St. Louis CofCC Blog

I bet the fish sandwiches aren’t the only thing “hot” in this place

San Francisco Chronicle:

Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland found themselves in the unwelcome spotlight this week over the letters of support they wrote on behalf of the notorious Your Black Muslim Bakery, but they aren’t the only politicos who have supported the group over the years.

At the height of its power back in 1996, the splinter Muslim group - whose members were implicated in last week’s slaying of newspaper editor Chauncey Bailey - got the city to approve an advance on a $1.2 million federal redevelopment loan to launch training program for health care jobs.

Within three months, the group had burned through $275,000 without turning out a single graduate.

They did, however, spend $650 a month to lease a Cadillac.

Another $44,000 supposedly went to consulting fees, $10,500 went for security and $7,500 for advertising on a local cable station, where then-leader Yusuf Bey had a weekly TV show.

(snip)

The school never opened.

And the loan - one of several the council made that year to help disadvantaged businesses - was never repaid.

This means that you paid for what turned out to be a grant for the members of “Your Black Muslim Bakery” to swill. This means that it’s truly “your” Black Muslim Bakery, whether you want it or not.

The Feds ultimately dumped $1.2 million on this bunch. St. Louisans might remember that, several years ago, the local chapter of BABAA (Blacks Assisting Blacks Against AIDS) paid a bunch of money to a relatively famous black man stripper for a supposed educational presentation by the group to high school students about the dangers of promiscuity, and some beancounters figured out that BABAA paid him with Federal anti-syphilis funds.. In reality, and not surprisingly, it turned out to be a strip act, and so the local media reported, some of the “education” involved black teenagers playing around with this guy’s organs with their hands.

In passing, the local media reported that the St. Louis BABAA received $1.5 million in Federal grants over a given period of time for health education missions.

So you figure, a million and change goes to waste on this black group in this city, a million and change goes to waste on that black group in that city — and they wonder why there’s no money to fix bridges. Verily, it’s the aggregate and accumulative effect of this kind of spending that is the reason why the infrastructure budget is squeezed.

Washington Times:

Islamic extremists embedded in the United States — posing as Hispanic nationals — are partnering with violent Mexican drug gangs to finance terror networks in the Middle East, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration report.

“Since drug traffickers and terrorists operate in a clandestine environment, both groups utilize similar methodologies to function … all lend themselves to facilitation and are among the essential elements that may contribute to the successful conclusion of a catastrophic event by terrorists,” said the confidential report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.

(snip)

“It is very likely that any future ‘September 11th’ type of terrorist event in the United States may be facilitated, wittingly or unwittingly, by drug traffickers operating on both sides of the United States-Mexico border,” the DEA report says.

As it turns out, the first “September 11th type of terrorist event” happened partially with the help of radical Hispanics.

Even though radical Islam eschews illicit drug use, and this was so much the case that the Afghani Taliban wiped out the poppy fields in Afghanistan, it has no trouble participating with drug cartels to carry out terrorist attacks. This is a pattern with AQ-types — in spite of fundamentalist Islamic morals, the 9/11 hijackers spent months and years before 9/11 in America acting like normal Americans, even when doing so was a violation of Sharia. In their minds, the ends of doing what it takes to make war on the infidel and advance Islam justifies the means of temporarily and expediently violating Sharia.

Also, while President Bush fights no-win police actions on the other side of the world to keep us safe over here, he is deliberately dragging his feet on border security and the border fence, making terrorism all the more likely over here.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Somebody who shouldn’t have been there started a fire that emptied a decaying apartment building early today.

The fire damaged two top-story units on the sixth floor of a brick building that’s part of the Cochran Gardens housing complex at Biddle and 7th streets, just north of downtown. Nobody was injured, but one firefighter was treated for heat exhaustion.

Pending an investigation, Fire Capt. Steve Simpson declined to speculate on how the fire had started, or who was responsible.

But tenant Amekia McCuller thinks she knows: “Crackheads. Anybody and their momma with no place to go, they have a hotel here.”

(snip)

Evidence of drug addicts in the building was suggested by Simpson, the Fire Department spokesman. He said, “When the firefighters got inside, they found that the brass fittings on the building’s standpipes were gone — stolen.”

Drug addicts often make off with brass and copper fittings, which fetch high prices from scrap-metal dealers.

And where is Bertha Gilkey during all this? Perhaps this public housing tenant is off on another junket to Europe. She somehow has the money to travel great distances and lecture about public housing cooperatives and tenant management, but never enough to buy her own house. And she certainly doesn’t seem to have the time these days to practice what she preaches and what she apparently used to do.

So much for the great success story at Cochran Gardens.

Spot the irony.

