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Unprecedented: Calderon Slams US From House Floor. Receives Standing Ovation

Lori Ziganto — Thu, 20 May 2010 23:34:14 +0000

From Lori Ziganto’s Latest Article at RedState:

Unprecedented, indeed. But, not surprising, given that our own President has done nothing but the same. I’m wondering if Calderon at least read the Arizona bill first, before demonizing an American state. That would actually be unprecedented, amongst our alleged leaders, at least.

President Obama, for once, forewent bowing. Not to worry, though! The Democrats in Congress picked up his slack and went one further. Standing ovations!

For a foreign leader bashing an American state. From our own House floor.

Not only do the Democrats fail to figuratively stand up for America, but they literally stand up for and applaud those who seek to condemn it. Worse, it is condemnation from the foreign leader whose own country is a primary source of our illegal immigration issues. All compounded by the fact that Arizona was forced to try to deal with their immense problem on their own, since the weak-willed and spineless folks in attendance at the Joint Meeting of Congress refused to do so. You know, the very same ones who are breathlessly applauding and jumping to their feet in sycophantic grand-standing, including two, Janet Napolitano and Eric Holder, who have admitted to not reading the 16 page law. Which I’ve read and can comprehend. Granted, I’m no community organizer or an (alleged) lawyer, but still.

(Click here to see Video and to read the rest)

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Follow Lori on Twitter and read more of her work at Snark and Boobs, iOwntheWorld , Right Wing News and, Hot Air’s Greenroom and Red State.

Obama Ridicules Palin’s Nuclear Expertise

Nancy Morgan — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 10:45:06 +0000

In a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, President Barack Obama on Thursday made perfectly clear that he wasn’t going to take nuclear advice from Sarah Palin.

Obama and Russian President Medvedev yesterday signed a much heralded ”New Start” treaty, a successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

This new treaty will shrink the limit of nuclear warheads to 1,550 each over seven years, down about a third from the current ceiling of 2,200. It also renounces the development of new nuclear weapons.

Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor, weighed in on this supposedly ‘landmark’ blow for world peace by saying Obama’s new policy “was like a child in a playground who says ‘punch me in the face, I’m not going to retaliate.’”

Not one to let any criticism go unchallenged, Obama made clear

that he wasn’t going to take advice from Palin when it comes to decisions on the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

“I really have no response to that. The last I checked, Sarah Palin is not much of an expert on nuclear issues,” Obama said in an interview with ABC News.

Which begs the question: Just when did Obama become a nuclear expert? Does being a community organizer automatically confer nuclear expertise? Or is this another question we’re not supposed to ask?

——

Nancy Morgan is a columnist and news editor for RightBias.com

She lives in South Carolina

Andy Stern and Barack Obama: Fiscal Responsibility Fraudsters

Michelle Malkin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 05:01:34 +0000

Everything you need to know about President Obama’s commitment to fiscal responsibility and cost containment can be summed up in two words: Andy Stern. The profligate, corruption-coddling head of the powerful Service Employees International Union was named to the White House debt commission last week. If Obama thinks Stern holds the cure for our government spending woes, you can be certain his latest health care prescription will be fiscal hemlock.

Obama extolled Stern and his other federal debt panel appointees as “distinguished individuals” who’ll bring a “sense of integrity” to the job. Tell that to rank-and-file SEIU members across the country who have watched their hard-earned dues go down the tubes under Stern’s thugocracy. While fat-cat union bosses toss hundreds of millions of dues into Democratic coffers, low-wage SEIU members’ pension funds are eroding and the organization’s debt is piling up. And federal prosecutors are reviewing requests that the union be investigated for potential illegal lobbying activities at the White House.

More damning: As head of the 2.2 million-member labor union, Stern directly installed a cadre of labor management stooges embroiled in financial scandals across the country.

SEIU crony Tyrone Freeman, like Obama, began his career as an urban community organizer. In 1994, Stern plucked Freeman from Georgia and set his loyalist up as head of Local 6434, the sprawling home-care workers’ chapter in southern California that represents an estimated 160,000 workers who make about $9 an hour caring for the elderly and disabled. Stern then named him a national vice president. It was part of Stern’s grander plan to consolidate power by merging locals into statewide chapters.

An extensive investigation by the Los Angeles Times exposed how Stern’s protege siphoned off hundreds of thousands of dollars in dues money for his personal enrichment and pleasure. Moreover, the paper alleged, Stern helped cover up the scandal. Freeman lived large — piping $600,000 in union contracts to his wife’s video production and entertainment ventures. The local also paid his mother-in-law $8,000 a month to babysit his daughter and other union employees’ children; footed a $13,000 bill for membership at a Beverly Hills cigar club; and forked over $8,000 in union dues to cover expenses for Freeman’s Hawaiian wedding.

Stern’s handpicked flunky also created a nonprofit training shop called the “Homecare Workers Training Center” — ostensibly to provide educational opportunities for nurses.

In practice, the nonprofit served as a conduit to subsidize a childcare business operated by Freeman’s mother-in-law. Freeman’s local also paid another $106,000 to Hollywood talent agency William Morris for “advice and counsel.”

SEIU’s top officials were warned of Freeman’s plundering six years before the paper blew the whistle. After dragging its feet and being forced to act to quell public embarrassment over the Times investigations, SEIU finally threw Freeman under the bus. He rebounded with a new career as a Los Angeles sports agent.

Rickman Jackson, another Stern administration protege and former chief of staff to Freeman, headed Michigan’s largest SEIU chapter before being “reassigned” for three years to a staff organizing job after the revelation of financial shenanigans tied back to Local 6434. While collecting a six-figure annual salary in Michigan, Jackson was drawing a second salary in California and accepted $33,500 in housing payments on a residence listed as the business address of Freeman’s bogus nonprofit housing corporation.

Another Stern administration protege, Annelle Grajeda, rose to power after Stern installed her as president of the 80,000-member Local 721 in Los Angeles. She ascended to positions on the union’s state council and international executive board. Like Freeman and Jackson, Grajeda had been voted onto Stern’s official administration at the SEIU convention in 2008.

Whistleblowers detailed how Grajeda’s ex-boyfriend, SEIU official Alejandro Stephens, collected multiple salaries and consultant fees from the union while also pocketing a salary as a Los Angeles County health services employee. Grajeda arranged for her ex-lover to get an eight-month leave of absence from the job. He was fired after he refused to return to work.

Grajeda quit her California posts after catching public flak and found a new job — as special assistant to SEIU secretary-treasurer (and Obama stimulus panel appointee) Anna Burger in Washington, D.C. Grajeda now oversees efforts to “partner with the Obama administration” to secure more public funds for SEIU projects involving infrastructure and core public services, including care for the elderly, health care, education and social services.

More recently, San Diego SEIU Local 221 came under fire last month for squandering dues on a cozy $107,000 severance package and consultancy deal for Stern’s former appointee Sharon Frances-Moore.

Freeman, Jackson, Grajeda and Moore were all groomed by Stern and personally appointed by him to the posts they exploited. Like Obama, Stern has managed to pass the buck while pretending it stopped at his desk. These fiscal responsibility fraudsters now back a massive expansion of government’s role in health care that they promise will rein in costs and root out fraud. Insert laugh track here.

Killing ManBearPig the Alinsky Way

JE Tabler — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:00:31 +0000

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) has been a man on a mission since 2003, when he embarked on his crusade to destroy the myth of ManBearPig and the Democrats’ associated agenda to redistribute wealth as a tribute to Gaïa. ManBearPig may have gone out with quite a bang, but Cap-’n-Tax went very quietly into the night last Saturday, when it was pronounced dead on arrival by Sen. Lindsey Graham. Do not expect Sen. Inhofe to accept his victory with the same discretion as Cap-’n-Tax’s exit from the congressional agenda, for he is well-versed in the very Alinsky tactics by which ManBearPig was propagated, grossly exaggerated in importance, and altered to fit whatever the current “truth” might have been at any given moment.

