Thursday - June 05, 2008

Party like it’s 1979!

1979…

I was a freshman in college. The hot album was Cheap Trick at Budokan. A live album. Remember albums?

Then I found this:

There are just some songs that country/western should leave alone.

Posted by Christopher     on 06/05/2008 at 08:15 PM   
Filed Under: • Fun-Stuff • History •  
• Comments (4) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

nuttin honey

Sorry folks, I’m just braindead today. I got nothin.

Ok, I got some smut links. And I did some housekeeping and updating around the blog. You’ll have to look really hard to notice. But that’s about it. I was thinking of running Bolton’s piece about Obamba, but what for? We all know he’s hopelessly naive, and the old Mustache of Truth gets almost zero airplay.

OK, here’s Something.

It looks like two goons were playing car tag in Hartford Connecticut. They ran some poor old guy over and drove away. The whole thing was taped on a traffic cam. The whole town is in an uproar, and CNN as well, because nobody did anything to help the guy, and they left him their on the street. For 90 seconds. Until the cops arrived.

‘Like a dog they left him there. Nobody did nothing’

A 78-year-old man is tossed like a rag doll by a hit-and-run driver and lies motionless on a busy city street as car after car goes by. Pedestrians gawk but do nothing. One driver stops briefly but then pulls back into traffic. A man on a scooter slowly circles the victim before zipping away.

The chilling scene—captured on video by a streetlight surveillance camera—has touched off a round of soul-searching in Hartford, with the capital city’s biggest newspaper blaring “SO INHUMANE” on the front page and the police chief lamenting: “We no longer have a moral compass.”

“We have no regard for each other,” said Chief Daryl Roberts, who released the video this week in hopes of making an arrest in the daylight accident last Friday that left Angel Arce Torres in critical condition.

The hit-and-run took place about 5:45 p.m. in a working-class neighborhood close to downtown in this city of 125,000.

In the video, Torres walks in the two-way street just blocks from the state Capitol after buying milk at a grocery. A tan Toyota and a dark Honda that is apparently chasing it cross the center line, and Torres is struck by the Honda. Both cars then dart down a side street.

Several cars pass Torres as a few people stare from the sidewalk. Some approach Torres, but most stay put until a police cruiser responding to an unrelated call arrives on the scene after about a minute and a half.
The police chief told The Hartford Courant that he was unsure whether anyone called 911.

“Like a dog they left him there,” said a disgusted Jose Cordero, 37, who was with friends Thursday not far from where Torres was struck. Robert Luna, who works at a store nearby, said: “Nobody did nothing.”

One witness, Bryant Hayre, told the Courant he didn’t feel comfortable helping Torres, who he said was bleeding and conscious.

The accident—and bystanders’ callousness—dominated morning radio talk shows.

“It was one of the most despicable things I’ve seen by one human being to another,” the Rev. Henry Brown, a community activist, said in an interview. “I don’t understand the mind-set anymore. It’s kind of mind-boggling. We’re supposed to help each other. You see somebody fall, you want to offer a helping hand.”

The victim’s son, Angel Arce, begged the public for help in finding the driver. “My father is fighting for his life,” he said.

The hit-and-run is the second violent crime to shock Hartford this week. On Monday, former Deputy Mayor Nicholas Carbone, 71, was beaten and robbed while walking to breakfast. He remains hospitalized and faces brain surgery.

“There was a time they would have helped that man across the street. Now they mug and assault him,” police chief said. “Anything goes.”

Councilman Matthew Ritter said police can do only so much.

“The citizens are the city,” he said. “Everybody has a part to play. Call 911 and reach out.”

Maybe the people who didn’t see the accident happen figured the guy was drunk. Or are they too well trained to “get involved”? Or are they ultra wary of being sued if they move an injured person, and thus excused from even stopping. Heck, at least one of them could have blocked traffic to keep people from running the guy over again, right? Or not? What would you do?

OR IS THIS WHOLE THING A BULLSHIT GUILT TRIP? The guy was hit, 21 seconds into the video. The cops were getting there at 1:15 - watch the dodging car come down from the top of the screen. So we’re talking 55 seconds for a response time. You can’t even get a call into 911 and out the other side that fast, can you? So is this moral outrage righteous or not?

