Thursday, November 24, 2016



DOJ fines Denver Sheriff Dept. for excluding noncitizens when hiring

Absurd

The Denver Sheriff Department will accept a penalty from the Department of Justice after a federal probe found it wrongly made U.S. citizenship a job requirement during a recent hiring spree.

The sheriff's department — the biggest sheriff's office in Colorado — will pay a $10,000 fine after it required applications for deputy sheriff jobs to be U.S. citizens when hiring from the beginning of 2015 through March 2016. The department went on a hiring spree of 200 deputies as part of its ongoing reform.

The department will also have to go through old applications to find applicants who were eliminated because of their citizenship status and reconsider them for future jobs.

The Justice Department made the announcement on Monday, saying the sheriff's department violated the Immigration and Nationality Act without having an exemption.

As part of the settlement with the federal government, the Denver sheriff's department will also have to train its human resources staff on the Immigration and Nationality Act's anti-discrimination provisions. It will also review its policies to make sure they are in compliance with those provisions.

"Eliminating this unlawful citizenship requirement will help ensure that the Denver Sheriff Department hires the best and most qualified individuals to protect and serve. The entire community will benefit from these reforms," said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, in a statement.

The Denver Sheriff Department is a different entity than the Denver Police Department, which received more than $130,000 from the DOJ last year for its police body-worn camera program.

SOURCE





Immigration Skyrockets From Countries With Very Different Cultures

Since the political elites have given up any attempt to assimilate immigrants to American culture, the cultural views immigrants bring to the U.S. are of primary importance.

These immigrants will bring the cultural values and views they have to the U.S. and try to impose those views on the American polity.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest surge in immigration population are from countries that do not share too many of the classical American political values.

No one will be surprised that social views in traditional societies differ from those in the post-industrial West, but the degree of divergence can be striking. Immigration is surging from countries where that divergence is especially large.

For example, six of the ten countries with the highest growth of U.S. foreign born population since 2000 are Nigeria, Egypt, Iraq, India, Pakistan, and Ghana.

Using the World Values Series to test various to illustrate the differences in cultural values between the United States and the “surging” countries, the results are striking.

In the question of “When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than a woman;” the U.S. answer was “yes” 5% of the time. In the six immigration surging countries, the “yes answer garnered between 49% and 84%.

More of these questions can be viewed here.

There are some factors at work which may serve to mitigate these cultural values clashes.  For example, immigrants are usually self-selected and may have cultural views closer to the mainstream in the U.S. than their home countries.  In addition, these self-selected immigrants may be more susceptible to assimilation. However, no one knows how long and to what extent cultural differences will persistent among immigrants or the extent to which these difference will cause social friction

SOURCE





Killing the Messengers: The Democratic Party Embarks on Path of Personal Destruction

Up until last week, I had always thought that Adolf Hitler was the worst person who ever lived. Well, the Fuhrer was apparently less of a menace to world peace and our common humanity than one Stephen K. Bannon, US President-elect Donald Trump's newly appointed chief strategist and senior adviser.

Indeed, based on the screaming headlines of hyperventilating mainstream news organizations, the incoming Trump administration will be staffed by a rogues gallery of misogynists, homophobes and the occasional anti-Semite.

Instead of developing a set of new messages and a cadre of dynamic young messengers to expand the Democratic Party tent to include not only the very rich and very poor, the action plan to reclaim the White House and both houses of Congress is to dig up every single errant thought ever expressed at any point that portrays team Trump as a gang of ultra-nationalist bigots.

However, outraged Democrats, in a tizzy over Hillary Clinton's shocking and resounding defeat, are too busy stocking up their bomb shelters to be bothered by a couple of inconvenient truths about the former head of Breitbart News.

Not only is Bannon unapologetically pro-Israel, as evidenced in his own writings and those of others who have contributed to Breitbart,  the man who would be Lucifer has actually sought to give voice to traditionally underrepresented Conservative voices from the American Jewish, Asian and Latino communities.

Regarding Senator Jeff Sessions, a few moth worn quotes devoid of all context have transformed the man who desegregated schools and took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama into a major threat to civil rights in the United States, should he in fact become Attorney General.

And when Vice President-elect Mike Pence was recently booed by an audience while attending the diversity-celebrating hit musical Hamilton, it evidently didn't dawn on the miffed theater goers that 'diversity' and its Constitutional manifestation, free speech, doesn't only apply to the right to believe that you're a perpetual victim of white privilege.

The 'Hamilton' cast was offended by the mere sight of Pence in their midst? Too bad: freedom of expression is utterly meaningless without the right to offend. Harassing him was both infantile and a direct frontal assault on the Vice President-elect's right to hold views that are contrary to those of the Broadway glitterati.

Yet America's cultural elite and its front, the Progressive Movement of the Democratic Party, are mad as hell and in no mood to be lectured on the finer points of Constitutional law.

Progressives simply cannot wrap their admittedly big brains around one earthshattering idea: not every American citizen is enthralled by utopian concepts of social, racial, economic and environmental justice.

On November 8th, the left-wing statist ideology was poked, prodded and otherwise examined by tens of millions of American voters. In the ultimate marketplace, the marketplace of ideas, Progressivism was deemed to be rotten to the core, and subsequently discarded into the ashbin of recent American political history.

