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.”

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, “While rumors abound of illegal aliens who allegedly refrain from reporting crimes out of fear of deportation, we could find no substantiated cases of crime victims who were removed as a result of having reported crimes to authorities unless the victims turned out to be criminals as well.”  So this is a nonsensical problem.  But it is constantly dragged out by liberal advocates to suggest normalization of illegal immigrants.  The solution, of course, is twofold: first, encourage everybody to report crimes, regardless of immigration status.  Second, control the border.

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.”

While officials maintain that no edict has gone out to give more tickets, the politics of the situation is clear: California’s hard up for cash, and they’re willing to do virtually anything to raise it.  That’s why in October, California created an “amnesty” plan for drivers with tickets older than January 2009 – if they paid up by the end of the year, they could pay half price.  That wouldn’t disincentivize bad driving, of course – it would just raise money faster for the state.  Meanwhile, liberals in California have rammed through a bill that blocks police from impounding cars of unlicensed drivers, mainly illegal immigrants – a measure that obviously increases vehicle danger, since illegal immigrants do not have insurance and are disproportionately likely to be involved in accidents.  In fact, unlicensed drivers are five times more likely to be involved in traffic fatality accidents than licensed drivers.

So this isn’t about safety.  It’s about cash, as always.  This is how police states are created – by out-of-control spending requiring somebody to fork over more dough.

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.

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.

Dr. Walter Willett of Harvard Medical School says that the original pyramid blatantly ignored the evidence against grains.  “There’s an inherent problem with the USDA creating the pyramid,” Willett said.  “The economic interests are so strong …. It’s very difficult for them to be objective, so it’s probably the worst possible agency to do the pyramid.”  As anybody who has ever tried to lose weight by eating bagels can tell you, the food pyramid is a dramatic failure.

The last time the government tried to make everybody skinny, in other words, it made everybody fat instead.  Now the government’s trying to make everybody healthy – by telling us we don’t need early mammograms.  Do you trust them?

Why? It’s the culture, smarty-pants.

By “culture,” I don’t mean Washington, DC culture. I mean pop culture.

While the brightest and most talented conservatives pour into DC and pump out one study after another, endlessly debating arcane policy with a handful of other pinheaded intellectuals, the left has been busy consolidating their iron grip on the real reins of power — movies, TV, music, art.

If half the conservatives who pine to work at Heritage or Cato would only turn their ambitions to moviemaking and showrunning, conservatism might have a fighting chance.

As it is, you can move the musical chairs in DC around all you want, but if you don’t recapture the culture — or even a healthy slice of it — you may win a political battle or two now and then, but you’re destined to always play catch-up in the war long-term.

The way to win a modern war is to win over the people’s “hearts and minds.” There’s a reason “hearts” are listed first. Whether you like it or not, most people think with their hearts. Conservatives have focused on the “minds” part almost exclusively since Ronald Reagan left office.

And don’t tell me the problem is that conservative and libertarian ideas stem from logic while liberal positions are based on emotion. In the first place, the left thinks exactly the opposite is true. Second, if you don’t believe concepts like freedom, patriotism, family, personal responsibility, property rights, and the struggle against tyranny can be portrayed with heart and passion, then maybe you should stick to writing policy papers.

Ever since our ancestors gathered around a fire at night to swap tales of that day’s hunt, nothing tops the power of story to get a message across, even if it’s one as simple as, “Don’t get within tusk’s reach of a woolly mammoth!”

Not only do movies and TV reach millions, they can reach otherwise unreachable people, beyond the proverbial “choir.” As Big Hollywood and Ben Shapiro’s new book “Primetime Propaganda” have painstakingly chronicled, movies and TV often sugarcoat left-leaning messages with humor, thrills, romance – all elements of a good story.

Why do you think most beer companies advertise their product with hot chicks or funny stunts that have nothing to do with beer? How did cigarette companies sell cigarettes? By touting the health benefits of their product, or by showing us how cool it was to smoke?

So conservatives, stop trying to be Karl Rove and be Steven Spielberg for a change. If that’s too hard, try being Steven Soderbergh or even Steve Guttenberg.

Still not sure how to go about it? Well, if you have some experience trying your hand at filmmaking or screenwriting, apply to the Filmmakers Workshop (August 19-21, 2011 at UCLA). Attendance, room and board are absolutely free, and travel costs may be reimbursed.

The workshop is run by the Taliesin Nexus, a new organization founded by me and Patrick Reasonover, which educates and promotes promising new filmmakers who share a passion for a freer society. Our faculty includes seasoned producers, writers and directors of such movies and TV shows as 30 Rock, Angel, Liar Liar, Legally Blonde 2, and Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

The regular application deadline is June 24, but if you mention this article, we’ll let it slide to June 27.

As Patrick and I go about gathering support for our fledgling organization, we frequently run into resistance from donors who are accustomed to simply handing their money to the usual suspects – think tanks, foundations, political campaigns, and other policy-oriented efforts.

But our foray into pop culture seems to throw many conservatives and libertarians for a loop. It’s like the computer in the old Star Trek series, intoning “Does not compute” over and over again, until the cognitive dissonance causes its mechanical head to explode.

It’s a shame that it’s come to this. Because once upon a time, conservatives dominated Hollywood. Virtually all of the early moguls and many of the filmmakers who built Hollywood were conservatives — Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Daryl Zanuck, Irving Thalberg, John Ford, Cecil B. DeMille, and Frank Capra, to name just a few.

