Mom filmed berating her son at Baltimore riots didn’t ‘want him to be a Freddie Gray’
By Abby Ohlheiser April 28 at 6:30 PM
A woman seen berating and hitting a black-clad teenager, later confirmed to be her son, has been hailed as “mom of the year” after her intervention on the streets of Baltimore was caught on video. As violence flared up across the city on Monday, the woman, who was identified as Toya Graham on Tuesday afternoon, was filmed telling her child to “take that f—— mask off.”[I was knocked to the ground by Freddie Gray rioters, then helped to my feet]
Graham spoke to CBS News about the video, which initially went viral with little context. In the interview, the single mother of six tells the network that she intervened out of concern for her 16-year-old son’s safety.
“That’s my only son, and at the end of the day, I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray,” Graham said. “But to stand up there and vandalize police officers, that’s not justice.”
Contrary to the emotional blackmail some leftists are attempting to peddle, Baltimore is not America’s problem or shame. That failed city is solely and completely a Democrat problem. Like many failed cities, Detroit comes to mind, and every city besieged recently by rioting, Democrats and their union pals have had carte blanche to inflict their ideas and policies on Baltimore since 1967, the last time there was a Republican Mayor.
In 2012, after four years of his own failed policies, President Obama won a whopping87.4% of the Baltimore City vote. Democrats run the city of Baltimore, the unions, the schools, and, yes, the police force. Since 1969, there have only been only been two Republican governors of the State of Maryland.
Elijah Cummings has represented Baltimore in the U.S. Congress for more than thirty years. As I write this, despite his objectively disastrous reign, the Democrat-infested mainstream media is treating the Democrat like a local folk hero, not the obvious and glaring failure he really is.
Every single member of the Baltimore city council is a Democrat.
BY PAUL BEDARD | APRIL 22, 2015 | 6:11 PM
Legal and illegal immigrants will hit a record high of 51 million in just eight years and eventually account for an astounding 82 percent of all population growth in America, according to new U.S. Census figures.
A report from the Center for Immigration Studies that analyzed the statistics said that by 2023, one in seven U.S. residents will be an immigrant, rising to one in five by 2060 when the immigrant population totals 78 million.
The report was provided to Secrets and released Wednesday evening.
The surge in immigrant population, both legal and illegal, threatens to slam into the presidential campaign as GOP candidates move to figure out what their position is and the president tries to use executive powers to exempt some 5 million illegals from deportation.
Economists have discovered how bad the economy really is
By Matt O’Brien April 21 at 8:00 AM
Unemployment is almost back to normal, but the economy isn’t.
That isn’t because the unemployment rate is a conspiracy to make things look better than they really are. It’s because even though the unemployment rate tells us the most about the labor market, it doesn’t tell us the full story. All it does is show us how many people who are actively looking for work can’t find it. But that leaves out the “shadow unemployed” who want full-time jobs but have either given up looking for them or can only find part-time ones. That usually doesn’t make that big a difference, but it does now, because, even six years after the crisis has ended, there still isn’t much that’s usual about this economy.
Now if you add it all up, this shadow unemployment means our jobs hole is more than three times as big as it looks. That, at least, is what economistsDanny Blanchflower and Andrew Levin found when they looked at how low the unemployment rate is versus how low we think it could go, how high the participation rate is versus how high we think it could go, and how many people can only find part-time jobs. That first part tells us how much further unemployment itself could fall, the second how many discouraged workers could come back, and the last how many people would work more if they could. In other words, it shows us the gap between how many full-time jobs we have and how many full-time jobs we need. The result, as you can see above, is that instead of being a million full-time jobs short, like the unemployment rate says we are, we’re about 3.5 million short.
Pricing yourself out of the market is not so smart
J.D. Tuccille|Apr. 20, 2015 2:04 pm
The Momentum Machines website is low-key right now, but that may have something to do with high-profile arguments in the press and protests in the streets demanding that fast-food chains pay workers $15 an hour to do the job the company’s robots are designed to fill. Even before those placard-wielders decided to raise their costs in terms of dollars and grief, the San Francisco-based start-up announced that they were obsolete.
Momentum Machines’ old, boastier website claimed:
Fast food doesn’t have to have a negative connotation anymore. With our technology, a restaurant can offer gourmet quality burgers at fast food prices.
