Four Decades After Clashes, Boston Again Debates School Busing

Progressive social engineering run amok.

At the New York Times, "New Boston Busing Debate, 4 Decades After Clashes":

BOSTON — Nearly four decades after this city was convulsed by violence over court-ordered busing to desegregate its public schools, Boston is working to reduce its reliance on busing in a school system that is now made up largely of minority students.

Although court-ordered busing ended more than two decades ago, and only 13 percent of students in the public schools today are white, the school district buses 64 percent of its students in kindergarten through eighth grade to schools outside their immediate neighborhoods. The city tried twice in the last decade to change the system and failed both times.

“Children are being bused now because they have been bused for 40 years and no one has had the political courage to dismantle it,” said Lawrence DiCara, a former Boston city councilor who supported busing in the 1970s and is writing a book about the city in that era. “Now, there are no white kids to be integrated. Everyone is being randomly bused. It doesn’t make sense.”

In January, Mayor Thomas M. Menino asked school officials to come up with “a radically different plan” under which students would be assigned to schools as close to home as possible.

Boston’s 57,000-student school district is divided into three sprawling geographic zones. A racially blind computerized algorithm assigns students to schools anywhere within their zone. Many students go so far that transportation alone costs the city $80.4 million a year — about 9.4 percent of the school system’s operating budget, almost twice the national average.

But expense is not the only concern. Children who live on the same block often go to different schools. In the violence-torn Bowdoin-Geneva neighborhood of Dorchester, school officials said, 1,912 students attend 102 schools out of 128 schools in the entire district. These include high school students, who are not limited by zone.

Under such a hodgepodge, the mayor and others argue, fewer people in a neighborhood are invested in the local school. And neither children nor parents develop the bonds that create a strong neighborhood and can improve other aspects of life, like public safety.

More at the link.

Eric Hobsbawm and the Details of History

From Bret Stephens, at the Wall Street Journal:

In 1987, Jean-Marie Le Pen called the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps "just a detail in the history of World War II." Explaining himself a few years later, the head of France's National Front said: "If you take a 1,000-page book on World War II, the concentration camps take up only two pages and the gas chambers 10 to 15 lines. This is what one calls a detail."

Such remarks cemented Mr. Le Pen's reputation as Europe's leading fascist. So what was one to make of the reception accorded the publication, in 1994, of "The Age of Extremes," by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm?

The book—subtitled "a history of the world, 1914-1991"—was hailed as "bracing and magisterial" by the New York Times. "Facts roll off Hobsbawm's pages like thunderbolts," gushed the New Republic. But search the index, and the words "Holocaust" and "Auschwitz" never appear. Nazi concentration camps get about 10 or 15 lines. As for the Soviet gulags, Hobsbawm devoted exactly two paragraphs to them.

Hobsbawm, who died in London Monday at age 95, was no Holocaust denier. Nor was he ignorant of the human toll imposed by communism, the ideology to which he remained faithful nearly his whole life. He acknowledged that the victims of Stalin's tyranny "must be measured in eight rather than seven digits," adding that the numbers are "shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification."

Yet Hobsbawm did justify them....

None of this should have been surprising coming from a man who, over the years, gave his political assent to everything from the Nazi-Soviet Pact to the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Asked by the BBC whether the achievement of a communist utopia would have justified "the loss of fifteen, twenty million people," he answered "Yes."

Yet what are we to make of the warmth with which Hobsbawm is now being eulogized? Only this: That the world is far from recognizing that the crimes of communism were no less monstrous than those of Nazism. In treating the gulag as a detail of his history, Hobsbawm proved himself to be the moral equivalent of Mr. Le Pen. And in treating Hobsbawm as a paragon among historians, his admirers prove they've learned nothing from history itself.

Leopard Kills Impala in Stunning YouTube Video

At London's Daily Mail, "The leopard that was hard to spot: Animal's stunning kill as impala runs straight towards camouflaged cat."

'List of Lies' — Daily Kos Handkerchief Truthers!

This is hilarious, "Did Mitt use crib notes for the debate?", and "Did Romney Cheat? - Vid - You Decide":

3:07 PM PT: Check out ericlewise and middleagedhousewife's screengrabs in the comments. Very interesting.

Via Memeorandum.

