Free Republic

Chicago-based financial analyst Janet Tavakoli writes that civil unrest is escalating in the great city of Chicago, as the downturn, and reckless spending, squeeze the city budget. Janet sends along this double action clip. First it shows a gang fight in the middle of a street, followed by angry residents chasing the local alderman, Helen Shiller, down the street. They chase her down the street yelling, "Run Helen run!"... In the upscale Lincoln Park area, just a little further south of [the above] unrest, men alone at night have been accosted by groups of three to six men and severely...

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Trial is under way in Knoxville for the first of four people charged in the kidnapping, rape and killing of a young couple more than two years ago. As court convened Monday, the judge read each of the 38 counts against 26-year-old Letalvis Cobbins. His attorney, Scott Green, responded by entering pleas. Green said his client pleaded guilty to five counts of facilitating robbery or theft in the carjacking that set the crimes into motion in 2007. He also pleaded guilty to one count of rape. To the remaining counts, Green responded "not guilty." Cobbins — of...

ALGIERS (Reuters) – Algerian shopkeeper Abdelkrim Salouda has witnessed China's global economic expansion first-hand and he does not like it, especially since he was in a mass brawl this month with Chinese migrant workers. "They have offended us with their bad behavior," said Salouda, a devout Muslim who lives in a suburb of the Algerian capital. "In the evening ... they drink beer, and play cards and they wear shorts in front of the residents."

WHITEHOUSE, TX (KLTV) - The school year is almost here, and if literature of the Bible is not already offered in your child's school, it will be this fall. Books are a common sight in classrooms around the nation, but the Bible is one book that is not. Come this fall, a Texas law says all public schools must offer information relating to the Bible in their curriculum. "By the end of the year, what they begin to realize is that it is pervasive. You can't get away from it. The kids came back and were like 'It's everywhere,'" said...

Science is telling us that ethnic diversity causes significant problems by diminishing valuable social capital. What then should we do about it? It was not the kind of message a Harvard seminar expects to hear. Ethnic diversity causes a lot of problems, our guest speaker told us. It reduces interpersonal trust, civic engagement, and charitable giving. It causes us to disengage from society, like turtles shrinking into their shells, reducing our overall quality of life. The more diversity we experience in our lives, the less happy we are. I came to Harvard to study public policy in the fall of...

Matt Cover at the Media Research Center's News Division, CNSNews.com, has a piece out today entitled "FCC’s Chief Diversity Officer Wants Private Broadcasters to Pay a Sum Equal to Their Total Operating Costs to Fund Public Broadcasting." This is insane. The "Chief Diversity Officer" in question, Mark Lloyd, is calling for the gross operating budget for every private radio station each year to be the fee (tax) they pay for their broadcast license for the year, with the monies going to the always liberal public stations. With whom they then must compete for listeners.

Mark Lloyd, newly appointed Chief Diversity Officer of the Federal Communications Commission, has called for making private broadcasting companies pay licensing fees equal to their total operating costs to allow public broadcasting outlets to spend the same on their operations as the private companies do. Lloyd presented the idea in his 2006 book, Prologue to a Farce: Communications and Democracy in America, published by the University of Illinois Press. Lloyd’s hope is to dramatically upgrade and revamp the Corporation for Public Broadcasting through new funding drawn from private broadcasters. The CPB is a non-profit entity that was created by Congress...

<p>BLACK intellectuals just don’t get it. They refuse to understand why there is widespread racial profiling and why they and people they know often are its victims. Black intellectuals simply refuse to acknowledge that there is a very obvious connection between themselves and the lawless black underclass. In a recent essay in The New York Times, Brent Staples, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, wrote, “The experience of being mistaken for a criminal is almost a rite of passage for African-American men. Security guards shadow us in stores. Troopers pull us over for the crime of ‘driving while black.’ Nighttime pedestrians cower by us on the streets.” In expressing his disgust that the Harvard professor-Cambridge cop confrontation has not been seen generally as a flagrant instance of racial profiling, Times columnist Bob Herbert urges black people “to rant and to rave, to demonstrate and to lobby, to march and confront and to sue and generally do whatever is necessary to stop a continuing and deeply racist criminal justice outrage.” The Harvard professor — Henry Louis Gates Jr. — and Staples and Herbert think the unfair treatment of blacks by the police is 100 percent the fault of white people. In the view of Staples, white people need to exorcise their “poisonous misconceptions.” But, for racial profiling to go away, blacks, especially black intellectuals, need to remove their blinders. They need to see what whites see. They need to see and acknowledge the criminal lifestyle that is pervasive in the black underclass....</p>

