Bloodthirsty Liberal

Just curious [Indirectly via I Hate the Media]

Most of the suspects believed to be involved in a suspected Palmdale hate crime have been detained, according to police.

Seven suspects, ranging in age from 13 to 16, were identified as the attackers involved in a March 14 attack on a 15-year-old Latino boy as he was walking home from Cactus Intermediate School in the 3200 block of East Avenue. His wounds were not life-threatening.

Detectives discovered a video of the scene posted on YouTube, said Lt. Don Ford with Palmdale Sheriff’s Station. The video has since been taken down and a copy is being used as evidence.

A group of up to 10 African-American boys challenged the boy to a fight, surrounded him and then punched him while several others watched, police said.

The victim fell to the ground and the suspects continued punching and kicking him in the face and head before he was able to get on his feet and escape, police said.

Shoe impressions were left on the victim’s skin, police said. He was treated at a hospital for swelling caused by multiple kicks to the head and faces surgery to repair several teeth kicked out during the fight.

The suspects, all Palmdale residents, face felony charges of committing a hate crime and assault with force likely to cause great bodily harm, police said.

As I noted yesterday about the Jew-hating graffiti in Chicago, where is Al Sharpton when you really need him?

PS: Are you following the video kerfuffle? No? Good. It’s a waste of time.

“A police surveillance video taken the night that Trayvon Martin was shot dead shows no blood or bruises on George Zimmerman,” ABC News reporter Matt Gutman wrote, noting that Zimmerman told police “he shot Martin after he was punched in the nose, knocked down and had his head slammed into the ground.”

ABC News reported that Zimmerman appears uninjured in the video. But a still image from the video indicates what appears to be a vertical laceration or scar several inches long.

What the heck do I know? What the heck does anyone know?

Or see that he sleeps with the fishes, I don’t care which:

Rubio has long been at the top of nearly everyone’s vice presidential short list — and with good reason. Rubio could help deliver the key swing state of Florida, and as the first Hispanic vice presidential nominee he would give the Romney team a fighting chance with Latino voters. His humble roots and compelling personal narrative could help blunt the class warfare attacks President Obama will surely level at Romney this fall. Rubio is telegenic and a dynamic speaker who can fire up crowds and generate desperately needed enthusiasm for the GOP ticket. He is beloved by the Tea Party, and he could help Romney win over the conservative grassroots (who are still wary of an “Etch a Sketch” nominee). In short, if you were to design the perfect running mate for Romney, you would come up with Marco Rubio.

So Rubio should have the VP slot locked up, right? Not if the Great Whisperer has anything to say about it. In recent months, a whispering campaign has spread in Washington suggesting that Rubio may look good on paper, but he cannot “pass vet” for the vice presidential nomination. The whispers became more audible last October following a hit piece by Washington Post reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia, who accused Rubio of deliberately “embellishing” his family history by saying that his parents arrived in the United States after Castro took power when they, in fact, arrived during the Batista years. (I pointed out at the time that the story offered zero evidence that Rubio intentionally misled anyone).

Then in February came the revelation that when Rubio was 8 years old and living in Las Vegas, his family was baptized into the Church of Latter-day Saints and attended a Mormon church for a few years before returning to Catholicism. Rubio’s detractors pounced, ridiculously arguing that this disqualifies him from serving as Romney’s running mate, because conservatives would never accept an “all Mormon ticket.”

Rubio also faces the lingering inquiry by the Florida Commission on Ethics into a 2010 complaint that he misspent campaign contributions and abused his perch as Florida House speaker to gain a teaching position at Florida International University. Rubio calls the charges “baseless” and politically motivated and recently demanded the commission close out its investigation.

…

The Post’s Chris Cillizza writes, “We hear whispers that his time in the state legislature could be mined by a good opposition researcher.” And this month, the National Journal downgraded Rubio’s position on its vice presidential power rankings because, it claimed, Rubio “skated into office without much of his past being vetted in the media. That would change in a hurry if he’s tapped for the vice presidency, and coming four years after Sarah Palin had such trouble adjusting to harsh scrutiny, that’s a very real concern for some Republicans. After all, Tallahassee has its own secrets.”