Posted by Drew458     on 06/05/2008 at 04:26 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
• Comments (12) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

Hillary Clinton the last to admit her own death

The View From Here on Hillary.

By Simon Heffer
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 05/06/2008

The joy of jet lag is that one is awake in time to channel-hop between all America’s breakfast news programmes. After an hour or so of this entertainment yesterday morning, it was clear that not just the media, but also the public interviewed over their bacon and maple syrup in diners the length of the East Coast, had decided on one thing: this was a historic morning for America.

Hillary Clinton the last to admit her own death, whilst Barack Obama garners sufficient delegates
Mrs Clinton has achieved her aim of becoming part of history: only not quite in the way she would have wanted

A black man was for the first time confirmed as a nominee for a major party for a presidential election. There seemed to be not just a sense of self-congratulation at this unquestionably inclusive step being made by a country that has not enjoyed the best international press of late, but also relief that a 17-month campaign to choose the top Democrat was over.

However, one person and her friends seemed not to share these sentiments: and that person was Hillary Clinton. When I was last here in New York, the state for which she is a senator, it was Super Tuesday, and even then the game appeared to be up. In the intervening four months, Senator Clinton has had her triumphs, but they have not managed to keep pace with her disasters.

Barack Obama has garnered delegates in sufficient numbers not merely to keep him well ahead of her, but also, at close of play on Tuesday night after the Montana and South Dakota votes ended the primary process, to declare himself the nominated candidate.

Yet Mrs Clinton was still slow to concede that her once-inevitable procession to the White House had been terminally diverted. She claimed she needed more time to think about something that had not merely been pretty obvious to most people for the past four months, but that was now an apparent arithmetical fact.

Her refusal to admit defeat can be, and is, justified in all sorts of ways. She says she is ahead in the popular vote, which ignores the fact that this is not how these things are decided. She says that the delegates might change their minds between now and the convention in Denver at the end of August. Indeed they might, but only if they wished to write their party’s suicide note because of the divisions that would ensue.

She has, of course, delivered a distasteful inference that someone might do to Senator Obama what Sirhan Sirhan did to Bobby Kennedy 40 years ago today, and the less said about that the better. As they say here, she starts to look like a pretty sore loser: or, as we say at home, she just doesn’t get it.

There has not been such a stubborn refusal to die in high politics since the end of Rasputin. Her determination to stay in the race was viewed as courageous by her supporters, who for reasons of taste cannot cite the reason why they think she is right: their belief that a black man, however gifted (and Mr Obama is certainly that) cannot become president of the United States, at least for the moment.

Others have seen it as pig-headed and destructive: and typical of a bullying, arrogant, slimy, dishonest and manipulative political culture that ruled in the White House from 1993 to 2001, when her husband was president.

That is Mrs Clinton’s main problem, and has been her undoing. Her style is that of 1990s machine politics. Her views are those of 1990s “third way” Leftism, with their emphasis on the power of the state and extended welfarism and their ignorance of real economics. Her rhetoric is tailored to appeal to the cohorts of organised blue-collar labour who are her power base, and she speaks stiltedly and rather patronisingly in their tongue.

For all these reasons she is completely out of date. She has an appeal only to those who wish to defend a position that a sane army would have abandoned long ago. She is an irrelevance to those who see that America has changed, the world has changed, and a new leader needs to make an accommodation with those realities. Does she remind you of anyone?

It has been difficult, watching Mrs Clinton’s final desperate moments as a would-be nominee, not to draw parallels with our own Prime Minister. She is being rumbled by her own party, and by the wider American public, as someone who can’t do the business. Mr Obama has been gentlemanly in the extreme in his lavish public tributes to her, but his followers regard her as self-serving and destructive.

Mrs Clinton’s period of reflection yesterday was the cover for her attempt to engineer Mr Obama into offering her a place as his running mate: her sense of entitlement will be the last part of her to die. It has been hard to find an Obama supporter, however wedded to party unity, who wants him even to countenance such a thing.

The Obama camp has snidely whispered throughout this process about “Bill’s unconstitutional third term”. Having beaten his wife to the nomination, do they really want to bring her, him and the baggage of Clintonism back into the White House for perhaps eight years of raining on his parade?

