellectuals boycotting a ceremony Tuesday by the PEN American Center to confer its annual courage award for freedom of expression on Charlie Hebdo. PEN is an association of writers, and six prominent novelists—Peter Carey,Michael Ondaatje,Francine Prose,Teju Cole,Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi—have been trying to repeal the award for Charlie Hebdo.

Ms. Kusher said she was uncomfortable with the “forced secular view” and “cultural intolerance” represented by Charlie Hebdo, whose signature attacks were on organized religion. Before the boycott, Mr. Cole wrote in the New Yorker magazine questioning the praise for Charlie Hebdo in the wake of the massacre. He lamented that the concern for Charlie Hebdo’s murdered cartoonists won’t be matched by concern for the young men of military age “who will have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere.”

A separate petition signed by more than 200 PEN members complains that their organization is “not simply conveying support for freedom of expression, but also valorizing selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.”

Trumpeting the list of petition signers was no less than Glenn Greenwald, last seen lionizing Edward Snowden’s right to go public with information stolen from the National Security Agency’s efforts to track the people who committed the Paris murders and tried to do it again in Texas this week.

Much of what Charlie Hebdo published was insulting and not infrequently obscene. No doubt that was true at the event in Texas. We would not routinely publish it in this newspaper. But insults are protected under the First Amendment. The terrorists who attacked cartoonists in Paris and in Texas hoped that murder would intimidate them—and others—into silence. As such theirs was not merely an attack on a publication; it was an attack on the foundations of liberal democracy.

All this PEN award does is underscore that in a civilized—indeed “tolerant”—society, you don’t get to murder people who insult or offend you. It is a principle that should be easy for everyone—especially acclaimed writers—to understand.
Of note: WSJ did publish images of the Charlie Hebdo Mohammed cartoons after the Paris attacks, unlike so many other craven Western news outlets.

RELATED: At the Other McCain, "TERROR IN TEXAS: Garland Gunman Elton Simpson Was Muslim Convert."

15-Foot Waves at the Wedge in Newport Beach

It's been beautiful beach weather too.

At the O.C. Register, "The Wild Wedge puts on a show with waves reaching 15 feet and higher."

And at ABC-7 Los Angeles, "HUGE WAVES LURE BODYSURFERS, CROWDS TO NEWPORT BEACH."

Free Speech or Islamofascist Suppression?

At IBD, "After Attack In Texas, Will It Be Free Speech or the Thugs' Veto?":
After a Muhammad cartoon event was attacked in Texas, the intelligentsia pointed the finger at the organizers. Let's get one thing straight: This event was not about guns, civility or Islam. It was about free speech.

Activist Pamela Geller is no stranger to saying things that horrify the politically correct. She protested the World Trade Center mosque and bought bus-sign ads describing what's really written in the Quran. Last weekend, she and writer Robert Spencer's American Freedom Defense Initiative organized a contest for the best Muhammad cartoon drawing with a $10,000 prize in Texas in response to the Islamofascist newsroom massacre of cartoonists in Paris at the French paper Charlie Hebdo earlier this year.

And to no one's surprise in a nation whose leaders consider rising Islamofascist terror groups "junior varsity" and where extremist depravities are viewed as "workplace violence" or dismissed as reactions to bad filmmaking rather than organized terror, a couple of Islamofacists from North Phoenix, Ariz., shot up the Garland, Texas, cartoon conference, wounding a security guard before an off-duty traffic cop took the pair down and saved the country from another massacre.

Since then, it's been Charlie Hebdo all over again, given the media's failure to understand that this is about the threat that radical Islam poses to free speech.

Incredibly, the left wasted no time blasting Geller and Spender, blaming them for the murderous behavior of the gunmen.

CNN's Alisyn Camerota attacked Geller as anti-Islamic, cherry-picking various news clips to make her case, despite Geller asserting that she wasn't.

"Civilized men can disagree," Geller told CNN. "Savages will kill you when they disagree."

Why she should be on the hot seat instead of the would-be attackers and their enablers is beyond us.

But the finger-pointing at Geller kept coming.

"Free speech aside, why would anyone do something as provocative as hosting a 'Muhammad drawing contest'?" tweeted New York Times' Rukmini Callimachi.

Free speech aside? From the newspaper of record?

Callimachi didn't seem to understand that the entire event — as Geller's participants repeatedly said in the pre-shooting film clips of the event posted on her blog — was explicitly about free speech, which is now under attack by Islamofascists and which can be demonstrated only by extreme means, such as cartoons.

And that's the heart of the matter. Agree with Geller or not, there can be no compromise on free speech. The attack on her event underscored the fragility of America's free speech, the basis for all of America's freedoms.
Also from Ms. EBL, "Blaming the Victims of Jihadi Terror: Leftist Media calling Pam Geller, AFDI, and Jihad Watch 'hate groups'."