Inhofe so successfully exploited Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals that he actually perfected them by weeding out the rules which would ultimately prove futile in the end. He is not a community organizer, so not all the Rules were useful for his purposes. He was in it for the long haul and he was largely on his own, as opposed to his well-organized opponents, who were only interested in radical change itself rather than any larger principle like freedom, capitalism, or the truth.

Since he did not have to fake the appearance of power or numbers, Rule 1 did not apply. He had facts on his side and his own truth squad, which were all he needed.

Rules 6 and 7 were useless to Inhofe because his far-sighted approach was ultimately the reason he prevailed. The science was rather boring and it seemed that it was Inhofe against the world, a man on a mission, long before any of his colleagues had heard the term “cap and trade.” As for Rule 8, he kept “the pressure on” without much shifting of tactics, as he recounts:

“When I called anthropogenic global warming a hoax in 2003, while in Milan for the U.N.’s climate-change negotiations, people said I was nuts,” says Inhofe. “These e-mails show, however, that this is a hoax being perpetuated not just by the far-left extremists like George Soros, Michael Moore, and the Hollywood elite, but by the scientists. Their agenda is not just to stop America’s progress but to hide the data. It’s just an extraordinary and unfortunate situation.”

He never had the opportunity to employ Rule 2 (“Never go outside the experience of your people”) because none of his people have had the opportunity to experience global warming. Going outside the experience of his opponent (Rule 3), however, proved quite useful whenever he cited the work of honest scientists, as opposed to the corrupt frauds of NASA and the IPCC who for so many years were the arbiters of truth. Post-Climategate, none of his “opponents” have a leg to stand on.

Rule 4 (“[making] opponents live up to their own book of rules”) was where Inhofe really shined, long before he lived to see Barbara Boxer and Lisa Jackson throw the IPCC and NASA under the bus and effectively concede that they were selling us nothing but hot air. He has repeatedly called Al Gore on his ridiculous carbon footprint and, just to underline his hypocrisy, introduced the Personal Energy Ethics Pledge. Holding his opponents to their claim that “the science is settled” ultimately proved to be their undoing.

There is now a veil hanging over the IPCC,” says Inhofe. “The EPA must begin to back off using its reports in its policies. Billions are at stake here. The CRU cooked the science, now we must make sure that truth, not climate spin, wins out.”

The truth did win out, largely because Inhofe acted as an albatross, following ManBearPig and his cronies all over the world for years.

In addition to Inhofe’s ridiculing (Rule 5) of Gore mentioned above, he more recently challenged Gore to a snowman contest and built him an igloo with his son while Washington was shut down due to inclement weather. But Inhofe is no longer joking; he is calling for Gore to be stripped of his Nobel Prize and investigated by Congress over his role in Climategate.

As for the threat being worse than the thing itself (Rule 9), only time will tell, but his opponents sure are running scared.

Having a plan (Rule 10) was a no-brainer, since the entire crisis was fabricated in the first place and we have plenty of carbon-emitting natural resources right here of which to make use. Inhofe merely had to establish that the climate was never broken so fixing it was therefore a non-issue.

Inhofe picked his target and isolated him (Rule 11) very early on. While he never lost sight of the scope of the ManBearPig conspiracy, he never forgot who his primary target was, either, nor is he likely to now. He forced Gore into the shadows at Copenhagen, challenged him to a debate, and built him an igloo. Inhofe is now polarizing his target by calling for an investigation of Gore’s role in Climategate, which will pit Congress against Gore and the junk science he has been pushing all these years.

Inhofe has been so successful at driving Gore underground, in fact, that some have been asking where he went. He was last heard from in an op-ed printed in some failing newspaper, rambling almost incoherently about how ManBearPig lives and how two minor errors (!?!?!) do not undermine his ManBearPig religion, never once admitting to the existence of an enormous conspiracy to falsify data or the other 17 bogus studies* on which his claims are based.

Inhofe was last seen dancing on Cap-’n-Tax’s grave, which I hear is located just beneath Al Gore’s igloo. Keep an eye on his YouTube channel for video.

*Update: Make that 18 other bogus studies.

Obama Calls for Bipartisan Commission on Debt. Has He Tried, You Know, Adding?

Lori Ziganto — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 08:24:28 +0000

Image Courtesy of iowntheworld.com

Lori Ziganto’s latest article from iOwntheworld.com

No, really. They need a commission to figure out why there is so much of that annoying debt stuff.

President Barack Obama on Saturday called on Congress to pass a bill creating a fiscal commission amid reports that he will likely create an executive commission if Congress does not act. Obama issued a statement calling for Republicans and Democrats to join the effort, even though Republicans have already voiced their opposition to the plan.

“I strongly support legislation currently under consideration to create a bipartisan, fiscal commission to come up with a set of solutions to tackle our nation’s fiscal challenges – and call on Senators from both parties to vote for the creation of a statutory, bipartisan fiscal commission,” the president said.

You know he means business (even if he doesn’t quite grasp the concept of “business”) because he used the word “strongly” and I’m certain he was using his super serious face when he said it. If that commission doesn’t come up with solutions, stat, he will issue a very sternly worded apology, dammit!

Granted, I don’t have the economics prowess of, say, a Community Organizer, but it seems to me that, perhaps, the first step to figuring out why you are in so much debt is learning how to balance a checkbook? Practice with that first, Obama, and then we can move onto the next step.I tendered my sage advice, as a wise Scottish-ina woman, who has learned to live within a meager household budget, on twitter earlier:

I wonder if Obama’s bi-partisan commission on debt will appoint a “Stop buying things that you can’t afford” Czar?

See, that’s all you need, Obama. Since you like those Czar types so much, appoint one who will teach you that 2 plus 2 does not magically equal 10, just because you wish it so or because you think that you are so much better than the laws of Math. … Full article

Chicago’s Real Crime Story

Heather MacDonald — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:06:55 +0000

[This article is reprinted from City Journal]

Barack Obama has exploited his youthful stint as a Chicago community organizer at every stage of his political career. As someone who had worked for grassroots “change,” he said, he was a different kind of politician, one who could translate people’s hopes into reality. The media lapped up this conceit, presenting Obama’s organizing experience as a meaningful qualification for the Oval Office.

This past September, a cell-phone video of Chicago students beating a fellow teen to death coursed over the airwaves and across the Internet. None of the news outlets that had admiringly reported on Obama’s community-organizing efforts mentioned that the beating involved students from the very South Side neighborhoods where the president had once worked. Obama’s connection to the area was suddenly lost in the mists of time.

Yet a critical blindness links Obama’s activities on the South Side during the 1980s and the murder of Derrion Albert in 2009. Throughout his four years working for “change” in Chicago’s Roseland and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods, Obama ignored the primary cause of their escalating dysfunction: the disappearance of the black two-parent family. Obama wasn’t the only activist to turn away from the problem of absent fathers, of course; decades of failed social policy, both before and after his time in Chicago, were just as blind. And that myopia continues today, guaranteeing that the current response to Chicago’s youth violence will prove as useless as Obama’s activities were 25 years ago.

One year out of college, Barack Obama took a job as a community organizer, hoping for an authentic black experience that would link him to the bygone era of civil rights protest. Few people know what a community organizer is—Obama didn’t when he decided to become one—yet the term seduces the liberal intelligentsia with its aura of class struggle and agitation against an unjust establishment. Saul Alinsky, the self-described radical who pioneered the idea in Chicago’s slaughterhouse district during the Depression, defined community organizing as creating “mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people.” Alinsky viewed poverty as a political condition: it stemmed from a lack of power, which society’s “haves” withhold from the “have-nots.” A community organizer would open the eyes of the disenfranchised to their aggrieved status, teaching them to demand redress from the illegitimate “power structure.”

