DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE WEEK THAT WAS PART ONE
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RADICAL RADISHES
Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. The left has been looking for a narrative in the mess and it has fished out the usual suspects.
1. Wisconsin was really a victory because it could have possibly succeeded. Which is almost a win.
2. If we massage the numbers, we can make it look like Wisconsin voters strongly back Obama.
3. The DNC didn’t do enough for Barrett.
4. Barrett lost because he wasn’t liberal enough.
The last one is the most popular because it reinforces the belief that Barrett lost because he was a sellout who wasn’t willing to go to the limit. He lost because he wasn’t willing to publicly state that he would give the unions absolutely everything, no questions asked. He lost because he didn’t lead an occupation of the polling booths.
When we get the technicalities out of the way, Barrett lost because he wasn’t radical enough. We need someone more radical. Someone who has no common ground with conservative or moderate voters.
The media blathers on a lot about Republican radicalization, even while they feed their own radicalization.
IRRATIONAL LIBERAL MEDIA HEADLINE OF THE WEEK
FREE THE TERRORISTS
What do you get for being a terrorist fundraiser? If you’re Emadeddin Z. Muntasser, then you grin after walking away with six months of home confinement. And if you’re, Samir Al-Monla, then you get off with eight months of home confinement.
Muntasser and Al-Monla had co-founded their group, Care International, together with Abdullah Azzam. Azzam was Bin Laden’s mentor and a co-founder of Al-Qaeda and Hamas. Care International had been started up after the World Trade Center bombing as a successor to Al-Kifah, which operated under the aegis of Maktab al-Khidamat, founded by Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam as a precursor to Al-Qaeda. Al-Kifah had fed money to the Mujhadeen in Afghanistan and its operatives had been closely connected to the World Trade Center Bombing. Its assets were frozen after September 11, but those of Care International were not.
All that should have made the case against Al-Monla and Muntasser a simple affair; instead after nearly ten years of raids, investigations and trials— two terrorist fundraisers have, for all intents and purposes, gone free.
In my Front Page article, How Two Al-Qaeda Fundraisers Were Set Free. I cover the case in some detail.
INVEST IN EDUCATION
Report: More college graduates needed to boost California economy
The report, by California Competes, a group of independent business and civic leaders, projected that the state will need more than 5 million new students with bachelor’s degrees or technical credentials by 2025 to fill job needs.
Currently, the state is on track to have about 3 million such students in the next 13 years, the report said. To bridge that gap, the state’s higher education systems must increase their output of bachelor’s degrees and technical certifications by 4% each year, according to the report.
I have a great plan. California needs to pour more money into education. And raise taxes to cover the added costs. That should take care of everything… and by “everything” I mean the entire state.
California currently has an 11 percent unemployment rate. Nationally, one of two college graduates is unemployed.
By region, the Mountain West was most likely to have young college graduates jobless or underemployed—roughly 3 in 5. It was followed by the more rural southeastern U.S., including Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Pacific region, including Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington, also was high on the list.
On the other end of the scale, the southern U.S., anchored by Texas, was most likely to have young college graduates in higher-skill jobs.
But no, it gets much much worse.
About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.
Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.
Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less.
In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionists or payroll clerks than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).
According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor’s degree or higher to fill the position—teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren’t easily replaced by computers.
Over half of college graduates are unemployed. Of the under 50 percent that are employed, another half are working base level jobs that don’t require college degrees or the heavy burden of degree debt.
That means something like 1/4 of college graduates actually have any chance at all of working at a job based on their degree. And the actual numbers are probably even worse.
But fear not… there are three occupations with openings for college graduates. Two of them are in education. Which means that we are investing in education in order to create education jobs for the graduates we created.
We need more college graduates so they can get jobs teaching college graduates to get teaching jobs. This is an economic setup that is entirely self-contained. We could just as easily build a factory that makes boxes that are shipped to another factory that pulps the boxes and then ship the pulp back to the first factory to turn them into boxes. Except this is even more senseless.
But California’s economy will perish unless there’s a 4 percent growth in degree holders, when currently 75 percent of degree holders don’t have degree produced jobs. The good news is most of the other 25 percent will work for the government. And if that doesn’t save the economy, I don’t know what will.
Oh wait, I know what will. Higher taxes to “invest” in education.
INCONCEIVABLE
“Master Sgt. Marc Maschhoff revels in the turns his life has taken in the last year. Last summer, Maschhoff had to keep his sexuality a secret or risk being kicked out of the Air Force.
On Monday, he was happily introducing his boyfriend to diplomats and politicians from around the world as the U.S. ambassador to Japan held a reception in honor of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Month.”
That’s not from the Advocate, that’s from Stars and Stripes Magazine.
President Barack Obama wrote in his June 1 proclamation for LGBT Pride Month, the fourth he’s designated since taking office. “LGBT Americans and allies have achieved what once seemed inconceivable.”
Inconceivable is certainly a good word for it. This administration has achieved many inconceivable things. Its continued operations are clearly inconceivable. There is no limit to its inconceivable destructive tendencies.
I leave you with this inconceivable article from the Huffington Post. “Gay Pride: Contagious and Mainstreamed by Obama ”
NIDAL HASAN, THE MILLION DOLLAR MAN
Remember that nice fella in Fort Hood who picked up secondhand PTSD and shot a bunch of people for reasons not in any way to do with him shouting, “Allah Akbar”.
When is he going to go to trial? This August. Maybe. Meanwhile…
Every year the cost of keeping Hasan locked up runs about half a million dollars, payable by the army to the county. That’s over a million dollars in the last two years. Where does all that money go?
Nidal Hasan’s living quarters are not exactly those of the ordinary prisoner. He has a handicap accessible shower in his cell, along with his own bathroom, and a bed with an air mattress. Those are better conditions than those of veterans in many VA hospitals, who describe everything from blood spills to fecal matter, and who would welcome the kind of facilities that a murderer of American soldiers enjoys.
The endgame of the defense is to keep Hasan from receiving the death penalty. That’s why a capital mitigation specialist has been digging into Nidal Hasan’s biography looking for a way to unbalance the scales of justice. The mitigation specialist has led to more delays and a quarter million dollar bill to the government for his services on Hasan’s behalf.
That’s an except from my article, The Long-Delayed Trial of the Fort Hood Terrorist.
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