A Year of Liberal Double Standards

What seems like staggering hypocrisy is actually remarkably consistent from liberals’ perspective.

By Jonah Goldberg

Many conservatives finished the year angry about the same thing they were angry about at the beginning of the year: liberal double standards.

As I write this, GOP House whip Steve Scalise is in hot water over reports that he spoke to a group of racist poltroons in Louisiana twelve years ago. Whether it was an honest mistake, as Scalise plausibly claims, or a sign of something more nefarious, as his detractors hope, remains to be seen.

But one common response on social media is instructive. Countless conservatives want to know: Why the double standard? Barack Obama was friends with a domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers. His spiritual mentor was a vitriolic racist, Jeremiah Wright. One of his administration’s closest advisers and allies is Al Sharpton, a man who has inspired enough racial violence to make a grand dragon’s white sheets turn green with envy.

Meanwhile, the Democratic party venerated the late senator Robert Byrd, a former Klansmen himself. He was one of 19 senators (all Democrats) to sign the Southern Manifesto opposing integration. One of his co-signers was William Fulbright, Bill Clinton’s mentor.

When Republicans are in power, “dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” When Democrats are in power, dissent is the racist fuming of “angry white men.”

Peaceful, law-abiding tea-party groups who cleaned up after their protests — and got legal permits for them — were signs of nascent fascism lurking in the American soul. Violent, anarchic, and illegal protests by Occupy Wall Street a few years ago or, more recently, in Ferguson, Mo., were proof that a new idealistic generation was renewing its commitment to idealism.

When rich conservatives give money to Republicans, it is a sign that the whole system has been corrupted by fat cats. When it is revealed that liberal billionaires and left-wing super PACs outspent conservative groups in 2014: crickets.

When Republicans invoke God or religious faith as an inspiration for their political views, it’s threatening and creepy. When Democrats do it, it’s a sign they believe in social justice.

One can do this all day long. But while examples are easy, explanations are hard.

I don’t know who first said, “Behind every apparent double standard lies an unconfessed single standard” (and as far as I can tell, neither does the Internet), but whoever did was onto something.

What looks like inexplicably staggering hypocrisy from the conservative perspective is actually remarkably consistent from the liberal perspective.

Well, “perspective” is probably the wrong word because it implies a conscious, deliberate, philosophical point of view. What is really at work is better understood as bias, even bigotry.

If you work from the dogmatic assumption that liberalism is morally infallible and that liberals are, by definition, pitted against sinister and — more importantly — powerful forces, then it’s easy to explain away what seem like double standards. Any lapse, error, or transgression by conservatives is evidence of their real nature, while similar lapses, errors, and transgressions by liberals are trivial when balanced against the fact that their hearts are in the right place.

Despite controlling the commanding heights of the culture — journalism, Hollywood, the arts, academia, and vast swaths of the corporate America they denounce — liberals have convinced themselves they are pitted against deeply entrenched powerful forces and that being a liberal is somehow brave. Obama, the twice-elected president of the United States, to this day speaks as if he’s some kind of underdog.

Frank Rich, the former New York Times columnist and theater critic, recently interviewed Chris Rock for New York magazine. He wanted to know why right-leaning comedian Dennis Miller isn’t as funny (at least according to Rich) as Jon Stewart of The Daily Show. He asked Rock, “Do you think that identifying with those in power is an impediment to laughter?”

It was a hilarious and revealing moment. Stewart — who recently had to turn down a pleading request from NBC to take over Meet the Press — has long identified with liberals in power. Moreover, he’s easily one of America’s most powerful liberals, routinely creating and enforcing liberal conventional wisdom (much as Rich had done from his perch at the Times). Miller, meanwhile, has nowhere near the same cultural clout precisely because he doesn’t affirm the single standard at the heart of liberalism: “We’re the good guys.”

— Jonah Goldberg is a senior editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2014 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/395526/year-liberal-double-standards-jonah-goldberg

 

 

Democratic Party Voter ID Hypocrisy

Black Conservative Son Educates Dad On Democrats Race Lies

By Lloyd Marcus

 

For the past six years, I have been a passionate, active black member of the Tea Party.  Unlike the vast majority of black Americans, I did not fall for the radical left's Trojan Horse in the form of a shiny new smooth-talkin' black man back in 2008.  When presidential candidate Obama told Joe the Plumber that he planned to spread the wealth around, I knew he was nothing more than another socialist/progressive liberal who hated America as founded.

My 86-year-old black dad, on the other hand, is a lifelong Democrat.  He believed that Dems are for the little guy and that voting Republican is like voting for the KKK.  Despite being a God-fearing Christian preacher and pastor for over 50 years, Dad rejected evidence of Obama's anti-Christian leanings and voted for him solely because he is black.

However, after six years, Dad and other blacks are awakening from their "racial loyalty trumps everything" zombie mindsets.  Amazingly, Dad voted Republican in the 2014 midterm election, contributing to the amazing GOP victory in Maryland.