Alinskyite empowerment suffered its worst scandal in 1960s Chicago. The architects of the federal War on Poverty created a taxpayer-funded version of a community-organizing entity, the so-called Community Action Agency, whose function was to agitate against big-city mayors for more welfare benefits and services for blacks. Washington poverty warriors, eager to demonstrate their radical bona fides, funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into Chicago’s most notorious gangs, who were supposed to run job-training and tutoring programs under the auspices of a signature Alinskyite agency, the Woodlawn Organization. Instead, the gangbangers maintained their criminal ways—raping and murdering while on the government payroll, and embezzling federal funds to boot.

The disaster failed to dim the romance of community organizing. But by the time Obama arrived in Chicago in 1984, an Alinskyite diagnosis of South Side poverty was doubly irrelevant. Blacks had more political power in Chicago than ever before, yet that power had no impact on the tidal wave of dysfunction that was sweeping through the largest black community in the United States. Chicago had just elected Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor; the heads of Chicago’s school system and public housing were black, as were most of their employees; black power broker Emil Jones, Jr. represented the South Side in the Illinois State Senate; Jesse Jackson would launch his 1984 presidential campaign from Chicago. The notion that blacks were disenfranchised struck even some of Obama’s potential organizees as ludicrous. “Why we need to be protesting and carrying on at our own people?” a prominent South Side minister asked Obama soon after he arrived in Chicago. “Anybody sitting around this table got a direct line to City Hall.”

Pace Alinsky, such political clout could not stop black Chicago’s social breakdown. Crime was exploding. Gangs ran the housing projects—their reign of thuggery aided by ACLU lawsuits, which had stripped the housing authority of its right to screen tenants. But the violence spread beyond the projects. In 1984, Obama’s first year in Chicago, gang members gunned down a teenage basketball star, Benjy Wilson.

The citywide outcry that followed was heartfelt but beside the point. None of the prominent voices calling for an end to youth violence—from Mayor Washington to Jesse Jackson to school administrators—noted that all of Wilson’s killers came from fatherless families (or that he had fathered an illegitimate child himself). Nor did the would-be reformers mention the all-important fact that a staggering 75 percent of Chicago’s black children were being born out of wedlock. The sky-high illegitimacy rate meant that black boys were growing up in a world in which it was normal to impregnate a girl and then take off. When a boy is raised without any social expectation that he will support his children and marry his children’s mother, he fails to learn the most fundamental lesson of personal responsibility. The high black crime rate was one result of a culture that fails to civilize men through marriage.

Obama offers fleeting glimpses of Chicago’s social breakdown in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, but it’s as if he didn’t really see what he recorded. An Alinskyite group from the suburbs, the Calumet Community Religious Conference, had assigned him to the Roseland community on the far South Side, in the misguided hope of strong-arming industrial jobs back to the area. Roseland’s bungalows and two-story homes recalled an era of stable, two-parent families that had long since passed. Obama vividly describes children who “swaggered down the streets—loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block.” He observes two young boys casually firing a handgun at a third. He notes that the elementary school in the Altgeld Gardens housing project had a center for the teen mothers of its students, who had themselves been raised by teen mothers.

Most tellingly, Obama’s narrative is almost devoid of men. With the exception of the local ministers and the occasional semi-crazed black nationalist, Obama inhabits a female world. His organizing targets are almost all single mothers. He never wonders where and who the fathers of their children are. When Obama sees a group of boys vandalizing a building, he asks rhetorically: “Who will take care of them: the alderman, the social workers? The gangs?” The most appropriate candidate—“their fathers”—never occurs to him.

Surrounded with daily evidence of Roseland’s real problem, Obama was nevertheless at a loss for a cause to embrace. Alinskyism, after all, presupposes that the problems afflicting a poor community come from the outside. Obama had come to arouse Roseland’s residents to take on the power structure, not to persuade them to act more responsibly. So it was with great relief that he noticed that the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training (MET), which offered job training, lacked a branch in Roseland: “ ‘This is it,’ I said. . . . ‘We just found ourselves an issue.’ ” So much for the fiction that the community organizer merely channels the preexisting will of the “community.”

Obama easily procured a local MET office. It had as much effect on the mounting disorder of the far South Side as his better-known accomplishment: getting the Chicago Housing Authority to test the Altgeld Gardens project for asbestos. In an area that buses wouldn’t serve at night because of fears that drivers would get robbed or hit by bricks, perhaps asbestos removal should have been a lower priority, compared with ending the anarchy choking off civilized life. In fact, “there is zero legacy from when Obama was here,” says Phillip Jackson, director of the Black Star Project, a community group dedicated to eliminating the academic-achievement gap. Jackson, like other local leaders, is reluctant to criticize Obama, however. “I won’t minimize what Obama was doing then,” he says.

In 1987, during Obama’s third year in Chicago, 57 children were killed in the city, reports Alex Kotlowitz in his book on Chicago’s deadly housing projects, There Are No Children Here. In 1988, Obama left Chicago, after four years spent helping “people in Altgeld . . . reclaim a power they had had all along,” as the future president put it in Dreams from My Father. And the carnage continued.

In 1994, two particularly savage youth murders drew the usual feckless hand-wringing. An 11-year-old Black Disciples member from Roseland, Robert “Yummy” Sandifer (so called for his sweet tooth, the only thing childlike about him), had unintentionally killed a girl while shooting at (and paralyzing) a rival gang member. Sandifer’s fellow Black Disciples then executed him to prevent him from implicating them in the killing. A month later, after five-year-old Eric Morse refused to steal candy for an 11-year-old and a ten-year-old, the two dropped him from a 14th-story window in a housing complex, killing him. Eric’s eight-year-old brother had grabbed him to keep him from falling, but lost his hold when one of the boys bit him on the arm. None of the perpetrators or victims in either case came from two-parent families.

A year after these widely publicized killings, and on the eve of Obama’s first political campaign, the aspiring state senator gave an interview to the Chicago Reader that epitomized the uselessness of Alinskyism in addressing black urban pathology—and that inaugurated the trope of community organizer as visionary politician. Obama attacks the Christian Right and the Republican Congress for “hijack[ing] the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility.” Yeah, sure, family values are fine, he says, but what about “collective action . . . collective institutions and organizations”? Let’s take “these same values that are encouraged within our families,” he urges, “and apply them to a larger society.”

Even if this jump from “family values” to “collective action” were a promising strategy, Obama overlooks a crucial fact: there are almost no traditional families in inner-city neighborhoods. Fathers aren’t “encouraging” values “within our families”; fathers are nowhere in sight. Moving to “collective action” is futile without a core of personal responsibility on which to build. Nevertheless, Obama leapfrogs over concrete individual failure to alleged collective failure: “Right now we have a society that talks about the irresponsibility of teens getting pregnant,” he told the Reader, “not the irresponsibility of a society that fails to educate them to aspire for more.”

The same rhetorical leapfrogging governs the Obama administration’s and the Chicago political establishment’s response to current Chicago teen violence. Compared with the 1990s, that violence is way down—114 children under 17 were killed both in 1993 and in 1994, while 50 were in 2008. But the proportion of gang-related murders has gone up since the late 1980s and 1990s, when the Chicago police, working with federal law enforcement, locked up the leaders of Chicago’s most notorious gangs. Those strong leaders, it turns out, exercised some restraint on their members in order to protect drug profits. “Back then, you knew what the killings were about,” says Charles Winston, a former heroin dealer who made $50,000 a day in the early 1990s in the infamous Robert Taylor Homes. “Now, it’s just sporadic incidents of violence.” The Black Star Project’s Phillip Jackson compares the anarchy in Chicago’s gang territories to Somalia: “There are many factions,” he says, all fighting one another in unstable, shifting configurations.

In the early 2000s, the number of assaults reported in and around schools increased significantly, according to Northwestern University political scientist Wesley Skogan. School dismissal time in Chicago triggers a massive mobilization of security forces across the South and West Sides, to try to keep students from shooting one another or being shot by older gang members. Police officers in bulletproof vests ring the most violence-prone schools, and the Chicago Transit Authority rejiggers its bus schedules to try to make sure that students don’t have to walk even half a block before boarding a bus.

