Soviet Oregon Steals Children from Christian Immigrant Family: Sends Strict Parents to Jail for Seven Years

…….and destroys the family.

The Headline in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Abuse Case Sparks a Clash Over Limits of Tough Parenting”, did not particularly catch my attention, much less my anger.  It suggested nothing about imprisonment.  It couldn’t be anything about parents getting their kids high on the illicit drug de jour.  That is  so common it doesn’t even qualify as abuse anymore in any of our 57 states…(the ones visited by Barack Hussein Obama’s by his count.)

I began to read the article.  “Salem Oregon” was the state  of the news.

On July 20, 2009 a 14 year old boy had called 911 and “Oregon authorities, alerting them to a terrible case of child abuse…..”

“He reported that his parents regularly beat him and several of his six siblings”, saying his parents “struck them with wires, branches and belts for wearing makeup and getting a fake tattoo.  Police quickly arrested Oleksandr and Lyudmila Kozlov and placed the children, who ranged in age from newborn to 15 years, into foster care.

The couple was eventually SENTENCED TO  SEVEN YEARS IN PRISON AND LATER STRIPPED OF MOST PARENTAL RIGHTS.  (emphasis mine).

That got my attention and I am still angry at what I read.   It seems there is a large tightly knit Ukrainian Baptist community near Salem,  capital city of doctrinaire, pompously  leftwing ‘tolerant’ Oregon.   These are relatively recent immigrants  from the old Soviet Union and many  were outraged at the arrest.

“Many of these supporters, Russian-born Christians like the Kozlovs themselves, believed  the parents were disciplining their chi8ldren according to Biblical law.”

“Oregon is now home to about 150,000 evangelical Christians from the former Soviet Union.  They were able to emigrate to the U.S. under the same law designed to help Soviet Jews escape religious persecution.”

These poor Christians had dared to cross  the Atlantic to escape religious persecution an entry accorded the Jews.   The Jews had an advantage.  Those who emigrated   were already indoctrinated into the secular world of the good old USSR.  How lucky they were not to be Christians settling in a  Progressive-Marxist state such as Oregon.   

I fact, as it turned out,  most of the Jewish refugees fleeing the Soviet Union now vote conservative in these United States.   The many I have met, I love dearly.  They knew Marxism when they saw and lived in  it.   They have not forgotten.  Most cannot understand how Americans can be so stupid to vote Marxists into office.

I don’t think there are many Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union living in Oregon.  But there is a large and wonderful community  here in the Twin Cities.  

The Kozlovs came to the United States in 2003.

As many of my friends know, I am not fond of this Soviet State which American Progressives seem to  have in store for the United States of America.   I don’t like Barack Hussein Obama’s projected future of a rich and powerful government to rule over a  poverty sharing  population, the inevitable Marxist  future for any State whose Progressive bureaucrats  ‘progress’ long  enough.   Mr. Obama promises a Progressive State for all ‘fifty seven states’ he visited during his 2008 presidential campaign.   We shall then all be positioned to the left of Oregon…..

In  October 1990 I spent almost the month in the Ukraine.   The horror of 7 decades of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was becoming  ‘so yesterday’.    I was invited to join a group of very, very conservative American Baptists from the Twin Cities who had collected money and medicines for victim of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster near Kiev in 1986.  That I was a secularist didn’t matter to these conservative Christians.   They needed help with the language.

We visited the Anabaptist community in Rovno in the western Ukraine.   I don’t know if the Rovno Anabaptist parents were so strict that they used a belt  to whip their children.   I do know that these Rovno children were among the most beautiful in appearance and  behavior I had ever seen in my life.

However, I have more than a passing interest in this travesty Oregon has perpetrated against this family.

I read nothing in this Wall Street Journal’s accounting of parental punishment that as a child till age fourteen, I had not  experienced from my own bi-polar Mother.  I lived in the city.  I bore welts from time to time from belts and sticks.   A wire rug beater was used once when I was about ten.   My Dad was always working.  He had a 60 hour work week.    No sexual abuse of any kind,  but before I began grade school there were psychological cruelties which I have never forgotten.

