Locally Speaking

ACLU Tells Public Schools It’s Monitoring School Prayer Complaints

As the new school year begins, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of South Carolina are hoping to educate the educators – as well as students and parents — about religious liberty through a new campaign encouraging schools to protect students’ rights to remain free from governmental promotion of religion.

“It’s important that all students know that they’re going back to school to a place where they will be welcome no matter what they believe,” said Victoria Middleton, executive director of the ACLU of South Carolina, in a statement Monday. The group claims to have received numerous reports of religious freedom violations, including complaints that many South Carolina schools impose religion on students.

In a letter sent to all public schools in the state, the ACLU of South Carolina said the campaign is trying to ensure that schools do not impose or promote religion, and adds that, “based on complaints received by the ACLU, many school districts are failing to honor this vital constitutional mandate.”

Among the incidents the ACLU claims to have received in the last two years are the distribution of Bibles to students, prayer and scriptural readings at school events and school assemblies featuring evangelizing and religious content. The letter also states that if the group receives a complaint about a particular school district, they will make contact in an attempt to resolve the issue. “Litigation will be a last resort,” the letter states.

State Superintendent of Education Mick Zais said in a statement to Law Blog,  “I support the rights of students and adults to pray or not to pray in schools. This misinformation campaign by the ACLU isn’t about religious freedom. It’s an attempt to discourage religious expression in the public arena by issuing threats of lawsuits and suggesting it is unlawful to pray in school. The Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. To those who choose to pray in school, I encourage them to keep praying.”

In January, the ACLU and ACLU of South Carolina filed a lawsuit challenging the practice of school-sponsored prayer and religious activities in a South Carolina school district. The case was settled by consent decree, and a permanent injunction was ordered, prohibiting prayers during or in conjunction with school events. The order also blocked school officials from organizing, financing or sponsoring religious services involving students. -By Sam Favate/Wall Street Journal/August 21, 2012

Ragbag Headliners

The Racist History Behind The Repeal The 17th Amendment Movement

There is nothing more American, more democratic, than the ability to directly elect our officials. So naturally, Republicans want to do away with it by repealing the Seventeenth Amendment.

In fact, repealing the Seventeenth Amendment, the constitutional amendment that guarantees voters the right to elect their own senators, has become almost as popular among the right as privatizing social security and defunding Planned Parenthood. The current list of supporters includes Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) who is currently campaigning to replace retiring Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ), Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, Missouri Senate Candidate Rep. Todd Akin, former Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Sen. Mike Lee and Justice Antonin Scalia all pine for the day when corrupt state legislatures picked their Senators.

The argument the hard-right advances for the elimination of the 17th Amendment is, of course, a state’s rights argument. Last November, Hoekstra told a conservative talk radio program on WAAM in Ann Arbor that allowing people to elect their own Senators weakened the power of the states relative to the federal government. “The direct election of U.S. Senators made the U.S. Senate act and behave like the House of Representatives,” Hoekstra said. “The end result has led to an erosion of states’ rights.”

According to those who support the repeal, the framers of the Constitution intended the Senate to be answerable to the states and to serve on a check of federal power that would naturally expand as a result of the direct election of representatives to the U.S. House of Representatives.

What supporters of repeal largely leave out is that prior to the 17th Amendment, the appointment of senators was one way the slave-holding and then later segregationist South maintained political power. And, the direct appointment of Senators was seen as one of the compromises necessary to get the slave-holding South to sign on to the Constitution since it would assure their less-populous states would have just as much say in the Senate as the free states in the North.

The move to pass the 17th Amendment was a direct response to a national desire to drive out that racist element from our political process and to keep, as much as possible, direct say in the governance of the people in the hands of the people. Not only was the direct election of Senators via the 17th Amendment a success of the progressive era, so to was the 19th Amendment which recognized a woman’s right to vote.

No wonder the Tea Party, our modern day recreation of the privileged slaveholding South sees the 17th Amendment as such a threat. I wonder how long until they openly move on to challenging the 19th as well? -By Jessica Pieklo/Care2/August 14, 2012

Why I Do Not Like The Obamas

The other evening on my Twitter, a person asked me why I didn't like the Obamas. Specifically I was asked: "I have to ask, why do you hate the Obamas? It seems personal, not policy related. You even dissed their Christmas family picture."

The truth is: I do not like the Obamas, what they represent, their ideology, and I certainly do not like his policies and legislation.

I've made no secret of my contempt for the Obamas. As I responded to the person who asked me the aforementioned question, I don't like them because they are committed to the fundamental change of my/our country into what can only be regarded as a communist state.

I don't hate them per definition, but I condemn them because they are the worst kind of racialists. They are elitist Leninists with contempt for traditional America. They display disrespect for the sanctity of the office he holds, and for those who are willing to admit same, Michelle Obama's raw contempt for white America is transpicuous.

I don't like them because they comport themselves as emperor and empress. I expect -- no I demand -- respect for the Office of President and a love of our country and her citizenry from the leader entrusted with the governance of same. President and Mrs. Reagan displayed an unparalleled love for the country and her people. The Reagans made Americans feel good about themselves and about what we could accomplish. Could you envision President Reagan instructing his Justice Department to act like jack-booted thugs?

Presidents are politicians and all politicians are known and pretty much expected to manipulate the truth, if not outright lie, but even using that low standard, the Obamas have taken lies, dishonesty, deceit, mendacity, subterfuge and obfuscation to new depths. They are verbally abusive to the citizenry and they display an animus for civility.

I do not like them because they both display bigotry overtly, as in the case of Harvard Professor Louis Gates, when he accused the Cambridge Police of acting stupidly, and the code speak pursuant to now being able to be proud of America. I view that statement and that mindset as an insult to those who died to provide a country where a Kenyan, his illegal alien relatives, and his alleged progeny could come and not only live freely, but also rise to the highest, most powerful, position in the world. Michelle Obama is free to hate and disparage whites because Americans of every description paid with their blood to ensure her right to do same.

I say that, "the only reason a person hides things is because he has something to hide." No president in history has spent over a million dollars to keep his records and his past sealed.

And what the two of them have shared has been proved to be lies. He lied about when and how they met, he lied about his mother's death and problems with insurance, Michelle lied to a crowd pursuant to nearly $500,000 bank stocks they inherited from his family. He has lied about his father's military service, about the civil rights movement, ad nauseam. He lied to the world about the Supreme Court in a State of the Union address. He berated and publicly insulted a sitting Congressman. He has surrounded himself with the most rabidly, radical, socialist academicians today. He has fought for abortion procedures and opposed rulings that protected women and children that even Planned Parenthood did not seek to support. He is openly hostile to business and aggressively hostile to Israel. His wife treats being the First Lady, as her personal American Express Black Card (arguably the most prestigious credit card in the world). I condemn them because as people are suffering, losing their homes, their jobs, their retirements, he and his family are arrogantly showing off their life of entitlement as he goes about creating and fomenting class warfare.

I don't like them, and I neither apologize nor retreat from my public condemnation of them and of his policies. We should condemn them for the disrespect they show our people, for his willful and unconstitutional actions pursuant to obeying the constitutional parameters he is bound by, and his willful disregard for congressional authority.

Dislike for them has nothing to do with the color of their skin, it has everything to do with their behavior, attitudes, and policies. And I have open scorn for their playing the race card.

It is my intention to do all within my ability to ensure their reign is one term. I could go on, but let me conclude with this. I condemn in the strongest possible terms the media for refusing to investigate them, as they did President Bush and President Clinton, and for refusing to label the Obamas for what they truly are. There is no scenario known to man, whereby a white president and his wife could ignore laws, flaunt their position, and lord over the people, as these two are permitted out of fear for their color.

