IS RACISM REALLY ABOUT RACE ANYMORE ?

Do liberals have any arguments for their idiotic ideas besides calling their opponents “racist”?
 

The two big public policies under attack by the left this week are “stop-and-frisk” policing and voter ID laws. Democrats denounce both policies as racist. I’m beginning to suspect they’re getting lazy in their arguments.

Stop-and-frisk was a crucial part of the package of law enforcement measures implemented by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani that saved the city. Under David Dinkins, who preceded Giuliani, murders averaged about 2,000 a year. There were 714 murders in New York the year Giuliani left office. Continuing Giuliani’s policing techniques, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s New York had only 419 murders last year.

Just during his first year in office, Giuliani’s policies cut the murder rate an astonishing 20 percent. Thirty-five percent of the crime drop nationwide from 1993 to 1995 was attributable solely to the reduction of crime in New York City during Giuliani’s first year in office. (The New York Times hailed this remarkable achievement with an article headlined, “New York City Crime Falls but Just Why Is a Mystery.”)

It was mostly black lives that were saved by Giuliani’s crime policies. By the end of his administration, the Rev. Calvin Butts, liberal pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, was describing Giuliani as King Josiah of the Bible, who “brought order, peace, the law back to the land.” The black minister told The New York Times, “I really think that without Giuliani, we would have been overrun.”

About the same time as the Rev. Butts was comparing Giuliani to King Josiah, Richard Goldstein of The Village Voice claimed he felt less safe in New York under Giuliani. It was the ravings of a madman, like saying winter is warmer than summer. But now, Goldstein’s ideas are being delivered from the federal bench by Judge Shira Scheindlin, who recently held New York City’s stop-and-frisk policies unconstitutional.

Yes, Democrat Bob Filner can pat down his female employees, but cops can’t pat down suspected criminals.

Liberals wail about guns, but how do they imagine police get guns off the street without going to high-crime neighborhoods and stopping young men acting suspiciously? Giuliani’s policing policies, including stop-and-frisk, reduced gun homicides in New York by 75 percent within five years.
It is precisely the fear of being caught with a gun that induces young hoodlums not to carry them. The word gets out: Don’t carry a gun! It’s not worth the risk.

Of course cops don’t find many guns anymore! That’s because they’re doing stop-and-frisk.
By liberals’ logic, the government should stop doing meat inspections because it turns up so few cases of contamination these days, anyway. We can also drop the metal detectors at airports. How many people does the TSA actually catch trying to sneak guns onto airplanes?

Have liberals polled the elderly black residents of high-crime neighborhoods on stop-and-frisk? As soon as the word gets out that it’s now safe to carry weapons, spray paint, drugs and stolen goods again, hoodlums will rule the streets and the elderly will, once more, be confined to their homes. As Martin Luther King said, crime is “the nightmare of the slum family.”

But liberals don’t care about the innocent black victims of crime. They don’t care about citizens being prisoners in their own homes — as long as it’s not in their neighborhoods. The important thing is, liberals get to self-righteously preen about racism.

When a policy that has saved thousands of black lives is attacked as “racist,” the word has no meaning. At this rate, liberals will be claiming that peanut butter sandwiches are racist — except that wouldn’t be as crazy.

Voter ID laws don’t actually save black lives the way stop-and-frisk policies do, but it’s not clear how such laws hurt them. I suppose the argument is that by allowing Democrats to steal elections, they can pass all those laws that improve black lives immeasurably, like promoting trial lawyers, gay marriage, abortion and amnesty for illegals. You know, the Democratic policies that really enhance black lives.

The claim that modern voter ID laws are a racist Republican plot to prevent minorities from voting is complicated by the fact that, in 2011, such a law was enacted by the overwhelmingly Democratic Rhode Island legislature and, in fact, was pushed through by black Democrats.

Despite the pleas of national Democrats who realized their cover was being blown, the state senate’s only black member, Democrat Harold Metts, sponsored a voted ID bill. He said he’d heard complaints about voter fraud for years, telling the story of one poll worker who encountered a voter who couldn’t spell his own last name.

A black legislator in the House, Anastasia Williams, complained that when she showed up to vote in 2006, she was told she had already voted. Another time, she saw a Hispanic man vote, go to the parking lot and change his clothes, then go back in and vote again.

