posted May 01, 2015 01:15 AM            

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp4vVZ7aVPM

The media of course has been spreading disinformation & lies.

posted May 01, 2015 03:01 AM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Eirlys:
@bella

I've already addressed your post.

I've already provided the proof.

It's in italics.

---

No, that is not a contradiction. The first quote proves my point, that most of the protesters have been peaceful.

What about the damages the armed forces down there have already caused? That is something you need to address.

I have said several times on this site I would prefer a peaceful protest, but I refuse to persecute those who act out. I refuse to call people savages and thugs for acting out in anger.

posted May 01, 2015 03:02 AM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Catalina:
A different take on the Thugs of Baltimore http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/how-baltimore-riots-began-mondawmin-purge[/UR L]

A better link for the photo a couple of posts up [URL=http://reverbpress.com/news/black-baltimore-protecting-police/]http://reverbpress.com/news/black-baltimore-protecting-police/

---

posted May 01, 2015 03:05 AM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Catalina:
[b]A handful of corporations (5 or 6) own something

like 90% of the mainstream news.

Most people know that- or they should

Shocking revelation...

Alter alert.[/B]

---

LOL, the thing that killed me about this is that it only proves my point. Who owns these 5-6 corporations?

posted May 01, 2015 08:22 AM            

What keeps repeating itself is far left loon demoscats get control of cities and run them straight into the ground. As in the case of Baltimore, the city is run by demoscats with a black Mayor who commanded the police to "stand down", don't confront rioters, looters and arsonists, to let them act out...it's only property! Right! Check!

This lunatic black Mayor also commanded police to not wear all their protective clothing. As a result 15 police officers were injured by flying bricks and bottles thrown by rioting thugs, some of whom are professional agitators from outside the city. You know..."community organizers".

Baltimore Is a Democrat Problem, Not America’s Problem
by John Nolte
28 Apr 2015

Contrary to the emotional blackmail some leftists are attempting to peddle, Baltimore is not America’s problem or shame. That failed city is solely and completely a Democrat problem. Like many failed cities, Detroit comes to mind, and every city besieged recently by rioting, Democrats and their union pals have had carte blanche to inflict their ideas and policies on Baltimore since 1967, the last time there was a Republican Mayor.

In 2012, after four years of his own failed policies, President Obama won a whopping 87.4% of the Baltimore City vote. Democrats run the city of Baltimore, the unions, the schools, and, yes, the police force. Since 1969, there have been only two Republican governors of the State of Maryland.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD)has represented Baltimore in the U.S. Congress for more than thirty years. As I write this, despite his objectively disastrous reign, the Democrat-infested mainstream media is treating the Democrat like a local folk hero, not the obvious and glaring failure he really is.

Every single member of the Baltimore city council is a Democrat.

Liberalism and all the toxic government dependence and cronyism and union corruption and failed schools that comes along with it, has run amok in Baltimore for a half-century, and that is Baltimore’s problem. It is the free people of Baltimore who elect and then re-elect those who institute policies that have so spectacularly failed that once-great city. It is the free people of Baltimore who elected Mayor Room-To-Destroy.

You can call the arson and looting and violence we are seeing on our television screens, rioting. That’s one way to describe the chaos. Another way to describe it is Democrat infighting. This is blue-on-blue violence. The thugs using the suspicious death of Freddie Gray (at the hands of a Democrat-led police department) to justify the looting that updates their home entertainment systems, are Democrats protesting Democrat leaders and Democrat policies in a Democrat-run city.

Poverty has nothing to do with it. This madness and chaos and anarchy is a Democrat-driven culture that starts at the top with a racially-divisive White House heartbreakingly effective at ginning up hate and violence.

Where I currently reside here in Watauga County, North Carolina, the poverty level is 31.3%. Median income is only $34,293. In both of those areas we are much worse off than Baltimore, that has a poverty rate of only 23.8% and a median income of $41,385.

Despite all that, we don’t riot here in Watauga County. Thankfully, we have not been poisoned by the same left-wing culture that is rotting Baltimore, and so many other cities like it, from the inside out. We get along remarkably well. We are neighbors. We are people who help out one another. We take pride in our community, and are grateful for what we do have. We are far from perfect, but we work out our many differences in civilized ways. Solutions are our goal, not cronyism, narcissistic victimhood, and the blaming of others.

