Detroit Surrenders As If It Had Been Invaded

/14 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Ann MillspaughBy the time Detroit declared bankruptcy, Americans were so inured to the throbbing dirge of Motown’s Greatest Hits — 40% of its street lamps don’t work; 210 of its 317 public parks have been closed; it takes an hour for police to respond to a 911 call; only a third of its ambulances are drivable; one-third of the city has been abandoned; the local realtor offers houses on sale for a buck and still finds no takers — Americans were so inured that the formal confirmation of a great city’s downfall was greeted with little more than a fatalistic shrug.

But it shouldn’t be. To achieve this level of devastation, you usually have to be invaded by a foreign power. In the War of 1812, when Detroit was taken by a remarkably small number of British troops without a shot being fired, Michigan’s Gov. Hull was said to have been panicked into surrender after drinking heavily.

Two centuries later, after an almighty 50-year bender, the city surrendered to itself.

The tunnel from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit is now a border between First World and Third World — or, if you prefer, developed world and post-developed world.

To any American time-transported from the mid-20th century, the city’s implosion would be incredible. Were he to compare photographs of today’s Hiroshima with today’s Detroit, he would assume Japan won the Second World War after nuking Michigan. Detroit was the industrial powerhouse of America, the Arsenal of Democracy, and in 1960 the city with the highest per capita income in the land.

Read more from this story HERE.

American Sovereignty and Its Enemies

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Ken FallinThe George Zimmerman saga came to an end last weekend when a jury of six Florida women found the neighborhood-watch captain not guilty in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. But even before the 15-month legal process had begun last year, the United Nations’ top human-rights official had rendered a guilty verdict—against Mr. Zimmerman and the entire U.S. judicial system.

“Justice must be done for the victim,” said U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay at an April 2012 press conference. “It’s not just this individual case. It calls into question the delivery of justice in all situations like this. . . . I will be awaiting an investigation and prosecution and trial and of course reparations for the victims concerned.”

Americans who ran across her statement may have dismissed Ms. Pillay as another U.N. busybody pestering the world’s leading democracy. But former Sen. Jon Kyl thinks there is something more pernicious at work: Such comments express the desire, and growing power, of a global progressive elite to pierce the shield of U.S. sovereignty and influence the outcomes of the country’s domestic debates.

Proponents call this movement “legal transnationalism,” and as Mr. Kyl writes in a recent Foreign Affairs magazine article (co-authored with Douglas Feith and John Fonte of the Hudson Institute), “the idea that a U.N. official can sit in judgment of the U.S.” is one of its main innovations. Transnationalists want to rewrite the laws of war, do away with the death penalty, restrict gun rights and much more—all without having to win popular majorities or heed American constitutional limits. And these advocates are making major strides under an Obama administration that is itself a hotbed of transnational legal thinking.

“Transnationalists are a group of people who are convinced they are right about important issues,” Mr. Kyl says as we sit down for a chat at the plush Washington office of the law firm Covington & Burling, where the 71-year-old Arizona Republican has served as an adviser since leaving the Senate in January. “But they are in too much of a hurry to mess with the difficulties of representative government to get their agenda adopted into law—or they know they can’t win democratically. So they look for a way around representative government.”

Read more from this story HERE.

An Immigrant’s View of Racism in America

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: American Thinker Many neighborhoods in Los Angeles are neither majority black nor whites, but mostly Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern, with both blacks and whites are becoming less and less visible. Many mainstream supermarkets are going out of business only to be replaced by ethnic supermarkets with Arabic or Hispanic music blasting while one shops, catering to the growing immigrant population. But in the mind of the US media, America is still racially divided between whites and blacks and is stuck on racial issues that were prevalent decades ago.

A large number of first generation immigrants in America don’t view themselves as black or white, and even those who do cannot help but be puzzled with how deep the issue of race is ingrained in the psyche of America. Because of the importance of race politics in the US, immigrants quickly learn to either ignore the issue altogether and concentrate on achieving the success they came here for, or join one camp or another if they are emotionally or financially benefiting from racial issues. Many Arab Americans have tried to claim that they are a minority in order to get an advantage in hiring or college acceptance, without success, but demonstrating how the politics of race corrupt.