Rush Limbaugh Really, Really Likes Marco Rubio

Well, I'm glad.

I have a sense Rubio might catch on with the general electorate --- and here's to hoping he gives the big GOP frontrunners a run for their money.

From Aaron Blake, at the Washington Post:
On his radio show Tuesday, Rush Limbaugh devoted plenty of time to praising Rubio in what can only be described as glowing terms. Yes, he said he wasn't happy about the "amnesty" thing, but he also seems to have pretty quickly moved past it. He even volunteered some excuses for Rubio.
More.

NYPD Officer Dies After Being Shot in Face by Black Thug With Long Rap Sheet

Don't expect nationwide protest marches against black thug murderers killing cops. Doesn't fit the left's evil narrative.

At WSJ, "New York City Police Officer Shot In Face Dies":


Brian Moore, who died Monday after being shot in the face attempting to stop a suspect, was hailed by Police Commissioner William Bratton as “an exceptional young officer” who ascended to an elite anticrime unit since joining the New York Police Department in 2010.

“I did not know this officer in person in life. I have only come to know him in death,” Mr. Bratton said outside Jamaica Hospital Medical Center after visiting with Officer Moore’s family and colleagues.

Mr. Bratton called the 25-year-old, who came from a family of police officers, including his father, “an extraordinary young man—a great loss to his family, a great loss to this department and a great loss to this profession and to this city.”

Officer Moore made 159 arrests since joining the force and received medals for Excellent Police Duty and Meritorious Police Duty, the NYPD said.

Hundreds of officers lined up outside the hospital to honor Officer Moore when his body was taken to the city medical examiner’s office in Manhattan.

Family members leaned in to touch the ambulance as it pulled away. Flags at the city’s police headquarters were lowered to half-staff.

Officer Moore had been in a coma since undergoing surgery for injuries suffered after he was shot through the glass of his unmarked police car Saturday. He was taken off life support Monday.

He was in plain clothes on Saturday, patrolling in an unmarked police car with his partner, when he was shot by a suspect who they saw tugging at the waistband of his pants, authorities said.

Demetrius Blackwell, a 35-year-old man with a long criminal record, has been charged with attempted murder and is being held without bail....

The incident that led to Officer Moore’s death occurred Saturday night near 104th Road and 212th Street in Queens Village neighborhood of Queens.

According to a law-enforcement official, Officer Moore, who was with his partner, Erik Jansen, saw Mr. Blackwell, identified himself as a police officer and asked “Do you have something in your waistband?”

Mr. Blackwell replied, “Yeah, I got something,” took a gun from his waistband and fired at the officers, striking Officer Moore, the official said. Officer Jansen wasn’t injured.

Mr. Blackwell was arrested about two hours later, near the crime scene...
More from CBS News New York, "Mayor De Blasio Speaks on Death of NYPD Officer Brian Moore."

Also at NYDN, "Suspected cop shooter has long rap list, including 8 years in prison for attempted murder."

'The Only Thing Better Than Dessert...'

Here's the smokin' Danish fashion model Nina Agdal, for Sports Illustrated Swimsuit:



Gun Salutes for Princess Charlotte

The royal baby is Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, Princess of Cambridge.

At the BBC, "Royal baby: London gun salutes mark birth of princess."



'Clinton Cash' Campaign Scandal: 'How Could This Have Happened?'

From Megan McArdle, who is increasingly becoming one of the more perceptive analysts around.

At Bloomberg, "What the Clintons Haven't Learned":
Tuesday will be the unveiling of what can be breathlessly awaited only in campaign season: a book on the Clinton Foundation, and allegations of a torrent of sleazy foreign cash that has poured into its coffers. I'm already on record as saying that the author, Peter Schweizer, might struggle to meet the burden of proof to show that the Clintons absolutely and unquestionably did something wrong. On the other hand, there's a lower burden of proof for "raises unsettling questions that will dog Hillary Clinton through a tough campaign," and that may already have been met.

The great mystery that remains is how this could have happened. The Clintons have known for a long while that Hillary would be running in 2016. And they ought to have known that accepting foreign donations, from folks who wanted things from the State Department, would become a problem for her candidacy. They certainly should have been aware that funneling all of her State Department e-mails through a private server, and then destroying them, would create terrible optics for her campaign and fuel any subsequent scandals. Why, then, did two such tenacious, wily campaigners proceed with this nonsense?