One attitude we don’t have here is the soul-killing belief that somebody owes us something, which, of course, is a recipe for discontent. Because if you’re not getting what’s owed to you, how can you be anything but angry?

Democrats and their never-ending grievance campaigns; their never-ending propaganda that government largess is the answer; their never-ending caves to corrupt unions; their never-ending warehousing of innocent children in failed public schools — that’s a Democrat problem, not America’s problem.

I might believe Baltimore was an American problem if the city was interested in new ideas and a new direction under new leaders. But we all know that will never happen. After Democrat policies result in despair and anarchy, Democrats always demand more of the same, only bigger.

And the media goes right along.

And things only get worse.

I wish you all the luck in the world Baltimore. And I truly wish you had the courage to change. If you ever do, send up a flare. Until then, there is nothing anyone can do for you. You are victims of your own choices, and no one can make choices for you but you.

As far as the good people of Baltimore trapped by the terrible voting of your fellow citizens, I suggest you buy more guns until you can move to a city not run by those who see rioting as part of the Master Plan.

posted May 01, 2015 09:59 AM            

Democrats in riot-torn Baltimore really like gangsters.

As radicals and other criminals reduce their once-great city to ashes, left-wing politicians are defining deviancy down. They just can't stop saying nice things about gangsters and when they occasionally slip up and say accurate things about them, they promptly apologize for speaking the truth. That's the way Democrats in Baltimore roll.

As the rule of law is dynamited, they genuflect before them, salute them, and pose for photographs with them.

Gangsters have become the de facto government in the city of Baltimore. Rioting has empowered them.

The current civil unrest was sparked by the mysterious death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man. Gray, a habitual criminal offender, was arrested by Baltimore police for possession of a switchblade, according to a late-breaking news report. While in police custody he apparently suffered severe injuries that led to his death. Unlike the endlessly hyped demise of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., police malfeasance or negligence may have played a role in Gray's death. Time will tell.

At a surreal press conference Tuesday, career criminals that Baltimore Democrats consider to be upstanding members of the community stood side by side with elected officials to plead for an end to the violence.

In a 2015 update of Rodney King's famous 1992 quotation, "Can we all get along?" a self-identified gang member named "Trey" said they were "against the violence."

"If we can stick together doing something negative, then we can stick together doing something positive," the Baltimore Sun quoted Trey saying. "I need a job. Most of the youths need a job. We need help. It ain't right what people was [sic] doing, but you've got to understand. Some people are struggling."

Because Trey was dressed in red, presumably he is a member of the Bloods, which started as a street gang in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Flush with profits from crack cocaine-trafficking, it expanded across the nation in the 1980s.

For reasons that are unclear, the Bloods are not members of the Baltimore City Chamber of Commerce. Following the example of their fellow criminals at the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, perhaps it's time for the Bloods to become a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) public charity. They could hire former IRS official Lois Lerner, who shares their worldview, as an advisor.

Gang-bangers are legitimate stakeholders entitled to respect, according to Baltimore Democrats.

At the press conference Baltimore City Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young (Democrat) praised these fine young men from the city's underappreciated organized crime sector.

Politicians, church leaders, and gangs must unite to shut down the violence plaguing the city, he said. "These men have been out on the street quelling the senseless violence that has consumed our society."

Why gangs, whose reason for being is the facilitation of criminal activity, would take an interest in ending civil disorder is unclear. A law-abiding gang is a contradiction in terms. Perhaps the wrong businesses were being looted.

Young showed the gangs unconditional love on Tuesday even after Baltimore Police warned of a "credible threat" that the Bloods, Crips, and Black Guerrilla Family had entered into an temporary alliance to "take out" law enforcement officers.

The cops must be wrong, Young reasoned, because after he met with gangbangers Tuesday "it is clear that the notion they were planning on harming our police officers is false and simply deterred [sic] the resources we need to focus on the individuals who instigated these riots."

Young felt really bad about calling out the property-destroying criminals running wild in the city. He apologized to the rioting thugs that he called "thugs" the day before.

"What we're seeing today is not about Freddie Gray," he said.