What I have to comment on has nothing to do with any support I have for parents being ‘cruel’ to children.  I oppose cruelty.  It goes with being a conservative.  Yet, I think  I would have loved to have had me as a Dad…..yet  one shouldn’t wish for what one doesn’t know for certain,    My own Dad was distant from me, but always a perfect gentleman who would never accept any conversation regarding my mother.   Beyond this he was a fine man who had a world of friends who really loved him and he dearly loved my Mother.

From this background and the transformation of our United States toward a more Sovietized government which intrudes ever more into citizen affairs, and being a high school teacher myself, I have often wondered what would have happened to my family if we had lived in a modern Oregon progressive community today……….

There is no doubt in my mind at all,  that my Mother would have been arrested if  “Oregon authorities” had discovered the  ‘discipline techniques’  she  applied against me until  I was about 13.

In today’s world of such spoiled, narcissistic children of so many ages 5-55, I might have even called 911 at age 13 and sntiched as did the  Kozlov boy.   But I do not blame him.   I blame  the do-gooders of the Progressive State of Oregon for the atrocity of jailing these parents, destroying this family and most likely  ruining the lives of the children as well as the parents all of whom the State of Oregon has punished.  One also wonders if the young Koslov when he grows up some, will ever forgive himself for what he did.

(I wonder what would have been the Oregon decree of punishment if these parents had been  MUSLIM…..even Jewish.)

There is no doubt the family which raised me  was made semi-dysfunctional,  made so by my mother’s hysterical malady.   I had only one sister, still alive, and the only other person in the world who really knew what life with ‘mother’ was really like.   She paid a price as well but from verbal not physical extremes.  Plus I was a much stronger person than my sister.  She’d wilt.  I stood up…..which increased the number of  my welts.

Brutal as she was, she terrorized me to be ‘good’.   “God”, she told me, “sees and knows everything”, thereby infecting my conscience.  

That idea did impress me.

“What if authorities had taken my sister and me  away from her”  I have thought a thousand times and discussed it twice with my sister.

We both agreed and I have always agreed, we would have been lost, ruined unless we would have been taken away before we were four or so.   For good or bad, we had bonded as a family……as we were also a part of my parents’  large extended families who were loving, happy people  quite shy on the cruelty.  

 My teachers first through fifth grade knew I was lonely and allowed me to hang around their rooms to read maps and National Georgraphics  1921-37 after school.  As I have written about my education previously, I loved these old maids.   They knew so much information.  I wanted to know as much as they did.  I was so lucky to have lived in the time I had lived.   I knew it at the time as well, even though I never wanted to go home.

I had resentments and anger both of which have haunted from time to time.   But that old lady gave me a lot of strength…..and despite the occasional  pain which still endures, she makes me smile everytime I think and write about her.  It is very difficult not to love ones own Mother.  I tried, but it didn’t work out very well.

 What would have happened to me if the State had taken her away from me when I was four, seven, eight, or twelve?    By 14 she could see that I was bigger and by this time she was working full time.  I went  off exploring  the world on my own….usually at school or in a library or riding around the Twin Cities on the street cars.   It only cost a dime, and if I worked the system right, I could get off to explore another  neighborhood or two  on the same dime by asking for  a transfer.

My American world was safe and kind then.   It was  civil.    I even hitch hiked just like all the other guys did.

The State does have a responsibility to protect children from danger.    The State should be duty bound to protect the human family as the  unit by which  we humans learn to behave humanly……more as a guide than as a Stalinist police state.

Who will punish these Oregon Stalinists for destroying  this family?

The Wonderfully American Thoughts of Walter Williams Come to Print…..

“The Welfare State has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do……..

And that is to destoy the black family.”     Walter Williams 

“The State against Blacks”      by Jason L. Riley,  Wall Street Journal

‘Sometimes I sarcastically, perhaps cynically, say that I’m glad that I received virtually all of my education before it became fashionable for white people to like black people,” writes Walter Williams in his new autobiography, “Up from the Projects.” “By that I mean that I encountered back then a more honest assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Professors didn’t hesitate to criticize me—sometimes to the point of saying, ‘That’s nonsense.'”