The movies these legends made are beloved to this day, though their legacy is fading with each passing generation. It’s time for a new generation to take up the camera.

Don’t have one? If you’ve got a smart phone, you’ve got a video camera. Start using it, or keep losing it (the culture, that is). It’s a lot more fun than sitting at a desk in a think tank – and a lot more influential, too.

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:

Transcript highlights after the jump:

At 2:28:
BACHMANN: It’s an infantile response for the president to point blame at BP when the president has given over full authority to BP to deal with and manage the cleanup.  If the president wanted to, he could intervene and he clearly hasn’t.

SHAPIRO: Isn’t that a running theme with this presidency?  They’re all about blame, and not about doing anything?

BACHMANN: He’s not about taking responsibility, and that’s why I say it’s an infantile response to not take responsibility when your’e the president of the United States, and that is all we have seen, unfortunately, coming out of this president is an unwillingness to take responsibility.

At 4:27:
SHAPIRO: I want to ask you, speaking of his violent language, and he’s been brutal on BP, talking about putting his boot on the throat of BP, talking about how he wants to go down there and kick someone’s ass — frankly, Michele, I think you could take President Obama, off the record.

BACHMANN: Hey, I took karate when I was 17 years old, I am dangerous.

SHAPIRO: I do believe that.  That was not said facetiously.

At 5:05:
SHAPIRO: President Obama said in 2008 about his political enemies, who are never terrorists, by the way, but they’re members of the tea party — he said to his supporters, “I want you to argue with them and get in their faces … If they tell you, ‘Well he’s going to raise our taxes,’ you say, ‘No he’s not, he’s going to lower them.’

BACHMANN: In other words, go lie to people.

SHAPIRO: Is it fair to call him a liar at this point?

BACHMANN: It’s not a truthful statement.  That’s the elixir of the tea party movement.  People are telling the truth.

At 6:55:
SHAPIRO: Is President Obama better or worse than Jimmy Carter?

BACHMANN: Worse.  Easily worse.

SHAPIRO: I agree.  So far, you’d have to say he’s the worst president in United States history …

BACHMANN: No question.  No question.

SHAPIRO: … with the possible exception of James Buchanan.

BACHMANN: And the thing is, here we are, people can’t wait until November.  They’re practically lining up for polls now, they can’t wait to go out and vote.  The only thing is people wish Barack Obama was up for re-election right now, because they’d honestly love to have a chance to throw him out of office.  Everywhere I go, people ask me, “Michele, can we impeach the president?” They want a referendum on him.  I also had someone today say, “There’s no way he’ll run for a second term.  No way.  No one would vote for him.”  I don’t know if the White House understands how the floor has dropped out under support for this president.

At 8:15:
SHAPIRO: Has President Obama sided with the Islamic world against Israel at this point?

BACHMANN: It appears that way.  This was horrific.

The mandates of the office dictate how those entrusted with its power should act.  The Obama White House has failed to maintain the high standards of this office.  Rather than operating in a dignified manner the staff has desecrated the office by resorting to old-school Chicago-style politics.  That is to say they’ve used the Presidency to reward their friends and single out and attack their enemies.

The White House bully pulpit should be used to advocate for policies to benefit the American public.  Instead we’ve seen it used to inure benefits to political supporters and to wage campaigns against critics.

The National Endowment for the Arts call on August 10, 2009 is a prime example of how the Obama Administration has sought to reward its friends.  They invited “artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, tastemakers, leaders or just plain cool people” to advocate on behalf of the Obama Administration.  Buffy Wicks from the White House Office of Public Engagement used the call to express her “deep appreciation for all the work that you all put into the campaign for the two plus years that we all worked together.”  Ben Shapiro has revealed how this improper political call violated a slew of federal laws in a shallow attempt to reward Obama’s political supporters and enlist their aid in producing government sponsored propaganda.

While rewarding supporters the White House has also aggressively used the bully pulpit to attack and intimidate those who dare to offer a dissenting viewpoint.  These bullying tactics include singling out talk show hosts and engaging in a vicious campaigns against them.  Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has targeted Rush Limbaugh, Jim Cramer, and Rick Santelli.

The Obama Administration has also attacked Fox News calling it “a wing of the Republican Party.”  White House Communications Director Anita Dunn has been using her position extract revenge on Fox News for a grudge she still holds against the network resulting from its coverage of the Obama campaign.

Recently the Obama Administration has set its sights on the voice of business, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  The Administration has honed in on the organization for opposing the White House healthcare and climate change proposals.  The President has called their advertisements “completely false.”  He has made public statements criticizing the organization for its policy proposals and impact.  When viewed in light of the NEA call the lesson becomes clear, Obama welcomes your input as long as you agree with him.

The Obama White House isn’t winning on the issues.  Their fight for universal healthcare has not met with the approval of the American public.  They’ve had to enlist the help of the Obama Campaign machine which is now housed at the Democratic National Committee under the auspices of the Organizing for America banner to fight for the President’s policy proposals. 

While Organizing for America has advocated for the President’s policy proposals, Robert Gibbs and Rahm Emanuel have turned the White House into a powerful weapon used to quell political dissent.  Even the Left has to admit that President Bush had too much respect for the office to use it in such a distasteful manner.