It is about the pain, the hurt and the suffering of these young people. There's no excuse for them to loot, riot, and destroy our city. I made a comment out of frustration and anger when I called our children thugs. They're not thugs. They're just misdirected. We need to direct them on a different path by creating opportunities for them.

To left-wingers like Young, spending more taxpayer money is always the solution.

And Young is not the only cognitively dissonant left-winger out there saying first, that there is no excuse for rioting and then, second, saying actually, there really is an excuse for rioting.

President Barack Obama (Democrat) said "there's no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw" in Baltimore. "It is counterproductive."

Obama blamed the police, not the rioters. "This is a slow-rolling crisis," he said. "This has been going on for a long time. This is not new and we shouldn't pretend it's new."

Obama also blamed stereotypical Republicans who refuse to spend as much taxpayer money as he would prefer. The government needs to flush more money down the toilet, lavishing poor minority communities with free early childhood education and job training, he said.

"I'm under no illusion that out of this Congress we're going to get massive investments in urban communities," the president said. "It's too easy to ignore those problems or to treat them just as a law-and-order issue as opposed to a broader social issue."

Of course the Obama White House sent a delegation worthy of a head of state to Baltimore for Freddie Gray's funeral, even though it's far from clear what happened to the career criminal. They were: Baltimore native Broderick Johnson, who chairs the racist My Brother's Keeper Task Force; White House spin doctor Heather Foster; and Elias Alcantara, associate director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.

And Obama is using government resources to keep the social justice-fueled fires burning in the streets of Baltimore. Left-wing community organizers from the Department of Justice's infamous Community Relations Service (CRS) are on the ground in Baltimore, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said hours after being sworn in. CRS agitators swarmed Sanford, Fla., in 2012 and organized political theater that was ultimately successful in getting the innocent George Zimmerman charged with the murder of his attacker, Trayvon Martin.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat), the lawmaker from Nevada who claims his home workout regime assaulted him making him blind in one eye, condemned the violence and then excused the rioters.

But let's not ignore the underlying problem. Let's not pretend the system is fair. Let's not pretend everything is okay. Let's not pretend the path from poverty like the one I traveled is still available to everyone out there as long as they work hard.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (Democrat), who represents part of Baltimore City in Congress, told NBC News that watching the riots unfold is "very, very painful... I have not seen anything like this since 1968."

Cummings, who conspired with the IRS to persecute Tea Party groups, blamed the riots on police whom he said have been killing unarmed black men all over the country.

"We've got a series of events that has caused people to just say, well we're not taking it anymore. People are literally very, very upset." (Note to the congressman: Freddie Gray was not unarmed. He had a switchblade on his person when he was arrested.)

Carl Stokes (Democrat), a member of Baltimore City Council, said calling rioting thugs "thugs" is the same as calling them the N-word. "These are children who have been set aside, marginalized, who have not been engaged by us. No, we don't have to call them thugs."

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (Democrat) apologized Tuesday to the rioting thugs for calling them "thugs" the day before as they destroyed property with her blessing.

"I wanted to say something that was on my heart ... We don't have thugs in Baltimore. Sometimes my little anger interpreter gets the best of me," she said. "We have a lot of kids that are acting out, a lot of people in our community that are acting out."

Throughout the current crisis, Rawlings-Blake has represented her constituency, rioters, with great zeal.

On the weekend, instead of waiting for the justice system to work, the Baltimore mayor became the enabler of an unfocused, scatter-gun approach to social justice vigilantism. She gave the angry mob permission to run wild. (I thought left-wingers believed it was better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission. But I digress.)

After the first wave of rioting started on Saturday, the strenuously non-judgmental mayor consoled the rabble, implying that their activities constituted legitimate contributions to public discourse.

"I made it very clear that I work with the police and instructed them to do everything that they could to make sure that the protesters were able to exercise their right to free speech," she said.

The property rights of victims were much further down on the mayor's hierarchy of values because in the leftist worldview the right to agitate trumps all other rights. She continued:

It’s a very delicate balancing act. Because while we tried to make sure that they were protected from the cars and other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy, space to do that as well. And we worked very hard to keep that balance and to put ourselves in the best position to de-escalate. [emphasis added]

Rawlings-Blake has been backpedaling furiously, claiming that her words were twisted and taken out of context. But it's obvious she meant what she said. In politics when someone inadvertently speaks the truth it's called a gaffe. The mayor, who is also secretary of the Democratic National Committee, committed a major-league gaffe.

