It's Super-Media! With the Power to Detect Non-Existent Racism

By Ann Coulter

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

The media's fixation on the Trayvon Martin case, while ignoring much more brutal crimes with clearer racial motivations, is a return to pre-O.J. America.

The thesis of my book, "Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama" -- out in paperback this week! -- is that after decades of liberals play-acting Racist America, wherein they cast themselves as civil rights champions, and other, random white people as Bull Connor (a Democrat), it all ended with the O.J. verdict.

That's when white America said, That's it. The white guilt bank is shut down. It was one of the best things that ever happened to America -- especially for black people.

But then in 2007, Barack Obama brought it all back. In order to immunize the most left-wing presidential candidate the nation has ever seen, the Non-Fox Media went into overdrive reporting their fantasies of an America full of racists, constantly terrorizing innocent blacks.

Of course, once Republicans got the Democrats to stop terrorizing black people, there was no one else doing it. Nonetheless, for decades, the media would highlight every apparent white-on-black crime, treating each such incident as the Crime of the Century.

White-on-black crimes were, and are, freakishly rare. But the media weren't showcasing these one-off events as man-bites-dog stories, but rather as dog-bites-man stories in a universe brimming with packs of rabid dogs. According to liberals, whites attacking blacks was an epidemic -- a nationwide "cancer," in the words of erstwhile New York City Mayor Ed Koch.

In December 1986, a gang of white toughs were roaming around Howard Beach, Queens, brawling with anyone they met. They beat up an off-duty white fireman. They attacked a couple of Hispanics. But it was only when the young delinquents fought with three black men -- Cedric Sandiford, Timothy Grimes and Michael Griffith -- that they secured their place in history and became the literary event of the season!

After the initial encounter between the black and white punks -- there were epithets exchanged and criminal records on both sides -- the white gang returned with a baseball bat, spoiling for a fight. Grimes ran off unharmed, Sandiford got beaten, and Griffith tried to flee by climbing through a hole in a fence -- and ran directly into a busy six-lane highway, where he was hit by a car and killed.

The police summarily concluded that the white gang's other fights that night had "no racial overtones." Only the fight with the blacks constituted a hate crime. The FBI opened an investigation and 50 police officers were assigned to investigate. Hollywood made a movie about Howard Beach. The New York Times still celebrates anniversaries of the Howard Beach attack.

News stories were brimming with references to Birmingham and Selma. Columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, "Howard Beach suddenly has become what Birmingham once meant." (A few years later, the ethnically sensitive Breslin was suspended for denouncing a young Korean-American colleague in the newsroom as a "slant-eyed b***h.")

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Atlantic editor Jack Beatty blamed Howard Beach on the Republican Party: "From Richard M. Nixon's 'Southern strategy' to Ronald Reagan's boilerplate about 'welfare queens,' the legatees of the party of Lincoln have wrung political profit from the white backlash. Howard Beach shows that the politics of prejudice may have some vile life left in it yet."

In 1986, only 2.6 percent of all homicides in the entire country were white-on-black killings. Black criminals killed nearly three times as many white people (949) as whites killed blacks (378) and they killed 16 times as many black people (6,235) as whites did.

Mayor Koch called the Howard Beach attack "the most horrendous incident of violence in the nine years I have been mayor."

Earlier that year, a 20-year-old white design student, Dawn Livecchi, answered the doorbell at her Fort Greene, Brooklyn, townhouse and was shot dead by a black man, Anthony Neal Jenkins, who had followed her home from the grocery store.

One Queens woman interviewed by the Times about the Howard Beach attack mentioned that her husband had been beaten so badly by a group of blacks that he remained in a coma two years later.

In one of dozens of "retaliatory" attacks that invariably follow these media-created racial incidents, the day after the attack, a black gang beat and robbed a white, 17-year-old boy sitting at a Queens bus stop, shouting, "Howard Beach! Howard Beach!" "He's a white boy, and they killed a black boy at Howard Beach."

Just a week before the Howard Beach attack there was another interracial crime in a neighborhood only slightly farther away from The New York Times' building than Howard Beach is. A 63-year-old white woman, Ann Viner, was attacked at her home in New Canaan, Conn., savagely beaten, dragged to her swimming pool and drowned by two 20-year-old black men.

It was the first murder in the affluent town in 17 years. That seems like a newsworthy event to me.

But the Times mentioned Viner's murder only in three short news items, totaling less than a thousand words. The longest piece, 500 words, was an initial report on the murder -- when there was still hope that the killers were white! No other major news outlets in the country mentioned Viner's murder.

So if you're confused by the blanket coverage of the Trayvon Martin case -- attracting even the attention of the president of the United States! -- while far more common and more vicious black-on-white murders are ignored, try to understand that liberals are frightened by change. They are desperately clinging to a world that never existed.

