ProDemocracy Groups in Egypt funded by GW Bush

Bush program helped lay the groundwork in Egypt

Vote monitors trained with funds from US

 

“WASHINGTON — A small, controversial effort launched under President George W. Bush to fund and train election monitors in Egypt played a key role in the movement to topple President Hosni Mubarak’s regime.

 

The program, which provided millions in direct funding to prodemocracy groups, helped dispatch 13,000 volunteers to observe Egypt’s parliamentary elections in December. Thousands of those monitors, angered by what they said was blatant election rigging, joined the protests. Some became outspoken leaders; others used the networking and communication skills they learned to help coordinate 18 days of rallies.

“The very fact that they saw the fraud firsthand has contributed to them turning from monitors into activists,’’ said Saad Eddin Ibrahim, founder of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, which has used a share of the US funds to train volunteers. “They became very disillusioned with the regime.’’

The evolving role of the monitors provides a measure of vindication for Bush administration officials and allies, including Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, who fought for permission to funnel money to the monitors, bucking a longstanding US policy of giving Egypt a veto over US funds.

“I certainly feel vindicated,’’ said Charles King Mallory IV, a former aide to Elizabeth Cheney, who could not be reached for comment.

But it also raises questions about whether some Egyptians will see a grain of truth in Mubarak’s allegations that “foreign intervention’’ fomented the uprising.

Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, a Washington-based advocacy and research group, said the protesters would probably still have been active without US support, but they wouldn’t be as well-organized.

“We didn’t fund them to start protests, but we did help support their development of skills and networking,’’ he said.

Mahmoud Ali Mohamed, head of the Egyptian Association for Supporting Democracy, the largest election monitoring organization in Egypt, said his monitors were dispatched to Tahrir Square on the first day of the protests to document attacks on demonstrators.

As the protests grew, he opened an operations room from which 320 volunteers took tips from the public about abuses by progovernment forces, and he wrote press releases publicizing attacks and arrests. Now his group is considering launching lawsuits against those who killed or hurt protesters.

He said December’s parliamentary election, viewed by many as the most fraudulent in Egypt since the 1970s, galvanized the entire nation.

When the government announced that the opposition won less than 12 seats in parliament, down from 95 in 2005, in the first round, Egyptians “understood that there was no fair election,’’ he said.

“In a way or another, it helped what is happening right now,’’ he said, speaking through an interpreter in a telephone interview.”

(from the Boston Globe)

Forced Busing is Back in the News

“Busing — or rather, the debate over busing — is back, and along with it, more misunderstanding of Brown v. Board of Education.

The Washington Post on January 12 published a long front-page article by reporter Stephanie McCrummen — “Republican school board in N.C. backed by tea party abolishes integration policy” — criticizing the new Republican majority on the Wake County, North Carolina, School Board for ending county-wide busing and, thus, turning its back on Brown. The next day the Post published a letter from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan criticizing the board for abandoning the “core value” of “diversity” and threatening an investigation.

Busing to achieve racial balance was initially foisted onto the nation by another North Carolina school system, courtesy of the Supreme Court’s 1971 ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. In the 1990s, some parents filed a lawsuit challenging the exclusion of their children from magnet schools because they were white; in 1999 a federal district court judge declared that the district — now 40% black — had long since remedied its segregation, ordering the board to stop “assigning children to schools or allocating educational opportunities and benefits through race-based lotteries, preferences, or other means that deny students an equal opportunity based on race.” Shortly thereafter, “the local school board adopted a new assignment plan that combined neighborhood schools with parental choice within several large assignment zones.” Wake County, however, stuck to its old, county-wide busing program. But in an attempt to avoid legal challenge, the old busing system was now justified as necessary to promote economic, not racial, diversity.

Predictably, ending county-wide busing has been attacked by civil rights groups and their friends as “turning back the clock” by re-introducing “segregation.” William Barber of the local NAACP said that allowing children to choose to attend their neighborhood schools is “morally wrong … legally wrong … economically wrong,” and McCrummen’s WaPo article quotes NAACP president Benjamin Jealous blaming the Tea Party:

So far, all the chatter we heard from tea partyers has not manifested in actually putting in place retrograde policies. But this is one place where they have literally attempted to turn back the clock.

This quote from McCrummen’s article has itself been widely quoted, and Jealous may well have said it somewhere — it’s certainly the sort of thing he would say — but it appears nowhere in the source McCrummen linked.