Mr. Williams, an economist at George Mason University, is contrasting being black and poor in the 1940s and ’50s with today’s experience. It’s a theme that permeates his short, bracing volume of reminiscence, and it’s where we began our conversation on a recent morning at his home in suburban Philadelphia.

“We lived in the Richard Allen housing projects” in Philadelphia, says Mr. Williams. “My father deserted us when I was three and my sister was two. But we were the only kids who didn’t have a mother and father in the house. These were poor black people and a few whites living in a housing project, and it was unusual not to have a mother and father in the house. Today, in the same projects, it would be rare to have a mother and father in the house.”

Even in the antebellum era, when slaves often weren’t permitted to wed, most black children lived with a biological mother and father. During Reconstruction and up until the 1940s, 75% to 85% of black children lived in two-parent families. Today, more than 70% of black children are born to single women. “The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do, what Jim Crow couldn’t do, what the harshest racism couldn’t do,” Mr. Williams says. “And that is to destroy the black family.”

Government programs and regulations are favorite butts of the professor, who is best known today for his weekly column—started in 1977 and now appearing in more than 140 newspapers—and for his stints guest-hosting Rush Limbaugh’s popular radio program. Libertarianism is currently in vogue, thanks to the election of a statist president and the subsequent rise of the tea party movement. But Walter Williams was a libertarian before it was cool. And like other prominent right-of-center blacks—Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele—his intellectual odyssey began on the political left.

“I was more than anything a radical,” says Mr. Williams. “I was more sympathetic to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King because Malcolm X was more of a radical who was willing to confront discrimination in ways that I thought it should be confronted, including perhaps the use of violence.

“But I really just wanted to be left alone. I thought some laws, like minimum-wage laws, helped poor people and poor black people and protected workers from exploitation. I thought they were a good thing until I was pressed by professors to look at the evidence.”

During his junior year at California State College in Los Angeles, Mr. Williams switched his major from sociology to economics after reading W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Black Reconstruction in America,” a Marxist take on the South’s transformation after the Civil War that will never be confused with “The Wealth of Nations.” Even so, the book taught him that “black people cannot make great progress until they understand the economic system, until they know something about economics.”

He earned his doctorate in 1972 from UCLA, which had one of the top economics departments in the country, and he says he “probably became a libertarian through exposure to tough-mined professors”—James Buchanan, Armen Alchian, Milton Friedman—”who encouraged me to think with my brain instead of my heart. I learned that you have to evaluate the effects of public policy as opposed to intentions.”

Mr. Williams distinguished himself in the mid-1970s through his research on the effects of the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931—which got the government involved in setting wage levels—and on the impact of minimum-wage law on youth and minority unemployment. He concluded that minimum wages caused high rates of teenage unemployment, particularly among minority teenagers. His research also showed that Davis-Bacon, which requires high prevailing (read: union) wages on federally financed or assisted construction projects, was the product of lawmakers with explicitly racist motivations.

One of Congress’s goals at the time was to stop black laborers from displacing whites by working for less money. Missouri Rep. John Cochran said that he had “received numerous complaints in recent months about Southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics.” And Alabama Rep. Clayton Allgood fretted about contractors with “cheap colored labor . . . of the sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country.”

Today just 17% of construction workers are unionized, but Democratic politicians, in deference to the AFL-CIO, have kept Davis-Bacon in place to protect them. Because most black construction workers aren’t union members, however, the law has the effect of freezing them out of jobs. It also serves to significantly increase the costs of government projects, since there are fewer contractors to bid on them than there would be without Davis-Bacon.

Analysis of this issue launched Mr. Williams’s career as a public intellectual, and in 1982 he published his first book, “The State Against Blacks,” arguing that laws regulating economic activity are far larger impediments to black progress than racial bigotry and discrimination. Nearly 30 years later, he stands by that premise.

“Racial discrimination is not the problem of black people that it used to be” in his youth, says Mr. Williams. “Today I doubt you could find any significant problem that blacks face that is caused by racial discrimination. The 70% illegitimacy rate is a devastating problem, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with racism. The fact that in some areas black people are huddled in their homes at night, sometimes serving meals on the floor so they don’t get hit by a stray bullet—that’s not because the Klan is riding through the neighborhood.”