Recently, Dad asked my thoughts regarding Ferguson.

I told Dad that the people who orchestrated and exploited Ferguson and are promoting national protests (Al Sharpton, the Democrats, and the mainstream media) have no real concern about the deaths of young black males.

Dad was shocked when I cited the high number of young blacks shot and murdered by other blacks in Chicago.  And yet, the same Democrat political hacks who are expressing outrage over Ferguson trash anyone, black or white, who attempts to deal with real problems in the black community – black-on-black crime, over 70% out-of-wedlock births, genocidal high abortions, and over 70% school dropouts.

Fatherless households lead to gang membership, crime, violence, and incarceration.  It is the natural instinct of young males to seek male bonding and mentors.  Sadly, the left has convinced far too many black youths that a thuggish street-cred persona is more authentically black and racially loyal than speaking English correctly and traditional values.  Single-parent households also lead to poverty.

Whites who dare to acknowledge and deal with the elephant in black America's living room are attacked – accused of insensitivity to the plight of being black in America and racism.  Blacks who attempt to free fellow blacks from the Democrats' liberal plantation via an underground railroad of conservatism are also attacked, called Uncle-Tom traitors to their race.

Consequently, all of the moral and cultural issues that create economic problems that have plagued the black community for forty years continue to get worse.

 Meanwhile, Al Sharpton continues to get paid with cash, influence, and power as the Grand Pooh-Bah of clueless black voters, able to create a riot on demand and deliver deceived angry black voters to the polls every election.

The left views the unfortunate deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner as gifts to be exploited for their America-Sucks-So-You-Should-Elect Democrats voter recruitment campaign.

 The left's deplorable campaign promotes the lie that black Americans are victims of a racist America in which white conservatives, Republicans and Tea Party members want to see them dead, and white cops shoot black males simply for walking around being black. 

Who cares if Sharpton and company's shameful, hate-generating, divisive, and extremely evil campaign is tearing our country apart?  Sharpton and company consider their divisive evil mere collateral damage.

I informed Dad that Rep. Andre Carson of the Congressional Black Caucus said the Tea Party wants to see blacks hanging from a tree.  This vile hatemonger politician ignored the fact that many Tea Party folks voted for Obama before he began unilaterally implementing socialist policies – a key component of his hostile takeover/fundamental transformation of America.

For decades, Democrats with the support of their homeys in the MSM have gotten away with deceiving blacks, promoting themselves as champions of blacks, women, and minorities. 

Extremely well-crafted is the image of Democrats riding in on white horses to punish selfish rich white racists while wielding swords of compassion, keeping conservatives, Republicans, the Tea Party, and America's racist police at bay.

Coming from a mindset of placing man above God, it is no coincidence that the religion of the liberalism-controlled Democratic Party always finds itself on the opposite side of the Bible.  The Bible strongly condemns the sin of covetousness, which is regularly promoted and exploited by Obama and his fellow Democrats. 

Covetousness is an unhealthy desire to obtain the possessions of others.  Team Obama thrives on ginning up hate for achievers in the form of class envy/covetousness.  Their absurd, insidious and manipulative message to the poor is "You have too little because they have too much."

Using simple language, I hoped to make Dad understand that Democrats are the ones who have been screwing blacks for over 40 years, contributing to the moral, cultural, and economic decline of the black community.

 Dad did not know that poverty in the black community had been on the decline before Democrat president Lyndon Johnson's 1964 War on Poverty, in which welfare programs were implemented that pushed fathers out of the home and destroyed the black family. 

Many blacks became addicted to government dependency and indoctrinated with entitlement mindsets.

My use of simple language is not meant to insult Dad's intelligence.  He is Dr. Rev. Lloyd E. Marcus.  My point is that many black conservatives on TV seem far too concerned with coming across intellectual rather than communicating to the masses why conservatism equals real compassion and is most beneficial to all Americans.

With Dad being a committed Christian preacher, I strove to enlighten him regarding the horrific evil at the core of what Sharpton and company are doing to our great country.  Though it is obvious to me as a black conservative gladiator in the political arena, Dad gets his news from the MSM, which makes him a low-info voter, unaware that the MSM spin the news to purposely polarize Americans along racial lines to achieve their political objectives.

For example, I heard an announcer on CNN attribute the stunning defeat of 18-year Louisiana incumbent Mary Landrieu to her inability to separate herself from Obama, who is unpopular with "white voters."

The truth is that Louisiana voters rejected Obama's agenda, which Landrieu voted for 97% of the time.  Dear Lord, have they no shame?  CNN's spin on the truth furthers Mary Landrieu's outrageous, insulting accusation that Southern voters are racist and sexist. 

Other MSM outlets have gone pedal-to-the-metal furthering the left's destructive hate-generating lie that blacks are being severely and systemically mistreated in America.

Dad has an e-mail account but hardly ever checks it.  So even though I have mentioned this truth in other articles, Dad has not read it.

