This Quarantine Is A Mockery Of A Sham (Elitist Democrats)

This quarantine is a “travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.” They have no intention of abiding by the restrictions they impose on their citizens.

New York Mayor Bill De Blasio vs. Reality!

My Take Eric Garner

What you don’t see in the Eric Garner video of his arrest:


Black female Sgt. was in charge of the arrest. She could have told the men taking him down to taze him (which still could have given him a heart-attack, BTW ~ that’s what killed him, a heart-attack).

They originally asked him to move down the street — away from the business that sells cigarettes lawfully. (And yes, I think the exorbitant taxes on cigarettes in NY is ridiculous… if you think it is too — QUIT VOTING DEMOCRAT!).

[In other words, Mr. Garner wouldn’t have been there in the first place if fiscal conservatives were voted into office there. He might have been in jail — and not home for Christmas — for a 32nd criminal code violation on his already 31 priors and resisting arrest, record.]

The video we are all familiar with is the very end of the incident… it doesn’t show the previous 13-M i N u T e S.

Do you see why the grand-jury maybe decided not to indite? They have 25 (I think) grand jury members on a grand jury in NY and need only 12 of them to say “yes” to indictment. They couldn’t get even twelve. This will all be public soon, but I wonder if ANY wanted to indite?

(Out of all Mr. Garner’s bad choices, one can see that his worst choice has most likely put him in a place worse than that choke hold. Sad. #UnrepentantLife)

Via Jason Riley (Wall Street Journal):

Beauty

We now know that Michael Brown was much more of a menace than a martyr, but that won’t stop liberals from pushing an anti-police narrative that harms the black poor in the name of helping them.

The black teen in Ferguson, Mo., robbed a store, attacked a white police officer and was shot dead while resisting arrest. That was the conclusion of a St. Louis County grand jury that brought no charges against the officer after considering all the physical evidence, along with eyewitness accounts from blacks in the vicinity of the confrontation.

Not that any amount of evidence would have stopped the hooligans in Ferguson Monday night who were determined use Brown’s death as a pretext for more bad behavior. Nor will evidence thwart liberals who are bent on making excuses for black criminality and pretending that police shootings are responsible for America’s high black body count.

According to the FBI, homicide is the leading cause of death among young black men, who are 10 times more likely than their white counterparts to be murdered. And while you’d never know it watching MSNBC, the police are not to blame. Blacks are just 13% of the population but responsible for a majority of all murders in the U.S., and more than 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks. Liberals like to point out that most whites are killed by other whites, too. That’s true but beside the point given that the white crime rate is so much lower than the black rate.

Blacks commit violent crimes at 7 to 10 times the rate that whites do. The fact that their victims tend to be of the same race suggests that young black men in the ghetto live in danger of being shot by each other, not cops. Nor is this a function of “over-policing” certain neighborhoods to juice black arrest rates. Research has long shown that the rate at which blacks are arrested is nearly identical to the rate at which crime victims identify blacks as their assailants. The police are in these communities because that’s where the emergency calls originate, and they spend much of their time trying to stop residents of the same race from harming one another.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani pointed this out recently on “Meet the Press” in a debate with sociologist Michael Eric Dyson. “What about the poor black child that is killed by another black child? Why aren’t you protesting that?” Mr. Giuliani asked.

“Those people go to jail,” Mr. Dyson responded. “I do protest it. I’m a minister. They go to jail.”

Mr. Dyson might want to try protesting a little harder. Chicago had 507 murders in 2012, only 26% of which were solved. “To put it another way: About three-quarters of the people who killed someone in Chicago in 2012 have gotten away with murder—so far, at least,” Chicago Magazine noted. Mr. Dyson and others on the left are not oblivious to this black pathology, but they are at pains even to acknowledge it, let alone make it a focus. Instead, liberals spend their time spotlighting white racism, real or imagined, and touting it as an all-purpose explanation for bad black outcomes.

Ferguson helps further that agenda in ways that Chicago does not. Hence, the left posits that the Michael Brown shooting is the norm, even though the data show that it’s the exception. And if black criminal behavior is a response to white racism, how is it that black crime rates were lower in the 1940s and 1950s, when black poverty was higher, racial discrimination was rampant and legal, and the country was more than a half-century away from twice electing a black president?