Chicago Tribune:

For Somalis, who have migrated here in the last decade, the bridge was a vital lifeline connecting an established community on one side of the river with a growing Somali neighborhood on the other. Sometimes locals jokingly referred to it as “the Somali Bridge” – a lifeline for the 40,000 to 50,000 Somalis estimated by community leaders to be living in the Twin Cities and their suburbs

(snip)

To the Somalis who live near the bridge, the picture remains unfathomable. After all, they said, bridges collapse in underdeveloped African nations not in metropolitan Minneapolis.

In other words, they are complaining that Minneapolis seems like the third world they left. I wonder why.

The collapse too adds to uneasy feelings among Somalis who say they have felt a federal backlash since Sept. 11, 2001 not only because of their Muslim faith but also because Somalia has been accused of harboring terrorists associated with Osama bin Laden. The bridge collapse has added jitters for Somalis who in recent years regrouped and rallied around one another.

If it’s so horrible, they can always go back home to Somalia. Sure, they’ll have crumbling bridges, but they’ll be liberated from the evil American foreign policy, and return to the Islamic paradise.

Jesse Jackson, in the Chicago Sun-Times:

What happened at both ends of the Mississippi and is happening in cities across the country are tragedies, but they aren’t random accidents. They are the direct price of the right wing in power. Scornful of government, intent on cutting taxes and slashing spending, they systematically have shorted public investment in our basic infrastructure — in bridges and roads, in rail lines and air systems, in parks and schools.

Keep in mind that Jackson is for amnesty and open borders.

Those are the stated priorities of modern-day conservatives — a far remove from those of President Dwight Eisenhower, who built the interstate highway system while putting a lid on military spending and balancing the budget. Ike knew that infrastructure was important; military adventurism was dangerous and fiscal balance was common sense.

Keep in mind that the interstate highway system was sold as an important element of national defense. The official name of the system is the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.

Jackson is right in that more than one bridge will crumble. But he will never recognize that the browning of America is and will continue to be the cause.

Today:  255,019
Yesterday:  254,700

AP:

Already tarnished by brutality and misconduct allegations, Chicago’s police department is facing more tough questions in the wake of two officer-involved deaths in less than a week.

Leading the latest chorus of critics are the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, who opened a local branch of his National Action Network after two alleged police assaults on civilians were caught on videotape.

Just as Al Sharpton sets up shop in Chicago, he gets a chance to show off. The fighting between Jesse and Al will be more entertaining than any of their anti-police crusades.

On Tuesday, about 14 hours before Jackson made an appearance at a rally protesting the Taser death of a 42-year-old man, police shot and killed an 18-year-old man who they say flashed a gun at them and ran away.

The latest shooting prompted an angry crowd of more than 100 people to gather near the scene where the Cook County medical examiner’s office said Aaron Harrison was killed by a gunshot wound to the back.

If that “angry crowd of more than 100 people” would each spend 10 minutes in a firearms simulator and play the role of a cop, they would understand why a cop would get scared when someone flashes a gun at them.

Locke Bowman, legal director of the MacArthur Justice Center, was furious that police suggested the officers acted properly so early in the investigation.

“I just don’t understand the tendency of this department to immediately circle the wagons, engage in blaming the victim and justifying the police actions before the facts are thoroughly investigated,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

If there’s any circling of the wagons, it’s in the black community. People talk about the “blue wall of silence,” that is, the tendency of cops not to rat each other out. However, I worry more about the “black wall of silence,” that is, the tendency of blacks not to tell the cops what they know about crimes or what crimes they witnessed (i.e. 50 people standing around, and nobody saw anything), and also the tendency for blacks on juries not to convict black criminal defendants in spite of overwhelming evidence (black jury nullification).

To me, if we can tolerate a black wall of silence, then the cops can have their blue wall of silence.

Schlafly:

Now that the game plan is laid out, we can connect the dots: NAFTA, the admission of Mexican trucks onto our highways, the contract to build the TransTexas Corridor and the plans to extend it into a NAFTA Super Highway, making Kansas City an international “port,” the “totalization” of illegal aliens into our Social Security system, and the recently defeated Senate amnesty bill. That bill would have integrated 20 million illegal aliens into our labor force, locked us (by Section 413) into the SPP, and spent massive foreign aid to “improve the standard of living in Mexico.”

If neither the USA nor Canada can deport illegal aliens, nor are any Mexicans in the USA or Canada are supposed to be considered “illegal aliens,” if the purpose of the American and Canadian government is to “improve the standard of living in Mexico,” and if Mexican commerce is to have free reign in the USA and Canada, the NAFTA/NAU/SPP can best be described with the title of this post.