I told Dad that the behavior of Sharpton, the Democrats, the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the MSM does not jibe with a real desire to empower blacks.  They elevated thugs Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown to the level of Medgar Evers, a real civil rights hero and icon. 

Meanwhile, they exhibit disdain for extraordinarily successful black role models like Dr. Ben Carson, Condoleezza Rice, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Dad was active in the civil rights movement back in 1963, when hero Medgar Evers was gunned down.  Dad thought it incomprehensible to mention Martin and Brown in the same breath as Evers.

 I told Dad that that is only one example of how Sharpton, the Democrats, and the MSM have perverted the cause of civil rights.

Dad advised, "You need to write all this down in a book.  Make it easy to read and understand."

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/12/black_conservative_son_educates_dad_race_lies.html#ixzz3N3lO9fy3

Democrats lost the South through culture war and elitism

By Timothy P. Carney

Fritz Hollings, John Edwards, Zell Miller, Blanche Lincoln, John Breaux, Kay Hagan, Mark Pryor and Mary Landrieu. These eight Democrats have been senators from the South in the past decade.

If not for Southern Democrats, Republicans would have nearly had a filibuster-proof Senate supermajority after the 2002 elections, giving George W. Bush some real clout. Without Southern senators, Democrats wouldn’t have taken over the Senate with Jim Jeffords’ party switch in 2001. If not for Southern Democrats, Obamacare wouldn’t have become law.

For the foreseeable future, though, Democrats will have make do without Southern senators.

With Mary Landrieu’s gigantic loss on Saturday, following Hagan’s surprise loss and Pryor’s thumping, the Southern Democratic senator is officially extinct. In the House, there are no White Democrats from the South.

Why did it happen?

In short: Democrats waged a culture war against the South, trying to force Southerners to stop “clinging” to their guns and to God. When you try to make it illegal for people to conduct their own affairs according to their conscience, you tend to lose their votes.

The self-soothing story the Left tells itself is that it’s all racism, that Democrats have lost the Southern vote because they’re not as willing to be racist as the Republicans are. Liberal columnist Michael Tomasky cheered the Democrats' loss of the South, which he lovingly called “one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment.”

Any full accounting of Southern politics has to involve race and racism, but it isn’t a top reason for the realignment.

Tomasky and other liberals may not have heard of Sen. Tim Scott, the first black Southerner elected to the U.S. Senate since reconstruction. South Carolina not only elected Scott to the Senate in a special election this fall, it gave him 757,000 votes — 85,000 more votes than his South Carolina colleague Lindsey Graham received the same day.

South Carolina’s voters re-elected their Republican Governor, Nikki Haley, nee Nimrata Nikki Randhawa. The state that defeated Mary Landrieu has had an Indian-American governor since the 2007 elections.

White racism can’t explain the GOP takeover of the South.

The best explanation comes from the mouth of President Obama himself. Speaking to San Francisco donors in 2008 about white voters in the Midwest, Obama lucidly expressed his low opinion of all non-rich voters in flyover country: “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.”

Naturally, Democrats and the Left have tried to pry Southerners away from their guns and religion. Gun control has largely been a culture war effort for Democrats. “Some of the southern areas have cultures that we have to overcome,” was Congressman Charles Rangel’s explanation for why gun control was both needed and difficult.

The Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten cursed the Second Amendment as "the refuge of bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches."

Obama and his party waged this culture-war crusade with glee — and failed, but not before making it clear that they disapproved of the way Southerners live.

And the Democrats have made it clear that they are willing to use government to impose their morality on others. Through the courts, the Left has banned prayers at high school football games and forced states to remove the Ten Commandments from public grounds.

The Obama administration, through its birth-control mandate that includes abortifacient drugs, has told Christian employers that they can’t run their businesses as Christians.

There’s no mystery here, and no need to assign widespread racism to why Southerners have rejected Democrats. It’s simple: Democrats and the Left have tried to outlaw Southerners’ way of life.

Here’s a related factor in the realignment: Democrats have given up on being the populist party, and — as they have increasingly won over the wealthy suburbs and the college-educated — have embraced their status as the party of the economic elite.

As crony capitalism and corporate welfare have grown, and as the Washington region has sucked in more and more of the nation’s wealth, Republicans have started to take up the populist mantle.

Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, whose populism flares up in many ways, joined Louisiana’s David Vitter in co-sponsoring a bill to break up the big banks. Sens. Landrieu, Hagan and Pryor all campaigned unsuccessfully on their support for the Export-Import Bank (a federal agency that subsidizes U.S. manufacturers and the banks that finance them).

Democrats have become the party of Hyde Park and Chevy Chase — elitist on culture and economics. It’s no wonder they can't also be the party of Charleston and Shreveport.

Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Sunday and Wednesday on washingtonexaminer.com.

