Update from the Utah ‘List”

MoonHowler

2 state employees in Utah compiled and stole a list of 1,300 people thought to be illegal immigrants. They were caught and have been fired. However, the debate continues.

The Latino community is concerned. What stuck me in particular is the charge that illegal immigrants need to learn to speak English. Jesus seems to speak pretty good English. He came here as a 15 year old–brought by his parents. He is now 25.

What happens in Arizona very much affects Utah since it is directly north of the Grand Canyon State. Utah is also the most homogeneous state in the Union, according to Pat Buchannan.

WaPo Front Page: Lurking in the Schools

MoonHowler

The front page of the WaPo has Kevin Ricks plastered larger than life. The Washington Post reveals months of investigative reporting that uncover the a decades-long pattern of abuse, deceit, and duplicitous behavior of 49 year-old teacher Kevin Ricks. Ricks, a former teacher at Osbourn High School, left a trail of betrayal of public trust that stretched as far away as Japan.

From the Washington Post:

Kevin Ricks was a gregarious, well-traveled English teacher at Osbourn High School, a Walt Whitman devotee who was so popular that a photo of him in class was chosen to fill the opening page of the yearbook. A writer and photographer himself, Ricks would walk the halls of the Manassas school with a leather-bound journal of his musings tucked in his bag, next to his laptop computer

What teachers, parents, students and even his wife didn’t know was that his journals contained decades of dark secrets, a running handwritten commentary of Ricks’s world of obsession, infatuation, pursuit, sexual abuse and international child exploitation.

They didn’t know about his library of homemade pornographic videos and explicit photographs capturing his tequila-soaked sex acts with teenage boys he had handpicked. They didn’t know about the makeshift shrine boxes containing mementos of the episodes, including sex toys, soiled tissues and hair trimmings.

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~~~~~~~~~~~~Heat Wave~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

MoonHowler

Moan, bitch, beef, whine, complain. It is just freaking hot out there. For the past 24 hours I have been without air conditioning and my neighborhood has lost electricity 3 times today. The first episode of no-juice was for over an hour.

Elliot (the Wonderful…..who has been cursed by me many times over since last night at 8 pm) finally rescued us today. He is our heating/cooling tech specialist. We weren’t getting the full 240 voltage to kick on the AC, so when it took a break, it couldn’t kick back on. Lafayette diagnosed the problem before Elliot ever got there. She said she just didn’t think they were giving us enough juice. She was right, although Elliot was more scientific.

For future reference, the Red Roof Inn takes pets. I was headed there when Elliot showed up. I had packed a tooth brush, dog food and water bowl, the ipad and a laptop and the latest netflix movie. I figured when I was done with that one I could call up one on the ipad.

What are the contributors doing during this horrible weather? Emma, how many movies total have you watched? I haven’t heard one nay-sayer anywhere make one of the usual snide cracks about global warming. If I had a choice, I would take a blizzard. My furnace is more reliable than the ac.

This weather is totally extreme. Who has the statistics?

Patricia Zengerle: Analysis: Race issues beset Obama’s “post-racial” presidency

MoonHowler

Continuing similar themes from last week:

 

From Reuters: (In its entirety)

Analysis: Race issues beset Obama’s “post-racial” presidency

By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON | Wed Jul 21, 2010 6:12pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Many supporters of Barack Obama hoped his election as America’s first black president might herald an era of post-racial politics, but race has been an issue his administration just can’t seem to avoid.

Division and tension between black and white Americans has cropped up repeatedly over Obama’s 18 months in office, hurting his popularity and distracting from his political agenda.

The issue surfaced this week when the Agriculture Department pushed a black official to resign after allegations she discriminated against a white farmer, only to apologize a day later for acting too quickly and without the facts.

Some said the White House was too eager to prove to its critics on the right that it does not favor blacks.

“The Obama administration lost some political capital because they acted without thinking things through,” said Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University.

Obama and race relations have often grabbed headlines.

Last July — in the heat of the White House fight for its healthcare overhaul — when Obama was subjected to scathing criticism for saying police had “acted stupidly” when they arrested Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates, who is black, on charges he was breaking into his own home.

More recently, the Justice Department dismissed voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party, prompting criticism from conservative groups who said the black president was unwilling to prosecute fellow blacks for civil rights violations.

“When the right-wing noise machine starts promoting another alleged scandal, you shouldn’t suspect that it’s fake — you should presume that it’s fake, until further evidence becomes available,” columnist Paul Krugman wrote in The New York Times.