PHOENIX, Aug. 5 (UPI) -- The waiver of rights to a lawyer or to stay silent is a central issue in the case of four Phoenix boys charged with rape, their spokesmen said Wednesday. The boys, ages 9, 10, 13, and 14 were charged with raping an 8-year-old girl. The case has sparked a public outcry for the prosecution of the two older boys as adults, the Arizona Republic reported. The newspaper said police and community activists dispute the children's abilities to understand or speak English. All the chidren are Liberian refugees. Steven Tuopeh, 14, has already been charged as...

As the morality police crowded around her table in a Khartoum restaurant, leering at her to see what she was wearing, Lubna Hussein had no idea she was about to become the best-known woman in Sudan. She had arrived at the Kawkab Elsharq Hall on a Friday night to book a cousin's wedding party, and while she waited she watched an Egyptian singer and sipped a coke. She left less than an hour later under arrest as a "trouser girl" - humiliated in front of hundreds of people, then beaten around the head in a police van before being hauled...

Today, I spoke briefly with a liberal member of California’s education establishment (forgive the obvious tautology), who told me that his Berkeley home had recently been broken into while he was in Washington, D.C. It’s been a wake-up call, he said. We were too lax. We’ll be putting in a security-alarm system. And then came the clincher: “This is a very diverse neighborhood.” Now what would possibly be the relevance of that euphemism to the likelihood of getting burgled, I wonder? Unlike Berkeley intelligentsia, the police actually don’t practice such blatant racial profiling — overwhelmingly, they use observed behavioral and...

The world today would be a helluva lot better place if only we would get the government to mandate everyone everywhere go to Tolerance Camp at least once a year -- especially all our impressionable children. We could all go there for various communalist- and identity-type group lessons, particularly Diversity Seminars and Sensitivity Training. Clearly this kind of far-minded, progressive education for all mankind would significantly promote the brotherhood of man, just as it radically enhanced planetary social harmony and worldwide public unity. After graduating from this universally-obligatory Tolerance Camp -- as run by the best of inclusive, egalitarian, truly-enlightened...

How About a National Conversation on Race Hoaxes? Ann Coulter Wednesday, July 29, 2009 You could not ask for a more perfect illustration of the thesis of my latest book, "Guilty: Liberal Victims and Their Assault on America," than the black president of the United States attacking a powerless white cop for arresting a black Harvard professor -- in a city with a black mayor and a state with a black governor -- as the professor vacations in Martha's Vineyard. In modern America, the alleged "victim" is always really the aggressor, and the alleged "aggressor" is always the true victim....

(snip) GRAHAM: Well, the speeches she gave, I think, bugged a lot of people, not just me. The idea that "a wise Latina woman" more often than not, because of her experience and background, would reach a better conclusion than a white male is not something I think most Americans want to embrace. I think Americans embrace the idea that diversity is good for the court.But I looked at her record and I put the speech in perspective. She's lived an incredible life. She's been a judge for 17 years. There's no indication that her speech drove way she judged....

More goodies in the Obamacare Bill. Money for Community Health Organizations includes billions for ACORN. Federal money to med schools will be based upon their proving they are "properly diverse in admissions" and in sending doctors to the proper inner-city communities. (Goodie! More affirmative action doctors!) Will create a new organization to track healthcare to find "racial discrimination" in medical treatment outcome -- to be passed to DOJ for prosecution. Beck also mentioned something about reparations, but at that point I went deaf with horror.