What is noteworthy about both the Post article and Secretary Duncan’s letter is their fundamental misunderstanding of Brown v. Board of Education, a misunderstanding that is now endemic to contemporary liberalism. Writing in the Post last fall McCrummen and Michael Birnbaum praised a new study touting the “benefits of economic integration” because

it lends fresh support to an idea as old as the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954: Segregated schools — in this case, separated by economics, not law — are rarely as good as diverse ones at educating low-income students.

McCrummen makes the same point in her January 12 Post article, describing Wake County as

the center of a fierce debate over the principle first enshrined in the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education: that diversity and quality education go hand in hand.

I suspect that neither McCrummen nor her editor has actually read the Brown decision, since neither that decision nor any of the briefs for the plaintiffs, nor their oral arguments, said anything about “diversity,” much less “enshrined” it as a fundamental principle.

The day after McCrummen’s article the Post printed a letter from Education Secretary Duncan manifesting the same mistaken belief that Brown enshrined “diversity.” He found it “troubling to see North Carolina’s Wake County School Board taking steps to reverse a long-standing policy to promote racial diversity in its schools,” promised an investigation, and called for “a conversation among educators, parents and students across America about our core values.” Duncan obviously does not believe “our core values” include what Gunnar Myrdal famously called the “American Creed,” the principle that individuals should be treated without regard to race.

How odd that Duncan so readily admits what the Wake County busing advocates make such an effort to disguise: that the busing to which they are so devoted is really all about racial balance, with “economic integration” being the camouflage they hope will allow it to sneak in undetected. You’d think the secretary of education would know that if Wake County’s prior purpose was what he says it was and still recommends — “to promote racial diversity in its schools” — it would be unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling in Parents Involved, which invalidated classifying students by race and using that classification in their school assignments.

Ultimately, however, what is most disturbing about the liberals’ Brown-worship is that they so fundamentally misunderstand their deity. They worship Brown; they worship “diversity;” so they are forced to conclude that Brown sanctified “diversity.” It didn’t.

As Chief Justice Roberts stated in Parents Involved, what the Court held in Brown is precisely what the plaintiffs’ attorneys asked it to hold:

the position of the plaintiffs in Brown was spelled out in their brief and could not have been clearer: “[T]he Fourteenth Amendment prevents states from according differential treatment to American children on the basis of their color or race […].” As counsel who appeared before this Court for the plaintiffs in Brown put it: “We have one fundamental contention which we will seek to develop in the course of this argument, and that contention is that no State has any authority under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.” There is no ambiguity in that statement. And it was that position that prevailed in this Court […].

Not only was “diversity” not “enshrined” or even mentioned in Brown, it was actually rejected as a goal by the plaintiffs. “The only thing that we ask for,” Thurgood Marshall argued,

is that the state-imposed racial segregation be taken off, and to leave the county school board, the county people, the district people, to work out their own solution of the problem to assign children on any reasonable basis [other than race] they want to assign them on. [p. 47]

What about “de facto segregation,” now often referred to — as Secretary Duncan just did in his letter — as “racial isolation”? Again, Marshall couldn’t have been more specific about what the Brown plaintiffs sought (and received). “My emphasis,” he insisted,

is that all we are asking for is to take off this state-imposed segregation. It is the state-imposed part of it that affects the individual children. [p. 49]

Marshall was pressed hard on this point by Justice Frankfurter:

Justice Frankfurter: You mean, if we reverse, it will not entitle every mother to have her child go to a nonsegregated school in Clarendon County?

Mr. Marshall: No, sir.

Justice Frankfurter: What will it do? Would you mind spelling this out? What would happen?

Mr. Marshall: Yes, sir. The school board, I assume, would find some other [non-racial] method of distributing the children…. I think whatever district lines they draw, if it can be shown that those lines are drawn on the basis of race or color, then I think they would violate the injunction. If the lines are drawn on a natural basis, without regard to race or color, then I think that nobody would have any complaint. [47–48]

It is worth recalling what The Washington Post, Secretary Duncan, et al. seem conveniently to forget whenever they discuss parents opposed to busing: the complaint of Linda Brown, Ethel Louise Belton, and the other black children on whose behalf Brown was brought is that they were barred from attending their neighborhood schools because of their race. Even Vera and Darius Swann in Charlotte filed the complaint that ultimately led to Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education because their 6-year old son James was refused permission to attend an integrated school that was close to their home.

