Archive for April 2007

Romanians with a bent towards ultra-nationalism can rely on two major parties to represent their strong feelings for their fatherland.

When it comes to ultra-nationalism, the star in Romania is 58-year-old Corneliu Vadim Tudor. The Bucharest-born writer and journalist is the leader of the Greater Romania Party (GRP).

Although Tudor is represented in Europe’s most democratic institution, the European Parliament, he has a reputation in Romania as a controversial and essentially populist political figure. In Wikipedia the first association that comes up after Tudor’s name is “strongly nationalist and xenophobic views; theatrics which often accompany his rhetoric, and his reliance on the denunciations of political opponents”.

Evidence for these claims emerges from the several civil court actions against him, which is the second thing he has in common with Bulgaria’s Ataka leader Volen Siderov. Romania Mare has been sued for libel on several occasions in connection with Tudor’s writings, which he usually produces under a pseudonym.

In 1971 Tudor received a degree in philosophy from the University of Bucharest. This was followed in 1975 by military training at the School for Reserve Officers in Bucharest. Unusually for the Cold War era, Tudor was granted a scholarship and studied history in Vienna in 1978-79. During the 1980s Tudor worked as a journalist and editor of several magazines.

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WASHINGTON - Immigration-related felony cases are swamping federal courts along the Southwest border, forcing judges to handle hundreds more cases than their peers elsewhere.

Judges in the five, mostly rural judicial districts on the border carry the heaviest felony caseloads in the nation. Each judge in New Mexico, which ranked first, handled an average of 397 felony cases last year, compared with the national average of 84.

Federal judges in those five districts - Southern and Western Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California - handled one-third of all the felonies prosecuted in the nation’s 94 federal judicial districts in 2005, according to federal court statistics.

While Congress has increased the number of border patrol officers, the pace of the law enforcement has eclipsed the resources for the court system.

Judges say they are stretched to the limit with cases involving drug trafficking or illegal immigrants who have also committed serious crimes. Judges say they need help.

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Like Ahab’s search for the Great White Whale, liberals’ search for the Great White Defendant is relentless and never-ending. When Tawana Brawley’s and Al Sharpton’s 1987 charge that several white men including prosecutor Steven Pagones (whose name Brawley had picked out of a newspaper article) had abducted and raped the 15 year old was shown in 1988 to be completely false, the Nation said it didn’t matter, since the charges expressed the essential nature of white men’s treatment of black women in this country. When the Duke University lacrosse players were accused of raping a black stripper last year, liberals everywhere treated the accusation as fact, because, just as with the Nation and Tawana Brawley, the rape charge seemed to reflect the true nature of oppressive racial and sexual relations in America.
To see the actual truth of the matter, let us take a look at the Department of Justice document on Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2005, which is discussed by Christopher Chantrill at The American Thinker. (Go to the linked document, then under Victims and Offenders, download the pdf for 2005.)

In Table 42, “Personal crimes of violence, 2005, percent distribution of single-offender victimizations, based on race of victims, by type of crime and perceived race of offender,” we learn that there were 111,590 white victims of rape/sexual assault in 2005. (The number of rapes is not distinguished from those of sexual assaults; it is maddening that sexual assault, which can mean inappropriate touching, is conflated with the crime of rape.) In those 111,590 cases in which a white woman was the victim of rape/sexual assault, the offender was white in 44.5 percent of the cases and black in 33.6 percent of the cases. Of 36,620 cases in which the victim was black, 100 percent of the offenders were black, and 0.0 percent of the offenders were white. The table explains that 0.0 percent means that there were under 10 incidents nationally.

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If you really want to blame someone for trying to destroy the United States, point the finger at… Satan?

The devil, Lucifer… whatever you want to call it, one Utah Republican says it is he who is trying to bring the USA down.

And Satan’s apparent weapon of choice: Allowing illegal immigrants to cross the border.