As is usual with the Clintons, subtle threats seep from “sources close” about what would happen if Mrs Clinton doesn’t get her consolation prize. They hint that her fundraisers, some of the most opulent of whom she met in New York on Tuesday night, might not bankroll Mr Obama. He, however, has had far more success at raising money than she has, and will not end the campaign, as she is ending it, $11 million in debt.

More worrying is the chorus from some of her supporters, notably white working-class women, that they will adamantly sit at home, or possibly even vote for John McCain, if she is not on the ticket. That is the judgment Mr Obama now has to make, and there is a united view outside Mrs Clinton’s camp that anyone but her will do.

To be fair to Mrs Clinton - and it requires a superhuman effort, given the dirty and charmless way she has run her campaign - she is more experienced than Mr Obama. It is true when she says he is untested in ways that she, as someone who has hacked around high politics for the past 15 years, is not. But to be fair to Mr Obama, he has not merely won a beauty contest by dint of being more beautiful.

He has won it by failing to promise anything in particular, notably the return to the 1990s that his opponent has. It may be in the battle now against Senator McCain that he will be found wanting, and the vacuity of his charismatic world view will be exposed: but he has earned the right to be in that battle, just as surely as Mrs Clinton has forfeited hers.

The only surprise now - short of Mr Obama asking her to be his running mate - will be a genuine act of loyalty by the Clintonistas towards him when they realise that Mrs Clinton will not be heading for the vice-presidency. As, again, we have seen in our own politics, it is always easier to fight one’s own side than one’s notional enemies, so this may not happen.

The unexpected can, of course, happen between now and November 4. Yet with the primaries over, Mrs Clinton has achieved her aim of becoming part of
history: only not quite in the way she would have wanted.

http://tinyurl.com/6564xf

Posted by Drew458     on 06/05/2008 at 10:46 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • Hildabeast • Politics •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

JUST TOO DARN FUNNY NOT TO POST.  POOR HILLARY.

ONE OF THE POSTED COMMENTS AFTER A SIMON HEFFER COMMENTARY IN THE TELEGRAPH

This about sums up Mrs Clinton!

Judy Wallman, a professional genealogical researcher, discovered that Hillary Clinton’s great-great uncle, Remus Rodham, was hanged for horse stealing and train robbery in Montana in 1889.

The only known photograph of Remus shows him standing on the gallows. On the back of the picture is this inscription: “Remus Rodham; horse thief, sent to Montana Territorial Prison 1885, escaped 1887, robbed the Montana Flyer six times. Caught by Pinkerton detectives, convicted and hanged in 1889.”

Judy e-mailed Hillary Clinton for comments. Hillary’s staff sent back the following biographical sketch:

“Remus Rodham was a famous cowboy in the Montana Territory.
His business empire grew to include acquisition of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings with the Montana railroad. Beginning in 1883, he devoted several years of his life to service at a government facility, finally taking leave to resume his dealings with the railroad.

In 1887 he was a key player in a vital investigation run by the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency.

In 1889 Remus passed away during an important civic function held in his honor, when the platform on which he was standing collapsed.”

Posted by Sidney Harbour-Bridge on June 5, 2008 3:14 PM

http://tinyurl.com/6564xf

Posted by Drew458     on 06/05/2008 at 10:21 AM   
Filed Under: • Hildabeast • Humor •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

HABSBURG EMPIRE, LAST ARMY VETERAN DIES AT AGE 107

Franz Künstler, popularly known as “The Emperor’s Last Soldier”, who was buried on Tuesday at Niederstetten, Baden-Wrttemberg in Germany, having died aged 107, was the last man to have served in the Austro-Hungarian army. 

Emperor Charles I of Austria
Emperor Charles: the last Habsburg ruler

In February 1918, at 17 years of age, he was drafted into the 1st Artillery Regiment of the Hungarian Army, in the service of Emperor Charles, the last Habsburg ruler, and served on the Italian front at Piave.

After the fall of the Dual Monarchy later that year he fought against the Communists before returning to civilian life in 1921.

Up to his death he worked as a museum guide and he was the oldest man in Germany. He lived to see his former commander-in-chief, Emperor Charles of Austria, beatified by the Pope.

Such small, personal milestones in history mark our diminishing connection with the past. The fall of the Habsburg Empire was a catastrophe for European civilisation.

