Friday, September 11, 2015
Movie Listings for the Fall Season and Beyond
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
Film Listings for the Fall Season and Beyond
Thursday, July 2, 2015
Police must improve on child protection, inspection finds
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Public Affairs Roundtable: The path to victory in 2016 [Extended]
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Pulse of the Peninsula: Clinton sets out progressive bonafides
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
2014 Year in review
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
2014 Year in review
Sunday, December 21, 2014
When Broadway Musicals Were Dark And Subversive
Friday, November 14, 2014
The National War Memorial
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Mystar kicks off children's foundation
Saturday, August 30, 2014
Are You Really Surprised Keira Knightley Posed Topless?
Friday, January 31, 2014
The US Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Young Readers' Edition: Social networks embrace the dark side of human kind
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Ugly Appetite for Online Suicide
Friday, October 11, 2013
Report Paints Fracking's Big Picture Ahead Of Decision On Virginia National Forest
Thursday, July 25, 2013
US should be proud of Latino immigration, Obama says
President Barack Obama's 2014 campaign team is spotlighting his emotional pitch to Latino voters, saying "our increasing Latino population should be a source of pride and strength."
The Thursday tweet by Organizing For America showcased Obama's statement from an interview with the Spanish-language Telemundo network.
"We know that 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, there are going to be more people of Latino heritage here in the United States, and that should be a source of pride and a source of strength," he told Telemundo's Denver anchor, Maria Rozmán.
The interview was one of four that Obama did July 16 with Spanish-language TV shows to help build support for the controversial immigration rewrite that would double immigration to add 46 million immigrants to the country by 2033.
The praise for large-scale Latino immigration is the flip-side of Obama's repeated suggestions that GOP opposition to low-skill immigration shows disrespect for Latinos and Latino culture.
That angle is also highlighted by amnesty-supporting pollsters. "Only 29 percent of Latinos felt the Republican Party ' respects the Latino community' while 67 percent said they did not," according to a July survey by Latino Decisions.
Obama's praise for the increased diversity caused by Latino migration reflects many progressives' preference for creating cultural and social variety in place of the broadly-held social consensus that has evolved in many mostly-white suburban and rural communities.
But it also illustrates Democrats' hard-headed efforts to gain politically from the political and economic conflict spurred by the arrival of tens of millions of low-skill and poor Hispanics since 1965.
In general, Democrats have offered to give immigrant Latinos government aid, in the correct expectation they will get their votes in legislative and presidential elections. In 2012, for example, Obama won 71 percent of the Latinos' vote, which comprised 8.4 percent of the electorate.
The GOP's best performance with Latinos came in 2004, when incumbent President George W. Bush won 40 percent during an housing bubble that temporarily provided jobs and houses to many blue-collar Latinos in the southern states.
In one of his July 16 interviews, Obama noted the gradual demographic shift, and also the GOP's growing concern over its political consequences.
"I think some [GOP members] in the House who believe that immigration will encourage further demographic changes - [believe] that may not be good for them politically," he told an interviewer from KXTX, a Telemundo affiliate in Fort Worth, Texas.
"Many of their constituents are suspicious of this, suspicious of what immigration might mean for their political futures in some cases," he added.
In repeated speeches and statements, Obama has lauded what he says is Latinos' contribution to the United States.
So far, that contribution has been modest, because many Latino immigrants and natives are low-skilled and lack good English.
For example, Obama has established a mini-amnesty for foreigners who were brought into the country as children. Many have attended government schools for a decade, and still many lack basic skills.
A report by the Migration Policy Institute, which generally favors Latino immigration, said the amnesty could extend to 800,000 K-12 students, plus 140,000 students enrolled in two-year or four-year colleges, 80,000 Latinos with a college degree and 740,000 Latinos who have a high-school education or who dropped out of high-school.
"We've been able to provide help through deferred action for young people and students - the "Dreamers" - who I've had a chance to meet with," Obama said in an interview with a Univision TV station, WXTV-Univision 41, with audiences in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
"They're just incredible young people and great assets to the United States," he said.
GOP leaders are also trying to demonstrate respect for Latinos and Latino culture. Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, has established new deputies to aid outreach to Latino voters.
Some GOP leaders, including Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, say that an immigration rewrite could help boost GOP support among Latinos, and also praise Latinos' culture.
"I live in Miami where half the people in my vibrant beautiful place were born outside the United States," he said at a June 1 appearance at the Bipartisan Policy Center. "When I finally make it home, normally on a Friday afternoon, I spend the night with my ... [Mexican-born] wife who was born outside the United States," he said.
"That [diversity] is the unique American experience that I have had the blessing, truly a blessing, to be able to experience in a way that adds a tremendous amount of vitality to my life," he said.
