NPI Blog: News and Commentary

In less than a year, the MSM has gone from ignoring Tea Parties to mocking and insulting their participants to grudging coverage with ridiculing overtones. Finally it has arrived at giving wide attention to the movement, albeit grudgingly and ungraciously. A once-highly esteemed fourth estate, they have become talking-head dilettantes on a mission to save the disgruntled masses from democracy itself.

David Brooks, token toy conservative at the NYT, wrote his explanation for the Tea Parties without ever mentioning them by name, even. He wrote a whole diatribe on the meaning of it all. It’s a knee-jerk reaction by us commoners, you see, against the “educated class.” It has nothing to do with real issues, don’t you know. This whole wave of discontent is simply a revolt by the common man against his intellectual betters.

What a bunch of myopic poppycock.

The real Tea Party story is quite simple and an eloquent tribute to democracy: a genuine movement of ordinary people rising to the demands of their all-American principles. It represents a fundamental difference between those who seek to provide for themselves and those who see government as provider of all material goods. The Tea Party movement is a valiant resistance to decades of profligate entitlement spending, which has had the real effect of worsening every problem it was intended to fix, landing the country, at last, in a sea of impossible debt. Tea Partiers, like the Liberty Boys of 1776, stand steadfast on the principle of equality in the rule of law, not government-ordered equality in material-world goods.

How Alinsky Counterfeited Community-Building Associations

Up until this presidential election, when hearing the term “community organizations,” most Americans probably assumed that these were the traditional community-building, volunteer civic and altruistic groups, giving tirelessly of their spare time and dollars to improve their own and others’ communities.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The list of genuine, all-American volunteer citizens’ groups is endless. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his mid-19th century treatise Democracy in America, one of the most exceptional qualities of this country was her vast proliferation of purely voluntary civic and altruistic associations.

Americans of all ages, conditions, and all dispositions constantly unite together. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations to which all belong but also a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very specialized, large and small. Americans group together to hold fetes, found seminaries, build inns, construct churches, establish hospitals, prisons, schools by the same method.

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Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has just announced a new push to enforce civil rights laws to combat discrimination in our schools. In the last decade, he said, his department’s Office for Civil Rights “has not been as vigilant as it should have been . . . But that is about to change.” His remarks were made March 8 in a speech at the Edmund Pettus Bridge commemorating the 45th anniversary of the civil rights march on Selma, Alabama, that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is also eager to break with the allegedly lax civil rights policies of the Bush administration. Tom Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights, has appointed a new education section chief, Anurima Bhargava, who comes to the department directly from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), where she had been director of education practice since 2006. “I am excited she will be joining us as we continue our efforts to restore and transform the civil rights division,” Perez declared.

Duncan wants to eliminate racial disparities in education in general, including in student discipline in particular. Undoubtedly, Perez does as well. But what will they do in response to a formal complaint filed by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) in the wake of serious black-on-Asian violence at South Philadelphia High School (SPHS)? AALDEF has charged that the district acted with “deliberate indifference” to the harassment of Asian students and with “intentional disregard” of their welfare.

Will the Obama administration act aggressively to ensure Asian rights to a public education free of intimidation and actual violence—surely a basic civil right? Or will such action be taken only when blacks are the victims rather than the perpetrators? If the administration acts in the interest of the Asians, black students will be singled out as racially hostile troublemakers—a conclusion that neither the Department of Education nor the DOJ will welcome, if Duncan’s announcement means what it says.
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Jose Solorza, 16, left, Roman Aldana, 20, and Anthony Bobadilla, 17

Two men are scheduled to go on trial Monday, 3 ½ years after 16-year-old runaway Kayla Wood was found, tortured and with her throat slashed, in a burning Moreno Valley home.

Roman Aldana, 22, and Jose Solorza, 18, are charged with first-degree murder and torture in the death of Wood, who had run away from a group home before she died.

Police found Wood’s body Sept. 9, 2006, in a bathtub at an abandoned duplex on Cactus Avenue. She had been stabbed 133 times. Officers were dispatched to the house after it had been set on fire and two boys were seen trying to douse the flames.

Three days later, Riverside County homicide detectives arrested Aldana, a Moreno Valley resident who was 19 at the time, along with Solorza and his cousin Anthony Bobadilla, who were 15 then.

Bobadilla, of Riverside, pleaded guilty in January to voluntary manslaughter.

Aldana could face the death penalty if convicted. Solorza, of Moreno Valley, could face life in prison without parole; he is ineligible for the death penalty because he was a juvenile when Wood was slain.
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Fred Reed

Racism is in bad odor among the virtuous. I wonder why. At least, I wonder why any discussion of race is thought to be racism. The United States faces grave racial problems—more accurately, has them but doesn’t face them. Refusal to acknowledge their existence is not productive: Few problems are solved by forbidding their mention. The question should not be whether views are racist, but whether they are wrong.

The American Renaissance, run by Jared Taylor, is quite racist in the poorly thought out and sniffish sense prevalent today. AmRen (as it is generally known) has recently gotten much bad press because it holds all manner of views whose mention results in pack attack by our arbiters of What Can Be Discussed: For example, that blacks commit violent crime at far higher rates than do whites, that massive immigration from Latin America offers no advantages to the United States but a great many evils, that affirmative action lowers the competence of government, the universities, and schools in general—and so on.

These ideas are no doubt racist, yes. Unpleasant, yes. But—are they wrong?