New immigrant families who did the impossible to come to America, are told soon after arriving that they are oppressed and should demand privileges and compensation for past injustice (which we have only experienced in the countries we fled from). But why not take the free stuff when offered? Immigrants would be stupid to reject the advantages proffered.

As a first generation immigrant, I perceive that constant racial consciousness and tension are extremely destructive to blacks, whites and others. I personally feel embarrassed and sad when I see grown men and women constantly complain about race and make a living promoting racial divide and anger. Many blacks and whites in America seem to be stuck on a phase in American history that they cannot seem to outgrow, preventing them from seeing the reality of change in American demographics.

Read more from this story HERE.

A Lesson From L.A. in the Zimmerman Case (+video)

/5 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: RCPBy Lou Cannon. Whatever one thinks of the jury verdict in the George Zimmerman case, history suggests that retrying him on federal charges would not produce a fairer outcome.

The last time a president of the United States and a U.S. attorney general disapproved of a jury verdict in a race-heightened case, they set in motion a series of events that produced a second verdict as suspect as the first.

It happened in 1992 when a suburban Simi Valley jury acquitted four white Los Angeles Police Department officers of excessive force and other charges in the beating of Rodney King, an African-American. The verdict, coupled with a woeful lack of preparation by the LAPD, touched off the deadliest American civil disturbance since the Draft Riot of 1863 in New York City.

By the time the Los Angeles rioting ended on May 4, 1992, 54 people had died with another 2,328 treated for injuries in emergency rooms by doctors practicing what one of them called “battlefield medicine.” The rioting was the costliest in U.S. history, with property losses exceeding $900 million — $1.45 billion in today’s dollars. Thousands of businesses were burned or looted and 862 structures burned to the ground.

President George H.W. Bush was, as he put it, “sickened” by a televised clip of the King beating he had seen soon after the incident occurred a year earlier. In the midst of the rioting the president met with civil rights leaders and made a televised appeal for calm, promising that the Simi Valley verdicts were “not the end of the process.” Read more from this story HERE.

__________________________________________________________________

Jesse Jackson Says Florida is an Apartheid State because of its Zimmerman Verdict

__________________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: AP‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws Are Winning

By Matt Berman. On Tuesday, the same day that Attorney General Eric Holder said that “Stand Your Ground” laws “sow dangerous conflict,” Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer called her state’s version of the law “important” and a “constitutional right.” And Wednesday, Florida state Sen. David Simmons called Holder’s comments “inappropriate” and “inaccurate.” Stand Your Ground may be getting more attention now after the Zimmerman verdict, but the laws themselves don’t look like they’re going anywhere.

And that’s not for a lack of effort from critics of the self-defense policy. While the exact laws differ somewhat from state to state, Stand Your Ground laws justify the use of force in self-defense when there’s a reasonably perceived threat. It’s on the books in some form or another in more than 21 states. Florida was the first to adopt the law, and the state is the focus of the law’s critics now. Those critics range from Stevie Wonder (who has decided to boycott any state with a Stand Your Ground law) to the dozens of student activists who crowded Gov. Rick Scott’s office on Tuesday.

But the critics aren’t limited to Florida. In New Hampshire, the state’s attorney general on Wednesday called for “another look” at the state’s Stand Your Ground law. “I think what it can do is cause a situation to escalate that doesn’t need to,” he said. Read more from this story HERE.

‘This Town’ Needs an Enema (+video)

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Blue Rider PressBy Erick Erickson. Mark Leibovich of the New York Times has written a pretty scathing book about Washington, DC, called This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America’s Gilded Capital. It is a pretty accurate portrayal of the Washington, DC more and more Americans have come to hold in contempt. There exists in Washington a new aristocracy where, for example, a poor boxer from Searchlight, NV, can get elected to the United States Senate, become wealthy enough to live at the Ritz, and see his family profit from K Street.

It is a city where the new aristocrats move and do not want to leave. It is a town in need of an enema. Read more from this story HERE.

