If this is a hate crime, what is it called when you shoot 50 unarmed people on an Army base?

Our descent into madness continues apace:

Woman accused of hate crime against Muslim – Chicago Breaking News

A woman who allegedly yanked the headscarf of a Muslim woman in a Tinley Park supermarket two days after the Fort Hood shootings has been charged with a hate crime.

Bank teller Valerie Kenney, 54, of the 16500 block of Evergreen Ave., is accused of confronting Amal Abusumayah while she shopped at the Jewel supermarket at Harlem Avenue and 171st Street on Nov. 7, Tinley Park police say.

Abusumayah alleged last week that Kenney made a reference to the Fort Hood shootings while passing her in an aisle of the supermarket.

Minutes later, Abusumayah alleges, Kenney approached her from behind near the cash register and pulled on her headscarf.

I’m sorry, but this is moronic. Charged with a “hate crime” for pulling someone’s headscarf?

Even worse, a FELONY?! She faces up to three years in prison and a fine of up to $25,000.

(voice over PA) George Orwell, pick up the red courtesy phone. George … Orwell … pick up the red courtesy phone.

If two white women got into a little tussle at the grocery store, and one of them pulled off the other one’s scarf, would that qualify for a hate crime? No, silly, that would just be a “chick fight”.

Hate crimes, you see, require class divisions, with a perceived victimizer exploiting a perceived victim .

Hate crimes are about guilt, basically. There is no guilt to repay when it’s just two white women. Who cares, right? But as soon as we get two people from different sides of the perceived victimizer – victim split, bingo! Hate crime!

Americans: you can now be charged with a felony and face 3 years in jail for the horrible crime of pulling a scarf off of someone’s head. Depending on who they are, and the level of perceived grievance they have against us at the time. Could go up and down over time, we don’t really know.

This is a thought crime. We enjoy Constitutionally protected freedom of speech, and to assemble and worship, but we aren’t allowed to have certain types of opinions about people. Got that?

Yeah, I’m sure the Founders would have been OK with that.

Let’s just lay this out there: the law has no business deciding which thoughts are permissible and which thoughts are not. Why this even needs to be mentioned, I do not understand. It goes against every concept that underlies the meaning of being a truly free people.

And besides, hate crime legislation is unnecessary, because beating up on people and killing them and stuff is already against the law.

Pulling on scarves, though, not so much. There’s the only divide that matters. You either assaulted somebody, or you didn’t. You either killed somebody, or you didn’t. You either committed a real crime, or you didn’t.

Instead, we now go down a bad road, a very bad road, when we lose that distinction and focus more on motivation than actions.

And, of course, as with any law, you have to plan for the inevitable overly-aggressive prosecution. Like this one, it seems. So, now an American citizen has to hire lawyers to fight against her own government–that she funds with her tax dollars–because she pulled off a scarf.

Help me out here. That nutjob Hasan who killed 13 people (plus an unborn baby of one of the victims) on Nov. 5 at Ft. Hood, and who for years had praised jihadis and suicide bombers, and made so many people uncomfortable about his jihadi ways that numerous complaints were filed about him, and who was even caught emailing a frigging terrorist fer-crying-out-loud … well, they just couldn’t quite figure out if he was a risk or not!

What were they hoping to find? An Al-Qaeda membership card? Electronic interception of direct orders from Osama bin Laden himself, like “IMPLEMENT OPERATION ‘KILL INFIDELS’ NOW!”? After getting a search warrant, of course.

This is sheer lunacy.

Obvious craziness motivated by real hatred is virtually ignored, while petty rudeness at the grocery store is elevated to a felony.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in a movie, filled with bad dialogue, stupid characters, and a scary plot where the people of a country forget who they are and what made their country great. And then they end up pissing it all away, afraid of their own shadows. I don’t really like that ending much. I’m hoping for a different ending, where people wake the hell up and realize they are under siege. You have to admit you have a problem before you can start to address it.

Maybe there is more to this story, more info that will make it seem less idiotic and dangerous to our Constitutional freedoms. If so I’ll re-evaluate. But as it stands right now, this looks to me like a needless politically-motivated prosecution of an private American citizen by her own government.

If only that same government had felt just as compelled to intervene with the Hasan situation.

‘Creating jobs’ explained

Creating ‘union government jobs’ isn’t what we had in mind

Maybe this explains why wages for federal employees have risen so fast: for the first time, the majority of union members work for local, state, or federal government.

This is not good. Unions act as clearing houses for political contributions to Democrats, and together they make deals to grow government. Now that most union members are now government workers, this is a huge conflict of interest.

So now we have a perfect storm: unionized government bureaucrats, whose salaries come from our tax dollars, and whose compulsory union dues are funneled (sometimes against their wishes) to Democrats for the purpose of growing a government that is already too big, too expensive, and a drag on the economy.

More, from the above:

Last month when the White House released its visitor log for the first six months of the Obama presidency, one name appeared far more often than any other: Service Employee International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern. Stern has every right to expect to be welcome in the Obama White House. He has repeatedly bragged about the fact that under his leadership, the SEIU spent $60.7 million to elect Barack Obama president. And what is Stern buying with his $60.7 million besides White House tours? Ever expanding federal government programs and state government bailouts which are rapidly bankrupting our country.