Left-wingers believe that rioting and looting for the right reasons are legitimate forms of political protest that are protected by the First Amendment. Ditto for physical force and intimidation so long as they are in pursuit of leftist goals.

This depravity is part and parcel of the Left. Radicals like the late Saul Alinsky (admired by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton) and the Trotskyist dowager Frances Fox Piven (admired by Bill Clinton) favored using violence for progressive ends.

Alinsky was a gangster groupie. He became friends with Frank Nitti of the Al Capone crime gang and tried to help the gang by advising on best business practices.

Alinsky biographer Nicholas von Hoffman wrote that his subject favored "conking" picket line crossers on the head. Alinsky shied away from praising violence in public but in private "he would say that violence has its uses."

In his first organizing opus, Reveille for Radicals, Alinsky wrote that the radical “hits, he hurts, he is dangerous.” Radicals “are most adept at breaking the necks of conservatives.”

Violence is seen as inevitable in the revolutionary struggle. “The radical may resort to the sword but when he does he is not filled with hatred against those individuals whom he attacks,” the community organizing guru writes.

Objectifying and depersonalizing his opponents, Alinsky writes that the radical "hates these individuals not as persons but as symbols representing ideas or interests which he believes to be inimical to the welfare of the people.”

A pragmatic warrior for radicalism must accept, Alinsky adds in his other opus, Rules for Radicals, that “in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind.”

Like Rawlings-Blake, academic-activist Frances Fox Piven goofed by offering an amoral endorsement of the use of violence by community organizers. During a book talk Piven said:

It's partly a problem of, almost, strategy and propaganda. It's a violent country. It's a violent government. It's killing people. And they're going to call us violent if we break a window, but they will do that, so probably unless you have good reason for breaking the window, probably you shouldn't do that. Unless it's, you know, a big part of your strategy.

Because of Rawlings-Blake and her ilk, Baltimore has become like the dystopian horror movie The Purge in which for one night every year all laws -- including those forbidding murder-- are suspended.

Many Twitter users following the riots likened the real-life scenes unfolding in Baltimore to the film. There were also reports that Baltimore schoolchildren were urged to begin a "purge" on Monday.

"The 2013 movie," USA Today explained, "is set in 2022 and chronicles one night a year called 'the purge,' when for 12 hours, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., police and medical emergency services are unavailable and people, loot, steal, and kill undeterred."

In an attempt to reassure frightened children, Ethan Hawke's character explains, "Tonight allows people a release for all the hatred and violence that they keep up inside them."

That justification seems eerily similar to the one offered by Rawlings-Blake when she explained why she gave space to rioters to destroy.

posted May 02, 2015 10:32 AM            

J. William Fulbright...politican tutor of William Jefferson Clinton and a rabid racist.

Albert Gore Sr...father of Algore..and a rabid racist.

Both of whom were DEMOSCATS and attempted to table civil rights and voting rights legislation in the mid 1960s.

Or perhaps you mean demoscat senator Robert KKK Byrd the Grand Poobaah of the KKK who was Majority Leader of Senate DEMOSCATS...several times.

You're the one who needs a little history lesson.

A much higher percentage of Republicans supported the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act....with their votes...than did DEMOSCATS. As I recall, about 87% of Republicans voted for those legislative acts..a higher percentage than DEMOSCATS.

But of course, your attempted deflection has nothing to do with DEMOSCATS getting control of large American cities and then running them straight into the ground with their usual leftist incompetent bungling.

posted May 03, 2015 11:42 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Randall:
I can see the relevance if it's a Democratic leadership.

---

Eh, not particularly, but if you want to go there:

Imagine that you were running for President as a Republican when Freddie Gray sustained fatal injuries in the back of a police van, and parts of Baltimore erupted into riots. How would you have reacted? Basically, you would have had two options.

With black youths on the streets, throwing rocks and overturning police cars, the obvious temptation would be to exploit the situation as a wedge issue, by defending the police, calling for the rioters to be dealt with harshly, and bemoaning the failure of Great Society programs. Broadly speaking, that’s what Richard Nixon’s G.O.P. did after the riots of the nineteen-sixties, and it helped the party to dominate Presidential politics for a generation.