Their fantasy of an America bristling with racists allows them to portray any criticism of our massively incompetent and dangerous president as just another sad episode of oh-so-typical white racism. They have to protect Obama, so the rest of us have to get Mugged .

The Left is Killing King’s Dream

By Michael Schaus

Thursday, August 29, 2013

The spectacle of the pro-Obama rally yesterday, disguised insufficiently as a tribute to one of America’s civil rights heroes, was rife with an undercurrent of unintentional irony. After all, it was the Democrat Party that led the Confederacy in the Civil War, opposed the civil rights legislation throughout the 20th Century, and used the federal government to intimidate would-be civil rights activists. The event, however, did awaken a renewed interest in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. for many Americans. One line, above all else, from his 1963 Address at the Lincoln Memorial speaks today as a testament to Liberalism’s callous, and repeated, failings in the black community.

The string of speakers yesterday were darlings of the Left. Organizers even felt it necessary to exclude the Nation’s only black US Senator, because before his name is the letter “R”. Despite the fact that the Democrat party supported the KKK, instituted Jim Crow laws, fought for “separate but equal” segregation laws, and opposed Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Washington, They felt only their champions could bring justice to the day’s events. Apparently if you don’t tow the Party line, you’re no friend to their interpretation of MLK’s Dream.

Standing before a crowd that had clamored for a message of hope, and individual rights, Dr. King rang out the warning, that “We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a small ghetto to a larger one.” A half century later, it would seem Liberalism has successfully managed to contain the Negro in the slums of Chicago, New York, LA, and Detroit. In America’s most liberal cities, the black community lives with violence, crime and poverty unmatched throughout most of the rest of the nation.

It seems appropriate then, to ask the question, what has happened to King’s Dream?

I also had a dream for America. I had a dream that one day this nation would rise up, and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Alas, the Democrat Party has convinced much of the nation that such a creed is not possible in today’s America. Minorities, according to the Modern American Left, are incapable of achievement without the helpful hand of government. Black men and women, according to the Democrat Party, can only find prosperity through the use of Food stamps, urban housing programs, and affirmative action programs in federally funded higher education

“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they are not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” And yet we live instead in a nation where the Liberally-inclined media uses the term “white-Hispanic” in their racially sensationalized news coverage. We also live in a nation where dozens of black children are shot every week in the war zone of Chicago without so much as a whisper on the nightly national news, or from the first “white-black” President in American history.

Most of America has a dream. It is the same Dream that King articulated so emotionally 50 years ago on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. And the progressive brand of Obama’s Democrat Party has spent the last fifty years suffocating this dream under empty promises and government programs. Just like the plantation owners of the pre-war south, the Modern Democrat Party promises black America a roof, food, and protection from the risks of freedom. . . And the brave few who dare to champion the forgotten cause of individualism are ridiculed among the Left; called traitors to their race; and are said to not know their proper place – as voters in the Democrat plantation.

Beyond the hypocrisy, the message that was absent from yesterday’s commercialized remembrance of King’s speech, was by far his most important message. Our rights, as King Preached, are not gifts given to us by the government. Our prosperity should not hinge on a governor’s attitude, or the President’s signature, but on our own initiative; for only without the oppressive hand of government will men and women of any race be able to say those powerful words that closed Martin Luther King’s historic speech:

Free at Last. Free at Last. Thank God Almighty, I am Free at Last.”

Tolerance, Health and Fascism

By Dennis Prager

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

I cannot count the number of times I heard liberal professors and liberal writers quote the phrase: "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

The phrase is brilliant. There is actually no threat to America of fascism coming from the right. The essence of the American right, after all, is less government; and fascism, by definition, demands ever larger government.

Therefore, if there is a real fascist threat to America, it comes from the left, whose appetite for state power is essentially unlimited. But because the left has so long dominated American intellectual, academic, artistic, and media life, it has succeeded in implanting fear of the right.

I have never written that there is a threat of fascism in America. I always considered the idea overwrought. But now I believe there really is such a threat -- and it will come draped not in an American flag, but in the name of tolerance and health.

Before explaining what this means, let's be clear about what this does not mean.

First, it does not mean, or have anything in common with, Nazism. Nazism may have been a form of fascism. But Nazism was a unique form of fascism and a unique evil. It was race-based and it was genocidal. No other expression of fascism was race-based. And not all fascism is genocidal. So my fear that the American left is moving America toward an expression of fascism in no way implies anything Nazi-like or genocidal.

Second, it is not liberals or liberalism that presents a threat of fascism. It is the left. Liberals of the 1940s to 1970s such as John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and so many others were not leftists. They were liberals.