Over the decades, Mr. Williams’s writings have sought to highlight “the moral superiority of individual liberty and free markets,” as he puts it. “I try to write so that economics is understandable to the ordinary person without an economics background.” His motivation? “I think it’s important for people to understand the ideas of scarcity and decision-making in everyday life so that they won’t be ripped off by politicians,” he says. “Politicians exploit economic illiteracy.”

Which is why, he adds, the tea party movement is a positive development in our politics and long overdue. “For the first time in my lifetime—and I’m approaching 75 years old—you hear Americans debating about the U.S. Constitution,” he says. “You hear them saying ‘This is unconstitutional’ or ‘We need limits on government’—things that I haven’t heard before. I’ve been arguing them for years, but now there’s widespread acceptance of the idea that we need to limit the government.”

Still, he’s concerned about how far the country has strayed from the type of limited government envisioned by the Founding Fathers. “In 1794, Congress appropriated $15,000 to help some French refugees,” he says. In objection, “James Madison stood on the House floor and said he could not take to lay his finger on that article in the Constitution that allows Congress to take the money of its constituents for the purposes of benevolence. Well, if you look at the federal budget today, two-thirds to three-quarters of it is for the purposes of benevolence.”

Mr. Williams says that “if there is anything good to be said about the Democratic White House and the [previous] Congress and their brazen attempt to take over the economy and control our lives, it’s that the tea party movement has come out of it. But we have gone so far from the basic constitutional principles that made us a great country that it’s a question of whether we can get back.”

The place to start, says Mr. Williams by way of advice to the new Republican House, is on the spending side of the federal ledger. “We need a constitutional amendment that limits the amount of money the government can spend,” he says. “Let’s say 18% of GDP to start. The benefit of a spending limitation amendment is that you’re going to force Congress to trade off against the various spending constituencies. Somebody says, ‘I want you to spend $10 billion on this,’ and the congressman can respond, ‘My hands are tied, so you have to show me where I can cut $10 billion first.'”

Mr. Williams says he hopes that the tea party has staying power, but “liberty and limited government is the unusual state of human affairs. The normal state throughout mankind’s history is for him to be subject to arbitrary abuse and control by government.”

He adds: “A historian writing 100 or 200 years from now might well say, ‘You know, there was this little historical curiosity that existed for maybe 200 years, where people were free from arbitrary abuse and control by government and where there was a large measure of respect for private property rights. But then it went back to the normal state of affairs.'”

Hoping to end our conversation on a sunnier note, I pose a final question about race. “A Man of Letters,” Thomas Sowell’s fabulous book of correspondence, includes a letter the Stanford economist sent in 2006 to Mr. Williams, whom he’s known for four decades. “[B]ack in the early years,” writes Mr. Sowell, “you and I were pretty pessimistic as to whether what we were writing would make an impact—especially since the two of us seemed to be the only ones saying what we were saying. Today at least we know that there are lots of other blacks writing and saying similar things . . . and many of them are sufficiently younger that we know there will be good people carrying on the fight after we are gone.”

Asked if he shares his friend’s optimism, Mr. Williams responds that he does. “You find more and more black people—not enough in my opinion but more and more—questioning the status quo,” he says. “When I fill in for Rush, I get emails from blacks who say they agree with what I’m saying. And there are a lot of white people questioning ideas on race, too. There’s less white guilt out there. It’s progress.”

Mr. Riley is a member of The Journal’s editorial board.

Keith Olbermann Disappears from MSNBC……Should He Try Out for Pro Wrestling?

“Goodbye to One of the World’s Worst People” was the headline displayed at PowerLine  to the following brief message regarding, guess what?……..

………..one of the worst people in America, if not the world, Keith Olbermann.

 “Keith Olbermann abruptly parted company with MSNBC tonight. Apparently his contract was either canceled or not renewed by the network, but the circumstances of his departure are not yet clear. Olbermann was one of the great haters in the media, but that wasn’t what caused his downfall: he is being replaced by Lawrence O’Donnell, one of the few people in America who are arguably more hateful than Olbermann.

My only regret, with respect to Olbermann’s MSNBC tenure, is that I never made it past runner-up on his Worst Person in the World feature.”