It looks to me like the answer is that they somehow didn't know the things that they should have known. They certainly act surprised. The campaign machine that used to blast away at incipient scandals with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns now lets them fester for weeks before offering a lame response: Hillary's press conference about the e-mails gave critics more fodder, and Bill's non-response response to questions about foundation finances is even worse. The former president told NBC that he has to keep giving high-priced speeches all over the world because "I gotta pay our bills." Coming from a man reputed to be worth tens of millions, who gave his daughter a multi-million-dollar wedding, this seems a bit ... off.

Which makes me wonder if the famed Clinton campaign skills aren't a little bit out of date...
More.

Monday, May 4, 2015

Hateful Leftists Try to Change the Subject to 'Islamophobia' After #Garland Jihad Attack

The attacks on Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer erupted immediately last night on Twitter, showing the radical left's true colors. One of these days jihadists will succeed with their own Charlie Hebdo-style attack on U.S. soil, and the left will demonize the victims for their alleged "hateful" ideas. The only hate involved is on the left, however. Depraved leftists hate anyone who challenges their ideological, politically correct shibboleths. If you speak out, you must be destroyed --- by any means necessary, it turns out.

From Jonathan Tobin, at Commentary, "After Garland, Don’t Change the Subject to Islamophobia":
Almost immediately after the news of last night’s shooting in Garland, Texas broke many in the chattering class started to blame the intended victims of the attack. The group that had sponsored a contest to draw pictures of the Prophet Muhammad and two of the controversial speakers at the event were quickly depicted as having invited violence by their willingness to offend Muslims. But whether or not you agree with Dutch politician Geert Wilders or American activist Pam Geller, the failed attempt to slaughter them or those who chose to hear their words illustrated one of their main contentions. You can offend any other religion with impunity but dare to speak rudely or even truthfully about Islamist intolerance and you’d better pay for heavy security and/or hope the police are doing their job (as, thank Heaven, they were in Texas). That, and not whether or not Wilders or Geller are right about some things or even anything, remains the only question to discuss when it comes to talk about Islamophobia.

Let’s specify that not all Muslims, especially here in the United States, are violent or intolerant. Most are hard working, decent people and deserve the same respect as any other American.

But there is a reason why humorists fear to skewer Islam or its holy book the same way they do Catholics or Mormons. You can mock Christian symbols, call it art and then expect cultural elites to lionize you and denounce those who are offended as fascists. You can stage an opera rationalizing Palestinian terrorism and the murder of Jews and be lionized as a courageous defender of artistic freedom and call those who denounce your bad taste Philistines. Write a play wittily trashing the Mormon faith and you can become immensely rich. None of those activities are particularly commendable but they are safe. But speak ill of Islam and you take your life into your hands.

Talk about Islamophobia in the United States is misleading since there is little or no evidence that the years that followed 9/11 or even now after the rise of ISIS that Muslims have suffered discrimination or violence. To the contrary, anti-Semitic attacks have always far outnumbered those despicable incidents in which Muslims were targeted. But the attempt to distract us from Muslim intolerance also misses the point.

You may say it is bad that some people are drawing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad specifically to offend Muslims who believe such drawings are forbidden. But the problem is that unlike other faiths that have learned to express outrage about those who show them disrespect without violence, a great many Muslims throughout the world still take it as a given that they are entitled to kill those who commit what they call blasphemy. The attacks on the Danish newspaper that first thought to publish Muhammad cartoons and then Charlie Hebdo illustrated this distorted principle...
Keep reading.

Fresno Man Arrested on Suspicion of Beating Wife Because She Posted Selfie on Instagram

Wouldn't want others to share his wife's beauty, or something.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Police: Fresno man attacks wife over Instagram selfies."

The wife desperately tried to delete the selfies but it was too late. The man "lunged at her, choked her and threatened to kill her," pretty much what leftists do when you expose their hatred.

Despite the Risk on Europe, the Coalition Led by David Cameron Should Have a Second Term

At the Economist:



Ben Carson's Legacy Among Blacks Fades

He's one of America's most accomplished black leaders, although his star is fading in the black community --- over his attacks on Obama.

An interesting piece, at WaPo, "As Ben Carson bashes Obama, many blacks see a hero's legacy fade."

Also, "Ben Carson announces presidential campaign."

Police Audio: Shooting at Mohammed Cartoon Art Show in Garland, Texas

At Telegraph UK.

Plus, at Rebel Media, "Garland TX Mohammed Cartoon Contest Shooting: First report," and "Garland Texas Mohammed Cartoon Contest Shooting (Video 2)." Also, "Garland TX Mohammed Cartoon Contest Shooting (Video 3)."

Magomed Abdusalamov

It's a wonder there aren't more stories like this, considering boxing's essential brutality.

At the New York Times, "Meet Mago, Former Heavyweight."

