Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Firefighters Lose Jobs for Not Speaking Spanish
[HT:GC]
Jim Walker of the Department of Forestry said "what we do know is 85 percent of the crew make-up is of Hispanic decent." But many of the Hispanic fire fighters do not speak English. Walker says the language barrier is a concern.
Those concerns led the state to draft a new rule that all firefighting bosses speak English, and the languages of crew members who don't speak English.
Because of the state's language requirement, Pickering can no longer work as a crew boss and supervise 20 firefighters, he can only manage a squad of four.
Pickering says that "if you have one Spanish guy on the crew, as an English crew boss, you can no longer be a crew boss, you have to step back to a squad boss, which is a demotion."
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More immigrants keeping mother tongue
Bimal Kular is busy ironing crisp, white napkins while eight other women scurry around preparing tantalizing sauces, homemade cheese and a sizzling oil, onion and cumin mixture before hungry diners arrive at one of Vancouver's most renowned restaurants. (Snip) Everyone around Kular speaks Punjabi, and that was the essential part of her short job hunt in Canada, where she became a citizen last year. Even now, seven years after arriving at her adopted homeland from India, Kular doesn't speak English.
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Anti-War Protestors Mar Easter Service
Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago is one of the city's landmarks and a place where Catholics have come to worship since the Chicago fire in 1871. [snip]
... just as Cardinal George began his homily - there was a disturbance in the rear of the venue. Six anti-war protestors affiliated with a group calling itself "Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War" burst in and began spraying fake blood on themselves and parishoners while screaming anti-war slogans...
After all, speaking "truth to power" means sometimes you have to step on some toes - even if that requires disrespecting the deepest beliefs of American citizens sitting in a place that should be a sanctuary from the ravages of the outside world. At least, that seems to be true when leftists hide illegal immigrants or harbor criminals in Catholic churches. Then the term "sanctuary" becomes literal.
But ordinary Americans worshipping in their usual way? Fair game to the left.
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Hollywood’s Holy Week Christophobic Fantasy
When will Hollywood’s secular bigots figure out that Bible-believing Christians have nothing in common with fundamentalist Muslim terrorists?
On Wednesday, Law & Order served up another of those famed episodes ripped from the headlines – except the violence-preaching madrassa is Christian, not Muslim, the evil cleric brainwashing children quotes the Bible, not the Koran...
This isn’t the first modern-day Christian stoning in recent months. On CBS, a Cold Case episode in September had several Christian teens in an abstinence club murder a girl to cover up their sexual hijinks. Hollywood’s secular bigots can’t seem to resist making up crazed, violent, hypocritical Christian characters. Perhaps they can’t find any real Christians who justify their stereotype.
[but Christianity and Islam are the same: recall the death threats, riots and murders that erupted world wide over the blasphemous "Davinci Code" movie...]
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The humanity of the victims of terror
[HT:MW]
The day after an Arab gunman infiltrated the Mercaz Yeshiva in Jerusalem, murdered eight students and wounded eleven, the front page of the Chicago Tribune showed a mother prostrate in grief. The mother was not related to any of the eight victims. It was the gunman's mother.
Similarly NPR coverage of the March 6 attack presented information about the gunman, Ala Abu Dheim, and some of his grievances, but nothing, not even the names of the victims.
A search of online information about the students produced more slander (They were not really students. The yeshiva was a hotbed for "violent fanatics" and "zealots.") than personal details. Such reporting grants the terrorist the humanity that it denies the victims of terror.
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Harvard: Media Has Effect on Insurgency
That shadowy, vast right-wing conspiracy in the Ivy League has done it again. Economists at Harvard have found a link between negative media coverage of Iraq and an emboldening of insurgents. Hot Air has more:
Caveats aplenty — but to no one’s surprise except possibly the left’s, “U.S. out of Iraq” does indeed create an incentive for jihadis to try to push the U.S. out of Iraq.
Allahpundit wonders if the media will report on "this rather media- unfriendly finding" or if it creates an "incentive for the press to at least include more pro-war voices in its coverage?"
[Brit Hume's Special Report did cover this last night]
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The War Endures, but Where’s the Media?