Each street in a neighborhood possesses a mystical significance to its juvenile residents. What defines their identities isn’t family, or academic accomplishments or interests, but ruthless fealty to small, otherwise indistinguishable, pieces of territory. Roseland’s 123rd Street is the 12-Treys’ turf, 119th Street belongs to the 11-9s, and 111th Street is in an area of Roseland called “the Ville.” Gang members from the Ville aren’t supposed to cross 119th Street; doing so will provoke a potentially lethal challenge. School-reform initiatives may have contributed to increasing tensions on the streets by shutting down failing schools and sending students into enemy territory; the demolition of Chicago’s high-rise housing projects in the 2000s likewise disrupted existing gang groupings.

In September 2009, that now-notorious cell-phone video gave the world a glimpse of Barack Obama’s former turf. Teenagers—some in an informal school uniform of khaki pants and polo shirts, others bare-chested—swarm across a desolate thoroughfare in Roseland; others congregate in the middle of it, indifferent to the SUVs that try to inch by, horns blaring. Against a background din of constant yelling, some boys lunge at one another and throw punches, while a few, in leisurely fashion, select victims to clobber on the torso and head with thick, eight-foot-long railroad ties. Derrion Albert is standing passively in the middle of a knot on the sidewalk when one boy whacks him on the head with a railroad tie and another punches him in the face. Albert falls to the ground unconscious, then comes to and tries to get up. A boy walking by gives him a desultory kick. Five more cluster around him as he lies curled up on the sidewalk; one hits him again with a railroad tie, and another stomps him on the head. Finally, workers from a nearby youth community center drag Albert inside. Throughout the video, a male companion of the videographer reacts with nervously admiring “damns.”

In the Alinskyite worldview, the school system was to blame, not the students who committed the violence. Several years before, Altgeld Gardens’s high school, Carver High, had been converted to a charter military academy. Students who didn’t want to attend were sent to Fenger High School in the Ville, several miles away. Students from Altgeld Gardens and from the Ville fought each other with knives and razors inside Fenger High and out, their territorial animosity intensified by minute class distinctions. Ville children whose mothers use federal Section Eight housing vouchers to rent homes look down upon housing-project residents like those from the Gardens. The morning of the Albert killing, someone fired a gun outside Fenger; during the school day, students sent one another text messages saying that something was likely to “jump” after school. When students from the Gardens, instead of immediately boarding a bus home, walked down 111th Street—the heart of Ville territory—the fighting started. Derrion Albert had a loose affiliation with Ville students; the students who killed him were from the Gardens.

South Side aldermen and the usual race claque accused the school bureaucracy of insensitivity and worse in expecting Altgeld Gardens and Ville children to coexist without violence. In a pathetic echo of 1950s civil rights protests, Jesse Jackson, cameras in tow, rode a school bus with Altgeld Gardens students from their homes to Fenger High, demanding that Carver be converted back to a neighborhood school. No one pointed out that the threat from which Jackson the Civil Rights Avenger was protecting black students came from other black students, not from hate-filled white politicians. Obama’s former organizing group, the Developing Communities Project, led noisy parent protests, demanding that Carver accept all comers from Altgeld Gardens and reduce its military component to a quarter of the school. James Meeks, a race-baiting South Side pastor and an Illinois state senator, staged his own well-photographed bus tour, taking suburban officials through Roseland and past Fenger to demonstrate the “adversity” that Fenger students faced compared with suburban kids—though the greatest adversity comes from the violence that students inflict on themselves.

Other protests sent an even more muddled message. After a day when a dozen fights in Fenger High School provoked a security clampdown and five arrests, a group of parents and students staged a two-day boycott of classes, complaining of excessive discipline and harsh treatment from the guards. “They put us on lockdown for two hours because of a little fight,” senior DeShunna Williams told the Chicago Sun-Times. “It was just an ordinary fight.” Schools can only restore safety by strict discipline and zero tolerance for violence, however. If parents and students protest whenever such discipline is enforced, they undercut their own call for greater safety.

Mayor Richard Daley initially rejected the protesters’ demands. “The day when the city of Chicago decides to divide schools by gang territory, that’s a day when we have given up the city,” he said. But the Chicago Public Schools soon promulgated a policy letting Fenger students transfer out of the school. Few mothers took advantage of the option for their children, despite the weeks of agitation for it. Meanwhile, the school system allocated millions of additional dollars to protect Fenger students from one another. Ten extra school buses now escort the 350 Altgeld teens to and from Fenger every day, and school administrators pressed the Chicago Transit Authority to add more public bus routes around Fenger so that students wouldn’t have to wait on the sidewalk for more than a few minutes.

Who wins the award for the most Alinskyite evasion of personal and parental responsibility after Albert’s death? Perhaps not the local protesters but the federal officials dispatched to Chicago for damage control. The videotaped murder, seen around the world, couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Obama administration—just over a week before the Olympic Committee was to decide on Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 games. On October 1, the day before Obama was to make his last-minute pitch to the Olympic Committee in Copenhagen, the White House announced that Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would fly to Chicago to deliver a federal response to youth violence. The next day, Chicago lost its bid in the first round of votes, but Holder and Duncan continued to Chicago the following week.

Their message picked up exactly where Obama’s 1995 Chicago Reader interview left off. “I came here at the direction of the president, not to place blame on anyone, but to join with Chicago, with communities across America in taking responsibility for this death and the deaths of so many other young people over the years,” announced Duncan. Of course, the government has been “taking responsibility” for children for several decades now, at a cost of billions of dollars, without noticeable effect on inner-city dysfunction. The feds have funded countless programs in child and youth development, in antiviolence training, in poverty reduction. If “collective action,” as Obama put it in 1995, could compensate for the absence of fathers, the black violence problem would have ended years ago.

Holder’s remarks were just as irrelevant (though, to his credit, he did pledge $500,000 for beefed-up school security). “We have to ask hard questions, and we have to be prepared to face tough truths,” he said, and then proceeded to ignore the hard questions and duck the tough truths. “Youth violence is not a Chicago problem, any more than it is a black problem, a white problem, or a Hispanic problem,” he claimed. “It is something that affects communities big and small, and people of all races and all colors. It is an American problem.” Tough-truth quotient: maybe 20 percent. No, youth violence isn’t just a Chicago problem. Urban school districts across the country flood school areas with police officers at dismissal time. But youth violence is definitely correlated with race. Though rates of youth killings and shootings vary—Chicago children under the age of 17 are killed at four times the rate of New York children, for example—youth violence is disproportionately a “black problem” and, to a lesser extent, a Hispanic one. According to James Alan Fox and Marc Swatt of Northeastern University, the national rate of homicide commission for black males between the ages of 14 and 17 is ten times higher than that of “whites,” into which category the federal government puts the vast majority of Hispanics. Black juveniles accounted for 78 percent of all juvenile arrests between 2003 and 2008 in Chicago; Hispanics were 18 percent, and whites, 3.5 percent, of those arrests. Recognizing that tough truth is the only hope for coming up with a way to change it.

In Chicago, blacks, at least 35 percent of the population, commit 76 percent of all homicides; whites, about 28 percent of the population, commit 4 percent, and Hispanics, 30 percent of the population, commit 19 percent. The most significant difference between these demographic groups is family structure. In Cook County—which includes both Chicago and some of its suburbs and probably therefore contains a higher proportion of middle-class black families than the city proper—79 percent of all black children were born out of wedlock in 2003, compared with 15 percent of white children. Until that gap closes, the crime gap won’t close, either.

Official Chicago’s answer to youth violence also opts for collective, rather than paternal, responsibility. The Chicago school superintendent, Ron Huberman, has developed a whopping $60 million, two-year plan to combat youth violence. The wonky Huberman, who created highly regarded information-retrieval and accountability systems for the police department and the city’s emergency response center in previous city jobs, has now applied his passion for data analysis to Chicago’s violent kids. Using a profile of past shooting victims that includes such factors as school truancy rates and disciplinary records, he has identified several hundred teens as having a greater than 20 percent chance of getting shot over the next two years. The goal is to provide them with wraparound social services. (The profile of victim and perpetrator is indistinguishable, but targeting potential victims, rather than perpetrators, for such benefits as government-subsidized jobs is politically savvy.) The program will assign the 300 or so potential victims their own “advocates,” who will intercede on their behalf with government agencies and provide them with case management and counseling.

