Thursday, February 07, 2008

Mystery 'Man' Sought in Chicago Murders

Post below lifted from Jammie Wearer. See the original for links

A brutal mass murder on the south side of Chicago on Saturday provides yet more evidence of Reuters mindless political correctness. Here is the article by my good friends at Reuters:
TINLEY PARK, Illinois (Reuters) - Five women were shot and killed inside a clothing store at a suburban Chicago shopping center on Saturday in what police said appeared to be a botched robbery. Police were searching for a lone gunman spotted outside the store by a witness, but said they had not identified him.
Awful crime, right? You'd like to see the murderer caught ASAP, right? Might be helpful to have an accurate description in the paper to help catch this crud, right? Here's the description published by Reuters:
The suspect had fled and they issued an alert for a man wearing black jeans, a black waist-length winter coat and a black knit cap, police said.
So you know for sure that the suspect is a man. That's it. For comparison, I now offer the corresponding description in the article carried by CNN, not exactly a right wing bastion of law and order itself:
A witness who saw the gunman leave the front of the store described him as a black man, about 5 feet, 9 inches tall and weighing between 230 and 260 pounds, Tinley Park Police Sgt. T.J. Grady told CNN on Sunday. He was wearing a waist-length black winter coat, a black cap and dark jeans.
Notice much difference? Gee, I wonder why Reuters editors ran a generic description that could fit every man alive? Reuters, documenting their stupidity and political agenda, every day.



Affirmative Action: Discrimination "Without Any Restrictions"?

I always find it instructive when people say, unselfconsciously, what they really mean when they say "affirmative action." Here's a good example from the American heartland, Mason City, Iowa.
Minorities make up 1.2 percent of the city workforce - far below the the minority makeup of the city as a whole. U.S. Census figures for 1996 show Mason City's population at 27,740 with 93.4 percent white, 3.4 percent Hispanic, 1.2 African-American and 2 percent Asian and Indian.
Now whether or not this level of minority employment by the city is "far below" what, by implication, it should be is open to some debate, but leave that aside. What's interesting to me in this article is the official explanation for this deficiency (if that's what it is), a very revealing comment about how affirmative action is widely understood:
Tom Meyer, human resources director, points out that city jobs are not like those in private industry where a business can decide to hire a certain number of minorities without any restrictions. Most city workers must take Civil Service tests to qualify for their positions and then are selected from the pool of applicants who pass the tests. Human Rights Director Lionel Foster, the only black city employee, said the city adopted an affirmative action policy years ago but has never pushed it. He acknowledged that Civil Service testing makes a difference. "You can't just go out and recruit people for jobs and promise them anything," said Foster.
Oh, so that's the secret of private industry's success in the "diversity" sweepstakes! It can discriminate to its heart's content "without any restrictions" like those pesky exams.

Source



The Jong Show

Post below lifted from Don Surber. See the original for links

The "Fear of Flying" author shows once again the elitist nature of "feminism." Upset by something William Kristol said on Fox News, novelist Erica Jong defended Hillary Clinton against the Patriarchy. In so doing, Miss Jong showed that the feminism born out of the Seven Sisters schools in the '60s is just the girls's version of "Skull and Bones" and other knock-ring orgs for men.

In the Washington Post today, Miss Jong wrote: "I'm hardly the only woman who sees my life mirrored in hers. She's always worked twice as hard to get half as far as the men around her. She endured a demanding Republican father she could seldom please and a brilliant, straying husband who played around with bimbos. She was clearly his intellectual soul mate, but the women he chased were dumb and dumber."

Puh-leeze. What tripe. "She's always worked twice as hard to get half as far as the men around her." Really? She was hired by the most powerful law firm in Arkansas because she was married to the attorney general who later became the governor. And how hard did she work to land a directorship on the Wal-Mart board. Again, connections, connections, connections. George Bush or John Kerry in a pantsuit.

"She endured a demanding Republican father she could seldom please and a brilliant, straying husband who played around with bimbos." As a Republican father, I should resent that, but "brilliant, straying husband who played around with bimbos" libels every woman who was ever sexually harassed by this man. The very stereotypes that feminists said they stood against, she invokes to defend what's her name.