I quote the oracle Rush: they tell you whom they fear. They fear Sarah, they feared Herman Cain, and they fear the hell out of Marco Rubio. Like weasels, you never want to corner a Democrat: when threatened, they get really nasty.

Very, very wrong:

Time magazine’s March 5 issue, hitting newsstands Friday, carries the coverline: “Yo Decido. Why Latinos will pick the next President.”

“For the first time in our history, we have a Spanish sentence as our cover line,” Rick Stengel wrote in his editor’s note.

The cover, illustrating Michael Scherer’s story about how Latino voters in Arizona could impact the 2012 presidential election, features the faces of 20 people readers would assume are Latinos.

But at least one of them is not. Michael Schennum, who appears on the cover photo in the top row, half hidden by the letter “M” in Time’s iconic logo, says he is half-White, half-Chinese–and definitely not Latino.

Schennum, a staff photographer at the Arizona Republic, was one of more than 150 “Latino” voters photographed by Time photographer Marco Grob in Phoenix earlier this month. But according to Schennum, neither Grob nor Time ever told him the subject of the shoot.

“They never told me what it was for or [asked] if I was Latino,” Schenum wrote in his Facebook page…

Yeah, but he looks Latino, which was the point, right? I mean, who would know? Besides, you could do this with almost any demographic. Why not a cover from 2000 featuring only Floridians? “We decide, if we could only figure out these darn ballots!” Or a 2004 cover with pictures of me and Aggie (and people like us who voted Democrat in 2000, but Republican in ’04 and ever since)? The cover line: “We decided for you: Bush again. Ha-ha! Suck on that.”

Upside-down, distorted, creepy

Two Dutch journalists will stand trial in Germany for allegedly invading the privacy of the escaped Nazi war criminal whom they helped expose.

Journalists Jelle Visser and Jan Ponsen are to report on Thursday morning to the courthouse in Eschweiler, a sleepy border town in western Germany. They will have to answer charges that they had violated the privacy and trust of Heinrich Boere, a Dutch Waffen-SS assassin.

The journalists for the investigative show Een Vandaag secretly filmed Boere in September 2009 at his home in Eschweiler, where he was also born. A German court sentenced Boere in March 2010 to life imprisonment for his wartime crimes.

He filed a complaint against the journalists for violation of privacy from prison. The investigation into the journalists’ actions began that year.

German authorities began preparing an indictment against Boere in 2008. The Dutch government repeatedly sought Boere’s extradition since the 1980s, to no avail.

“This case is ridiculous,” Visser told The Jerusalem Post. “The German authorities took more than 60 years to prosecute Boere, but they took less than two years to prosecute the reporters who filmed him at large.”

If convicted, the journalists face up to three years in jail.

Accompanying the journalists will be representatives of the journalist unions of the Netherlands and Germany, as well as family members of people whom Boere had murdered.

One of them is the daughter of Fritz Bicknese, a pharmacist and father of 12. Boere executed him near Breda in July 1944. Also present will be Anny Schröder-Schilte and her sister. Her father hid people wanted by the Germans and their collaborators in his home until Boere reported him to the Nazis. Mr. Schilte, father of five, died in a German concentration camp.

“I was relieved to see the broadcast,” Anny Schröder- Schilte told the Post. “Finally the person who killed my father had a face. I knew who had done it. I was 12 when it happened and it all happened very fast. It is unbelievable that he [Boere] dares file complaints after what he did.”

“The judge in this case will need to balance the public’s best interests with those of the individual,” said Esther Voet, deputy director of CIDI, Holland’s watchdog on anti-Semitism, and former editor-in-chief of the country’s Jewish journal, NIW. “The public’s interest here clearly outweighs the individual’s.”

Along with Boere’s extradition, the Netherlands is also seeking that of Klaas Carel Faber, another convicted Dutch Nazi who fed to Germany. Faber is still at large.

Learn more about how Germany protects her Nazis here and here.