Five years later, the United States remains at war in Iraq, but there are days when it would be hard to tell from a quick look at mainstream television news or newspapers. As recently as the middle of last year, it was still the most-covered topic. Since then, Iraq coverage by major American news sources has plummeted, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Since the start of last year, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a part of the nonprofit Pew Research Center, has tracked reporting by several dozen major newspapers, cable stations, broadcast television networks, Web sites and radio programs. Iraq accounted for 18 percent of their prominent news coverage in the first nine months of 2007, but only 9 percent in the following three months, and 3 percent so far this year...
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POO POWER: Giant Vat of Crap to Produce Natural Gas for CA
California cows start passing gas to the grid
The CA Poo Power project is located in the Vintage Dairy Farm in Riverdale, CA and is the brainchild of David Albers, head of BioEnergy Solutions, who we previously featured in his attempts to turn poop into green. The project aims to turn the effluent of 5000 cows, effectively a 33 feet deep, 5 football field-sized vat, into natural gas. The lagoon is naturally covered to prevent the manure from escaping, and lined in plastic to stop the manure from seeping to the ground water.
At the moment, this rather huge installation is able to power approximately 1,200 house per day. Not a large number, but then, you if you consider that there are 2,000,000 cows in California alone, you can start smelling the possibilities.
[let's hold the applause until we've seen the bill please... {however jokes can start immediately}]
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Green Eyeshade Blues...
California
... By contrast, the State Controller’s report called the “Statement of General Fund Cash Receipts and Disbursements” are the actual revenues and actual expenditures as they are officially recorded on our bank statement.
During the last 12 months (from January 1st to December 31st of 2007), the state’s general fund received $95.602 billion in actual revenue and spent $106.232 billion, for a total general fund deficit of $10.630 billion.
During the prior 12 months (from January 1st to December 31st of 2006), the state received $94.879 billion and spent $98.216 billion, for a total general fund deficit of $3.337 billion.
Put another way, actual revenues grew at an annual rate of 0.72 percent and expenditures grew 8.16 percent, tripling the actual annual deficit spending. In the last four years from January 2004 to December of 2007, the state general fund has spent a total of $18.328 billion more than it has received as revenue.
[but thanks to district gerrymandering, our 70% democratic Assembly will almost certainly be returned to Sacramento]
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Eight in Ten Say Public Should Have Greater Influence on Government
This is an interesting poll published by the World Public Opinion.org group. It highlights the question that has been debated in America since the Constitution became law; are we a democracy? Or a republic?
[OK, so do that > http://www.votesmart.org/]
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THE COSTS OF CRIME 2
According to the New York Times, "Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, and Oregon devote as much or more to corrections as they do to higher education." But the relevant comparison would be between the cost of keeping a criminal behind bars and the cost of letting him loose in society:
* In Britain, the total cost of the prison system per year was found to be £1.9 billion (about U.S. $3.8 billion).
* The financial cost alone of the crimes committed per year by criminals was estimated at £60 billion (about U.S. $121 billion).
The big difference between the two kinds of costs is not just in their amounts - the far higher costs of letting criminals loose is paid by the general public in both money and in being subjected to violence.
The net result is that both politicians and ideologues of the left are forever pushing "alternatives to incarceration" - all the while putting law abiding citizens at increased risk.
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DON'T WRITE VOUCHERS OFF
Vouchers are more successful than ever. A recent referendum loss in Utah should be weighed against the many victories vouchers have achieved across the nation. Consider:
- Since 2000, vouchers have had their greatest period of legislative success; of the 21 school choice programs that exist, 12 were enacted in the past eight years, and the fastest growth has been in the past three years.
- Moreover, 10 existing programs have been expanded in the same three years; vouchers have never been more successful in state legislatures than right now.
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Police chase stolen doughnut truck
It sounds like a scene out of "Wayne's World" or "Tommy Boy," but police chased a doughnut delivery truck across Benton and Tama counties Thursday at speeds of up to 100 mph after the vehicle was reported stolen in Rock Island, Ill. (snip)Mey couldn't resist noting in a press release that "what strikes me as a bit out of the ordinary in this case is the number of officers who were able to respond"
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080321/NEWS/803210356
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