There was a time when unions protected working people from harsh, inhumane conditions. But do today’s government workers, who mostly sit in cubicles in temperature-controlled offices, need to be unionized? To protect them from what? Lower (and more realistic) wages?

Again, from the above:

Union membership has fallen to 7.3% of private sector workers – the lowest rate since Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act into law. But it is a completely different story in the public sector: 37.6% of government employees belong to unions, up almost a percentage point since last year. Those 7.9 million unionized government employees are 51% of all union members nationwide.

So when we hear Obama continually talking about “creating jobs”, we have to remember: he must mean creating government jobs. Because that’s the only kind his kind of economic policies can create.

The only government intervention that will drive the economy is “getting the hell out of the way”

I think I just found a new blog to love. It’s called Mean Street, at wsj.com, by a man named Evan Newmark. Here’s why.

He says we should be very careful about buying into this “the recession is over” stuff in A Sham GDP for a Sham Economy. Our GDP “growth” announced today is from government spending, much of it from cash for clunkers. This is just kicking the can down the road in the form of borrowing against the future. Remember how auto sales tanked horribly in September, after the program ended? That is not, by anybody’s definition, an “economic recovery”.

But even better, this post is a must-read: It’s Official — Obamanomics Isn’t Working.

You likely missed it. But Thursday’s Congressional testimony from Obama Council of Economic Adviser Chief, Christina Romer was the big story. She officially admitted what many of us already knew: Obamanomics isn’t working.

The $787 billion Obama stimulus package that was supposed to keep U.S. unemployment at under 8% will not only fail to keep it under 10%. But by mid-2010 “fiscal stimulus will be contributing little to further growth.”

As for President Obama’s big promise last January to create 3.5 or 4 million new American jobs. Forget it. “Unemployment is unlikely to end 2010 much below its current levels.”

Romer’s admission was startling. You’ll recall that it was her January 10th paper that outlined what a mighty job machine the Obama presidency would be. Every 1% boost in GDP would get a million new jobs.

Now here we are running stimulus-heavy budget deficits that will total almost $3 trillion over this year and next. GDP is on the rise again. And still, no new jobs.

What’s even more depressing, is that the Obama White House still hasn’t figured out why businesses aren’t hiring.

The White House seems pretty certain about how American businesses should behave. And it seems pretty certain that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, insurance companies and banks aren’t doing what they should be doing.

But all that joblessness? Who knows? Not Romer. It’s all a macroeconomic mystery of time-lags and GDP multipliers. In her testimony, she offers up seven different guesstimates on jobs created by the stimulus.

Does it ever occur to the White House to see the economy as businessmen do? Does it ever occur to the White House that America’s businesses aren’t hiring because they don’t trust Washington?

No. Business is E-V-I-L!

Just check out President Obama’s Saturday radio address on small business to see what I’m talking about.

The president paid tribute to small business, to “mom and pop stores and neighborhood restaurants we know and love.” Small business, he intoned, was the “engine of our economy,” “the heart of the American dream.”

So did the president propose new ways of cutting payroll taxes, employment costs and red-tape for the “engine of our economy?” Nope. Instead, he promised more federal SBA loans and health insurance reform courtesy of federal intervention and mandates.

How many small businessmen do you know that want government more involved in their business?

I know lots of small businessmen and I can’t think of one. I myself employ just one worker in New York City — and the amount of paperwork, fees, taxes and aggravation involved makes it feel like I’m employing a thousand.

I recently discovered that as a self-employed New Yorker I now have the pleasure of paying a new Metropolitan Commuter Mobility Transportation Tax. This measly 0.34% tax on wages is exactly the kind of stupidity that kills jobs. It’s the kind of tinkering that governments can’t resist. And it’s the very reason government terrifies businesses.

Read the whole thing.

How did we end up with a bunch of Keystone Cops in the White House?

 

Eric Holder: “Excellent point. Now shut up!”

Attorney General Tries to Silence School Choice Ad

Well, sure. It’s not like we have freedom of speech or anything. Wait … turns out, we do! Huh.

Very odd. I mean, this is the Attorney General of the United States we’re talking about here. He knows about the Constitution, right? The rule of law? Stuff like that?

Also, exercising restraint when you hold a huge amount of power?

Respect for the guaranteed right of others to hold their own opinions and even advocate for them, in public? How scary is that!?

So very, very odd.

Because seriously, come on now, a President wouldn’t nominate a political operative for Attorney General, would he? A guy to do his political bidding, and oh-by-the-way, also run the entire Department of Justice, where he could direct thousands of attorneys and FBI agents to harass enemies of the President?

And even, you know, make idiotic demands in public that show his true colors, along with a disgusting lack of respect for free speech and how essential that is to our overall freedoms?

Nah! That would be a big conflict of interest. So we know that is completely off the table. Phew!

Obama is a Democrat. And we all know that Democrats don’t have conflicts of interest, or a lust for power, or a tendency to tell everybody else what to do.

Bullet dodged!

Your government at work. Well, if by “at work” we mean “stealing from you”.

 

Hmmm. This seems backwards.

 

Two major things wrong here. Federal civilians not only make TWICE what those in private industry make, thereby pulling money out of the economy with higher taxes, but the rate of increase in their wages and benefits is much higher, too. Compare the slope of the two lines.

Via Illinois Policy Institute.