But liberalism has been taken over by the left. There are virtually no non-left liberals.

The left now has a president who is a true leftist who is asserting unprecedented presidential power through his cabinet and myriad other agencies (such as the Environmental Protection Agency) and through presidential decrees. The left has taken over the universities and, increasingly, high schools and elementary schools. It dominates the news and entertainment media. And many judges and courts are leftist -- meaning that their decisions are guided by leftism more than by the law or the Constitution.

With all this power, the left controls more and more of the life of the American citizen. And when nothing stops the left, the left doesn't stop.

Take tolerance.

Last week, the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that an event photographer's refusal on religious grounds to shoot the commitment ceremony of a same-sex couple amounted to illegal discrimination.

The photographer had never objected to photographing gays. She did not, however, wish to be part of a ceremony to which she religiously objected. In America today, thanks to myriad laws and progressive justices, people can go to prison for refusing to participate in an event to which they object.

This is what happened to a florist in Washington state who had always sold flowers to gay customers but refused to be the florist for a gay wedding: sued and fined.

This is what happened to a baker in Oregon who had always sold his goods to gays but refused to provide his products to a gay wedding: sued and fined.

This is what happened in Massachusetts, Illinois and elsewhere to Catholic Charities, historically the largest adoption agency in America. Their placing children with married (man-woman) couples, rather than with same-sex couples, was deemed intolerant and a violation of the law. In those and other states, Catholic Charities has left adoption work.

In the name of tolerance -- and fighting sexual harassment -- five- and six-year-old boys all over the country are brought to the police for innocently touching a girl.

In the name of tolerance, girls' high school teams in California and elsewhere must now accept male players who feel female.

In the name of tolerance, businesses cannot fire a man who one day shows up on the sales floor dressed as a woman.

For the left, tolerance does not mean tolerance. It means first, acceptance. And second, celebration. That is totalitarianism: You not only have to live with what you may differ with, dear citizen, you have to celebrate it or pay a steep price.

Meanwhile, in the name of health, there is a similar intrusion into the life of the individual. We saw it in New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's call for a law limiting the amount of soda a person can order at one time.

In the name of health, people are banned from smoking outdoors, cigar stores are prohibited from allowing customers to smoke inside, and, incredibly, California is about to ban electronic "cigarettes" as if they were real cigarettes, even though they contain no tobacco, nothing is burning, and they emit only water vapor.

In the name of health, some businesses, like the Bert Fish Medical Center in Florida and Kids II, Inc. (Baby Einstein, Disney Baby) do not hire those who smoke at home. In the name of health, for the first time in American history, what you do -- legally -- at home will be reason for companies not hiring or terminating employees.

In the name of safety, first-grade boys are suspended from schools for playfully aiming a pencil at another boy and "shooting" him.

And then there are the ubiquitous "re-education" and "rehabilitation" seminars that the allegedly insensitive need to take at both private and government workplaces and the speech codes at nearly all universities.

The only question is: Will Americans awaken to the increasingly rapid deprivation of their freedoms -- not draped in an American flag but draped in tolerance and health?

Ashton Kutcher's Message

By Cal Thomas

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Ashton Kutcher, the 35-year-old actor and ex-husband of actress Demi Moore, has never been considered a poster child for the "family values crowd," but at the Teen Choice Awards two weeks ago, he could have easily passed for one.

Following screams from young female fans in the audience, Kutcher silenced them with a motivational message that bordered on inspiration. He told them: "I believe that opportunity looks a lot like hard work. ... I've never had a job in my life that I was better than. I was always just lucky to have a job. And every job I had was a steppingstone to my next job, and I never quit my job until I had my next job."

Kutcher wasn't through: "The sexiest thing in the entire world is being really smart and being thoughtful and being generous. Everything else is c--p ... that people try to sell to you to make you feel like less. So don't buy it. Be smart, be thoughtful and be generous."

That such remarks would gain so much attention is indicative of where we are as a nation. One way to take the cultural temperature is to observe how ancient wisdom suddenly sounds new, even radical. Not many Millennials are hearing this message. Maybe some get it from their parents, but many teens and young adults don't discover such wisdom until they are parents, if then.

For older adults, Kutcher's remarks are so obvious that when they were teens they would have been unremarkable and nearly universally believed, if not always practiced. They resonate today because of the dire condition of the nation's economy and because of moral libertarianism -- whatever feels good goes; whatever works for the individual is right, even if the good of society suffers. More and more people seem to be looking for a lifeline. Kutcher threw them one.

