Archive for July 2011

Supporters of Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American studies showed up in force this spring to tell the board: “Don’t make our classes electives.”

“They’ve told us you touch this class in any way, we’re going to leave, we’re going to do this, blah blah blah, they keep threatening us. I don’t respond to threats very well,” said TUSD board member Michael Hicks.

Hicks supported appealing to an administrative judge to see just how much of the program has to change to satisfy state law. But Hicks said that he has found that the district is also challenging the law itself, just like eleven teachers are doing, and he doesn’t support the district getting involved.

“I’m seeing that, then all of a sudden I see that we’re challenging HB 2281, the constitutionality of that. I did not vote to question the constitutionality of HB 2281,” Hicks said.

“I don’t believe that we’re challenging the legality of the law at this point,” said board member Judy Burns in a phone interview from Michigan Sunday.

She said she’s waiting for the appeal and a decision on any changes to the program and said she doesn’t know of any challenge by the district to the law.

After the shocking massacre committed last Friday in Norway by fanatic Anders Behring Breivik, the Marxist ‘Liberal’-dominated media in Britain have had a field day in their attempts to connect Breivik to ‘far-right’ groups in the UK.

Naming these groups as the EDL and with no evidence to support their claims, including the name of the British National Party in their biased articles and news reports, the Marxist ‘Liberal’ media reveals a blatant attempt to blacken the name of the British National Party and associate us with the monstrous crime committed by Breivik.

With the inference that these ‘far-right’ groups are extremists, the mainstream media conveniently ignores the fact that the policies of the British National Party are not ‘far right’ by any measure, and, before the decades of forced cultural Marxism, our policies were considered normal commonsense measures necessary for the preservation and health of our nation and people and were actively pursued by the Lib/Lab/Con parties themselves.

Their evil attempt to associate the British National Party with a mass murderer in order to brainwash their audience into thinking that our party and its members and supporters are all willing and capable of emulating these wicked deeds reveals the determination of the Marxist ‘Liberal’ establishment to destroy any legal and valid opposition to their unpopular and destructive policies.

A group of young Turkish nationalists march in Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul in protest of a recent pro-Kurdistan Workers’ Party demonstration in the district.

Tension following the deaths of 13 soldiers in Southeast Anatolia has spread across much of Turkey, with pro-Kurdish political party headquarters assailed with stones and a Kurdish performer protested for singing in her mother tongue.

As the clashes continue, leading academics and other experts have criticized politicians and the media for casting blame rather than making an effort to solve the issue.

“I cannot believe that instead of really addressing the issue, the politicians are speaking like taxi drivers in answering each other,” Bekir Ağırdır, the general manager of the research firm KONDA, told the Hürriyet Daily News this week. KONDA recently published a survey showing that polarization between Turkish and Kurdish people in Turkey is quite high.

The tension has ramped up following a July 14 terrorist attack by members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, that killed 13 troops in Diyarbakır’s Silvan district.

California Gov. Jerry Brown, right, signs AB 130 Dream Act bill on the back of Assemblyman Gil Cedillo

California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law on Monday a bill allowing illegal immigrants to receive privately funded scholarships to attend the state’s public colleges and universities.

The bill, dubbed the California Dream Act, passed the state Legislature earlier this month and aims at helping illegal immigrants who earned a diploma after attending at least three years of high school in the state.

Enactment of the California measure came three days after opponents of a similar law in Maryland collected enough signatures to force a state referendum seeking its repeal.

“At the end of the day, if we’re going to continue as a powerful, equal-opportunity society, we’re going to have to invest in our people,” Brown, a Democrat, said at the signing ceremony in the library of a Los Angeles community college.

The California law is named after national legislation in Congress to give young, undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for at least five years a pathway to citizenship through college or military service.

Jim Ludwick, communications director for Oregonians for Immigration Reform, said obtaining an Oregon birth certificate should require more than someone’s word. His group advocates for ending illegal immigration and favors improved border security.

Nicolaza Eusiquio was living in a North Plains-area migrant camp in January 2005 when she gave birth to a boy — an event attended only by her cousin. Eusiquio received no prenatal care and sought no medical attention after her son’s birth. For months afterward, Eusiquio hardly left her cousin’s home.

She sought a birth certificate from the Oregon Center for Health Statistics more than a year later, offering only her word and that of her cousin as proof that the boy was born here.

