RUTHFULLY YOURS

Obama’s solutions fall back on liberal bromides going back 50 years.

President Barack Obama responded to the Baltimore riots with a heartfelt bout of self-righteous hectoring. Supposedly, we all know what’s wrong with Baltimore and how to fix it, but don’t care enough. Not only is this attitude highhanded, it rests on a flagrantly erroneous premise. President Obama doesn’t have the slightest idea how to fix Baltimore. His solutions fall back on liberal bromides going back 50 years. Dating back to the Kerner Commission after the riots of the 1960s, the Left’s go-to solution to urban problems has been more social programs. Since then, we’ve gotten more social programs — and just as many urban problems.

Exhibit A is Baltimore itself. The city hasn’t been “neglected.” It has been misgoverned into the ground. It is a Great Society city that bought fully into the big-government vision of the 1960s, and the bitter fruit has been corruption, violence, and despair. We don’t know all the facts surrounding Freddie Gray’s tragic death. But as a general matter, it is easy to believe that the Baltimore police are corrupt, dysfunctional, and unaccountable — because most of the Baltimore government is that way. This is a failure exclusively of Democrats, unless the root causes of Baltimore’s troubles are to be traced to its last Republican mayor, Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, who left office in 1967. And it is an indictment of a failed model of government. The city has been shedding jobs and people for decades, including in the 1990s when the rest of the country was booming.

Prospective Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush clashed with National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry over immigration policy on Thursday, telling Lowry “I love you. I just think you’re wrong on immigration.” In an interview at the National Review Institute’s Ideas Summit,at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, D.C., the former Florida governor spoke about his policy positions and his plans for a potential presidential administration.

Lowry and the audience were in broad agreement with the governor on foreign policy and most economic issues. Bush voiced his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and stressed the need to confront Islamic terrorism — poking fun at “the girl with the really cool glasses in the State Department,” Foggy Bottom spokeswoman Marie Harf, for refusing to accurately characterize the threat. And he decried economic over-regulation and “the New Normal” of a deflated American economy. “’The New Normal’ makes me nauseous,” he said.

The [Conservative] Government has drafted legislation designed to give the Charity Commission greater powers to shut down charities linked to terrorism. Some critics argue, however, that many of the government’s promises are largely bluster.

If Labour wins the upcoming elections, the next government will include a number of Ministers with strong Islamist ties.

The UKIP’s foreign policy, however, seems tolerant of the Russian-Iranian axis.

“We have been impressed by the warm and welcoming attitude of the SNP.” — Azzam Tamami, Hamas’s “special envoy” to the UK.

On May 7, the British electorate will go to the polls in the 2015 general election. Voters will elect their local members of parliament. It seems voters may not, however, be able to choose their next government.

As in 2010, current polling data suggests a hung parliament, in which no political party can achieve an outright majority. Governance requires the confidence of the House of Commons. Of the 650 parliamentary seats, then, a ruling coalition requires the backing of at least 326 MPs.

For the past five years, Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party has retained the confidence of the House through a reasonably successful and stable coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

This time around, however, things are not so simple. For the first time, special interest and minor parties look set to have a powerful influence over the next government. If, as looks likely, neither the Conservatives nor the Labour Party is able to achieve an outright majority, coalitions with smaller parties will become a necessity.

The Liberal Democrats, the UK Independence Party, the Green Party, the Scottish National Party, Wales’s Plaid Cymru a

Race riots usually begin with criminality and end with criminality. They’re protests by criminals on behalf of a dead criminal.

The stores with smashed windows aren’t the means to express outrage, but the end. The purpose of criminality is criminality. The police exist so that stores can remain unrobbed and random pedestrians can remain unbeaten. The protests express opposition to that policy by robbing stores and assaulting random white people.

The police were never the problem. The looters and rioters were.

The counterculture has not changed dramatically since the 70’s, but it has tossed aside any appearance of idealism. The new counterculture draws in two groups, disaffected upper middle class white youth and lower class black youth. Their goals are purely materialistic, looted iPods and government subsidies for housing, education and anything else they can think of.

Divestment is the common denominator. Neither the white leftist nor the lower-class black rioter is invested in his society. The white rioter is a globalist, the black rioter is an outsider. Neither are invested in the city and country they are busy trashing.

“In Miliband’s Britain, it will become impossible to criticise any aspect of Islamic culture, whether it be the spread of the burka or the establishment of Sharia courts or the construction of colossal new mosques. … If he wins, Miliband will ensure that the accelerating Islamification of our country will go unchallenged.” — Leo McKinstry, British commentator.

The report shows that Britain’s Muslim population is overwhelmingly young and will exert increasing political influence as time goes on. The median age of the Muslim population in Britain is 25 years, compared to the overall population’s median age of 40 years.

The leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Ed Miliband, has vowed, if he becomes the next prime minister in general elections on May 7, to outlaw “Islamophobia.”

The move — which one observer has called “utterly frightening” because of its implications for free speech in Britain — is part of an effort by Miliband to pander to Muslim voters in a race that he has described as “the tightest general election for a generation.”