July 20, 2009 | Republicans can engage in complicated studies to determine the standing of our brand. We (after all, I most certainly am a Republican) can search for policy positions that better connect us to the concerns of voters. We can do any number of things to try to change our fortunes. Until we come to grips with some fundamental math, however, the numbers simply do not add up to the GOP prevailing in a national election any time soon. In 1976, 90 percent of the votes cast in the presidential election came from non-Hispanic whites. In 2008, John...

In Harrisburg, the capital city of Pennsylvania, crime has become such a problem that Stanley Lawson of the NAACP has asked Governor Ed Rendell to call in the National Guard to restore order. During the month of June, twelve young people were gunned down. Many in broad daylight. Mr. Lawson said: “We’re beyond what the Harrisburg police department can do. We need help.” Another NAACP member, Stanley Mitchell, in declaring the need to suspend some civil rights, added: “We have the civil right not to be shot.” It’s easy to attack their willingness to demand martial law with a mandatory...

Among Democrats on Capitol Hill, black aides are significantly more likely to work for committees whose chairmen are African-American, according to a survey conducted by the Congressional Black Caucus. Blacks make up nearly half the staffs at two committees with black chairmen — the Oversight and Government Reform and Homeland Security — while there are only two blacks among the 55 staff members working for the House Agriculture and Rules committees, both of which are headed by white representatives. “The survey confirms what members have noticed anecdotally—the lack of African-American staffers on Capitol Hill, particularly in senior positions,” said Representative...

Police: Robber leaves empty-handed when Hispanic clerk cannot understand demands Thursday, July 09, 2009 By JILLIAN KRAMER Staff Reporter An armed man gave up trying to rob a Hispanic clerk at the Asia Market on Tuesday night when she didn't understand his demands for money, Mobile police said. The clerk, Angelina Geronimo, speaks almost no English. Geronimo, whose husband owns the Asian food store on Azalea Road, was alone when a man, masked by two T-shirts around his head and armed with a handgun, entered about 8:30 p.m., according to police.

Ethnic conflict has exposed the Communist Party's vulnerabilities. The state says the Uighurs are "Chinese," but that's not true in any meaningful sense of the term. The Uighurs are, in fact, from different racial stock than the Han; they speak a different language, and they practice a religion few others in China follow. Of the 55 officially recognized minority groups in China, they stand out the most. The Uighurs are a conquered people. In the 1940s, they had their own state, the East Turkestan Republic, for about half a decade. Mao Zedong, however, forcibly incorporated the short-lived nation into the...

EDITORIAL: Sotomayor plays the race cardThe Washington Times, LLC A biased judge should not be promoted to a higher court. Yet the Obama administration has not been able to put to rest fears that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor might let ethnic grievances sway her decisions on the bench. That's exactly what it appears Judge Sotomayor did in the Ricci v. DeStefano case, in which she ruled that white firefighters could be denied promotions they clearly had earned. That's why it is worth revisiting the Supreme Court nominee's infamous "wise Latina" speech. The renewed focus on that speech should center...

Thousands of angry ethnic Han Chinese wielding clubs and machetes roamed this capital city of Xinjiang territory and engaged in sporadic revenge attacks against Uighurs after deadly riots Sunday. The fresh unrest prompted Chinese President Hu Jintao to fly home early Wednesday from Italy, where he had been scheduled to attend the meeting of the Group of Eight leading nations. His sudden departure from such a high-profile international event underlined the severity of the challenge the Xinjiang violence presents to China's leadership. In Urumqi, authorities imposed a curfew and security forces tried to keep the two ethnic groups apart in...

"Naval Academy Professor Challenges Rising Diversity," ran the headline in The Washington Post. The impression left was that some sorehead was griping because black and Hispanic kids were finally being admitted. The Post's opening paragraphs reinforced the impression. "Of the 1,230 plebes who took the oath of office at the Naval Academy in Annapolis this week, 435 were members of minority groups. It's the most racially diverse class in the nation's 164-year history. Academy leaders say it's a top priority to build a student body that reflects the racial makeup of the Navy and the nation." Who can be against...