Finally, it is true that the Brown record is filled with arguments that the Fourteenth Amendment was not intended to and does not prohibit reasonable classification based on race, and that courts, even the Supreme Court, have no business telling states or local school boards how to assign their students.  “Your Honors do not sit,” as one attorney put it, “and cannot sit as a glorified Board of Education….” [p. 216]

Those arguments, however, were all made by attorneys defending the racial assignment policies that the plaintiffs attacked. They lost. The Washington Post and Secretary Duncan to the contrary notwithstanding, the principle and the core value that Brown “enshrined” is that students (and by extension, others) may not be burdened by the state because of their race — not the conflicting principle that cities may — or, according to some, must — impose burdens based on race to promote integration.”

John Rosenberg blogs at Discriminations.

One of the most disruptive governmental policies in the history of American urban communities occured  last century with the forced busing of blacks to schools which didn’t have enough black faces among  enrollees to warrant exclusion from court edicts whose goal was equal eduation.   

The American wealthier leftwing  folks of the day, leaders in the community,   used to courts to do their bidding to change the public school demographics.    In the meantime they sent their children to private schools.

These lefties of yesterday  were good people believing they were doing good.   They were so certain of their goodness that there was never any debate about what this goodness might cause……..such as   the disappearance of  education in favor of pandering politically and socially to the underclass.

Those who requested to debate the policy   were dismissed as racists and if school teachers, were  also fired.

Whites fled, moving  to safer territories to flee the racism and violence.  Traditional learnings in the inner city schools collapsed.   Black crime was rampant.

 

GALLUP: Unemployment is at 10.3%

Gallup Daily: U.S. Employment

Each result is based on a 30-day rolling average; not seasonally

adjusted

 

Gallup’s U.S. employment measures report the percentage of U.S. adults in the workforce, ages 18 and older, who are underemployed and unemployed, without seasonal adjustment. “Underemployed” respondents are employed part time, but want to work full time, or they are unemployed. “Unemployed” respondents are those within the underemployed group who are not employed, even for one hour a week, but are available and looking for work. Results for each 30-day rolling average are based on telephone interviews with approximately 30,000 adults. Because results are not seasonally adjusted, they are not directly comparable to numbers reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which are based on workers 16 and older. Margin of error is ± 0.7 percentage points.

the USSR Actually WAS an evil Empire

Soviet Economist Agrees with Reagan, Labels USSR

‘Evil Empire’

Samuel Pennell

 from the American Thinker:

“A famed and revered Soviet economist refers to the former USSR as an “evil empire,” in an online article. I print this largely because I know that it will be a source of unending frustration for the liberals of our country. Reagan’s labeling of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” has drawn criticism from the left wing ever since Reagan spoke these iconic words in his famous speech, given March 8, 1983. It now it seems a Russian expert agrees with him.

 

The Russian in question is named Yuri Maltsev. Maltsev was an economist in the former USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is more than qualified to speak on the subject and has written at length about the millions of people killed by the communist regime of the former USSR. He served in the 1980s, during the perestroika unwinding of the Soviet Union. He witnessed the bodies piling up to the sky under the poisonous and brutal left-wing scheme of central planning. In an amazing and insightful article from mises.org, Maltsev offers his definitive, argument shattering analysis:

 

“…..the primary problem in the Soviet Union was socialism, and it is still far from being dismantled in the nations that once made up that evil empire.”

 

Maltsev’s words appear to be a massive triumph for Ronald Reagan in the information war between communism and capitalism. They would appear to be a massive barb in the side of the liberals, who intentionally or unintentionally added to the Soviets’ propaganda effort. Maltsev’s article also serves as the introduction to the book “Requiem for Marx.”

 

Reagan’s words came at a time when faces were white with fear and paranoia over the spread of red communism across the globe. In the government buildings of Washington DC and Moscow, there were white knuckles and cigarette butts piled high in ashtrays over the idea that a tactical nuclear strike could turn a city into ash. At one point, the Soviet Union had gained the upper hand, with the advent of the menacing “Satan” missile. The appropriately titled “Satan R-36” ICBM missile had given the Soviets first strike capabilities against America. Russia could hit America before America could hit Russia. Period.