BONUS: From NewsBusters, "Ed Schultz on ‘Today’: Obama Thrown Off by ‘So Many Lies’ From ‘Corporate Shark’ Romney."

Man, these people need help.

Eastwood's Last Laugh: New Yorker Mocks President Obama With Empty Chair Cover

Ha!

President Empty Chair gets hammered at the New Yorker, "COVER STORY: THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE."

And at Twitchy, "Brutal: New Yorker cover depicts Obama ‘Eastwooding’ at debate podium."

Image Credit: London's Daily Mail, "Mitt Romney and the empty PODIUM: New Yorker magazine cover pokes fun at Obama's disaster debate (with apologies to Clint Eastwood)."

PREVIOUSLY: "In Debate, Empty Chair Draws a Blank on Second Term Agenda."

Black Teenager Punches, Knocks Out Bus Driver in Kansas City

It's not just a "teen." It's a "black teen." As long as society refuses to acknowledge black social pathology, there'll be increasing social disorganization and anarchy.

At The Blaze, "DISTURBING SURVEILLANCE VIDEO SHOWS TEEN SUCKER-PUNCHING, KNOCKING BUS DRIVER UNCONSCIOUS."

Romney Moves Into Leads in Florida, Virginia; Tied in Ohio

Check the findings for Friday, October 5th, at RealClearPolitics.

Forget the Jobs Numbers, Americans Impoverished by Soaring Gas Prices

Friday's contested unemployment numbers have been dominating the cable news shows and the headlines at Memeorandum, but more startling news on the West Coast is the surge in gasoline prices, now reaching record levels.

The Los Angeles Times reports, "Gas prices suddenly skyrocket in California":

Skyrocketing gasoline prices caused some local service stations to shut off their pumps Thursday while others shocked customers with overnight price increases of 30 cents or more.

California's fuel industry isn't running out of gasoline — supplies are only 2.5% lower than this time last year — but recent refinery and pipeline mishaps sent wholesale prices to all-time highs this week. As a result, some station owners weren't buying fuel for fear they couldn't sell it. Those who did buy simply kicked prices higher and bet customers would understand.

"If this keeps up, I'll be looking at $5-a-gallon gas by next Thursday," said Ali Mazarei, who owns an Arco station in Riverside County. On Thursday, Mazarei was charging $4.52 for a gallon of regular gasoline, up from $4.27 on Wednesday and $4.21 on Tuesday.

"I really don't have any choice here, and I won't be making money at $4.52 a gallon," he said.

Some fuel stops had already crossed the $5 threshold.

More at the link.

And see Power Line, "CALIFORNIA GAS" (at Memeorandum):

Want to give the Obama campaign even more heartburn than it has now?  How about putting California in play?

Seems farfetched, but then people outside of California might not have noticed that gasoline pump prices jumped as much as 30 cents a gallon yesterday.  That’s how much pump prices jumped between lunch and late afternoon here on the central coast; the figure is lower in the major metropolitan areas apparently.  It is not inconceivable that there could be old-fashioned shortages and gas lines by the end of the month.  Some stations are shutting down or limiting sales already.  Paging Jimmy Carter!

The sharp price spike is attributed to tight refinery capacity problems in the state (as a couple of refineries are offline), which is true, but not exhaustive, as Churchill once explained in a different context.  As I explained in “Bureaucratic Gas” in The Weekly Standard a few months ago, California has its own special blend of gasoline for environmental reasons that are now largely obsolete.  This means that California can’t use the gasoline blends sold in Oregon, Nevada, or Arizona, which means that a refinery shortage here can’t be remedied by the usual means of bringing in more supply from somewhere else.

But President Obama could order the EPA to waive the gasoline regulations, and allow out-of-state gasoline to be transported and sold in California, delivering at least 10 to 20 cents a gallon of price relief, and perhaps much more.  Oh, that’s right: Obama wants higher gasoline prices, so don’t hold your breath.

And at Instapundit as well.

Regulations have kept gas prices at astronomical levels for years. And the problem's not just regulations, there are indeed some tightening in supplies. See iOWNTHEWORLD, "California Gas Stations Shut as Oil Refiners Ration Supplies":

Bloomberg

Gasoline station owners in the Los Angeles area including Costco Wholesale Corp. (COST) are beginning to shut pumps as the state’s oil refiners started rationing supplies and spot prices surged to a record.