A second option, a more daring one, would have been to use the occasion to highlight how Republican attitudes toward the criminal-justice system are changing. In Texas, Florida, and other G.O.P.-run states, Republican governors have launched initiatives aimed at reducing the prison population and ending custodial sentences for non-violent offenders, such as low-level drug dealers. And on Capitol Hill, Republicans are taking part in a bipartisan initiative to reform federal sentencing guidelines.

For a candidate primarily interested in gaining the support of traditional Republican voters, the safe bet, clearly, was to play the law-and-order card: if you did that, there was very little chance that you would end up offending Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. But if you were positioning yourself as a new type of Republican, one interested in updating the party’s brand and reaching beyond its electoral base of elderly white voters, then adopting the riskier option may have been worth considering. At the very least, it would have garnered a lot of attention.

So how did the G.O.P. primary contestants actually react?

Perhaps deciding that there wasn’t much to be gained from engaging on such an incendiary topic, some of them didn’t say much. On Tuesday, Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, tweeted, “Our prayers for restoration of peace in Baltimore.” That was it. Senator Marco Rubio, who was busy pledging not to raise taxes and trying to undermine the Iranian nuclear deal, didn’t make any public comment about what was happening in Maryland—or at least none that I saw.

Of all of the G.O.P. candidates, Senator Rand Paul was perhaps the most likely to say something interesting. Over the past couple of years, he has made a sustained effort to reach out to the black community, offering a message of hope and enterprise. If Jack Kemp has any heir in today G.O.P., it’s probably Paul. In the wake of the unrest in Ferguson, he authored an article in Time which criticized the police’s military tactics, writing, “Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.”

After Baltimore erupted, however, Paul goofed, and goofed badly. Appearing on Fox News, he quipped, “I came through the train on Baltimore last night. I’m glad the train didn’t stop.” In his other remarks, he expressed sympathy for the police and blamed the violence on ”the breakdown of the family structure, the lack of fathers, the lack of sort of a moral code in our society,” but nothing he said was particularly insightful, and, in any case, it was overshadowed by his tasteless attempt at a joke. He didn’t speak at all to the circumstances surrounding Gray’s death, his own support for sentencing reform, or the long history of poverty and deprivation in parts of Baltimore.

Jeb Bush, to his credit, was more sensitive in his comments. ”A young man died and that’s a tragedy for his family,” Bush said on Thursday, at an event organized by the National Review. “This is not just a statistic; this is a person who died.” Having shown some humanity, however, he was also content to fall back on a number of all-too-familiar Republican nostrums. He defended the “broken windows” model of policing pioneered by Rudy Giuliani. He bemoaned the “pathologies being built around people who are poor, that they’re going to stay poor,” and asked, “How do you create a system of support that doesn’t create dependency?” He also praised Toya Graham, the Baltimore mother who was videotaped smacking her sixteen-year-old son for joining the rioters: “It was a nice visual symbol of what needs to be restored.”

Ted Cruz, in an appearance on Fox News Latino on Wednesday, also spoke to the circumstances surrounding Freddie Gray’s death. “There needs to be a fair and impartial investigation into what happened,” he said. ”But the answer is not violence and mayhem…. The people who have been paying the biggest price have been the minority communities.” Having offered these measured comments, however, Cruz couldn’t resist taking some potshots at President Obama, whom he accused of fomenting racial tensions. The President “had the opportunity to be a unifying President, to try to bring people together,” Cruz said. “Rather, his Administration, it seems, constantly seeks to divide, to turn us against each other … based on race, based on sex, based on wealth, based on geography.”

Given the G.O.P.’s animus toward Obama, remarks such as these were to be expected, I suppose. But still. Parties that are seeking to improve their image need to play against type occasionally; only by doing so can they persuade voters that they have really changed. On this occasion, though, the G.O.P. candidates didn’t say much of note. Compared to the lengthy contributions from Hillary Clinton, and also from Obama, most of their remarks seemed canned and lightweight.