In some cities, it’s a police officer who visits a violence-prone teenager to warn him about staying out of trouble. Chicago sends a social worker. The Chicago police department has kept a low profile during the public debate over teen shootings, ceding primary accountability for the problem to the school system. This hierarchy of response may reflect Chicago’s less assertive police culture compared with, say, New York’s. “We’d marvel at how the NYPD was getting mayoral support” during New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s tenure, says a former Chicago deputy superintendent. “Mayor Daley is not a cop supporter; it’s no secret that he rules the police department with an iron fist.” The South Side’s black ministers, whom Daley does not want to alienate, also act as a check on more proactive policing. There have been few calls in Chicago for a more aggressive stop-and-frisk policy to get illegal guns off the street, and the police department hasn’t pushed to implement one.

Now, perhaps if Huberman’s proposed youth “advocates” provided their charges with opportunities to learn self-discipline and perseverance, fired their imaginations with manly virtues, and spoke to them about honesty, courtesy, and right and wrong—if they functioned, in other words, like Scoutmasters—they might make some progress in reversing the South Side’s social breakdown. But the outfit that Huberman has picked to provide “advocacy” to the teens, at a reported cost of $5 million a year, couldn’t be more mired in the assiduously nonjudgmental ethic of contemporary social work. “Some modalities used in this endeavor,” explains the newly hired Youth Advocates Program (YAP), “include: Assess the youth and his/her family to develop an Individualized Service Plan (ISP) to address the individual needs of each youth.” The Youth Advocates Program’s CEO tried further to clarify the advocates’ function: “If a family needs a new refrigerator or a father needs car insurance, it’s the advocate’s job to take care of it,” Jeff Fleischer told the Chicago Tribune. The reference to a “father” is presumably Fleischer’s little joke, since almost none of the Chicago victims-in-waiting will have their fathers at home. It’s not a lack of material goods that ails Chicago’s gun-toting kids, however, or their mothers’ lack of time to procure those goods. Providing their families with a government-funded gofer to carry out basic adult tasks like getting car insurance will not compensate for a lifetime of paternal absence.

The Youth Advocates Program represents the final stage of Alinskyism: its co-optation by the government-funded social-services industry.

Obama came to Roseland and Altgeld Gardens with the fanciful intention of organizing the “community” to demand benefits from a hostile power structure. But here’s that same power structure not just encouraging demands from below but providing the community with its own government-funded advocates to “broker and advocate for each youth and family,” as YAP puts it, thus ensuring constant pressure to increase government services.

Huberman’s plan for ending youth violence includes other counselors and social workers who will go to work in the most dangerous public high schools. He also wants to create a “culture of calm” in the schools by retraining security guards and by de-emphasizing suspensions and expulsion in favor of “peer mediation.” Nothing new there: in 1998, Chicago schools announced plans to train students to be peer mediators and to engage in conflict resolution. In fact, there is nothing in Huberman’s plan that hasn’t been tried before, to no apparent effect. You’d think that someone would ask: What’s lacking in these neighborhoods that we didn’t notice before? The correct answer would be: family structure.

Needless to say, everyone involved in the Albert beating came from a fatherless home. Defendant Eugene Riley hit Albert with a railroad tie as he lay unconscious on the ground in his final moments. According to 18-year-old Riley’s 35-year-old mother, Sherry Smith, “his father was not ready to be a strong black role model in his son’s life.” Nor was the different father of Riley’s younger brother, Vashion Bullock, ready to be involved in his son’s life. A bare-chested Bullock shows up in the video wielding a railroad tie in the middle of the street. As for Albert himself, his father “saw him the day he was born, and the next time when he was in a casket,” reports Bob Jackson, the worldly director of Roseland Ceasefire, an antiviolence project.

The absence of a traditional two-parent family leaves children uncertain about the scope of their blood ties. One teen who attends the Roseland Safety Net Works’s after-school program thinks that she has more than ten siblings by five different fathers, but since her mother lives in North Carolina, it’s hard to pin down the exact number. Eight of the ten boys enrolled in Kids Off the Block, another after-school program, don’t know their fathers. “The other two boys, if the father came around, they’d probably kill him,” says Diane Latiker, who runs the program. If children do report a remote acquaintance with their father, they don’t seem to know what he does for a living.

Though teen births have dropped among blacks since the 1990s, unwed pregnancy is still a pervasive reality in Chicago’s inner-city high schools. “Last year at Fenger, it was all you heard about—pregnancies or abortions,” reports the youth president at Roseland Safety Net Works. In autumn 2009, one in seven girls at Chicago’s Paul Robeson High School was either expecting or had already given birth to a child. It’s not hard to predict where Chicago’s future killers will come from.

A 15-year-old resident of Altgeld Gardens, for example, was sitting at home with her three-month-old boy during the week of Veterans Day this year, having been suspended for fighting. You’d never know it from her baby-doll voice, but this ninth-grade mother runs with a clique of girls at Fenger High “who have no problem taking you out,” says Bob Jackson. She lives with her 34-year-old mother, two brothers, and a sister; she sometimes sees her father when he’s in town but doesn’t know if he has a job. Her son’s father, still playing with toys, isn’t providing support. She was on her way to pick up free food from the federal WIC program when I spoke with her.

The next stage in black family disintegration may be on the horizon. According to several Chicago observers, black mothers are starting to disappear, too. “Children are bouncing around,” says a police officer in Altgeld Gardens. “The mother says: ‘I’m done. You go stay with your father.’ The ladies are selling drugs with their new boyfriend, and the kids are left on their own.” Albert’s mother lived four hours away; he was moving among different extended family members in Chicago. Even if a mother is still in the home, she may be incapable of providing any emotional or moral support to her children. “Kids will tell you: ‘I’m sleeping on the floor, there’s nothing in the fridge, my mother doesn’t care about me going to school,’ ” says Rogers Jones, the courtly founder of Roseland Safety Net Works. “Kids are traumatized before they even get to school.” Some mothers are indifferent when the physical and emotional abuses that they suffered as children recur with their own children. “We’ve had mothers say: ‘I was raped as a child, so it’s no big deal if my daughter is raped,’ ” reports Jackson.

The official silence about illegitimacy and its relation to youth violence remains as carefully preserved in today’s Chicago as it was during Obama’s organizing time there. A fleeting reference to “parental” responsibility for children is allowed, before the speaker quickly moves on to society’s more important role. But anything more specific about fathers is taboo. “I have not been in too many churches lately that say: ‘Mom, you need to find yourself a husband, this is not the norm,’ ” observes Jackson—an understandable, if lamentable, lacuna, he adds, since single heads of households constitute the vast majority of the congregation. Press coverage of teen shootings may mention a participant’s mother, but the shooter and victim may as well be the product of a virgin birth, for all the media’s curiosity about where their fathers are. I asked John Paul Jones of Obama’s old Alinskyite outfit, the Developing Communities Project, if anyone ever tries to track down the father of a teen accused of a shooting. The question threw him. “Does anyone ever ask: ‘Where are the fathers?’ ” he paraphrased me. A brief silence. “That’s a good point.”

Some members of Chicago’s Left will argue against holding fathers or mothers responsible for their children. “To blame it on the family is totally unfair,” says Gwen Rice, a board member of the Developing Communities Project. “I’m tired of blaming the parents. The services for the poor are paltry; it boggles the mind. Historically, you can’t expect a parent who can’t get a job to do something that someone with resources can do. These problems have histories; there are policies that have mitigated against black progress. What needs to happen is a change in corporate greed and insensitivity.” Rice corrects my use of the term “illegitimacy”: “There are no illegitimate births,” she says.