John Hinderaker was author of the above assessments.   I am too impressed by the President’s call for civility to add to this rather generous assessment of Mr. Olbermann’ demeaner, understanding of truth, reality, and facts, and the problem in general which this Keith faces,  that he may indeed require either psychiatric guidance or an hour or two of listening to Dennis Prager’s Happiness Hour to set him on some  path to recovery.   Yet, I think he thoroughly enjoyed the title, “The Worst Person in the World”.

Maybe he could try out for pro wrestling.  He might draw a better following.

Mr. Olbermann will be replaced by his protege, Ed Schultz.

Note:   Now, a  few days after writing this entry, I am wondering if readers might conclude this is simply a smear piece against anything Left…..another tract of name calling.   The Left loudly complains about Fox Television News as the rightwing version of the  Keith Olbermanns at MSNBC.

That is a lie…..at best an untrue political smear.    Does Fox News entertain a conservative bias?….Absolutely.   It also has a bullying East Coast urban community bias, primarily led by Bill O’Reilly. whom I find obnoxious.   Most of their reporters are excellent however.  Chris Wallace is supberb.  No one on or off television can beat Chrales Krauthammer for thinking and analysis.   Fox News  does not by intent extract venom from the folks they interview.   Their conservative assumptions do occur occasionally, but are  not venomous.

I do dutifully watch the animals at MSNBC….Ed Schultz,  Larry O’Donnell, Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, and  Keith Olbermann,  until his departure, of course.   Their tactics are unworthy in the American scene.  When they interview their select Leftwingers, like vile meeting vile, the worst in all comes to the surface.   The folks at MSNBC  bring to our America television propaganda, vulgarity and lies and in tones which match those of  standard Marxist communications in any of the European Communist countries including the Soviet Union in the last generation of life of these dastardly regimes.   ((perhaps, however, occasionally  adding a bit more humor than ever attempted at  their Communist dictatorship counterparts in Europe.

Where does the MSNBC Left come from?

My ex-wife is an emotional devotee ot the Democrat Party left.  Her training was in Journalism and Public Relations.  She was competitive and loved the world of “Humanities” as a romance, and was well educated in recitations regarding them and achieved a graduate degree from the University of Minnesota back when a graduate degree was worthy and had value.   She was an excellent student of literature and of writing.   She was a skilled editor, fair and professional…..a quality professional.    She remained so all of her professional life.

Politically,  today,she is to the Left of Barack Obama, intolerant of any, even the slightest criticism of  the person or his politics.  To criticize him is a crime.   He, as is Bill Clinton, her hero for the ages.

She lives in Little Rock, Arkansas and in her retirement volunteers at the Clinton Library and attends the many partisan lectures there including those of religious anarchists such as Richard Dawkins.   She hates Fox News……”Oh, I would never watch Fox News”, she announces to my sons with hisses and  snears to accompany the statement.  She wouldn’t so belittle herself.  She watches public television.

She wouldn’t watch MSNBC either, for I know her well.    For starters about ‘knowing’,  the former Mrs. Ray has never had cable television.  No matter. 

She is offended if ever  called a Christian…..on occasion correcting me saying with great pride, “I’m a Deist”……(although sympathetic to Richard Dawkins)  and became very upset when I suggested to her that perhaps she was  a Christian Deist since she was raised (a Presbyterian) in a country of Christian culture.

She would have none of it.   To her the American rightwing is a menace to humanity…….and enemy of her romance with ‘truth’.    Christianity  conspires against truth.

She  loved her  government service when she worked for Democrats.   (She had never worked outside of the government arena of some sort or another.  This is an articulate woman, intelligent, at one time was liberal as well as Liberal in political conviction, who today has no feel at all for free speech and its role in  free democratic societies……a journalist by training, mind you……..and   possesses no curiosity whatsoever into the Why or True  of life……..but  heavily devoted to life’s romance and the censorship of its competitors.   She opposes ‘talk’ radio.  She reads the New York Times.

In  my experience she represents the entire army of my former leftwing compatriots  then, in our youth, and now in our old age…….those who are still living.   There is a bitterness, a loneliness about them.   They hate  everything Republican for it is beneath their “intellectual realm”  even to consider what these people might have in mind.