As I wrote in a syndicated column titled "Nero In The White House", (speaking of Barack Obama and his wife):

"....Never in my life, inside or outside of politics, have I witnessed such dishonesty in a political leader. He is the most mendacious political figure I have ever witnessed. Even by the low standards of his presidential predecessors, his narcissistic, contumacious arrogance is unequalled. Using Obama as the bar, Nero would have to be elevated to sainthood. Many in America wanted to be proud when the first person of color was elected president, but instead, they have been witness to a congenital liar, a woman who has been ashamed of America her entire life, failed policies, intimidation, and a commonality hitherto not witnessed in political leaders. He and his wife view their life at our expense as an entitlement, while America's people go homeless, hungry and unemployed...."

-By Mychal Massie, (a respected African-American writer and Los Angeles talk show host)/The Daily Rant

Muslim Brotherhood 'Conspiracy' to Subvert America

A World of Hillbilly Heroin: The Hollowing Out of America, Up Close and Personal

During the two years Joe Sacco and I reported from the poorest pockets of the United States, areas that have been sacrificed before the altar of unfettered and unregulated capitalism, we found not only decayed and impoverished communities but shattered lives.  There comes a moment when the pain and despair of constantly running into a huge wall, of realizing that there is no way out of poverty, crush human beings.  Those who best managed to resist and bring some order to their lives almost always turned to religion and in that faith many found the power to resist and even rebel.

On the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota, where our book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt opens, and where the average male has a life expectancy of 48 years, the lowest in the western hemisphere outside of Haiti, those who endured the long night of oppression found solace in traditional sweat lodge rituals, the Lakota language and cosmology, and the powerful four-day Sun Dance which I attended, where dancers fast and make small flesh offerings.

In Camden, New Jersey, it was the power and cohesiveness of the African-American Church.  In the coalfields of southern West Virginia, it was the fundamentalist and evangelical protestant churches, and in the produce fields of Florida, it was the Catholic mass.

Those who are not able to hang on, fall long and hard.  They retreat into the haze of alcohol -- Pine Ridge has an estimated alcoholism rate of 80% -- or the harder drugs, easily available on the streets of Camden: from heroin to crack to weed to something called Wet, which is marijuana leaves soaked in PCP.  In the produce fields, drinking was also a common release.

In West Virginia, however, the drug of choice was OxyContin, or “hillbilly heroin.”  Joe and I went into some old coal camps, largely abandoned, and there it was as if we were interviewing zombies; the speech and movements of those we met were so bogged down by opiates that they were often hard to understand. This passage from the book is a look at some of those West Virginians, discarded by the wider society, who struggle to deal with the terrible pain of rejection and purposelessness that comes when there is a loss of meaning and dignity. Chris Hedges, August 2012

***

A Community on Overdose

About half of those living in McDowell County depend on some kind of relief check such as Social Security, Disability, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, retirement benefits, and unemployment to survive. They live on the margins, check to check, expecting no improvement in their lives and seeing none. The most common billboards along the roads are for law firms that file disability claims and seek state and federal payments. “Disability and Injury Lawyers,” reads one. It promises to handle “Social Security. Car Wrecks. Veterans. Workers’ Comp.” The 800 number ends in COMP.

Harry M. Caudill, in his monumental 1963 book Night Comes to the Cumberlands, describes how relief checks became a kind of bribe for the rural poor in Appalachia. The decimated region was the pilot project for outside government assistance, which had issued the first food stamps in 1961 to a household of fifteen in Paynesville, West Virginia. “Welfarism” began to be practiced, as Caudill wrote, “on a scale unequalled elsewhere in America and scarcely surpassed anywhere in the world.” Government “handouts,” he observed, were “speedily recognized as a lode from which dollars could be mined more easily than from any coal seam.”

Obtaining the monthly “handout” became an art form. People were reduced to what Caudill called “the tragic status of ‘symptom hunters.’ If they could find enough symptoms of illness, they might convince the physicians they were ‘sick enough to draw’... to indicate such a disability as incapacitating the men from working. Then his children, as public charges, could draw enough money to feed the family.”

Joe and I are sitting in the Tug River Health Clinic in Gary with a registered nurse who does not want her name used. The clinic handles federal and state black lung applications. It runs a program for those addicted to prescription pills. It also handles what in the local vernacular is known as “the crazy check” -- payments obtained for mental illness from Medicaid or SSI -- a vital source of income for those whose five years of welfare payments have run out. Doctors willing to diagnose a patient as mentally ill are important to economic survival.

“They come in and want to be diagnosed as soon as they can for the crazy check,” the nurse says. “They will insist to us they are crazy. They will tell us, ‘I know I’m not right.’ People here are very resigned. They will avoid working by being diagnosed as crazy.”

The reliance on government checks, and a vast array of painkillers and opiates, has turned towns like Gary into modern opium dens. The painkillers OxyContin, fentanyl -- 80 times stronger than morphine -- Lortab, as well as a wide variety of anti-anxiety medications such as Xanax, are widely abused. Many top off their daily cocktail of painkillers at night with sleeping pills and muscle relaxants. And for fun, addicts, especially the young, hold “pharm parties,” in which they combine their pills in a bowl, scoop out handfuls of medication, swallow them, and wait to feel the result.

A decade ago only about 5% of those seeking treatment in West Virginia needed help with opiate addiction. Today that number has ballooned to 26%. It recorded 91 overdose deaths in 2001. By 2008 that number had risen to 390.

Drug overdoses are the leading cause of accidental death in West Virginia, and the state leads the country in fatal drug overdoses. OxyContin -- nicknamed “hillbilly heroin” -- is king. At a drug market like the Pines it costs a dollar a milligram. And a couple of 60- or 80-milligram pills sold at the Pines is a significant boost to a family’s income. Not far behind OxyContin is Suboxone, the brand name for a drug whose primary ingredient is buprenorphine, a semisynthetic opioid. Dealers, many of whom are based in Detroit, travel from clinic to clinic in Florida to stock up on the opiates and then sell them out of the backs of gleaming SUVs in West Virginia, usually around the first of the month, when the government checks arrive. Those who have legal prescriptions also sell the drugs for a profit. Pushers are often retirees. They can make a few hundred extra dollars a month on the sale of their medications. The temptation to peddle pills is hard to resist.

We meet Vance Leach, 42, with his housemates, Wayne Hovack, 40, and Neil Heizer, 31, in Gary. The men scratch out a meager existence, mostly from disability checks. They pool their resources to pay for food, electricity, water, and heat. In towns like Gary, communal living is common.

When he graduated from the consolidated high school in Welch in 1987, Leach drifted. He went to Florida and worked for the railroad. He returned home and worked in convenience stores. He held a job for 11 years for Turner Vision, a company that took orders for satellite dishes. He lost the job when the company was sold. He worked at Welch Community Hospital for six months and then as an assistant manager of the McDowell 3, the Welch movie theater. His struggle with drugs, which he acknowledges but does not want to discuss in detail, led to his losing his position at the theater. He is preparing to start a course to become licensed as a Methodist minister and serves the two local United Methodist churches, neither of which muster more than about a half dozen congregants on a Sunday. The 20 theology classes, which cost $300 a class, are held on weekends in Ripley, about four hours from Gary.

Leach is seated in his small living room with Hovack, who bought the house when his home was destroyed by flooding, and Heizer. Hovack was given $40,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Authority to relocate. Heizer tells us how he almost lost his life from an overdose a few weeks before.

The three men are the sons and grandsons of coal miners. None of them worked in the mines.

“My dad worked with his dad,” Heizer says, nodding towards Leach. “My grandfather died in the coal mines in 1965. He had a massive heart attack. Forty-nine years old.”

“It was good growin’ up in McDowell County twenty-plus years ago,” Leach says.

“Except for when the mines would go on strike,” adds Hovack. “That was rough. I can remember that.”