One activist, however, makes ending illegitimacy an explicit part of his work. “I tell people: ‘Unless you get married, you will perish,’ ” says the Black Star Project’s Phillip Jackson. An intense, wiry man who looks like a cross between Gandhi and Spike Lee, Jackson organizes events to make fathers visible and valued again, like “Take Your Child to School Day.” Yet Jackson is not immune from the Alinskyite tic of looking to government for solutions to problems of personal responsibility (nor does Jackson avoid launching groundless charges of racism). He has gathered a crate of petitions to President Obama regarding Chicago’s youth violence, some of whose signers are as young as four. “President Obama, please send help for the sake of these young people in Chicago,” reads the petition. Asked what he wants Obama to do, Jackson’s answers range from a trickle-up stimulus plan to jobs to leadership.

Jobs, whether government-created or not, aren’t likely to make much difference in the culture of illegitimacy. As journalist Nicholas Lemann observed over two decades ago in The Atlantic Monthly, the black illegitimacy rate has only a weak correlation to employment: “High illegitimacy has always been much more closely identified with blacks than with all poor people or all unemployed people.” An Alinskyite approach to the related problems of illegitimacy and crime is only a distraction. Seeking redress and salvation from the “power structure” just puts off the essential work of culture change.

Barack Obama started that work in a startling Father’s Day speech in Chicago while running for president. “If we are honest with ourselves,” he said in 2008, “we’ll admit that . . . too many fathers [are] missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. . . . We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.”

But after implicitly drawing the connection between family breakdown and youth violence—“How many times in the last year has this city lost a child at the hands of another child?”—Obama reverted to Alinskyite bromides about school spending, preschool programs, visiting nurses, global warming, sexism, racial division, and income inequality. And he has continued to swerve from the hard truth of black family breakdown since his 2008 speech. The best thing that the president can do for Chicago’s embattled children is to confront head-on the disappearance of their fathers and the consequence in lost lives.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

The Marijuana and Conservatism Debate, Part 2: Counterculture – by FrontPagemag.com

Frontpagemag.com — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:00:39 +0000

Click here for Part 1 of this debate between Pajamas Media’s Mary Grabar and NewsReal’s David Swindle.

Mary Grabar:

David, thank you for letting me reply once more.

You’re right:

“It’s not pot-smoking counterculturalists that are sending Guantanamo detainees to Illinois.”

But the counterculturalists voted and campaigned for Obama and company, who are sending Guantanamo detainees to Illinois. And though it is true that Harry Reid and Howard Dean adopt the veneer of respectability in terms of their lifestyles and appearances, they are the ones carrying out the counterculture’s aims. (And how much more counterculture can you be than being a “community organizer”—the first profession of Bill Ayers?) And it is the counterculture that is instituted in education at all levels that very deeply indoctrinates future voters (and at levels most have no inkling of). I’ve seen that and written about it.

You are right:

McCain was an uninspiring candidate with a poorly run campaign.

But if our culture had not produced a generation whose majority believes that socialism is okay, we would not have elected a president who openly talked about “spreading the wealth” and being a “global citizen.” Would someone like Obama have been a serious candidate before the counterculture movement? Successful campaign managers know what will appeal to voters; in other words, they get their cues from voters and shape messages accordingly. Voters are not blank slates, but carry with them certain values—values that are shaped by the culture.

The Constitution may be neutral, but the founders and Alexis de Tocqueville repeatedly invoked the importance of religion and morality in maintaining the republic. Libertarians’ eagerness to defend “freedoms” regarding vices like drug use and prostitution, and attendant disregard for the moral fabric of our culture (enforced by reasonable laws) is dismaying.

David Swindle:

The difference of understandings between Mary Grabar and myself could not be more clear by her most recent response. The root of our disagreement is not on marijuana itself but on our different understandings of the nature of the Left.

Observe:

But the counterculturalists voted and campaigned for Obama and company, who are sending Guantanamo detainees to Illinois. And though it is true that Harry Reid and Howard Dean adopt the veneer of respectability in terms of their lifestyles and appearances, they are the ones carrying out the counterculture’s aims. (And how much more counterculture can you be than being a “community organizer”—the first profession of Bill Ayers?) And it is the counterculture that is instituted in education at all levels that very deeply indoctrinates future voters (and at levels most have no inkling of). I’ve seen that and written about it.

[emphasis mine]

What this paragraph makes clear is that to Mary the Left and the Counterculture are entirely synonymous. (And she’s certainly not the only conservative with this misunderstanding.) I thought I’d made clear the two movements differences when quoting from a previous blog I’d written. But it appears I’m going to need to elaborate on this a bit more.

What is the counterculture? Or more importantly, who is the counterculture? How does the counterculture pursue its objectives? How is it different from the Left?

The “counterculture” refers to a number of interrelated cultural movements throughout the 19th, 20th, and now into the 21st century. Counterculturalists seek to change the world through new kinds of art, spirituality, and lifestyles. Examples from modern history include the Bohemians, the Transcendentalists, the Romantics, the Beats, the Hippies, the Punks, the Goths, and the Ravers. Examples from ancient history include the Jews, the Christians, the Socratic counterculture of Ancient Greece, the Sufis, and the Zen Buddhists. (A great history of counterculture is Ken “R.U. Sirius” Goffman’s Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House.)

The most important book, though, for understanding the nature of the counterculture today is Richard Metzger’s Disinformation: The Interviews. His Disinformation TV show and DisinfoCon (both available on DVD here) provide a useful audio-visual companion. Disinformation: The Interviews features discussions with quirky artists (Joe Coleman, Norbert Kox, Kembra Pfahler and Paul Laffoley) and innovative writers (Robert Anton Wilson, Grant Morrison, Douglas Rushkoff, Howard Bloom.) This is the counterculture.

Now who is the Left? David Horowitz’s summary from Left Illusions is accurate:

Among the intellectual leaders of this left are Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Edward Said and Cornel West; among its figureheads, Angela Davis and Ramsey Clark; among its cultural icons, Tim Robbins, Barbara Kingsolver, Arundhati Roy and Michael Moore; among its political leaders, Ralph Nader and the heads of the three major “peace” organizations (Leslie Cagan, Brian Becker and Clark Kissinger); among its electoral organizations, the Green Party and the Peace and Freedom Party; among its elected officials Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-California) and Congressman Dennis Kucinch (D-Ohio); among its organizations, the misnamed Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild; among its publications and media institutions, The Nation, Z Magazine, The Progressive, Counterpunch, Pacifica radio, Indymedia.org and commondreams.org. Like the Communist Party in the heyday of the Soviet empire, the influence of the hard left –intellectually and organizationally – extends far beyond the institutions, organizations and publications it controls.

To clarify Mary’s paragraph… This is the movement that campaigned for Obama. This is the movement that, inspired by the theories of Stalinist Antonio Gramsci, has embedded itself in our universities. This is the movement who trains community organizers. (Counterculture occupations would include artists, poets, New Age shop owners, etc.)

The differences between the Left and the Counterculture (and why conservatives should not be default antagonistic toward the latter) can be demonstrated with a case study. Let’s consider one issue and then examine how figures from both movements respond in dramatically different ways: the corporation.

The Left regards the corporation as an evil entity that is destroying the planet and killing people. Its prescription is predictable: government must step in to reign in corporate power. The Left’s recent manifesto on the matter is neo-communist journalist Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. For a broader view of the Left’s perspective watch The Corporation, a documentary by the same team that created Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media.

But the counterculture has a different understanding of the corporation and how to challenge it. Rushkoff’s Life Inc. articulates a more nuanced view of corporations. (I reviewed Life Inc. for FrontPage in July. In my review I explain how Rushkoff is pro-capitalism, pro-founders, pro-freedom and does not preach government solutions to curbing corporate influence.)

Rushkoff commented on one of my posts recently:

Thanks for “getting” it.
The problem, of course, for someone like me is that I find no home in either camp. And Life Inc didn’t reach the number of people it could have because it attacked both leftist and rightist entrenchment.

