The Decline of the Civil-Rights Establishment

Shelby Steele (who is black enough to comment) talks about the Civil-Rights establishment and its foot-stomping tantrum because it was not able to intimidate the jury into convicting George Zimmerman.

The verdict that declared George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin was a traumatic event for America's civil-rights establishment, and for many black elites across the media, government and academia. When you have grown used to American institutions being so intimidated by the prospect of black wrath that they invent mushy ideas like "diversity" and "inclusiveness" simply to escape that wrath, then the crisp reading of the law that the Zimmerman jury displayed comes as a shock.

On television in recent weeks you could see black leaders from every background congealing into a chorus of umbrage and complaint. But they weren't so much outraged at a horrible injustice as they were affronted by the disregard of their own authority. The jury effectively said to them, "You won't call the tune here. We will work within the law."

[snip]

Why did the civil-rights leadership use its greatly depleted moral authority to support Trayvon Martin? This young man was, after all, no Rosa Parks—a figure of indisputable human dignity set upon by the rank evil of white supremacy. Trayvon threw the first punch and then continued pummeling the much smaller Zimmerman. Yes, Trayvon was a kid, but he was also something of a menace. The larger tragedy is that his death will come to very little. There was no important principle or coherent protest implied in that first nose-breaking punch. It was just dumb bravado, a tough-guy punch.

The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon's cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America's inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural "truth" that is the sole source of the leadership's dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership's very reason for being.

The purpose of today's civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism. This idea of victimization is an example of what I call a "poetic truth." Like poetic license, it bends the actual truth in order to put forward a larger and more essential truth—one that, of course, serves one's cause. Poetic truths succeed by casting themselves as perfectly obvious: "America is a racist nation"; "the immigration debate is driven by racism"; "Zimmerman racially stereotyped Trayvon." And we say, "Yes, of course," lest we seem to be racist. Poetic truths work by moral intimidation, not reason.

Read the whole thing.

Ramirez on Race and the Media

Ramirez on the Rolling Stone cover

R

Guess which one the press focuses on.

Ramirez on Sharpton

Reaganomics vs.Obamanomics

Ted Cruz: Reaganomics: you start a business in your parents’ garage. Obamanomics: you move into your parents’ garage.

Adam Carolla Trashes HuffPost for Calling Him Racist (AUDIO)

Comedian Adam Carolla savaged the Huffington Post for calling him a racist, shooting back that the organization is full of cowards and accusing it of perpetuating the problem of “black-on-black” and “brown-on-brown” crime. Carolla said the website and those who cover for politicians like California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom “all have blood on your hands.”

Go to the link for the audio.

Mona Yvette Nelson and the 12-year old child burned to death with a BLOW TORCH!

Need to keep the focus on Martin-Zimmerman so this won't see the light of day in the MSM.

First, let's kill all the TV producers

From R.S. McCain

Why is it so difficult for people to understand this? About 30 people get shot to death every day in America — more than 200 a week, nearly 1,000 a month — and most of those shootings are just local news. If you exclude mass-murder sprees, shooting deaths very seldom become national news, and very rarely does this kind of one-on-one shooting become the sort of story that gets nationwide coverage for more than a day or two. So . . . why?

You care about this case because TV producers decided you should care about the case, and I seem to be the only person who wonders why America has decided to outsource to TV producers the decision about which homicides are truly important. Are TV producers really wiser, more virtuous, more intelligent than everybody else in America?

This is infuriating. The other day a pervert just released by a judge. Pervert goes to the mall, follows a 10-year-old girl and her mother to their car, violently rapes the girl and stabs the mother to death. TV producers don't care.

Two men rape 16-year-old prostitute and throw her off a three story building. TV producers ignore the story.  Here's one of the perps.

If Obama had a son, would he throw a teenage prostitute off a roof?

Some victims of crime are more equal than others. Some crimes are ignored by the national media and some crimes are not. These decisions are made by TV producers, and by political activists whose agendas have very little to do with justice (or with peace).

Ho-hum, say the media. Just another 16-year-old Internet call girl thrown off the top of a three-story building in Brooklyn.

Ho-hum, say the media. Just another pervert raping a 10-year-girl and stabbing her mother to death at a mall near Syracuse.

Let’s just ignore those stories, say Piers Morgan and Martin Bashir and Anderson Cooper and George Stephanopoulos, because stories like that aren’t really important in the way that a 17-year-old getting shot by a half-Peruvian in Florida is important.

Terrorists kill a U.S. ambassador? Trayvon Martin!

IRS targets the president’s opposition? Trayvon Martin!

Detroit goes bankrupt? Trayvon Martin!

No matter what story you might consider to be genuinely newsworthy, TV producers decide Trayvon Martin is more important.

We don’t have a race problem in America.

We have a liberal problem in America.

The blame-shifting, guilt-tripping, grievance-mongering Victimhood Sweepstakes mentality, which paralyzes individual initiative and invites us to rationalize our problems as resulting from indomitable historic trends over which we have no control — that’s the problem.

Stacy McCain: Take his Gun Aways and George Zimmerman might have been Matthew Shepard

And if we had known then what we seem to know now, that Trayvon took off running because his idiot friend Rachel Jeantel warned him that the “creepy-ass cracker” might be a homosexual pedophile — hey, that’s what she told Piers Morgan, and nobody is calling Rachel Jeantel a liar, are they? — how different might our perceptions of this case have been in the spring of 2012?

Think about it: George Zimmerman, victim of an anti-gay hate crime, beaten bloody by an angry young homophobe — well, if he hadn’t had a pistol, George might have been Matthew Shepard!

Silly as that analogy may seem, is it really a more far-fetched hypothetical than half-white Obama walking back from the store in his hoodie with his Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea getting shot to death by a half-Peruvian neighborhood watch captain in a crime-plagued townhouse community? Maybe that kind of stuff happened 35 years ago and it just didn’t make the headlines in 1978 or something.

 

Is Your City the Next Detroit?

Detroit’s bankruptcy filing is one depressing read. Poverty, crime, blight – you name the malady and there’s plenty of data to back it up. And unfortunately, Detroit’s not alone. You may be wondering which city hits the wall next.

I’m not making predictions, but I’ve looked at one indicator that may offer some clues: population loss.

As any good Ponzi Schemer will tell you, your future looks much better when there are more people moving in than moving out. Once the population change turns negative, a vicious circle can take hold, and that’s exactly what we saw in Detroit.

And Brains Still Be Dead and Not Concealing.

Vanderleun comments:

And Brains Still Be Dead and Not Concealing.