Our alpha machine replaces all of the hamburger line cooks in a restaurant.
It does everything employees can do except better:
*it slices toppings like tomatoes and pickles only immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible.
*our next revision will offer custom meat grinds for every single customer. Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground after you place your order? No problem.
*Also, our next revision will use gourmet cooking techniques never before used in a fast food restaurant, giving the patty the perfect char but keeping in all the juices.
*it’s more consistent, more sanitary, and can produce ~360 hamburgers per hour.
The labor savings allow a restaurant to spend approximately twice as much on high quality ingredients and the gourmet cooking techniques make the ingredients taste that much better.
Commentators on two different Arabic television programs claimed that President Barack Obama is pushing a nuclear deal with Iran because his father, Barack Obama Sr., was a Shiite Muslim, and President Obama apparently wants the Shia-run government of Iran to be victorious in the region.
The commentators made their remarks on the UK channel Al-Hiwar TV on March 25 and on 4Shbab TV in Saudi Arabia on April 10; the segments were recorded and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute TV Monitor Project (MEMRI).
“There is one thing we must not forget,” said Syrian writer Muhydin Lazikani on Hiwar TV. “I am not peddling some theory, and I am not being racist. But Barack Hussein Obama is the son of a Shiite Kenyan father.”
“He spent much of his childhood in Mombasa, south Kenya,” said Lazikani. “I visited this very area, and I can tell you that it is mostly Shiite. All the childhood memories of the man who rules the White House are Shiite memories.”
“This is why the Iranian issue is so important to him and why he is so anxious for Iran to emerge victorious, and for Syria and all the countries of the Arab Gulf to be shattered,” said Lazikani.
President Obama’s father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (1936-1982), was born in Nyang’oma Kogelo, which is in the southwest region of Kenya. His own father, Hussein Onyango Obama (1895-1979), had converted from Christianity to Islam. Barack Obama Sr. was raised a Muslim but his son, President Obama, said at the February 2009 National Prayer Breakfast, “I had a father who was born a Muslim but became an atheist.”
Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-TX) doesn’t think much of the job that Jeh Johnson and the Department of Homeland “Security” are doing in protecting us, particularly in light of the recent unauthorized and surprise landing of a small helicopter on the lawn of the Capitol. In an interview on the Lars Larson program, Gohmert doesn’t pull any punches in his evaluation and criticism of DHS, an agency that is currently little more than an anti-American political arm of the Obama regime.
After directing some sarcasm towards the ineffective bureaucracy, Gohmert says, “The truth is it ought to scare people because Homeland Security is so overwhelmed in trying to bring in and ship around illegal aliens and give amnesty to as many people as they can.” He faults the focus on lawbreaking and circumvention as the reason why, “They can’t do something as simple as protect the United States Capitol.”
He continues, saying, “A lot of people thought the fourth plane that those American heroes took down in Pennsylvania was probably going for the White House, information I had was he was going to the Capitol. And there are some surveys that show that the U.S. Capitol is the most recognized building in the world.”
At Global Economic Gathering, Concerns That U.S. Is Ceding Its Leadership Role
By JONATHAN WEISMANAPRIL 17, 2015
WASHINGTON — As world leaders converge here for their semiannual trek to the capital of what is still the world’s most powerful economy, concern is rising in many quarters that the United States is retreating from global economic leadership just when it is needed most.
The spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have filled Washington with motorcades and traffic jams and loaded the schedules of President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew. But they have also highlighted what some see as a United States government so bitterly divided that it is on the verge of ceding the global economic stage it built at the end of World War II and has largely directed ever since.
IMF CUTS FORECAST FOR US ECONOMY, UPGRADES EUROPE AND JAPAN
Apr 14, 9:47 AM EDT
BY PAUL WISEMAN
AP ECONOMICS WRITER
WASHINGTON (AP) — The International Monetary Fund, citing the consequences of a strong dollar, is downgrading its outlook for the U.S. economy but raising its forecast for Europe and Japan.
The IMF predicted Tuesday that the American economy will grow 3.1 percent this year and next – a performance the fund characterized as “robust.” But the U.S. outlook was down from the IMF’s January forecast of 3.6 percent growth in 2015 and 3.3 percent growth in 2016. The American economy advanced 2.4 percent last year.