For Austria it meant virtual extinction: that country surfaces only fitfully in international consciousness when a man imprisons his daughter in a cellar. It is a far cry from the glories of the Schnbrunn Palace, the court balls, the colourful parades celebrating an empire forged not by conquest but by marriage.

The dark forces of nationalism that dismembered Austria-Hungary (sanitised in American ideology at the Versailles peace conference as “self-determination”, in reality incipient Nazism) have been supplanted by an equally sinister supranationalism in the shape of the European Union.

Brussels was once ruled by the Habsburgs; today Vienna is a dependency of Brussels. The vulgarity and corruption of the EU testifies to how far Europe has sunk from its zenith under glittering monarchies such as the Bourbons and Habsburgs.

The only Nazi law the Austrian republic did not repeal was the one dispossessing the Habsburg family of its property. Britain shamefully backed America in preventing the restoration of Emperor Charles as King of Hungary in 1921 (apparently the western democracies preferred the Horthy dictatorship).

Nostalgia for the Habsburgs inspired at least one literary masterpiece: The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth’s incredibly evocative but melancholy re-creation of the last days of the Empire that the recently deceased Franz Künstler served. Hoch Habsburg!

http://tinyurl.com/53a7qh

Posted by Drew458     on 06/05/2008 at 09:48 AM   
Filed Under: • History •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

AND THE WINNER IS …..

JUST FER FUN .... OR MAYBE NOT.

Posted by Drew458     on 06/05/2008 at 08:19 AM   
Filed Under: • Fun-Stuff •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

Today’s economics lesson

Posted by Christopher     on 06/05/2008 at 04:42 AM   
Filed Under: • Economics • Taxes •  
• Comments (4) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

   Wednesday - June 04, 2008

How Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton

It’s a pretty long column people, but use the link below for the rest of it. You might find it interesting.
It’s interesting I think, to read how foreign reporters read our happenings.

Good grief it’s after midnight here. Gotta go. I’m outta here.

By Toby Harnden in Washington
Last Updated: 9:53PM BST 04/06/2008

Hillary Clinton began her presidential bid as the overwhelming favourite and party establishment pick, the inevitable candidate who was “in it to win it”.

During the agonising denouement of the past three months, she has been the inevitable runner-up. She’s still in it, she protests, even now. But she has lost.

Although she finished the Democratic race on Tuesday with nine wins in the last 16 contests and “found my own voice”, as she declared after an upset victory in New Hampshire, her stunning loss in Iowa exactly five months earlier began the slow bleed she could never staunch.

In hindsight, the seeds of that defeat lay in the very strategy she and her chief strategist Mark Penn had mapped out more than a year before.

As the new face of Team Clinton - then the most powerful brand in Democratic politics - she could build up the momentum and money needed to lock up the nomination before the voters were consulted.

Even before her first event in Iowa - dubbed ‘Let the Conversation Begin!” - her focus seemed to be on the general election. She had already seen off the centrists Senator Evan Bayh and Governor Mark Warner and believed her greatest threat was John Edwards, running as a populist friend of the downtrodden.

Having carefully positioned herself - and badly miscalculated - with her vote for the Iraq invasion in October, she recalibrated repeatedly until she became an opponent of the war.

But rather than apologise for her vote, as Mr Edwards had done, she refused to admit she’d been wrong for fear of seeming weak in a general election against Rudy Giuliani or John McCain.

She reckoned without a young freshman senator called Barack Obama. In December 2006, it was already clear he had become a political rock star, attracting adoring crowds at book signings and already drawing comparisons with John and Robert Kennedy.

“The single most important thing that happened was the Clinton campaign always underestimated Senator Obama,” said Simon Rosenberg, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign and president of the NDN think tank.

“Even when Obama started to rise, he didn’t become in their minds their central opponent. They also overestimated their own strength. Her staff kept saying she was leading in all national polls but she was never leading in Iowa and that was the most important poll of all.”