But Bush also suggested that many Hispanic immigrants won't ever vote GOP. "My hope is ... they will not apply for citizenship... They want to come out of the shadows and be treated with dignity and respect, they don't necessarily want to be citizens," he said.
In contrast, other GOP leaders, such as Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, argue that the GOP can gain more votes from lower-income Americans - white, Latino and African-American - by spurring wage growth via a slowdown in immigration. That appeal to economic self-interest would demonstrate respect for immigrant Latinos by treating them identically to native-born Americans, muting ethnic appeals by Obama and his allies, say people in this GOP wing.
"The response should be to treat Americans of Latin background as Americans," said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks to reduce immigration below its current level of 1 million.
"Their private ethnic interests should be respected, just as anyone else's is - if they want to have 15th birthday parties for their daughters, that's fine - but they need to be addressed as Americans because that's what they are," he said.
"Obama's comment is more like ethnic triumphalism," said Krikorian. "What he's saying is that American is better when it is different, and it will be improved by immigration."
Currently, immigration rules annually add 1 million immigrants per year, plus roughly 650,000 short-term and long-term non-farm guest-workers, despite a steady drop in wages and in the percentage of Americans with jobs. The Senate bill passed in late June would double the inflow to roughly 46 million immigrants by 2033, and boost the number of non-farm guest-workers to roughly 1 million per year.
Latino immigrants are varied, and include skilled and unskilled immigrants from very different countries, including Cuba, Colombia, El Salvador and Mexico.
Roughly 65 percent of the U.S. Latino population has ties with Mexico, and they tend to be the poorest group.
"The median annual personal earnings for Mexicans ages 16 and older were $20,000 in [2010]... the same as for U.S. Hispanics in total; the median earnings for the U.S. population were $29,000," said a June 2013 report by the Pew Research Hispanic Center, titled "Hispanics of Mexican Origin in the United States, 2011.
"An estimated 33.5 million Hispanics of Mexican origin resided in the United States in 2011... some 10 percent of Mexicans ages 25 and older - compared with 13 percent of all U.S. Hispanics and 29 percent among the entire U.S. population - have obtained at least a bachelor's degree," according to the Pew report.
"The share of Mexicans who live in poverty, 28 percent, is higher than the rate for the general U.S. population (16 percent) and slightly higher than the rate for Hispanics overall (26 percent)," it added.
The education level among the Latino illegal immigrants is even lower.
For example, roughly half the 11 million illegals in the United States don't speak English at all or well, according to the MPI.
If the Senate immigration rewrite becomes law, the 11 million would be allowed to live and work in the United States, and be placed on track to win U.S. citizenship.
The 11 million would cost taxpayers $11.3 trillion in federal services over the next 50 years, according to a May report by the Heritage Foundation.The massive bill would be partially offset by the 11 million's various tax payments, which would add up to only $1 trillion every decade.
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Iraqi refugee tries to repay welfare money after he becomes a success
In 2009, Sam Eisho walked into the Centrelink office at Maroubra and tried to give the staff a cheque for more than $18,000.
Told to line up at the end of the claims queue, he attempted to explain that he was there to pay back what he felt he owed the Australian Government.
The amount was equivalent to all the welfare payments he received between 1999 and 2001, when he first arrived here and before he started the construction company he's successfully built.
He'd come a long way since he was nearly killed at an Iraqi checkpoint, fleeing Saddam Hussein's regime.
Travelling into Kurdistan, the autonomous region which encompasses parts of Eastern Turkey and Northern Iraq - where Eisho is from - the guards decided they wanted his cash, a small amount of money he needed to complete the journey to see his family.
Enraged, he scrunched the notes - emblazoned with the face of the now-executed dictator - and threw them into the dirt at his feet.
He was led away and locked in a room. And if he had not seen a solider he knew from university, who pleaded for his life, Eisho is sure he would have been killed.
"They would give you a very hard time ... The north of Iraq was separate then," Eisho told Business Insider.
That was when he decided the leave. 11 days after marrying his wife in 1996, she and the civil engineer fled. He was 28 years old, and running from the country he was born in.
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After flying to Turkey, they travelled to Greece, at times hidden under furniture in the back of a truck, his wife nearly suffocating. And Eisho - who completed his Bachelor degree at the University of Mosul, spent three years making mattresses.
He came to Australia through legal channels. His uncle, a doctor already living here, was eventually able to sponsor him, and he arrived on the first day in May, 1999.
Since then Eisho, the Managing Director of SR Construction, has built a successful business. Directly, he employs more than 40 people, and has more than 100 sub-contractors, with offices in Sydney's Hillsdale and Ingleburn.
None of it, he says, would have been possible if was not for the support he received from the Australian Government when he got here. It was this debt that saw him standing in the Centrelink line in 2009, trying to explain that he wanted to pay back what he felt he owed.