If white liberals are so concerned about black votes counting, why don’t they ever vote for black representatives in their own congressional districts? Black Republicans are always elected from majority white districts: Gary Franks, J.C. Watts, Tim Scott and Allen West.

But black Democrats apparently can get elected to Congress only from specially designated minority districts. How come white liberals won’t vote for a black representative? Can’t a black person represent Nita Lowey’s district?

Democrats do nothing for black Americans except mine them for votes, which they do by telling tall tales about racist Republicans.

by Ann Coulter...........

A NIGHT OF BASEBALL.....WHOOPIE

                        I'm the luckiest man in baseball, which is why they gave me this number

                       Coors Field in Denver. The Rockies won 14-2. Wonders never cease.

                                 In Denver even the view from the ball park is interesting.

T

                                                     Even the sun plays games.

Being seated in the right field,upper deck, I tried giving the 20x lens on my Canon Powershot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                           Good shot from the bleachers.

                Camera working good. Look close and you can see the ball coming..

        Every park has a scoreboard. By this time (5th inning) it was raining a bit.

                                        Time to go home. Getting wet.

CLIMATE CHANGE ?

Recently unearthed photographs taken by Danish explorers in the 1930s show glaciers in Greenland retreating faster than they are today, according to researchers.
Danish explorers in Greenland in 1932. Credit: National Survey and Cadastre of Denmark

We're not worried about rising sea levels. Well, we are in a seaplane.

The photos in question were taken by the seventh Thule Expedition to Greenland led by Dr Knud Rasmussen in 1932. The explorers were equipped with a seaplane, which they used to take aerial snaps of glaciers along the Arctic island's coasts.

After the expedition returned the photographs were used to make maps and charts of the area, then placed in archives in Denmark where they lay forgotten for decades. Then, in recent years, international researchers trying to find information on the history of the Greenland glaciers stumbled across them.

Taken together the pictures show clearly that glaciers in the region were melting even faster in the 1930s than they are today, according to Professor Jason Box, who works at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State uni.

There's much scientific interest in the Greenland ice sheet, as unlike most of the Arctic ice cap it sits on land: thus if it were to melt, serious sea level rises could occur (though the latest research says that this doesn't appear to be on the cards).

It's difficult to know exactly what's happening to the Greenland ice in total and very different estimates have been produced in recent times. However Professor Box says that many glaciers along the coasts have started retreating in the past decade.

It now appears that the glaciers were retreating even faster eighty years ago: but nobody worried about it, and the ice subsequently came back again. Box theorises that this is likely to be because of sulphur pollution released into the atmosphere by humans, especially by burning coal and fuel oils. This is known to have a cooling effect.

Unfortunately atmospheric sulphur emissions also cause other things such as acid rain, and as a result rich Western nations cracked down on sulphates in the 1960s. Prof Box believes that this led to warming from the 1970s onward, which has now led to the glaciers retreating since around 2000.

Other scientists have said recently that late-20th-century temperature rises in the Arctic may result largely from clean-air legislation intended to deal with acid rain: some have even gone so far as to suggest that rapid coal- and diesel-fuelled industrialisation in China is serving to prevent further warming right now.

Still other scientists, differing with Prof Box, offer another picture altogether of Arctic temperatures, in which there were peaks both in the 1930s and 1950s and cooling until the 1990s: and in which the warming trend which resulted in the melting seen by Rasmussen's expedition actually started as early as 1840, before the industrial revolution and human-driven carbon emission had even got rolling. In that scenario, variations in the Sun seem to have much more weight than is generally accepted by today's climatologists.

MY LAST COMMENT ON THE PENN STATE FIASCO

Since the beginning of the Penn State revelations I have debated the edict of the NCAA upon the football program. It’ not the financial aspect, but rather that the penalties levied on past contests and on future contests as it relates to to the individual player, I think, is not relevant to the crimes committed by the six individuals involved. In short I believe that a great deal of overkill has taken place. Most of the response to my objection has been emotional in nature. In virtually every feedback to my argument people have responded as to how insensitive my point of view is towards the victims and the damage done to the young minds and their emotional future.

My answer, of course, is that the debate on the victims is a foregone conclusion and no further discussion is needed to illustrate the outcome of those heinous acts perpetrated on them and the effect on their future. Anything further is redundant and not the significance  of my deliberation. The  subject here is punishment for crimes committed.