"She was clearly his intellectual soul mate, but the women he chased were dumb and dumber." Again with the elitist slamming of people who are "inferior" because of their station in life. You know what? Monica Lewinsky has it all over Hillary Rodham Clinton because Miss Lewinsky made it without any help of a man - in fact, she made it despite the infamy her relationship brought. Mrs. Clinton is where she is at because she is someone's wife.

Oh she is talented and smart. If she had a little more confidence in herself 35 years ago - if she truly worked twice as hard for half as much - she would not be running for president on her husband's coattails. She'd be an ex-president.



British police lose SIX MILLION hours a year to red tape

The Blair legacy. As Lenin said: "Account must be taken of every single article, every pound of grain, because what socialism implies above all is keeping account of everything"

Up to six million police hours a year are being wasted on bureaucracy, says a damning review. Officers are "straitjacketed" by red tape and reduced to arresting the most minor of offenders to meet crime targets. The withering verdict is passed by Sir Ronnie Flanagan in his bombshell review of the state of the police service. His conclusions - due to be published tomorrow but leaked to the Daily Mail last night - are an indictment of Labour's record on policing and insistence on targets. Sir Ronnie claims that three to six million police hours a year - the equivalent of 3,000 frontline officers - are being squandered on bureaucracy.

Despite a string of promises and reforms since Labour's election in 1997, the former chief constable describes the police as so afraid of getting in trouble they are "risk averse" and reluctant to use their initiative. Sir Ronnie paints a picture of a police service drowning in form-filling - which takes a fifth of officer time - regulations and 'perverse' Government targets. He reveals one officer even charged someone who had built a snowman on a footpath with a public order offence because it helped meet goals imposed by Whitehall.

Sir Ronnie says: "The 21st century police service is in danger of becoming a slave to doctrine and straitjacketed by process." The "needless drain of unnecessary bureaucracy" and the emphasis on targets had led to "poor professional judgment" and the criminalising of people who had not committed any offence.

Other findings include the fact that - despite five years of Labour promising change on bureaucracy - up to 70 per cent of information is entered into police computers more than once. Forty one new pieces of doctrine have been introduced in the last two years alone. A staggering 500,000 hours of officer time are spent each year on internal audits.

Yet Sir Ronnie's recommendations stop well short of the Conservative blueprint unveiled over recent weeks and are likely to leave rankand-file officers dismayed. The review was supposed to set down a blueprint for the future of the police service. But the stop and search form - which takes 25 minutes to complete - will stay. Officers will simply be given hand-held computers to make it easier to input the details. The Tories would replace the form with a simple call to the station.

The proposals for replacing the stop form - which Mr Brown had indicated would be scrapped altogether - will also cause bemusement among police. Sir Ronnie said they should hand over a "business card" containing their details to anybody who they question about their movements - enabling them to later ring to complain. There is also no reference in the 106-page document to giving police more powers to stop a person if there is no suggestion of wrongdoing. Last week, Downing Street spin doctors were suggesting this would be the case.

Plans for a bonfire of red-tape by moving to a single set of forms across the country have also been shelved. Tory police spokesman David Ruffley said of the leak: "This review simply does not go far enough in cutting red tape and risk aversion in the police force. "It does not follow our pledge to abolish the 40 question stop and search form and allow officers to radio in the basic details of a search which will be digitally recorded. "After five Labour red tape reviews in ten years, this lags way behind already announced Conservative plans for tougher law and order."

Sir Ronnie wants targets which give police a "perverse incentive" to catch minor rather than serious criminals to be ditched. The rules, which rank solving a murder in the same way as fining a litter bug, have been blamed for police targeting normally law-abiding citizens. As well as the snowman case, Sir Ronnie highlighted a child prosecuted for chalking on pavements. Some of these offences should no longer be classed as "notifiable", he says, which means police will not be rewarded for solving them. He also warns the police must be less "risk averse", a process which would require the Government to accept mistakes will occasionally be made.

Source

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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