_________________________________________________________________

‘This Town’ rattles D.C. social scene

By Luis Romano. Washington is a town that shuns wannabes and impostors to ensure no one as unsavory as the gate-crashing Salahis makes it into the inner sanctum. So, it’s no small irony that a guy who was embraced by the A-list soirees of D.C. ends up toppling the hors d’oeuvres trays.

Indeed, the nation’s capital is in full spasm over Mark Leibovich’s cutting takedown of the city’s cozy culture in his new book, “This Town.” The fear: That it will send a chill through the elite after-hours social circuit — where the real business of this town often gets done between reporters and sources. What has rattled many is that Leibovich did a chunk of his reporting at parties and funerals at which he was considered a guest — or, at least, not a working journalist taking detailed notes…

For his part, Leibovich says that he is “always working as a journalist.” And furthermore, he adds, it’s a real circus out there…

One of his prime targets in the book is Tammy Haddad, a former television producer who has hosted a lot of parties at which Leibovich was a regular. He portrays her as a social-climber and access-peddler, writing, “… perhaps a bit of a cartoon.”

And Leibovich clearly had a front-row seat to observe her. By his own count, he’s attended about 10 of Haddad’s parties over the years, including one or two of her famous annual garden brunches before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. (He was dropped this year after Haddad got wind of what he was writing.) Read more from this story HERE.

Big Government: What Does it Take for America to Wake Up?

/7 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Human EventsSomeone did an experiment to test an old tale — that a frog placed in a pot of cool water, which is then slowly and continuously heated, will be boiled to death. By contrast, if thrown directly into scalding hot water, the frog jumps out. But it turns out that, no, once the water got hot enough, the critter hopped out of Dodge.

This raises a question. At what point does the continuous growth and intrusiveness of government make people wake up? This is not just a matter of theory or philosophy. People are hurting — as a direct result of President Barack Obama, his party and the inability of the GOP to make the case for a smaller, less expensive and less intrusive government.

For five years, we have watched as President Barack Obama successfully pushed the following redistributionist agenda for building an economy: Take from the most productive to “stimulate” the economy by redistributing money, often with political consideration involved or attached; allow bureaucrats to pick winners and losers in the market; issue feel-good, top-down regulations that cost jobs and do little to improve conditions; and dictate the terms of health care with ObamaCare, a monstrosity that places one-seventh of our economy under the control of the federal government.

The results are in.

This is the worst economic recovery since World War II. Unemployment remains high. So many able-bodied people are dropping out of the labor force that the “labor force participation rate” remains near a 30-year low.

Read more from this story HERE.

To Avoid Looking Like A Criminal, Don’t Commit A Crime

/6 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Human EventsBlack liberals keep bemoaning the danger to their own teenage sons after the “not guilty” verdict in George Zimmerman’s murder trial. To avoid what happened to Trayvon Martin, their boys need only follow this advice: Don’t walk up to a stranger and punch him, ground-and-pound him, MMA-style, and repeatedly smash his head against the pavement.

The Justice-for-Trayvon crowd keeps pretending there hasn’t been a trial where the evidence overwhelmingly showed that Trayvon committed the first (and only) crime that night by assaulting Zimmerman. Instead, the race agitators are sticking with the original story peddled by the media, back when we had zero facts. To wit, that Zimmerman had stalked a young black child and shot him dead just for being black and wearing a hoodie.

Dozens of these hair-on-fire racism stories are retold in my book, “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama.” In the golden age of racial demagoguery, they came at a pace of about one a year. Al Sharpton was usually involved.

A normal person would hear some of the more outlandish allegations and think, “I can’t believe it!” not meaning, “Wow! What a blockbuster story!” but rather, “I would like to hear the facts because I literally don’t believe it.” (That was much of America’s reaction to the media’s claim last year that a neighborhood-watch captain in Florida had hunted down a black teenager and shot him dead just for wearing a hoodie.)Whenever a much-celebrated claim of racism turned out to be false — which was almost always — you’d just stop hearing about it. There would never be a clippable story admitting that the media’s harrumphing had been in error:

Attention, readers! That story we’ve been howling about for several months turned out to be a complete fraud.