Perhaps that’s because the G.O.P. doesn’t wish to focus on the problems of inner cities, where the party picks up hardly any votes. Or perhaps it’s because the 2016 hopefuls feared offending traditional Republican voters. Whatever the reason, at least one of the candidates, Paul, has conceded that he might have gone another route. “We’re listening and learning every day,” Elroy Sailor, a senior adviser to Paul, told Politico after the candidate’s remarks on Fox News. “And we learned from this.”

We shall see if that’s true.

posted May 03, 2015 11:43 PM            

The need for a national conversation on race, policing and the crisis that exists in so many of our cities becomes greater with each event like the tragedy that is now gripping Baltimore. Those who would lead our nation should be at the forefront of this discussion, as President Obama has sometimes been.

Which is not to say every voice should be heard. Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator and political aspirant, for instance, chose an interview with the Republican radio host Laura Ingraham the other night to show that he has a) no taste, b) no sense of humor and c) nothing useful to add to the discussion of race.

“I came through the train on Baltimore last night,” he said, confusing his cities and his modes of transportation. “I’m glad the train didn’t stop.”

As Daily Kos pointed out, there don’t appear to be trains on that route that do not stop in Baltimore. But the big point is that Mr. Paul’s witless joke demonstrates that he’s simply not prepared to take on national leadership. Hiding in a moving rail car is not anything remotely like an adequate response to the Baltimore mess from someone who wants to be president.

Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, characteristically fumbled for a response. He called for “a commitment to the rule of law” and said there should be a quick investigation into Freddie Gray’s death “so that people know that the system works for them.”

That shows a shocking lack of understanding about the racial divides in this country. The system does not work for “them.”

On the fringe of the campaign, Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon and supposed presidential aspirant who never has anything useful to say, said the problem in Baltimore was that parents don’t have enough control of their children.

posted May 03, 2015 11:59 PM            

At least one rioter turned himself in and got booked w a half million bail and possible life sentence. This is how Baltimore is "soft" on teens with no record? This high school grad with two parents who insisted he do the right thing? While the pundits blame dysfunctional black family and community?

Any opportunity for a soapbox tirade on the evil Commie Dems in our midst. There has never been a corrupt Republican! There were never riots by white people. The Boston Tea Party was not looting but a sacred rite..

posted May 04, 2015 12:11 PM            

Those of you bemoaning the "rioting and looting" would be well-served if you would try harder to put aside your political and (hopefully subconscious) racial biases (which we all have) for a moment and try to understand the perspective of most black men. That is hard to do unless you listen very carefully to interviews and read closely, or preferably become close enough friends in real life that people of color begin to trust you and talk about how life really is for them.

The U.S. is about 5% of the world's population but we have 25% of the world's prison population, most of them minorities. That is disgusting and beyond insane, particularly in what is supposed to be the best and most free country in the world. The mass incarceration of minority populations, usually at least initially for non-violent, drug related offenses, must end. There is no other humane option.

Smoking pot, stealing a cigar, failing to pay child support, and even burning a police car or looting a CVS, may be illegal but the just punishment for such crimes is not immediate execution.

I have no words beyond "despicable," "unforgiveable" and "horrific" for blaming the victim like I've seen on these boards (perhaps in another thread), but I wish I could find stronger words that actually convey how offensive that is. I don't give a rat's ass if Eric Garner did sell illegal cigarettes and mouth off to a cop, or Freddy Gray did smoke pot or Michael Brown did push a clerk (and the cop?) and steal a cigar, etc. etc. etc. None of those actions justify their murder.

African-Americans have been violently and otherwise horrifically oppressed by the white power elite for 4 centuries. We do not live in a post-racial society, and anyone who thinks we do is living under a rock. Police brutality, mostly against minorities and the mentally ill, exists and must be stopped.

One man's unlawful rioting and looting is another man's justified revolution against tyranny. That's how our country began.

I do not condone violence in any form, but I'm a lot more concerned about violence by the powerful resulting in multiple deaths of unarmed black children and young men than I am about destruction of property.

All of us should be concerned about finding a solution as a cooperative society to the poverty, systemic racism, unemployment, lack of education, lack of mental health and drug treatment services etc. that plague our nation, black, white, and brown alike.

If we do not do so and continue to blame the victims of such a system, we are beyond doomed.

posted May 04, 2015 02:30 PM            

“I think we, as a country, have to do some soul searching” about the rioting in Baltimore, President Barack Obama said Tuesday.