Instead of showing some respect to our country this Four of July weekend, American Muslims are gathering in locations to give us the Islam means peace con and shove Islam down our throats. Approximately 30,000 Muslims are expected in Washington today in an "outreach" effort by the ISNA and about 1500 Muslims are gathering in Dearborn Michigan.

Bruce Fleming has been an English professor at the United States Naval Academy for twenty-two years and has served as a member of USNA’s Admissions Board. He has expressed concerns over the Academy’s admissions process which he strongly believes places too much emphasis on racial diversity at the cost of quality students. He explains these concerns as follows: Here’s a question: would you rather be defended by the officer with high all-around predictors (including leadership and athletics in addition to grades and test scores), or low ones? I bet you think I’m joking when I say that at the Unites...

There’s not enough racial diversity among the congressional staff on Capitol Hill and activists want corrective action. “Given such poor numbers, let’s acknowledge that there is something broken about the process,” said Citigroup lobbyist Paul Thornell, a former aide to Al Gore and former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota. He added that there are “few intentional strategies in place to promote minorities.” The solution, say critics of the status quo: fully embrace the so-called “Rooney rule,” named after Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney. The rule requires that NFL teams interview at least one minority prospect when filling...

A recent thread on the Al-Falluja jihadist forum discussed the case of whether a Muslim who has nothing else to eat may kill an infidel in order to eat him. The discussion was prompted by a recently published book by Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi, one of the most influential jihadist sheikhs active today"Is It Permitted To Eat The Flesh of American Soldiers?" On June 13, 2009, a member of the Al-Falluja forum who uses the moniker "Al-Maqdisi's Student" wrote a post based on this passage [in full report] titled "Is it permitted to eat the flesh of American soldiers? A quote...

The staff on Capitol Hill is too white. That’s what a group of frustrated members, lobbyists and aides are claiming as they press congressional leaders to adopt a version of the so-called Rooney rule. The rule, named after Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney, has been credited with significantly increasing the number of African-American coaches in the National Football League. Even with the first black president and African-Americans and Hispanics wielding more power than ever in Congress, there are just two Senate chiefs of staff who are minorities. In the lower chamber, there are only five white lawmakers who have African-American...

New Muslim Cool - It’s about diversity, and many contend diversity is misunderstood and if given a chance to be understood, the world could be a much better place. What say you?

The smiling, ethnically diverse family featured on the cover of Toronto's latest edition of its summer Fun Guide was digitally altered to make the photo more "inclusive," which city officials say is in keeping with a policy to reflect diversity. A spokesman for the department that publishes the guide listing recreation activities confirmed the publication was doctored to insert the face of a different father. "He superimposed the African-Canadian person onto the family cluster in the original photo. It was two photographs and one head was superimposed over the original family photo," said John Gosgnach, communications director for the...

One in four men in South Africa may have raped someone - with most of those attacking more than one victim, data from a new survey suggests. The study, by the country's Medical Research Council, also found three out of four who admitted rape attacked for the first time while in their teens. It said practices such as gang rape were common because they were considered a form of male bonding.

The Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead announced in Annapolis recently that "diversity is the number one priority" at the Naval Academy. Advertisement The Naval Academy superintendent, Vice Adm. Jeffrey Fowler, echoed him. Everyone understands that "diversity" here means nonwhite skins. Fowler insisted recently that we needed to have Annapolis graduates who "looked like" the Fleet, where enlisted people are about 42 percent nonwhite, largely African American and Hispanic. The stunning revelation last week was that the Naval Academy had an incoming class that was "more diverse" than ever before: 35 percent minority.

The Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead announced in Annapolis recently that "diversity is the number one priority" at the Naval Academy. The Naval Academy superintendent, Vice Adm. Jeffrey Fowler, echoed him. Everyone understands that "diversity" here means nonwhite skins. Fowler insisted recently that we needed to have Annapolis graduates who "looked like" the Fleet, where enlisted people are about 42 percent nonwhite, largely African American and Hispanic. The stunning revelation last week was that the Naval Academy had an incoming class that was "more diverse" than ever before: 35 percent minority. Sounds good, only this comes with a...