Frankly, I am partisan!   a conservative one.    I have prejudices earned from my life’s experience  especially from teaching, which I highly value, for I believe them to be eminently AMERICAN……If someone has better ideas, I want to know.

In contrast to my Leftwing  friends and opponents whose anger, hate, and bigotry seem  hidden in the secrecy of their minds, controlled by the Leftwing rules of political correctness, I believe in exposing ideas to open air and the glory of sunlight for examination.  What we honestly believe to be true must be honestly expressed and honestly challenged.

The Tea Party gatherings, talk radio,  Fox News, your corner Christian church, knowledge about America’s glorious past, are all hated by America’s Leftwing  today, those inside the country as well as outside.   As a citizen living in a  free society, we  must learn to seek the truth……such as the differences between Fox News and the news at MSNBC….or there will be no freedom in anyone’s future.

---

Health Care Repeal Won’t Add to the Deficit

January 21, 2011

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would increase the deficit by $230 billion over the coming decade and by a modest amount in the decade after that.  A close examination of the CBO’s work and other evidence leads to the exact opposite conclusion, according to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the CBO, Joseph Antos, former assistant director at the CBO and James C. Capretta, former associate director at the Office of Management and Budget.

If the CBO is right, 32 million people will be added to the health entitlement rolls at a cost of $938 billion through 2019, and growing faster than the economy or revenues thereafter.  How, then, does the ACA magically convert $1 trillion in new spending into painless deficit reduction?  Through budget gimmicks, deceptive accounting and implausible assumptions.

• For starters, $1 trillion is a low-ball estimate, covering only six — not 10 — years of subsidies that do not begin until 2014.
• Over 10 years of full implementation, it’s more like $2.3 trillion.

The deepest spending cuts in the ACA are in Medicare.  No doubt Medicare needs real reform, but the ACA’s cuts are illusory.  Medicare’s payments to health care providers would fall below those of Medicaid.  The network of hospitals and physicians willing to care for Medicaid patients is notoriously constrained, say Holtz-Eakin, Antos and Capretta.

• About 15 percent of the nation’s hospitals would have to stop seeing Medicare patients in just a few years to stem their losses.
• What’s worse, ACA’s advocates are double-counting this fictional savings, claiming it can pay both for the ACA’s entitlements and Medicare solvency too.
• The truth is, these cuts cannot be relied upon to pay for anything.

So, even if the CBO’s analysis were flawless, the authors of the ACA guaranteed a misleading bottom line.  Their legislative prescriptions were written to create deficit reduction only on paper — not in reality.

Source: Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Joseph Antos and James C. Capretta, “Health Care Repeal Won’t Add to the Deficit,” Wall Street Journal, January 19, 2011.

For text:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703954004576089702354292100.html

(The above information was sent to me by the  National Center for Policy Analysis.)

Welfare Tab for Children Of Illegal Immigrants Estimated at $600M in L.A. County

From Fox News found at HotAir.

“Welfare benefits for the children of illegal immigrants cost America’s largest county more than $600 million last year, according to a local official keeping tabs on the cost. 

Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich released new statistics this week showing social spending for those families in his county rose to $53 million in November, putting the county government on track to spend more than $600 million on related costs for the year — up from $570 million in 2009. 

Antonovich arrived at the estimate by factoring in the cost of food stamps and welfare-style benefits through a state program known as CalWORKS. Combined with public safety costs and health care costs, the official claimed the “total cost for illegal immigrants to county taxpayers” was more than $1.6 billion in 2010. 

“Not including the hundreds of millions of dollars for education,” he said in a statement. 

Antonovich’s figures, though, center on costs generated by American-born children of illegal immigrants. Isabel Alegria, communications director at the California Immigrant Policy Center, said it’s “unfair” to roll together costs associated with both illegal immigrants and U.S.-born citizens.

“Those children are U.S. citizens, children eligible for those programs,” Alegria said. 

She also questioned the authenticity of Antonovich’s numbers regarding health care and public safety — though for the welfare program statistics, Antonovich cited numbers from the county’s Department of Public Social Services. 