I would prefer to think so. It gives me no pleasure and little hope to hear that black schools regularly produce functional illiterates, that the schools of Detroit and of the nation’s capital and for that matter of wherever blacks predominate are disasters, that savage beatings of whites by gangs of blacks are common and hidden by the media. That these things happen is of no advantage to me. I would be delighted to see blacks and Hispanics excelling academically. I would like to walk the streets of American cities without carefully noting pigmentation, which we all do and pretend we don’t. While I like Jared personally, I would like to tell him that his racial ideas were all wrong.

But are they?

On AmRen’s web site you find news stories, taken chiefly from the respectable publications, that in aggregate paint a grim picture of things racial in America. Can you show these to be in error, isolated instances, not representative of a larger reality? I hope so. But I can’t. Almost everything I read at AmRen well describes reality as I have seen it. And also as all cops have seen it, though telling what they know is a firing offense.
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Another fun fact from the New York Times’s proxy: Senior executives can get an extra bonus for hiring minorities and women instead of white guys.

Don’t believe it?

Let’s go to the text:

The [Compensation] Committee also retained the discretion to increase or decrease the individual component of the total bonus paid to each executive by up to 10% based on the continuing development of a diverse work force, including the inclusion of diverse candidates in hiring processes and the demonstration of personal commitment to diversity through participation in diversity-related activities, such as mentoring and sponsorship of affinity groups.

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On August 19, 2003, two Mexican farm laborers, possibly illegal aliens, committed arguably the most heinous crime in the history of Wisconsin’s Green Bay. They abducted a 26-year-old woman from the parking lot of a Main Street nightclub, drove many miles to a remote area in another county, repeatedly gang-raped her, then doused her with lighter fluid and set her on fire.

“The woman testified she heard her attackers ‘laugh, get in the truck, and leave.’” Fortunately or unfortunately, she survived but with “burns on 61% of her body”, including her face. She will be grotesquely disfigured for life. She also “suffered” and survived, “respiratory failure”. [Man Enters Pleas In Kidnapping, Rape, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 7, 2005]

In non-diverse Green Bay, the victim, then a mother of two young children, can be assumed to be white, although of course the politically correct Wisconsin newspapers didn’t say.

Juan Nieto

The two monsters: Gregario Morales, then 27 with a wife and three children, and Juan Nieto, 24, apparently the more vicious of the two and rumored to have possibly committed a similar rape/burning in Arizona. Morales was offered a plea bargain in exchange for his testimony against Nieto.

Their crime was featured on Fox TV’s America’s Most Wanted, which resulted in Nieto’s arrest in December 2004. But otherwise it received no national coverage.

Morales had been apprehended a few months earlier in Dexter, NM. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison in 2005 and is now living at Waupun Correctional Institution, the state’s first prison, built in 1852. Nieto was sentenced to 70 years in prison and is now incarcerated at Columbia Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in Portage in Southwestern Wisconsin.
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A man shot multiple times Thursday evening at a Moreno Valley house where two others were killed may have been a victim of human smugglers’ increasing violence against immigrants, authorities said Friday.

The two shooting victims who died were found inside the house where police say undocumented immigrants were held while waiting for their families to pay for their release. The wounded man was able to escape and ran to a cell phone store nearly two miles away.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said they are seeing a preference among smugglers for holding immigrants in the Inland region rather Los Angeles. The officials say smugglers in general are becoming more violent and are demanding more money once the immigrants have been brought across the border.

“We’ve seen more violent activity spurred by greed because there aren’t people paying the smuggling fees the way they used to,” said Debra Parker, an ICE acting deputy in charge of the Los Angeles investigations unit. “It’s awful. This is a very disturbing trend.”

Homicide detectives continued Friday to investigate at the house on Bay Avenue at Edgemont Street. The tan stucco home, in an older Moreno Valley neighborhood, had security bars on some windows and is surrounded by a brown wooden fence.

Detectives are unsure what led to the shooting. Neither the dead men nor the injured man have been identified by police. It isn’t known whether they were immigrants being held at the house or smugglers.
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The “Operation Deception” investigation continues to unfold in the case of the Providence police cocaine ring.

The story has now received national attention after the Rhode Island State Police arrested three Providence police officers on drug-related charges on March 4, 2010.

The number of arrested Providence cops is expected to rise according to RI State Police Capt. David Neill.

Capt. David Neill and the attorney general’s office expect more arrests within weeks.

Although just three officers were arrested in the drug sting, four additional officers were put on desk duty as of Friday, March 5 pending further investigation.The Providence Journal recently reported that three narcotics officers and one partrol officer were put on administrative duty until internal affairs completes their investigation.

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ACORN, the liberal group notorious for allegedly trying to inflate voter rolls through fraudulent practices, has seen its last election in Ohio.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now will permanently surrender its Ohio business license by June1 as part of a legal settlement with the conservative Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, both sides said yesterday.

ACORN was active in Ohio in the 2006 and 2008 elections, working to register thousands of low-income people to vote and get them to the polls. The group’s efforts were marred by irregularities, including one case in which ACORN workers allegedly induced a Cleveland man to register to vote 72 times, offering cigarettes as an incentive.

The Buckeye Institute’s 1851 Center for Constitutional Law teamed with two Warren County residents to sue ACORN in Warren County Common Pleas Court just before the 2008 election. The residents alleged that their rights were abridged by thousands of fraudulent voter registrations, each representing “a potential illegal vote that has the capacity to dilute (legitimate) votes.”

The case was moved to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.

Yesterday’s settlement is mostly confidential, said Maurice A. Thompson, the conservative group’s attorney.

“They will surrender their business license by June 1 and cease to operate in Ohio and cease to support or enable other groups to do what they do,” Thompson said.
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