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Six in ten Virginians are unfamiliar with the Tea Party

MoonHowler

From the Richmond Times Dispatch  7/23/10

Six in ten Virginians are unfamiliar with the Tea Party

By: Olympia Meola
Published: July 23, 2010 7:12 AM

We told you this morning that Virginia Commonwealth University released a poll showing a mixed favorability rating for Gov. Bob McDonnell.

It’s really the first independent poll aiming to capture the governor’s approval rating since he took office in January—other than a poll commissioned in June by his political action committee, Opportunity Virginia, which pegged his approval rating at 63 percent.

Of the 810 adults surveyed, 10 percent rated McDonnell’s job as governor as excellent, 30 percent as good, 34 percent as fair and 10 percent as poor.

The poll also found that the most Virginians are unfamiliar with the Tea Party movement, which has not only grabbed headlines for the past year but could have sway in the Congressional elections this fall. Six‐in‐10 Virginians hold no opinion about the Tea Party movement, while 19 percent have a favorable view and 21 percent have an unfavorable view of the movement.

Just out of curiosity, do some of the folks who were polled live in a cave? How can they not have heard of the Tea Party? I have no problem with their rating of the governor, but no not have heard of the Tea Party?

Of the 40% who have heard of the movement, I find it even more interesting that 19% have a favorable view and 21% have an unfavorable opinion. Where do these people live and do they own televisions? Maybe I am no longer a ‘real Virginian.’ I just don’t get it.

More on VCU Poll.

Senator Jim Webb: Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege

MoonHowler

Southern people have always had a way of simply not talking about things.  We, as a group, all know the things exist but we don’t talk about them.  Kids learn at an early age  because their mothers have a way of grabbing them up under their arms and giving them this special squeeze….I used to call it the grocery store squeeze….not to ask questions about certain things.  Senator Jim Webb has grabbed the proverbial tiger by the tail in an op/ed piece in the Wall Street Journal as he comments on the myth of white privilege and how 95% of white southerns have perhaps been miscast. 

Senator Webb definitely has cojones for taking on this ‘unmentionable.’

Suggested by Poor Richard, from the Wall Street Journal:

By JAMES WEBB

The NAACP believes the tea party is racist. The tea party believes the NAACP is racist. And Pat Buchanan got into trouble recently by pointing out that if Elena Kagan is confirmed to the Supreme Court, there will not be a single Protestant Justice, although Protestants make up half the U.S. population and dominated the court for generations.

Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.

I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to America’s economic system and to our work force, regardless of what people look like or where they may worship. Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived.

How so?

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Immigrant detention center to open in Prince Edward County

MoonHowler

From the Washington Post July 18, 2010

The largest immigrant detention center in the mid-Atlantic will soon open in Prince Edward County, an effort to accommodate Virginia’s unprecedented surge in detentions of illegal immigrants picked up on criminal charges.

The $21 million, privately run center will house up to 584 immigrant detainees when it opens its doors. Over the next year, it might grow to hold 1,000 prisoners, most of them snagged by the federal government’s growing Secure Communities program, which aims to find and deport criminal illegal immigrants.

Last month, Virginia became the second state, after Delaware, to implement the program statewide, requiring jails and prisons to screen prisoners by immigration status and check their fingerprints against the country’s immigration database.

With three months left in the fiscal year, the number of illegal immigrants with criminal convictions detained in Virginia and the District has increased by 50 percent from last year’s total, to 2,414. Those numbers are expected to increase now that the program is being implemented statewide.

The new facility “is mostly here to address the impact of Secure Communities,” said Robert Helwig, assistant director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “We do anticipate a surge in detainees.”

The immigration debate has grown increasingly polarized, and the Secure Communities program has become a symbol of that division. John T. Morton, head of ICE, calls it the agency’s attempt to “secure the nation and protect public safety.” But many immigrant advocates, including Enid Gonzalez, a lawyer at CASA of Maryland, say the program “claims to keep violent criminals off the streets, but instead it’s just incarcerating innocent busboys.”

There’s one point on which experts across the spectrum agree: Without additional detention space, the program cannot function. ICE has detained fewer than one-quarter of the immigrants identified by Secure Communities, a range of suspected criminals facing charges as varied as misdemeanors and murder.

“The Obama administration can’t expect to increase enforcement measures without increasing detention capacity,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies

.