"They said 'the line is there,' and I said 'no, I'm here to pay you," Eisho said.
"In 2008, 2009 my situation was perfect. I said, 'it's time to go and pay the country back.
"I could not have done anything without Australia's support."
Bureaucracy thwarted him. A cheque made out to the Collector of Public Money (pictured at the foot of this story) for $18,641.43 was returned with a letter suggesting Eisho donate the sum.
In the accompanying note, he had asked if his money could be put towards schools and hospitals.
Asylum seekers are never far removed from Australia's political rhetoric; processing of refugees is one of few issues where there are marked policy differences across the country's political spectrum.
Eisho arrived in Australia legally - it was Greece where he claimed asylum - though he did benefit from a social welfare system others are accused of wallowing in.
He is an exception to what is, by some, painted as a rule.
Eisho was able to secure a builder's licence after completing a TAFE course.
Finding work though, was harder. To make ends meet Eisho went to a group interview for a job at the Coles at the Eastgarden shopping centre, now a short walk from his office in Sydney's south.
Applicants were told to complete an aptitude test, and wait a few days until they were contacted. After the hiring manager saw his results, they said: "You start tomorrow."
The next day while he was on his lunch break, a contractor contacted him, after seeing his advertisement in the local newspaper.
"They called and said we have seen your ad in the Southern Courier.
"They said can you come now, and I said 'of course."
"I left Coles without even any notice, and they started giving me some work, like tiles here, doors there.
"I bought a Toyota Cressida for $500 with savings from Centrelink, me and my wife.
"And then I applied for a credit card from ANZ. That gave me $5000 ... to buy tools, to buy petrol. It was very tough anyway.
His aunt, who is based in the United States lent him $US25,000.
"She knew I was struggling with money."
He has since paid it back twice over. And as well as gifting the $18,000 Eisho has also, he said, donated around $60,000 to Hospitals, and his daughter's primary school.
While he will always feel indebted for the financial assistance that helped make him, Eisho said the main reason he gives so much, is the care his wife received when she gave birth, in Australia, to the couple's daughter - and the contrast to the health care system in his homeland.
"Here, they treat a human being like a human being."
Temar Boggs, American hero
On an ordinary summer afternoon in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, five-year-old Jocelyn Rojas entertained herself playing in her grandmother's front yard. With blonde hair, brown eyes, stylish glasses, and a courageous, radiant smile, Jocelyn is the picture of an adorable all-American girl.
A white man in his seventies approached her. He walked with a limp. Witnesses say he wore green shoes, green pants and a red-and-white striped shirt.
Preying on her innocence, he persuaded Jocelyn to accompany him. He offered to buy her some ice cream. She trusted him.
And just like that, they both vanished.
Jocelyn's family called the police. Authorities issued an Amber Alert signaling a serious child-abduction case.
"Horrible, horrible thoughts flashed through my mind," said Jocelyn's grandmother.
Monsters exist. In real life, they are much scarier than the imaginary horrors of science fiction.
Each year, low-life scumbags abduct about 58,000 unrelated children, primarily for sexual purposes, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Nearly half of these children are sexually assaulted.
Far too often, the abductors murder the children, hold them for ransom, or intend to keep them indefinitely.
"You see the Amber Alerts and you think, 'I feel for that family,'" said Jocelyn's grandmother. "But when you're in that situation ... it's horrible."
The Amber Alert galvanized the community. People of all ages joined in the search for Jocelyn.
Temar Boggs, a fifteen-year-old African American, was helping move an elderly woman's couch at a nearby apartment complex that evening when he learned of the ongoing search.
He and his friend Chris Garcia hopped on their bikes. About a half-mile from the apartment complex, Boggs spotted Jocelyn in a dark red car with an old white man behind the wheel.
Boggs knew they had little time to prevent a young child from becoming another heartbreaking story on the evening news.
He was not going to let that happen. The young men spotted Jocelyn and pursued the car for fifteen minutes.
"Every time we would go down the street, he would turn back around, and we'd go back and follow him," Boggs told WGAL.
"As soon as the guy started noticing that we were chasing him, he stopped at the end of the hill and let her out," Boggs recalled. "She ran to me and said that she needed her mom."
Boggs realizes that he might have saved Jocelyn's life. He sees it as "a blessing for me to make that happen." His proud mother remarked that Boggs is "learning what I tell him, to help others."
The VA's billion dollar boondoggle
Daily Caller News Foundation
A long-planned Veterans Affairs hospital being built in Denver, already hundreds of millions of dollars over its $604 million budget, has turned into a billion-dollar boondoggle for the agency.
The contractor, Kiewit-Turner, blames the VA for ignoring agreements to submit plans that can be built within budget and has asked a federal board overseeing civilian contract disputes to let the company walk away from the job.