Let’s have a contest! Which European country is the creepiest? Is it Norway for driving their Jews out and complaining that they are losing their Jewish population? Is it Germany for prosecuting journalists who point out the ugly fact that Germany was hiding and protecting the vicious animals they nurtured? Or do you have a different idea? How about the Austrians, who pretend that they had nothing to do with any of it? Gosh, there are so many worthy contenders, it’s tough to decide.

Write in with your answer and the logic behind it. The best entry wins something. Right, BTL?

- Aggie

I’ve always said that Republicans should be able to wrap up the Latin vote. If immigrants, legal and illegal, really want to build better lives for themselves, who represents that better, liberals or conservatives? If, rather, immigrants (illegal) just want to bend and break the rules and get all the free [bleep] they can get away with, we all know who caters to that.

Anyhow, Jeb Bush agrees with me:

Although Democrats hold the edge, Republicans have an opportunity. We also have a record of winning Hispanic voters in certain statewide and national elections. Here are four suggestions on how Republican candidates can regain momentum with the most powerful swing voters.

First, we need to recognize this is not a monochromatic community but, rather, a deeply diverse one. Hispanics in this country include Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and many others. Some came here 50 years ago to make a better life; others came last year. Some have lots of education, some have none. The traditional Republican emphasis on the importance of the individual has never been more relevant.

…

Like all voters, Hispanics respond to candidates who show respect and understanding for their experiences.

Second, we should echo the aspirations of these voters. The American immigrant experience is the most aspirational story ever told. Immigrants left all that was familiar to them to come here and make a better life for their families. That they believe this is possible only in America is the best expression of American exceptionalism I know. And on this score, Republicans have a winning message and record as the party of the entrepreneur. We are the party of the family business, and the family business is the economic heart of Hispanic communities.

Third, we should press for an overhaul of our education system. Republicans have the field to themselves on this issue. Teachers unions and education bureaucrats have blocked Democrats from serious reform — it will happen only with Republican political leadership. But we have to move beyond simplistic plans to “get rid of the Department of Education” and focus on substantive, broad-based reform that includes school choice, robust accountability for underperforming schools and the elimination of social promotion, in which kids are passed along without mastering grade-level skills. Such improvements, it was noted in 2009, plus efforts to embrace digital learning, helped Hispanic students in Florida lead the nation among their peers. And Hispanic voters, who often feel their children are trapped in failing schools, notice.

Finally, we need to think of immigration reform as an economic issue, not just a border security issue. Numerous polls show that Hispanics agree with Republicans on the necessity of a secure border and enforceable and fair immigration laws to reduce illegal immigration and strengthen legal immigration.

Hispanics recognize that Democrats have failed to deliver on immigration reform, having chosen to spend their political capital on other priorities.

Republicans should reengage on this issue and reframe it. Start by recognizing that new Americans strengthen our economy. We need more people to come to this country, ready to work and to contribute their creativity to our economy. U.S. immigration policies should reflect that principle. Just as Republicans believe in free trade of goods, we should support the freer flow of human talent.

Let’s clear a couple of things up. First, as should be clear, when we use the word “immigrants”, we mean Hispanic immigrants. And when we use the word “immigrants”, we have to be clear whether we mean legal or illegal. There’s a difference. Americans, be they first generation or Mayflower descendants, believe in fairness and the rule of law. More than maybe anything else, that’s what we admire about ourselves and attracts others here.

So, when we read about people breaking our laws to get here (or stay here past their invited time), obtaining fraudulent IDs to gain access to work or benefits they’re not entitled to, live apart from American society rather than join in it (often by necessity of their illegal status), wiring money to their native countries instead of investing and spending it here, only to drop us like a hot potato when the economic or legal climate grows hostile, we are a little reluctant to offer perks like in-state tuition rates and automatic citizenship to parents of so-called “anchor babies”. It’s not fair—not to any American citizen, least of all to a recently naturalized one from a Hispanic country who followed the rules.

The illegal alien may argue that it’s not fair to him that he has had to live the life of a second-class citizen, and he may have a point. Of course, that’s the path he chose, and his second-class life is first-class with extra leg room and complimentary champagne compared to the life he left behind—else why would he choose to stay here?