According to The Salt Lake Tribune, Utah County District 65 Chairman Don Larsen has submitted a formal resolution to oppose the devil’s plan to destroy the country — to be discussed this weekend at the Utah County Republican Convention.

“In order for Satan to establish his ‘New World Order’ and destroy the freedom of all people as predicted in the scriptures, he must first destroy the U.S.,” Larsen’s resolution states. “[It is] insidious for its stealth and innocuousness.”

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Giles MacDonogh is a bon viveur and a historian of wine and gastronomy, but in this book, pursuing his other consuming interest - German history - he serves a dish to turn the strongest of stomachs. It makes particularly uncomfortable reading for those who compare the disastrous occupation of Iraq unfavourably to the post-war settlement of Germany and Austria.

MacDonogh argues that the months that followed May 1945 brought no peace to the shattered skeleton of Hitler’s Reich, but suffering even worse than the destruction wrought by the war. After the atrocities that the Nazis had visited on Europe, some degree of justified vengeance by their victims was inevitable, but the appalling bestialities that MacDonogh documents so soberly went far beyond that. The first 200 pages of his brave book are an almost unbearable chronicle of human suffering.

His best estimate is that some three million Germans died unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities. A million soldiers vanished before they could creep back to the holes that had been their homes. The majority of them died in Soviet captivity (of the 90,000 who surrendered at Stalingrad, only 5,000 eventually came home) but, shamingly, many thousands perished as prisoners of the Anglo-Americans. Herded into cages along the Rhine, with no shelter and very little food, they dropped like flies. Others, more fortunate, toiled as slave labour in a score of Allied countries, often for years. Incredibly, some Germans were still being held in Russia as late as 1979.

The two million German civilians who died were largely the old, women and children: victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide - and mass murder.

Apart from the well-known repeated rape of virtually every girl and woman unlucky enough to be in the Soviet occupation zones,

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Stephan Goyne entered teaching as a “fight the good fight” kind of guy, taking a job in East Oakland right out of college.

“I come from a family of teachers. It wasn’t even a question of whether to do that,” Goyne said. “The question was whether to do elementary, middle or high school.”

But after six years in the trenches — transferred from campus to campus, forbidden from organizing field trips and ordered to teach math only after lunch — Goyne left the profession.

Now he works in real estate and runs a Brazilian jiujitsu studio in Oakland.

“That last year, I had enough of it,” said Goyne. “The biggest skill you’re applying is crowd control. You’re not really having a say in the curriculum or what goes into it.”

Teachers stifled by bureaucracy and blocked from making decisions in their own classrooms are leaving teaching in droves, according to a new study by Cal State University’s Teacher Quality Institute.

Nearly 22 percent of California teachers leave teaching after four years, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. With this type of exodus, the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning projects a 33,000-teacher shortage in California by 2015.

At high-poverty schools, one in 10 teachers leaves each year, either for a different campus or a new occupation entirely.

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ORLANDO, Fla. — A SeaWorld employee was arrested on Monday, accused by sheriff’s officials of saying that he “was going to do what happened at Virginia Tech here at SeaWorld.”

Gilbert Alexander Garcia, 20, of Orlando, was arrested and charged with threatening to throw, place or discharge a destructive device and unlawful use of a two-way communication device.

According to an Orange County Sheriff’s Office report, a co-worker said in a statement that Garcia told her on Sunday that he was serious about the threat and would shoot everyone because he hated SeaWorld.

Garcia was also accused by another co-worker of saying that the victims in the Virginia Tech shootings deserved to die because “they made the Korean guy feel like a loner.”

Garcia said he was going to shoot people in SeaWorld, and that he would be remembered for it nationwide, the report said.

Garcia also stated to a co-worker that he wanted to kill himself and showed her a BB gun and a baseball bat in his car, the sheriff’s report said.

On Monday, Garcia was escorted to a security office at SeaWorld where he was informed that he was being investigated for the threats. Garcia admitted to officials that he told co-workers that he idolized the Virginia Tech shooter and wanted to shoot people but said he was only joking and had no intentions of following through, the report said.