The IMF forecast that the 18 European countries that use the euro currency collectively will expand 1.5 percent in 2015 and 1.6 percent in 2016, up from a January forecast of 1.2 percent growth this year and 1.4 percent next. The eurozone grew just 0.9 percent last year.
The fund expects Japan to grow 1 percent this year and 1.2 percent next year, versus an earlier forecast of 0.6 percent this year and 0.8 percent in 2016. The Japanese economy shrank 0.1 percent in 2014.
The IMF expects the world economy to grow 3.5 percent in 2015, barely up from 3.4 percent last year and unchanged for its January forecast. It raised the outlook for global economic growth in 2016 to 3.8 percent, up from a January forecast of 3.7 percent.
The international lending agency also left unchanged its prediction that the Chinese economy will grow 6.8 percent this year and 6.3 percent in 2016. That marks a sharp deceleration from last year’s 7.4 percent expansion, already the slowest for China in two decades. But Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, the IMF’s deputy director for research, told reporters the slowdown in China reflects the country’s transition from growth built on often-wasteful investment in factories and real estate to slower but steadier growth built on spending by Chinese consumers. “We think it is a good slowdown for China,” he said.
(CNSNews.com) – The federal government taxed away more money, spent more money and ran a bigger deficit in the first half of fiscal 2015 than it did in the first half of fiscal 2014, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
“The federal government ran a budget deficit of $430 billion for the first half of fiscal year 2015, CBO estimates–$17 billion more than the shortfall recorded in the same span last year,” the CBO said in itsMonthly Budget Review for March 2015, which was published April 8. “Both revenues and outlays were about 7 percent higher than the amounts recorded in the first six months of fiscal year 2014.”
The federal fiscal year begins on Oct. 1 and ends on Sept. 30.
In the first six months of fiscal 2014, the government took in approximately $1,323,000,000,000 in revenue, according to CBO. In the first six months of this fiscal year, it took in approximately $1,420,000,000,000—an increase of $98,000,000,000.
Meanwhile, the federal government spent approximately $1,736,000,000,000 in the first six months of fiscal 2014. It spent approximately $1,851,000,000,000 in the first six months of the fiscal year—an increase of $115,000,000,000 over last year.
Last year, the government ran a deficit of $413 billion in the first six months of the fiscal year. This year, it ran a deficit of $430 billion—a $17 billion increase over last year.
Residents of high-tax states are voting with their feet
By Stephen Moore – – Sunday, April 12, 2015
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren appeared on one of the late night talk shows last week, beating the class warfare drum and arguing for billions of dollars in new social programs paid for with higher taxes on millionaires and billionaires. In recent years, though, blue states such as California, Illinois, Delaware, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland and Minnesota adopted this very strategy, and they raised taxes on their wealthy residents. How did it work out? Almost all of these states lag behind the national average in growth of jobs and incomes.
So, if income redistribution policies are the solution to shrinking the gap between rich and poor, why do they fail so miserably in the states?
The blue states that try to lift up the poor with high taxes, high welfare benefits, high minimum wages and other Robin Hood policies tend to be the places where the rich end up the richest and the poor the poorest.
California is the prototypical example. It has the highest tax rates of any state. It has very generous welfare benefits. Many of its cities have a high minimum wage. But day after day, the middle class keeps leaving. The wealthy areas such as San Francisco and the Silicon Valley boom. Yet the state has nearly the highest poverty rate in the nation. The Golden State, alas, has become the inequality state.
A Wednesday “Good Morning America” piece gave President Barack Obama an open mic to claim that, in ABC’s words, “climate change became a personal issue for him when his older daughter Malia, now 16, was rushed to the emergency room with an asthma attack when she was just a toddler.”
Somehow, ABC managed to avoid another possible contributor — besides the obvious possibility that Malia developed asthma independent of external influences — namely the President’s 30-year smoking habit. He is said to have quit once and for all in 2011. USA Today columnist James S. Robbins wasn’t impressed with the President’s “reasoning,” and with good cause, as he articulated in a Thursday evening column. He even managed to get a “there’s been no warming for a long time” observation past USA Today’s editors (links are in original; bolds are mine):
Global warming didn’t give Malia asthma
President’s smoking more likely to cause daughter’s health problem than climate change.