But at least we agree that there has to be an accommodation based on fairness. We’ve tried amnesties, even last chance, this time we mean it, seriously, amnesties—but they don’t work. Ultimately, what will work will have to be based on fairness—and deterrence.

But if Republicans argue that their future and the future of immigrants are inextricably tied, and that fairness is inextricably tied to opportunity, they may be able to close the sale. The future of our country depends on it.

From New Mexico, brought to us by The Daily Caller

A Democratic state legislator in New Mexico lashed out at a Republican colleague, attacking her as acting as a minion of the state’s Republican governor, Susana Martinez, and referring to the governor in questionable terms.

Calling Martinez “the Mexican,” Democratic state Rep. Sheryl Williams Stapleton reportedly shouted at Republican state Rep. Nora Espinoza.

The source of the dispute was an investigative news report that suggested Stapleton had behaved unethically. The piece aired on KRQE-TV in October, reporting that “for years, Stapleton did not take leave from her job as an administrator at the Albuquerque Public Schools system and received pay while attending legislative sessions.” Espinoza commented in the report.

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez and state Rep. Sheryl Williams Stapleton

What a country!

- Aggie

More jobs saved or created by the Obama administration!

A liberal organizer told the Daily Caller on Thursday afternoon that he paid some Hispanics to attend “Occupy DC” protests happening in the nation’s capital.

TheDC attended the protest event, an expansion of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement that began in New York City. Some aspects of the protest, it turned out, are more Astroturf than grassroots.

One group of about ten Hispanic protesters marched behind a Caucasian individual from the DC Tenants Advocacy Coalition, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting rent control in Washington, D.C.

Asked why they were there, some Hispanic protesters holding up English protest signs could not articulate what their signs said.

…

TheDC asked that organizer whether he was paying the group to attend the protest, and he conceded that some protesters “aren’t” volunteers.

The giveaway: some of the signs read “Yo Quiero Taco Bell.”

Lubavitcher Latinos?

In 1995, Demetrio Valdez, his wife, Olive, and some of their neighbors in Conejos County, Colorado, started a kosher food co-op.

“We wanted to harvest our own meat, but we couldn’t get a good price for it, so we decided to do it kosher to make more money,” said Valdez, 64, who has raised cattle all his life.

The co-op members, all non-Jews, flew in a rabbi from New York to instruct them in kosher slaughter. To Valdez’s surprise, many of the practices introduced by the rabbi were ones that Valdez, a Catholic, had grown up with and maintained on his ranch.

“I saw that we do a lot of things the same,” he recalled. “The rabbi was surprised, too.”

…

Since childhood he had heard rumors that his family had Jewish ancestors dating back to colonial New Spain when, as historical records show, a good number of Converso Jews – Jews and their descendants forcibly converted during the Spanish Inquisition – came to the New World. Many of the Conversos who had made the trek over had become Catholics in name only. They were Crypto Jews who in traveling across the Atlantic were attempting to flee the Inquisition.

“My parents never spoke about it, but everyone knew there was something there,” said Valdez.

Now a new study in the Journal of Human Genetics has turned up fresh scientific evidence that the Spanish Americans of the Southwest must have had some Jewish forbears.

…

The study found “observable Sephardic ancestry” in both communities and calculated Jewish ancestry among the Lojanos at about 5 to 10 percent and among the Spanish Americans, also called Hispanos, at about 1 to 5 percent.

“This study provides firmer evidence for what people have been conjecturing for up to 20 years now,” said the study’s director, Dr. Harry Ostrer, director of genetics and genomic testing at Montefiore Hospital of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

Over the past several decades, scholars have been pursuing stories like Valdez’s and claim to have found remnants of Crypto-Jewish practices in communities in the US Southwest and Latin America. Some Hispanos and Latin Americans also have come forward to claim a Crypto-Jewish past, with a small number embracing a Jewish identity outright.

“The ancestry is really dispersed throughout the communities,” Ostrer said of his findings, which also concluded that along the maternal line, Native American ancestry is as high as 30 to 40 percent.