The state registrar turned down Eusiquio’s request for a delayed birth certificate — certificates issued more than a year after birth — saying the mother needed documentation showing she was in Oregon at the time of her child’s birth. A Marion County Circuit Court agreed; Eusiquio’s son was not entitled to an Oregon birth certificate.

But earlier this year, in a highly unusual case, the Oregon Court of Appeals overturned the lower court’s decision, saying statements from Eusiquio and her cousin were proof enough. It sent the case back to the trial court and, in essence, ordered that Eusiquio’s son be issued an Oregon birth certificate.

Here is a reality check. Despite well-meaning discussions on racial disparities in America, most poor kids are not who you may think.

Absorb these nuggets from the National Center for Children in Poverty: “About 60 percent of black and Latino children and 57 percent of American Indian children live in low-income families, compared to about 26 percent of white children and 30 percent of Asian children. At the same time, however, whites comprise the largest group of low-income children: 11 million white children live in families with incomes below twice the federal poverty line.”

The center has calculated that 42 percent of children should be considered low-income. The center uses the term “low-income” for families with incomes below twice the official poverty level.

Consider those figures: More than two out of five of the nation’s children are growing up in struggling families — and as the Great Recession lingers, their situations aren’t likely to improve anytime soon.

Dee J. Hall of the Wisconsin State Journal is writing a professional and somewhat balanced series of articles called “Black and Busted in Dane County.” I’m linking to Monday’s.

Buried in the third-last paragraph of a long story is the money statistic:

About half of the people arrested by Madison police each year are black, even though blacks make up just 8 percent of the city’s residents.

I give the State Journal credit for confronting the issue head-on but wonder if they will have the courage to say what needs to be said.

The reporter scoured the community for quotable experts: the jail chaplain, the guilty-liberal-Rev. Jerry Hancock, a few judges, the usual liberal think tanks. But you know who never gets asked? Successful business people. So, I’m doubtful.

President Barack Obama addresses the National Council of La Raza annual conference Monday in Washington.

America’s immigration system is broken, but only a bipartisan political movement can fix it, President Barack Obama said Monday.

“The idea of doing things on my own is very tempting, I promise you, not just on immigration reform. But that’s not how our system works. That’s not how our democracy functions,” Obama told the National Council of La Raza.

Speaking at the organization’s annual conference in Washington, Obama said passing immigration reform measures will require support from both sides of the aisle in Congress.

“Let’s be honest, I need a dance partner here, and the floor is empty,” he said.

Audience members greeted Obama with a standing ovation, and responded to his discussion of immigration reform by chanting, “Yes you can, yes you can.”

Though the birth rate in the U.S. has dropped for a third year in the row, and many European countries report rock-bottom fertility rates, Malthusians and others concerned about the impact humans have on the planet aren’t rejoicing.

Population experts predict that this fall, the global population will hit yet another milestone: 7 billion people. Seven billion!

Only 24 years ago, people were wringing their hands about the world population hitting 5 billion.

A fascinating National Geographic article works readers through the history of world population studies, which began when a 17th Century cloth merchant and amateur scientist (who, incidentally, invented the microscope) estimated that the earth could only hold a maximum of 13.385 billion people. At that time, experts estimate the world population was only half a billion. At the rate we’re going, despite negative population growth in many industrialized countries, by the time our kids are having kids, world population will hit 9 billion.

Today’s $292 million five for one people swap deal with Malaysia is an act of gross hypocrisy and a humiliating admission of Labor’s border protection policy failures over the past three years, Shadow Minister for Productivity and Population & Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Scott Morrison said today.

The conclusion of the agreement in Malaysia today, after almost three months, is an open admission that pull factors, created by Labor’s weakened border protection policies, have been responsible for ‪11,839 people arriving on 235 illegal boats to Australia over the past three years.

‪Labor’s failed policies are also responsible for more than 6,500 boat arrivals being held in our detention network – including almost 1,000 children – and the havoc that has caused and continues to cause. When the Coalition left office, only 4 people who had arrived by boat were in detention.

For years Labor’s policies have underwritten the people smugglers’ business model Labor now claim they want to break.

Today’s arrangement is specifically designed to counteract the pull factors of Labor’s own policies. Whether it works or not, Australians will be paying for Labor’s past policy failures for years to come.