 

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/democrats-lost-the-south-through-culture-war-and-elitism/article/2557157

 

16 Facts About Al Sharpton the Media Won't Tell You

By Jim Meyers

 

(Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

 

The Rev. Al Sharpton has been praised as a civil rights icon by prominent figures in politics, and "60 Minutes" reported that he has become President Barack Obama's "go-to black leader."

Sharpton has been frequently in the media for leading protests against grand jury decisions exonerating white policemen in the deaths of unarmed African-Americans in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York.

But many in the mainstream media have sought to downplay the negatives surrounding the firebrand minister, who has been accused of being a rabble-rouser out for personal gain, including:

1. When Sharpton sought involvement in the funeral of Akai Gurley, an African-American shot dead in November by a rookie police officer in the darkened stairwell of a housing project in Brooklyn, New York, Gurley's family told him to stay away.

Sharpton held a news conference condemning the cop and promised to deliver a eulogy at the wake. But Gurley's aunt, who was speaking for his mother, told TMZ: "Al Sharpton came in, put his name on the situation, but has not even made one single call to the parents of Akai," adding that all Sharpton sees "is money and political gain and he is turning the tragedy into a circus."

2. Sharpton has more than $4.5 million in current state and federal tax liens against him and his businesses. His National Action Network has repeatedly failed to pay travel agencies, hotels and landlords, records show.

3. Sharpton has allegedly sought to keep his nonprofit afloat with money that was supposed to go to payroll taxes, although he contends that the payroll tax shortfall was not intentional.

4. The reverend accused an upstate New York prosecutor, Steven Pagones, of being part of a group of white men who raped teenager Tawana Brawley in 1987. A grand jury found "overwhelming evidence" that the rape allegation had been fabricated. Pagones sued Sharpton for defamation and won a judgment of $65,000. Sharpton reportedly paid the judgment with money raised by his supporters.

5. Sharpton has frequently sparked controversy with his strident language. During a rally in Brooklyn, he called white people "crackers."

6. After a car in a Hasidic rabbi's motorcade killed a 7-year-old black boy in Brooklyn in 1991, Sharpton referred to the Hasidic Jews as "diamond merchants" and said "if the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house." Shortly afterward, an innocent Hasidic Jewish student visiting the area from Australia was set upon by a mob and stabbed to death.

7. In 1995, an African-American Pentecostal church in Harlem, New York, asked a Jewish tenant of one of its properties, Freddie's Fashion Mart, to evict a black-run record store that was subletting part of the property. Sharpton showed up outside Freddie's vowing to a crowd: "We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business."

Two weeks before Christmas that year, Freddie's was attacked by a man in the crowd who shot several customers and then set fire to the building with a flammable liquid, killing seven employees. Sharpton subsequently apologized for his "white interloper" remark, but vehemently denied responsibility for the violence.

8. Speaking at a college in 1994, Sharpton referred to gay men as "homos."

9. When Mitt Romney, a Mormon, was running for president in 2007, Sharpton said: "As for the Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him anyway."

10. In 1990, Sharpton was acquitted of felony charges that he stole $250,000 from his youth group.

11. In 1993, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for failing to file a state income tax return.

12. State law bars nonprofits from making loans to officers, but Sharpton admitted that his National Action Network had once loaned him money to cover his daughters' tuition.

13. Sharpton was jailed for 90 days in 2001 on trespassing charges stemming from his protest against U.S. military target practice exercises in Puerto Rico.

14. Sharpton worked as a government informant. In 2002, HBO aired a 19-year-old FBI videotape of an undercover sting operation showing Sharpton with an FBI agent posing as a Latin American businessman and a reputed Columbo crime family captain.

Sharpton said in 1988 that he informed for the government in order to stem the flow of crack cocaine into black neighborhoods, although The Smoking Gun alleged that he was paid to be an informant.

15. In December 2005, Sharpton agreed to repay $100,000 in public funds he received for his 2004 presidential campaign, because he had exceeded federal limits on personal expenditures for his campaign.

16. In 2005, Sharpton appeared in three TV commercials for LoanMax, an automobile title loan firm that reportedly charged fees that were the equivalent of 300 percent APR loans.

 

 

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/sharpton-fines-racism-taxes/2014/12/09/id/612015/?ns_mail_uid=32343128&ns_mail_job=1598857_12092014&s=al&dkt_nbr=dykog6bl

 

What's Really Going on with Holder's Civil-Rights Crusade against Police Departments

Federal investigations of the Garner and Brown cases are just a pretext.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Civil-rights investigations in Ferguson and Staten Island? No, what denizens of St. Louis and New York City ought to be worried about right now is . . . the crime wave overtaking Seattle.

If you don’t understand why, then you probably thought Obamacare was about covering the uninsured. Like its health-care “reform” campaign, the Obama Left’s civil-rights crusade is about control — central control of state law enforcement by Washington.

The deaths of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York are each tragic in their own way. But in neither is there a federal civil-rights case to be had. To think otherwise, you have to be getting your advice from Al Sharpton — the huckster confidant of President Obama and Attorney General Holder.