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) say there is a lack of diversity on the Sunday political talk shows. The CBC, which is more powerful than ever before, with four committee chairmen and a former member in the White House, contends that more minorities should be invited to appear on the influential shows. "I'm not pleased at all with the diversity issue as it relates to talk shows," CBC Chairwoman Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said in an interview with The Hill. "We have, what, 17 subcommittee chairs and four full committee chairmen? These members are brilliant; they know their stuff....

Officials at the University of Texas at Austin are defending their actions following a minor confrontation between school officials and members of the Young Conservatives of Texas that has left the latter group decrying censorship. On Tuesday, YCT members took aim at a Diversity Training Program taking part on campus as part of the annual Summer Orientation program for incoming freshmen students. YCT contends that such diversity programs represent a radical agenda that devalues the individual and tries to indoctrinate students in a group consciousness system that many students may not wish to be a part of. Members showed up...

You can always tell on campus who the conservative professors are. They’re the ones not attempting to indoctrinate their students. When I had the opportunity to teach several courses at a local college a few years back, I became a conspicuous example of this phenomenon. I stuck to the facts but could not prevent students from occasionally politicizing discussions as established practices are not easily abandoned. Their interjections always unnerved me. On one occasion, a young lady replied, in response to a mundane comment from a peer, “Well, I’m not surprised. We’re all Democrats in here with the exception of...

WASHINGTON – Multiracial Americans have become the fastest growing demographic group, wielding an impact on minority growth that challenges traditional notions of race. The number of multiracial people rose 3.4 percent last year to about 5.2 million, according to the latest census estimates. First given the option in 2000, Americans who check more than one box for race on census surveys have jumped by 33 percent and now make up 5 percent of the minority population — with millions more believed to be uncounted. Demographers attributed the recent population growth to more social acceptance and slowing immigration. They cited in...

THE diversity crowd doesn't really believe in diversity. In fact, what it's really aiming for is conformity of opinion. This crowd expects that members of racial and ethnic groups will adhere to liberal orthodoxy, and woe to those who don't fall into line. If Judge Sonia Sotomayor were a conservative or the nominee of a Republican president, we'd be hearing that she wasn't an "authentic" Latina at all. I recall similar arguments used by my critics when I was the first Latina nominated to a US Cabinet back in 2001. You're only celebrated as the "first" by the diversity crowd...

Note: The following text is a quote: THE BRIEFING ROOM THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary _______________________________________________ For Immediate Release June 2, 2009 NATIONAL CARIBBEAN-AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH, 2009 - - - - - - - BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA A PROCLAMATION Caribbean Americans have made lasting contributions to our Nation's culture and history, and the month of June has been set aside to honor their cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and social diversity. Generations of immigrants have preserved the traditions of their homelands, and these traditions have defined our Nation's identity. Caribbean Americans bring a...

America is intermarrying, integrating, and assimilating as never before. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has scolded Americans for being “cowards” and not talking more about race. Now, Holder is getting that “dialogue” with the recent controversy surrounding President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. Most of the furor surrounds statements on race by Sotomayor herself: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Sotomayor was clear enough. In a broad discussion about sex/race discrimination cases...

Does this remark make you want to head for the hills? "I would hope that a wise Caucasian man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn't lived that life." A male faculty member who made such a claim would be laughed off of any college campus. But a slightly-revised version of that remark actually was made at the University of California at Berkeley. This is what Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor had to say at a Law and Cultural Diversity lecture she gave in 2001: "I would...

snip Unfortunately, this has not been the case. Over the past decade, racial groups have become more polarized, not less. A simple example will suffice. A personal friend, a white man who teaches at an inner-city school in Los Angeles County with an almost entirely Hispanic population, polled his students shortly before the 2008 election regarding their parents' presidential preferences. Every hand in the classroom went up for Obama. After class, my friend approached one of the students. "Why are your parents voting for Obama?” he asked a 10-year-old Hispanic girl. She answered him in four words: "Because he's not...