“Welch used to be a boomin’ place,” Vance says. “When you went to Welch you really thought you went somewhere.”

“Used to be about three thee-ay-ters in Welch many, many years ago,” Leach says.

“All them stores,” says Hovack. “I can remember my mom goin’ to take me to Penny’s and Collins. An’ H&M. But when the U.S. Steel cleaning plant went out, that was it for this county.”

“I went to school here in Gary, and when the plant closed down I was ’bout twelve or thirteen and my friends in school would say, ‘My dad and mom, we’re movin’ ’cause they have to go look for work,” Hovack says.

“You seen a lot of people depressed after that, wonderin’ how they were gonna make it, how they were gonna pay their bills, how they were gonna live, how they were gonna pay their mortgage,” says Leach. “It was devastating. A lot of people didn’t have a good education, so there wasn’t anything else to turn to. The coal mines was all they ever knew. My dad, he didn’t finish high school. He quit in his senior year, went right into the mine.”

Heizer speaks in the slowed cadence of someone who puts a lot of medication into his body. He recently lost his car after crashing it into a fence. His life with his two roommates is sedentary. The three men each have a television in their bedrooms and two more they share, including the big-screen television that, along with an electric piano for Hovack, were bought with Heizer’s first disability check. The men spent the $20,000 from the check in a few days.

“I became disabled back in late 2006,” Heizer tells us. “I had degenerative disc disease and I hurt my back. I was workin’ at this convenience store. They knew that I had a back injury, but yet they had me come in on extra shifts and unload the truck. Now I’ve got four discs jus’ layin’ on top of each other, no cushion between them. For three years I lived here without an income, and my dad helped support me, and then last November I finally was awarded my disability.”

Heizer, who is gay, saw his drug addiction spiral out of control four years ago after his boyfriend committed suicide. He tells us he has been struggling with his weight -- he weighs 324 pounds -- as well as diabetes, gout, and kidney stones. These diseases are common in southern West Virginia and have contributed to a steady rise in mortality rates over the past three decades.

OxyContin takes a few hours to kick in when swallowed. If the pills are crushed, mixed with water, and injected with a syringe, the effect is immediate. Heizer says that after the drug companies began releasing pills with a rubbery consistency, they could not be ground down. Heizer heated the newer pills in a microwave and snorted them -- leading to his recent overdose. It took place at his mother’s house. He went into renal failure. He stopped breathing. His kidneys shut down. He was Medevac’d to a hospital in Charleston, the capital of West Virginia, where he stayed for four days.

“I was just sittin’ around watching TV and started aspiratin’,” Heizer says flatly. 

“The medication was goin’ into my lungs. You gurgle with every breath. You are drownin’, basically. I remember walkin’ down my mom’s steps and gettin’ in the ambulance. I remember at Welch, they put me on the respirator and then transferred me. After they put me on the respirator, I stopped breathing on my own. And then I remember in Charleston wakin’ up an’ they had my hands restrained so I wouldn’t pull the tubes out. I had a real close call.”

The men sit in front of their flat-screen television and chat about friends, classmates, and relatives who died of overdoses. Hovack talks about a niece in her early twenties, the mother of two small children. She recently died of a drug overdose. He tells us about a high-school classmate, an addict living in a shack we can see from the window. The shack has no electricity or running water. The men, who rarely leave the house, mention the high bails being set for selling drugs, with some reaching $50,000 to $80,000. They joke about elderly grandmothers being hauled off to prison for drug dealing.

“I’ve seen a lot of busts in the county over the last few years, and a lot of the people that have been arrested are elderly people that are sellin’ their medication just to live,” Vance says. “When I was workin’ at the hospital I seen ODs all the time. Young people were comin’ in. It’s bad. The depression and the pain. I guess some people that hang and live in this area, they just have to turn to somethin’.”

“Since the drug problem is so bad you see the crime rate as well,” Leach says. “People breakin’ into homes, stealin’ whatever they can to sell or pawn, just to keep up with their drug habit.”

Heizer, seven weeks later, dies of a drug overdose, sitting on the living room couch in front of the big-screen television. –By Chris Hedges/Common Dreams/August 21, 2012   

Foot Note: Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Doctor In The Upper House

Senate candidate Dave Weldon on 'big brother' Obamacare

WND: Dr. Weldon, you went to medical school on a United States Army Health Professions Scholarship, so let me ask you, how will Obamacare impact the U.S. economic recovery?
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Weldon: As a physician and former member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1995-2008) I know how flawed this law is; it is too costly, and it transfers decision making from patients and doctors to bureaucrats. The law undermines the economy of the nation by adding burdens on business and individuals who must support government mandated decisions out of their control and without benefit. Perhaps more importantly, we need to be protecting patients and help strengthen their ability to work with their health care professionals to provide the best health care available, not create another government monster to play “Big Brother” with our health care.

WND: What should Congress do about health care in the United States? Should health care be a federal issue?

Weldon: Healthcare has emerged as a major issue for our nation. I am a physician, and I know the issues very well, and I can bring that background to the debates in Washington. Right now, with Obamacare hanging over our collective heads, it is clear the federal government has taken far too much control of health care. The federal government has oversight responsibility to protect Americans and their access to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But right now, under Democrat leadership, the administration and the Congress are hazarding what has been one of the most effective health care systems the world has ever known by exercising unconstitutional control. There are reforms we can make to reduce costs and improve access to health care. These include refundable health care tax credits for the working poor and expanded tax deductions for medical savings accounts. We can also make the cost of health insurance tax deductible for individuals like it is for corporations and allow people to purchase insurance across state lines to create a real competitive market for insurance.

WND: Is America able to sustain the new Obama levels of spending?

Weldon: American taxpayers should not be asked to sustain the Obama levels of spending that now threaten to impact future generations. It is clear that we can not continue to borrow these large sums of money, and raising taxes will not solve the problem, but will only delay the real reform that is needed – reduced spending.

WND: What is the major obstacle to returning the U.S. to full employment?

Weldon: The current business environment with an unknown future fueled by this administration’s regulatory, tax and economic policies is the single, major obstacle. Businesses are unwilling to hire, expand or even introduce risk into an already dubious business quotient. While it is key that we repeal Obamacare, we also need to reduce many of these burdensome regulations coming from the Obama administration.

WND: Dr. Weldon let’s talk about national security concerns. You are a noted supporter of Israel. But some argue that American needs to strategically distance itself from Israel. How important is Israel to American strategic interest in the Middle East?

Weldon: America and Israel have been strongly and positively aligned for decades. This has been and remains in America’s best interests. The stability of that region depends largely on the success of the nation of Israel and that pluralistic democracy’s ability to relate to its neighbors. I have been disappointed in President Obama’s Middle East strategy. We should always strive for peace in the Middle East, but not at the cost of the security of our greatest ally in that region, Israel. It would be a major mistake for us to distance ourselves from Israel at this critical time. I believe we should move our embassy to Jerusalem. One of the things I was most proud of as a freshman congressman was the vote to move the embassy from Tel Aviv, and I am very disappointed with the Administration’s refusal to do that.

WND: Do you believe that the lack of U.S. oil exploration enables America’s enemies? If so how?

Weldon: Our energy dependency gives our enemies leverage economically and strategically, and it is a matter of national regret that we have failed to develop our God-given resources. To my knowledge the United States is one of the only nations on the planet that deliberately refuses to exploit its own resources and prefers to import energy at great cost. This needs to stop. We can be energy independent.

WND: What should Congress do regarding lax presidential enforcement of immigration laws and border security?

Weldon: President Obama’s lax enforcement of our immigration laws is a travesty and an insult to all those who often wait decades to immigrate here legally. Congressional hearings should be ongoing to expose the injury to our national security, not to mention other domestic problems made worse by the administration’s inexcusable policy of blindness to the problems and unwillingness to enforce the laws of our land.