Valero Energy Corp. (VLO) stopped selling gasoline on the spot, or wholesale, market in Southern California and is allocating deliveries to customers. Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) is also rationing fuel to U.S. West Coast terminal customers. Costco’s outlet in Simi Valley, 40 miles (64 kilometers) northwest of Los Angeles, ran out of regular gasoline yesterday and was selling premium fuel at the price of regular.

The gasoline shortage “feels like a hurricane to me, but it’s the West Coast,” Jeff Cole, Costco’s vice president of gasoline, said by telephone yesterday. “We’re obviously extremely disheartened that we are unable to do this, and we’re pulling fuel from all corners of California to fix this.”

I usually try to fill up my Odyssey van in Long Beach. Gas is less expensive there. I topped off the tank Monday with ARCO regular at $4.00 a gallon. That was about $60.00 to fill up, which usually holds me over for a week. But my wife went to fill up at Costco last night and the filling station was closed. She got gas this morning at the local Chevron in Irvine for $4.70 a gallon. When I drove today to Mission Viejo to meet my wife for lunch, I noticed gas prices at $4.80 a gallon at the local Shell station, pictured above.

Check that Instapundit link for a map of gas prices nationwide. The Pacific Northwest is in the mid-four dollar range, and prices in upper-New York state are pushing $5 a gallon as well.

The unemployment situation hasn't changed much. The indicators folks are citing today are volatile and economists suggest that jobless numbers could head back up over 8 percent in the months ahead. Most of the employment gains were for part-time workers returning to the market. It's not a robust recovery by any means.

On top of that then is surging inflationary pressures for drivers in high-cost gasoline markets (which hits small business especially hard, causing an inflation spiral locally). With gas at near $5 levels in California, voters can again see the implications of the blue state model of crushing environmental regulations, and that combines with the Obama administration's disastrous energy policies to impoverish more and more of this nation's citizens. Mitt Romney mentioned energy policies in his opening remarks in Wednesday night's debate. He'll be smart to reference the skyrocketing gas prices in California as elsewhere in the next debate. It's getting prohibitively expensive to drive a car. Nothing will put a bigger crimp on future economic growth than a stagnating energy sector. The current administration doesn't get it. It's up to Romney to bring that point home to the American people.

In Debate, Empty Chair Draws a Blank on Second Term Agenda

From Ronald Brownstein, at National Journal, "Where's Obama's Second-Term Agenda?":

DENVER—President Obama didn’t have many good moments in this week’s first presidential debate. But it was telling that the few came when he was raising objections to Mitt Romney’s tax, spending, and Medicare plans. The president had much less to say about his own ideas for the next four years.

In that way, the debate spotlighted the biggest hole in Obama’s reelection effort: the paucity of specifics he has offered about his second-term agenda. To a remarkable extent for an incumbent, Obama and his team have redirected this campaign into a referendum on the challenger—a reversal of roles that Romney has facilitated with a monthlong series of gaffes and missteps. (Until Wednesday night, pretty much nothing good had happened for Romney since the minute Clint Eastwood inexplicably lugged that chair onstage on the final evening of the Republican convention.)

But the 90-minute expanse of Wednesday night’s debate proved too long a stretch for Obama to keep the focus on Romney. And when the spotlight shifted back to the president—either his record or his plans—he often seemed diffuse, if not listless. As one undecided woman in a Las Vegas focus group of “Walmart moms” put it, the president seemed “defeated, a little bit.”

The debate is unlikely to solve all of Romney’s problems. He still faces a strong perception, especially in battleground states bombarded by Obama’s advertising, that he favors the rich over the middle class; that perception particularly appears to have taken root in Ohio, a state that Romney almost certainly needs to win. And although this debate didn’t highlight any of the issues that have caused the problems, Romney’s weakness among Hispanics and socially liberal upscale white women still requires him to win a dauntingly (though not impossibly) large percentage of all other white voters to overtake the president.

But the debate did two very important things for the challenger. First, it arrested the rush to judgment in much of the political community that Obama had effectively sealed the race. “This is exactly what Romney needed to stop everybody from declaring this race, and they were on the verge of it,” noted Floyd Ciruli, an independent Colorado pollster.