It’s as if, if you don’t pick a side you don’t get heard.

But it shouldn’t be that way — at least not on the Right. Conservatives need to stop lumping the Counterculture and the Left into a single entity that must be opposed at all costs. As long as conservatives do that they’ll be:

A) Cutting themselves off from a world of engaging ideas and exciting art — both of which can inspire them to discover new strategies for how to defend the American Idea.

B) Promoting the false notion that one cannot be both alternative in one’s culture and conservative in one’s politics. This gives strength to the Left. It makes people think that if they like rock music, marijuana, or non-Judeo-Christian religion then they have to be part of the Left. Why would anyone want to hand the Left a recruitment tool as powerful as the Counterculture?

Thus, I cannot embrace Mary’s principle reason for marijuana’s continued criminalization. “Fighting the counterculture” in no way trumps constitutional principles and the fiscal sanity of ending the tens of billions of wasted dollars every year. If Mary thinks that marijuana use is a danger to America then I encourage her to take a lesson from counterculturalists like Jesus of Nazareth: fight it with culture, not with politics. Don’t use the force of government to try and shape the culture in the direction you want it to go. That’s what the Left does — and it doesn’t work and it’s why we must fight them.

Why Would Conservatives Want to Give the Left the Counterculture as a Recruitment Tool?

David Swindle — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 17:00:58 +0000

This is the Counterculture.

Read Mary Grabar’s and David Swindle’s debate on marijuana, conservatism, and counterculture here.

Observe:

But the counterculturalists voted and campaigned for Obama and company, who are sending Guantanamo detainees to Illinois. And though it is true that Harry Reid and Howard Dean adopt the veneer of respectability in terms of their lifestyles and appearances, they are the ones carrying out the counterculture’s aims. (And how much more counterculture can you be than being a “community organizer”—the first profession of Bill Ayers?) And it is the counterculture that is instituted in education at all levels that very deeply indoctrinates future voters (and at levels most have no inkling of). I’ve seen that and written about it.

[emphasis mine]

What is the counterculture? Or more importantly, who is the counterculture? How does the counterculture pursue its objectives? How is it different from the Left?

Now who is the Left? David Horowitz’s summary from Left Illusions is accurate:

Among the intellectual leaders of this left are Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Edward Said and Cornel West; among its figureheads, Angela Davis and Ramsey Clark; among its cultural icons, Tim Robbins, Barbara Kingsolver, Arundhati Roy and Michael Moore; among its political leaders, Ralph Nader and the heads of the three major “peace” organizations (Leslie Cagan, Brian Becker and Clark Kissinger); among its electoral organizations, the Green Party and the Peace and Freedom Party; among its elected officials Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-California) and Congressman Dennis Kucinch (D-Ohio); among its organizations, the misnamed Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild; among its publications and media institutions, The Nation, Z Magazine, The Progressive, Counterpunch, Pacifica radio, Indymedia.org and commondreams.org. Like the Communist Party in the heyday of the Soviet empire, the influence of the hard left –intellectually and organizationally – extends far beyond the institutions, organizations and publications it controls.

Rushkoff commented on one of my posts recently:

Thanks for “getting” it.
The problem, of course, for someone like me is that I find no home in either camp. And Life Inc didn’t reach the number of people it could have because it attacked both leftist and rightist entrenchment.

It’s as if, if you don’t pick a side you don’t get heard.

A) Cutting themselves off from a world of engaging ideas and exciting art — both of which can inspire them to discover new strategies for how to defend the American Idea.

The Countculturalists and Gitmo North

Mary Grabar — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 13:30:41 +0000

Who is responsible for Guantanamo detainees ending up here?

Editor’s note: Click here for a collection of the previous exchanges between Pajamas Media’s Mary Grabar and NewsReal’s David Swindle in this dialogue regarding marijuana legalization, conservatism, and the counterculture.

David, thank you for letting me reply once more.

You’re right:

“It’s not pot-smoking counterculturalists that are sending Guantanamo detainees to Illinois.”

You are right:

McCain was an uninspiring candidate with a poorly run campaign.

David Swindle responds here.

The Man Who Wrote the Blueprint for Obamacare from His Prison Cell

Discover The Networks — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 03:11:47 +0000

Click here to view the full Robert Creamer profile.

Robert Creamer is the husband of Democrat Rep. Jan Schakowsky. He formerly served as … a lobbyist for George Soros’s Open Society Institute. Today Creamer heads the Strategic Consulting Group, a political consultancy whose list of clients includes ACORN and the Service Employees International Union….

Pursuant to an FBI investigation, Creamer in 2006 was indicted for bank fraud and tax evasion…. He ultimately was sentenced to five months in federal prison plus eleven months of house arrest….

While incarcerated, Creamer wrote a 628-page political manual titled Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win (published in 2007). In the Acknowledgements section of the book, Creamer stated that his political views had been deeply influenced by “the legendary community organizer” Saul Alinsky.

Stand Up Straight! advanced the notion that the Democratic Party could win a permanent majority in Congress by doing the following:

passing a national health care bill, thereby turning more people into wards of an ever-expanding government, and of the party that works to grow government; and
giving amnesty to all illegal immigrants, thereby creating, virtually overnight, a large new constituency of Democratic voters….

“To win,” added Creamer, “we must not just generate understanding, but emotion—fear, revulsion, anger, disgust.” …

On November 24, 2009, Creamer attended a White House state dinner — along with high-level Obama advisors like Andrew Stern and David Axelrod – despite the fact that ex-convicts are usually barred from such events.

To view the complete Robert Creamer profile, click here.

Felon Community Organizer Robert Creamer Smears Beck

Matthew Vadum — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:53:32 +0000

Robert Creamer

Left-wing lowlife Robert Creamer, who seems to be the criminal brains behind the left’s push for Big Government healthcare, is in no position to be casting stones.

After TV Host Glenn Beck criticized the community organizer and swindler, the fraudster Creamer shot back, saying Beck was part of a “new McCarthyist movement of the far right.”

The convict who did five months in federal prison for bank fraud and a tax violation said Beck is “a man who lies about everything.”

“It is important,” Creamer said, “for the targets of the smear machine to push back and to use whatever kind of means we can to prevent him from continuing these kinds of reckless charges.”

But who is really doing the smearing here?

Creamer is the convicted felon and senior Democratic operative who defrauded banks in order to keep his Marxist community organization afloat.

He founded the radical group Illinois Public Action and this makes him a hero to the left, whose members don’t care that he wrote a series of bad checks to pay his salary and meet other financial demands. To the left, the ends justify the means.

He’s behind an influential book called Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win which left-wingers say has inspired them in their fight to turn America into socialist Europe. Creamer is married to extreme left-wing Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), one of Capitol Hill’s most visible cheerleaders for DMV-style socialist healthcare. Despite his felony conviction, he also recently attended the official White House dinner honoring the Indian prime minister.

Beck had the audacity to point out that Democrats are currently following a playbook Creamer designed. For this observati0n, Creamer the criminal slimed him.

“It sure looks like [David] Axelrod and company are following the ”blueprint,’ but — once again — this saintly convicted felon views himself as the victim,” Beck said of Creamer. (video here)

The Threat at Home – by Ryan Mauro

Ryan Mauro — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 05:23:46 +0000

As the United States turns its attention to security threats abroad, the disturbing trend of extremism in America’s Somali communities is a reminder that there are also real and present dangers at home.

A growing body of evidence suggests that Somali communities in the Unites States have become fertile ground for terrorist groups to recruit and implant operatives. On November 23, the federal government announced eight more indictments of Somali-Americans in Minnesota on charges of recruiting members of their community to join the al-Shabaab terrorist organization in Somalia. This brings to 14 the number of Somalis from Minnesota who have been indicted for helping the Al-Qaeda-linked group.