Prince Edward County is sure to appreciate the 300 jobs that will come to the county. It only makes sense that those states using the Secure Communities program will need a place to house criminal illegal immigrants rather than putting them in already overcrowded local detention centers. If we want to take violent criminals off the street, we must be able to detain them rather than have our criminal justice system merely serve as a revolving door.

If Virginia has implemented the Secure Communities program, how does it differ from our 287g program? Do we use both? Secure Communities seems to have tiptoed in without a great deal of notice. Contributors, what do you know about Virginia implementing this program?

From the June 21, 2010  Washington Post: (background)

Immigration status check in Va. arrests

A new system that lets local law enforcement check fingerprints of people who are arrested against immigration records maintained by the Department of Homeland Security is now in use in every county in Virginia, according to a joint release by the Attorney General’s office and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Previously, authorities could check fingerprints against the FBI’s criminal history database. But the new “Secure Communities” program lets them check DHS records and automatically alerts ICE to those with immigration violations. According to a release, ICE will prioritize enforcement for those who are convicted of major drug offenses, murder, rape and kidnapping.

Counting Virginia’s participation, the program is now available in 336 jurisdictions in 22 states and will be available nationally by 2013.

“This information sharing enables criminal aliens to be identified at the time they are booked in a jail anywhere in Virginia, and those convicted of serious crimes can be prioritized for deportation after serving their sentences,” Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) said in a statement.

It should be painful to be stupid

MoonHowler

There is a reason we call wild animals, ‘wild animals.’ Wild animals are unpredictable and capable of causing great injury and even death. People always seem to want to defy the odds by either keeping wild animals as pets or invading the space of wild animals in nature. 

Sometimes the animals fight back.  There are signs all over Yellowstone National Park warning visitors not to go near the buffalo and other wild animals. (the signs about the grizzlies are particularly stern.) However, I have personally watched far too many people fail to heed the warnings. Why would anyone approach a beast that is just huge? Buffalo make cattle look like wimps.  This buffalo showed these people who was the boss, with attitude. 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Again, it should be painful to be stupid. We need a break in here from politics. Don’t forget to give to your national parks if you have any spare change.  National Parks have been hit hard by this economy and belt-tightening.  They also suffered under the Bush Administration.

http://www.nps.gov/index.htm

Feeding a Dog from the Table: Stop falling for it!

MoonHowler

I would think that Rachel Maddow was madder than a bat, except Elena and I have been talking about this same theory for over a year. Nothing that happened with Shirley Sherrod was random. It was all part of political theater being played out to accomplish a political goal.

Maddow gets it. Here is her analysis:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Rachel goes through what has happened this week, step by step. This video was from her show on Tuesday.

Pay careful attention to the dates in the video. Notice that Fox News was all over the story, vilifying Sherrod for her racism. By Wednesday, everyone else was wrong except Fox News.

This video was recorded on Tuesday, July 20, 2010. Maddow links up several stories that link ACORN, Sherrod, NAACP, and other ‘scandals.’ All go back to www.biggovernment.com. That would be Andrew Breitbart’s less than reputable website.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Maddow continues to ask, whose next? Whose next in the Fox/Breitbart sites? We all know what the object is.

Shep Smith takes on his own network over Shirley Sherrod

MoonHowler

According to Huffington Post, Smith stated the following:

“We here at Studio B did not run the video and did not reference the story in any way for many reasons, among them: we didn’t know who shot it, we didn’t know when it was shot, we didn’t know the context of the statement, and because of the history of the videos on the site where it was posted, in short we do not and did not trust the source.”

Smith was speaking of Breitbart’s websites, specifically, www.biggovernment.com. Shep Smith also took on the White House. He has a reputation for standing up for right and wrong, as he perceives it, even if it goes against the party line of Fox News.

Alan Colmes Gets Corey Stewart on the Ropes

MoonHowler

In a recent interview with Corey as a guest on his radio show, Alan Colmes tried to convince Corey Stewart that begging the US governemnt to sue Virginia is fool-hearty and expensive. Corey disagreed that such a law suit could cost the state millions defending itself.

Furthermore, Stewart continued to say that our local law is almost identical to Arizona’s law. That statement simply is not true and Corey knows it. Why lie if he is so sure he is right.