The law of civil rights requires the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant, usually driven by racial prejudice, willfully acted — violently in these cases — with the evil purpose to deprive a person of specific federal rights. Let’s put aside the utter absence of proof that race had any bearing on what happened in Staten Island, for example, where police supervised by an African-American officer came to the scene because of complaints about Garner by local business owners. It is virtually impossible to prove a civil-rights violation when there is no denying that police were engaged in a good-faith arrest and were put in the position of using force because a suspect resisted.

In Ferguson, Michael Brown did not merely resist arrest. Having just robbed a store, he was the aggressor in a confrontation with a police officer, who was made to fear for his life. And in Staten Island, there may be a real question about whether one police officer used excessive force under the circumstances; but there is no question that some quantum of force was appropriate in arresting a physically imposing suspect who insisted he would not be taken into custody and waved his arms to prevent the cops from cuffing him.

Federal civil-rights cases are much harder to make than state homicide cases. They are supposed to be. They were conceived as a rare federal intrusion on the sovereign police power a state exercises within its territory. When police are engaged in an arrest because a crime really has been committed, and they use force because the suspect really does resist, the claim that they were actually scheming to deprive the suspect of his civil rights is asinine. The time to worry about the deprivation of civil rights, as Messrs. Williamson, Cooke, and Goldberg point out, is when progressives enact overbearing laws that criminalize things like untaxed cigarette sales, not when police dutifully carry them out.

Eric Holder knows this as well as anyone. The bloviating he is doing today about Ferguson and Staten Island is of a piece with the bloviating he was doing two years ago about Sanford, Fla. As I observed of the Trayvon Martin killing at the time, the attorney general huffed and puffed about bringing a civil-rights case against “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman, but he was never actually going to file one. It would have been even more embarrassing than the trumped-up murder case he and Sharpton browbeat Florida into charging — the one the jury threw out in nothing flat.

Holder and his constitutional-scholar boss are not banging the civil-rights drum because they believe these are prosecutable cases. It is just a pretext for unleashing Justice Department community organizers on state and municipal police departments.

The government cannot win a standalone loser of a civil-rights prosecution by crying, “Disparate impact!” Individual cases that have been demagogued by the racial-grievance industry become high profile. Once public attention is riveted, the legal and logical flaws become obvious. When people start looking long and hard, the “institutionalized racism” canard is exposed. For guys like Sharpton, that’s bad for business.

But the Justice Department civil-rights investigations Holder is fond of announcing are not like public trials. They occur out of the public eye, where feverish Justice Department claims are not aired and scrutinized. More significant, they happen with the air of extortion created by the nearly $28 billion in funding Congress keeps giving Justice every year, no matter how many congressional investigations it obstructs, how many false statements its officials make, and how much it politicizes law enforcement. The investigations are taxpayer-funded jihads that states, cities, and towns know they lack the resources to fight off.

Here is how the game works. Holder streams in behind a tragedy that Sharpton and Obama have demagogued. He announces a civil-rights investigation. Eventually, he backs down from the threat of an indictment in the individual case, never conceding that the supporting evidence was not there, usually citing some strawman injustice that has nothing to do with the matter at hand — in Florida, for example, it was “stand your ground” gun laws that purportedly needed reforming. But, the attorney general is pleased to add, the original civil-rights probe of the non-crime has metastasized into a thoroughgoing civil-rights probe of the state or local police department’s training, practices, and . . . drumroll . . . institutional racism.

You never get to see what that investigation turns up. States and their subdivisions know they cannot afford to go toe-to-toe with the Beltway behemoth. Big cities, moreover, are governed by Democrats sympathetic to the Obama/Holder race obsessions — they’re happy to have the feds come in and hamstring police with “social justice” guidelines that would be a hard sell politically. So the Justice Department makes the locals an offer they can’t refuse: A consent decree that makes the Treaty of Versailles look like a slap on the wrist. This device is the license by which the Obama administration is remaking state law enforcement in its own image.

How do they get away with this? Well, Obamacare may be the most notorious “reform” progressives have foisted on an unsuspecting nation in modern times, but it’s not the only one. In 1994 — the last time before 2009 that Democrats controlled the White House and both congressional chambers — they rammed through a monstrosity known as the “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.” A Clinton deputy attorney general named Eric Holder was among the first to exploit it.

Consistent with the Left’s view of the states as cauldrons of racism, the statute criminalizes “any government authority” that “engage[s] in a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers . . . that deprives persons of [federal] rights, privileges, or immunities.” It is the civil-rights laws writ large — imposed on whole cities rather than threatened against individual police officers and citizens. And for good measure, the act encourages the attorney general to file civil lawsuits in federal court to “obtain appropriate equitable and declaratory relief to eliminate the [offensive] pattern or practice.”

Under this scheme, there are now more than 20 major American cities and their police departments beholden to the Obama Justice Department. On Thursday, in fact, Holder took time out from stirring the Staten Island pot to pounce on Cleveland, which is still reeling from last month’s racially charged case involving the death of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice.