Problems with the building emerged in January, when letters between the builder and the VA revealed the project to be running some $200 million over budget, with Kiewit-Turner blaming a pricey design that was only partially completed by the time it entered into the contract.
The two sides subsequently agreed - via a handwritten agreement - to build the hospital within the original budget, with the VA in charge of submitting a new, pared-down design reflecting a number of cost-saving measures.
But in a July 8 complaint to the Civilian Board of Contract Appeals, Kiewit-Turner said the VA submitted new plans that are even more expensive than the old ones.
"In fact, the VA has never provided Kiewit-Turner with a complete design for the Project that could be constructed anywhere close to the ECCA [estimated Cost of Construction at Award]," the complaint reads.
The new plans "were increasingly complex, including few cost reductions than expected, significantly increased the scope of work and made the budget problem worse rather than better," the complaint reads.
The company estimates it will cost over $1 billion to complete the new hospital.
"The VA continues to direct Kiewit-Turner to perform work in accordance with its purported 100% design while at the same time acknowledging ... that the VA's design greatly exceeds both the ECCA and the Ceiling Price and yet refusing to increase the Ceiling Price."
As a result, Kiewit-Turner said in its complaint, it would essentially be financing as much as $400 million of the VA's building if it were to follow the new design plans without further funding from Congress.
The company alleges that the VA is breaching its handwritten agreement and therefore the company is under no obligation to continue work.
The new hospital is meant to replace an existing but aging facility. Plans for it have been in the works since 1999.
"As a combat veteran and as a taxpayer, I couldn't be more embarrassed over what is happening with the construction of our hospital," Colorado Rep. Mike Coffman told the Denver Post. Coffman serves on the U.S. House Committee on Veterans' Affairs and the new building is being constructed in his district.
"Our veterans, who have made tremendous sacrifices on our behalf, deserve better than this," he's quoted as saying. "And the taxpayers, who are stuck with paying the bill, also deserve better than this."
In response to the company's complaint, Thaddeus Willoughby, a senior contracting officer with the VA, denied in a letter sent to the company in June that it breached the contract. Willoughby wrote that just because the cost is going to be higher doesn't mean Kiewit-Turner can walk away from the job.
"A contractor cannot refuse performance on the ground that performance would entail substantial additional expense not taken into account in its bid price," he wrote. "Receipt of subcontractor bids in excess of those anticipated by KT's allocation on this project is not a basis for an adjustment of the ceiling price. Moreover, none of KT's assertions form a sufficient basis for refusal to continue performance."
The Civilian Board of Contract Appeals will take up the matter at a future date.
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Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Lawsuit: Arizona college suspended student because she wanted English
A nursing student at Pima Community College (PCC) has filed a lawsuit claiming that she was illegally suspended after she complained that her classmates were speaking in Spanish and orally translating English to Spanish so excessively that she was failing to learn.
In early April, the student, Terri Bennett, formally requested a rule limiting classroom discussion to English. Nursing program director David Kutzler allegedly responded by called her a "bigot and a bitch," reports Courthouse News Service.
Kutzler allegedly charged that Bennett was "discriminating against Mexican-Americans" and threatened to report her complaint as a violation of the school's policies against discriminatory behavior and harassment.
"You do not want to go down that road," he said, according to the filing.
Bennett, 50, recalls leaving the meeting in distress and in tears.
A second meeting two days later involved Bennett, Kutzler and three more PCC staffers. The public school officials allegedly told Bennett that she would "not get a job" because of her desire to limit class discussion to English. She claims they said she should "seek counseling" and that she might have a learning disability.
Kutzler also allegedly produced an anonymous evaluation form that Bennett had filled out, also suggesting a "no Spanish in the classroom" rule.
Later in April, Bennett received critical feedback from a teacher-for the first time, she maintains. The critique chastised Bennett for "ineffective communication skills."
Then, on April 22, Bennett received a suspension letter from the state-owned school. The charges levied against her included discrimination, "stalking" and "bullying." She also allegedly argued with a professor about the correct answer to a test question.
Her indefinite suspension was to last "until she receives counseling to improve her communication style and to learn to be less abrasive," the lawsuit states.
"Six armed" campus security officers promptly escorted her off PCC's Desert Vista campus. The officers then allegedly followed her several miles down the road to Interstate 10.
Bennett sued the community college and its boards of directors in an Arizona state court under several causes of action including harassment, breach of contract, retaliation, discrimination and violations of the Arizona Constitution. The college and its board of governors are the only defendants.
Article 28 of Arizona's state constitution establishes English as "the official language of the state." Section 3 states: "A person shall not be discriminated against or penalized in any way because the person uses or attempts to use English in public or private communication."
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