Mention of Mr Obama would often prompt an eye role from an inhabitant of Hillaryland - a hermetically-sealed bubble protected by the Secret Service and from which all naysayers were kept out. Like President George W Bush, Mrs Clinton put a premium on loyalty, which meant hard truths were seldom aired.

http://tinyurl.com/69yxum

Posted by Drew458     on 06/04/2008 at 05:56 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Hildabeast •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

Today in GOP History

June 4, 1860

On this day in 1860, Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA) delivered his classic address The Barbarism of Slavery.  Sumner had just returned from four years in France recovering from a brutal attack by a Democrat (pro-slavery Preston Brooks (D-SC), who beat him with a stick on the Senate floor).

No one in Congress had previously dared openly criticize slavery and slave-holders.  His denunciation of the Democratic Party’s pro-slavery policies was eloquent and devastating:

“Only when we comprehend the motive that we can truly comprehend the Crime.  Here, the motive is found in Slavery and the rage for its extension… This is no time for soft words or excuses.  All such are out of place.  They may turn away wrath, but what is the wrath of man?  This is no time to abandon any advantage in the argument.  Senators sometimes announce that they resist Slavery on political grounds only, and remind us that they say nothing of the moral question.  This is wrong.  Slavery must be resisted not only on political grounds, but on all other grounds, whether social, economical, or moral.  Ours is no holiday contest; nor is it any strife of rival factions… but it is a solemn battle between Right and Wrong; between Good and Evil.  Such a battle can not be fought with excuses or with rose-water.  There is austere work to be done.”

Sumner’s words help stiffen Republican resolve to oppose the Democrats’ drive to extend slavery to the western territories and then, ultimately, to the northern states.

The full text of Sumner’s long long speech can be found here.

Posted by Drew458     on 06/04/2008 at 04:38 PM   
Filed Under: • History •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

INQUIRING MINDS WANNA KNOW

Since I’ve been posting crime and other angry stuff, I thought maybe I should lighten up. This one time.

‘We, in Ireland, can’t figure out why people are even bothering to hold an election in the United States.

On one side, you have a bitch who is a lawyer, married to a lawyer, running against a lawyer who is married to a bitch who is a lawyer.

On the other side, you have a war hero married to a good looking woman who owns a beer distributorship.

‘What are you lads thinking over there?’

Posted by Drew458     on 06/04/2008 at 01:27 PM   
Filed Under: • Humor •  
• Comments (5) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

Brigitte Bardot fined for inciting racial hatred.  (Again)

Damn it I feel sorry for her and am so pissed off (again) at the French for their ... for their ... ??
Help me here guys.  This is the fuckin pits and sorry about the bad language but ... the woman hasn’t said a damn thing that I can see is inciting anything other then total disrespect and revulsion for the French legal system for making her a victim of their damn multi-cultural pol.correctness.

By Peter Allen in Paris
Last Updated: 9:43PM BST 03/06/2008

Legendary sex symbol Brigitte Bardot has been fined £12,000 for inciting racial hatred against Muslims.

In December 2006 the retired French film star-turned-animal rights activist wrote a letter to France’s then interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, arguing that Muslims should stun animals before slaughtering them during the Aid al-Kabir holiday.

She outraged anti-racist groups by saying: “I’ve had enough of being led by the nose by this whole population which is destroying us, and destroying our country by imposing their ways.”

(Hey, that’s another thing the French soviet doesn’t want. The truth and woe to those who tell it.)

Miss Bardot, now 73, made it clear that she was referring to Muslims in the letter.

She was absent from today’s court hearing in Paris, but wrote to prosecutors saying: “I’m sickened by how anti-racist groups are harassing me.

“I won’t shut up until stunning is carried out” on animals before their ritual slaughter.

Miss Bardot, who shot to wordwide fame in the 50s in the lead role in And God Created Woman, already has four convictions on similar charges.

In 2004 she was fined £4000 for inciting racial hatred in her book “A Cry in the Silence”.

(apparently one must not write and publish a book in France unless it’s approved by the local soviet)

France is home to Europe’s largest Muslim community, estimated at five million people.

http://tinyurl.com/4gvz6p

Posted by Drew458     on 06/04/2008 at 12:18 PM   
Filed Under: • Commies • EUro-peons • Stoopid-People •  
• Comments (5) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

Third payout from Scotland Yard in race prejudice case.  (and ALL by the same guy!)

