Oregon Live has produced this very cool map. Please read the story to learn more.
For all of our new readers, go here, to see the federal list of refugee contractors working near you. You should also see our Frequently Asked Questions.
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You Only Think You Know How Many Illegal Immigrants Live in the U.S.
Okay, I will say it out loud. Far too many Hollywood celebs are self-aggrandizing idiots when it comes to politics and culture. Their worldview makes them feel superior to the rest us. Neither facts nor common sense will change their minds. Ronald Reagan nailed it when he said, “It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.”
Here’s a prime example of a liberal making void-of-reality statements while thinking himself superior. Black superstar actor Samuel L. Jackson said he wished the San Bernardino shooters “was another crazy white dude” rather than Muslims. Jackson said such attacks gives people “legitimate reason” to look at their Muslim neighbors and friends the way they look at young black men.
Mr Jackson, I am black. I resent your assumption that Americans are racists looking for reasons to look cross-eyed at Muslims and young black men. Frankly, members of both groups (Muslims and blacks) have declared war on Americans.
So tell me Mr Jackson. How are we suppose to deal with the fact that practically every terrorist attack resulting in the maiming and murder of Americans has been by Muslims? Also, though under reported, black youth flash mob attacks, the knock-out game and polar bear hunting attacks on innocent whites are frequent.
The Black Lives Matter hate group which Mr Jackson and his Hollywood homeys hold in high regard have declared it open season on killing cops and “crackas” (white people). How are Americans suppose to process that?
A white friend was mugged on a Baltimore street. My friend admitted he was preoccupied. Had he been paying attention, upon seeing the group of thuggish young black males approaching, his street-smarts would have kicked in causing him to cross over to the opposite side of the street. Mr Jackson would deem my friend a racist guilty of profiling. In the minds of liberals, politically correctness trumps everything; even self-preservation instincts and life-experiences.
What I find so scary about the Muslim thing is we have no way of knowing who is for us or “a-gin” us. All the successful terrorist attacks maiming and murdering Americans were by Muslims who presented themselves as harmless neighbors, friends and co-workers.
The Boston Marathon was bombed by the seemingly Americanized Tsarnaev brothers. They killed 3 and wounded over 260, many maimed for life.
For crying out loud, the Muslim terrorist at Ft Hood was a major in the U.S. Army. Major Nidal Hasan, shot and killed 13 and injured over 30 while yelling, “Allahu akbar! (God is great)”
The San Bernardino shooters were undercover Muslim terrorists. They left their company’s Christmas party, returned later wearing combat gear and killed 14 co-workers.
Again I ask Mr Jackson, how should we as responsible reasonable Americans respond?
And another thing. What is up with Jackson and other mega-rich black celebs constantly trashing white Americans whose patronage made them ga-zillionaires.
While promoting her movie, “Selma”, Oprah made the absurd claim that the 1950s persecution of blacks featured in her film still happens daily in America. With all due respect Oprah, your accusation is irresponsible, divisive and insulting.
Oprah Winfrey and I were co-workers at WJZ-TV in Baltimore before she became nationally renowned “Oprah.” Oprah co-hosted our local morning talk show. Blacks were a bit suspicious of her for being comfortable with whites. Black viewers did not make Oprah a mega star. White viewers made Oprah.
Sameul L. Jackson, Oprah and other black celebs relentlessly bashing America is a huge disservice to all Americans, particularly black youths. Rather than saying their success is “because” of America, most black celebs promote the liberal spin; saying their success is “in spite of” America. The truth is America is the greatest land of opportunity on the planet for all who choose to go for it. The Left is relentless in its efforts to insidiously hide the blessing of America from minorities.
Proverbs says, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” In other words, belief is a powerful thing. So when black superstars tell black youths that America is forever racist and white cops shoot them on sight, they believe it. The lies become truth in their minds. Angry young blacks respond accordingly. WARNING: Video has explicit language:
Mr Jackson and other black celebs, your insistence on portraying America as a hellhole of racism towards minorities is irresponsible, divisive and hate-generating. Your supportive public deserves much, much better.
EDITORS NOTE: The featured image of Samuel L. Jackson is courtesy of Marvel Studios.
ILind: Apparently the change in the date for the Democratic presidential poll to Saturday March 26, part of the Democrat’s precinct caucuses, was anything but routine, according to a very interesting analysis in a comment posted on the website, TalkLeft.com. …
“Our state’s caucuses are also being held on a Saturday afternoon for the very first time, thanks to the deal cut between DNC Chair Wasserman Schultz and our own State Chair Stephanie Ohigashi, upon a promise that Hawaii would receive 10 extra delegate slots for our national convention.
“Ohigashi presented the party with what amounts to a fait accompli at the meeting of the State Central Committee (SCC) last month, and I can tell you, party members from across the islands — myself included — are downright livid with her, particularly since we’ve further learned since that meeting that DWS then reneged on her end of the bargain, and Hawaii will be receiving only three additional delegate slots instead of the ten that were promised.
“Ohigashi was told to her face by members at that SCC meeting that she had absolutely no right to enter into any such negotiations with the DNC, without first consulting with the SCC and obtaining its prior concurrence for the date shift. Her attitude was blasé at best, literally telling us, ‘Well, what’s done is done.’” ….
Big Q: We’re Against Hillary 66% to 34%
Read more … Change in party caucus creates rift in Hawaii Democratic Party
Having visited Austria and Germany just months ago, and recalling the indescribable beauty of that part of the world and the cheerful, hard-working people who live there, it is hard to visualize the dark fate that awaits them in the weeks, months, and years ahead. An October 26 article by Leo Hohmann for WorldNetDaily, describes the massive invasion of Muslim refugees flooding into Europe and the frantic attempt by locals to purchase guns in countries that have made it all but impossible to own a firearm. It provides a chilling picture of things to come… not only in Europe, but in America as well.
In Austria, for example, where gun ownership is legal, the shops struggle to meet the demand. Because the Muslim immigrants feel that European women are theirs for the taking because they appear in public provocatively dressed (by Muslim standards), most Austrian gun-buyers are women. Across Europe, sexual assaults by Muslim men have become endemic and police officials refuse to describe the sexual holocaust for what it is for fear of agitating the Muslims.
European and American police and government officials need not worry any longer about when and where the first shots in the war to save western civilization will be fired. Those shots were fired in the heart of Paris on an otherwise peaceful autumn evening in November 2015, and they were fired at a Christmas party in sunny San Bernardino, California on December 2, 2015.
In an article titled, Tet, Take Two: Islam’s 2016 European Offensive, author Matt Bracken provides a most chilling prediction of what the people of Europe have in store for them in the weeks and months ahead. If Bracken is correct in his assessment… and I believe he is… what we will witness in the coming year will be, literally, the beginning of the end of European civilization. He predicts a violent 2016 showdown and collision that will, in historical terms, be on par with the First and Second World Wars.
Unless I am mistaken, Bracken may underestimate the horror of what is about to occur on the European continent. During World War II, allied bombers targeted cities and towns that were home to a wide variety of industries critical to the German war effort, while units of infantry, armor, and artillery came behind, shelling strategically located towns and villages until German forces were driven out. Many cities, towns, and villages across Germany escaped relatively unscathed. The same will not be true during the coming Muslim holocaust.
