Thursday, May 2, 2013

Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, May 2, 2013


My nephews playing a gig in Portland, Oregon, with K's Choice!

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4 comments:

William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-politics/bradshaw-gets-1-million-for-violence-prevention-un/nXbs4/

* FILE UNDER: "WOW... JUST... WOW."

Florida House and Senate budget leaders have awarded Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw $1 million for a new violence prevention unit aimed at preventing tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., from occurring on his turf.

* STOP... SPENDING... MORE... AND... MORE... MONEY... EVER... EXPANDING... GOVERNMENT...!!!

Bradshaw plans to use the extra $1 million to launch “prevention intervention” units featuring specially trained deputies, mental health professionals and caseworkers.

* WHY DOES THIS REQUIRE NEW FUNDING...??? THIS IS LOGISTICS! THIS IS SIMPLY MANAGEMENT! ALL THE "INGREDIENTS" ARE ALREADY - SUPPOSEDLY - ON THE JOB!

The teams will respond to citizen phone calls to a 24-hour hotline with a knock on the door and a referral to services, if needed.

* ANONYMOUS CALLS AS WELL AS "TRACKED" CALLS?

* SO LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT... THE COPS GET A CALL... NOW INSTEAD OF SENDING A SINGLE OFFICER OR PARTNER OFFICERS TO ASSESS THE SITUATION THEY'LL BE SENDING ONE OR TWO OFFICERS... ONE OR MORE MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONALS... AND ONE OR MORE CASEWORKERS... AS AN INITIAL RESPONSE. SOUNDS PRETTY LABOR INTENSIVE TO ME.

The goal will be avoiding crime — and making sure law enforcement knows about potential powder kegs before tragedies occur, Bradshaw said.

* THE GOAL... U-HUH... (AND HOW WILL "PROGRESS" TOWARDS THIS "GOAL" BE MEASURED?)

But the earmark, which is a one-time-only funding provision...

* SO THEN HOW IS THE PROGRAM SUPPOSED TO BE FUNDED IN YEAR TWO... THREE... FOUR...? (FOLKS... THIS IS BULLSHIT! IT'S SOMETHING THESE SCUMBAG POLITICIANS - AND PERHAPS THE SHERIFF - WILL RUN ON NEXT YEAR AS PART OF THEIR "WE'VE DONE THIS" ELECTION CAMPAIGN.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

May 2, 2013 at 2:26 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

Bradshaw is readying a hotline and is planning public service announcements to encourage local citizens to report their neighbors, friends or family members if they fear they could harm themselves or others.

* UH-HUH...

“We want people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government, hates the mayor and he’s gonna shoot him,” Bradshaw said. “What does it hurt to have somebody knock on a door and ask, ‘Hey, is everything OK?’”

* BECAUSE... (*SCRATCHING MY HEAD*)... PEOPLE CAN'T DO THIS NOW...???

That’s enough for Senate budget chief Joe Negron, R-Stuart, who helped push through the funding last weekend.

* YEP! REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATICS... WORKING TOGETHER TO SPEND MORE AND MORE... TO EXPAND GOVERNMENT FURTHER AND FURTHER...

Bradshaw acknowledged the risk that anyone in a messy divorce or in a dispute with a neighbor could abuse the hotline. But, he said, he’s confident that his trained professionals will know how to sort out fact from fiction.

* AT WHAT COST IN WASTED TIME... IN WASTED MAN-HOURS... IN MISALLOCATED RESOURCES WHEN RESOURCES ARE LIMITED IN THE FIRST PLACE?!

“We know how to sift through frivolous complaints,” he said.

* AND THEN THE VERY FIRST TIME A "FRIVOLOUS" COMPLAINT TURNS OUT NOT TO BE FRIVOLOUS...??? (MY POINT... IT SOUNDS LIKE THEY'RE TELLING EVERYONE WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR AND DEPENDING UPON THEIR ABILITY TO MOVE THE GOAL-POSTS AS NECESSARY TO COVER THEIR ASSES WHEN ON MATRIC DOESN'T WORK OUT.

The proposal still needs the blessing of Gov. Rick Scott, who has line-item veto authority.

* LET'S HOPE SCOTT VETOS IT.

But if it goes forward, Palm Beach County’s already stretched mental health and substance abuse providers could find themselves even busier. There is no ready source of funds once the $1 million runs its course, as there hasn’t been an increase to community mental health funding in many years.

* AS I WAS SAYING UP ABOVE, FOLKS... (*SIGH*)

[T]he county already pays for mobile crisis response teams at two non-profit mental health providers, a service that includes a 24-hour crisis call center. They, too, are trained to deescalate conflicts and refer troubled people to care. Which ones will respond when there’s a call from a school or a home? That will have to be clarified.

* GEEZUS... (*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

May 2, 2013 at 2:26 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_23149817/gonzalez-wrong-message-assimilation

In the aftermath of the Boston bombings, many are asking how someone who came to America at the age of 9, attended some of our best schools, captained the wrestling team, went to the prom and became a citizen could have inflicted such a devastating attack on our society.

The emerging evidence suggests that part of the answer is that no one in the past decade taught Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to love America...

Tsarnaev wasn't taught that assimilation into American society was desirable.

As I'm finding while researching a book on Hispanics — indeed, what I experienced as a young Cuban coming to this country in the early 1970s — we no longer teach patriotic assimilation. We teach the opposite, in fact — that we're all groups living cheek by jowl with one another, all with different advantages and legal class protection statuses, but not really all part of the same national fabric.