A mind is a terrible thing to be wasted. Poor sad, bitter, and self-unmade woman. Twenty years of schooling, they put you on the day shift, and you still can't write or think clearly. You. Are. Doomed. But just keep voting for everyone and everything that has doomed you all you life.

Unforgivable: Only God Forgives Is One of the Worst Movies Ever Made

I don't go to movies so I never read movie reviews, but this one is worth the price of admission.

Gruesomely grotesque and pathologically pretentious, a diabolical horror called Only God Forgives may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is unquestionably in the top five. It reunites the usually reliable Ryan Gosling with the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, whose work I admired (prematurely, it seems) two years ago in the moody, shocking and perversely fascinating Drive. There is nothing remotely compelling about this one. I should have suspected as much. Premiering in May at the Cannes Film Festival, Only God Forgives was viciously barbecued by the critics after the film was booed so loudly that Ryan Gosling didn’t even show up for the red carpet. Now I know why.

Ultra-violent, demented, plotless, creepy, meat-headed and boring, this is nothing more than a depraved travesty of abstract expression that wastes the film it’s printed on. Get to the point, you say. What is it about? Absolutely nothing, really. Ryan Gosling, looking dangerously anaesthetized, is an American thug who runs a brutal boxing club that doubles as a drug den in the slums of Bangkok. When his sub-mental brother rapes and slaughters a teenage whore, her father slices his head off. Enter a catatonic cop, who proceeds to Cuisinart everyone in sight, and Gosling’s mother Crystal, the despicable, drunken, pill-popping bottle-blonde nymphomaniac head of a family drug empire who travels 10,000 miles to lick her pomegranate-red lips over the corpse of the rapist son, with whom she has obviously been having an incestuous affair for years. This hag is played by none other than Kristin Scott Thomas, who may think she’s slumming, but instead trashes a big chunk of her otherwise respectable career. After she unfavorably compares the size of Gosling’s penis with her dead prodigal son’s johnson, Gosling tells her, “He raped and killed a 16-year-old girl!” The mother retorts, “I’m sure he had his reasons.” The audience howls derisively. That’s about as talky as this disaster ever gets. The script contains such a bare minimum of words that it resembles a cadaver ripped clean of flesh by carrion birds. The action is pretty much left up to the benign Thai cop, who throws boiling oil in a man’s face and bashes his head in with the hot skillet. Then he drives sharp metal spikes through another screaming man’s eardrums and scoops out his eyeballs. Between massacres, the cop sings love songs in a karaoke cabaret. I don’t want to tell you what he does with a samurai sword, or how he slashes open Kristin Scott Thomas’s body with a butcher knife before a drooling Gosling inserts his hands and does unspeakable things with her entrails.

Tell us what you really think Rex.

Detroit's Problem is its people.

Via Meadia writes: Detroit Court Case Presents an Impossible Choice.

The problem with Detroit is that they ran out of other people's money. When I say "they" I'm talking about the people who are left. The ones who voted for the past 60 years of corrupt mayors and city council members. The ones who voted for Barack Obama in overwhelming numbers figuring that they could be bailed out from "Obama's Stash."

Why is Detroit the first major Democrat ruled city to go bankrupt? Because the people who ran the city into the ground, who turned it into a semblance of Hiroshima 1945, were not just greedy and corrupt but stupid. They were not content with plucking the golden goose, they enjoyed wielding the axe that killed it, believing with the confidence of the criminal class that another would come along.

However the courts eventually decide, decades of misgovernance, the criminal corruption of the Democratic Party in Detroit, and the depraved indifference of politicians at every level as crooks and hacks conspired together to loot and wreck a great American city have brought us to a place where Detroit’s problems seem almost beyond solution. The saddest part of this story is that there is still much, much more pain to come for a lot of people. Both the residents of current day Detroit and the cops, teachers, firefighters and others who trusted in the promises of Detroit politicians and union officials face a world of hurt.

Detroit is going to need some outside help to get back on its feet, but that help should be tied to deep reform in the way city government works. Many liberals will want to offer the help without requiring reform; many conservatives will want to impose the reform without offering the help. Republicans need to do more than gloat over the ruins, and Democrats need to do more than wring their hands. Detroit can become a great example of a post-blue city emerging from the ashes, but that won’t happen unless some smart people in both parties take the crisis as the call for creative thinking.

Sorry, Mr. Mead, I may be wrong but there are no real technical fixes. Cutting back on pensions, getting rid of the current bunch of crooks, selling off the assets, will not provide a long-term solution to Detroit's fundamental problem. The basis for the trouble Detroit finds itself in is cultural. The bulk of the Detroit's residents aren't that much into working for a living, raising a nuclear family, living for tomorrow. The ones who were, have moved out long ago.

 

The solution to Detroit is to give it back to nature and allow it's residents to find someplace else. Or perhaps live in the thousands of tumbledown shacks and raise a few chickens, a goat and plant some vegetables. Think of a "Green" and rural community.  A few generations ago tens of thousands of sharecroppers flocked to Detroit to get away from Jim Crow and find a well-paying job in the auto factories.  Many may find their roots again, right there in Detroit.  Except it's a lot colder in the winter.

Dragnet: "Don't try to build a new country. Make this one work."

Via Vanderleun

MOBLEY: "You just don't understand."

FRIDAY: Maybe we do, son. Don't think you have a corner on all the virtue vision in the country or that everyone else is fat and selfish and yours is the first generation to come along that's felt dissatisfied--they all have, you know, about different things; and most of them didn't have the opportunity and freedoms that you have.

"Let's talk poverty. In most parts of the world, that's not a problem, it's a way of life. And rights? They're liable to give you a blank stare because they may not know what you're talking about.

"The fact is, more people are living better right here than anyone else ever before in history. So don't expect us to roll over and play dead when you say you're dissatisfied. It's not perfect, but it's a great deal better than when we grew up: a hundred men standing in the street hoping for one job; selling apples on the street corner-- that's one of the things we were dissatisfied about; and you don't see that much anymore..."

GANNON: "You're taller, stronger, healthier, and you live longer than the last generation ...

Read the whole thing.

Delaware Tax Chief Says That Snooping into Christine O'Donnell's Tax Records was "Routine."

The director of Delaware’s tax-collection office said Friday that his agency accessed the federal tax records in 2010 of an unnamed taxpayer, believed to be former GOP Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell.

Patrick Carter, director of the state’s division of revenue, would not identify Ms. O'Donnell as the taxpayer but said he approved the inquiry “for routine purposes.”