Radio host Rush Limbaugh said of many of today's young people: "There is a fog of depression ... There's pessimism ... and it's because they do not think there's any prosperity left for them. ... They don't think there's any money to be earned; it's all gone. Their parents' and grandparents' generation were the last ones that really had it made. And they're certainly not hearing this kind of message from anybody in politics that they vote for."

Kutcher has described himself as "a fiscally conservative, socially liberal independent." He supports gay rights and same-sex marriage. Though raised a Roman Catholic in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he has dabbled in Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism. No one can typecast him as a soldier for religious conservatism. He is a supporter of President Obama, but doesn't like his health care plan.

The road to success remains what it has always been: hard work, believing in yourself, never taking "no" as the final answer and making right moral choices. These have been proven throughout history to better any life and improve even the worst of circumstances.

If we know such things to be true, why are they not taught and modeled in today's culture? For many, it could lead to less reliance on government. Politicians would become less necessary. If such principles were again taught in our public schools, someone might sue for imposing someone's "moral values" on others.

Envy, greed and entitlement are the unholy trinity of failure. What Kutcher offers young people is the opposite, leading to success, self-realization and independence.

Here's one more Kutcherism: "Everything around us that we call life was made up by people that are no smarter than you. And you can build your own things. You can build your own life that other people can live in. So build a life. Don't live one, build one."

If only Washington politicians would think and talk this way.

Why Democrats Love Failing Schools: Because Unions Pay Them To

By Michael Schaus

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

It is now official. For all their talk about education’s failings, and all their feigned interest in bettering the educational system, liberals once again have proven that they hate giving the disadvantaged the same opportunities as the privileged. According to Fox News, the Justice Department is trying to stop a school vouchers program in Louisiana that attempts to place children in independent schools instead of under-performing public schools. So, apparently it’s all about “the kids”. . . Unless Teacher’s Unions are set to lose a dollar.

Louisiana is one of a few states that have implemented a very limited voucher program. Vouchers, on their own merit, should be a championed idea for underprivileged minorities and low income families. With educational dollars meant to better the learning process for students throughout the state, vouchers were given to 570 public school students so that children in impoverished and underperforming schools might reap the same benefited education as some of the most privileged in the state. However, in papers filed in US District Court, the Justice Department said that the vouchers “impeded the desegregation process."

Right. Imagine the horror on Martin Luther King Jr.’s face when he learned that low-income students were given the opportunity to attend some of the most exclusive and impressive academies in the state. The federal government is arguing that allowing students to attend independent schools under the voucher system “could create a racial imbalance in public school systems protected by desegregation orders.”

Anyone else find it ironic that the first black President’s administration is blocking a reform effort that is poised to dis-proportionately benefit minority communities?

According to Fox News: The Louisiana Governor, Bobby Jindal -- who last year expanded the program that started in 2008 -- said this weekend that the department's action is "shameful" and said President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder "are trying to keep kids trapped in failing public schools against the wishes of their parents."

Tough words. . . And accurate.

The Louisiana Supreme Court already found, earlier this year, that the state could not use the allotted voucher money. As a result the Republican governor had to find the $40 million in other public funds to move the project forward and help the 8,000 students already enrolled in the program.

The objection by the DOJ is just one more case where Democrats and Liberal groups have tried to limit the ability of minorities to move out of failing schools. A hypocritical maneuver for a group that claims the mantel of moral superiority on the issue.

The reason is far more simple, and insidious, than most would think. The Liberal/ Democratic agenda is closely aligned with Teacher’s unions. And like all unions, they are working to protect due paying positions above all else. And yes: That means the Unions would rather preserve their jobs than work for the betterment of your child’s educational experience. After all, over 95 percent of political donations from Teacher’s Unions went to Democrats; and based off of Democrat run cities like Chicago, New York, LA, and Detroit, that’s a horrible investment. On a purely economic analysis, it would seem the Democrat Party is far more dedicated to keeping the Union happy, than honestly improving student education. As a consequence, the lobbying arm of the union is not focused on the interests of students. . . But don’t take my word for it:

Apparently losing a teacher’s tenure is “too high a price to pay” for a more effective educational system for our youth. And to think they act like it’s “all for the children.”

The most terrifying part of the story: The case is scheduled to be heard by a judge who has already ruled that parts of Jindal's 2012 expansion were unconstitutional. So, we have a Judge who is opposed to using public education monies for the purpose of educating the public (as opposed to feeding Teacher’s Unions), about to rule on a law that runs contrary to the fundamental concerns of the Obama Administration. If the Judge, or the DOJ, were actually interested in improving education, they would applaud any attempt to move students from failing schools. They, instead, seem far more interested in preserving the failing status quo.

After all, our ruling elite don’t send their kids to underperforming schools. So, really, why should they promote opportunities for the rest of America’s youth without first bowing to politically connected Unions?