Racial profiling and tensions between the police and poor black communities are real problems, but these are effects rather than causes, and they can’t be addressed without also addressing the extraordinarily high rates of black criminal behavior—yet such discussion remains taboo. Blacks who bring it up are sell-outs. Whites who mention it are racists. (Mr. Dyson accused Mr. Giuliani of “white supremacy.”) But so long as young black men are responsible for an outsize portion of violent crime, they will be viewed suspiciously by law enforcement and fellow citizens of all races….

…read it all…

New York’s Public School’s Spend $20,226 Per Below Average Pupil

I was feeling the steak salad at TILT THE KILT, so I grabbed my newest copy of THE CITY JOURNAL and a book I am reading “Contradict: They Can’t All Be True,” and headed over. I must look like a COMPLETE idiot as I have my faced buried in either of the two… just glancing up to see if there is a change of score in the Blackhawks game (the only thing good to come out of Chicago… that and it’s school of economics [back-in-the-day]). Some good articles in the City Journal this time around. One was so interesting that I scanned a bit of it for others to read.

But before you do — two things. 1) promise to watch “Waiting for Superman” in the future, as well as 2) watching the video directly below, now. The video below is one — even if already seen — will refresh the visuals of what the below article explains:

So you know, UFT stands for United Federation of Teachers, and is the largest teacher union in New York. Here is a portion of the article:

The UFT has been especially effective because, unlike other interest groups in the city, it gets two bites at the apple—through collective bargaining and through politics. Three structural features of the collective bargaining process skew in the UFT’s favor. First, even in the best-case scenario, in which the city fights for the children’s interests and the union battles to protect its teachers, the result would be something in between—that is, an outcome not fully in the interest of students. Second, the city is a near-monopoly provider of education. Absence of competition reduces pressure on the city to drive a hard bargain with the UFT, while lessening incentives for the union to moderate its demands. Third, the UFT contributes cash and campaign assistance to the politicians with whom it negotiates. To the extent that the UFT backs winners, the union ends up on both sides of the bargaining table. Consequently, negotiated outcomes favor the UFT over time.The United Teachers Federation (UFT) represent most of New York’s public schools, so you understand the acronym below:

In the political arena, no group in New York City can rival the UFT’s manpower and money. Most of its 116,000 members hold college and graduate degrees, making them more likely to be politically active. The union also collects huge sums in dues, which are automatically deducted from members’ paychecks. Each UFT member pays, on average, approximately $600 a year in union dues, bringing the union’s annual revenues to about $70 million—much of it reserved for paying union officials’ salaries, contributions to state and national federations, rent for office space, and the costs of collective bargaining. The UFT also maintains a Committee on Political Education, sponsored by members who voluntarily donate anywhere from 50 cents to ten dollars out of their biweekly paycheck for explicitly political purposes. The fund hauls in more than $10 million a year, about $3 million of which goes for lobbying and protests.

Thanks to its massive war chest, the UFT has become the Democratic Party’s largest underwriter in New York City and State. (It is also a major donor to the left-wing Working Fam­ilies Party.) Over the last two years, the union has given $1.7 million to city council candidates—all Democrats. According to the National Institute for Money in State Politics, in 2012 (as in most years before and since), the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), largely a state-level extension of the UFT, was the Empire State’s big­gest contributor to candidates and parties in state politics. Seventy-nine percent of the NYSUT’s S1.2 million in contributions went to Democrats.

In his book Special Interest, Stanford University political scientist Terry Moe found that from 2000 to 2009, teachers’ unions’ cam­paign contributions exceeded those of all other business associations in New York State combined by a ratio of five to one. And most business groups don’t try to influence education policy so single-mindedly.

The UFT and the Democratic Party in New York are intertwined in other ways. For ex­ample, the union provides office space—next door to its headquarters at 50 Broadway in Manhattan—to the State Senate Democratic Campaign Committee. Then—UFT president Randi Weingarten served as cochair of Hillary Clinton’s 2000 senate campaign. Not surpris­ingly, during the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, Senator Clinton dismissed the idea of teacher-merit pay as disruptive. A revolving door of consultants, campaign operatives, and lobbyists connects the UFT and the campaign staffs of state legislators and city council mem­bers. Many liberal interest groups in the city—such as Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, 1199 SEIU Healthcare Workers East, and other public-employee unions—are, for the most part, UFT allies. The union also helps fund other ad­vocacy organizations, such as U.S. Action and the NAACP, and think tanks, such as Demos and the Economic Policy Institute, whose loy­alty it can rely on in a pinch.