Bunk. “We, as a country” are not to blame.

First and foremost, blame resides with the thugs who looted stores, burned buildings and automobiles, and assaulted police officers and shopkeepers.

Next in order of culpability are the politicians whose belated and timid response allowed the thugs to run amok. The conduct of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has been especially appalling.

When violence broke out April 25, city officials protected those who protested peacefully the death in police custody of drug dealer Freddie Gray, the mayor said, “and we also gave those who wish to destroy space to do that as well.”

I doubt that was what she meant to say, but when rioting broke out again Monday night, Ms. Rawlings-Blake ordered the police to stand down, a “senior law enforcement source” told Fox News.

Shopkeepers recounted how call after call to the police for help went unanswered.

How Mr. Gray suffered a severe spinal injury shortly after his arrest is not yet clear.

If police are responsible — six officers have been charged — it isn’t likely racism was a motive. Baltimore’s police chief is black. So are 48 percent of Baltimore police officers.

Ms. Rawlings-Blake didn’t ask Gov. Larry Hogan for help from the National Guard until 6 p.m. Monday — three hours after he’d urged her to ask for it. She announced a curfew that afternoon, but (bizarrely) delayed imposing it until Tuesday night.

Dozens of businesses were looted, 19 buildings — including a senior center and a drug store — were burned down, and 24 police officers and others were injured before the curfew was imposed. Much of that could have been prevented if Ms. Rawlings-Blake hadn’t been so grossly negligent.

Those who make excuses for the rioters — and for the public officials who failed in their duty to protect their victims — also deserve a substantial share of blame. By apologizing for calling the thugs “thugs,” Ms. Rawlings-Blake demonstrated anew her unfitness for office.

“The system” failed the poor blacks of west Baltimore, said many of the talking (and mostly empty) heads on cable TV. There’s some truth to that. Crime and unemployment are sky high. Schools are awful. Social service agency chieftains do more to promote their own welfare than that of the community.

Ms. Rawlings-Blake is a Democrat. So are all 15 members of the city council. Baltimore hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Theodore McKeldin left office in 1967. Maryland has had just two Republican governors since 1969. Democrats have controlled both houses of the legislature since 1992. “The system” that has failed poor blacks in Baltimore was designed and administered by Democrats.

Ms. Rawlings-Blake is black. So is the president of the city council, a majority of its members and the state attorney. Blacks in Baltimore aren’t oppressed by The Man. In Baltimore, politically connected left-wing Democratic blacks are The Man.

Those — especially those in journalism — who claim (white) racism is the root cause of the rioting in Baltimore, or make excuses for the rioters, have much to answer for.

Democrats fan racism among blacks to keep their stranglehold on the black vote, argued radio talk show host Larry Elder, who is black. Tell people they are victims, and they’ll act like victims, he said.

Former Rep. Allen West, R-Fla, who is black, said “a culture of dependency as promulgated by the race baiters and new plantation overseers of the inner city” is chiefly to blame.

Failed liberal policies have “mired black people in generational poverty, kept their kids in failing schools, chronically unemployed, they can’t find meaningful work, having to live in crime-infested neighborhoods,” said Milwaukee County (Wisconsin) Sheriff David Clarke, a Democrat who is black.

To change things, all three pointed out, blacks must stop voting for the politicians and policies which have failed them.

posted May 04, 2015 02:47 PM            

I remember a story about a white unarmed man beaten to death in public in Bakersfield by NINE Cali sherriffs. The people who filmed it had their phones confiscated. The story died swiftly.

posted May 05, 2015 11:15 PM            

Nearly $500 MILLION dollars of that went to education funding for Baltimore. Baltimore is near the top...1, 2 or 3 in per pupil public education spending in the United States.

Yet, we have loony leftists whining, screeching and shrieking that not enough money is spent on education in Baltimore. The loony left's solution to every problem is more government and more spending.

So with all this money being handed out to Baltimore for education, where did it go OR who the hell is stealing all that money in a city controlled by demoscats for the last 50 years. Demoscats aren't running a city there, they're running a plantation.

Oh, but we have it on good authority leftists meant well. That's the problem with leftists. No one is supposed judge leftist initiatives on results. Instead, leftists are to be judged on their "good intentions" no matter what retched results they produce.