WND: Finally Dr. Weldon, Americans appear divided over values and definitions. Dr. Weldon how do you define a “right” and how do you define a commodity?

Weldon: True rights are bestowed upon us by the Creator such as our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Others such as the right to a fair trial are rooted in biblical principles or common sense and fairness. Some people try to assert that we have other rights such as the right to housing, food and health care. All of these additional items have to be paid for by somebody. The only way these items can be protected as “rights” is when the government takes wealth from one individual and gives it to someone else. These items are more correctly defined as commodities. Once we start defining these kinds of things as rights, they we will quickly discover that there is no limit such as the recent Obama administration initiative to give people free cell phones. -by Albert Thompson/WND/August 11, 2012

Foot Note: Albert Thompson is a military historian, defense and foreign policy analyst, and WND staff commentator.

My Long Time Friend

Tim Chickering, Photographer

Just One State

1. It is estimated that 40% of workers in Los Angeles County (which has a population of 10.2 million people) are predominantly illegal aliens who work for cash only and who do not pay taxes on their earnings.

2. 95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens.

3. 75% of people on the "Most-Wanted" list in Los Angeles are illegal aliens.

4. Over 2/3 of births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien mothers on Medi-Cal, whose hospital bills are paid for by taxpayers.

5. Nearly 35% of all inmates in California detention centers are illegal nationals.

6. Over 300,000 illegal aliens in Los Angeles County live in garages.

7. The FBI reports that half of all gang members in Los Angeles are most likely illegal alien from south of the border.

8. Nearly 60% of all occupants of HUD properties in Los Angeles are illegal aliens.

9. 21 Los Angeles radio stations are Spanish-speaking.

10. In Los Angeles County, 5.1 million people speak English, 3.9 million speak Spanish.

11. Less than 2% of illegal aliens are California crop-pickers or farm workers, but 29% are on welfare.

12. Over 70% of the United States' annual population growth (compared to over 90% of California, Florida, and New York) is from immigration.

13. 29% of federal prison inmates are illegal aliens.

Except for items #5, #11, #12, and #13, all the rest of the above information is for Los Angeles County only.

Imagine what the figures would be like if the statistics regarding illegal immigrants in all counties in California and the other 49 states were compiled!

The United States of America must be a country governed by fools for letting this trend to continue!

Source/Author Unknown

Deciding The President By Popular Vote Is A Flawed Idea

[The] GOP presidential debate was a doozy. Some of the commercials weren’t bad, either. My favorite was the ad from the National Popular Vote movement, promoting legislation in the 50 states to guarantee that the people, not the electoral college, choose our president.

Mind you, I’ve always found it kind of fallacious to worry that our current system elevates popular-vote losers to the presidency: that’s because popular votes cast in a state-by-state contest for 270 electoral votes do not reflect the national will. Rather, they reflect the results of a competition in which candidates tailor their messages and deploy their resources according to the rules of the electoral college; they would do everything differently if the goal was a popular-vote majority.

So when Al Gore got about 500,000 votes more than George W. Bush in 2000 but still lost, I was pretty much unmoved. Complaining about that — as opposed to the different issue of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore — was like griping that your basketball team lost even though it made more free throws.

In a contest for popular votes, Bush would have had an incentive to scrounge for every vote in states he had locked up, like Texas, or the ones he had consigned to Gore.

Still, it’s easy to see why the electoral college is so unloved. It is inconsistent with the idea of one-person, one-vote; every 677,000 Californians get one electoral vote, while the 563,000 inhabitants of Wyoming get three. And it gives presidential nominees an incentive to cater to the interests of “swing” states while treating the rest as flyover country.

The National Popular Vote plan would, at least in theory, solve those problems. Instead of trying to abolish the electoral college through a constitutional amendment — which small states might block — National Popular Vote devised a way to get around it: States agree by law to cast all of their electoral votes for the first-place finisher in the national popular vote; and the law becomes operative as soon as it is adopted by enough states to total 270 votes in the electoral college.

So far, nine deep-blue jurisdictions with a total of 132 electoral votes — including Maryland, the District and California, the 55-elector behemoth — have signed on to this proposed interstate compact.

I might be eager to support it, too, if I were convinced that the proposal wouldn’t lead to all sorts of unintended negative consequences. Alas, I’m not convinced.

The proposal still falls short of a true national direct election for the presidency, which would, presumably, require a uniform set of rules for verifying and counting ballots, administered by a national electoral board.

Instead, this plan would leave the election to the states and the District, which means that the “national” popular vote would still be the summation of 51 different elections, each run according to slightly different rules and procedures.

Think how much chaos surrounded hanging chads and other variations among the county-level vote counters of Florida in 2000. Now project that over the entire country.

The Constitution says Congress has to approve all interstate compacts. The Supreme Court interpreted this permissively in a 1978 case on taxation — but you can be sure a compact that affected presidential elections without Congress’s approval would get litigated, big-time.

For all its flaws, the electoral college helps stabilize U.S. politics by encouraging the development of a two-party system. Choosing the president by direct popular vote would encourage third- or fourth-party candidacies whose appeal might not extend beyond a few large states or a single region.

This has occurred a few times in U.S. history even under the existing system, with the result that the electoral-college winner garnered considerably less than 50 percent of the popular vote in multi-candidate races.

It’s not clear why this is any less of an affront to democracy and majority rule than the electoral college itself. Do we really want a popular-vote system that could easily produce presidents based on 25 or 30 percent of the ballots cast?

Six decades ago, Stanford professor Kenneth Arrow demonstrated mathematically that there is no such thing as a perfectly fair voting system. “Arrow’s impossibility theorem,” as it came to be known, won him the Nobel Prize in economics. In all these years, no one has proved him wrong. -By Charles Lane/Washington Post/January 23, 2012

Ragbag Headliners

Social Security: Prepare To Give More Than Receive

People retiring today are part of the first generation of workers who have paid more in Social Security taxes during their careers than they will receive in benefits after they retire. It's a historic shift that will only get worse for future retirees, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

Previous generations got a much better bargain, mainly because payroll taxes were very low when Social Security was enacted in the 1930s and remained so for decades. ...

The shift among middle-income workers is happening just as millions of baby boomers are reaching retirement, leaving relatively fewer workers behind to pay into the system. It's coming at a critical time for Social Security, the federal government's largest program. –By Stephen Ohlemacher/The Washington Times/August 5, 2012

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Russian Facebook Users Especially Cynical, Research Says

Russian Facebook users are more cynical and aggressive than those using other social networks, while Vkontakte users swear more often in their written posts, according to a new study released Wednesday.

The study, conducted by communications group Vizantia, was based on surveys and analysis of Russian-speaking users on five major social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki and Moi Mir, RIA-Novosti reported.

After compiling the necessary data, each network was awarded a score on the Cook-Medley hostility scale — the lower the score, the higher the level of hostility — the news agency said.

Facebook users received the lowest score of 17.5 points in the survey and were judged the most cynical. Facebook users from the capital were especially cynical.

Those posting comments on Twitter and Vkontakte came in second and third for cynicism, with scores of 18.9 and 20.65, respectively.

In terms of aggression, Facebook users again beat out the competition, scoring 15.9 points, as opposed to 16.45 for Twitter and 17.05 for Vkontakte.

But Facebook posts contained less swearwords than those on Vkontakte, featuring 12.8 swearwords per 1,000 words compared with 17.2 for the Russian social network.