Read more from this story HERE.

Tim Donnelly, the Man Who Would be California’s Next Governor, Talks Immigration and the Failed State on Our Border

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Irish centralTim Donnelly is the California Assemblyman representing the 33rd district, which includes the town of Hesperia. The 33rd District is close to the border with Mexico and is in the cross hairs of illegal immigration. Tim is nationally known and has announced his intent to seek the GOP nomination for Governor of California, America’s most populous state.

Tim was recently featured on the popular John Stossel program that airs on Fox News. Tim was interviewed as he guided Stossels investigative reporter Kennedy, along the porous border between Mexico and the US.

Some of the sections they toured showed gaping holes in a flimsy border fence, while other sections had no fence at all, leaving uninterrupted human highways entering the US.

I had the pleasure to talk to Tim about his thoughts on the pending immigration bill in Washington and what he would do if he had the opportunity to “fix” our immigration system.

On the Senate Immigration bill:

The issue is too complex and immense, this bill is too huge to try to tackle it….it’s like the 2,700 page Obamacare law. But we’ve missed an opportunity to fix key areas of borders and immigration because of this.

Border security:

First we have to understand that Mexico is a failed state. Due to corruption and the breakdown of the rule of law, the great country of Mexico is being destroyed.

Estimates of deaths in Mexico due to drug wars are 70-100 thousand, but no one really knows. Compare this death toll to the Syrian civil war that has gotten the worlds attention.

Mexican drug cartels launder money in our country through legitimate business fronts then use it to pay off politicians on both sides of the border to look the other way….We need to discuss a way to take the profit out of this by the possible decriminalization of recreational use of some drugs.

But drugs and people seeking a better life in the USA are not the only ones crossing our borders, human traffickers bring over young girls to be immersed in drug addiction and to be exploited in the sex trades.

I also disagree with the US governments estimate that only 11 million illegals are in the US. I think we have 11 million in California alone. The Mexican government as well as the Catholic diocese, both know more about this issue than anyone else… They estimate there are between 30 and 40 million illegals in the US.

We need to take the incentive away from entering our country illegally: No benefits! No jobs, no free money- education- food or medical care for those that come here illegally.

Erect physical barriers wherever they make sense along our border and make sure illegals don’t build it. Let border agents determine where these barriers should be built…Not bureaucrats in Washington.

If we don’t control our borders and our immigration, pretty soon folks coming here will come to a country just as failed and corrupt as the one they left.

Start a guest worker program

We need some sort of guest worker program. If you want to seasonally come here and work, no problem, but we’re not supporting your family. We should allow in workers only and not their families, to fill in the gaps of labor that Americans cannot fill

Of course this goes hand in hand with reforming our culture. Our social safety net has been turned into a hammock in many cases, with long term unemployment and benefits actually incentivizing Americans not to work. The situation needs to be turned around to where it pays more to have a job than it does to stay home collecting benefits from the government.

We are not creating a new pathway to citizenship

We already have a pathway to citizenship, it has a few glitches, but we can work it out. Changes in the system could include not kicking out foreign students after they earn their PHD’s in science, etc. Let them stay here and contribute to our society, let us get a return on our educational investment by letting them create jobs and wealth.

Transfer our immigration policy into a win/win situation for us and new immigrants. Let us base our decisions on who is allowed in by what is in our national interests. Do not allow in anyone from countries that hate us and want to kill us…No more from areas like the Boston bombers came from.

Target the needs of vital industries when we consider new immigrants. Focus on industries that make our country strong and competitive.

E Pluribus Unum

America has been great because it assimilates cultures from all over the world. I want everyone that wants to become an American citizen to cherish that citizenship. It is a privilege to be an American and it comes with a lot of responsibilities.

Be an active citizen, learn our language and culture. America doesn’t need to replace its culture, this one has worked well.

We still like to think President Kennedy had it right when he said: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” That also means no public charge for anyone that immigrates here. Work and support yourself, America needs contributors, not more on the dole.