The boy was reportedly pointing a gun at people in a park, prompting an emergency call to police, one of whom tragically shot him to death only to find that the gun was a BB gun. Again, other than the happenstance that the boy was black and the officer was white, race had no bearing on the case. But that didn’t stop Holder from invoking the boy, along with Garner’s death in Staten Island, in announcing that Justice’s investigation had found a “pattern or practice” of excessive force used by Cleveland police. As he spoke, he was flanked by Mayor Frank Jackson, the Democrat who presided over this allegedly rogue police regime for the last decade — upon inheriting it from Jane Campbell, the last mayor . . . a Democrat who, you’ll be shocked to learn, moved on to Harvard’s Kennedy School to teach how cities should be run. Mayor Jackson has, of course, agreed to the installation of a “monitor,” who will see to it that Cleveland police conduct themselves in an Obama-compliant manner.

Seattle is another of the big cities that has been snagged by the DOJ. It has been under a consent decree since the Justice Department targeted it in 2012 for a “pattern or practice” of violations, allegedly including “subjecting individuals to excessive force” — in particular, “using excessive force against persons of color,” and “escalating situations and using excessive force when arresting individuals for minor offenses.”

You may recall that the tide of rampant crime in New York City was turned when, under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the police began cracking down on minor offenses — not untaxed cigarette sales but real violations that had nearly destroyed the city’s quality of life. What ensued was a miraculous transformation, with the Big Apple becoming the safest big city in America.

That policing model is under attack now — just as the NYPD’s extraordinarily successful counterterrorism model has been undermined by Obama’s Homeland Security Advisory Council. As Holder was making his Cleveland splash, Bill de Blasio, New York City’s hard-left mayor, opportunistically — and in the absence of any evidence — pointed to Garner’s death as proof that “the way we go about policing has to change. . . . People need to know that black lives and brown lives matter as much as white lives.”

Holder announced that the Justice Department, which is already monitoring the NYPD, will conduct a civil-rights investigation into Garner’s death. Yes, that’s how it always starts.

Meanwhile, Seattle has been making announcements, too. It seems crime in the Emerald City has been skyrocketing since the Justice Department came in to, er, help. Homicides up 21 percent, car theft up 44 percent, aggravated assaults up 14 percent, and so on.

Welcome to Change: produced and directed by the Obama Justice Department and coming soon to a town near you.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

 

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/394116/whats-really-going-holders-civil-rights-crusade-against-police-departments-andrew-c

 

 

 

Obama’s Economy Leaves Black Americans Behind

November Jobs Report

 

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus released the following statement on the November jobs report: We're glad to see Americans going back to work, yet the unemployment rate is still too high. Millions of Americans still need jobs. Millions more have just given up looking. We're still faced with Carter-era levels of labor force participation…"Thankfully, the Americans people spoke out last month and sent a Republican majority to the Senate, so next year we can begin passing the pro-growth, pro-jobs legislation that has gone nowhere in the Democrat Senate. That includes the Keystone Pipeline. Soon, it will be up to President Obama to decide if he wants to stand with American workers or continue siding with liberal special interests." Click HERE to read more.

 

·          In November, The African American Unemployment Rate Increased From 10.9 To 11.1 Percent. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 12/5/14)

·          The Number Of Unemployed Workers In November Was 9.1 Million. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 12/5/14)

·          18.1 Million Americans Are Unemployed, Underemployed Or Have Given Up Looking For Work. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 12/5/14)

Also, click HERE for the RNC Research Department's piece on President Obama's economy leaving black Americans behind.  This article is also shown below.

 

_________________________________________

 

Obama's Economy Leaves Black Americans Behind

The New Republic: "There Is No Way Around It: Creating A More Equitable Future Is Going To Require Building The Median Assets Of Black American Families." (Dean Starkman, "The $236,500 Hole In The American Dream," The New Republic, 6/30/14)


The Majority Of Wealth Gap Between Black And White Americans Is Due To "Current Policies And Structures" That Have Accelerate Disparity. "Notwithstanding its undeniable historical roots, the bulk of the black-white wealth gap can be traced to current policies and structures that have made the wealth divide grow at an accelerating pace over the past 25 years." (Dean Starkman, "The $236,500 Hole In The American Dream," The New Republic, 6/30/14)


BLACK AMERICANS HAVE LOST GROUND IN THE OBAMA ECONOMY

Instead Of Solving The Problem, The Income Gap Among Black And White Americans Has Widened Under Obama

As Of 2012, Black Americans Have The Lowest Median Income Of Any Demographic."No racial or ethnic group experienced significant changes in income, but that left the gap between Asians, at the top, and blacks, at the bottom, as wide as before. The median income for Asian households was $68,600. For non-Hispanic whites, it was about $57,000, while the typical Hispanic household had an income of $39,000, and blacks were at $33,300." (Annie Lowrey, "Household Incomes Remain Flat Despite Improving Economy," The New York Times, 9/17/13)