And wouldn't you know it, a "computer glitch" suddenly appears that shows there's a tax lien on a house she doesn't own. Funny how convenient those computer glitches are for her opponents ... in both parties.

 

And the Federal Government says there's no crime, just an accident, nothing to see, move on.

ObamaCare Datebase worse than NSA

Would you trust thousands of low-level Federal bureaucrats and contractors with one-touch access to your private financial and medical information? Under Obamacare you won’t have any choice. As the Obamacare train-wreck begins to gather steam, there is increasing concern in Congress over something called the Federal Data Services Hub. The Data Hub is a comprehensive database of personal information being established by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to implement the federally facilitated health insurance exchanges. The purpose of the Data Hub, according to a June 2013 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, is to provide “electronic, near real-time access to federal data” and “access to state and third party data sources needed to verify consumer-eligibility information.” In these days of secret domestic surveillance by the intelligence community, rogue IRS officials and state tax agencies using private information for political purposes, and police electronically logging every license plate that passes by, the idea of the centralized Data Hub is making lawmakers and citizens nervous.

And what will they be able to see?

The massive, centralized database will include comprehensive personal information such as income and financial data, family size, citizenship and immigration status, incarceration status, social security numbers, and private health information. It will compile dossiers based on information obtained from the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Veterans Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the Social Security Administration, state Medicaid databases, and for some reason the Peace Corps. The Data Hub will provide web-based, one-stop shopping for prying into people’s personal affairs.

You won't have to worry about another Snowden getting access to your personal records. The local ACORN (or it's successor) chapter will be re-named "Navigators" and will be paid to look at them.

The hub will be used on a daily basis by so-called Navigators, which according to the GAO are “community and consumer-focused nonprofit groups, to which exchanges award grants to provide fair and impartial public education” and “refer consumers as appropriate for further assistance.” Thousands of such people will have unfettered access to the Data Hub, but there are only sketchy guidelines on how they will be hired, trained and monitored. Given the slap-dash, incoherent way Obamacare is being implemented the prospect for quality control is low. And the Obama administration’s track record of sweetheart deals, no-bid, sole-source contracting and other means of rewarding people with insider access means the Data Hub will be firmly in the hands of trusted White House loyalists. So if you think the IRS targeting Tea Party groups was bad, just wait for the Obamacare Navigators to be unleashed. “Trust us,” the administration says, no one will abuse the Data Hub. Sure, because that has worked out so well in the past.

Fudging the numbers.

Trayvon Martin was not arrested for stealing jewelry because the school police department wanted to be able to claim that they had reduced the crime rate.  It's fairly certain that if he had, he would still be alive.

And then there's another academic scandal. 

Academic Scandal at Winston-Salem State

Administrators at the university sacrifice academic integrity to make the school’s results look better.

In this historically Black college

Many of the entering students were not prepared for college and required remediation before they were able to take regular college courses. Thus, many of these students were unable to make it through to graduation and that put pressure on the university and faculty to increase success rates. The university’s four-year graduation rate for the university was a mere 14 percent. Since funding from the state is based on graduation rates and a school’s accreditation can be jeopardized by low rates, campus officials were extremely concerned.

Because of WSSU’s low graduation rate, school officials had to decide whether to change its admission standards and move to attract a higher quality of student, or to lower course standards to make it appear that students were more successful. During faculty and staff meetings, this was discussed and the chancellor stated that he did not want to change the “look” of WSSU. Raising admission standards would mean fewer students on campus and therefore less state money flowing in.

The path the administration took was to make it seem as though students were doing better. Of course, there was no official statement to that effect, but I realized that was the case after faculty members began to share their concerns and frustration with me.

Read the whole thing.

Car plunges from Chesapeake Bay bridge, woman lives

It's a very pretty ride. We just drove over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. You can see the ships anchored in the bay before they are brought into port. But there are accidents and when there are, there's not much between you and the water.

A woman swam to safety in the Chesapeake Bay Friday night after her car plunged 40 feet off the Bay Bridge following a collision.

The Trayvon Trademark

It's all about the Benjamins.

Down the Rabbit Hole

WaPo reluctantly reports Terry McAuliffe’s bald-faced debate lie.

Via Redstate.

In the most obvious misstatement of the debate, [Democrat Terry] McAuliffe attacked [Republican Virginia Attorney General Ken] Cuccinelli over the findings of a Richmond prosecutor who had been tasked with investigating Cuccinelli’s financial disclosures.

“If you read the whole report, which I have, it says in here that the attorney general should have been prosecuted,” McAuliffe said, over Cuccinelli’s failure to disclose his stock holdings in Star Scientific and gifts from Williams. McAuliffe also said that because of Cuccinelli’s ties to Williams and Star, which filed a civil tax case against the state, “a judge took the case away from him because of a conflict of interest.”

Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney Michael Herring said in a report last week that he found no evidence that Cuccinelli had violated the law. And it was Cuccinelli’s office that requested recusal from the civil tax case.

“So much is inaccurate,” Cuccinelli said when asked in the debate to respond, “I’ll let the fact checkers take care of it. That one’s gonna get sliced up.”

After the debate, McAuliffe sought to clarify his comment. “On the report — the attorney general could have been prosecuted if we had stronger disclosure laws in Virginia,” McAuliffe said, although Herring’s report did not make that assertion.

You can be sure the Virginian Pilot will repeat McAuliffe's lies verbatim.

“My child is gifted. He’s also 29, unemployed, and living in my basement”

From The Matt Walsh Blog

I don’t respond to most of the negative emails I get from people who listen to my show or read my blog. This one struck a chord, though. Here’s a message I received from a guy named Nick, in reference to a discussion we had on the broad subject of parenting. I think we can all benefit from reading this and confronting the sad reality that this country is full of Nicks:

“Matt, I heard your horrible conversation today about parenting. A few comments in response:

1) Based on your remarks, I have to say I feel bad for your kids. You sound like the sort of person who never should have been a parent. You said you plain to teach your kids “how to think.” I guess this is common in right wing religious fundamentalist households. Personally, I let my child form his own conclusions about things. To impose your views on a child is tantamount to child abuse. Do them a favor, let them think FREELY.

2) You greatly exaggerate the importance of “chores.” Also, the idea that a kid should be forced to “get a job” is abhorrent. My son was very gifted so we gave him all the tools to succeed academically. This meant we didn’t turn him into slave labor and we certainly didn’t tell him he needed to go work behind a cash register. He concentrated on his school work, and we did our job as parents and financially supported him.

3) It’s easy to mock a “30 year old who lives with is parents.” My son is almost 29 and he’s been home with us since he graduated.

....

Read the rest of the letter. The response is entertaining.