Background at USA Today, "Boxer Mago Abdusalamov remains in ICU, on life support."

Sunday, May 3, 2015

Two Suspects Open Fire, Shot Dead at AFDI 'Draw Muhammad' Event in Garland, Texas

At Pamela Geller, "Multiple shootings, possible bomb at AFDI/Jihad Watch free speech event in Texas":
This is a war. This is war on free speech. What are we going to do? Are we going to surrender to these monsters?

Two men with rifles and backpacks attacked police outside our event. A cop was shot; his injuries are not life-threatening, thank Gd. Please keep him in your prayers.

The bomb squad has been called to the event site to investigate a backpack left at the event site.
Also at Jihad Watch, "Update – Multiple shootings, possible bomb at AFDI-Jihad Watch free speech event in Texas," and "“Allahu Akbar!!!!! 2 of our brothers just opened fire at the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w) art exhibition in texas!”"

Also, "Cowardly Daily Mail blacks out Muhammad cartoons in story on shooting."

More, at the Dallas Morning News, "2 killed by police after opening fire outside Muhammad art event in Garland." (At Memeorandum.)

Now at the Other McCain, "TERROR IN TEXAS: Gunmen Attack @PamelaGeller Event in Garland UPDATED: ISIS Takes Credit? ‘May Allah Accept Us as Mujahideen’."

Downplaying the Radical Left's Black Revolutionary Violence

Actually, I disagree with Bryan Burrough's argument that #BlackLivesMatter activists aren't endorsing armed resistance against America's law enforcement. Maybe the dude's not on Twitter. I've repeatedly posted on the Ferguson activists, in Missouri and New York, advocating cop killing and the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary overthrow of capital. The deaths of New York City police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were the direct result of leftist anti-cop agitation, including New York protesters chanting "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!"

The fact is leftist cop-killing agitation is all over the place. It's not isolated to a few so-called "fringe" elements. As urban riots continue around the country, expect to see leftists target more police officers for murder.

Here's Burrough, at LAT, "Today, a softer response to police violence than in 1960s and '70s":

Radical Leftists Kill Cops photo 1419331513573.cached_zpsgvavmrtm.jpg

Among the first black leaders [in the 1960s] who called for retaliation was Robert Williams, an NAACP man in North Carolina who, after confrontations with the Ku Klux Klan, urged blacks to arm themselves in a 1962 book called “Negroes With Guns.” After fleeing to Cuba, Williams called for black servicemen to kill their white superiors during the Cuban missile crisis.

A far more prominent advocate was Malcolm X, who made police a focus of his demands for a bloody black revolution in American streets. After his assassination in 1965, Malcolm's baton was picked up and carried forward by angry militants such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who popularized the term “Black Power.”

But it was the Black Panther Party, formed in 1967 by a pair of Oakland college students, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who led a broad segment of black America into something approaching open conflict with urban police. The Panthers were initially a kind of neighborhood watch for Bay Area blacks; when they saw a white cop stop a black motorist, they would approach with guns drawn, demanding that the cop respect the black man's civil rights. Time and again they angrily confronted police — first in Oakland, later around the country — in incidents that, when broadcast, introduced an entirely new paradigm to the strained relations between black Americans and police officers.

Panther rhetoric was stunningly inflammatory. It was the Panther newspaper that spread the term, “Off the Pig.” “The only good pig,” one New York Panther told startled white newspapermen, “is a dead pig.” At one point the Panther chief of staff, David Hilliard, announced that killing policemen wasn't enough: “We will kill Richard Nixon,” he announced at a rally.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, attacks on urban policemen paralleled the rise in violent rhetoric. From 1964 to 1969, assaults on Los Angeles patrolmen quintupled. In Detroit they rose 70% in 1969 alone. Emboldened, a group of white militants calling themselves Weathermen went underground in 1970 and began plotting attacks on policemen in solidarity with the Panthers. Only after an accidental bomb explosion killed three of its members that spring did the group disavow murderous violence.

A Panther offshoot, the Black Liberation Army, or BLA, emerged in 1971, launching a series of attacks on police in New York, Atlanta and San Francisco; four were killed. The BLA remained a threat through 1972, when three of its members carried out perhaps the most gruesome assassination of police officers in New York history, shooting to pieces two officers, one of them black, on an East Village sidewalk. The group was finally eliminated after a series of attacks and shootouts in 1973, one of which resulted in the capture of its last leader, Joanne Chesimard, now known as Assata Shakur. After another group of militants freed her from a New Jersey prison in 1979, Shakur escaped to Cuba, where today she remains the highest-profile U.S. fugitive still under the protection of the Castro government.