(Racially approved)

Cop wins third payout from Scotland Yard in race prejudice case
By Richard Edwards, Crime Correspondent
Last Updated: 3:40PM BST 04/06/2008

An Asian police officer who was twice paid compensation for racial discrimination from Scotland Yard has won a third five-figure payout - and launched a further two complaints.

Det Sgt Gurpal Virdi was this week awarded £70,400 for victimisation after he was passed over for promotion for having exposed race prejudice at the Metropolitan police.

It takes the total he has won from the force to more than £300,000 and the Sikh officer is seeking further compensation in two more tribunal claims in the next three months.

After winning the case, Sgt Virdi, 49, urged Commissioner Sir Ian Blair to take tough measures to stamp out discrimination in the force, saying that “no amount of training appears to be working”.

Mr Virdi, who joined the Met as a PC in May 1982, was awarded £150,000 by a tribunal in August 2000 for race discrimination after he was unfairly dismissed from the force. He had been sacked after being wrongly accused of sending racist hate mail to black and Asian officers at Hanwell police station.

He was reinstated in February 2002 and an internal investigation found major mistakes had been made in what was seen as a landmark case in race relations within the police service.

Sir John Stevens, then Commissioner, apologised and agreed Mr Virdi should be paid another £90,000 in an out-of-court settlement by the force for “injury to his feelings”.

On his return to duty, he worked for assistant commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, the Met’s most senior Asian officer, on community issues and policy.

In 2005, encouraged by senior officers, he applied for promotion to detective inspector at a time when the Met had a shortage.

He was endorsed by his line manager and it was agreed that he satisfied all the official criteria. But he was turned down by a review panel and his appeal was rejected.

In its judgment on liabilty, the tribunal ruled that Mr Virdi’s promotion application was treated differently to that of someone who had not taken legal action against the force.

It said the process was “shoddily operated” and noted that he was now unlikely to get another chance of promotion before he retires.

Mr Virdi’s award included £61,621 for loss of earnings and pension and £8,780 for injury to feelings.

Speaking after his latest award, Sgt Virdi said: “If Sir Ian Blair is serious about tackling victimisation and discrimination in the ranks of the Met, then he must take some form of disciplinary action as no amount of training appears to be working.

“Having spent nearly ten years fighting discrimination in the Met, I am delighted that the tribunal has once again decided in my favour. With four years left to serve, I am looking forward to continuing my career with a unblemished record.”

Mr Virdi is involved in two more employment tribunals, including a fresh victimisation claim next week alleging that he was ostracised on his return to work and his appraisal downgraded.

In September a tribunal will decide on allegations that he has also been the victim of bullying.

Sarah Drury, vice chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said: “We hope the Met will learn the lessons and treat all officers in a fair and transparent manner.”

While winning the victimisation claim against the Met, Mr Virdi failed in a claim of race discrimination. Scotland Yard is appealing the tribunal’s decision on victimisation.
http://tinyurl.com/4ungl6

Posted by Drew458     on 06/04/2008 at 12:00 PM   
Filed Under: • Racism and race relations • UK •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

Criminals rest easy.  (don’t worry, be happy)

Yes, I know it’s an old article.  But, has anything changed since this was written in ‘05?
I think you already know the answer to that one.
I’m posting this I suppose due to all the crime related things I’ve posted here lately. I can’t help it I guess because it’s so damn prevalent and the crimes so horrific.  They stand out due to their nature.

Well, old or not, please read this because it says a lot.  In fact, it says it all.  I’m also posting it because of another story that just has to be seen and I’ll get to that shortly.

Criminals rest easy, the Met is chasing race and gender targets

By Leo McKinstry
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 09/06/2005

It is an iron law of modern civic life in Britain that the more an organisation trumpets its commitment to equal opportunities, the more it will be accused of discrimination. For the neurotic focus on equality leaves it vulnerable to vexatious and frivolous complaints.

That is certainly what has happened in the Metropolitan Police, a once proud body renowned across the world for its integrity, but now crippled by an ideological obsession with race and gender. The disastrous mismanagement was highlighted this week by an industrial tribunal case, in which three white police officers are taking action against the Met for alleged discrimination, claiming that they have been the victims of a politically correct witch-hunt.

It is fair to say that the Met has had a problem with racism but the force has now lost all sense of proportion. The three officers were investigated - and one of them suspended - after they were said to have made offensive anti-Muslim remarks in front of a female Asian officer during a race-awareness training course. After months of inquiry at the highest level of the Met, the three men were finally cleared of any wrong-doing.