NAACP Releases Video of Shirley Shirrod’s Speech

MoonHowler

Update: 7/21/10

Here are the original videos posted on Fox Nation on Monday 7/19:

The other video can be found at http://www.thefoxnation.com/culture/2010/07/19/caught-tape-obama-official-discriminates-against-white-farmer

end of update

Apparently racism got Ms. Sherrod once again. This is her full speech. Whoever altered the video that went viral on Monday knew exactly what they were doing.

Ms Sherrod’s story is a far cry from the crap someone was feeding us. Let’s see, did Fox News and Andrew Breitbart work this one out together? I need to apologize for jumping the gun and saying this lady needed to be fired. I have not yet heard that apology from the one who distributed the short, altered video. I didn’t hear Fox apologize either. I did hear Glenn Beck pointing fingers at Bad Obama.

Without further ado, the video is long. It should be watched, at least first first 10 minutes.

Quite a Set Up

MoonHowler

From Huffington Post:

Shirley Sherrod Resigns From USDA Post After Racism Controversy Get Politics Alerts

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is standing by its quick decision to oust a black Agriculture Department employee over racially tinged remarks at an NAACP banquet in Georgia, despite evidence that her remarks were misconstrued and growing calls for USDA to reconsider.

Shirley Sherrod, who until Tuesday was the Agriculture Department’s director of rural development in Georgia, says the administration caved to political pressure by pushing her to resign for saying that she didn’t give a white farmer as much help as she could have 24 years ago when she worked for a nonprofit group.

Sherrod says her remarks, delivered in March at a local NAACP banquet in Georgia, were part of a story about racial reconciliation, not racism. The white farming family that was the subject of the story stood by Sherrod and said she should keep her job.

“We probably wouldn’t have (our farm) today if it hadn’t been for her leading us in the right direction,” said Eloise Spooner, the wife of farmer Roger Spooner of Iron City, Ga. “I wish she could get her job back because she was good to us, I tell you.”

The NAACP, which initially condemned Sherrod’s remarks and supported Sherrod’s ouster, joined the calls for her to keep her job. The civil rights group said it and millions of others were duped by the conservative website that posted partial video of her speech on Monday.

“We have come to the conclusion we were snookered … into believing she had harmed white farmers because of racial bias,” said the statement from NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous.

A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said President Barack Obama was briefed on the matter after Sherrod’s resignation and stands by the Agriculture Department’s handling of it.

The website, biggovernment.com, gained fame last year after airing video of workers at the community group ACORN counseling actors posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend. It posted the Sherrod video as evidence that the NAACP, which recently passed a resolution condemning what it calls racist elements of the Tea Party, condones racism of its own.

Sherrod said she was on the road Monday when USDA deputy undersecretary Cheryl Cook called her and told her the White House wanted her to resign because her comments were generating a cable news controversy.

This episode to destroy the Obama presidency shows me that there are people out there who will say or do anything to accomplish their goals. After the conservative stations spend the day yesterday beating the war drums over Ms. Sherrod, today she becomes the victim because she was fired. I am totally disgusted.

It is all very transparent. Where was the hue and cry yesterday when Ms. Sherrod was Satan Incarnate? How many lives is Andrew Breitbart going to affect? Does he just pinpoint minorities? I hope Sherrod sues his pants off.

Virginia Budget Faux Surplus

MoonHowler

From The Washington Examiner  7/19/10:

 

Virginia’s government is in surplus, and the McDonnell administration couldn’t be happier. So, too, are state workers, who were promised a three percent bonus if the state finished its fiscal year in the black.

But is Virginia’s surplus really all it’s cracked up to be? Republican Delegate Bob Marshall put it this way:

To say Virginia ended the fiscal year with a surplus when we decided not to pay all the bills i.e. VRS (I did not vote for the final version of the budget because taxes and fees were added which did not pass both chambers or which were rejected), is to be caught speeding with literary license.

Needless to say, Marshall’s pith doesn’t fit the narrative being peddled by McDonnell and others, who very much want the world (and credulous talk show hosts) to believe the books were balanced and a surplus generated without gimmicks or tax hikes.

Here’s McDonnell pitching his story to Sean Hannity. No taxes raised? A model for Washington politicians to follow? Sorry, Sean. They already do.

Marshall’s point about the VRS – Virginia’s state employee retirement system – is an important one. To help make the budget numbers work, the General Assembly declined to make a $620 million payment into the VRS. They say they will, at some future date, and with interest. But that’s playing with fire.  A review of state pension plans from the American Enterprise Institute put Virginia’s unfunded liabilities at nearly $53 billion – 17 percent of state GDP.

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