 

The criticism of Reagan’s words has ranged far and wide, coming from sources including the liberal media and liberal academia. As a young man in the 1990s, one of the harshest rebukes of Reagan’s phrase I heard came to me from the uber-cool band Rage Against the Machine. C’mon, I was a teenager. With a sarcastic twist, they named their second major label album “Evil Empire.” The album was released in 1996. As a wiser adult, I recognized Rage Against the Machine’s album title as the further indoctrination of the youth through cool social outlets such as music and TV. After all, Rage also endorsed mass murderer Che Guevara, a man who had many people executed, wanted to nuke America in 1962, and helped to drive Cuba into abject poverty, while America soared ever-higher into prosperity on the same time line.

 

I suppose what the left is getting at is the idea that Reagan’s words were hypocritical, and that America was an “evil empire” itself, which is not true. I keep trying to conjure up examples of times in the Cold War when America was mismanaging its economy, both intentionally and unintentionally, and laying waste to tens of millions of people. Ideas of America’s capitalist ideology piling bodies up to the sky and soldiering onwards just aren’t coming to me. That image comes quickly to me when imagining Stalin, Krushchev, and even Gorbachev (as Maltsev points out), but not really America. In his article, Maltsev also states:

 

“In the name of Marxism, the death toll reached 100 million; the rivers of blood flowed from Russia to Kampuchea, from China to Czechoslovakia.”

 

I suppose the left could argue that America’s hegemony in Latin America drove the region into the depressed state that it is currently in. However, according to Maltsev, the communist/socialist system of central planning is the main driver behind the poverty of left wing countries — not so much their relationship with foreign countries. Also, if Latin American countries would thrive if they could just divorce themselves from America, why isn’t Cuba thriving right now? They have economic isolation and “freedom” from the “blood sucking capitalist regime” of America, yet they are neck deep in the muck of depressing poverty. I’d love to ask Cubans how that glorious freedom that Che and Castro granted them feels.

 

To recap, everyone who reads this needs to read Yuri Maltsev’s article that is available through mises.org.  Maltsev was a witness, as the red machinery of communism ground up human bodies in the millions. He has an amazing, story to tell, backed up by numbers and figures, and his expert insight as an economist of the Soviet Union. He gives definitive proof that the USSR was indeed the “evil empire” that Ronald Reagan referred to, and the article serves as a strong rebuke to the liberals who contend that America was the true bad guy during the Cold War. When I think of the leftists taking ideological arms against Reagan’s stance in the Cold War, the term “useful idiot” starts ringing in my mind.”

 

Comment:  For those too young to remember, President Reagan was villified constantly by the Left for using the word ‘Evil’ even when in the 1980s he referred to the Soviet Union.   George W. Bush was again reviled for his use of Axis of Evil.    The Left in its moder cloak does not believe in good or evil.   They are taught  at university that only American conservatives are evil.   Evil elsewhere in the world is a result of conservative American greed.

Who is Our American Representative to the United Nations?

How many votes do the Islamists have at the United Nations”

Who is the largest financial supporter of the United Nations?

What enterprise in private business is more corrupt than the United Nations?    In answer to this last item, NONE in any of the countries of Western Europe.   All governments , with the possible exception of France or Switzerland, would shut them down and take government action against them.    Americans should remember that most governments of the world are corrupt both financially and politically. 

Nations of Islam total 56 votes whenever there is a United Nations vote on an issue.  There are a total of 192 ‘independent’ country members of the organization. 

Susan Rice is the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations…..I didn’t know either until the following article.

No one has kept a corruption chart on the United Nations in its 60 plus years of existence, but I don’t think anyone would argue with the statement that it has never been so fiscally and politically corrupt as it is today.

Leftists have the future of America as a subject of the U.N. in their crystal ball.   So the following information should capture citizen’s attention:

From Politico:

“Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, will argue in a major address Friday evening that the nation should “strengthen” — not “starve” — the world body.

The address is the first in a series of speeches — to continue this spring — making the case to the American people for why the U.N. matters to national security, and detailing how it is being improved. The ambassador will be speaking to the World Affairs Council of Oregon in Portland.

“The U.N. provides a real return on our tax dollars by bringing 192 countries together to share the cost of providing stability, vital aid and hope in the world’s most broken places,” Rice said in prepared remarks.

“Because of the U.N., the world doesn’t look to America to solve every problem alone. … We’re far better off working to strengthen the U.N. than trying to starve it — and then having to choose between filling the void ourselves, or leaving real threats untended.”

Further comment:   The United Nations was the source of the great Climategate scandal spread by Al Gore.