Scotland Yard’s most senior Asian officer, assistant commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, who looked into the case in 2002 and gave the verdict of innocence, said that he “found it incredible that this matter was taken up”.

But in truth there is nothing incredible about the way this ludicrous case was handled. Since 1999, when the Macpherson report into the death of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence accused the Met of “institutional racism”, London’s police force has been paralysed by anxiety over the issue of diversity. Eager to prove its anti-racist, pro-gay, feminist credentials, the Met prefers to fight supposed prejudice than real crime.

One sorry result of this neurosis about discrimination is the creation of a vast bureaucracy, which does nothing but waste resources. The Met is now awash with race units and equality action plans, all geared towards heightening the climate of grievance.

So within the shambolic organisation there is a consultation, diversity and outreach unit; a diversity directorate that includes six separate diversity teams covering everything from age to sexual orientation; a diversity champion; an equal opportunities and diversity board; a positive action team; a lesbian, gay and transgender advisory group and a cultural and communities unit.

Today’s senior London coppers might not be much use in defeating criminality, but they are superb at organising meetings and generating reports. They can talk like the most fluent pseudo-Marxist academic about “contextualised learning on race” and act like the most politically correct Blairite civil servant in demanding that “performance in respect of race and diversity be measured through a corporate measurement framework” or seeking to “facilitate the change process through the establishment of the development and organisation improvement team (DOIT)”.

Increasingly the Met resembles one of those extremist Left-wing councils of the 1980s. Recruitment policies are driven by skin colour and sex, above quality of applicant. The bias towards women and ethnic minority candidates is quite explicit, with priority given for training places towards those who speak a second language or “have knowledge or experience of a community group”. The goal is to have 25 per cent of the Met non-white by 2009, but even the National Black Police Association has said that this is “a ridiculous target”, for its achievement would require 80 per cent of new recruits to be black or Asian over the next four years.

And 35 per cent of current recruits are female, hardly an inspiring thought given the soaring levels of violent crime on the streets of the capital.

(A SOARING LEVEL OF CRIME. WRITTEN THREE YEARS AGO. WELL IT’S STILL FLYING HIGH)

Indeed, the Met is now quite explicit about its enthusiasm for social engineering. Its Confidence and Equality Strategy paper, published last month, states, “mainstreaming diversity is essentially about creating a fairer society in its widest sense, when everyone can participate and have the opportunity to realise their full potential”.

This kind of socialist utopianism is nothing to do with crime, but it now permeates the Met’s work. So, typically, the Met runs a fashion show at Tate Modern, costing £110,000 for disaffected teenagers in Southwark. In the same vein, Scotland Yard has asked Asian businesses to hire “vulnerable youngsters” from their own communities to divert them from crime, while senior Met officer Michael O’Keefe recently visited India to examine the concept of “corporate social responsibility”.

It is just as keen on gay rights, and will be one of the key hosts for “Celebrate”, a European gay police conference in London at the end of the month. The central theme is the “ability to actively celebrate difference, not merely to tolerate or even respect it”. The Met is also to be represented at the “Big Gay Out” festival in London next month.

The tragedy of all this activity is that it is severely detracting from the central job of the police in protecting society. The British public spends £2.7 billion on the Met, which now employs no fewer than 32,000 officers and 13,400 civilian staff. But, because of warped political priorities, the number of officers on patrol is minuscule, and rates of clear-up for crime remain dismally low. At September 2004, just 18.3 per cent of crimes were resolved, while the rate for burglary was 13.2 per cent and for robbery, 16 per cent.

It is no wonder that the middle-classes in London have lost faith in the police. Once the police could be regarded as their allies in the provision of security and the protection of property; today they are in the vanguard of the social revolution.

Meanwhile, the police officers’ trade union, the Police Federation, exploits the atmosphere of victimhood to entrench its position, upholding outdated working practices and systematic abuses. Where manufacturing and the private sector were forced to change over the past three decades, the Metropolitan police service remains one of the last bastions of the producer-led culture, its workforce abusing its monopoly position as flagrantly as the nationalised industries of the Seventies. That is why rates of absenteeism - currently an average of 7.4 days a year for police officers and 9.3 days for civilian staff - remain so high. And there is no sign of change.