Compared with what we experienced during the 1970s, even the Baltimore riots are tame. Kids are throwing rocks and looting, while most adults are telling them to go home...
Right. Tame.

Last week's riots were Baltimore's worst since 1968.

Frankly, thank god no one was killed.

Sunday Cartoons

At Flopping Aces, "Sunday Funnies."

 photo New-Civil-600-LI_zpsvrz0wn7y.jpg

Also at Randy's Roundtable, "Friday Nite Funnies," and Reaganite Republican, "Reaganite's SUNDAY FUNNIES."

More at Lonely Con, "Saturday Funnies," and Theo Spark's, "Cartoon Round Up..."

Cartoon Credit: Legal Insurrection, "Branco Cartoon – That Was Then."

Obama Wants to Kill the Opportunity Scholarship Program, Thus Torpedoing Hopes of Inner-City Blacks

And blacks still love this president, despite his every move demonstrating how he mostly exploits race to keep his corrupt crony Democrats in power.

See Stephen Moore, at WSJ, "President Obama, Are You Listening? The president wants to zero out a program that is saving poor kids from bad schools—the kind of reform that could work in Baltimore too":
The scenes of Baltimore set ablaze this week have many Americans thinking: What can be done to rescue families trapped in an inner-city culture of violence, despair and joblessness?

There are no easy answers, but down the road from Baltimore in Washington, D.C., an education program is giving children in poor neighborhoods a big lift up. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which George W. Bush signed into law in 2004, has so far funded private-school tuition for nearly 5,000 students, 95% of whom are African-American. They attend religious schools, music and arts schools, even elite college-prep schools. Last month at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, I met with about 20 parents and children who participate in the program. I also visited several of these families in their homes—which are located in some of the most beaten-down neighborhoods in the city, places that in many ways resemble the trouble spots in Baltimore.

These families have now pulled together to brace for a David vs. Goliath fight to save the program. For the seventh straight year, President Obama has proposed eliminating this relatively tiny scholarship fund, which at $20 million accounts for a microscopic 0.0005% of the $4 trillion federal budget.

The parents and students point out that the scholarship program has extraordinary benefits—they use phrases like “a godsend for our children,” “a life saver” and “our salvation.” One father, Joseph Kelley, a tireless champion of the program, says simply, “I truly shudder to think where my son would be today without it.” (He and his son, Rashawn Williams, are pictured at home nearby on this page.)

Virginia Ford, whose son escaped the public schools through a private-scholarship to Archbishop Carroll, now runs a group called D.C. Parents for School Choice. She tells me that “kids in the scholarship program have consistently improved their test scores, have higher graduation rates, and are more likely to attend college than those stuck in the D.C. public schools.”

The numbers back her up. An Education Department-funded study at the University of Arkansas recently found that graduation rates rose 21 percentage points—to 91%, from 70%—for students awarded the scholarship vouchers through a lottery, compared with a control group of those who applied for but didn’t get the scholarships. For all D.C. public schools, the high-school graduation rate is closer to an abysmal 56%.

“If you’ve got a program that’s clearly working and helping these kids, why end it?” asks Pamela Battle, whose son Carlos received a voucher and was able to attend the elite Georgetown Day School. He’s now at Northeastern University in Boston. She says Carlos “almost surely wouldn’t have gone to college” without the voucher. “We send all this money overseas for foreign aid,” she adds, “why not save the kids here at home first?”

Amazingly, these energized parents are opposed by almost every liberal group, even the NAACP, and nearly every Democrat in Congress—including Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents the District of Columbia in Congress but opposes a program that benefits her own constituents.

There is little question what stirs this opposition. The teachers union sees the program as taking away union jobs, and it is so powerful that the Democratic establishment falls in line. “It is so sad that our public schools aren’t doing what’s best for the kids,” laments Ms. Ford, but instead are looking out for “the adults.”

The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program turns conventional politics upside down. President George W. Bush created the program and invited several of the parents, including Ms. Battle, to the White House. “I got to meet President Bush and his wife, who was so lovely,” she recalls about the meeting.

Mr. Obama won’t even meet with these parents...
Underline that a million times: President Obama won't meet with the parents of the kids he wants to throw under the bus of inner-city crime, unrest, and poverty.

And yet, blacks love the Democrats.

Our political system is seriously f-cked up.

More at the link.

Saturday, May 2, 2015

After Urban Riots, a Long Road to Revival

From Christopher Caldwell, at the Wall Street Journal, "In troubled American cities, such as Baltimore, neighborhoods devastated by unrest seldom come back":
The Woodberry Kitchen, near Druid Hill Park in northwestern Baltimore, is among the best restaurants in the mid-Atlantic. It shares a renovated cotton mill with an art gallery and a glassblowing studio. Washingtonians flock there. The restaurant website recommends taking the highway, but there is a shortcut for those willing to creep northward along Fulton Avenue in West Baltimore.