…

As the historical hypothesis goes, once the Inquisition arrived in the New World, Crypto Jews pushed on to the remote corners of the Spanish empire, such as New Mexico and Colorado, to escape the Church’s reach. The San Luis Valley and Loja – both located in the farthest corners of what were once Spanish holdings – would therefore be expected to have discernible Jewish ancestry.

…

Genetic mutations viewed as predominantly Jewish for a number of diseases, like breast cancer or Bloom’s syndrome, were popping up at a notable rate among Hispanos.

A mutation for breast cancer called 185 del AG that is much more common among Ashkenazi Jews than other populations, for example, turns out to be prevalent among Hispanos as well. According to Dr. Paul Duncan, a medical oncologist in private practice in Albuquerque, N.M., only his Hispano and Ashkenazi Jewish patients carry the mutation.

…

In Loja, genetic traces of ancestry are even more apparent. Scattered across the remote villages of the province are nearly 100 people with Laron syndrome, which is marked by a severe short stature. When Dr. Jaime Guevara-Aguirre, a diabetes specialist based in Quito, Ecuador, who collaborated with Ostrer on his study, first began treating this group in 1987, the referring physician told him that legend had it that these people all descended from the same Sephardic Jew who had come over with the explorers.

In 1992 and 1993, scientists discovered that all Lojanos with Laron’s carried the same mutation and shared it with one person in Israel and nine others in Latin America.

“When I saw this I thought there is a strong possibility that the story was true,” said Guevara-Aguirre, because “what are the chances that in the billions of nucleotides the same mutation would happen twice at random? But Harry’s study confirms it for the first time.”

Ostrer’s study stands out from previous studies in its scope. It is the first time that any researcher has looked beyond particular disease mutations or shared individual genetic markers to view the entire genome for large chunks of DNA that indicate shared ancestry.

“Statistically it is very difficult to see it any other way” other than that “these people [in Ostrer’s study] were descendant from Conversos,” agreed Duncan.

Mel Brooks, right again:

They may be small, shriveled fruit—but we can just juice ‘em:

Hispanics now make up the largest group of children living in poverty, the first time in U.S. history that poor white kids have been outnumbered by poor children of another race or ethnicity, according to a new study.

In a report released Wednesday, the Pew Hispanic Center said that 6.1 million Hispanic children are poor, compared with 5 million non-Hispanic white children and 4.4 million black children. Pew said Hispanic poverty numbers have soared because of the impact of the recession on the growing number of Latinos.

Growing number, huh? I guess they’re taking welfare Americans won’t take.

If I were a liberal, I’d say since they’d be in poverty somewhere, might as well be here!

I do think that at a certain point, you’ve lost enough money:

The wealth gap in the United States has grown wider in the wake of the Great Recession, with black and Hispanic American households faring much worse than white households, according to a study published Tuesday.

The study, from 2009 data compiled by the Pew Research Center, found the median wealth of white households was 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households.

Household wealth is defined as the sum of a family’s assets minus the sum of its debts. The study defines assets as homes, cars, savings and financial investments, while debts include mortgages, auto loans and credit card debt, among other things.

Based on data from the Census Bureau, the study highlights how blacks and Hispanics have been disproportionately affected by the collapse of the housing market, the financial crisis and the recession that marked the period from 2005 to 2009.

It found that the wealth gap between white households and their black or Hispanic counterparts was the widest it has been since the government began publishing such data by ethnicity in 1984.

With sympathy toward my white and black brothers and sisters, what happened to my Latino amigos? You guys got hammered!

Here’s a guess:

In addition, the downturn in the housing market was most severe in states with large populations of Hispanics and Asians, including California, Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Michigan, according to the study.

And to think that Obama’s first signature initiative was to intervene in foreclosures to “stabilize” the housing market. Latinos are saying no mas.

PS: It should also be clear that no one’s getting rich in this economy. Just because minorities have been singled out for disproportionately harsh treatment in ObamAmerica doesn’t mean everyone isn’t suffering. He is, truly, bringing us together.