An Honest Conversation About Race

Here they go again. “They” being the outrage-machine, the institutional left. Now that the jury returned the only possible verdict based on the actual evidence in the Zimmerman case, we’re being told we need to have a “national conversation” or an “honest conversation” about race. I would actually welcome an honest discussion about race, but the truth is that’s not the conversation we’re going to have.

You see, an honest discussion about race wouldn’t start with the premise that Trayvon Martin is the Emmett Till of the 21st century. Till was tortured then murdered in cold blood for flirting with a white woman. At the time Trayvon Martin was killed, he was sitting on top of George Zimmerman, pounding Zimmerman’s head into a concrete sidewalk. We’re not having an honest conversation until those things are acknowledged by the people demanding an honest dialogue.

Read the whole thing.

The Lynching

Bill Whittle is merciless on the liars that sold us the Trayvon Martin - George Zimmerman story and held a journalistic lynching.



The same ones who sold us the Barack Obama Story.

You know what? When Obama told us that he could have been Trayvon Martin 35 years ago he was right.  He was a thug then and a thug now.  Of course when Obama was 17 he was going to an exclusive prep school in Hawaii and taking drugs.  So he was Trayvon plus an education.

Pure Detroit

Are Blacks Un-assimilating?

Rush Limbaugh responded to a caller about the assimilation of Hispanics by making a fairly long digression about the Black movement from integration to Balkanization. 

It's actually blacks who are not only not assimilating, they appear to be regressing. There's actually an opinion piece about this at PJ Media. ...

Now, our caller, Eileen, said that she saw something recently, and I found out what she saw. It's a Wall Street Journal editorial called, "America's Assimilating Hispanics."

The Journal claims that they have seen evidence that showed that Hispanics are following the path of earlier immigrants and are assimilating into a singular American culture. Now, Eileen believed it. She read it. She believed it. It's a 2007 editorial that is being re-circulated. You have to keep in mind when you read it, though, that the Wall Street Journal is very much a pro-amnesty organization. Not just the editorial page, but the entire newspaper is what I call "open borders."

...In fact they're not only not assimilating, they're regressing. They are Balkanizing, if you will. Now, both of those assertions are fascinating. In the case of the first one, the Journal and the Hispanic assimilation, you do have to read that knowing full well that the Journal's in favor of amnesty and open borders. If all that assimilating is taking place, then why do we hear even more often in our society, "Press 1 for English"? Why is the audience for Telemundo and Univision, both those networks, growing?

... I think NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucasians are having conventions either at the same time or back-to-back, and in both places Holder and Obama are being pressured to do something about this Zimmerman thing and the travesty of justice.

Now, you would think that President Obama would try to rise above this and do what everybody thought that he was automatically going to do by virtue of being the first African-American -- and that's unite everybody. But he's not doing that. He's got this constituency to serve. He's got the CBC, the Congressional Black Caucasians. He's got the NAACP. Holder, the same thing. They're out there, and they're dangling a carrot in front of these people.

"Don't worry, Zimmerman's not off the hook yet."

We just had a jury trial, and we just had a verdict, and we just had everybody involved say race wasn't part of it. But because it didn't turn out the way the left wants, that's not the end of it. "No, we're not gonna stop until we get what we want. If we have to put pressure on Obama," and I don't know how much it will really take. "If we have to put pressure on Obama or Holder to get what they want, what are Obama and Holder gonna do?"

..."What Do You Do When the Oppressed are Their Own Worst Oppressors?" PJ Media, David Goldman. He starts this way: "My earliest memory is looking up at a circle of black and white faces. I was seated in the living room of the family home in Edison Township, NJ, and the group I saw was the local chapter of the NAACP. My association with the civil rights movement goes back to the age of two. The year would have been 1953 or 1954, and my parents were left-wing activists, among the very few white people involved at the time.

"Their activism was deep. In 1950, my father drove from New York with a group of Columbia University students to protest the impending execution of Willie McGee, a black man convicted and eventually electrocuted for the alleged rape of a white woman in Mississippi. I followed my parents' example: in my senior year of high school I organized and led a student civil rights demonstration and marched next to Andrew Young. You can look it up. I believe in civil rights as much now as I did then.

..."That's why it's painful to watch the degeneration of the NAACP with its silly petition to persuade the Justice Department to bring a civil rights case against George Zimmerman. The leaders of what used to be a civil rights movement want to talk about everything but the main problem afflicting black people in the United States. That is the breakdown of the black family. Just 29% of black women over the age of 15 were married in 2010, according to the Census Bureau's comprehensive Current Population Survey.

"That compares to 54% of white women. At all ages, black women were about half as likely to be married as white women. That is an astonishing number," he writes. "The percentage of out-of-wedlock births has risen from 18% in 1980 to 40% in 2010. Twenty-nine percent of white births were non-marital, against 73% for black births. That's nearly three-quarters of all black births," occur outside of marriage.

"Young black men without a high school diploma are more likely to be in jail than to be employed, reports the Pew Institute," which did the scholarly research. So Mr. Goldman gets to his real point here in the lead sentence of the next paragraph. "The worst oppressors of young black men are older black men who abandon their children. And the second-worst oppressors of young black men are other young black men -- 94% of black murder victims are killed by blacks.

"The accelerating decline of the black family portends a much worse situation in the future. Why have civil rights organizations and black clergy wagered their reputations on the Zimmerman case? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the issues that really concern African-Americans simply are too painful to discuss," and there it is. You just can't talk about it, Rush. "Five years after the ultimate boost to self-esteem -- the election of the first black president -- things are getting worse faster.

"If black leaders -- from Barack Obama and Eric Holder on down -- can't talk about the real problems, the prospects for the future are frightening indeed," and he has a postscript here where he says, "Conservatives should view African-Americans’ emotional response to the death of Trayvon Martin with empathy. What makes the incident so hard to bear is that so many young black men die every day through involvement in violent crime." However, it's 94% black-on-black crime.

Anyway, I read this, and, again: This has stuff that you're not supposed to say.

You're supposed to leave this alone.

ls Al Sharpton the Voice of Black America?

Jonah Goldberg recounts for us the unsavory history of the despicable Al Sharpton. The Al Sharpton of the Tawanda Brawley hoax, of the Crown Heights riots and murder, of the Freddy's Fashion Mart fiery deaths.

Goldberg asks the question of why Sharpton is embraced and empowered by the Liberal elite.  We know where he gets the microphone.  Here's the puzzle: where's his money, and how does a penniless man get invited to join the membership of the Grand Havana Room? 