I suspect few patrons take that shortcut twice. The jazz bandleader Cab Calloway and the Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall grew up in the neighborhood, but it has, to put it mildly, gone downhill since then. This is Sandtown, where dozens were arrested this week in the rioting that followed the death in police custody of 25-year-old Freddie Gray (on Friday, charges were filed against the officers involved). Unless you have been to the worst parts of Detroit or Camden, N.J., you are unlikely to have seen anything like Sandtown.

More shocking, perhaps, is how little distance separates sophisticated, 21st-century Baltimore—where you can dine on wood-roasted Delaware River rockfish with pak choi and koshihikari rice—from the left-behind, boarded-up Baltimore that Americans have been watching on television with alarm.

The country can only hope that this week’s damage remains limited to one wild night. The fate of Baltimore and other troubled American cities often depends on how the violent parts get rebuilt after rioting. In most cases, riot-torn neighborhoods don’t get rebuilt at all.

Baltimore missed the boom of the 1990s. It has lost 120,000 residents in the last quarter-century. It has a murder rate (37 per 100,000) that only New Orleans, St. Louis and Detroit can match. A decade ago, under Democratic mayor (and now presidential candidate) Martin O’Malley, reforms drove the rate down, but they required policing so aggressive as to be unsustainable. In 2005, there were 108,000 arrests in a city of 622,000 residents. Less than half of Sandtown’s working-age residents work.

The city, which is two-thirds black, has a black political establishment that has been entrenched for a generation. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and her police commissioner, Anthony Batts, called last fall for a federal civil-rights probe of their own city. The notion, heard on some talk shows, that the city’s leaders want to keep black residents down can be dismissed.

In the wake of urban unrest, well-positioned neighborhoods eventually attract private and public capital for rebuilding. Both Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles have suffered riots that were orders of magnitude greater than this week’s in Baltimore. Washington’s U Street corridor, nearly destroyed by the revolt that followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, is again a lively business hub.

But it took a very long time. U Street didn’t see the first stirrings of revival until the 1990s. And businesses were replaced, not restored. U Street was once the premier black downtown in the U.S.; now it is a place for hipsters to drink microbrews and smoke hookahs. That’s better than nothing, but U Street isn’t the hub it was. It is a new hot spot on the site of the riots rather than any sort of resolution of the problems that the riots revealed.

The legacy of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which followed the acquittal of four policemen videotaped beating the black motorist Rodney King, is similarly mixed. A 2009 poll found that 68% of the city’s African-Americans and 76% of its Latinos had a favorable view of the city’s police department, formerly denounced for its paramilitary tactics.

But here, too, the process took time, with the lost economic activity amounting to as much as $3.8 billion. A 20-year retrospective in the Los Angeles Times showed that the unemployment rate in the neighborhood is now higher and median income lower than at the time of the riots.

Less prominent cities tend to languish after riots...
More.

Friday, May 1, 2015

Web of Problems Led to Baltimore Rioting

At WSJ, "Longstanding troubles include a steep drop in manufacturing jobs, drug use, abandoned houses and crime":
BALTIMORE—To 18-year-old high school senior Diondre Jackson, the causes of Monday’s rioting here go much deeper than boiling anger over the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray from spine injuries he suffered while in police custody.

The spasms of looting and destruction in predominantly African-American parts of the city sprang from long-festering distrust of police among young blacks, he said, along with what he called weakened family structures and inadequate leadership in the community.

“There’s nobody to tell them right from wrong,” he said of young rioters. “A lot of them don’t have parents. When there’s no leadership to raise a child, how can you expect the child to act civilized and adultlike?”

Cleaning up the damage will be far easier than addressing the complex web of problems that has weighed on inner-city Baltimore for decades, including a steep drop in well-paying manufacturing jobs, the scourge of drugs, high crime rates and what some call a prison pipeline that leaves many young black men with records that lock them out of jobs.

At Mr. Gray’s funeral Monday, several speakers highlighted these problems. The Rev. Jamal Bryant spoke of self-empowerment but also about the forces that he said have made some African-Americans feel “boxed in”: housing discrimination, high incarceration rates, poor schools.

Former Mayor Kurt Schmoke said that when he graduated from high school in 1967, the region’s largest private employer was Bethlehem Steel Corp. By the time he became mayor 20 years later, Johns Hopkins University and its health system had risen to No. 1, a perch they maintain.

Just since 1990, the number of manufacturing jobs in the Baltimore metro region has fallen to 55,000 from 131,000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. During the same span, employment in education and health services has jumped to 258,000 from 146,000.