The UFT’s membership constitutes the larg­est single voting bloc in mayoral elections. And because teachers and school paraprofessionals live in all parts of the city, they can be decisive in low-turnout city council races. The UFT’s get-­out-the-vote operation is rivaled only by its ally, SEIU 1199. In 2013, de Blasio was elected mayor with just 752,604 votes in a city of 8.4 million people. Fully 42 percent of voters said that they belonged to a union household.

The UFT also spends millions each year lob­bying city council members and state legisla‑tors. According to the New York State Ethics Commission, the union spent $1.86 million in Albany in 2012. And the New York Public Interest Research Group re­ports that the NYSUT, to which the UFT contributes substantial revenues, was the state’s second-biggest lobby­ing spender in 2010, plunking down $4.7 million. (The Healthcare Education Project, a vehicle of SEIU 1199 and the Greater New York Hospital Association, was first.)

The UFT’s extensive political activities en­sure that the school system continues to serve the needs of teachers first. The union’s enduring objectives—better pay, benefits, and job protec­tions for its members—are divorced from issues of student achievement, as New York’s declin­ing school performance since the unionization of teachers in the 1960s makes clear. By 1990, nearly 40 percent of freshmen entering high school had been held back in earlier grades, while 23 percent of students dropped out of school altogether. In 1994, only 44 percent of students graduated from high school in four years. Only one in three third-graders could read at or above grade level in 1997….

[….]

All this spending means that the New York City school system now lays out $20,226 per pupil — double the national average of $10,608 — based on census data released in May 2014.

Daniel DiSalvo, The Union That Devoured Education Reform, The City Journal (Autumn 2014), 12-13, 16.

New York To Feel the Pain (NY is the new `Red`)

From the “I bet you didn’t know this” files via Breaitbart:

Bill de Blasio is not the only red coming to power in New York City. He will also be joined by a “progressive” majority City Council. Here is a sampling of three of those he will be working with: 

 

Melissa Mark-Viverito,

top contender for City Council Speaker, went down to Bolivia to campaign for that nation’s marxist dictator, Evo Morales, in 2009. Records of the infamous red narco-terrorist organization FARC show that ties between that organization and Morales stretch all the way back to at least 2003, with meetings organized in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela between senior FARC operatives and Morales. That was two years before Morales’s Chavez-bought “election” in 2005, and the collaboration continues unabated. 

Additionally, in 2010 Mark-Viverito pushed for the release of a jailed leader of the extremely violent Cuban-controlled Puerto Rican terrorist-separatist group FALN, which in the 70s and 80s killed and maimed hundreds in New York, Chicago, and Puerto Rico. Until recently, Mark-Viverito refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance because of her support for Puerto Rican separatism.

 

Inez Barron,

a more quiet but equally radical sidekick to her husband Charles Barron. Their views, as voiced by Charles, include: “a special fondness for Castro because of the Cuban leader’s efforts to help several African nations, particularly Angola, in their march toward independence decades ago” (the late Bayard Rustin, a true civil rights champion and architect of the 1963 March on Washington, recognized the Soviet-Cuban rape of Angola as among the most tragic outrages in African history. 

Far from any form of “liberation,” the Communist invaders aborted the planned democratic process, plundered the wealth of Angola, and resorted to indiscriminate force and even used chemical weapons. An estimated one million people died in the Angolan civil war. “Robert Mugabe is my hero, and guess what, so is Muammar Qaddafi!” Charles Barron declared in November 2011. In addition to being a tyrant in his own right, Mugabe is sheltering the former Communist dictator of Ethiopia who murdered over one million of his own people–a regime that was defended by Barron’s other hero Fidel Castro, bringing the number of black Africans murdered with Castro’s help to over 2 million. No comment necessary on Qaddafi. He has also expressed hatred of Israel, which earned Charles, a former Black Panther, the endorsement of former KKK leader David Duke. 

 

Margaret Chin,

 former spokeswoman for the Maoist Communist Worker’s Party. She first ran for the City Council in 1991, but thanks to the activism of outraged Chinese-Americans and a man known to New York talk radio fans as “Jimmy from Brooklyn,” her attempt was defeated. In 2009, however, she returned and managed to win the election. It is a sad commentary on society that a longtime fanatical follower of the most tyrannical and bloodthirsty form of Chinese Communism–responsible for the death of some 70 million Chinese people and tens of thousand of Americans in Korea–could get elected on the 20 year anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre.

In 1983, Bill de Blasio took a student trip to the USSR. Now he and his allies are making the rest of us relive their youth.