One Baltimore protester exclaimed to FOX News’ Geraldo Rivera, “I want to tell White America to stop not giving a damn about Black people.” And there you have it in a nutshell, the underlying sentiment trying to be vocalized by a violent, frustrated Black urban demographic that has taken to the streets in cities areas across America. There is just one thing wrong with that narrative. It is based in obliviousness of a cultural reality that has been prevalent for the last two to three generations. And it is truly sad.

I grew up in the 1960s. I remember full well the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The 1960s and the 1970s were decades of true and real change; change that reshaped and redefined American culture in many ways, some for the better, some for the worse. Those years gave way to the Civil Rights movement and the understanding of a need for gender equality, to name but a few of the good things that came from that era. But it also gave way to a degradation of the importance of personal responsibility, civility and a need to be a productive and positive member of a community.

Hillary Clinton is a ferocious critic of Israeli settlements. She took point on the Obama administration’s demand for a settlement freeze. She regularly berated Prime Minister Netanyahu on the subject, including an infamous, expletive-laced 45-minute phone call in 2010. She calls settlements “illegitimate” and said, “their continued expansion is corrosive not only to peace efforts and the two-state solution, but to Israel’s future itself.”

If only settlers had donated to the Clinton Foundation!

Ken Vogel reports today that some of its donors are shocked, shocked to learn that the foundation operates more or less as a slush fund for the Clintons and a lobby for foreign interests. One source of the heartburn is a Clinton Foundation event next week in Marrakesh that:

“is to be funded partly by a donation of more than $1 million from a Moroccan government-owned phosphate company — a donation that has drawn fire from critics who contend that Moroccan phosphate extraction in the adjacent disputed territory of Western Sahara amounts to exploitation.”

Baltimore is a city with a black mayor and black police chief making one pause at the notion of municipally ordained police brutality against black men. Perhaps because of this, racial activists, politicians (our president included) and the liberal media have quickly shifted the issue of criminal behavior – looting, arson, violent attacks against police – to what is characterized as its underlying cause – poverty and unemployment in their city. Although both are serious problems in Baltimore, it’s time to question whether violent rioting and criminality are inevitable consequences of economic deprivation.

Comparing the list of American cities with the highest poverty and the cities with the highest murder rates reveals that Baltimore is 5th in the nation for homicides but not even in the top ten for poverty. The city that is classified as the poorest is Flint, Michigan with an unemployment rate of 13%, yet it doesn’t appear on the list of 10 cities with the highest murder rates. Nor do Athens, Ga; Cleveland and Dayton, Ohio; Hartford, Conn; or Syracuse and Rochester, NY, also in the top ten for poverty. In addition to Baltimore, the cities with the highest murder rates are Detroit, New Orleans, Newark, St. Louis, Birmingham, Jackson, Miss, Cincinatti and Oakland, Ca. All told, only Detroit appears on both lists. So perhaps the automatic assumption that poverty leads to violent behavior is one that needs more open-minded study. Though it’s too racially charged and politically incorrect to state this, Flint has a population that is 66% white and only 25% black whereas Detroit, number one for murder rate, has a population that is 75% black. Similarly, almost every city on the top ten for murder rates has a black population exceeding the white or Hispanic one – ranging from 51% – 83%. (all statistics are from AreaVibes.com or the U.S. Census)

The racial diversity of local government does not matter when people want to seize on an excuse to commit crimes.

The racial makeup of city leaders, the police department and other municipal workers in Ferguson, Mo., played a central role in the media coverage and analysis of Michael Brown’s death, which is worth remembering as history repeats itself in Baltimore.

The Justice Department’s Ferguson report noted that although the city’s population was 67% black, just four of its 54 police officers fit that description. Moreover, “the Municipal Judge, Court Clerk, Prosecuting Attorney, and all assistant court clerks are white,” said the report. “While a diverse police department does not guarantee a constitutional one, it is nonetheless critically important for law enforcement agencies, and the Ferguson Police Department in particular, to strive for broad diversity among officers and civilian staff.”
Broad diversity is not a problem in Baltimore, where 63% of residents and 40% of police officers are black. The current police commissioner is also black, and he is not the first one. The mayor is black, as was her predecessor and as is a majority of the city council. Yet none of this “critically important” diversity seems to have mattered after 25-year-old Freddie Gray died earlier this month in police custody under circumstances that are still being investigated.

The apologetics began almost as soon as the fires were lit in Baltimore yesterday, heralding a night of violence and looting that would leave 24 police officers injured and 19 buildings torched, including a $16 million senior center providing affordable housing and a CVS drugstore providing crucial medications for elderly customers. Society “refuses to help [young blacks] in a serious fashion,” Michael Eric Dyson announced on MSNBC. “We’re only there when they riot.” Mika Brzezinski observed on Morning Joe: “This was an extremely, desperately poor city. This was bound to happen.” We were seeing an “uprising of young people against the police,” the result of a “combination of anger and disparity,” said professional talking head Wes Moore. Neill Franklin, a former Baltimore police officer and member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, blamed the drug laws.