In comments submitted to Facebook, ESPN, the Boston Herald, and my local news outlets, the first outrage is how lacking I am in feeling for the victims. Many scenarios are given about collateral damage in these instances. Mostly they point to the fact that players can move on, play elsewhere, or just play on with the circumstances. But the punishment for evil doing is the castigation put upon players past and present that some how they are guilty by association as is the football program at Penn State which is so evident with intrusion of the NCAA into  punishment that belongs in the judicial system for conviction of child molestation.


The monetary fines imposed, the university having agreed to it, I can understand. The program ,no. And here is my position. When I started this opposition early on locally, the scenario given relating to collateral damage to crimes committed by individuals was that of Rod Blagojovich and his children. The writer relayed the misery due to the absence of their father and the how they suffer due to no fault of their own. That's collatteral damage. In trying to digest this, my first thought was, what utter nonsense as it pertains to Penn State. The state of Illinois did not put restrictions on Blago’s children . They were not denied recognition for accomplishments of past years. They were not forbidden to participate in future events and denied the award for any accomplishment. They were not denied access to the local parks. There was no indication of guilt being placed upon them through being associated with their father . I rejected the whole thing outright. Collateral damage is one thing but indicating guilt by association is quite another.

The next objection I ran into was in reference to a reply I got in the Boston Globe. I made the suggestion in my rebuttals, what if Mr. Sandusky had been an associate professor in the physics department and the same ten year scenario had gone on. The question I asked , would the Academy of Arts and Sciences have decimated the physics department ? Would they have taken away scholarships ? Would they have erased the previous ten years of awards and recognitions of students ? Would they have abolished the future participation of students in science fairs and off campus seminars ? The reply I got was astonishing in it’s hypocrisy. The commenter said yes, they probably would have. And there we have the hypocrisy of an independent body issuing punishment on the university. Those who dislike football programs and football in general think that because the guilty party was associated with football and Paterno was involved that the cover up was about protecting the program and Paterno.

The hypocrisy here is that the commenter believes that the physics department would have suffered the same fate. Many, more than likely, believe it also. One problem remains however, and that is the fact that there were three high level officers of the university that I’m sure, when it came to nitty gritty, would not give a damn about Paterno or the football program. There only thought would most likely have been about their jobs and legacy in the history of the school. Following that line of reasoning, then why only the punishment of the football program. The top three were not fully associated with the program but had more responsibility to the school as a whole. And yet, other than the the fines and monetary penalties levied by an outside athletic organization, there is absolutely no cry to penalize the school as a whole. Where is the state board of education. Why not the whole university  put on academic probation ? Why not the whole university guilty by association. So now the hypocrisy of punishment for child molesters.

I hardly believe the physics thing would have happened for the simple reason that the physics department does not bring in the enormous amount of money that the football program brings in. The sole purpose for extending punishment to the football program is "that's where the money is". The NCAA is somehow empowered to punish public felonies by simple association.

Let's understand something. In the public sector the punishment for the same heinous crimes that were committed at Penn State would be the incarceration of the 6 or 7 people involved in those crimes. One, so far, seems destined to that end. But people who see little educational benefit in the major schools athletic programs think that punishment of the evil doers should, in some cases, include all the schools if they had their way. My question still remains, at what point in retribution does justice cease to be relevant.

If we delve into the justice system at large we see convicted child molesters given probation (Virginia) or short two year sentences(New York, convicted of 48 counts). My point here is that people approach the punishment of these hideous crimes of child molestation with too much maudlin emotion. At Penn State we want the death penalty for a program, but in Virginia probation is warranted. Not cover up mind you, but the actual crime.

In an interview the other night, a one Dr. Keith Ablow, a phychiatrist, was asked if he thought the NCAA had meted out the right punishment. Of course he thought that possibly not enough was done. The conversation then turned to the afore mentioned New York case. The mentioning of Jessica's law was brought up and immediately Dr. Ablow displayed his displeasure with the Jessica's law and it's mandate of a 25 year mandatory sentencing guideline. And there we have it. Liberal thinking jumps on the fact that punishment by association endows empathy for the plight of abused children, but then it can, somehow, come to the conclusion that mandatory sentencing is bad because, as Dr. Ablow said, there are " extenuating circumstances" in every case.

I'm just wondering, just between the two of us, what side of hypocrisy should we be on.