Bracken points out that, right now, approximately a million new Muslim migrants… at least 75% of them men between the ages of 18 and 40… are struggling to find a warm place to sleep and something to eat. None of the European countries have food or living quarters for that many cold and hungry people, so what will happen when the worst part of the European winter arrives with blizzards, high winds, and sub-zero temperatures? Bracken speculates that, “When the snow is deep in Germany and across Europe, these men are going to enter local houses, demanding to be taken in as boarders… or else! Where it is useful, small migrant children will be held up in front as human shields for their emotional blackmail value; elsewhere, they will be discarded. One way or the other, Muslim migrants will be attempting to move into German homes and apartments seeking heat and food, and the young Muslim men will be seeking undefended infidel or kafir women to slake their lust (which is their right under Islamic law).”
To put the coming Muslim holocaust into perspective, Bracken uses as a yardstick the September 2004 school siege at Beslan, in the Russian Federation. The siege began on September 1, 2004, when armed Chechen Muslims occupied a school in Beslan, taking 1,100 hostages, including 777 children. Three days later, Russian security forces stormed the school with heavy weapons. At least 385 hostages were killed, including 186 children.
As we sit before our Christmas trees and our fireplaces this Christmas season, surrounded by family and friends, it’s difficult to imagine the horrors that await the good people of Europe who’ve seen their Muslim population grow from 29 million to 55 million in the years between 1990 and 2013… before the massive invasion of Muslims in 2014 and 2015. Bracken asks us to visualize not just one Beslan-style incursion by Muslim jihadists, but ten or twenty such atrocities occurring simultaneously all across Europe.
Already, in cities, towns, and villages, from Italy and Austria to Norway, Sweden, and Finland, we hear the anguished screams of women and young girls as they are gang-raped by bands of Muslim hijra invaders. Such savagery will tear the hearts out of the male population of Europe until they decide that death is preferable to such humiliation. Then, and only then, will they begin to fight back with all the ferocity they can muster. Bracken predicts that this is what lies ahead for the people of Europe who have silently allowed their socialist governments to disarm them in the years since World War II.
So who is to save them from their all-but-certain fate… the United States? Let us not forget, we have a political party in our country… the Democratic Party… which has a record of importing potential voters from abroad, no matter who and what they are, so long as they will ultimately vote Democratic.
According to U.S. government statistics, nearly 50,000 Muslim immigrants were granted permanent residency status in the United States in 1992. By 2009, that number had increased to more than 115,000. If current trends continue, by the year 2030 roughly 130,000 Muslims are expected to be granted permanent residency status in the United States annually.
A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that, among likely Republican voters, 59% support a temporary ban on Muslim immigration until the federal government is able to develop a fail-safe method for screening out violent jihadists, while 82% of Democrats oppose such a ban. Overall, party affiliation aside, only 36% of Americans favor such a ban, yet 60% feel that Obama’s handling of the terrorist threat has been a failure.
When European civilization is seriously challenged in the weeks and months ahead, those
numbers will likely change dramatically in favor of a ban on Muslim immigration. While Democrats are quite sanguine about security matters, so long as someone else’s “ox is being gored,” even they exhibit a bit of common sense when their own lives and property are at stake.
As an indicator of how far the Democratic Party is out of touch with reality, a group of 123
Democrats have introduced HR 4269, titled The Assault Weapons Ban of 2015. Introduced on December 16, 2015, the stated purpose of the bill is, “To regulate assault weapons, to ensure that the right to keep and bear arms is not unlimited, and for other purposes.”
This, of course, comes at a time when the people of Europe are scrambling to get their hands on weapons of any kind to protect themselves and their families from rampaging hordes of Islamic butchers and rapists. At a time when the people of Europe will do almost anything to get their hands on weapons and ammunition, and the Obama administration conspires to import at least an additional 100,000 unvetted Muslim immigrants into the United States, Democrats continue their effort to disarm the American people. When the Islamic holocaust of 2016 comes to full fruition and European civilization teeters on the brink, the gun control issue in the United States will be brought into sharp focus and the gun control zealots of the Democratic Party will finally be exposed for the fools they truly are.
Matt Bracken reminds us that the Vietnamese Tet Offensive of 1968 was carried out by just 80,000 Viet Cong fighters. He asks us to consider the killing and the bloodshed that will occur at the hands of 800,000 well-armed muhajirs flooding into Europe, many of them intent upon killing as many non-believers as possible. When asked by German journalist Jurgen Todenhofer, in a rare interview for Jewish News, if ISIS was prepared to kill every Shiite Muslim, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi scoffed, “150 million or 500 million, we don’t care; it’s only a technical problem for us. We are ready to do that.”
The question is, are Europeans and Americans ready for an intra-Islamic genocide of that magnitude and the implications such savagery holds for the future of western civilization? If ISIS considers the difference between killing 150 million or 500 million Shia to be a mere “technicality,” a matter of “scale,” how will the people of Europe handle a full-scale onslaught by such people? In response, will they be willing to carpet-bomb major Islamic cities, much as Dresden was carpet-bombed during World War II? Or are they simply too war weary from having two world wars fought on their soil to even defend themselves?
With an all-out, no-holds-barred effort by the civilized world… including an unlikely coalition comprised of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Russia, China, Germany, and the rest of NATO, excluding Turkey… the forces that now comprise the Islamic State can be utterly destroyed. But even if we are able to achieve that result, we must not allow ourselves to be deluded into thinking that this will be the end of the matter. Even if the world of Islam is temporarily chastened by the loss of millions of their believers, they will lick their wounds for a few years and then they’ll be back with even greater force and bloodlust than before.
We in the west have just two options: 1) we must either find a way to bring about a massive reformation among the 1.6 billion Muslims of the world… a solution that is given little or no creative thought whatsoever in western nations, or 2) we must be prepared to defend ourselves against an unending onslaught of radical Islamists who wish to either convert us or kill us. There are no other alternatives.
Given what we see as the near term future of Europe, we might wish to warn our European allies, “The last ones out of Europe, please turn out the lights.”
Anyone who has ever deployed can tell you how hard it is to kiss your family goodbye. You kiss your wife and children counting the days until you return home. Why are these refugees just now leaving Syria and all at once. These refugees are not widows and orphans they are soldiers on deployment. They are soldiers deploying for war and this administration is providing housing, clothing, food, to those who are coming here to destroy us. If that’s not treason, then please tell us Feinstein what is. She sits on the intelligence committee, only proving to me she isn’t all that intelligent.
When a man flees his homeland, he brings his family with him. When a man deploys for war he kisses his family goodbye with no promise of returning home. The Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated every branch of our government while establishing command right here in our home. This is nothing more than a military deployment in disguise. The weapons they need are staged throughout the country to be handed out when they get here. This administration was unable or unwilling to protect our embassy so I have no confidence they can protect this country. Corruption in Government has gone on for centuries and must stop. Washington I am sending you a message that each of you had better read.
You better stop worrying about your careers and start focusing on the life of this country.
Anyone who knowingly gives aid and comfort to the enemy is a traitor and should be arrested. If they are not stopped, there will be no election. Unlike some voters you have to be alive for a vote.
If you’re afraid of these traitors then you are no leader we need. This country needs someone who knows how to fight and not worry about hurting feelings when making decisions to get that done. Most of you are so concerned with your image you’re to blind to see the evil in front of your face. Incompetence or blackmail will be no excuse for your failures because failure is not an option. This is not about politics, it’s’ about life and the future of this country. The choice is yours and you better start doing your freaking jobs today or pack a box and resign tomorrow.