In other words, we teach multiculturalism and diversity, and are officially making assimilation very hard to achieve.

[A]s we grapple now with the thorny question of immigration, how to handle the millions of people who started to arrive at mid-century in a massive immigration wave, we could do worse than look at the affairs in Boston for a clue on whether our current approach works.

As Peggy Noonan said in a prescient column in 2006:

"We are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically now. We are assimilating them culturally. Within a generation their children speak Valley Girl on cell phones. 'So I'm like no,' and he's all 'yeah,' and I'm like, 'In your dreams.' "Whether their parents are from Trinidad, Bosnia, Lebanon or Chile, their children, once Americans, know the same music, the same references, watch the same shows. And to a degree and in a way it will hold them together. But not forever and not in a crunch."

What's even worse is that this state of affairs is the result of decision we made. We didn't just get lazy and stopped teaching immigrants (and natives) to love America; we decided to stop and made assimilation a dirty word that connoted coercion and loss of ancestral culture. This despite all the evidence that assimilation, as preached and practiced since the nation's founding, was not coercive nor did it demand an end to St. Patrick's Day parades or love of Italian cooking.

(*NOD*)

In a retrospectively timely paper this month, the Hudson Institute reviewed evidence from a Harris Interactive Survey that showed that a large patriotic gap exists between naturalized Americans and native born. On such questions as to which should be the highest legal authority in the land, the Constitution or international law, or whether they considered themselves Americans or "citizens of the world", native Americans saying the Constitution and U.S. citizen led naturalized Americans by more than 30 points.

* THESE PEOPLE NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN GRANTED CITIZENSHIP!

"Why is there this large patriotic gap between native-born and naturalized citizens?" asked the Hudson researchers. "American leaders have essentially altered our de-facto assimilation policy from Americanization (or patriotic integration) to a multiculturalism that emphasizes ethnic group consciousness at the expense of American common culture. In short, we have sent immigrants the wrong message on assimilation."

* THE LEFT. THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. THIS IS WHO HAS DONE THIS - DELIBERATELY.

It wasn't always so. We debated assimilation vs. multiculturalism in the 1910s, and chose the former. The Greatest Generation that ensued met Noonan's "crunch test."

(*THUMBS UP*)

May 2, 2013 at 2:49 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.wral.com/classmates-rally-around-princeton-student-expelled-for-gun-in-car/12401713/

North Carolina's Princeton High School community is rallying around a student who was arrested and expelled for having an unloaded shotgun in his car in the school's parking lot.

David Cole Winthrow, 16, was charged Monday with bringing a weapon on educational property, which is a felony.

He was expelled from school and won't be allowed to graduate with his class later this month.

* AHH... BUT WAIT! WAIT TILL YOU DISCOVER THE CONTEXT! (READ ON!)

Family friend Kim Boykin said Winthrow, an Eagle Scout and honors student, accidentally left his gun in the car after skeet shooting over the weekend. When he realized, he went inside to ask school officials if he could leave campus to take the gun home, but an administrator reported the weapon to police.

"To have him arrested and expelled from school is excessive," she said. "He locks his vehicle, goes inside and tries to do the right thing."

* FOLKS... THIS IS INSANITY! I CAN SEE CALLING THE COPS. I CAN SEE ASKING THE POLICE TO REMOVE THE GUN FROM THE KID'S CAR AND EITHER BRING IT BACK TO THE POLICE STATION WHERE THE BOY COULD PICK IT UP AFTER SCHOOL OR PERHAPS EVEN REQUEST THAT THE POLICE DELIVER THE WEAPON TO THE BOY'S FATHER AT HOME OR AT WORK... BUT UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES, TO PUNISH THE KID... TO EXPEL HIM FROM SCHOOL... INSANITY!

* OH...! AND GET THIS, FOLKS! (READ ON!)

Others in the Princeton High community agree that Winthrow's punishment is too harsh, especially after charges weren't filed when a loaded gun...

* LOADED GUN!

...was found in an assistant principal's car two years ago. The assistant principal and a school resource officer were each suspended for three days without pay in that incident.

(*PURSED LIPS*)

Johnston County schools spokeswoman Tracey Peedin Jones said the school system has to follow state law regarding weapons on campus. "Please know that with student and personnel issues, we carefully balance all factors to arrive at a fair and just outcome," she said in a statement Wednesday. "Certain items are mandated and we have no choice but to follow the law."

Boykin said Winthow's family isn't upset with school administrators, but believes the law is too strict. "With no areas for mistakes or human error or gray area in there, that just can't apply to everything," she said.

Students have been painting "Free Cole" on their cars and a local printer even designed a "Free Cole for Doing the Right Thing" bumper sticker.

"I believe he did the right thing by being truthful and being honest," said Joseph Canzaniello of Express Signs. "His integrity will be held intact no matter what happens to him."

* LET'S ASSUME THE SCHOOL REALLY HAD "NO CHOICE." THAT DOESN'T MEAN THEY - AND THEIR LAWYERS - SHOULDN'T RIGHT AT THIS VERY MOMENT BE LEADING A VERY PUBLIC EFFORT TO EITHER GET A JUDGE TO VACATE THIS APPLICATION OF THE LAW "IN THE INTERESTS OF JUSTICE" OR FAILING THAT CAMPAIGN FOR A PARDON FROM THE GOVERNOR.

* WHY IS BILL BARKER THINKING OF THIS INSTEAD OF THE SCHOOL BOARD... THE SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT... THE LEADERS OF THE PTA...?

May 2, 2013 at 3:06 PM

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