Vizantia researchers consulted 2,000 people for the survey, which gave no margin of error. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they had Vkontakte accounts, 33 percent used Odnoklassniki and 14 percent preferred Facebook. Less popular were Moi Mir (10 percent) and Twitter (7 percent). –The Moscow Times/August 9, 2012

The Republican Ticket

Mit Romney and Paul Ryan

A Note From A Former U. S. Marine And Vietnam Veteran Living In Danbury, Connecticut …

I am a 67-year-old former Marine and a Vietnam veteran. And I say: "Forget about living to age 75 in the USA!"

This morning at Danbury Hospital here in Connecticut, I was scheduled for a cardio-lite stress test. This is a treadmill stress test where nuclear dye is injected into your bloodstream and you are put in a CAT scan or something similar in order to take a picture of your heart. If all is good, the heart shows up red; if there are blocked arteries anywhere, the heart shows up pink. I have had three of these tests in the past twelve years due to blocked arteries discovered in 2000. They use the test to determine if I need a "roto rooter" or a bypass operation.

So, I arrived for my previously schedule appointment at the hospital at 8 a.m. this morning and in the process of checking in, the lady in the front desk said that my appointment has been canceled. She made a call, spoke with someone, and then she handed me the phone. It was a nurse in the Cardiology Department who said that my medical insurance carrier denied the procedure.

I said, "It is a routine part of my heart maintenance program as ordered by my PCP and with approval from my cardiologist who is the head of Danbury Cardiology Department, which is right where I am standing right now."

She went, "Yes, but our request was denied."

So I said, "I have Medicare, so what is my backup insurance doing denying anything."

Then the bombshell. . .she said, "It was the Medicare Board that denied the procedure."

At that point, I turned to everyone behind me, and it was a long line, and I said to them "Well, you won't have to wait too long today because my stress test procedure was just canceled by a Medicare Death Panel. I am only 67 so can you imagine what is going to happen when we really get old?"

The entire waiting room and everyone there from patients to staff just went dead silent.

Then, I turned to the front desk staff and told them, "I guess I will have to write a letter to the editor of the Danbury News Times and call my senators and congressman and let them know the Death Panels have already convened".

Then I walked out.

By the time I got home the message machine was blinking. My PCP had called and so did the hospital and guess what? Medicare decided to approve my stress test procedure, and I should get back down to the hospital, and they would fit me in right away for the 3-hour procedure.

I called back and told them that I couldn't make it, I was going fishing because I didn't know how many more fishing trips I could get in before I went into cardiac arrest, but not to worry about me costing the government any money because I am a 30% disabled Army veteran due to Agent Orange poisoning which is what caused this heart problem to begin with, and I qualify to be buried for free in a plain pine box in the cheap graves section at any national cemetery. I certainly don't want to cost our government any money. So, maybe we just won't do the procedure anymore and we can use the money to redistribute it to all of the illegals to keep them alive so they can mow the lawns at the national cemeteries.

And so this note is for everyone to know that the Death Panel crap has already started. And if we don't vote this guy and his criminal cronies out of office this November, then we should all expect to die younger and as completely broke paupers as the country goes further down to hell.

Feel free to distribute my note to anyone and make it your mission to not only make your vote count in November 2012 but on behalf of all of us, please also make an effort to help convince everyone to NOT vote for the present White House occupant or any of his cronies in the November 2012 election if they want to receive proper medical care and expect to live to age 75 or older!

Another forwarded email message from another Marine:

Dr. Suzanne Allen, the head of Emergency Services at the Johnson City Medical Center in Johnson City, Tennessee, was recently asked if she has seen any effects of ObamaCare in her work.

Her reply was: "Oh, yes. We are already seeing cutbacks on the services we provide. For example, we are now having to deal with patients who would normally receive dialysis, who no longer can. In the past, there was always automatic approval under Medicare for anyone who needed dialysis -- not anymore."

When asked what the outcome will be. "The patient will die sooner without dialysis," she replied.

What about other services?

She said that as of 2013 (after the election), no one over 75 will be given major medical procedures unless approved by the government-appointed local Ethics Panel. These Panels will determine whether a patient should receive medical treatment or not. Dr. Allen points out that most life-threatening emergencies do not occur during normal hospital business hours, and if there are emergencies that need to be resolved within minutes or few hours, the likelihood of getting these Panels' approval in time to save a patient life is going to be very challenging and difficult, if not impossible. This applies to operations such as stent placement, bypass surgery, kidney operation, or treating an aneurysm which are normally covered under Medicare today. In other words, starting in 2013, if you needed a life-saving operation, it is likely that Medicare might not provide coverage anymore, or if it does, it will require approval by a government appointed Ethics Panel if you are age 75 or over.

When in 2013? "We haven't been given a specific date, it could be in January or July, but it's after the 2012 election," says Dr. Allen.

This is shocking to anyone who will be 75. Her advice? "Get healthy and stay healthy. We do not know the specifics of the actual implementation of the full ObamaCare policies and procedures; they haven't filtered down to the local level yet. But we are already seeing severe cuts in what we provide to the elderly. We have refused dialysis to an individual who was 78 just the other day. We have also refused to give stents to a gentleman who was in his late 80s. Every day, we are seeing these cutbacks aimed at reducing care across the board for anyone who is over 75."

This is a death sentence to those who are over 75....perhaps you should pass this on to your friends who are thinking of voting for Obama this year. Regardless if you have private health care coverage now (I have Aetna Medicare Part B), it will no longer apply after 2013 if the Ethics Panels disapprove of a procedure that may save your life. Scary! Think about how this applies to you, your parents, and your other loved ones!

If you didn't know about it, as Nancy Pelosi said, "Well, if you want to know what's in the bill, you'll have to read it...." (after it was already passed).

This is an important reminder to stay healthy, and to get your plot at the nearest Forest Lawn Memorial Park now, while they are still available because the ObamaCare Plan is a death sentence to those who are age 75 or older!

Author Unknown

Inside the Mind of a Serial Rapist

A discussion thread on Reddit asked members if any of them had ever committed sexual assault. One response in particular stood out.

It may be a convincing hoax. Or it may truly be a portrait of the inside of a serial rapist’s mind. Either way, it’s the most chilling thing you’ll read all day.

On AskReddit earlier this week, the question was posed, “Reddit’s had a few threads about sexual assault victims, but are there any redditors from the other side of the story? What were your motivations? Do you regret it?” The responses quickly flooded in. Stories from people who knew rapists. “My brother is serving time for sexual assault on his under age daughters,” writes one commenter. “I can tell you first hand he has no remorse. He blames his ex-wife and his daughters for ‘doing this to him.’ He will get out in 2015 and he is totally convinced he is a victim.” There are stories from people who’ve done awful things and still rationalize them. “I ignored her and did it. She realized what was happening and tried to clamp her legs shut, but it was too late and I was much stronger than her.” There are stories from people who did things in the most messed up times of their lives, things they regret horribly. There are stories from people who’d been confused, and can now recall with clarity and wisdom how easily a moment could change dramatically. “I remember pulling off her and she kept crying,” writes one man. “I then do remember doing something i’m probably most ashamed of is asking her to finish me off, more begging for it… I hate to say it but after it was done I went to bed, she stayed up crying.” Another admits, “Later, I realized the big difference between what she had offered to do and what I had tried to make her do. MUCH later I realized that I had basically assaulted her, and that was why she broke up with me.”

It’s an unflinching and incredibly insightful document, a reminder that the persistent notion of sexual assault somehow only counting if it happens to a modestly dressed lady who’s attacked by a stranger in utter BS. It happens in vague and complicated situations, every day and night. It happens between buddies. It happens between boyfriends and girlfriends. The lines are not always clear-cut. And that’s what makes the entire thread a fiercely illuminating conversation. How can you not feel the obvious pain of both parties involved in the story of a man who says that a classmate he’d been friends with had said, “okay I guess” to sex but later admitted “she felt like I had raped her”? How can you not ache when he goes on to say, “I have never in my life felt as shitty and depressed as when she told me that she felt what happened was rape. The depression made me have to drop out of school and go live back home. My parents thought I was gonna try to kill myself”? How can you not try to have the same measure of compassion for the guy who drunkenly undressed a female friend as the girl herself, who says, “He had been really drunk, I had been really drunk… so I talked to him, he apologized again, and we moved on. I forgave him a very long time ago”?