We can do this

We’re Americans; we’re like no one on the face of the earth. We’re the ones everyone wants to be…Even the ones that hate us.

You can listen to Tim’s speech on immigration here.

_____________________________________

Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.

Barack Obama Could Have Saved Trayvon Martin

/9 Comments/in , /by

By Walt Ughes. When the President famously said in the heat of a presidential election “If I had son, he’d look like Trayvon,” he ironically spoke a truth greater than he knew. I assume Obama was talking about the photo of the young, smiling Trayvon that was shamelessly displayed on every major media outlet and on activists tee shirts, not the actually 17 year old troubled youth expelled twice from school with the raised middle finger. Both pictures of Trayvon were taken during Mr. Obama’s Presidency. The lad went from smiley youth to self-described angry “gangsta” on your watch, Mr. President. Mr. First Black President, both versions of Trayvon were your sons and you failed them.

Regardless of your political persuasion, it is a sign of the greatness of this country that black Americans could go from Selma to the White House in part of one lifetime. All Americans should have be proud of that achievement particularly given that the black man ran on an inclusive platform of “Hope and Change,” uplifting ideals if also very fuzzy. Martin Luther King would have been proud.

Much progress has been made since Selma, but not everything “progressive” is good. To say the black family is in crisis is a huge understatement when over 70% of black children are born to single mothers. The education inner city minorities receive is a scandal. Even those few who graduate get a substandard education that leaves them increasingly unqualified in a high tech world. Black teen unemployment is twice white rates. Welfare dependency is a multigenerational problem with young black males incarceration rates astronomically high. Half of all murders are committed by blacks and almost all blacks are killed by other blacks. The black inner city is an urban war zone with wasted lives and destroyed dreams

The black family is imploding and there has never had a greater need for a black voice of authority and reason. Barack Obama, elected as America’s first Black President (or White Black President as the New York Times might say), was uniquely qualified to deliver that message. Read more from this story HERE.

_________________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: APPresident Obama keeps quiet on race — again

By Edward-Isaac Dovere. America’s been waiting five years to hear more from President Barack Obama on race.

The waiting continues.

Trayvon Martin is dead and George Zimmerman was found not guilty — leaving many looking to the president to lead the thoughtful, national conversation about black-white relations they thought was promised in his 2008 campaign speech on race.

Yes, there’s a double standard. No previous president has been asked so often for his personal feelings on race. But for the first black president, that double standard is part of his life, and of his presidency. And black leaders say that, especially after last year’s election, the time has come to deliver more than what he has so far.

“The president is now in his second term. Because of the Voting Rights Act and the Trayvon Martin case” and the disproportionately greater impact on the black community from the recession, said National Urban League President Marc Morial, “I think that the table is set for the president to think about how he can address these issues not just in words, but renew some of the issues that he’s championed.” Read more from this story HERE.

There Are No Indispensable Men

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: SenRockefellerThere are no indispensable men, but go to Washington and everyone treats everyone else as indispensable.

Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have been in the United States Congress since 1985. In that time the national debt has grown from $1,823,103,000,000.00 to $16,066,241,407,385.89. In that time the GOP went from being the part of small government to the party of slightly smaller than the Democrats. No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, TARP, the General Motors bailout, and so much more happened on their watch.

But they remain and voters who vote party and not person keep supporting them. But they are not indispensable. No man is indispensable. The longer one stays in Washington though, the more desperate one becomes to stay in Washington. They collaborate in a system of arrangements whereby they get more power and more influence. Their staff leaves to K Street creating a feedback loop. They and their Democratic counterparts reward friends and steer policy not toward ideas and ideology, but toward power with themselves in the center of it.

No man is indispensable. Mike Enzi (R-WY) is right there with them.

Mike Enzi is a fine Republican, but he is not putting points on the board for conservatives. We need more like Ted Cruz and less like . . . well . . . Mike Enzi. We need less rudderless Republicans who shuffle around at the direction of their leadership and lobbyist friends.

Read more from this story HERE.