At least 11 people have been injured during a fight inside a Sikh temple in the Austrian capital Vienna. Police said five men armed with knives and another with a pistol started a fight in the temple, the BBC's Bethany Bell reports. The number of injured is expected to rise, a police spokeswoman said. It is unclear what caused the fight, with reports of a feud between rival families and also of disputes with worshippers at other Sikh temples. Preacher 'attacked' All six of the armed men were severely injured in the incident and were taken to hospital where they...

The 18-year-old accused of gunning down a middle school student at a bus stop earlier this month allegedly shot him twice and then continued on his way to high school, police and prosecutors said today at a press conference announcing his arrest. "This was a cold-blooded assassination of a middle school student," said Assistant District Attorney Joshua Wall at the press conference at Boston police headquarters. Xzeniyeju Chukwuezi is accused of walking up to Soheil Turner, 15, as he waited for a bus on Dudley Street at 7:20 a.m. on May 7 and firing two bullets into his head. Boston...

At Right of Course (FMJRA Site O’ Th’ Day at The Other McCain), Chance makes an important observation about Obama at Notre Dame: The other problem with this whole ‘open discussion’ argument is the very people making it. These are the same people who see no problem at all with the near monopoly the left holds on the public and secondary education system. There is no open discussion on evolution or global warming, it is taught as absolute fact. I took several Sociology courses at two separate state universities (my college career was long and meandering). There were no opposing...

Boards composed entirely of white males can damage their businesses by indulging in narrow “groupthink”, says Helen Alexander, who is nominated on Monday as the first female president of the CBI employers’ group. Ms Alexander, senior adviser to Bain Capital, criticised the slow growth in female appointments to FTSE 100 boards, where women still occupy under 12 per cent of directorships. In an interview with the Financial Times, she said that while “most sensible companies” were starting to take the issue seriously, “you might just be losing real talent and at an important time”. Ms Alexander is expected to be...

I have enjoyed Oprah Winfrey’s work on television since she showed up as the second banana on People are Talking with Richard Scher on WJZ in Baltimore, four decades ago. Now, she is the leading talk show host in the known universe. Although her audience has decreased from nearly 9 million in 2005 to 7.3 million in 2008, she is still the top of her profession. Oprah’s success demonstrates that several efforts of the current Administration to restrict both freedom of the press, and freedom of speech are both wrong and unconstitutional. There is a proposed bill in Congress which...

Two years ago while I was studying abroad in Paris, my younger sister called me from the U.S. giggling that she had delicious news to share with me. She announced breathlessly that Disney was creating its first black princess movie. Despite the fact that I was a sophomore in college and my sister was a senior in upper school, we all but swooned. Oh, I had my reservations – as someone who is African American, Native American, Asian American, and English American, it seemed that Disney had misrepresented the better part of my various heritages. I’m not even talking about...

The law finally caught up with an alleged gang member who police say held down his 7-year-old son while a fellow gang-banger tattooed the boy's belly with the group's insignia. Police say 26-year-old Enrique Gonzales held down his 7-year-old son while another gang member tattoed the group's insignia on his belly. Fresno cops arrested Enrique Gonzalez, 26, at hotel in the Sierra foothills and booked him for investigation of mayhem, child abuse, false imprisonment, battery, participating in a criminal street gang and committing a crime for the benefit of a gang, Police Chief Jerry Dyer said. Gonzales, a member of...

Introduction Know a lawyer who is involved in a discrimination lawsuit? Particularly one in which the plaintiff alleges discrimination because actual disparities are found in company hiring practices? Where you aware that, just by chance, a company can be absolutely innocent of discrimination even though they actually are found to have under-hired a particular group? No? Then read on to find out how. What are diversity and disparity? We discussed earlier that there are (at least) two definitions of diversity: one meaning a display of dissimilar and widely varying behaviors, a philosophical position that is untenable and even ridiculous (but...