The thread is a powerful testament to the insidiousness of sexual coercion, and of how damaging to both men and women the culture of silence can be. It’s still expected that nice girls won’t make a fuss. Females are still  raised to keep quiet and not make a scene, even when they want say no. They’re raised to keep quiet, even after they’ve been abused. And that’s nowhere more harrowingly clear than in the story of the man who claims to be “a post-colleged age male who raped several girls through use of coercion, alcohol, and other tactics over a course of 3 years.”

His story reads like a textbook guide for would-be rapists — a chronicle of a guy who says he is no longer in that “dark and horrible place in my life,” but sure has a shuddering knack for tapping into the predator mindset. He describes himself a good-looking guy who now has a beautiful wife, a man who learned early that “after a while it became boring to go after the sluts and sorority girls that would easily throw their cunt after you.” A man who figured out he needed more of a challenge. He describes in nauseating detail how he’d zone in on lower-hanging fruit: “a girl who was a bit damaged, had a shitty ex-boyfriend, or family issues, came from a small shut in town, that sort of thing,” and make his move. After laying the groundwork of flirtation, he’d invite her over to watch a movie. He’d ply her with alcohol. He’d make sure the room was cold so she’d snuggle in. Then he’d make his move. Sometimes the girl would yield, leading to what he calls “consensual and boring sex.” Other times, as he puts it, it went differently. “I’m a muscular guy, over 6′ around 200 lbs. and most of these girls may have been 125-130, really tiny and easy to pin down,” he writes. “To be honest, even remembering it now, the squirming always made it better, they didn’t want it to happen, but they couldn’t do anything about it. Most girls don’t say no either. They think you’re a good guy, and should pick up on the hints, they don’t want to have to say ‘no’ and admit to themselves what’s happening.”

And that right there is the line that is the sharp knife into the heart of every person who has ever been in a similar situation and felt ashamed. Every person who has thought later, “It was my fault.” That line is your worst fear come true. It’s your confirmation that you’re not wrong, that you didn’t make this up in your head, and that he was not a good guy. But I hope that line can also be your greatest comfort. I hope it assures you that when the bells were going off in your head that what was happening was wrong, it really was wrong. I hope it demonstrates the difference between the guys who did dumb, selfish things and are desperately contrite about them, the ones who now say, “If I hadn’t looked up at her face and seen what she was feeling, I might have continued,” and the sociopaths who get off on your fear. I just wish to God there were an easy way to tell those two groups apart. And I am so, so sorry that far too many among us have crossed paths with the latter.

Post-college rapist guy might just be a terrible joke, a fake story designed to stir up conversation. But I’ll tell you this – he is dead on the money when it comes to channeling the utter lack of empathy and compassion, the creepy braggadocio, and the egocentric self-justification of a sex abuser. Well done, sir. I don’t know if you’re really a rapist, but I believe you’ve got the right stuff to be one, for sure.

What makes post-college male, above all the other contributors to the Reddit conversation, so spot-on is that he knows so well that he’s the smiling face in your yearbook. He knows he’s the cheerful neighbor with the lovely family — and the woman on the other side of town who’s still traumatized by what he took from her one long ago night. He knows he’s your coworker and your fellow parent on the PTA. He’s the memory of the guy who’s never stopped haunting you. And he’s everywhere. As he himself says, with obvious delight, “I think it’s kind of funny that no one will ever know if the person they’re talking to on reddit, or someone who moderates their subreddit, is me on my main account.” -By Mary Elizabeth Williams/AlterNet/July 29, 2012

Foot Not: Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub.

Racist Siri

Up On The Roof

When this old world is getting you down -- but how can it be?

Wednesday
 

Hot, hot, hot here in Sandpoint. It was hot as soon as I awakened and got out on my deck to look at the lake. Too hot to get up. I went to the guest room, a very small room with just one double bed and a few sticks of furniture. But it looks up at the Selkirks and also is right next to Mister Buffett's trains. On almost any day, you can look out of the window from the bed and see fleecy clouds. The sky is a pure blue. No smog at all.

The clouds remind me of the clouds that Ferris Bueller was looking at on the day when he decided to take the day off. They are powerfully relaxing.

I lay there for a while contemplating my fears --usually about money, especially about running out of money before Alex and I die. These fears have become especially powerful as I have grown older. My shrink says they are a metaphor for fears of death. Maybe so, but they are deeply frightening anyway. Suicide. Then I think, "Suicide because you have too many homes? Are you crazy?" Do not answer, dear diary. You know me too well.

I got up, made breakfast for Alex and me -- the usual, scrambled eggs, English muffins, OJ, Tazo Refresh herbal tea, one of the many great gifts from my sister (she also told me about Hill's Resort in Priest Lake many years ago).

I got dressed and went out for a ride on my mighty Cannondale bike all around the town. I especially love riding around City Beach. At this time of year, it's packed with visitors, especially high schoolers from the area and some parents and some very young kids.

A stunningly beautiful little girl came walking past me holding an ice cream confection that looked as if it had about ten different kinds of ice cream, all different, cheery colors.

I went to the ice cream/refreshment stand to see what the ice cream could be. At just that moment, the girl with the ice cream appeared, possibly to get a refill.

Truth to tell, I don't recall exactly what she looked like but I do remember that the ice cream had some blue in it like the blue in her eyes. I wished I had my camera with me. Her perfect little face next to that ice cream would have been good.

"What's in that?" I asked the woman behind the counter, who gamely tried to reconstruct it.

"How old are you?" I asked the little girl.

"This is so cool," she said breathlessly. "I'm talking to Ben Stein and he's a celebrity. I'm almost twelve." I think she said that. I really wasn't paying attention. She might have said she was almost sixteen. I just don't remember.

I asked her what her name was. "Jackie," she said. "Jackie Sweet." She was simply adorable. I wish I could live long enough to make a movie about what happens to someone that beautiful in North Idaho post 2012. I hope lots of good things.

Back home to pay bills (an excruciating process), and take a long nap. Then out on the boat with Tim Farmin and Alex to have some spectacularly good Bottle Bay Burgers. A Bottle Bay Burger, which you can ONLY get at Bottle Bay, about a ten-minute boat ride from our marina at The Seasons, is a hamburger with cheddar cheese and chutney. It is heavenly.

We looked out at two frisky English Springer Spaniels that kept jumping into the water and eventually got on a paddle board with a boy and balanced themselves perfectly. This is a peaceful scene and I wish it stayed warm all year in North Idaho so we could go to it all year, but it does not stay at all warm after summer and Bottle Bay Resort is closed anyway.

(In North Idaho, a resort is not like The Greenbrier. It can be a very small café and a few rooms to rent.)

Back to The Seasons, and then another nap. Then Alex and I got into our rented Chrysler and headed up to Hill's. The drive along the river was stupendously beautiful. In my humble opinion, that broad river, with its many meadows and mountain faces abutting it, is almost as beautiful as the ride to Hope, with its wetlands, sloughs, and literally endless lake views. But there is no one on that road. Why? The views are stupendous, again. Why go to Disneyland?

The Northwest is the America we think of when we pledge allegiance to the flag. Jane Heyman told me that long ago, and she was totally right.

At Hill's, I had delicious spare ribs, then bought a lot of postcards, then headed home.

In Priest River, about half way back to Sandpoint, I got pulled over by the local police for speeding. This is a real problem in the Northwest, at least for me. The speed limits shift dramatically, and bingo, all of a sudden, it was 60 and then it's 35 and you're caught.