 Taking up the penthouse floor of 666 Fifth Avenue, the Grand Havana Room is a private, invitation-only cigar club and four-star restaurant. Through its windows, you can see the toiling salary men 39 floors below as they scurry about like ants, some furtively smoking in doorways, ever fearful of Nanny Bloomberg’s All-Seeing Eye.

Named by Business Insider as one of the “11 exclusive clubs Wall Streeters are dying to get into,” the Grand Havana Room is where power brokers and celebrities hobnob with captains of industry in one of the last places where it’s still legal to smoke in the Big Apple.

Immune as I am to the seductions of class resentment and Jacobin envy, I will admit it: I love the place. If invited, and if I could afford it, I’d join.

The one question I have is: Who’s paying for Al Sharpton’s membership?

“The Rev” is an omnipresent member of the club. After his MSNBC show, he’ll swing by for dinner and cigars amid the other Masters of the Universe. I couldn’t confirm that he repaired there after he broadcast his radio show, Keeping It Real, from Zuccotti Park to show his solidarity with the 99-percenters.

The reason I ask who’s paying for his membership is that Sharpton’s relationship with money has always been complicated. When he claimed he didn’t have the resources to pay damages in a defamation suit he lost, Sharpton was asked in a deposition how he could afford his suits. He didn’t own them, he replied, someone else did. He was merely granted “access” to the garments as needed. The same went for his TV, silverware, etc.

 

So it turns out that he not only goads his followers to kill the Jews  and the "white Hispanics" and "creepy-ass crackers", he is a tax cheat.   But then, he fits in well with the other members of the Obama administration.  Which gets us to the headline question.  Al Sharpton manages to stir the passions of a lot of people.  Is he the voice of Black America?  Let me know because if he is we have more reason to be worried that you may think. 

Holder says that Zimmerman can't have his gun back.

Not because he's guilty of murder, he was acquitted.  But it's "evidence."  Of what?  This is just harassment for the sake of appealing to  Holders "people" as he would put it. 

 

As a side note, Jay Carney made a snot nosed comment after he was asked by a 16 year old intern at the White House press briefing if the government was doing anything about protecting Zimmerman and his family in view of the widespread death threats they were receiving.   Much of the Obama Press Corps piled on to young man.  "You can't ask questions, this is the press room."

Killing the Czar: "The House Of Special Purpose"

Around midnight Yakov Yurovsky, the superintendent of The House of Special Purpose, ordered the Romanovs’ physician, Dr. Eugene Botkin, to awaken the sleeping family and ask them to put on their clothes. The Romanovs were then ordered into a 6×5 meter semi-basement room. Nicholas asked if he could bring two chairs for himself and his wife. A firing squad appeared next and Yurovsky announced:

“ Nikolai Aleksandrovich, your relatives have tried to save you, but they had not to. And we are forced to shoot you by ourselves… ”

Yurovsky then began to read the decision of the Ural Executive Committee (Uralispolkom), and Nicholas said “What?” As the weapons were raised, the Empress and the Grand Duchess Olga, according to a guard’s reminiscence, had tried to cross themselves, but failed amid the shooting. Yurovsky reportedly raised his gun at Nicholas and fired; Nicholas fell dead instantly. The other executioners then began shooting until all the intended victims had fallen. Several more shots were fired at the victims and the doors opened to scatter the smoke. Some survived the gunshots, so executioner P.Z. Yermakov stabbed them with bayonets because the shouts could be heard outside. The last ones to die were Anastasia, Tatiana, Olga, and Maria, who were wearing several pounds (over 1.3 kilograms) of diamonds within their clothing, thus rendering them bullet-proof to an extent. However they were speared with bayonets as well. Olga sustained a gun shot wound to the head while Anastasia and Maria were said to have crouched up against a wall covering their heads in terror until Maria was shot down, and Anastasia had been finished off with the bayonets. Yurovsky himself killed Tatiana and Alexei. Tatiana died from a single bullet through the back of her head. Alexei received two bullets to the head, right behind the ear. Anna Demidova, Alexandra’s maid, survived the initial onslaught but was quickly murdered against the back wall of the basement, stabbed to death while trying to defend herself with a small pillow she had carried into the sub-basement that was filled with precious gems and jewels. Military commissar Peter Ermakov, in a drunken haze, stabbed at the dead bodies of the former Czar and Czarina, shattering both their rib cages in a pool of blood.

This brutal murder of a whole family was certainly not the first, nor would it be the last, such action perpetrated by Leftists in their various ‘glorious’ marches to bring about Heaven on Earth [hundreds of millions of souls cry-out to us], but in it, in this one action, is to be found the ultimate representation of where Leftism will always lead: to the slaughter of innocent human beings in the name of ideas — ideology. Logic dictates that there can be no other end.

As long as Leftism is allowed to thrive, to just exist, then the Olga’s, Maria’s, Tatiana’s, Anastasia’s, and Alexis’s of this world are not safe from the barrels of Bolshevik guns. If the Leftists were to control the world, they would turn the whole of it into a House Of Special Purpose.

US Government Reveals Criminal Conspiracy Against Christine O’Donnell.

The phone message earlier this year shocked the battled-scarred candidate, a tea party favorite who knocked off Republican mainstay Michael Castle in the primary before losing in a bid to win Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s former seat.

“Ms. O'Donnell, this is Dennis Martel, special agent with the U.S. Department of Treasury in Baltimore, Md. … We received information that your personal federal tax info may have been compromised and may have been misused by an individual,” he said in the January message left on her cellphone.

For Ms. O'Donnell, the message immediately raised red flags.

On March 9, 2010, the day she revealed her plan to run for the Senate in a press release, a tax lien was placed on a house purported to be hers and publicized. The problem was she no longer owned the house. The IRS eventually blamed the lien on a computer glitch and withdrew it.

Now Mr. Martel, a criminal investigator for the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, was telling her that an official in Delaware state government had improperly accessed her records on that very same day.

Now here's where it becomes a criminal conspiracy:

But the Justice Department has declined to prosecute any of the offenders. Treasury officials have refused to give Mr. Grassley any specifics on the cases or to describe the disposition of Ms. O'Donnell’s case, claiming even people who improperly access tax records have an assumption of privacy under federal tax laws.

Christine O’Donnell was mercilessly mocked and her candidacy was pummeled by everyone on the Left and in the media (but I repeat myself) including the Ruling Class in the Republican Party. But she was apparently considered enough of a threat to have her tax records searched by political criminals.

So what’s a private citizen to do when their tax records are illegally searched and they are told about it, but nothing will be done?