So, after producing such retched results for the entire state of Maryland...including Baltimore, Martin O'Malley, ex demoscat Governor is going to Baltimore to announce his candidacy for Prez. I'm sure demoscat O'Malley would like to do for the rest of America what he did to Maryland...including Baltimore. O'Malley was such a retched Governor that Maryland voters elected the 1st Republican Governor in almost 50 years. Oh, but you can be sure Martin O'Malley had "good intentions".

The Baltimore Democrats built
Marc A. Thiessen
May 4

Martin O’Malley (D) says he plans to announce his presidential campaign in Baltimore. Perhaps he’ll used a burned-out police car or a looted storefront as his backdrop. The former Maryland governor and Baltimore mayor tried to blame last week’s unrest on structural problems in our economy, outsourcing and a failure to invest in infrastructure. Nice try. The fact is, O’Malley and the Democrats own Baltimore and the disaster it has become. As one resident who met O’Malley at an inner-city food drive last week put it, “He’s walking into the aftermath of his legacy.”

It’s not his legacy alone. The last time Baltimore had a Republican mayor was 1967, nearly five decades ago. Indeed, the state of Maryland has had just two Republican governors since 1969 (and one took office just four months ago). Baltimore is a deep blue city in a deep blue state. The mayor is a Democrat. Every member of the city council is a Democrat. The school system is run by Democrats (and their teachers union overlords).

So when you see Baltimore on fire, Democrats built that.

Baltimore is the poster child for the left’s failed war on poverty. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson launched the Great Society. He promised, “Our American answer to poverty is not to make the poor more secure in their poverty but to reach down and to help them lift themselves out of the ruts of poverty and move with the large majority along the high road of hope and prosperity.”

Do you see a Great Society in Sandtown? I sure don’t.

Today, the national poverty rate is 14.5 percent, which is virtually unchanged from 1966, when most of Johnson’s Great Society programs first took effect. In Baltimore, the poverty rate is even worse, with 24 percent of all residents and 35 percent of children living below the poverty line. The unemployment rate for black men in Baltimore between the ages of 20-24 is 37 percent. To put that in perspective, the unemployment rate during the Great Depression was just 22.9 percent. You know you have failed when reaching the employment levels of the Great Depression would be progress.

The New York Times reported Monday morning on a new study which found that “among the nation’s 100 largest counties, the one where children face the worst odds of escaping poverty is the city of Baltimore.” Low-income boys who grow up in Baltimore earn 25 percent less as adults than low-income boys who moved away as small children.

In the Baltimore community of Sandtown-Winchester, where the riots took place, The Post reported on Saturday that city officials “injected $130 million into the community in a failed effort to transform it. Instead there are block after block of boarded-up houses and too many people with little hope.” Nearly half of all Sandtown-Winchester high school students missed at least 20 days of school in 2011 and just 6 percent graduated from college — less than a quarter of the rate for the rest of the city. The community’s murder rate is double the average for Baltimore (which, in turn, had the fifth-highest murder rate last year among major U.S. cities). The state spends $17 million a year just to incarcerate Sandtown-Winchester residents.

The problem, as former Baltimore Housing commissioner Daniel Henson III told The Post, was that the city knew how to build houses, but “what we did not know as well was how to improve human capital.” Clearly, the Democratic approach of throwing money at the problem has not worked. In 2014, Baltimore public schools ranked third in the country in per-pupil spending, behind only New York and Boston. Yet, according to the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 55 percent of Baltimore fourth graders scored “below basic” in reading while just 14 percent scored at the proficient or advanced level. Meanwhile 54 percent of eighth graders scored “below basic” in math, while just 13 percent were proficient or advanced.

O’Malley says recent events in Baltimore should serve as “a wake-up call for the entire country.” He’s right about that. After five decades of virtually uninterrupted Democratic rule, Baltimore is an utter disaster. The left’s approach to poverty has failed.

posted May 06, 2015 03:53 PM            

Satyendra Singh Huja D Mayor of Charlottesville VA.
Terry McAuliffe D Governor of Virginia

Bill de Blasio D Mayor of NYC
Andrew Cuomo D Governor or NY

Jay Nixon D Governor of Missouri......................................................................