A search of Garcia’s vehicle uncovered a paintball gun, several baseball bats, emblems of vehicles and a baton, the sheriff’s report said.

Two hours later, a co-worker recorded a phone conversation between herself and Garcia in which he allegedly stated that he would get revenge and blow up SeaWorld by dropping a bomb from a helicopter, according to the report. He also allegedly warned her to “stay out of his way” and “to duck if she saw an AK-47.”

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PROVIDENCE, R.I., April 18, 2007—Displaying a dramatic disregard for students’ constitutional rights, a committee of the University of Rhode Island (URI) Student Senate voted on Monday to derecognize the College Republicans student group. For months, the Student Senate has demanded that the group publicly apologize for advertising a satirical $100 “scholarship” for white, heterosexual, American males. The College Republicans refused to apologize and contacted the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help. FIRE is now calling upon URI President Robert Carothers, who has already informed the Senate that it could not compel student speech, to reverse the decision to derecognize the group.

“Neither the Student Senate nor anyone else at URI has the power to force the College Republicans to say things against their will,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “As bad as it may be to tell people what they cannot say, it is still worse to tell them what they must say. The Supreme Court has long recognized that compelled speech is not compatible with free societies. It is stunning that URI’s student government would show such contempt for fundamental rights, especially after URI’s own president explained it to them.”

The College Republicans student organization first advertised the satirical “White, Heterosexual, American Male” “scholarship” in November, 2006. The scholarship consisted of a nominal $100 to be awarded to someone fitting those criteria who submitted an application and an essay on the adversities he has faced. College Republicans President Ryan Bilodeau explained that the point was to use satire to protest scholarships awarded on the basis of race, gender, or nationality. Over 40 URI students applied for the “scholarship,” many submitting equally satirical application essays.

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Britain risks becoming a “mini America” dominated by racially determined schools, Commission for Racial Equality policy director Nick Johnson warned.

Those schools with more control over their admissions selected advantaged white, middle-class pupils who were more likely to succeed, he claimed.

The government said schools were required to promote community cohesion.

Speaking at a segregation seminar, Mr Johnson said research suggested it was increasing in schools and called for urgent action to reverse the trend.

Steps could include offering cash incentives to encourage schools to take more ethnic minority pupils.

Mr Johnson added: “If a Muslim child is educated in a school where the vast majority of other children are also Muslim, how can we expect him to work, live and interact with people from other cultures when he leaves school?

“This is a ticking time-bomb waiting to explode.”

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Do those words offend you? Are they words that identify a group of people?

How about a generalization involving such groups, such as: all Canadians eat fish. Does this offend?

Let’s say, you are offended. What consequences should follow? Is a stern warning deserved? Sensitivity training? How about a job?

Pipe welder Bill Hen– deley Jr. said he was fired from his job Wednesday for using the word “Mexican” in describing a person from Mexico at a group safety meeting.

Hendeley said he has worked for Fagen Inc., an engineering and construction company based in Granite Falls, Minn., off and on for the past 10 years. The company is building an addition to the Big River Resources ethanol production plant in West Burlington.

Hendeley, who recently moved to Burlington, said he has never been fired, has never even been reprimanded for making inappropriate comments, and co–workers describe him as a model employee.

At a group safety meeting Wednesday, however, Hendeley singled out supervisors and a Hispanic worker for smoking in inappropriate places. Smoking is only allowed in a designated area across the road from the plant.

“I guess if you’re a supervisor or a Mexican, you can smoke anywhere you like,” Hendeley reportedly told an Hispanic safety supervisor.

Several days earlier, a Caucasian worker was suspended by a Hispanic supervisor for smoking in the parking lot of the plant, said Jeff Kokemiller, a Fagen employee.

Following the suspension, Hendeley and his co–workers said they observed supervisors and a Hispanic woman smoking in trailers near the plant.

Hendeley said he simply was pointing out discrepancies in policy enforcement.

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