“Hi, I’m from the IRS. We let somebody comb through your tax records looking for damaging information. Oh, no, we’re not going to tell you who it is. Have to protect their privacy. And we’re not going to do anything about it. Have a nice day.”

Team Obama is a corrupt Southern Sheriff in the Jim Crow South … in blackface.

New York may seek to reduce power for 3rd straight day

Biggest city in US joins the Third World.

New York State's power grid operator said it might ask some of its customers in its power reduction programs to limit electricity use for a third day as people crank up air conditioners to escape the brutal heat wave.

All the while the EPA and Team Obama demand the end of coal fired power plants.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Would Not Wear A Hoodie

Dr. Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., rejected the now-viral image showing the late civil rights leader wearing a hoodie just like the one Travyon Martin wore the night of his death.

“Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would very likely not wear a hoodie,” she said. “I can assure you he would not wear sagging pants.”

I'm not sure.  I'll let them figure it out.  He's dead and the dead can be shredded, molded and shaped into anything people want to use them for.

TO AVOID LOOKING LIKE A CRIMINAL, DON’T COMMIT A CRIME

Ann Coulter recalls another Treyvon Martin - George Zimmerman encounter:

The case most like George Zimmerman's is the Edmund Perry case. In 1985, Perry, a black teenager from Harlem who had just graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, mugged a guy who turned out to be an undercover cop. He got shot and a few hours later was dead.

Instead of waiting for the facts, the media rushed out with a story about Officer Lee Van Houten being a trigger-happy, racist cop. When that turned out to be false, The New York Times looked at its shoes. It was the kind of story the elites wanted to be true. It should be true. We had such high hopes for that one. Damn!

The initial news accounts stressed not only that Perry was a graduate of Exeter on his way to Stanford, but that he was unarmed. (In all white-on-black shootings, the media expect the white to have RoboCop-like superpowers to detect any weapons on the perp as well as his resume.)

A few weeks after the shooting, The New York Times called Perry "a prized symbol of hope." In a telling bit of obtuseness, The Times said that "all New Yorkers have extraordinary reasons to wish for the innocence of the young man who was killed." I doubt very much that the cop being accused of being a murderous racist hoped for that.

An article in The Village Voice explained: "[L]ike so many other victims in this city," Perry was "just too black for his own good."

Luckily for the policeman, Perry had mugged him in a well-lit hospital parking lot. Twenty-three witnesses backed the officer's story in testimony to the grand jury. (Unlike Zimmerman, Van Houten's case was at least presented to a grand jury.)

As I wrote in "Mugged": "God help Officer Van Houten if he had been mugged someplace other than a hospital parking lot with plenty of witnesses." Such as, for example, a dark pathway in The Retreat at Twin Lakes. There weren't 23 witnesses backing Zimmerman's story, only about a half-dozen. But, as with Van Houten, the evidence overwhelmingly corroborated Zimmerman's story.

In Van Houten's case, even after it was blindingly clear that Perry had mugged him, the truth was only revealed amid great sorrow. When the facts were unknown, the cop was a racist. When it turned out Perry had mugged the cop, it was no one's fault, but a problem of "violence," "confusion" and "two worlds" colliding.

Perhaps, someday, blacks will win the right to be treated like volitional human beings. But not yet.

Read the whole thing.

Black man who shot unarmed white teen acquitted. MSM not interested.

From Rochester, NY

Not guilty: The verdict in the manslaughter trial of Roderick Scott. After more than 19 hours of deliberations over two days, a jury acquitted the Greece man in the shooting death of Christopher Cervini, 17, last April. ...

Cervini's family members say justice wasn't served. They say Christopher was murdered in cold blood, that he'd never been in trouble and Scott acted as judge, jury and executioner.

"The message is that we can all go out and get guns and feel anybody that we feel is threatening us and lie about the fact,” said Jim Cervini, Christopher’s father. “My son never threatened anybody. He was a gentle child, his nature was gentle, he was a good person and he was never, ever arrested for anything, and has never been in trouble. He was 16 years and four months old, and he was slaughtered."

Like NBC I edited this story to make it fit, proving I am ready to take my place among the leading members of Big Media.

 

Pictures of a 10-year-old Christopher Cervini were not available. A lawyer and a PR agent with ties to the NY Times, MSNBC and the alphabet networks had not yet been hired.

Four Children Gunned Down in Chicago During Zimmerman Trial

On June 28, five-year-old Sterling Sims was killed in a double murder that also claimed the life of his mother, 31-year-old Chavonne Brown. Both were shot in their apartment, and police believe the motive was robbery.

On July 1, 16-year-old Antonio Fenner was gunned down on the sidewalk next to the body of a 32-year-old man who had gang ties. No arrests were made, and no suspects have been named. Fenner’s mother believes her son was in the wrong place at the wrong time, because no one in her family knew the other victim or what Fenner’s association was to him.

The reason you won't be reading about this and there won't be marches to stop the killing is because they don't have a high powered law firm and a PR agent who will work together for a big multi-million payday.

The People Behind St. Treyvon and the Big Money Payout

The story is very long and not well formatted, but it's like a bright light in a dark room.  If you ever wondered how this story was shaped, kneaded, molded and fed to the public via a sympathetic media, this is a must read.

Trayvon Martin and the "Crips"

Via The Other McCain (some allegations)

Here’s something else you don’t know. From the age of 3 until age 15 or 16, Trayvon Martin lived NOT with Sybrina Fulton but with Tracy Martin, a known member of the Crips, and his then-wife Alicia Stanley-Martin, who was mentioned above. Alicia Stanley-Martin in that interview with Anderson Cooper said Trayvon spent 90% of his life in her home being raised with her two daughters from a previous relationship.

When Tracy Martin dumped Alicia for Brandy he sent Trayvon to live with Sybrina — a woman he hardly knew. The two didn’t get along at all. Sybrina kicked Trayvon out two days before he ju.mped Zimmerman

It is also alleged that Tracy initiated "... Trayvon into the Crips, including purchasing illegal guns on the street."

The reason this bears looking into is that the Crips are not know to stop before they kill someone. If this is true, George Zimmerman may have been killed if he had not had a gun. It also give impetus to the suspicion that the Martin family is cold-bloodedly cashing in on Trayvon’s death.

The REAL crime

Baby shot in face by robber

These are the reasons why this killing will not hit the national news headlines in the MSM.




The mother

The child

The killer

‘Hope this juror b*tch gets raped’: ‘Justice for Trayvon’ mob hopes Juror B37 suffers rape and death

Big Race and Big Media getting what it wants.