God bless America and I pray you each make the right decision,
EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the DC Gazette.
I recently received an inquiry from Jim Taylor, a fellow combat veteran of the War in Vietnam. Jim sent me a link to an article about combat veteran Sergeant John Ross who served in 1968 with the 173rd Infantry Brigade (Airborne) in Vietnam. Sergeant Ross was part of the battle for Dak To in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. The article was written by Don Moore and titled “Sgt. John Ross in 173rd Airborne, took part in biggest battle in Vietnam War“.
Jim questioned whether the battle for Dak To was in fact the “biggest battle of the Vietnam War.”
For every soldier the battles they were involved in are, at the time, the biggest ones, and as time goes on they become even bigger. Our fellow U.S. Army airborne soldiers should be commended for their bravery in combat, and we should never forget our surviving and fallen comrades sacrifices. All gave some and some gave all.
The Vietnam War website column “What were major Battles of the Vietnam War?” lists the following battles as major:
Battle of Ap Bac was the first major battle in the Vietnam war. It was fought by the ARVN and NVA at Ap Bac – a village in Dinh Tuong province, approximately 50 miles southwest of Saigon on January 2, 1962. The battle resulted in heavy casualties on a much more superior South Vietnamese troops with American assistance in weapons and planning. It exemplified poor performances in both fighting ability and spirit of the South Vietnamese forces in compared to the Viet Cong.
Battle of Ia Drang was the first major battle between regular U.S. and People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) troops. The 2-part battle occurred from November 14 to November 18, 1965 at the Landing Zone X-Ray and Albany in La Drang Valley, Central Highlands of South Vietnam. Despite heavy casualties on both sides, both claimed the battle was a victory of their owns. As a matter of fact, Ia Drang Valley battle was considered essential as it set the blueprint for tactics for both sides during the conflict. American troops continued to reply on air mobility and artillery fire to achieve their battlefield objectives – victory of the so-called “body count”. On the other side, the Viet Cong learned that by quickly engaging their combat forces close to the enemy (fighting at close range), they could neutralize American advantages.
The Battle of Khe Sanh took place in Quang Tri province, North-western South Vietnam from January 21, 1968, when PAVN troops began a heavy artillery bombardment on the U.S. Marine garrison at Khe Sanh. For the next 77 days, ARVN and U.S. Marines fought an extensive fight until Operation Pegasus ended the siege. Khe Sanh turned out to be one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War.
Aftermath, both sides claimed victory despite heavy casualties on the communists and the fact that the U.S. had to abandon a key combat base due to enemy pressure for the first time. Although the U.S. officials expected a full-scale offensive from the North Vietnamese troops, it never came. Instead, Battle of Khe Sanh seemed a diversionary tactic to distract American & South Vietnamese forces from the Viet Cong build-up in the South for the so-called “Tet Offensive”.
The author, a 2nd Lieutenant with the 101st Airborne Division during the 1968 Tet Offensive – taken during the Battle for Hue, South Vietnam. Photo by the author.
While the U.S. and South Vietnamese were still focusing on Khe Sanh, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops surprisingly launched the Tet Offensive – a series of aggressive and coordinated surprise attacks on over 100 major towns and cities throughout South Vietnam on January 30 – the first day of Tet (Vietnamese Lunar New Year).
Despite its surprise and initial success, the communists were quickly repelled within several hours or days except for Saigon, which took around 2 weeks and particularly Hue, which took the PAVN nearly a month to recapture the former capital city of Hue.
The Tet Offensive was, in deed, a massive military defeat for the North communists. However, the offensive could be seen as a “strategic”, “psychological” win and a turning point in the war for them as it shocked the U.S. government and public at home.
What’s the difference between biggest and major? The battles impact on the outcome of the war!
I served with the 101st Airborne Division and was in Vietnam for the 1968 Tet Offensive. It was a major battle that turned the tide of the war against the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army. I know, I was there. It was a clear North Vietnamese defeat on the battlefield.
Walter Cronkite in Vietnam.
However, Walter Cronkite called it a loss for our military and the Tet Offensive of 1968 was the beginning of the end of our involvement in Vietnam. In his National Interest article “Cronkite’s Vietnam Blunder“, Robert W. Merry writes:
Douglas Brinkley’s new biography of Walter Cronkite has sparked an intriguing controversy about the CBS anchorman’s famous trip to Vietnam in February 1968. That’s when, as legend has it, Cronkite was so shocked at the devastation of the communists’ Tet offensive that he went over to see for himself what was really going on. And he concluded the war was a stalemate, probably unwinnable.
Brinkley buys the argument, put forth by the late David Halberstam in his characteristically portentous manner, that Cronkite’s February 27 [1968] broadcast, “Report from Vietnam,” played a major role in turning Americans against the war and inducing President Lyndon Johnson to abandon his reelection campaign.
This lead to increased calls to exit Vietnam and eventually gave North Vietnam their final victory in Paris, France. Congress capitulated, the South Vietnamese were abandoned. The Christian genocide in Vietnam began.
I, to this day, say that our military won the war on the ground in Vietnam but lost the war on the streets of Washington, D.C. and in Congress due to the protests. We won the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people but lost the hearts and minds of the American people. Each battle during the Tet Offensive, from Khe Sahn to Dak To to the the battle for Hue, were part of the larger war against the Communist forces aligned against the armies of the free world.
Vietnam was a proxy war in the greater global war fought between the former Soviet Union and the Free World.
We continue to relearn that lesson today as we see the war in Iraq now lost and so too in Afghanistan. History is repeating itself. The players are the same, just the names of the battles have change – from the Battles for Fallujah in Iraq to the 101st Airborne Division in the Hornets Nest (watch the below video) in Afghanistan.
Winning the battles inextricably will lead to winning the war. That was true up until Vietnam. Since then the dynamic has changed, for the worse.
It’s the will of the American people that counts, not the victories on the battlefield by our soldiers. Sad but true.
EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of American soldiers near the ancient city of Hue in the Northern province of the former South Vietnam, taken during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.
This establishes once again that the jihad is not provoked by what we say and do — because if anyone has indefatigably pursued a course of not saying or doing anything that could possibly anger Islamic jihadis or Muslims in general, it’s Hillary Clinton.
“Media gleefully reporting al-Shabab video with Trump, IGNORES Hillary and ‘Black Lives Matter’ are in it TOO!!,” Right Scoop, January 2, 2016:
El Trumpo is finally being used in a terrorist training video and the media couldn’t be more happy.
Here’s TIME magazine:
An al-Qaeda affiliate released a recruitment video Friday that includes an excerpt of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announcing his call to temporarily ban all Muslims from entering the U.S.
AND:
The video, apparently the first to include footage of Trump, juxtaposed clips of the presidential candidate and al-Awlaki saying “the West will eventually turn against its Muslims citizens,” according to the Times, while also including footage of al-Awlaki calling for attacks similar to that of the Fort Hood shooting in 2009, in which Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan killed 13 people and injured more than 30 in Killeen, Texas.But, as NRO columnist Stephen Miller points out, they’re completely ignoring some details:
Image from Twitter.