Obviously, there’s much to admire about this guy. But I can’t help focusing on a couple of small details:

Jose Antonio Vargas has written many pieces that have put him in the spotlight – including ones on the Virginia Tech shooting that made him a Pulitzer Prize winner. But perhaps his biggest piece yet may be the one that could put him in the most precarious position – his New York Times Magazine piece in which he explains and documents his life as an illegal immigrant.

“I’m done running. I’m exhausted. I don’t want that life anymore,” he writes in the personal essay. “So I’ve decided to come forward, own up to what I’ve done, and tell my story to the best of my recollection. I’ve reached out to former bosses and employers and apologized for misleading them — a mix of humiliation and liberation coming with each disclosure.”

…

“I don’t know what the consequences will be of telling my story,” he writes.Vargas is telling his story as he ramps up an effort with the advocacy group he founded called Define American, which says “It’s time to have a real conversation about immigration in our country.”

Just so we’re clear: I’ll listen to anything you have to say about immigration; I’ll even probably agree. But I do have a tendency to grow a little deaf when you talk about illegal immigration. I didn’t hear the word “illegal” in what he wrote above, for example.

Vargas, who came from the Philippines when he was 12-years-old, has spent most of his life flying under the radar: Using false documents and Social Security numbers to try to make it by. He even once gave the Secret Service an illegally obtained Social Security number so he could attend a White House dinner.

I don’t know whether we should deport him yesterday for violating the president’s security—or give him a medal for demonstrating a potential weakness.

But if we’re going to celebrate the contributions of Spanish-speaking illegal immigrants, may I nominate one?

An illegal immigrant awaiting a deportation ruling has been charged with killing a nun and critically injuring two others in a drunken driving crash that has sparked criticism of how immigration enforcement is handled.

…

Twenty-three-year-old Carlos Martinelly Montano, who police say is illegally in the country, is charged with drunken driving, involuntary manslaughter and felony driving on a revoked license after the accident on Sunday in Virginia’s Prince William County.

Montano’s car crossed a median Sunday morning when it hit the car carrying three nuns, police said.

An illegal Hispanic causing a fatal, alcohol-related traffic accident: what are the odds?

A study from the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center shows that Hispanics involved in car crashes were two-and-a-half times more likely to be drunk than white drivers and three times more likely to be drunk than black drivers.

Hispanics also account for 18 percent of drunken-driving arrests, while making up less than 7 percent of the state’s population. Drunken driving is also the number one killer of young Hispanic men in North Carolina.

But here I am filibustering a conversation. Go ahead, you were saying…?

Not Obama, you racist leftie—Marco Rubio:

“Don’t forget who he is. Marco Rubio was raised in Las Vegas, Nevada. He is from Las Vegas, went to high school there. His cousin serves in the Nevada State Legislature. Marco Rubio has to understand who he is and who he represents. He doesn’t represent the tea party. He represents the state of Florida, the third largest populated state in the country, [that] has all kind of problems and he has to recognize that.”

Marco Rubio was just elected six months ago—running as a conservative! Doesn’t Reid think the voters of Florida (yes, I know this is Florida we’re talking about) knew whom they elected?

But Reid has been a race-baiter going way back:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is taking heat after he told a crowd of supporters Tuesday that he doesn’t know “how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican.”

Reid’s comments were quickly criticized Wednesday by one of the GOP’s rising stars — Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles who is running for U.S. Senate in Florida.

In an interview with Fox News, Rubio called Reid’s remarks “outrageous” and “ridiculous” and said “this kind of outrageous speech in politics is continuing to spread.”

“You know, Americans of Hispanic descent, you know what the strongest issue there is? That is economic empowerment, upward mobility,” Rubio said. “There’s only one economic system in the world that that’s possible in, time and again, and that’s the American free enterprise system.

“And the reason why Americans of Hispanic descent should be Republicans is because the Democratic leadership is trying to dismantle the American free enterprise system,” he continued.

“The point is he’s wrong.”

Of course, Reid is just following in the noble tradition of the Grand Kleagle himself, Harry Byrd (D-WV)