Second, the evening delivered a powerful reminder of Obama’s inherent vulnerabilities. All of Romney’s difficulties in recent weeks have provided ample testimony to his own challenges. But they have obscured the parallel reality that Obama is seeking reelection with elevated unemployment rates, low levels of growth, a massive federal deficit, and an approval rating that, while getting better, rarely peeks above 50 percent. This debate ensures that the campaign discussion, after weeks of being focused on Romney’s troubles, will now also highlight Obama’s weaknesses, and that itself is an important victory for Romney.

One of those vulnerabilities is Obama’s inability so far to enlighten voters about his second-term agenda. To the extent the president outlined goals during the debate, they were largely defensive. He wants to restore the tax rates for upper-income earners established under President Clinton, protect Medicare and Medicaid in their current form—and, above all, implement his health care plan. He didn’t talk nearly as much about what he might do in a second term to accelerate job growth. “You didn’t hear anything about how he is going to get the economy going,” jibed Stuart Stevens, Romney’s chief strategist, after the debate. Other than blocking the GOP’s initiatives, Obama didn’t seem to be burning to accomplish much of anything over the next four years.

He's a vapid empty-chair presidential imposter. And a losing loser who deserves to lose on November 6.

What an asshole Democrat faux-presidential hack.

IMAGE CREDIT: The People's Cube, "Chair to Pinch Hit for President in Second Debate."

RELATED: The Looking Spoon, "Clint Eastwood Empty Chair Meme Not So Goofy After All...Eh Liberals?"

Radical Cleric Abu Hamza to Be Extradited to U.S.

At BCF, "Hamza Gets The Hook!"

And Telegraph UK, "Abu Hamza: civil engineer who turned hate preacher against West":

Radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza has finally lost his eight-year battle against extradition and will face a series of terror charges in the United States.

Radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza has finally lost his eight-year battle against extradition and will face a series of terror charges in the United States.

Hamza, 54, who is missing his right hand and an eye, has celebrated the September 11 terror attacks, preached jihad to a young congregation, and landed the British taxpayer with a bill running into millions of pounds for detention and legal costs.

But Hamza will now be handed over to US authorities to face 11 counts of criminal conduct related to the taking of 16 hostages in Yemen in 1998, advocating violent jihad in Afghanistan in 2001 and conspiring to establish a jihad training camp in Bly, Oregon, between June 2000 and December 2001.

The Muslim cleric once appeared to embrace Western society.

He worked as a bouncer in a Soho nightclub and had a reputation for socialising and heavy drinking when he first came to Britain from Egypt 30 years ago.

Rutting Stag Stalks Man in London Park

This is amazing.

At London's Daily Mail, "Stuck in a rut! Man is caught on camera as an angry stag chases him up a tree in a London park."

Mitt Romney Hammers 'Unexpected' September Jobs Report

You gotta love the puffery and spin at the New York Times, "Jobs Report Brings Unexpected Good News for Obama." Unexpected!

But listen to Romney campaigning today in Virginia:

And check Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit: "THE WAGES OF OBAMACARE: Why part time unemployment is surging but not full time employment."

NewsBusters: 'Elizabeth Warren Practiced Law Without a License...'

Via Theo Spark:

Trickle Down Government

Not even the cooked employment numbers, nor the Big Bird political diversions, can shake off the dogged truth of the Obama administration's failed policies:

Via Legal Insurrection.

The Sickly Stagnant September Jobs Report

From James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute (via Memeorandum).

This is what I thought when I first heard the numbers:

4. The shrunken workforce remains shrunken. If the labor force participation rate was the same as when President Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be 10.7%. If the participation rate had just stayed steady since the start of the year, the unemployment rate would be 8.4% vs. 8.3%. Where’s the progress? Here is RDQ Economics:

Such a rapid decline in the unemployment rate would be consistent with 4%–5% real economic growth historically but much of the decline is accounted for by people dropping out of the labor force (over the last year the employment-population ratio has risen to only 58.7% from 58.4%). We believe part of the drop in the unemployment rate over the last two months is a statistical quirk (the household data show an increase in employment of 873,000 in September, which is completely implausible and likely a result of sampling volatility). Moreover, declining labor force participation over the last year (resulting in 1.1 million people disappearing from the labor force) accounts for much of the rest of the decline.

Read it all at the link. (A lot of the new jobs are part-time.)

And at Protein Wisdom, "Serendipity! Unemployment rate falls to 7.8% right before the election."