Here’s how TIME is vaguely reporting the Black Lives Matter appearance:
According to the New York Times, al-Shabab—the Islamic militant branch of al-Qaeda in Somalia—included the clip of Trump along with footage of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American imam and recruiter for al-Qaeda who was killed in 2011, as well as clips of white supremacists and protests over police use of force in the U.S.
Funny how they don’t mention their name, isn’t it?…
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December 2015 is gone, and so is US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who announced in October that he would be leaving DC in December.
In this January 02, 2016, NBC “Meet the Press” article, President Obama offers an unsubstantiated statement in an effort to portray Duncan’s tenure in Washington, DC, as successful:
“Arne has dedicated his life to the cause of education — and sometimes in the nicest possible way, he has gotten on people’s nerves because he has pushed them and prodded them,” Obama said at the signing of the Every Student Succeeds Act.
“Had he not been, I believe, as tenacious as he was, I think that we would not have as good of a product as we do here today. And so I could not be prouder of Arne Duncan,” the president added.
I wonder exactly what that “as good of a product” is. Obama isn’t offering details.
The NBC article is generous in its assessment (funny word choice) of Duncan’s accomplishments. For example, NBC credits Duncan with “helping convince” states to adopt the Common Core State Standards (CCSS):
Duncan helped convince 42 states to adopt education goals based on the Common Core, and 21 of them to use tests that directly align with those standards, which were created by a bi-partisan group and attempt to both make U.S. schools more challenging and the curriculum more similar from state-to-state.
Recall that CCSS was supposedly “state led.” Too, the wording that CCSS was an “attempt” to make schools more challenging is wording polished to a glossy sheen given the rush to write and implement CCSS before America knew what had hit it.
And let me add a corrective finger wag to NBC– CCSS isn’t supposed to be a curriculum— even though taking hold of standards on one end and assessments on the other will indeed drive the curriculum in the middle.
Arne was just “helping” with all of this.
Note, however, that the CCSS push was in the works before Duncan arrived in 2009 (e.g., billionaire Bill Gates was asked to fund the venture in summer 2008), so what Duncan did in 2009 was attach money to CCSS via Race to the Top (RTTT), which was careful to not name CCSS, instead opting for the term “common standards” that were “consortium developed.”
In June 2009, Duncan attended the National Governors Association (NGA) symposium and announced that RTTT would be coming– and that the federal government would foot the bill for CCSS’s consortium-developed, common assessments. However, before Duncan officially announced RTTT, 46 states and three territories had already signed the CCSS memorandum of understanding (MOU).
Of course, it is possible that the governors were willing to sign onto a CCSS that did not yet exist because of the smell of federal money coming– and Duncan certainly could have helped them smell it.
(Note that the CCSS MOU also indicated that the federal government would have an extensive role in all to do with CCSS except specifically funding its writing.)
To NBC’s credit, it does note later in its Duncan piece that “conservatives accurately cast Duncan as effectively federalizing education policy.” However, the NBC article adds that Duncan views the CCSS backlash as “more about a failure to communicate his vision than his ideas themselves.”
Dream on, Arne.
Duncan was protective of CCSS to the extent that he told newspaper editors how to report on CCSS; he has even insulted parents for CCSS opposition. These details did not make it into the NBC article, and apparently, Duncan does not consider that his vision was indeed accurately communicated.
What did make it into the NBC piece was Duncan’s charter school affinity– so much so that he is credited with “presiding over” charter school growth in places that were charter-school friendly pre-Duncan, such as DC and New Orleans:
While some liberals dislike charter schools, Duncan has been a strong supporter of them and presided over a huge growth in students attending charters in cities like Washington, D.C. and New Orleans.
Yes, Duncan is friendly toward charter schools. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the latest Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) revision, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), both seek to expand the presence of “high quality charter schools” (should be a trademarked term by now) without addressing issues of charter school mismanagement and scandal. Indeed, on the day that he resigned, Duncan doled out a cool $249 million to charter schools despite the criticism that his Department of Ed failed to monitor its generous charter school payouts:
On that day, Duncan rattled the education policy world with news of a controversial grant of $249 million ($157 the first year) to the charter school industry. This announcement was controversial because, as The Washington Post reports, an audit by his department’s own inspector general found “that the agency has done a poor job of overseeing federal dollars sent to charter schools.”
Post reporter Lynsey Layton notes, “The agency’s inspector general issued a scathing report in 2012 that found deficiencies in how the department handled federal grants to charter schools between 2008 and 2011″ – in other words, during Duncan’s watch.
Even more perplexing is that the largest grant of $71 million ($32.5 the first year) is going to Ohio, the state that has the worst reputation for allowing low-performing charter schools to divert tax money away from educational purposes and do little to raise the achievement of students.
Any Duncan legacy piece should account for this glaring Duncan lapse, and NBC’s piece on Duncan does not.
Is this part of Obama’s “good” educational “product”? Is he proud of Duncan for his failure to bring some of that so-called accountability over federal charter school cash?
He isn’t saying.
In giving $71 million to Ohio, which has been in the news for issues of charter corruption– including the Ohio Department of Education’s manipulating charter school stats– the USDOE offered the unbelievably weak explanation that it simply did not conduct a thorough review of the Ohio application before approving Ohio for that $71 million.
Another issue: NBC alludes to Duncan’s attempts to coerce states into his, uh, “vision” via his conditional NCLB waivers, which actually led to lots of detailed ESSA language attempting to limit the role of future US secretaries of education, especially as concerns Title I funding. I am in the process of writing a digest on the 1,061-page ESSA; below is an excerpt regarding the ESSA prohibitions on the US secretary of education.
They are undeniably inspired by the actions of former US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan:
[Regarding ESSA state plans and Title I funding], there are a number of specifics that the secretary cannot do. …The secretary cannot create a hard-and-fast, exhaustive list of illustrations on how the Title I state plan should read, and the secretary cannot offer “new, non-regulatory guidance” that “purports to be legally binding” (page 104)– hinting at Duncan’s overreach with his No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers.
There is also the statement that the secretary cannot add to the data reporting requirements of Title I: “[the secretary cannot] require data collection under this part beyond data derived from existing Federal, State, and local reporting requirements” (page 104).
The secretary cannot redefine Title I terminology in an effort to bypass the limitations on the secretary’s role regarding Title I (pages 104-105).
The US secretary-limiting language in ESSA is attributed to Duncan, and NBC does get that right:
Earlier this month (December 2015), Congress passed the “Every Student Succeeds Act,” a replacement to the Bush-era “No Child Left Behind” law. Included in the ESSA, at the behest of congressional Republicans, are several provisions that explicitly bar the federal Department of Education from setting policy for all of America’s schools. Republicans wanted to ensure there are no more Arne Duncans.
If the Republicans wanted to ensure there were “no more Arne Duncans,” they likely missed their goal, at least in part. When it comes to the 95-percent participation requirement for English language arts (ELA) and math testing in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school, ESSA tells states that they are not supposed to fashion state- and local-level opt out laws and regulations based on the federal testing requirement as a condition for Title I funding.
In other words, don’t blame the federal government for the federally-required Title I testing.
This will produce a showdown in which states that fail to make the federally-mandated 95 percent of students tested will be at the mercy of the next US secretary of education, who does have the authority to waive ESSA requirements. (For details, see pages 815 to 826 of the ESSA document.)
