Category Archives: News

News

California Democrat paid $800,000 to manage city of 38,000 people

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UPDATE: Rizzo and a bunch of other Democrats have been arrested!

Excerpt:

Today, eight city council members were arrested in Bell, California for what Los Angeles County District Attorney labeled “corruption on steroids.” Thus far, every major news outlet that has reported on the story has omitted the fact that all eight individuals arrested are Democrats.

These glaring omissions come only weeks after NewsBusters reported that of the 351 stories on the then-brewing controversy, 350 had omitted party affiliations, and one had mentioned they were Democrats only in apologizing for not doing so sooner.

ABC, CBS, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and the San Francisco Chronicle all reported on the arrests today without mentioning party affiliations.

Here’s the previous story about the salaries.

Story here from Bloomberg News. (H/T ECM, Hot Air)

Excerpt:

Hundreds of residents of one of the poorest municipalities in Los Angeles County shouted in protest last night as tensions rose over a report that the city’s manager earns an annual salary of almost $800,000.

An overflow crowd packed a City Council meeting in Bell, a mostly Hispanic city of 38,000 about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles, to call for the resignation of Mayor Oscar Hernandez and other city officials. Residents left standing outside the chamber banged on the doors and shouted “fuera,” or “get out” in Spanish.

It was the first council meeting since the Los Angeles Times reported July 15 that Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo earns $787,637 — with annual 12 percent raises — and that Bell pays its police chief $457,000, more than Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck makes in a city of 3.8 million people. Bell council members earn almost $100,000 for part-time work.

City Attorney Edward Lee said the council members couldn’t discuss salaries in public without advance notice. The council then adjourned for a private session. About an hour later, the council members returned, and Hernandez read a statement saying the city would prepare a report on the salaries and seek public comment at the next council meeting, scheduled for Aug. 16.

Residents shouted in protest. Lee said he would have the room cleared if people continued to speak out of line. Police Chief Randy Adams said the fire department wanted to end the meeting because the crowd outside was blocking the door.

Here’s something I found on my own while searching for his party affiliation.

Excerpt:

Authorities discovered a methamphetamine lab at a Bell home owned by the city’s mayor early today and arrested two men, officials said.

Narcotics investigators raided a home in the 3800 block of Bell Avenue about 1:30 a.m. and found a “super lab,” capable of producing 20 pounds of methamphetamine at one time, said Deputy Guillermina Saldana of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. The investigators were part of a multi-agency state task force.

Saldana said two men were taken into custody, and two young children, ages 2 and 3, were placed in protective care. The suspects’ identities were not immediately available.

The home, one of three units on the lot, is owned by Bell Mayor Oscar Hernandez, who said in a phone interview that it was one of several properties he owns and that he rented it out to a young couple in their 20s. He said the husband was one of the men arrested. Hernandez said that although his son and daughter live in one of the units, his family knew nothing about the lab and had nothing to do with it.

“Nobody smelled nothing. I never got any complaints, and it’s a small community and the houses are close to each other,” said Hernandez, who runs a corner grocery store down the street and has been the city’s mayor since March.

I guess it goes without saying that he’s a Democrat. Not that any news stories will mention that he is a Democrat. But he is a Democrat.

News

Journalists conspired to spike the Jeremiah Wright story

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Story here in the Daily Caller. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign.

The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public – to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”

Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. “George [Stephanopoulos],” fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is “being a disgusting little rat snake.”

Others went further. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

The mainstream news media is not objective. They’re Democrats. They vote Democrat. They give money to Democrats.

News

New peer-reviewed paper endorses irreducible complexity and intelligent design

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From Evolution News.

Excerpt:

A peer-reviewed paper, “Information and Entropy — Top-Down or Bottom-Up Development in Living Systems?,” by University of Leeds professor Andy McIntosh in the International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics expressly endorses intelligent design (ID) via an exploration of a key question in ID thinking…

Notice that this journal is NOT related to the intelligent design movement in any way – this is a mainstream peer-reviewed journal.

The author of the paper has two goals:

(1) First, he defines the term “machine” (a device which locally raises the free energy) and observes that the cell is full of machines. Such machines pose a challenge to neo-Darwinian evolution due to their irreducibly complex nature.
(2) Second, he argues that the information in living systems (similar to computer software) uses such machines and in fact requires machines to operate (what good is a program without a computer to run it?). An example is the genome sitting on the DNA molecule. From a thermodynamics perspective, the only way to make sense of this situation is to understand that the information is non-material and constrains the thermodynamics so that the local matter and energy are in a non-equilibrium state.

And a bit later:

…the presence of information is the cause of lowered logical entropy in a given system, rather than the consequence.

…[T]here is a perfectly consistent view which is a top-down approach where biological information already present in the phenotypic creature (and not emergent as claimed in the traditional bottom-up approach) constrains the system of matter and energy constituting the living entity to follow intricate non-equilibrium chemical pathways. These pathways whilst obeying all the laws of thermodynamics are constantly supporting the coded software which is present within … Without the addition of outside intelligence, raw matter and energy will not produce auto organization and machinery. This latter assertion is actually repeatedly borne out by experimental observation – new machinery requires intelligence. And intelligence in biological systems is from the non-material instructions of DNA.

You can read more about the paper here.

I wonder what the fallout will be from this bold act?

Luskin writes:

I have no doubt that the editors of International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics will take much heat for publishing this paper. Even though they make it clear that “[t]he reader should not assume that the Journal or the reviewers agree with the conclusions of the paper,” they should be commended for their courage in publishing it it and calling it a “a valuable contribution that challenges the conventional vision that systems can design and organise themselves.” They write, “The Journal hopes that the paper will promote the exchange of ideas in this important topic” — showing that there is hope for true academic freedom on the debate over ID in some corners of the scientific community.

I think it’s good that some of the more honest journals are starting to post these research papers on ID without endorsing them explicitly. It’s important for people to have a free and open debate about these things. I’m sure that the other side is going to try to come back now with a published response – maybe even with some quality research. And that’s how science is supposed to march forward. We don’t want to get into the situation where there are more of these big “Climategate” scandals in biology. Let all the opposing views be heard.