So on the list of common causes of death for black youths, where does “member of neighborhood watch with a concealed carry permit” rank?

Frank J. asks the headline question.  And it's a good one.

If it were not for DRUDGE, people who don’t live in Chicago would not know the carnage that occurs there in a typical week. To solve the murder problem, Mayor Emanuel should ship the people living in certain sections of Chicago to Baghdad. But perhaps that would be unfair to the Iraqis.

The entire Martin-Zimmerman case was ginned up by Big Race and brought to America’s front steps by Big Media. It was never about race. It was always about money. Money for the Martin family to cash in on their son’s death. About members of the Big Race industry looking for contributions from the gullible and “protection” from the fearful. And Big Media are pumping up their viewer numbers so they can charge bigger ad rates. And all it took was a dead punk and a “creepy-ass cracker” who will have to wear a bulletproof vest for the rest of his life. The ones who get richer off the remains figure that it’s a pretty good day.

Racist Hispanic Cracka Uses Head and Face to Attack Black Gang's Fists and Feet

"This is for Trayvon"

HOLDER ORDERS SKYPE TO ALLOW NSA SURVEILLANCE

Via Slate

June 2008: Skype, while owned by eBay, goes on record saying it can’t help law enforcement agencies eavesdrop on users’ conversations because of its “peer-to-peer architecture and encryption techniques.”


[Unknown month, 2008: Secretly, Skype initiates an internal program called “Project Chess” to explore how it could make Skype calls readily available to intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials, according to the New York Times.]


September 2009: Skype is purchased by an investor group including two U.S. private equity firms Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz in partnership with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.


[November 2010: Work begins on integrating Skype into the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program, according to the Guardian.]


[Feb. 4, 2011: Skype is served with a directive to comply with NSA surveillance signed by the U.S. attorney general, according to the Guardian.] [That would be Attorney General Eric Holder]


[Feb. 6, 2011: Skype joins the PRISM program and the NSA begins spying on Skype calls. The agency reports that "feedback indicated that a collected Skype call was very clear and the metadata looked complete," according to the Guardian and the Washington Post.]


May 2011: Microsoft announces it is purchasing Skype for $8.5 billion.


June 2011: Microsoft obtains a patent for “legal intercept” technology designed to be used with services like Skype to “silently copy” communications.


[July 2012: The NSA boasts that a new capability has tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through PRISM, according to the Guardian.]


July 20, 2012: Skype refuses to answer repeated questions about whether it can or cannot comply with government surveillance.


July 26, 2012: Skype’s Mark Gillett writes a blog post dismissing media reports about Skype eavesdropping, which he says “we believe are inaccurate.”


March 2013: Microsoft publishes a transparency report claiming that it handed over the content of zero Skype communications in 2012. The company also claims that “Skype continues to operate under Luxembourg law.”


June/July 2013: The Guardian, the Washington Post, and the New York Times expose the extent of Skype’s collaboration with the U.S. government on surveillance.

Slate makes Microsoft the focus, completely ignores Eric Holder's key involvement.

Miami-Dade Schools Could Have Saved Travyon Martin’s Life by Arresting Him

Robert Stacy McCain

Leniency is not always mercy when dealing with juvenile delinquents, and I say this on the basis of my own experience of having been a teenage dopehead in the ’70s. My hoodlum buddies got away with a lot of stuff, but we also caught a time or two, and Sheriff Earl Lee was not the kind of man a dopehead hoodlum could take lightly.

...

The February 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martion might never have happened if school officials in Miami-Dade County had not instituted an unofficial policy of treating crimes as school disciplinary infractions. Revelations that emerged from an internal affairs investigation explain why Martin was not arrested when caught at school with stolen jewerly in October 2011 or with marijuana in February 2012. Instead, the teenager was suspended from school, the last time just days before he was shot dead by George Zimmerman.

The MSM insist on talking about mistakes that the “white Hispanic” otherwise known as “creepy-ass cracker” George Zimmerman made. Zimmerman was caught in a dark night getting sucker-punched and knocked to the ground because my guess is that he did not believe Trayvon Martin would attack him. That was a mistake.

But Trayvon Martin made a bigger mistake. He appeared to believe he could take the “creepy-ass cracker” out by hitting him in the face, straddling him when he went down and trying to beat him, possibly to death. One thing he did not take into account is that the man he was trying to injure or kill had a gun. Trayvon Martin made lots of mistakes in his short life; that was his last one.

NSA Spying

This must be part of the "smart diplomacy" that Obama brought to the table. 

I hope he reads about it in the paper so he can denounce it.

DRUDGE

Bolivia's Morales Says U.S. Hacked Top Officials' Emails...

---

 Snowden accuses U.S. officials of 'threatening behavior'...

GREENWALD WARNS: SNOWDEN BETTER NOT BE HARMED...

Controls dangerous information that could become USA's 'worst nightmare'...
Revelations stir anti-US feeling...

Govt's worldwide view America as arrogant superpower...

Headaches, distractions for White House...

Secrecy concerns mount in 2nd term...

Shapiro: Zimmerman’s not guilty verdict shines troubling light on prosecutor’s decision-making

From the Washington Times:

The jury in the Trayvon Martin case on Saturday night acquitted George Zimmerman, but it should never have gotten that far. The Florida State Attorney’s Office should have dismissed their case before submitting it to the jury. That’s what the law required.

The prosecution failed to prove the defendant’s guilt by any standard of evidence. And based on the standard of probable cause, dismissing the case would have been the right thing to do.

Now, the debate begins about whether the Zimmerman case may go down as one of the most meritless and politically motivated prosecutions in history. And the fallout on the streets of America remains to be seen.

Ironically, during its own presentation, the State actually made a case for the defense.

A key witness called by the State who saw the confrontation between Zimmerman and Martin surprised prosecutors when he implied that Martin was actually the attacker.

One police interrogator who was expected to implicate Zimmerman instead testified that the defendant did not appear to demonstrate ill will, hatred or spite toward the alleged victim. Ill will, hatred and spite are the elements required under Florida law to secure a second-degree murder conviction. Once prosecutors realized they couldn’t prove any of those elements, they asked the judge if they could add the lesser manslaughter charge.

Jurors decided the evidence fit neither charge and declared Zimmerman not guilty.

One key police detective testified that he found Zimmerman’s account of how the confrontation ensued credible.

Surprisingly, the prosecution’s case actually sounded a lot like a defense case.