As it stands, spring 2016 testing still falls under NCLB. Note that the NCLB intention of the 95-percent of students tested was retained in ESSA, with tighter language in ESSA. NCLB language is looser in that it notes that states must administer tests (there was no parental opt-out in 2001 and therefore no inkling that state-administered tests would be resisted by parents and students), but it seems that Ann Whalen, whose temp title is “Delegated the authority to perform the functions and duties of Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education,” plans to put the squeeze on states to get that 95 percent of students to actually take the tests that the state is required by NCLB to “administer.” (It is one issue for states to administer the tests and quite another for parents to allow their children to take the tests that the state is in good NCLB faith offering to administer.)
Whalen advises states to put pressure on districts to get that 95 percent of students participating in the testing. Among her suggestions are lowering the less-than-95-percent-testing district rating in the state accountability system; requiring districts with fewer than 95 percent test takers to develop an “improvement plan”; designating such districts or schools as “high risk,” or a state’s withholding state or federal aid from such districts.
Finally, before her creepy “we look forward to working with you” closing, Whalen states that she is not beyond withholding Title I funding, especially for states with notable opt outs last year:
If a State with participation rates below 95% in the 2014−2015 school year fails to assess at least 95% of its students on the statewide assessment in the 2015−2016 school year, ED will take one or more of the following actions: (1) withhold Title I, Part A State administrative funds; (2) place the State’s Title I, Part A grant on high-risk status and direct the State to use a portion of its Title I State administrative funds to address low participation rates; or (3) withhold or redirect Title VI State assessment funds.
For all States, ED will consider the appropriate action to take for any State that does not assess at least 95 percent of its students in the 2015−2016 school year — overall and for each subgroup of students and among its LEAs. To determine what action is most appropriate, ED will consider SEA and LEA participation rate data for the 2015−2016 school year, as well as action the SEA has taken with respect to any LEA noncompliance with the assessment requirements of the ESEA.
We look forward to working with you to ensure that all students participate in statewide assessments during the 2015−2016 school year and each year thereafter, and in supporting implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which includes a new focus on auditing and reducing unnecessary State and local assessments and providing parents and families with better information about required testing….
Please do not hesitate to contact your State’s program officer in the Office of State Support if you need additional information or clarification. Thank you for your continued commitment to enhancing education for all of your State’s students.
Nice. If it seems that Whalen sounds like a Duncan, it is because she has ties to Duncan and Chicago. I know her from reading her pro-corporate-reform writing at Ed Post (which happens to be run by another Duncan-Chicago-USDOE crony, Peter Cunningham):
Ann Whalen is senior advisor to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Prior to returning to the U.S. Department of Education, she served as the director of policy for Education Post.
Whalen has served more than five years in the Obama Administration with the U.S. Department of Education. At the department, Ann was director of the Implementation and Support Unit, providing technical assistance to states and school districts as they rolled out new reform programs to improve student results. In that role, she managed a 35-member team and a portfolio of over $50 billion in grant programs. She also served as a special assistant to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, helping shape administration policy across a range of issues. She also worked with Duncan at Chicago Public Schools for six years and served in the City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development under the administration of former Mayor Richard M. Daley.
She has B.A. in political science from Stanford University.
You can read Whalen’s December 22, 2015, “I’m warning you” letter to state superintendents in its entirety here, compliments of Alyson Klein of EdWeek.
Duncan is gone, and the USDOE test worship continues.
We’ll see what spring brings for Whalen.
EDITORS NOTE: Schneider is the author of A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who In the Implosion of American Public Education. She has published a second book, Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?. If you don’t wish to buy from Amazon you may purchase the books from Powell’s City of Books directly.
By Judith Gelernter Reisman and Mary E. McAllister
CNN’s The Hunting Ground has won critical acclaim from filmmakers, winning the Stanley Kramer award from the Producers Guild of America while garnering criticism from Ivy League elites who worry that their reputations are being sullied by the depiction of a “rape culture” on their campuses (Harvard Crimson). That, in turn, has prompted a response from students in the form of a discrimination complaint under the Federal anti-discrimination law known as Title IX.
The attention that The Hunting Ground has attracted raises the question, “has it always been so on college campuses?”
VIDEO: Trailer The Hunting Ground.
Even radical sexologists such as Prof. Ira Reiss have to admit that it has not. Reiss reports that unmarried WWII 18-22 year-old Army lads were largely “still virgins.” Even Hugh Hefner was a college virgin at age 22. Dutch “sexperts” Drs. Kronhausens’ 1960 survey revealed, “The average modern college man is apt to say that he considers intercourse “too precious” to have with anyone except the girl he expects to marry and may actually abstain from all intercourse for that reason.” (p. 219). However, by the 1970s youth were generally sexually radicalized–once normalized, most thought unwed sex was “natural.”
How did this transformation occur? A brief chronology shows the historical context:
1950: “Age Disparity (Relations Involving One Adult) …. [P]ersons under the age of 7 are legally regarded as not responsible….but many are by endowment and training fully capable of….responsibility for sexual behavior.”
Manfried Guttmacher, Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP).
1953: “The cultural tendency to overprotect women and children [is] often…more detrimental to the…victim than the offense itself….Kinsey’s findings…permeate all present thinking on this subject.” The Illinois Commission on Sex Offenders
1955: “Despite the indication that 12 is…the onset of puberty….it is known that significant numbers of girls enter the period of sexual awakening as early as the tenth year.” Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry; the ALI, Model Penal Code
1983: “[T]he older term “rape” was fraught with negative emotion and [is] unrealistic for this era. . . . [T]he female is [not] … harmed in some unique way by untoward sexual behavior.” C. Nemeth, How New Jersey Prosecutors View the New Sexual Offense Statutes; N.J. Law Journal.
Fast forward from a Hugh Hefner as a 22 year old virgin to today, where high-profile college and professional athletes like Tim Tebow and Russell Wilson are ridiculed for announcing they will abstain from sex until they are married. Does this contempt for virginity reflect somehow a kind of “sexual exploitation pedagogy” of esteemed professors and administrators? And how have these prestigious graduates of a sexploitive pedagogy affected society? Have elitist sex abuse fantasies evolved into ideology, seeping into leading minds of the legal, political, educational, legislative, religious, scientific, medical, justice, law enforcement, entertainment, etc. worlds? And is pornography in university offices and dorms seeding its widespread sexual ideology?
Statistics tell the story. Roughly 80% of college men and 34% of co-eds use porn on campus or off, sanctioned by “free speech” Harvard professors and administrators—that’s campus sex culture! And, ominously, Data4Justice documents many “professors and staff…arrested for trading in brutal child sex abuse, including of infants.”
From University of Virginia’s Assistant Dean, Michael Morris downloading infant anal rape to Kirk Nesset, creative writing professor at Allegheny College with over 500,000 videos/images including” rape of infants. Professors and staff are involved in child sex trafficking….Since 2015 August, at least two professors per week have been arrested, arraigned or sentenced.”
Moreover, FBI’s Joseph Campbell says “the level of pedophilia is unprecedented right now.” A “survey of high school graduates” found 13.5% had sex with a teacher. If some administrators and professors are viewing child rape on campus computers does this become an intellectualization of a “rape culture”? A 2014 op-ed by Yale Professor Jed Rubenfeld, drew heated objections from Yale Law Students. He reminds our largely historically ignorant populace of the fallout following the nostalgic 1969 “Woodstock” “sexual revolution”.