“There are jobs going begging,” said Mr. Schmoke, a Democrat who is now president of the University of Baltimore. But he said they are out of reach for many city residents.

“They are jobs that require a level of literacy that is higher than the parents or grandparents of these people needed to obtain,” he said, adding that improving public schools is critically important.

Another challenge many residents face in finding employment is a criminal record, often for low-level drug offenses, Mr. Schmoke said. He noted that a task force led by Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford, a Republican, is looking into making expungement easier.

“An arrest for marijuana possession when you’re 18 should not be a cross you bear for the rest of your life,” Mr. Schmoke said.

Drugs have long plagued the city. During the 1990s homicides topped 300 a year, fueled by a crack cocaine trade concentrated in black neighborhoods. Heroin addiction is also a long-standing problem.

Online court records show Mr. Gray had a number of arrests, mostly for drug-related offenses, some of which resulted in conviction.

He was arrested on April 12 after running from a police officer when the two made eye contact in an area known for drug-dealing, officials have said. When they caught him, officers allegedly found a switchblade in his pants pocket and loaded him into a transport van.

A family lawyer has said that while Mr. Gray was in police custody, his spine was nearly severed at his neck and three vertebrae were broken. Mr. Gray died of his injuries on April 19. Six police officers have been suspended with pay, and five have given statements to police. None has commented publicly on the case...
More.

Baltimore's Indictments and How Not to Fix America’s Cities

From Jonathan Tobin, at Commentary:
Baltimore got the celebration this afternoon that many in Ferguson, Missouri longed for last summer and fall. The decision of Baltimore’s State’s Attorney to indict all the police officers connected with the death of Freddie Gray while in their custody turned demonstrations about the case into street parties today. The announcement that the cops had been charged with the most serious charges possible and faced decades in prison was exactly what the city needed to restore the peace that was disrupted by violent riots earlier in the week. But even as the nation sighs in relief at the prospect of calm in Baltimore, the upcoming trial and the ongoing debate about the significance of the case may raise more questions than can be answered by the indictment of six officers. If, as may happen, the officers are not convicted, the prospect of violence will be great. Nor is it likely that much light will be shed in the debate about the future of troubled urban areas like Baltimore or law enforcement in the rush to jail the cops in the case that has given new life to a largely misleading narrative of racism.

Unlike in Ferguson, protesters need no longer demand that police accused of a role in the death of a young black man be arrested and indicted. State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby immediately became a media heroine when she gave demonstrators and pundits calling for quick justice what they wanted during the course of a lengthy address that blasted the accused for their conduct.

Mosby handled her press conference ably. But the haste with which the state’s attorney charged the officers and her choice to avoid using going through the grand jury process, leaves open the possibility that her decision had more to do with politics and the need to keep the peace than justice. The multiplicity of charges as well as the second-degree murder count also makes it likely that she is hoping to offer a plea to some of the officers in order to convict others. The guilty should be punished severely. Yet it remains to be seen whether she has overcharged the police. But just as the accused are entitled to a presumption of innocence, so, too, must the country hope that the evidence exists to support the accusations of murder. If not, then Mosby is earning temporary applause that will eventually blow up in her face as well as that of the rest of the city...
More.

Also at Weasel Zippers, "Alan Dershowitz: #Baltimore Prosecutor Overcharged Officers, Identified With Protesters, Saying “You’re at Forefront of This Cause and as Young People, Our Time Is Now.”

Freddie Gray's Death Ruled a Homicide, Six Officers Charged

At the Baltimore Sun, "Six officers charged in death of Freddie Gray":
The six Baltimore police officers involved in the arrest of Freddie Gray – who died last month after being injured in police custody – have been charged criminally, State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced Friday.

Mosby's announcement on the steps of the War Memorial Building was greeted with cheers and applause. Mosby said she told Gray's family that "no one is above the law."

Word traveled quickly of the charges against the officers. In West Baltimore, cars honked their horns. A man hanging out of a truck window pumped his fists and yelled; "Justice! Justice! Justice!"

At the corner where Gray was arrested, 53-year-old Willie Rooks held his hands up in peace signs and screamed, "Justice!"

Meecah Tucker, 23, wearing a T-shirt that read, "I Bleed Baltimore," said: "If it was one of us doing that against a police officer, it would be first-degree murder."

In Gilmor Homes, the neighborhood where Gray lived, things were quiet Friday, with a police helicopter circling overhead. At the intersection of North Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue, the focus of rioting Monday and demonstrations all week, traffic moved through with many motorists honking their horns.

