All posts by Wintery Knight

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Commentary

MUST-READ: Mark Steyn discusses how Britons inform on each other

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Mark Steyn writing in MacLean’s magazine. Apparently, the practice of informing the government about speech that is not in conformity with political correctness is widespread in the UK.

Excerpt:

A couple of years back, 14-year-old Codie Stott asked her teacher at Harrop Fold High School if she could sit with another group to do her science project as in hers the other five girls all spoke Urdu and she didn’t understand what they were saying. The teacher called the police, who took her to the station, photographed her, fingerprinted her, took DNA samples, removed her jewellery and shoelaces, put her in a cell for 3½ hours, and questioned her on suspicion of committing a Section Five “racial public order offence.” “An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark,” declared the headmaster Antony Edkins. The school would “not stand for racism in any form.” In a statement, Greater Manchester Police said they took “hate crime” very seriously, and their treatment of Miss Stott was in line with “normal procedure.”

And:

Six weeks ago, Roy Amor, a medical technician who made prosthetics for a company called Opcare, glanced out of the window at their offices at Withington Community Hospital, and saw some British immigration officials outside. “You better hide,” he said to his black colleague, a close friend of both Mr. Amor and his wife. Not the greatest joke in the world, but the pal wasn’t offended, laughed it off as a bit of office banter, and they both got on with their work. It was another colleague who overheard the jest and filed a formal complaint reporting Mr. Amor for “racism.” He was suspended from his job. Five days later, he received an email from the company notifying him of the disciplinary investigation and inviting him to expand on the initial statement he had made about the incident. Mr. Amor had worked in the prosthetics unit at Withington for 30 years until he made his career-detonating joke. That afternoon he stepped outside his house and shot himself in the head. The black “victim” of his “racism” attended the funeral, as did other friends.

The part that scares me about this is the confidence that the other side has in pushing their viewpoint using coercion.

Were did this nanny-like opposition to feeling offended, feeling excluded and feeling judged come from? Who puts elevates feelings and compassion over the risky, confrontational exchange of ideas? Who minimizes truth and debate and maximizes self-esteem and happiness? Who emphasizes victimhood?

You know what? Life is tough. Sometimes people say things that make you feel bad. And if you are a grown-up, you let it go. You don’t empower government to coerce people so that you can have happy feelings. Freedom and prosperity are more important than happy feelings. Life isn’t fair.

For the record, I am a very visible minority, and consider the secular left PC thought police to be the worst racists on the planet.

News

Did GM pay off its bailout loans by using other government loans?

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Story from Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

Moderate Republican Chuck Grassley, who supported Obama’s bailouts, wants to know how GM paid off their debts. He wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Excerpt:

General Motors (GM) yesterday announced that it repaid its TARP loans. I am concerned, however, that this announcement is not what it seems. In fact, it appears to be nothing more than an elaborate TARP money shuffle.

On Tuesday of this week, Mr. Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for TARP, testified before the Senate Finance Committee. During his testimony Mr. Barofsky addressed GM’s recent debt repayment activity, and stated that the funds GM is using to repay its TARP debt are not coming from GM earnings.

Instead, GM seems to be using TARP funds from an escrow account at Treasury to make the debt repayments. The most recent quarterly report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for TARP says “The source of funds for these quarterly [debt] payments will be other TARP funds currently held in an escrow account.” See, Office of the Special Inspector General for TARP, Quarterly Report to Congress dated April 20, 2010, page 115.

Furthermore, Exhibit 99.1 of the Form 8K filed by GM with the SEC on November 16, 2009, seems to confirm that the source of funds for GM’s debt repayments was a multi-billion dollar escrow account at Treasury—not from earnings.

[…]In reality, it looks like GM merely used one source of TARP funds to repay another. The taxpayers are still on the hook, and whether TARP funds are ultimately recovered depends entirely on the government’s ability to sell GM stock in the future. Treasury has merely exchanged a legal right to repayment for an uncertain hope of sharing in the future growth of GM. A debt-for-equity swap is not a repayment.

Ed summarizes:

In other words, this is just a shell game. As Jim Vicevich points out, it’s akin to paying off your Visa credit card with your Mastercard — and then bragging about your financial condition. Taxpayers are still on the hook for GM. Nothing at all has changed.

Instead, we have another good reason for government to refrain from bailing out private companies. It makes them act like government when it comes to transparency about their finances. This claim really does prove that GM now stands for Government Motors.

Michelle Malkin also has a good column here about MORE connections between Democrats and rich Wall Street investment bankers. The Democrats are tightly connected with large corporations and investment banks. As a small government conservative, I find this alarming and unsettling. I believe in separation of government and corporations.

Videos

ACORN’s CEO Bertha Wilson explains why she favors amnesty

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A new video clip of Bertha Wilson, the CEO of ACORN. (H/T Verum Serum)

Here’s an excerpt from the transcript:

Immigration is the next big battle. Immigration, immigration, immigration. And the reason this is so important is, you know, here’s the secret [whispers]:

We’re getting ready to me a majority, minority country. Shhhh. [applause] We’ll be like South Africa. More black people than white people. [laughter] Don’t tell anybody.

[…]My challenge to black folks, and to people of color and civil rights folks, are as this: the face of immigration needs to be a lot blacker than it is. Because once they can frame the immigration debate as about Latinos, crossing some mythical border, when in fact we have second and third generation black folks in this country who come from immigrant families. But they’re not standing up and marching with their Latino brothers and sisters, and saying “I am an immigrant too”…

Morgen (from Verum Serum) writes:

As a country, we have a proud history of accepting immigrants from all over the world, and we are better off for it. But we do not have a “mythical border”. It is the responsibility of our government to maintain our territorial integrity, and as citizens – through our democratic institutions – we should proudly seek to defend the laws and traditions which have made this nation great. There is nothing inconsistent between this and a rational immigration policy, as evidenced by multiple generations of immigrants who have peacefully and successfully assimilated into our way of life. (While enjoying unparalleled freedom to continue to honor their cultural and religious traditions, however they desire.)

But we should have no tolerance for those who ignore our laws, and seek to undermine the values we hold most dear through subversive means. This is the socialist agenda for America, and this is the “progressive” agenda for America – and it must be defeated.

I find it interesting that Bertha Wilson seems to be so concerned with race. Why is race so important to people on the left? There’s a word for people who judge people by the color of their skin, like Bertha Wilson does. Come to think of it, lots of Obama’s friends (Jeremiah Wright, Father Pfleger, etc.) seem to have a fixation on skin color. What is it about the left that makes them judge people by their skin color? Maybe it has something to do with the need to gain power by pitting some groups against other groups, then offering government as a solution.

My thoughts

I am myself a very dark person of color, and a son of a first-generation immigrant family. My parents came to this country with virtually nothing, and we worked our way up. I am the first person in my family to attend graduate school (computer science). And at no point did my skin color ever hold me back from achieving success. What matters in the capitalist West is a person can produce, not what a person looks like. This is the best place for me to succeed.

Like almost all conservatives, I am in favor of increased legal immigration – provided that those immigrants work hard, play by the rules, and are ineligible for social programs for at least a decade. Any legal immigrant who can stick to these rules for a few years should be put on a path to citizenship. America should welcome those who have skills that benefit all of us. But we should not be rewarding illegal immigrants just because they have the “right” skin color.

ACORN and Obama

ACORN, you remember, is Barack Obama’s former employer. He trained them in community activism. He helped them to sue Citibank, so that the bank would be forced to make loans to people who could not afford homes. This was a major cause of our current recession. Bertha Wilson endorsed Barack Obama for president.

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