It’s part of the revolution in sexual attitudes and college sex codes that has taken place over the last 50 years. Not long ago, nonmarital sex on college campuses was flatly suppressed. Sex could be punished with suspension or expulsion….Rape was a matter for the police, not the university. Beginning in the late 1960s however, sex on campus increasingly came to be permitted….The problem then became how to define consent.[Emphasis added]
So almost three generations ago, youth were lied to (read Dr. Reisman’s books for details) and persuaded that the WWII generation were closet sexual adventurers. This belief in their parental hypocrisy (see, The Graduate, 1967) helped youth reject the American legacy of sex restrictions in exchange for “sex drugs ‘n rock-n-roll.” Since then, each subsequent generation has been increasingly sexually permissive. Sexpert ideologues now teach sex to children in school, videos, social media, film, novels, text books, even pulpits while “every five days, a police officer in America is caught engaging in sexual abuse or misconduct.” And sexual victimization of males occurs in the military today, not just in prisons. Well over 14,000 in 2012, “[a]ccording to the Pentagon, thirty-eight military men are sexually assaulted every single day. So, it’s not just more reporting. Is it possible pornography is training a rape culture?
Meanwhile, back at Harvard, nineteen Law Professors posted an irate protest of CNN’s portrayal of the sexualized campuses as a “rape culture.” Their most illustrious professorial signatory is Prof. Laurence Tribe, an admitted plagiarizer, who taught American Legal History to Obama and two Supreme Court Justices. Tribe apparently is inexcusably ignorant of, or deliberately hiding, the worst child sex crimes and frauds in American Legal History—of pedophile Prof. Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University, the “father of the sexual revolution.” American past and present sexual law was revolutionized based upon experiments on up to 2,035 children raped and tortured for alleged “orgasms” published in Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) Kinsey, a sadistic obsessive masturbating pedophile and pornography addict was the scientific authority for these disastrous changes. His Tables 30-34 record the worst, unprosecuted, infant andchild sexual experimentation ever conducted in American Legal History, (Reisman, 2013)
By 1952 Herbert Wechsler’s Harvard Law Review article relied on Kinsey’s sex tome to justify liberalizing all sex laws. By 1955 Wechsler, chief author of the first-ever American Law Institute Model Penal Code (MPC), reported that sex protections for females were onerous for men. The new, innovative MPC argued that reduction of sex crime required more sexual freedom, lighter penalties, parole, and tax paid therapy for all sex criminals. Under Wechsler the neoteric MPC proposed age ten for consent as her “seductive” conduct might push men to rape. Kinsey claimed of 4,441 female interviewees none was really injured by a sexual assault, hence the Kinsey-MPC plan was to eliminate “unrealistic” rape and statutory rape laws. No rape harm, no need for rape laws! With this “cultural” pedagogy promoted by our prestigious legal lights and backed by Kinseyan “sex science” our legacy would inevitably be a “rape culture”—rape on college campuses, middle schools, libraries, bedrooms, barrooms, church pews, court rooms, etc. Be careful what you ask for. After the MPC advised a lowered age of consent (to allow “peer” sex), as Reisman documents, America’s legislatures and courts loosened state laws that had favored women (harsh laws against rape, adultery, child sex abuse, incest) and eased criminal penalties for sex offenders in more than two-thirds of U.S. states.
Wechsler and others used Kinsey’s alleged “sex science” to justify these actions and claims such as “[t]he cultural tendency to overprotect women and children [is] often…more detrimental to the…victim than the offense itself… Kinsey’s findings … permeate all present thinking on this subject.” Recall, until Kinsey, society allowed “the marital act” only in the “institution” of marriage, severely limiting even “fun consensual” fornication.Morris Ploscowe wrote, in the 1948 “Pre-Kinsey era” three states gave mandatory death sentences for rape—nineteen states provided the death penalty, life, or very long terms. Twenty-eight states gave the rapist 20 years or more, and one 15 years or more. Post-Kinsey’s “data” stated that 95 percent of men were already sex offenders and most women were promiscuous, or wanted to be. According to Ploscowe, justification for strict rape, child abuse or obscenity law was largely old fashioned.
How many millions of college lassies were spared disease, pregnancy, heartbreak, rape, suicide even homicide by such “old fashioned” ideas?
Now, trained by these elite academics and since “tween-age” by media such as Cosmopolitan magazine (be a “fun, fearless female”– booze up and hook-up), millions of Cosmo followers reveal how well they have learned by accepting or appearing in student pornography magazines such as Harvard’s “Diamond” launched in 2004. At least 10 American universities followed suit, featuring nude photo-spreads of ordinary students. Dozens more host “sex events,” such as naked parties at Yale, “sex week” at Tufts or “Outdoor Intercourse Day” at Western Washington University. Other examples include photographs of half-naked gay couples at the University of Chicago, Squirm at Vassar and, arguably, the most explicit, Boink….College Guide to Carnal Knowledge at Boston University.
Elitist administrators, perhaps some of those who complained about The Hunting Ground, award free speech funds and/or advocate for abusive porn events. Yale graduate Nathan Harden reports on “Sex Week” at Yale, recruiting naïve students into today’s vicious sexploitation. Here “porn stars and sex industry CEOs are invited on campus for a marathon of sex-related film screenings, seminars, and product demonstrations — all sanctioned by the university as ‘sex education.’” Harden notes that the university polity (steeped in the sex-saturated, rape culture they deplore yet breed) no longer understand the reason for education.
This is an unanticipated cost of the ‘60’s sexual revolution along with an explosion of inventive, barbaric sex crimes against women, children, even infants, and increased recidivism.
Some academic elites are waking up. Feminist lawyer and former Democratic presidential Campaign Manager for Michael Dukakis (1988), Susan Estrich was perplexed by the MPC influence on rape laws. She wondered at the “fresh complaint” clause that said, “a complaint must be filed within three months,” if the crime were sexual. This clause had not been part of America’s Common Law. Moreover, now that liberal lawyers were in charge, only “if serious bodily injury is inflicted” would rape be a “first degree felony.”
Moreover, noted Estrich, the lawyerly libidos had new rules for rape. If the victim had a “racy” past she might be classed as a “prostitute.” Therefore, even when she was the victim of a “gang” or fraternity “group” rape, the guilty predator might be cleared of the crime. These and other new laws followed on Kinsey’s claims that rape was a harmless, natural and normal reaction to seductive females (by age 10). Also, the New York Times reported, March 8, 1949, Kinsey had proven that not more than 5 percent of arrestees cause any real damage and thus sex offense laws had no function other than to preserve custom.
Today—60 years later, the same Ivy League Schools are embroiled in controversy regarding the “rape culture” they helped create through training students, lawyers, judges, politicians and legislators in Kinseyan pansexuality and the MPC. Many of these 2nd generation learned professors are now signatories on letters protesting claims that there is a rape culture caused by the very sexual revolution they helped institute on campus.
For a truly touching video on the reality of the damage done to all by the elites’ promotion of the sexual revolution, do take time to view former porn “star” Shelley Lubben’s reverential video, Dead Porn Stars Memorial.
Judith Gelernter Reisman, PhD
Research Professor, Director Liberty Child Protection Center, Liberty University School of Law
Mary E. McAlister, Esq.
Senior Litigation Counsel, Liberty Counsel
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EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on Breitbart.com.
By Wallace Bruschweiler and William Palumbo
Promotional poster for a Grand Guignol performance. Courtesy of Wikipedia.com.