As Of 2012, Black American Per Capita Income Has Fallen By 2% During Obama's Presidency, While White Per Capita Income Increased. (Current Population Survey, Annual Social And Economic Supplement, U.S. Census Bureau, Accessed 7/31/14)

• White Per Capita Income Increased From $33,393 In 2008 To $33,434 In 2012, A $41 Increase. (Current Population Survey, Annual Social And Economic Supplement,U.S. Census Bureau, Accessed 7/31/14)
• Black American Per Capita Income Fell From $19,628 In 2008 To $19,267 in 2012, A $361 Decline. (Current Population Survey, Annual Social And Economic Supplement, U.S. Census Bureau, Accessed 7/31/14)

As Of 2012, Black American Median Household Income Has Declined By 9% Since Obama Became President, While White Median Household Income Has Declined By 4%. (Current Population Survey, Annual Social And Economic Supplement, U.S. Census Bureau, Accessed 7/31/14)

• White Median Household Income Decreased From $55,786 In 2008 To $53,706 In 2012, A $2,080 Decline. (Current Population Survey, Annual Social And Economic Supplement, U.S. Census Bureau, Accessed 7/31/14)
• Black American Median Household Income Decreased From $36,491 In 2008 To $33,321 In 2012, A $3,170 Decline. (Current Population Survey, Annual Social And Economic Supplement, U.S. Census Bureau, Accessed 7/31/14)

Chronic, Long-Term Unemployment Is Disproportionately Hitting Black Americans

While Black Americans Are Only 10 Percent Of The Employed Population, They Are 22 Percent Of The Long-Term Unemployed. "In addition, African Americans comprise 22 percent of the long-term unemployed, compared with just 10 percent of the employed population." (Alan B. Krueger, Judd Cramer, David Cho, "Are The Long-Term Unemployed On The margins Of The Labor Market?," Brookings Institute, 3/20-21/14)

The Average Duration Of Unemployment For Black Americans Was 33.2 Weeks In July, Well Above The 29.8 Weeks For White Americans And The 27 Weeks Used To Define Long-Term Unemployment. (Current Population Survey, Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 7/31/14)

35 Percent Of Unemployed Black Americans Were Unemployed For 27 Weeks And Over In July 2014. (Current Population Survey, Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 7/1/14)

Black American Labor Force Participation Has Fallen From 63.2 Percent When Obama Became President To 61.7 Percent In July 2014. (Current Population Survey,Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 7/1/14)

Under Obama, Black Americans Have Seen Their Poverty Rates Increase

In 2012, 37.9 Percent Of Black Children Lived In Poverty, The "Hardest Hit" Of Any Demographic. "The new data also show that 13.7 percent of Americans who live in poverty are from 18 to 64 years old, and 9.1 percent are those aged 65 and older. Those hardest hit are children of color: 37.9 percent of black children lived in poverty in 2012, and 33.8 percent of Hispanics did as well. Compare that to 12.3 percent for white, non-Hispanic children." (Valerie Strauss, "New Census Data: Children Remain America's Poorest Citizens," The Washington Post's The Answer Sheet, 9/17/13)

In 2012, 27.2 Percent – 10.91 Million – Of Black Americans Were Below The Poverty Line. (Current Population Survey, Annual Social And Economic Supplement, U.S. Census Bureau, Accessed 3/13/14)

• In 2008, 24.7 Percent – 9.38 Million – Of Black Americans Were Below The Poverty Level. (Current Population Survey, Annual Social And Economic Supplement, U.S. Census Bureau, Accessed 3/13/14)

In 2012, 37.9 Percent Of Black Americans Under 18-Years-Old Were In Poverty, An Increase From The 34.7 Percent In 2008. (Current Population Survey, Annual Social And Economic Supplement, U.S. Census Bureau, Accessed 3/13/14)

https://gop.com/obamas-economy-leaves-black-americans-behind/

 

 

Charles Barkley: 'We Black People, We Have a Lot of Crooks'

By Sandy Fitzgerald

 

Former NBA star Charles Barkley

 

The color of someone's skin never seems to come up in the U.S. unless it's in a negative way, former NBA star Charles Barkley told CNN Tuesday, saying he finds it "ridiculous" when people believe white police officers set out to shoot African-Americans.

 

"We never discuss race in this country until something bad happens," Barkley told CNN's Brooke Baldwin Tuesday, and even then, "everybody wants to protect their own tribe, whether they are right or wrong."

 

The controversial Barkley, who is now a basketball analyst for Turner Sports, has come under fire in recent days after calling protesters who have destroyed businesses in Ferguson "scumbags" and complaining that some successful African-Americans like himself are degraded by the community for not being "black enough."

 

Barkley also agrees with a Missouri grand jury's decision not to indict former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who is white, in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, which led to protests in Ferguson and around the country.