Warrants were issued for the arrest of all six officers. It wasn't immediately clear where the officers were Friday morning.
Also at Ms. EBL's:


'Nothing Matches the Hysteria' for Mayweather-Pacquiao Title Bout

Profiles of the 1 percent, heh.

Mostly leftist 1 percenters, at that.

At LAT, "Celebrities fight for the best tickets to Mayweather-Pacquiao":
Saying yes to Robert De Niro was easy.

The Oscar-winning actor will get a prime seat for Saturday night's main event. So will Clint Eastwood, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

As the clock ticks down to the Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquiao bout — the most-anticipated fight in decades — promoters are scrambling to accommodate a flood of ticket requests from celebrities, business tycoons and superstars from other sports.

"They can't all sit in the front row," said Dena duBoef of Top Rank Inc., which represents Pacquiao. "Tickets and seating are probably the biggest nightmare for this fight."

Most of the 16,800-seat arena at the MGM Grand has been divvied up among the resort and the two fighters' camps, with only 500 seats made available for public sale.

There will be about 900 ringside spots, depending on the final configuration. That isn't enough for all the A-list names and high rollers who want to be near the action.

"Nothing matches the hysteria we're seeing," said Stephen Espinoza, a Showtime executive who controls some of Mayweather's allotment.

Promoters are still mixing and matching names, pondering whom to put where, especially in the first few rows. As longtime Hollywood publicist Howard Bragman said: "Absolutely there is a pecking order."

Star-studded crowds are as much a part of boxing as uppercuts and smelling salts.

Mayweather versus Pacquiao has become a red-carpet event if only because it took years of negotiation to get the boxers — perhaps the greatest of their generation — into the same ring.

"This has been a long time coming," Oscar winner Jamie Foxx says in a promotional TV spot.

The MGM Grand declined to comment for this story, as did numerous celebrities expected to attend. The Times received a list of ticket requests from boxing executives who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss seating details.

De Niro, Eastwood, Damon and Affleck made the cut for the first few rows, the executives said. So did Michael J. Fox and producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

Will Smith and Jimmy Kimmel are expected to be there, but one Oscar winner was placed farther back and decided not to attend, said an executive not authorized to give the actor's name. UFC fighter Ronda Rousey, quarterback Tom Brady and nearly a dozen NFL team owners were still waiting for their exact seat locations.

Celebrities will share the floor section with the likes of Jesse Jackson and hip-hop mogul Sean Combs. The MGM Grand has offered prime seats to its best customers — gamblers who carry a minimum $250,000 credit line in the casino — said Bob Arum, chief executive of Top Rank Inc.

Over the last few weeks, the longtime boxing executive has stopped short of making promises to big-name actors and directors, telling them instead: "We'll put you on the list."

The situation is delicate because boxing and the entertainment industry enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship. No one complained when pop star Justin Bieber — a regular in Mayweather's entourage — barged onstage at a recent pre-fight news conference.

A singer with more than 63 million Twitter followers can generate buzz and boost pay-per-view revenue. Espinoza said that Bieber "adds to the s

In return, celebrities parlay their fame into great seats. They get a close-up view, a chance to hear the thud of each body blow and some free publicity.
More.

Also, "Will the Mayweather-Pacquiao bout affect future of boxing in the U.S.?"

California Latinos Lag 'Far Behind' in College Achievement

Over half the students at my college are Hispanic, so you can get a sense of the challenges we're dealing with.

At the Long Beach Press-Telegram, "Latinos in California lag ‘far behind’ in college enrollment, graduation rates":
While nearly 60 percent of Latinos in the state between the ages of 25 and 64 are foreign born, even those who are native born were much less likely than the state average — 18 percent vs. 31 percent — to have at least a bachelor’s degree, the report found.

In addition, only 29 percent of 12th-grade Latino graduates completed all of their coursework to make them eligible for UC or Cal State entrance, compared with 47 percent of white students and 65 percent of Asian students, according to the report.

The obstacles Latinos face are many. A good number are low-income, they are often the first generation in their family to go to college and many attend low-performing schools that do not adequately prepare them for college, [Michele] Siqueiros [president of the Campaign for College Opportunity] said. They are grappling with these challenges as students today share a greater burden in funding their education than before in light of a decline in state contributions...
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'F*ck Her Right in the Pussy' — Black Thug Disrespects CNN's Poppy Harlow on Live Televsion

At Fire Andrea Mitchell, "Fuck her right in the pussy Philly ‘protester’ to CNN VIDEO."

Michael Jackson Impersonator Busts a Move in #Baltimore

Watch, at WMAR ABC 2 News Baltimore, "Man busts a move like Michael Jackson to raise money for Freddie Gray's family in Baltimore."

And at the Baltimore Sun, "Michael Jackson impersonator hopes to make a better day."