Yeah, I thought about that too.

PREVIOUSLY: "'Widespread Mistrust' — Who Goosed the Jobs Numbers?"

'Widespread Mistrust' — Who Goosed the Jobs Numbers?

Stuart Varney slams this morning's political jobs numbers:

And at the Los Angeles Times, "Jack Welch charges White House manipulated unemployment numbers."

And see Rep. Allen West on Facebook, "In regards to today's Jobs report---I agree with former GE CEO Jack Welch, Chicago style politics is at work here..." (via Memeorandum).

An Unhelpful Debate — For the Obama Cult!

At the Wall Street Journal, "The Obama Matrix":

Liberals and the media are attempting to explain President Obama's anemic debate performance by claiming that he was merely "rusty" and out of practice, or he doesn't watch enough MSNBC, or he was consumed by the burdens of the office. Maybe it was all those security briefings he's not attending between the fundraisers and political rallies.

This may be comforting to his supporters, but our reading is that something far different was on display Wednesday night. For the first time, the carefully crafted campaign illusions that the President has constructed were exposed. Mitt Romney had the audacity to describe Mr. Obama's record and his own agenda in ways that the American public has rarely heard. The Obama Matrix collapsed into bits on the Denver stage.

The most instructive exchange came early, after Mr. Obama had already denounced Mr. Romney's "central economic plan" for the third time. He repeated his lines from the stump about Mr. Romney's $5 trillion tax cut for millionaires and billionaires that "dumps those costs on middle-class Americans" and raises their taxes by $2,000.

Mr. Romney has no such plan. Mr. Obama simply made it up, with an assist from one of his former economists and others at a liberal Washington think tank. Mr. Romney said as much categorically. He then added that Mr. Obama would continue to make the accusation, on the theory that incantation could make it true, "but that is not the case, all right?" and "I will not, under any circumstances, raise taxes on middle-income families."

Mr. Obama was nonplused, perhaps because he had come to believe what he was saying in the bubble of his campaign rallies and unquestioned by the media. The best reply he could offer was that, "Well, for 18 months he's been running on this tax plan. And now, five weeks before the election, he's saying that his big, bold idea is 'never mind.'" But for 18 months it has been Mr. Obama who has campaigned against a mirage of his own imagining. No wonder he was stumped.

Then there was health care, when Mr. Obama claimed the Romney-Ryan Medicare reforms would force seniors to pay $6,000 a year and leave "folks like my grandmother at the mercy of the private insurance system."

But Mr. Romney didn't sound like a wild-eyed radical as he patiently described his own "premium support" ideas, which would simply require traditional Medicare to compete with the private market and let seniors "make their own choice." If government is better, he added, that's fine, but "my experience is the private sector typically is able to provide a better product at a lower cost."

The former Governor sounded reasonable and pragmatic, and some pundits are now claiming that he changed his platform or that he is trying to dump GOP "extremist" ballast. He didn't and he doesn't have any. He described his center-right reforms truthfully. The Obama cheerleaders were shocked that Mr. Romney's remarks didn't repeat the Obama-created caricature that they've spent months broadcasting as if it were gospel.

The other illusion that exploded Wednesday is the one Mr. Obama tells about his own Presidency. He always mentions the recession he inherited and the many great feats he will perform in his second term. What he rarely mentions are the last four years...

He can't mention the last four years, because he's kept none of his campaign promises on fixing the economy and he hasn't improved the lives of the American people.

But read the whole thing.

And then check this sad and truly disturbed editorial at the New York Times, "An Unhelpful Debate" (via Memeorandum). The editors are nearly as deluded as the Democrat campaign staffers attempting to spin a "strong" Obama debate performance Wednesday in Denver. The left has been hit hard. You don't recover from something like that very quickly, but it's excruciatingly painful to even watch these people groping their way back to reality. This whole thing has been like prying open the cult of this presidency to reveal a diseased rotting rump of a political movement attempting to wring reelection from the collapsing facade of those heady times of four years ago.

Photo Credit: The People's Cube.

Confessions of a Centerfold

Jenny McCarthy interviewed at ABC News:

'Mitt Romney will create 12 million new jobs, when President Obama couldn't...'

Via Althouse:

Barack Obama Has Attacked Religion 'Since Virtually the Moment He Took Office'

Via Blazing Cat Fur: