In an absolutely shocking scandal at Miramonte Elementary school in Los Angeles, California, two teachers were arrested for lewdness involving their students.  One of the teachers taught third grade, where he allegedly forced children to eat his semen from a spoon over the course of five years.  The case widened yesterday when the police found 200 more photos of the teacher committing lewd acts, bringing the grand total to around 600.  The teacher also sent notes and CDs to students, who were all of nine or ten years old.

So what took so long for this pervert to be caught?  According to the Contra Costa Times, the school is heavily attended by illegal immigrants.  Their parents were afraid to report the situation to the authorities for fear of being arrested and sent back to their home countries.  Manuel Flores, one parent at the school, told the Times that he wouldn’t attend a parents’ meeting, since the school “was full of police.”  Said a lawyer for some of the victims’ families, “One little girl told me she doesn’t want to come forward because she’s afraid her parents will be deported.”

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This week, Los Angeles County okayed a new regulation banning the throwing of Frisbees or footballs on the beaches – which, of course, destroys the purpose of living in Southern California in the first place.  The first offense will earn you a hefty $100 fine; the second, $200; the third and beyond, $500.  You can, of course, apply for a permit.  For parents with industrious children, holes deeper than 18 inches are also banned – so get your kids the cheap plastic shovels or pay a fine.

What’s the point of this law?  Unless it’s to prevent horrific incidents like this, the only point is to raise cash for the state.  This has become the MO for California law enforcement: higher ticket costs, more tickets written.  California is now a police state – except when it comes to policing actual crime in hard-hit areas.  The state, counties, and cities task police officers with going after soccer moms going 45 in a 35 zone rather than monitoring drug-ridden precincts.

The trend is obvious, and California motorists know it: as McClatchy reported back in August 2011, “As the state and cities wrestled with shrinking revenue and growing budget gaps, the California Highway Patrol issued about 200,000 more traffic citations in 2009 than it did two years before.  Sacramento Superior Court, meanwhile, processed about 37,000 more traffic filings last year than in 2006 – a 16 percent increase.”  The size of the fines has escalated dramatically, too: “With the average fine costing as much as $250 and rising, the increase in CHP tickets produced as much as $50 million over two years. That money went to state and local courts, crime labs and other purposes.”

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In a time when America’s immigration system is swamped – when illegal immigrants are routinely caught and released, many of whom are dangerous – it seems that one of ICE’s top priorities is public relations with illegal immigration advocates.  Yesterday, Andrew Lorenzen-Strait announced via the Department of Homeland Security website that he had been named ICE’s “first-ever public advocate.”

Lorenzen-Strait

His job will be to “serve as a point of contact for individuals, including those in immigration proceedings, NGOs, and other community and advocacy groups, who have concerns, questions, recommendations or important issues they would like to raise.” This new role, says Lorenzen-Strait, will help ICE “focus the agency’s immigration enforcement resources on sensible priorities” – code for doing less, since the Obama Administration consistently makes a big deal out of the notion that most illegal immigrants aren’t dangerous and therefore should be left to their own devices – and “implement policies and processes that priorities the health and safety of detainees in our custody.” And he has one more job, according to ICE Enforcement Director John Morton: he’ll have to explain to all of us why ICE lets illegal immigrants off the hook.

What did Lorenzen-Strait used to do? He’s been with ICE since 2008. Before that, he was a pro bono attorney in Maryland, doing child advocacy and divorce work via Community Legal Services. How does that qualify you for working in immigration, exactly? And then there’s the question of money spent. It’s more and more obvious these days that working for the government is the quickest road to a healthy paycheck – and Lorenzen-Strait’s salary proves it. In 2010, he was paid $112,224 by the feds. We can only imagine that the salary has risen since then. Not bad for being a public relations officer who does nothing to actually enforce immigration law.

We’re constantly hearing that the government has trouble finding places to cut spending. This seems like a good place to start.

President Obama says we should allow the federal government to take charge of our healthcare; as usual, the “experts” are best positioned to instruct us how to live our lives.

Except they’re not.  Today, according to the AP, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans that they eat too much bread and rolls, and that such foods account “for more than twice as much sodium as salty junk food like potato chips.”  No wonder we’re fat.

Unfortunately, the federal government that now tells us that we eat too much bread is the same government that originally told us to stuff our pieholes with … bread.  Remember the original food pyramid?

I remember this pyramid – I grew up learning about it in my vaunted public school.  Notice how the bottom section is enormous, and suggests 6-11 bread, cereal, rice and pasta servings each day.  Why did the government originally mandate that?  According to Harvard Medical School’s Eat, Drink and Be Healthy (Simon & Schuster, August 2001), the government was attempting to help out farmers via the Department of Agriculture’s recommendations.

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Today, the 9th Circuit upheld the absurd ruling of Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, striking down Proposition 8, the voter-approved constitutional amendment that would uphold traditional marriage in the state. The ruling itself was highly political and in no way legally oriented. “Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians,” wrote the Court, “and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior… the Constitution simply does not allow for ‘laws of this sort.’”

This, of course, is blatantly false. To begin, the Constitution says nothing about marriage whatsoever, which means that its definition is left to the states to decide. Second, there are plenty of great reasons to uphold traditional marriage and to disapprove alternative forms of marriage, ranging from thousands of years of history to state interest in childbirth to state interest in child rearing. Thirdly, the notion that the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution applies to homosexual behavior rather than innate distinctions like race is absurd. Marriage laws approve and disapprove behavior, not status. While gay rights advocates like to equate race and sexuality, the two are vastly different – you can’t shake your race, but your behavior can always change, no matter how unpleasant that change may be. Behavior is routinely regulated by the states and invariably affects people differently based on whether or not they engage in said behavior.

Leave aside the absolutely correct charges that this ruling is a legal abomination, and the fact that our judiciary wields far too much clout overall. Let’s focus instead, for a moment, on the impact this ruling will have on the presidential race.

President Obama has been able to elude the question of same-sex marriage overall. His slippery rhetoric indicates that he’s pro-civil unions but anti-same sex marriage but is “evolving.” This ruling will force him to take a side. He will likely attempt to suggest that this is a decision best left to the courts, but he’s never taken that position before – see, for example, campaign finance reform. It’s unlikely that the gay community or the religious community will allow him to get away with that. (more…)

In the wake of the news that Obamacare will mandate all employers to provide for birth control, including Catholic employers, many have wondered whether President Obama will damage his standing with the Catholic vote. In 2008, the Catholic vote split for Obama by a large margin, 54-45. Much of this was driven by Obama’s support in the Latino community; white Catholics actually voted McCain by a similarly broad margin, 52-47.

But now, even Hispanics are having second thoughts about Obama. According to a December Ipsos-Telemundo poll, Obama’s approval rating among Latinos is now down to 56%, as opposed to 86% in April 2009. Although Obama’s unfavorables have risen among Latinos, however, only 14% strongly dislike Obama’s presidential approach. That means there’s room for Obama to move the needle up once again.

He’ll have to do it soon. Obama threatens to match John Kerry’s negative Catholic electoral record – Kerry lost the Catholic vote 52-47 in 2004, and he lost white Catholics 43-56. He still won Pennsylvania, a heavily Catholic state (53%), but he lost Florida (26% Catholic) and Ohio (24% Catholic). The most heavily Catholic battleground states other than those three are New Hampshire (35%), Arizona (31%), Louisiana (30%), and Wisconsin (29%). Obama’s anti-Catholic moves may hurt him there.

We’ve actually already seen some movement in terms of the Catholic vote.

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This week, Sol Stern of Encounter Books released a broadside titled “A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism and Jew Hatred.”  In it, Sol details the history of Arab rejection of a Palestinian state.  His point is well summed up in this brilliant video narrated by Bill Whittle:

Sol is very kind when he writes that President Obama’s motives are unclear with regard to his ideological support for Mahmoud Abbas’ odd iteration of the Palestinian state-to-be.  His motives are absolutely clear.  President Obama is not who New York Magazine pretends he is – he is our first ideologically Muslim president.

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Every president has his bête noire.  For Reagan, it was Sam Donaldson.  For Clinton, it was Ann Coulter.  For President Obama, it’s David Limbaugh.

No better book has been written compiling the evidence against a president that Limbaugh’s Crimes Against Liberty.  “This book is about a young presidency,” Limbaugh opens.  “[Y]oung, but already the most destructive in American history.  Everything about Barack Obama’s radical background signals his visceral contempt for America – its culture, its values, and its political and economic systems.  His unmistakable goal is to bring America down to size – an America that has been, in his view, too big for its britches, selfish, exploitative, unfairly wealthy, arrogant, and dismissive.”

That’s a powerful thesis, and Limbaugh spends the better part of 400 pages proving it in painstaking detail.  The amazing thing is that he doesn’t even scratch the surface, as he told me on my radio show in Orlando.  Every day, Obama does something new to destroy the Constitution and undermine America’s founding values.

Limbaugh isn’t calling for impeachment – he doesn’t think Obama has committed impeachable offenses, at least not yet.

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Yesterday, I had the opportunity to interview Congressman Steve King (R-Iowa) for my radio show, “The Ben Shapiro Show,” which broadcasts every Sunday 1-4 PM ET in Orlando, FL. The topic of Shirley Sherrod came up, and in particular, the topic of the so-called Pigford Farms settlement.

For background, the Pigford Farms case is a class-action lawsuit filed against the federal government on behalf of black farmers and black wannabe farmers, who say they were discriminated against in loan proceedings. The federal government settled Pigford Farms for an unbelievable $1.15 billion. An incredibly high percentage of those receiving awards under this settlement have done so fraudulently.

Shirley Sherrod was not only an initiator of the Pigford Farms case, she received a chunk of change for her company, New Communities, Inc. To be accurate, she received the largest chunk of change for New Communities — $13 million. New Communities was a bankrupt commune-type land trust held by Sherrod and her husband. She and her husband personally received $150,000 each to compensate them for “pain and suffering.”

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When one watches Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-NC) pushing a camera, grabbing a college student by the arm, collaring him around the neck, and finally hugging him to his body in order to threaten him for information about his identity, one thing becomes absolutely clear: this guy is a moron.

Well, something else also becomes clear: Etheridge is guilty of criminal assault under Washington D.C. law. DC Criminal Code §22-404(a)(1) dictates, “Whoever unlawfully assaults, or threatens another in a menacing manner, shall be fined not more than $1,000 or be imprisoned not more than 180 days, or both.” Generally, assault requires four elements: (1) ability to carry out a threat (i.e. Stephen Hawking threatening you with a personal kick to the jaw would probably not constitute assault); (2) an unlawful attempt (the perp actually has to try to do something); (3) to commit a violent injury; (4) upon someone else (you can’t assault yourself – duh).

All of the elements are clearly fulfilled here. The movement toward hitting the camera, the attempt to grab the student, the attempt to collar the student, the achievement of those goals – all constitute simple assault. One of the most common defenses to assault is consent – if you’re an S&M freak, for example, you’re going to have trouble claiming assault. But in this case, the kid is telling the Congressman to let him go, and actually threatens to sue him. The Congressman doesn’t comply. And he doesn’t get immunity just because he’s a Congressman – Congressional immunity only applies to speech during Congressional debate, not to grabbing students by their necks. If it did, Teddy Kennedy would have had to worry a whole hell of a lot less during his profligate lifetime.

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Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is a rising star in the Republican Party, a true representative of the tea party spirit. She’s plainspoken, brilliant, and incisive. She’s running for re-election to the House in Minnesota. And today, I had the chance to pre-record an interview with Congresswoman Bachmann for my radio show, “The Ben Shapiro Show,” broadcast Sundays 1-4 PM EST on 810 AM in Orlando, FL. You can also listen live at big810am.com.

In the interview, Congresswoman Bachmann characterizes President Obama’s response to the BP spill as “infantile,” says he’s the worst president in American history, says he’s siding with the Islamic world against Israel. How’s that for guts! Take a listen:

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In March 2010, Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University released a study about President Obama’s stimulus package.  It contained many informational gems:

• Public entities received 42 percent of awards under the stimulus package, but received over half of dollars awarded (meaning they got larger chunks of change than private contractors);
• Even according to the administration, $285,814.61 was spent to create each job under the stimulus;
• On average, Democratic districts received 1.53 times the amount of awards that Republicans were granted, with Democratic districts receiving 2.65 times the amount of stimulus dollars Republican districts received.  Democratic districts received 73 percent of the total stimulus funds awarded, and Republican districts received 27 percent of the total amount awarded.

De Rugy claimed that “a district’s representation by a Republican decreases the stimulus funds awarded to it by 41.7 percent.”  She also found that unemployment did not correlate with stimulus funds received.  In other words, much of the money under the stimulus was directed at Democratic districts for political reasons.

The mere suggestion that politics had anything to do with allocations under the stimulus got the journalistic left’s panties in a wad.  Some of the criticism of de Rugy’s study was worthwhile.  Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com pointed out that de Rugy had not taken into account the fact that cash was allocated largely to districts containing state capitols, since money allocated to states generally flows through state capitols (which are overwhelmingly represented by Democrats).  There is something to be said for this criticism, of course, which is why de Rugy proceeded to re-run the study taking into account the effect of allocations to state capitols – and found that the average Democratic district still gets 30 percent more cash than the average Republican district.

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Jason Mattera is a smart guy.  More than that, he’s utterly unafraid of the left, a leading member of the new breed of conservative warriors who are not frightened by the Alinsky tactics of the Democrats and their allies.  You may remember him from his encounter with Charlie Rangel:

Or his undercover reporting at an ObamaCare rally:

Or his recent speech at CPAC, for which the New York Times labeled him a racist:

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Today, the Washington Post reported that a painting by artist Alma Thomas entitled “Watusi (Hard Edge)” was being removed from the White House’s East Wing.  For those who don’t remember, Thomas’ painting is a plagiaristic copy of Henri Matisse’s “The Snail” rotated 90 degrees – see my piece, and the paintings side by side here.  According to Semonti Stephens, Michelle Obama’s deputy press secretary, the painting was moved “because it didn’t fit the space right.”

The White House explicitly denied that the painting was being removed because of its obvious similarity to the Matisse piece.  And the Washington Post writers cover for the White House in typical press lackey fashion:

Stephens’s explanation makes sense because it is inconceivable that the White House’s art experts would imagine Thomas’s painting was fraudulent or a copy … Elaborations on earlier artists’ work, even full appropriation, have been common practice in art for hundreds of years.

Right.  And Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services because Obama didn’t like his red glasses.  It had nothing to do with his tax cheating.  (more at Big Hollywood…)

Over the last week, Big Hollywood and Big Government have been extensively covering the August 10 conference call between the National Endowment for the Arts and a group of artists – a call on which the artists were encouraged to support President Obama’s agenda, with the tacit promise that they would be handsomely rewarded with government grants.  The NEA representative on the call was then-Communications Director of the NEA Yosi Sergant.

Now we have new evidence that the White House itself has been using its sway to recruit artists – not just to support President Obama’s “volunteerism” initiatives, but to support basic planks of his political agenda, including health care.  In fact, the White House has been tapping its extragovernmental political allies to work with artists with the tacit promise that NEA funds will be in the offing for those who join the Obama Administration political program.

According to a briefing report from Arlene Goldbard, the Pratt Center for Community Development, State Voices, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, on May 12, 2009, “more than 60 artists and creative organizers engaged in civic participation, community development, education, social justice activism, and philanthropy came together for a White House briefing on Art, Community, Social Justice, National Recovery.”  Each of the sponsors of the meeting was contacted by – yes, you guessed it – Yosi Sergant, who had just been promoted from the Office of Public Engagement to serve at the NEA. (more…)

In the aftermath of the Andrew Breitbart/James O’Keefe/Hannah Giles-broken ACORN scandal, President Obama and his allies in Congress have distanced themselves from the community organizing goliath.  Congress has cut off funds, and Obama has refused to speak about the matter.  End of story, right?

Wrong.

There’s only one problem: the ACORN mentality – pinpointing and mobilizing particular groups in support of a radical-left agenda – is no longer restricted to government-funded private non-profits like ACORN.  The ACORN mentality now dominates the government itself.  Taxpayer dollars are being used by elected officials to encourage the deification of President Obama and his agenda.  And one of the chief organs of the government propaganda machine is the National Endowment for the Arts.

Let’s start from the beginning.  On August 25, artist Patrick Courrielche told the story of a conference call he attended on August 10.  That conference call was hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve.  The goal of the conference call: “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”  The call would push “a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!” (more…)