Under Florida Bar Rule 3.8, prosecutors in a criminal case are required to “refrain from prosecuting a charge that the prosecutor knows is not supported by probable cause… or make timely disclosure to the defense of all evidence or information known to the prosecutor that tends to negate the guilt of the accused or mitigates the offense…”

When considering whether or not the State is in compliance with that critical rule, recall the following:

Last year, when charges were originally filed, legal scholars criticized the State for reportedly withholding material evidence that supported Zimmerman’s self-defense claims. They reportedly withheld photographs of Zimmerman’s injuries when originally submitting an affidavit under oath. Florida’s special prosecutor Angela Corey made it clear that she believed it was her job was “to do justice for Trayvon Martin.”

She was wrong.

A prosecutor’s job is to do justice for everyone—and that includes protecting the defendant’s constitutional rights and ensuring he is not wrongly prosecuted without probable cause.

This last point is important because for many people the process of protecting yourself against unjust prosecution can be devastating. Simply by indicting someone, the state can effectively destroy someone's life. Prosecution can be the punishment. Zimmerman will never get his life back despite his acquittal.

The media's prosecution of Zimmerman - a timeline.

Breitbart's "Big Journalism" has the story: Guilty Until Proven Innocent: How the Press Prosecuted Zimmerman While Stoking Racial Tensions.

Here's just the beginning of this "high tech lynching"

February 26, 2012 - George Zimmerman Shoots and Kills Trayvon Martin

Zimmerman claims self-defense. After an investigation, the police agree and decide not to press charges.



March 8, 2012 - The AP Falsely Describes Zimmerman as "White"

The story of the grieving parents of Trayvon Martin demanding Zimmerman be arrested first achieves national attention on March 8 when CBS This Morning runs a report.

Later that same day, the Associated Press throws the first log on the racial fire by inaccurately describing Zimmerman as white.



March 13, 2012 - NBC's Al Sharpton Uses MSNBC Platform to Stoke Phony Racial Narrative

Breitbart editor-in-chief Joel Pollak:

Sharpton devoted a portion of his program on MSNBC, PoliticsNation, to the Trayvon Martin case. He interviewed Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump, who reiterated the accusation that Zimmerman was “white”: “We think Trayvon Martin didn’t know who the heck this white man was who approached him before he got killed.”

Earlier that same day, Sharpton's National Action Network released a statement calling for...

...a “complete and thorough investigation” into Martin’s death. He added: “[W]e are told that racial language was used when the young man reported his suspicions to police[.]”

The story about Zimmerman's use of racial language was false.



March 13, 2012 - ABC News Reporter Claims Trayvon Shot Because "He Was Black"

Read the whole thing.

Zimmerman: Not guilty!

ZIMMERMAN: FREE...
Sheriff appeals for calm...
Police surround community where Martin shot...
CA protesters break windows, start fires...
Teen threatens 'mass homicide' on TWITTER...
NY Giants Star: 'Zimmerman Doesn't Last a Year Before the Hood Catches Up to Him'...
Beyonce holds moment of silence for Trayvon at concert...
AP REPORTER: 'SO WE CAN ALL KILL TEENAGERS NOW?'
Sharpton: 'Slap in the Face'...
NAACP calls on Obama admin to pursue civil rights charges...
PAPER: State never proved case...
Zimmerman attorney: 'Disgraceful'...
Will jury remain anonymous?
TIMELINE: Media's prosecution of Zimmerman...
MIAMI CH. 7 LIVE...
WFOR-TV...

Baba Yetu ...The Lord's Prayer in Swahili.

FYI for the words.

For nine decades, Egypt has fled modernity.

Mark Steyn again.  Read the whole article, it's always worthwhile to read Steyn in full.

It is hard to be too cynical about Egypt ... or about the entire region referred to as Arabia.  Just as you though things are really bad, they get even worse.  Read, for example, Gang Raping Your Way to Democracy

But Egypt is a special case because it is the biggest country in the region with a long history. Forget the Pharaohs, the Romans, the caliphs who ruled, the two millennia of history until the English and French set up a king.

Ninety years ago, Fuad I’s kingdom was a ramshackle Arab approximation of a Westminster constitutional monarchy: Even in its flaws and corruptions, it knew at least what respectable societies were supposed to aspire to. Nasser’s one-party state was worse, Mubarak’s one-man klepto-state worse still, and Morsi’s antidote to his predecessors worst of all — so far.

Steyn gives us the history of "modern" Egypt via the life of Princess Fawzia, the aunt of the last King of Egypt who died the other day at age 91 in Alexandria. 

A long life reminds us of how short history is: Princess Fawzia outlived the Egyptian monarchy, and the Nasserist fascism and pan-Arabism that succeeded it, and the doomed “United Arab Republic” of Egypt and Syria, and the fetid third-of-a-century “stability” of the Mubarak kleptocracy. And she came within 24 hours of outliving the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief, disastrous grip on power. In the days before her death, it was reported that 14 million people took to the streets of Egypt’s cities to protest against Morsi (and Obama and his ambassador Anne Paterson). If so, that’s more than the population of the entire country in the year Princess Fawzia was born. The Mubarak era alone saw the citizenry double from 40 million to 80 million, a majority of which live on less than two dollars a day. The old pharaoh was toppled by his own baby boom, most of whom went for Morsi. The new pharaoh was toppled by his own stupidity. The Muslim Brotherhood waited 85 years for their moment and then blew it in nothing flat.

 

I am being persuaded that people get the government they deserve. 

Gang-Raping Your Way to Democracy

Mark Steyn notes that in Egypt, covering yourself in the body bag known as a hijab, has practical implications.  You are probably less apt to be gang-raped, as long as you stay indoors, that is.

As in the Congolese civil war, where both sides agreed that pygmies made excellent appetizers, in the Egyptian political stand-off, the young men of both pro- and anti-Morsi forces agree on little else except that the chicks are fair game. This ugly aspect has gone strikingly under-reported in America for over two years, ever since CBS chose to downplay the rape of its own correspondent. So I’m very glad NPR chose to do a story on this grim subject, “Sexual Assaults Reportedly Rampant During Egypt Protests.” To put it in the terms famously formulated by Whoopi Goldberg, this isn’t rape-rape but rape-rape-rape:

The rights group says the latest attacks follow an all too familiar pattern since mass protests began in 2011: A few men force a girl or woman away from the people she’s with; rip off her clothes and assault her. Passersby join in the attacks, which range from groping to gang rapes that can last more than an hour.

Congressional Candidate Ron Meyer: Young Americans Are Struggling And Nobody Is Speaking For Them

Ron Meyer is running for Congress in Virginia's 11th District. If elected, he would be one of the youngest members of Congress. What's his plan for the deficit, the economy, and welfare reform? Click to find out.