Antonovich acknowledges that the children whose benefits he’s focusing on are U.S.-born. But he argues that the money is collected by the illegal immigrant parents, putting a painful burden on taxpayers, including those who are legal immigrants. 

“The problem is illegal immigration. … Their parents evidently immigrated here in order to get on social services,” Antonovich spokesman Tony Bell said. “We can no longer afford to be HMO to the world.” 

He said the state should cut back on these social benefits. According to the November statistics, that cost accounted for 22 percent of all food stamp and CalWORKS spending in the county. 

Over the summer, the Federation for American Immigration Reform also looked at these kinds of costs nationwide to get an idea of the burden to local governments at a time when many are grappling with budget deficits. 

The organization reported that the cost of illegal immigration stands at about $113 billion a year. Nearly half of that amount went toward education costs, according to the study. Costs were naturally higher in states with large illegal immigrant populations — in California, the total annual cost was pegged at $21.8 billion.”

Maher: Tucson Massacre Wouldn’t Have Happened If America Had “Socialized Medicine”

The following video of a circle of Lefty Bill Maher friends was found at Weasel Zippers.   A thank you goes to California Cole for directing me to the  WZ zone.  

Maher is the atheist who often certifies that there is no afterlife for the human soul.  Of course, he may be right….no, “correct” in the prospect.  (Actually, Maher is never right.)  This same Bill Maher claims, “If only we had socialized healthcare, there wouldn’t have been a Tucson Massacre.”

Mr. Maher is recognized by the Left as a great thinker.   

Follow hin along in this video clip displaying his thoughts:

http://weaselzippers.us/2011/01/16/lefty-hero-bill-maher-if-only-we-had-socialized-healthcare-there-wouldnt-have-been-a-tucson-massacre/

Sheila Jackson Lee….Loony Because She is a) a woman, b) a black, c) a Democrat, or d) all three?

I have violated not one of the laws of leftwing political correctness by writing such a headline, but several of the most sacred to the Marxist loonies in today’s Democrat Party.   In Canada I might already have the thought police at my door.   I have my judgments regarding Ms. Lee.   If she were a minority of one in the Congress, why bother to complain? 

However, I believe Ms.Lee has huge crowds of charlatons performing at about the same levels on all fronts as Ms. Lee.

She is featured in the following video talking, talking and talking in front of the stage prop she brought with her for the ‘interview’ with Neil Cavuto of Fox News.   

Do focus on Ms. Lee’s skills or lack of them of thinking…..and listening……and answering. 

“From today’s Cavuto, a chat with noted constitutional scholar Sheila Jackson Lee on location at the Capitol. I know, it doesn’t look like the Capitol, but that’s because she has an aide slightly out of view holding up a poster-sized photo of a bedridden elderly woman behind her. Yes, really — they didn’t even set it up on a stand. You can actually see the staffer’s hand enter the left side of the frame at times. Frankly, I’m a little disappointed that Lee didn’t take it and hold it in front of her, just because that would have made it a literal human shield in addition to being a metaphorical one. (Bonus fact: As Cavuto notes, the woman pictured in the photo is a Medicare recipient. Not only will she not lose her coverage if O-Care is repealed, it’s precisely because so many voters fear the consequences to Medicare from passing ObamaCare that the Democrats were destroyed among seniors last November.)

Obama’s Long Hand of Marxism to Prop Communist Zelaya to Honduras Throne?

What is this Obama Marxist crew up to now?  Alberto de la Cruz wrote the following fround at HotAir with title:

“Obama Adminstration Lobbying Honduras to Allow Zelaya Back in!  Are you kidding>”

“On the last day of December last year, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, the deposed Honduran president and self-described victim of high-frequency radiation attacks by Israeli mercenaries, vowed to the press that he would return to Honduras. Few outside of Honduras have paid much attention to Zelaya’s MacArthur-esque prediction, but it has become apparent there is more behind his declaration than his usual hyperbole and bombastic absurdities.

Behind the scenes in the Obama administration there appears to be a concerted effort to pressure the democratically elected government of President Porfirio Lobo to dismiss charges of misappropriation of government funds and falsifying documents that are pending against Zelaya. This would open the door for his return to the country, and would be certain to undermine the delicate process of reestablishing democracy and order that is currently taking place in this poor and beleaguered nation.