President Obama blames global warming for his daughter’s asthma. Today that’s politically useful spin, but the science says something different. If you’re looking for a culprit, it just might be Malia’s dad.
… The president connected his daughter’s malady to global climate change. In a discussion Tuesday, he said “all of our families are going to be vulnerable” to global warming-induced health risks because “you can’t cordon yourself off from air or from climate.”
A White House fact sheet connected the dots, saying that asthma rates have more than doubled in the past 30 years, and that “climate change is putting these individuals and many other vulnerable populations at greater risk of landing in the hospital” like Malia.
The good news is that there is less reason for alarm than the White House suggests. The Environmental Protection Agency cautions that “outdoor air pollution and pollen may also worsen chronic respiratory diseases, such as asthma.” Yet the EPA also reports that our air quality has substantially improved; aggregate emissions of common pollutants have decreased 62% between 1980 and 2013. It is unlikely that cleaner air is causing the increase in asthma.
Whether there is a link between asthma and global warming, Malia herself hasn’t really experienced much. The high school junior was born in 1998, when temperatures spiked. By some measurements, the world hasn’t warmed significantly since then.
… Even when smoking is done outside, nicotine in infants’ hair is five times higher for babies with outside smoking parents than non-smoking parents. Smoking-related chemicals in infants’ urine is seven times higher. Other studies have found similar results.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “tobacco smoke is one of the most common asthma triggers,” and “if you have asthma, it’s important that you avoid exposure to secondhand smoke.”
No father wants to feel that his habits might hurt his children. But sometimes you have to look in the mirror to find the guilty party, not search the stratosphere for a hidden culprit.
APRIL 12, 2015, 10:41 PM LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, APRIL 12, 2015, 10:43 PM
BY HERB JACKSON
RECORD COLUMNIST |
THE RECORD
Sen. Bob Menendez frowned Sunday when asked if a 14-count indictment accusing him of bribery and false statements means he betrayed the public trust.
“Absolutely not,” he declared to the “Fox News Sunday” camera, accusing prosecutors of taking “snippets of a story to make their case” and promising the whole story would come out in court.
“When all the facts are known, I know that I will be vindicated,” Menendez said.
In his first television interview since the April 1 indictment, Menendez made no revelations. But he telegraphed what his strategy may be as he returns to Congress this week and faces questions from the media about the case: Profess innocence, denounce prosecutors and leave detailed answers to some future date in court.
“He will not be running from reporters. It’s not his style,” spokeswoman Tricia Enright said last week. “Nevertheless, because this case is now in the courts, he won’t be able to say anything about it more than he has already.”
Americans who were held hostage in Iran from 1979 to 1981 are pushing the Obama administration to demand that they be compensated as part of any nuclear deal.
Dozens of the hostages and their families will meet with lawmakers’ staffs early next week to reiterate their call for compensation from Iran, which has gone unanswered in the 35 years since they were held prisoner.
Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) has filed two amendments to Iran legislation that would “ensure that resolving the issue of compensation for hostages is considered” prior to any nuclear agreement, a source familiar with the amendments told The Hill.
Isakson proposed the amendments to legislation introduced by Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) that would require congressional review of any deal the administration brokers with Tehran. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to move forward with the legislation on Tuesday.
A State Department official noted that the administration has in the past backed Isakson’s bipartisan efforts on compensating the hostages, but suggested the issue would not be part of the nuclear talks.
The newly released documents buttress a report issued late last month detailing how an immigration director was swayed with respect to hundreds of millions of dollars in film and TV investments under the EB-5 visa program.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has released hundreds of pages of emails plus other documents in support of its investigation of improper influence on the EB-5 immigration program. Many of the documents discuss hundreds of millions of dollars in financing for film and television productions from Sony Pictures and Time Warner with prominent politicians including former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendall and the office of former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa interjecting in an effort to get approvals.
Since inception in 1990, the EB-5 visa program allows foreign nationals to become conditional permanent residents upon an investment of at least $500,000 for a qualifying project that creates American jobs. Entertainment studios begun to eye the program to get film investment capital, but some projects have been rejected. For example, in 2009, Lionsgate was denied funding from EB-5 investors because it was determined that the studio was not legally obligated to accept the funding.