Of the eight indicted, only one has been arrested; the rest are currently outside of the United States. Four of those previously arrested have pled guilty and two have been released while they wait to be tried. The government believes that about 20 Somali-Americans have left the state to join al-Shabaab’s jihad in Somalia, at least three of whom have died since departing. One, Shirwa Ahmed, died when he became the first American suicide bomber.

Several of those indicted attended the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center in St. Paul, as did many of those who were recruited. The mosque released a statement in March saying that “Abubakar Center didn’t recruit, finance, or otherwise facilitate in any way, shape, or form the travel of those youth.”

Somali gangs are also becoming an issue in Minnesota. Shukri Adan, a former Somali community organizer, said in 2007 that there 400-500 members of his community were involved in gangs. The Associated Press reported in July that

“Despite anger and despair over the killings in Minnesota’s Somali community—the nation’s largest—police and prosecutors have struggled to catch and try the killers. Few witnesses have stepped forward because of a fear of reprisal and deep-rooted distrust of authority.”

The concern over extremist elements in the Somali community is not limited to Minnesota. The FBI is worried about the community of 6,000 living in the Washington D.C. area. The Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, which was attended by two of the 9/11 hijackers and the Fort Hood shooter, has many Somali attendees. The former imam of the mosque has acted as an Al-Qaeda recruiter and may be part of the group’s efforts to help al-Shabaab. The FBI’s investigation into disappearing Somalis who may have joined the terrorist group includes Seattle, Columbus, Cicinnati, Boston and San Diego.

Brian Moseley, a reporter for the Shelbyville Times-Gazette, won an award for documenting of the inability of Somali immigrants in Shelbyville, Tennessee, to assimilate, causing a culture clash in the town. Moseley described how law enforcement and fire department personnel had described to him how the immigrants were hostile to them, and how police officers were often reluctant to patrol areas where they live when it is dark. I also broke a story in May about how counter-terrorism expert Dave Gaubatz and his researchers had found extremist material at a mostly Somali mosque in Nashville. Gaubatz and his team collected evidence of child abuse and accused the Department of Child Services of failing to act.

A similar clash was caught on tape when on June 27, 2009 a video was uploaded to YouTube showing about 15 Somali youth harassing and throwing rocks at a homosexual man leaving the Gay Pride Festival in Minneapolis.

Terrorism researcher Patrick Poole wrote in November 2007 that an organization tied to radical Islamic militants in Somalia was holding conferences in Falls Church and Minneapolis, where those attending were instructed on how to send money overseas without being detected. Poole wrote:

“…there exists an active recruiting and transportation network in the U.S., including Minneapolis, for Somali-run terrorist training camps, many of which have recently reopened. In many instances, these same Somali leaders purporting ignorance and innocence for the local media are not only aware of these recruiting operations, but have actively participated in them.”

Al-Shabaab’s ranks have been swelled by the addition of non-Somalis. The president of Somalia’s government has said that up to 1,100 foreign terrorists have joined the group, which now is operating training camps in the East African country. The terrorist group has a wide international network and its training of foreign operatives means it has sympathizers willing to act in the West.

One Somali-American from Minneapolis was arrested in November in the Netherlands for financing the transportation of American recruits to Somalia. Up to five Somalis living in Canada disappeared in November as well and are believed to have traveled together to their homeland via Kenya. Previously, a Toronto-based businessman was killed in 2008 after he joined Somali terrorists fighting Ethiopian troops who had invaded the country to stop extremists from coming to power. British intelligence has said that dozens of people have gone to Somalia and received terrorist training and returned to the United Kingdom.

Al-Shabaab has taken large control over large swaths of territory, including parts of Mogadishu, potentially allowed Al-Qaeda to replicate the safe harbor and reverse some of its most major losses since the war in Afghanistan began. Already, Somalia is being used as a base to export terrorism. Saudi Arabia has captured Somalis that were helping the extremist Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen and were planning attacks in the Kingdom.

Of course, not all Somalis are sympathizers with extremism. There has been outrage in the Somali community over these developments. On June 11, Somali-Americans in Minneapolis protested the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which they accused of encouraging members of their community not to cooperate with the government’s investigation. The Terror-Free Somalia Foundation, which closely tracks events related to al-Shabaab, is led by Abdurahman Warsame, a Somali-American activist.

The failure to integrate these Somali immigrants into American society is causing strife and has proved to be an asset to al-Shabaab. The majority of the immigrants oppose such extremism. But it doesn’t take many sympathizers to create a network of support for terrorists. The current focus of al-Shabaab is Somalia, but when the day comes that they change their focus to the U.S., they will have American recruits ready for action.

And We Won’t Be Back ‘Till It’s Over, Over There! (Which Will Be In 2012)

Jeanette Pryor — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:58:09 +0000

Run Away! Run Away!

The first twenty minutes of President Obama’s speech at West Point found me in a state of shock. His clear and forceful justification for our presence in Afghanistan, sound identification of the enemy, the Taliban and not just Al Qaida, and the declaration of his intention to commit the necessary troops to

“disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaida and the Taliban…”

initially left nothing I could honorably criticize.

That Obama felt the need to disparage, delegitimize, and distance himself from the War in Iraq was unfortunate and unrefined, though not unexpected. Apart from this, I was beginning to feel somewhat guilty for having rushed to judgment before the speech. Then the perfume of the rhetoric and the impression of decisiveness began to evaporate and I was left considering the actual plan on the table.

By the end of 2011, there will be no American military presence in Iraq. By the end of 2012, there will be no American military presence in Afghanistan. We will put some time in on the battle field and then train the local police force and it will be all over. Beneath the oratorical spell, was the simplistic understanding of the nature of Radical Islam according to which, in the space of two years, both Iraq and Afghanistan will be sufficiently stabilized and independently committed to shunning the path of Radical Islam, that we can leave and claim success. (Just in time for the next election.)

The last fifteen minutes of the speech was the Ode to Bernadine I was expecting. In a carefully crafted, honeyed outpouring, the elite of America’s armed forces were treated to a sound lecture on the inferior nature of the military in actually resolving social conflict. Hail the Community Organizer. We will use diplomacy and build new coalitions. We will isolate those who do not help to build this world of peace. We will respect others instead of trying to occupy them. We will hold them accountable and reward those who behave. We will defeat the power of Jihad simply by living our values. The President also believes we can be united again as we were on 9-12.

When we have wielded our pens and performed our literary and political autopsies on the speech, what we are left with is a strong commitment to abandon the War on Terror. We are leaving. Surge to receed.

All Americans found something to praise and something to bemoan in the West Point Speech. Only Radical Jihadists went home tonight in unmitigated jubilation. They can relax and take a much needed vacation…until they are back on duty in 2012.

Claim: ACORN theft was five times previously thought | Washington Examiner

MB Snow — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 04:54:14 +0000

Wade Rathke

Claim: ACORN theft was five times previously thought

By: DAVID FREDDOSO

10/05/09 11:50 PM EDT

ACORN was embroiled in scandal last year when it was revealed that Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke, had embezzled nearly $1 million from an ACORN affiliate years earlier. According to news reports, a handful of ACORN officials covered up the embezzlement, keeping the information even from some of the group’s directors, in order to prevent an episode embarrassing to the group’s left-wing mission.

But Louisiana’s Attorney General is now alleging a theft of ACORN funds five times as great. A new subpoena, granted on Friday by Louisiana’s 19th Judicial District, asserts that ACORN insiders have known for nearly a year that $5 million was embezzled, based on their own internal investigation.

Steve Beatty of the Pelican Institute in New Orleans provides the documentation once again. In seeking the subpoena, Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell made this assertion:

Current high ranking members of ACORN have publicly acknowledged that embezzlement did in fact occur, but the exact amount of the embezzlement was unknown until it was recently acknowledged in a board of directors meeting on October 17, 2008 by Bertha Lewis and Liz Wolf that an internal review had determined that the amount embezzled was $5,000,000.00 (FIVE MILLION), and it is still unclear if some of the monies embezzled are from state, federal or private funds.

via Claim: ACORN theft was five times previously thought | Washington Examiner .