Over the last several years, the American people have witnessed one perplexing political shenanigan after another – a never-ending story. Instead of standing up for principles, for democracy itself, our elected leaders routinely sell-out the same country to which they swore an oath to protect.
The most recent enormous sell-out was the passage of a budget that served only the government, not the country. It began with the election of a new Speaker, whom many hoped would serve the country better than his predecessor. Instead of a political savior, we got yet another total political loser.
Once in power, the Speaker raised the curtain on a most appalling political horror, a true grand guignol: a budget that funds a government which is already standing on financial quicksand, and that has an abysmal, out-proportion debt. So much for “we won’t get fooled again.”
Indeed, many of the men and women whom we once considered true patriots have, in recent years, months, and weeks, shown that their own personal agenda and banks accounts take priority over the safeguarding and destiny of our nation. Their treachery – their betrayal – of the American people is forcing a major geopolitical realignment. Under rule of the current political establishment, the United States is a leading contender in whatever Oscar equivalent is awarded to banana republics.
How and why did all this happen? Without access to personal records, such as bank accounts domestically and on an international level, including tax shelters, it is impossible to say with certainty. But, if past is prologue, then bribery facilitated by a government-entrenched mafia is what greases this political machinery.
Welcome to Our Real World: Today’s Ugly Reality
It is not pleasant at all to think that a mafia-type government runs Washington, D.C. Yet it exactly explains why, despite widespread disapproval of Barack Hussein Obama and Congress, both parties continue working shamelessly against the interests and well-being of the American electorate.
Take, for example, the so-called Iranian nuclear deal. By legitimizing Iran, the world’s preeminent sponsor of terrorism, Obama has opened the Iranian markets (especially oil and natural gas) to the western world. In the long run, this deal has the potential to generate trillions of dollars in international trade. Companies represented by extremely well-financed and influential lobbyists see Iran as the mother-of-all potential markets.
Despite the overwhelming dangers that emanate from enriching a brutal regime with not-so-veiled nuclear ambitions and a proven worldwide terrorist network, the Republican-led Congress refused to try anything which would have effectively postponed and/or killed the deal.
Again, how and why could this have happened? The answer is unfortunately obvious: money (and, in the case of the Iranian nuclear deal, close family connections between the negotiating members from both sides).
There are other examples that come to mind: a multi-trillion dollar “stimulus” package, a $700 billion dollar bank bailout, countless “green” energy loans that have ended in bankruptcy, etc.
How likely is it that some of this money has been used to line pockets for political favors on both sides of the aisle? All of this was paid and financed by the people’s tax dollars.
“A government of the mafia, by the mafia, and for the mafia” – that seems to be today’s motto
Mafia is non-ideological: it does not embrace political ideals. It cynically espouses ideals from time to time, but ultimately it will not uphold virtues that interfere with the strict pursuit of money and power. So, when (not if) necessary, ideals and decency are conveniently forgotten.
The public at large calls this process “a bipartisan compromise.” However, in reality, there is only one party. It is a political animal which puts your God-given rights on the auction block, to be sold to the highest willing and able bidder.
It’s also indisputably true that politicians, on both sides of the aisle, are taking bribes. Wherever power accumulates, corruption immediately follows. Widespread corruption is the defining trait of Washington’s establishment today. There is no principled leader among them.
Politicians, like everyone else, have a price.
It is inconceivable that any Western leader would favorably cite Hitler in any context, but in Turkey, citing Hitler doesn’t bring instant opprobrium. Mein Kampf became a bestseller when it was published there in 2005, and Hitler remains popular. Also, a former classmate says Erdogan used to carry a copy around when he was a young man. Hitler’s antisemitism resonates with Islamic Jew-hatred.
“Turkey’s Erdogan says Hitler’s Germany exemplifies effective presidential system,” Reuters, January 1, 2016:
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who is pushing for executive powers, cites Hitler’s Germany as an example of an effective presidential system, in comments broadcast by Turkish media on Friday.
Erdogan wants to change the Turkish constitution to turn the ceremonial role of president into that of a chief executive, a Turkish version of the system in the United States, France or Russia.
Asked on his return from a visit to Saudi Arabia late on Thursday whether an executive presidential system was possible while maintaining the unitary structure of the state, he said: “There are already examples in the world. You can see it when you look at Hitler’s Germany.
“There are later examples in various other countries,” he told reporters, according to a recording broadcast by the Dogan news agency.
The ruling AK Party, founded by Erdogan, has put a new constitution at the heart of its agenda after winning back a majority in a November parliamentary election.
It agreed with the main opposition CHP on Wednesday to revive efforts to forge a new constitution….
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“There has been a desire among some employees to go in larger groups of people to pray. We just can’t accommodate that. It backs up the flow of all the production. We’re a federally inspected, USDA inspected plant. We have to ensure food safety. We have to ensure the products we produce meet consumer expectations.” No, you don’t, as you’ll soon learn: you have to make sure Muslims are accommodated. Everything else takes a back seat to that.
In reality, Muslims can make up missed prayers at later times, which makes it clear (as does the involvement of Hamas-linked CAIR) that this is simply an Islamic supremacist endeavor to secure special privileges for Muslims, such as we have seen on many other occasions. The objective is to reinforce the principle that wherever Islamic law and practice conflict with American law and practice, it is the latter that must give way.
“Cargill: Tried to resolve issues before firing Colorado Muslim workers,” by Emilie Rusch and Jesse Paul, Denver Post, December 31, 2015 (thanks to David):
Cargill Meat Solutions said Thursday it tried to resolve a workplace prayer dispute with Somali workers at its Fort Morgan meatpacking plant that led to the firing of about 190 employees.
The workers who lost their jobs were mostly immigrants from Somalia, and their termination came after they failed to report to work for three consecutive days last week to protest what they say were changes in times allowed for Muslim prayer.
Cargill says, however, it makes every “reasonable attempt” to provide religious accommodation for all of its employees at the Fort Morgan plant without interrupting operations.
“At no time did Cargill prevent people from prayer at Fort Morgan,” said Michael Martin, a spokesman for the Wichita-based company, which is part of the agribusiness giant Cargill Inc. ” Nor have we changed policies related to religious accommodation and attendance. This has been mischaracterized.”
Cargill also said while reasonable efforts are made to accommodate employees, accommodation is not guaranteed every day and depends on changing factors in the plant.
“This has been clearly communicated to all employees,” Martin said.
But the [Hamas-linked — Ed.] Council on American-Islamic Relations, which is representing more than 100 of the fired employees, said Thursday that messaging from plant supervisors has not always been so clear.
On Dec. 18, the Friday before employee protests began Dec. 21, “the workers were told: ‘If you want to pray, go home,’ ” CAIR spokesman Jaylani Hussein said.
“To these employees, that is what it is. Maybe Cargill never changed its policy, but to these employees, they feel whatever the policy is, or how it is implemented, there was a change put in place,” Hussein said.
Cargill provides a “reflection room” at the plant where observant Muslim workers are allowed to pray, something that has been available since 2009.
Hussein said depending on the season, the workers pray at different times of the day, typically taking five to 10 minutes away from their work. The time was carved out of a 15-minute break period or from the workers’ unpaid 30-minute lunch breaks.
Many of the workers banded together and decided to walk off the job in an attempt to sway plant managers to reinstate the prayer policy.