 

Barkley has had his own issues with the police, but told Baldwin that many communities complain about racial profiling after they call for police to clean up their neighborhood, and said there is "a reason" for racial profiling.

 

"We as black people, we have a lot of crooks," he said. "We can't just wait until something like [the Michael Brown shooting] happens. We have to look at ourselves in the mirror.

 

"There is a reason that they racially profile us in the way they do. Sometimes it is wrong, and sometimes it is right."

 

But even though Barkley criticizes rioters who caused destruction in Ferguson, he agrees with peaceful protests, such as the other demonstrations being waged in Ferguson or those by NFL players who held up their hands in the "don't shoot" pose that has been used after the Brown death.

 

"Anybody who walks out peacefully, who protests peacefully, that's what this country was built on," he told Baldwin. "But to be burning peoples' property, burning police cars, looting peoples' stores, that is 100 percent ridiculous."

 

Although Barkley decried the rioting in Ferguson's streets, he does not think Brown's stepfather, Louis Head, should face charges of inciting a riot, after being captured on video yelling "burn this b***h down," after the grand jury made its decision.

 

Focusing on such issues confuses the situation, Brown told Baldwin, as "there's so much noise going on you never get to the crux of the issue that you need to be discussing."

 

 

http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/ferguson-Barkley-police-looting/2014/12/03/id/610760/?ns_mail_uid=32343128&ns_mail_job=1597989_12032014&s=al&dkt_nbr=vekepobk

When Ferguson Rioting Arrived, Demagogues Thrived

By Thomas Sowell

Everyone seems to have an opinion about the tragic events in Ferguson, Mo. But, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say, "You're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts."

Soon after the shooting death of Michael Brown, this 285-pound young man was depicted as a "gentle giant." But after a video was leaked, showing him bullying the owner of a store from which he had stolen some merchandise, Attorney General Eric Holder expressed displeasure that the video was leaked.

In other words, to Holder the truth was offensive, but the lie that it exposed was not.

Many people who claimed to have been eyewitnesses to the fatal shooting gave opposite accounts of what happened. Some even gave accounts that contradicted what they themselves had said earlier.

Fortunately, the grand jury did not have to rely on such statements, though some in the media seemed to. What the grand jury had, that the rest of us did not have until the grand jury's decision was announced, was a set of physical facts that told a story that was independent of what anybody said.

Three medical forensic experts — one representing Michael Brown's parents — examined the physical facts. These facts included the autopsy results, Michael Brown's DNA on the door of the police car and on the policeman's gun, photographs of the bruised and swollen face of policeman Darren Wilson and the pattern of blood stains on the street where Brown was shot.

This physical evidence was hard to square with the loudly proclaimed assertions that Brown was shot in the back, or was shot with his hands up, while trying to surrender. But it was consistent with the policeman's testimony.

Moreover, the physical facts were consistent with what a number of black witnesses said under oath, despite expressing fears for their own safety for contradicting what those in the rampaging mobs were saying.

The riots, looting and setting things on fire, which some in the media are treating as reactions to the grand jury's decision not to indict the policeman, actually began long before the grand jury had begun its investigation, much less announced any decision.

Why some people insist on believing whatever they want to believe is a question that is hard to answer. But a more important question is: What are the consequences to be expected from an orgy of anarchy that started in Ferguson, Mo., and has spread around the country?

The first victims of the mob rampages in Ferguson have been people who had nothing to do with Michael Brown or the police. They include people — many of them black or members of other minorities — who have seen the businesses they worked to build destroyed, perhaps never to be revived.

But these are only the first victims. If the history of other communities ravaged by riots in years past is any indication, there are blacks yet unborn who will be paying the price of these riots for years to come.

Sometimes it is a particular neighborhood that never recovers, and sometimes it is a whole city. Detroit is a classic example. It had the worst riot of the 1960s, with 43 deaths — 33 of them black people. Businesses left Detroit, taking with them jobs and taxes that were very much needed to keep the city viable. Middle-class people — both black and white — also fled.

Harlem was one of many ghettos across the country that have still not recovered from the riots of the 1960s. In later years, a niece of mine, who had grown up in the same Harlem tenement where I grew up years earlier, bitterly complained about how few stores and other businesses there were in the neighborhood.

There were plenty of stores in that same neighborhood when I was growing up, as well as a dentist, a pharmacist and an optician, all less than a block away. But that was before the neighborhood was swept by riots.

Who benefits from the Ferguson riots? The biggest beneficiaries are politicians and racial demagogues.

In Detroit, Mayor Coleman Young was one of many political demagogues who were able to ensure their own reelection, using rhetoric and policies that drove away people who provided jobs and taxes, but were likely to vote against him if they stayed.

Such demagogues thrived as Detroit became a wasteland.

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-on-the-right/120114-728561-ferguson-riots-became-a-feeding-frenzy-for-demagogues-and-phony-leaders.htm#ixzz3KljywlMz