When Zelaya was removed from office in July of 2009, the Obama administration at first joined with leftist dictators Fidel Castro of Cuba, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua in calling for his reinstatement. The Obama White House seemed oblivious to the Honduran constitution, as well as the threat Zelaya posed to the stability of the country and the region. When the courageous Honduran people held firm to their democratic constitution and refused to yield to the pressure exerted by the U.S., the Obama administration found no way of saving face other than reversing course and backing the democratic presidential elections called for by their constitution.

After their amateurish and myopic miscalculation, which exposed the Obama State Department’s lack of experience and incompetence, one could imagine the White House would want to avoid the subject of Honduras and Zelaya altogether. That, however, does not seem to be the case, as we learn from the new chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL).

According to Ros-Lehtinen, she has received reports that the State Department is applying considerable pressure on members of the Honduran government to absolve Zelaya of his alleged crimes. In a letter earlier this month to Arturo Valenzuela, the assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, Ros-Lehtinen calls for an end to the coercion of Honduran officials by the U.S. government that is allegedly taking place:

I am gravely concerned by reports I have received regarding efforts by U.S. officials to pressure the Government of Honduras to absolve former President Manuel Zelaya of the criminal charges he faces in that country and ask, within all applicable rules and guidelines, that if these reports are accurate, the State Department immediately cease exerting such undue influence over duly elected Honduran government officials acting in accordance with Honduran law.

With Honduras’ economy still in shambles in the aftermath of Zelaya’s attempt to install himself as dictator, the U.S. has announced it will not renew a $215-million aid program that ended in December 2010, which provided farming technology to Honduran farmers and helped improve the country’s infrastructure. Whether this decision by the Obama administration is a result of their efforts to pressure Honduran officials to grant amnesty to Zelaya is uncertain. Nevertheless, the news does not come at a good time for the administration, and it harkens back to those treacherous days in 2009 when the White House was threatening Honduras with holding back financial aid if it did not comply with its demands and those of Chavez and Castro.

Although the Obama State Department would like to portray their efforts to return Zelaya to Honduras as an attempt to bring closure and help heal that nation from the wounds it suffered 18 months ago, the reality is the opposite. Zelaya’s return would instead stoke the fires of factionalism and most likely bring more violence to a country that is still struggling to recover from the turmoil it suffered in 2009.

One of the groups leading the charge in Honduras to return and reinstate Zelaya as president is the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP). This leftist organization has produced a poster calling for Zelaya’s reinstatement that rivals the pomposity of their deposed leader. It features an artistic silhouette of Zelaya wearing his trademark cowboy hat, and it perfectly captures the leftist use of art to portray tyrants as heroes. The FNRP does not try to hide its Marxist dogma — on its website, it proudly declares that it is:

… carrying out a political and social struggle against a savage capitalism that is transnational, monopolistic, and alienating. This struggle is anti-neoliberal, anti-oligarchic, anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-racism, which seeks the transformation of social, political, economic, and educational structures and cultural domination .…

These are the allies of Zelaya in Honduras; leftists who seek the destruction of democracy and the free market in Honduras in order to install a system of “social justice,” which is newspeak for tyranny and enslavement. A return of Zelaya to Honduras would embolden and inspire the FNRP and other leftist groups, ensuring violence and bringing about another attempt to align with countries such as Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, which are all well on their way to a Cuban-style communist dictatorship.

 

In a country that is still struggling to maintain law and order, where Catholic bishops receive death threats for publicly defending the rule of law and judges recuse themselves from trying the case against Zelaya, the situation is nothing if not volatile. The Obama administration’s insistence on introducing a pretentious despot with a propensity to incite violence into this unpredictable environment goes beyond incompetence and lack of experience; it is blatant recklessness.

One can only surmise what motivation is behind the Obama administration’s decision to continue meddling in Honduran domestic affairs. Whatever the reasons may be, the Obama administration needs to explain itself. If the White House continues pursuing this course, it needs to explain to the American and Honduran people, as well as the rest of the world, why it has decided to put the Honduran people and their democracy in harm’s way.

Alberto de la Cruz blogs at Babalu Blog.