Management is just as big an appeaser of its own failing workforce as it is of criminality. The public, which pays for this farce and has to suffer ever-increasing crime, deserves better.

Posted by Drew458     on 06/04/2008 at 11:32 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Racism and race relations • Stoopid-People • UK •  
• Comments (0) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

teacher cleared of assault (too bad she couldn’t have kicked his nuts up around his ears)

This is one of the places where the problems start folks.  Gee, I can’t understand why they are having a problem finding teachers. Can you?

School wrongly dismissed me, says teacher cleared of assault
By Paul Stokes
Last Updated: 8:15PM BST 03/06/2008

A teacher has claimed that she was forced from her job after being cleared of assaulting a disruptive teenager because senior staff turned a blind eye to pupil discipline.

Judi Sunderland, 58, restrained the 13-year-old boy in a corridor as his classmates “egged him on” to attack her, a tribunal heard. He kicked her shins, tried to run away, swore and called her a “fat cow” before she held him.

When she got him into her office at Immanuel CofE Community College, Bradford, she said he threatened to “torch her house and car”.

Mrs Sunderland, who had an unblemished 30-year career, alleged that in a meeting after the incident the head teacher told her things were “looking bad” for her.

She was later taken to court, but the case collapsed three years ago after questions were raised about the character of the boy, who had just been convicted of a serious sexual assault.

The judge ruled that she should leave the court “without a stain on her character” and she also received a letter of apology from the Crown Prosecution Service.

But, after a disciplinary hearing and an appeal, college governors decided that she had assaulted the boy. Mrs Sunderland resigned in March last year because she felt it was not “safe” to carry on in a violent school without the support of senior staff.

She told the hearing in Bradford that the governors had used “perverse logic” to make their finding.

The grandmother said: “It seemed politically more attractive to blame me rather than dealing with discipline problems at the school.”

She told the panel that in 2004 Ofsted had described the school as “one of the worst in the country”.

The management team failed to control pupils, while staff were verbally abused, kicked, punched and butted.

Mrs Sunderland told the hearing: “I was astonished by the way that senior management and certain colleagues appeared to permit some of the worst behaviour. That is partly why the school was in such a state.”

She accuses governors of constructive dismissal.

Mrs Sunderland rejected evidence given to her disciplinary and appeal hearings by the boy’s learning mentor and another teacher who claimed she used “unnecessary force”.

She said that although both were present at the incident, they offered her no help and had given conflicting evidence.

“They had to concoct the evidence to find me guilty and that is what they did. When the decision came, I was devastated, my whole world had fallen apart again.”

The hearing continues.

http://tinyurl.com/4a8hp4

Posted by Drew458     on 06/04/2008 at 11:15 AM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

DISCLAIMER

THE SERVICES AND MATERIALS ON THIS WEBSITE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE HOSTS OF THIS SITE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ANY AND ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF SATISFACTORY QUALITY, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICE OR ANY MATERIALS.

Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

1. Keep a firm grasp of Right and Wrong
2. Stay involved with government on every level and don't let those bastards get away with a thing
3. Use every legal means to defend yourself in the event of real internal trouble, and, most importantly:
4. Keep talking to each other, whether here or elsewhere

It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

THE INFORMATION AND OTHER CONTENTS OF THIS WEBSITE ARE DESIGNED TO COMPLY WITH THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. THIS WEBSITE SHALL BE GOVERNED BY AND CONSTRUED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND ALL PARTIES IRREVOCABLY SUBMIT TO THE JURISDICTION OF THE AMERICAN COURTS. IF ANYTHING ON THIS WEBSITE IS CONSTRUED AS BEING CONTRARY TO THE LAWS APPLICABLE IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY, THEN THIS WEBSITE IS NOT INTENDED TO BE ACCESSED BY PERSONS FROM THAT COUNTRY AND ANY PERSONS WHO ARE SUBJECT TO SUCH LAWS SHALL NOT BE ENTITLED TO USE OUR SERVICES UNLESS THEY CAN SATISFY US THAT SUCH USE WOULD BE LAWFUL.

Copyright © 2004-2015 Domain Owner