Curiously, the Democratic Party, instead of engaging in a protracted and meaningful period of reflection as to how the hell Donald Trump managed to derail the coronation of Hillary Rodham Clinton, has embarked on a personality killing spree, attacking anyone currently or potentially associated with the incoming administration.

Why so tense, Dems?

Because utopian thinkers aren't in the least bit interested in lively public policy discourse. Their goals are much more grandiose: uniformity of thought, preferably of the politically correct variety.

What kind of world do Bernie Sanders, Susan Sarandon and the cast of 'Hamilton' want us to live in anyway? Not sure. But history leaves clues, and it's replete with instances in which utopianism trumped crude nationalism:

In France, revolutionaries rallied under the utopian banner of 'Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.' Within a few short years, their revolution had morphed into the Reign of Terror.

In Russia, the Bolsheviks came to power under the slogan 'Land, peace, and bread.' Within just five years, Lenin had insured a smooth transition from tsarist dictatorship to Soviet dictatorship.

At its core, utopianism is little more than thinly veiled intolerance, sprinkled with fairy dust to appeal to the intellectually vulnerable.

On November 8th, the people spoke, yet Progressives refuse to hear. This damn the torpedoes attitude will ultimately destroy the Democratic coalition, and turn it into a truncated, European-style socialist fringe party, utterly inconsequential but morally pristine.

SOURCE





National Security Adviser Designate: 'Islam Is a Political Ideology,' Not Many 'People Screaming Jesus Christ With Hatchets'

Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Michael T. Flynn, a registered Democrat who has been offered the position of National Security Adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, believes “Islam is a political ideology” that veils itself as a religion, and is unique in that sense because he does not “see a lot of people screaming Jesus Christ with hatchets” or guns “shooting up clubs” or “literally axing families on a train.”

As for Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, Lt. Gen. Flynn said, “We have to deal with Russia” and “and figure out ways to work with them” particularly because we have more than “5,000 of our own troops there in Iraq trying to fight the rise of ISIS.”

In a speech before the Dallas, Texas chapter of ACT! For America in August, Lt. Gen. Flynn said,  “Islam is a political ideology, it is a political ideology. It definitely hides behind this notion of it being a religion.”

“And I have a very, very tough time because I don’t see a lot of people screaming ‘Jesus Christ’ with hatchets or machetes or rifles shooting up clubs or hatcheting, literally axing families on a train,” said Flynn.

“Or like they just killed a couple of police officers with a machete,” he said.  “I mean, it’s unbelievable.  So we have a problem.”

“It’s like cancer,” said Flynn in reference to radical Islam.  “I’ve gone through cancer in my own life. And so it’s like cancer, and it’s like a malignant cancer, though in this case that has metastasized.”

He continued, “It’s like I just said in the number of attacks in 22 countries in just the last 45 days. When I look back over the last 10 years or 15 years of my life and the things that I’ve seen and the things that I’ve witnessed against this very vicious threat.”

On MSNBC Live on Nov. 2, host Stephanie Ruhle asked Flynn, “When I think about Vladimir Putin, and what a dangerous man he is, I ask you, how would you describe Vladimir Putin in one word?”

Flynn answered, “You know something, Stephanie, here we just cut a deal. The United States of America just cut a deal with Russia -- with Russia’s direct involvement -- to give the leading state sponsor of terrorism in Iran a nuclear weapon, to put them on a path to a nuclear weapon.”

“So, if Russia is so bad, why is it that our government, our current government right now, and Hillary Clinton was over there trying to do Russian reset?” said Flynn.

Ruhle replied, “They would argue that that deal puts a check in place so they don’t do it.” Flynn then said, “They just gave the leading state sponsor of terrorism -- their national, Iran’s national anthem is ‘Death to America.’ They have said they are going to annihilate the state of Israel. I mean, come on.”

“And so this is our current government,” said Flynn. “Hillary Clinton was definitely behind and influencing the Iranian nuclear deal when she was the Secretary of State. So here the U.S. is working with Russia to give Iran all of this nice stuff , $150 billion dollars.”

He continued, “We’re working with them right now to try to resolve the issue in the Middle East. So all Donald Trump is saying is, ‘Hey look, let’s find some common ground with the Russians, but you know what, let’s have mutual respect.’”

Ruhle then asked how Flynn could respect Putin, “someone who kills journalists, who’s invaded Crimea. Is that a man you respect?”

Flynn replied, “Stop it with that kind of stuff…. How you’re describing a leader in the world that is, actually that we have to deal with, we’re dealing with him right now. We have to deal with Russia.”

“We have to deal with Russia,” he said. “We cannot make Russia an enemy. Russia is a nation that is deeply involved in the Middle East. Right now, the Middle East is totally unstable. We have over 5,000 of our own troops there in Iraq trying to fight the rise of ISIS.”

“Russia’s directly involved,” he said. “So we have to figure out ways to work with them instead of making them an antagonist.”

Lt. Gen. (ret.) Michael T. Flynn is President-elect Trump’s designated National Security Adviser, according to The New York Times and numerous other media, citing an unnamed top official on the Trump transition team.

Flynn, 57, is from Rhode Island. He grew up in a family of nine. He and his wife, Lori Flynn, have been married for 30-plus years. They have two sons and several grandchildren. Flynn served in the U.S. Army from 1981 to 2014 and served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Uphold Democracy and Operation Urgent Fury.

Lt. Gen. (ret.) Flynn was the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from July 2012 to August 2014. His designated position in the Trump administration does not require Senate confirmation.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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