“They feel missing their prayer is worse than losing their job,” Hussein said. “It’s like losing a blessing from God.”
On Dec. 23, Cargill fired the holdouts who had not returned to work, citing a company policy that employees who do not show up for work or call in for three consecutive days will be let go.
“It’s an unfortunate situation that may be based somewhere in a misunderstanding,” Martin said. “But the policies have been in place, and we go over the policies for all people who are newly hired to the company when they are hired.”
All of the terminated employees worked the second shift on the plant’s fabrication floor, where chilled beef carcasses are broken down into smaller cuts and packaged, Martin said.
Of those involved, “fewer than 20” employees walked out in the middle of a shift, he said. About 160 failed to report to work, and 10 resigned.
Before the walkout, Cargill employed roughly 600 Somali workers at the Fort Morgan plant. More than 400 still work there, Martin said, and accommodations are still being made to allow Muslims to leave the floor in small groups to pray.
“There has been a desire among some employees to go in larger groups of people to pray. We just can’t accommodate that,” Martin said. “It backs up the flow of all the production. We’re a federally inspected, USDA inspected plant. We have to ensure food safety. We have to ensure the products we produce meet consumer expectations.”…
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What is noteworthy about this story is not — horror of horrors! — the bacon at the mosque. That is obnoxious and stupid, but that’s all it is: no one was hurt, no one was intimidated, no one was threatened.
What is noteworthy here is the furious dhimmi overreaction of the FBI. $5,000? For some bacon?
Watch for Obama get involved in this. He could intone, “The future must not belong to those who leave bacon at mosques.” He could appoint a bacon-protection task force. They could be outfitted in grand uniforms featuring brown-and-beige stripes, to resemble a slice of bacon. Obama could name them The National Bacon Mosque Guards and commission them in an elaborate ceremony at the White House, after which they would march in formation to the nation’s mosques and take up watch against the greasy Islamophobic bacon bearers.
This story shows the lengths to which authorities in the U.S. will go to perpetuate their victimhood myth. Instead of just throwing the bacon away and dismissing it as a silly prank, it becomes part of the “climate of hate” against Muslims. You want a real “climate of hate,” check out the Christians who have been driven from their homes, exiled, killed, etc. in Iraq and Syria. No one is putting up $5,000 rewards for those who are persecuting them.
Bacon on door of the Masjid-e-Tawheed mosque in Las Vegas.
“FBI offers $5,000 reward after bacon found at Vegas mosque,” by Sally Ho, Associated Press, December 31, 2015:
LAS VEGAS (AP) — The FBI is offering a $5,000 reward for information that helps them find the person who put raw bacon on the door handles of a Las Vegas mosque.
The FBI said in a statement Wednesday that agents are trying to find the man seen in a surveillance video putting the meat on the entrances of the Masjid-e-Tawheed mosque. Authorities call it a desecration of the Islamic worship center.
The Quran, the holy book of Islam, prohibits Muslims from eating pork, and pigs have been used to taunt or offend Muslims.
Both the FBI and Las Vegas police say they’re investigating the case as a possible hate crime.
Las Vegas police spokesman Larry Hadfield said the bacon was wrapped on the door knobs, and was also found on the ground and fences.
Officials at the mosque couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
The FBI said the incident happened about 3:15 a.m. Dec. 27. The culprit is described as a white man wearing a dark blue hat, jacket and black-framed glasses. He had black or dark brown hair with long, thin sideburns.
The site west of the Las Vegas Strip wasn’t damaged, and no one was hurt. The mosque was empty at the time, and the case was reported by members who came to worship later that morning….
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Promises, promises! The do-gooder (paternalistic!) Liberals run into a bit of a problem. 70% of Syrian refugees don’t want to go to Canada.
The new Canadian prime minister, boy Trudeau, had campaigned on the promise to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by December 31, 2015. They fell short by about 19,000! Here is one important reason why (you won’t see this mentioned by the NO borders agitators in the U.S. resettlement industry!).
Canadian PM Justin Trudeau
They want to stay in the Middle East!
Can you believe it! They like their culture and they hope to go home!
From the Globe and Mail:
Omayma al-Kasem is bold, forthright and speaks clearly and with confidence. She has completed four years of law school and volunteers as a mental-health worker with a Jordanian charity, and as such, is exactly the kind of Syrian refugee Canada wants to welcome. The trouble is, Ms. al-Kasem isn’t interested in coming.
The 26-year-old from Daraa, Syria, is one of a sizable number of Syrians turning down the chance to become permanent residents of Canada. According to UN figures, just three out of every 10 households contacted about resettlement in Canada go on to relocate.
“Some families are still hoping to return home, others are concerned about their ability to integrate into another country – including learn the language,” said Aoife McDonnell, an external relations officer at the UNHCR refugee agency in Jordan.
One of the unspoken truths that the resettlement industry is loathe to admit is that many refugees who do reach the West are unhappy and want to go home, but they are trapped in a land where they have discovered (to their great disappointment) that no streets are paved with gold.
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Mrs. Obama
It sickens me that I have to take time to write you this letter. I am a Marine who doesn’t recognize color because every color has lived and died for you. You live in a free country to blame your life on the color of another man’s skin. All colors have given their lives for an educated woman to have the freedom to be so ignorant. I don’t blame black people for the ignorance that comes from your mouth.
I love all colors because I love all that God creates. I don’t have to like you to love you because we can’t always like the ones we love. Just because I don’t like you today doesn’t mean I can’t like you tomorrow. I don’t like you or your husband today because of what you’re doing to this country. Isn’t it funny how the truth always reveals itself in time. You and your husband never showed this side of yourselves in 2008 before he was elected.
You both live better than 99% of the people in this world because of this country. You said that you are for the first time proud to be an American. Well, I will tell you that most of us are ashamed of you. You and your husband have become millionaires off the people of this country, but demonstrate very little appreciation for all that we give. White, black, brown or indifferent millions have fought and died for you to have the freedom to say the ignorant things you say.
You are educated, but clearly have very little common sense. You blame past generations of Americans for the troubles of a few. Stop blaming white people for your misery and take a look at yourself in the mirror. We are responsible for our own happiness and misery. The KKK is ignorance wrapped in a sheet while the Black panthers are raised on ignorance and hate. No different from the teaching of Islam thinking their race is better than all other men. God is love and creates every color to include everyone’s skin. To truly love God is to love all that He loves. For that I love each of you and pray that we all start taking responsibility for our own damned sins.
Martin Luther King had a dream that we would all live in the promise land. He is not remembered for being black. He is remembered for the love, and character he had within his heart. If you don’t like this country get on that plane and never come back. I will stay here and love all Americans, regardless of skin.
I will love the beauty of what God created and stand tall with my American friends. Not because of their color but for the character and love they carry within. This country doesn’t owe you anymore than it owes me. So many have thanked me for my service and I will always be grateful. I pray that one day you and your husband might cause me to be grateful for yours. You will never be remembered as the First Lady of Color but soon forgotten after you leave the White House. You nor your husband shall ever divide us. I wish you no harm, but pray you will take your troubles to a land you no longer hate. Hate shall come and go but His love shall last forever.
If you wish to find me I am now a writer for the DC Gazette. #Marine4Truth Also on Twitter @mshep08_mike I have included the interview I gave to the wonderful people of Australia, explaining my reason for writing this letter.
God bless America,
Shep
EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the DC Gazette.