This has happened to me in Priest River a great many times.

But the obliging policeman laughed and only gave me a warning, so I was happy and drove very slowly all the way back to Sandpoint.

I love this area a lot. Thank you, Mark Story, famous director, for telling me about it. Thank you, God, for making it. Thank you, Peter Feierabend, RIP, for making me feel welcome here.

Thursday
 

Expulsion from Eden. Alex and I drove down to Spokane to catch a plane to Chicago. The trip was totally uneventful except that we stopped at Del Taco in Hayden for a taco. It was crowded so we left. The manager came out to the parking lot and waved me inside. He told me to sit patiently and he would get me my usual taco. Sure enough, out came the taco. It was heavenly.

One of the great culinary secrets of life is that well-prepared fast food is as good, or better, than haute cuisine.

That is a fact that is especially evident at Del Taco, although the tacos are also good at Taco Bell. There is another factor: "Hunger is the best sauce," says the Roman maxim, and it's true. It is especially true if the people at the Del Taco remember me and are kind to me. Hunger plus kindness plus smiling faces all make a good sauce.

Friday
 

Now, this has been quite a day. I am here in Chicago with Big Wifey at The Peninsula. Tonight, I spent three and a half hours at a reception for graduates of American Intercontinental University at Harry Caray's Steak House.

AIU is predominantly on line but with some "ground campuses" as well. The moving thing about it is that its students are highly non-traditional. People who have worked terribly hard to get their degrees while working full time and taking care of a family. They are largely minority (I guess for now they are minority), and deeply determined to make something of themselves.

I talked to many of them. My favorites were a woman named Alvania, from a small town in Mississippi, and another woman who had served ten years in the Navy Construction Battalions, building things under fire in Iraq. She wants to be a coroner. These are impressive people.

When I think of how hard they work, and what a privileged life I led as a student, I truly am embarrassed at how much I complained. I really lived like the Aga Khan and I bitched and moaned endlessly. That was until I joined the Alpha Delta Phi, met Mary J., and my life became paradise.

I will pray for the Alpha Delta Phi and for Mary always.

Saturday
 

Graduation at the Navy Pier for AIU. I really was so choked up at the ceremony and how hard the kids had worked for their degrees that it was hard to sit still. The best was a woman with advanced MS who had to be helped across the stage. She was shaking badly but smiled when she got her diploma. This country still has some life in her.

Tuesday
 

Now, we are back in L.A. Yesterday I had lunch with my genius stock broker, Jerry Au, from Merrill Lynch, and my dear pal and financial guru, Phil DeMuth, at Mister Chow. Life in Beverly Hills is pretty damned nice. I know I don't deserve it. You don't have to tell me. I know.

I will just tell you I cannot afford this life much longer. I am going to downsize and just live quietly somewhere. Soon, too. I just do not have the strength to live this large much longer. I wish I were as sensible as my sister, but I never have been and never will be. She lives a life that has balance. I am a fiddler on the roof, to coin a phrase. But what a roof it is, surrounded by stucco and a glittering blue pool and palms and jacarandas and cedars and my Julie Good Girl always wanting me to throw the ball for her.

What a roof.

By Ben Stein/American Spectator/August 1, 2012

A New Sect of Honor Killing Enthusiasts

It is by now a familiar scenario for German police. The lifeless body of a teenaged Middle Eastern girl, missing since November. Discovered in a hidden spot with signs of a violent death. A suspected honor murder at the hand’s of the family, some of whose members were already in custody.

But this time the script is slightly different.

While most honor murders in Germany originate within the country’s four million strong Muslim community, the latest victim, Arzu O. from Remminghausen (German law does not allow for the release of the last name), 18, whose corpse was found last week, belonged to a little known Middle Eastern religious sect called Yazidism. And it is this sect’s adherents who are becoming better known recently for their part in the nightmarish phenomenon of honor killings in Germany. Already in 2003, the German news magazine, Der Spiegel, wrote:

More and more often, police must protect young women from the Yasidi faith community from their own relatives – and help them flee.

The Yazidis are Kurds who inhabit primarily northern Iraq but are also found in Syria and Turkey. Many Yazidis have immigrated to Germany where they form the second largest Yazidi community in the world, numbering an estimated 30,000 to 80,000, outside their home countries. Over the centuries, their religious beliefs have often put them at odds with their Muslim neighbours, who have at times cruelly discriminated against them, forcing them to convert on pain of death or sometimes just outright massacring them. Since Yazidis are not ‘People of the Book’ in the Koran, like the Jews and Christians, they were afforded no protection in Islamic lands.

Yazidi religious beliefs, like those of other religions, are complex. The Yazidis believe in one God, who created the world and left it under the care of seven angels. They don’t believe in the devil, since that would limit God’s power. Nevertheless, they have often mistakenly been called devil worshipers. Yazidism is described as being “syncretic,” influenced by Sufism and Iran’s pre-Islamic religion, Zoroastrianism. One also cannot convert to Yazidism; one is born into it.

But the problem Yazidism poses for young Yazidi women (and a few men) living in a modern Western state like Germany where freedom of choice and development of the individual are regarded as virtues is that they are not allowed to marry outside their religion. They are also not supposed to marry outside the three castes that make up their culture and usually wind up taking a cousin as a spouse. And like their Muslim neighbors, women are expected to be virgins when they marry.

“When a girl tries to marry outside the community, that is perceived not only as a dirtying of the family honor, but a break with the religion and the community,” wrote one German reporter.

Another reason Yazidis probably do not want their daughters to marry outside their religion is money. According to one report, the bride price for a Yazidi girl can cost a prospective groom and his family up to $ 80,000, “although the highest Yazidi spiritual leader…wants to limit the bride money to $5,000.” A woman marrying a non-Yazidi would probably add nothing to the family’s coffers.

Police believe Arzu’s breaking of these age-old religious restrictions is probably behind their gruesome discovery last week. Arzu, a high school student, had developed a forbidden love last summer with a 23-year-old apprentice baker, a non-Yazidi, at a bakery where she worked weekends. Her mother and older sister had also once worked there. But for wanting to determine her own life path, which includes selecting her own boyfriends like most normal teenagers do, this vibrant, young woman had to pay with her life.

Although the family, which originally came from Turkey, was described as “a shining example” of successful integration, they still acted out their archaic religious and cultural customs behind closed doors. Last August, Arzu’s family members tried to put a halt to her blossoming romance by giving her a beating, which got police attention. The assault only resulted, though, in Arzu’s fleeing the home for a women’s shelter, which alone is often reason enough for an honor killing. Once away from family control and observation, even for one night, it is suspected the girl may have lost her virginity.

“Every woman who flees the home is the object of an honor murder,” noted one German social worker. The Federal Crime Office (Germany’s FBI) registered 48 such homicides between 1996 and 2006 with a further 22 people surviving attempted honor killings.

Other reasons for honor killings, besides a loss of virginity, range from the female victim living too Western (re: independent) a lifestyle, to wanting a divorce, to fleeing either an abusive or an upcoming forced marriage. Conversion to another religion is sometimes punished by death as well as marrying or having a boyfriend outside one’s religion, race or ethnic group. Only with the blood sacrifice of a fellow human being do the murderers believe their family honor can be cleansed and restored.

A German paper reported that despite warnings from shelter workers, Arzu couldn’t bear the separation from her boyfriend and went to spend a night at his residence in November. His home, however, was only a kilometer and a half from her family home and was probably under observation. That night, her five brothers and sisters broke in, threatened the boyfriend with a gun before knocking him to the floor and kidnapping Arzu. That was the last time the young woman was seen alive. The police took the five into custody, one of whom, the oldest sister, works for the city administration.

While German police are still investigating Arzu’s murder, they are searching for another Yazidi honor killer, Ali Askar Hasso Barakat, a native of Iraq. In the name of “honor,” Barakat murdered his 13-year-old daughter, Sousan, last month with two shots to the head and one in the neck on an open street. The daughter had fled the family home for a youth shelter because of her father’s violence and was lured to an arranged, supervised meeting at a neutral site by a letter from her parents, in which, using touching language, they wanted to discuss the problems that existed between them.

“We are not judges and not police; we are your parents and would very much like to know how you are doing after six months,” they wrote.

But Sousan’s father had already judged her and planned to carry out the death sentence after the meeting. The reason? Sousan’s friends told a German newspaper the deceased simply wanted more freedom. The paper reported the father was offended that Sousan “instead of helping with the housework every day and taking care of her three younger brothers, wanted to take part in social life, to live as a German among Germans.” A woman’s living a Western lifestyle is all too often the pretext for an honor murder.

And Sousan appeared to be well on her way to becoming fully integrated into German society before her untimely death, if she wasn’t already. She was a member of a judo club as well as of the fire department and “liked to meet her friends after school.” Her mother is also being investigated for her daughter’s murder.

German police believe Sousan’s father is no longer in Germany. He may have had help in escaping as well as in procuring the murder weapon from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish terrorist organization fighting both the Turkish and Iranian governments for an independent Kurdistan. The outlawed PKK, which is well represented in Germany and other Western European countries, is also suspected of making life very difficult for Yazidi women on the run. Those women the police have helped are placed in the equivalent of an American witness protection program but are often found – and very quickly at that – through the European-wide PKK network.

One 16-year old Yazidi teenager, a German newspaper reports, caught kissing her Pakistani boyfriend by her brother, fled the family home that night, fearing an honor murder. She was on the run for at least five and a half years, living in several different cities and two other countries besides Germany, but was always discovered. Another brother has joined her in the program because he fell in love with a non-Yazidi woman.

Besides the PKK, the Yazidi clan chiefs also hire detectives to find these fear-filled women.

“The Yazidi clan chiefs seldom give up; they want to bring back, often with violence, the renegades – or simply take revenge,” the paper reported.

It was actually an honor murder that brought the Yazidis to world attention several years ago. A 17-year-old Yazidi girl, Du’a Khalil Aswad, was stoned to death in Iraq in 2007 and a shocking video of the murder sparked worldwide outrage. The girl’s crime? She had fallen in love with a Muslim boy.

One cannot speak of integration in Germany and other Western European countries. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has already announced that multiculturalism is a failure. It has imported, and tolerated, barbarisms such as honor murders into Western societies, where, ironically, the victims are usually girls and women who want to integrate. The Yazidi families who killed Arzu and Sousan represent an anti-civilization who voluntarily self-segregate themselves in their communities from the host country’s culture and values. And since these anti-civilizational laws and values are the only ones respected in these communities, and fear and respect of German laws are non-existent, then the horror of honor murders is in Germany to stay. –By Stephen Brown Bio/Front Page Mag/January 17, 201

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Jamie Glazov Speech Part 1

Click Here For Jamie Glazov Speech Part 2-4

PAUL: TSA’s Intrusions Undermine Security

Senator or not, we’re all stripped of our freedom and dignity
Today, while en route to Washington to speak to hundreds of thousands of people at the March for Life, I was detained by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for not agreeing to a patdown after an irregularity was found in my full body scan. Despite removing my belt, glasses, wallet and shoes, the scanner and TSA also wanted my dignity. I refused.

I showed them the potentially offending part of my body, my leg. They were not interested. They wanted to touch me and to pat me down. I requested to be rescanned. They refused and detained me in a 10-foot-by-10-foot area reserved for potential terrorists.

I told them that I was a frequent flier and that just days ago I was allowed to be rescanned when the scanner made an error. At no time did I ask for special treatment, but I did insist that all travelers be awarded some decency and leniency in accommodating the screening process.

My detention was real and I was repeatedly instructed not to leave the holding area. When I used my phone to inform my office that I would miss my flight, and thus miss my speech to the March for Life, I was told that now I would be subjected to a full body patdown.

I asked if I could simply restart the screening process to show that the machine had made an error. I was denied and informed that since I used my phone, to call for help, I must now submit or not fly.

Let me be clear: I neither asked for nor expect any special treatment for being a U.S. senator. In fact, this case is not about me at all. This is about every single one of us and how we are sick of the intrusive nature of our government.

While sitting in the cubicle, I thought to myself, have the terrorists won? Have we sacrificed our liberty and our dignity for security? Finally, the airport head of TSA arrived after I had missed my flight. He let me go back through the scanner and this time the scanner did not go off. The only comment from TSA was that some of the alarms are simply random.

So passengers who do everything right, remove their belts, remove their wallets, remove their shoes, their glasses and all of the contents in their pockets are then subjected to random patdowns and tricked into believing that the scanners actually detected something.

I have been through some of this with TSA Director John S. Pistole before. Last spring, a 6-year-old girl from Bowling Green was subjected to an invasive search despite her parent’s objections. Mr. Pistole claimed that small children were indeed a risk because a girl in Kandahar, Afghanistan, had exploded a bomb in a market in Afghanistan. But Mr. Pistole, this girl wasn’t from Kandahar and she wasn’t in Afghanistan. Isn’t there a significant difference?

In writing, he replied that TSA concluded because a child in a market in Afghanistan exploded a bomb, all American children needed to be evaluated as potential threats. My response: If you treat everyone equally as a potential threat, then you direct much attention to those who are never going to attack us and spend less time with those whose risk profiles indicate a need for tougher screening.

Random screenings not based on risk assessments misdirect the screening process and add to the indignity of travel. Those passengers who suffer through the process of partially disrobing should be rewarded with less invasive examination.

Ever since the news of my struggle with TSA, the phones in my office have been ringing off the hook with calls from citizens who sympathize with my frustration, as they, too, feel their liberties are being compromised every time they travel. My office is being inundated with their stories of assault and harassment by TSA agents. This agency’s disregard for our civil liberties is something we are expected to understand and accept. But we are tired of being insulted and we are tired of having our dignity compromised. TSA was created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but was it necessary? Has it overstepped its bounds? Is it respecting the rights of citizens?

It is time for us to question the effectiveness of TSA. America can prosper, preserve personal liberty and repel national security threats without intruding into the personal lives of its citizens.

Every time we travel, we are expected to surrender our Fourth Amendment rights, yet willingly giving up our rights does not make us any safer. It is infuriating that this agency feels entitled to revoke our civil liberties while doing little to keep us safe.

Is the TSA looking at flight manifests? Are we researching those boarding the planes? Are we targeting or looking at those who might attack us? Apparently not, if we are wasting our time patting down 6-year-old girls.

If a federally funded TSA is going to exist, then its focus should be on police work and it must respect the rights of citizens. The TSA should not universally insult all travelers; it should however research, track, monitor and target people that are, in fact, threats to our nation.

This blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans against unwarranted search and seizure, has insulted many citizens, and rightfully so. I, along with many other travelers, do not view traveling as a crime that warrants government search and seizure. In fact, I view traveling as a basic right, for Americans are free to travel from state to state as they please.

I refused an unnecessary patdown and stood up for my rights as an American citizen. This is a battle Americans face every time they fly. It is my firm belief that TSA should not have such broad authority to violate our constitutional rights in ineffective and invasive physical searches, thus I will further push for the reinstatement of traveler privacy and rights. I will be proposing legislation that will allow for adults to be rescreened if they so choose. –By Sen. Rand Paul/The Washington Times/January 23, 2012

Foot Note: Sen. Rand Paul is a Republican from Kentucky.