". . . a republic, if you can keep it."
(Knoxville, TN) Desmond Hatchett is pleading with the state of Tennessee to help him pay for child support.
With 30 kids, who could afford to pay child support?
Yes, 30 children by 11 different “baby mamas.”
Desmond explained how it all happened, well you know what we mean, “I had four kids in the same year. Twice.”
The children range in age from toddlers to 14 years old.
He was last in court in 2009, at which time he had 21 children.
(Read more)
An honor student in Texas was thrown in jail after she missed too many classes at her high school.
A judge issued Diane Tran, 17, a summons Wednesday for her excessive truancy after she missed class. She was arrested in open court.
Last month, Tran was issued a warning by the judge for missing school.
Tran said she works both full-time and part-time jobs, in addition to taking advanced and college level courses.
But the judge said Tran’s case was bigger than the individual situation of one student.
“If you let one run loose, what are you gonna’ do with the rest of ’em?,” said Judge Lanny Moriarty. “Let them go too? A little stay in the jail for one night is not a death sentence.”
But Tran’s classmates said she had a lot more to juggle than the average teen.
“She goes from job to job from school. She stays up until 7 a.m. in the morning doing her homework,” said Devin Hill, a classmate and co-worker. (Read more)
From Patrick Barron:
From today’s Open Europe new summary:
Former Greek PM warns of “vortex of self-destruction” if Greece leaves the euro
The FT reports that former Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos has warned that Greece would enter a “vortex of self-destruction” if it left the euro. Papademos suggested inflation could hit 50% while real national income could fall by a further 20%. Separately, Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras said yesterday that if he wins the next election he will not fire any civil servants, scrapping the current pledge to cut 150,000 public sector jobs by 2015, agreed under the bailout programme.
There is no better illustration of the destructiveness of the European common currency, as currently constructed, than these statements. One Greek politician predicts chaos in Greece if the euro subsidies stop, and the other states that he will do nothing to reform the Greek economy. These statements expose the destructive forces of what can only be described as a socialist currency–the euro.
Here’s some of the essay on Women’s Suffrage by Madeline Dahlgren, 1871:
We acknowledge no inferiority to men. We claim to have no less ability to perform the duty God has imposed upon us, than they [men] have to perform those imposed upon them.
We believe that God has wisely and well adapted each sex to the proper performance of the duties of each. We believe our trusts to be as important and sacred as any that exist.
It is our fathers, brothers, husbands and sons who represent us at the ballot-box. Our fathers and husbands love us. Our sons are what we make them. We are content that they represent us in the corn-field, the battle-field and the ballot-box, and we them in the school-room, at the fireside, and at the cradle; believing our representation, even at the ballot-box, to be thus more full and impartial that it could possibly be were all women allowed to vote.
. . . .
We hold that the new status will prove to be the worst kind of communism. The relations between the sexes, so carefully guarded by religion and by parents, by law and by society, will become common and therefore corrupt. The family, the foundation of the State, will disappear. The mothers, sisters and daughters of our glorious past will exist no more and the female gender will vanish into epicene.
. . . .
A group of 18 people dressed in black, wearing masks, wielding steel batons and hammers and claiming to be extreme anti-racists allegedly stormed a suburban Chicago family restaurant in broad daylight to assault a meeting of alleged white supremacists, officials said.
Ten people were injured and at least three required treatment for head wounds as a result of the attack Saturday at the Ashford House Restaurant in Tinley Park, Ill., a quiet Chicago suburb. The restaurant sustained $15,000 in damages including broken plates, glasses and furniture.
“I’ve been mayor for 31 years,” Tinley Park Mayor Ed Zabrocki tells ABC News, “and I’ve never heard of anything stranger than this.”
Five of the attackers were caught and have now been charged with aggravated battery, mob action and criminal damage to property, all felonies. Brothers Jason, Cody and Dylan Sutherlin, along with Alex Stuck and John Tucker are all from Indiana. The men are connected to the Hoosier Anti-Racist Movement (H.A.R.M.) whose website now claims them as “The Tinley Park 5?.
. . . .
Meanwhile the targets of their attack were about a dozen members of the Illinois European Heritage Association, a group linked to the “White Pride” group Storm Front. Two of these victims were also caught up in the police investigation following the incident: Steven Speers of North Dakota was arrested on an outstanding warrant for possession of child pornography and Francis Gilroy of Florida was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon.
A restaurant surveillance camera captured some of the melee on video and Zabrocki viewed it before it was turned over to prosecutors as evidence in the investigation.
“You see the door opens up, these 15, 18 people walk in. They’ve got hoods on, they’ve got masks on,” Zabrocki said. (Read more)
A gang of 20 hooded youths stormed a pub after the Champions League final before dragging away a 25-year old man and stabbing him to death in scenes ‘like a horror film’, friends said today.
‘True gent’ Luke Fitzpatrick was killed and his father Bernard, who threw himself on top of his son in a desperate attempt to shield him, remains in a critical condition in hospital after being stabbed four times.
The pair were attacked when a gang armed with bats and knives stormed the north London pub after father and son had watched Chelsea win the cup together at on Saturday.
A forensic tent remained at the scene of the tragedy just yards from the pub near his Dollis Hill home.
A female friend, 22, who asked not be named, said: ‘Luke was one of the nicest guys around, always looking after people, he actually cared about people, a really nice, funny guy.
‘The amount of flowers that are here just shows how loved he was, this has ruined this community.
‘I was there on Saturday and it was like something out of a horror film.
‘There were about 20 young black guys all with their hoods up armed with sticks and bats and knives. They just ran in the pub and started trying to attack people. (Read more)
Gun. Ownership.
An Israeli leader of an anti-assimilation group sent a letter to Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, objecting to his marriage to a non-Jewish woman, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday.
Zuckerberg, who finally tied the knot to his longtime girlfriend, Chinese American, Priscilla Chan, is a self-proclaimed atheist for years but hails from a Jewish background.
Zuckerberg and Chan received over 1.5 million congratulatory messages on Facebook.
Benzi Gopstein
However, Benzi Gopstein, head of the Lehava Organization for the Prevention of Assimilation in Jerusalem, sternly objected.
“I don’t know you, nor did I give you a ‘like’ on the occasion of your wedding; to be precise, if Facebook had a ‘dislike’ button I would have given you a big ‘dislike,’” Israel National News reported Gopstein as writing to Zuckerberg on Friday.
“I’m writing to you not for my sake, but on behalf of the Jewish people of every generation, being that you are part of this people, like it or not,” he added.
“True, you did well in the stock market, but just to remind you, money isn’t everything in life. You chose to marry a non-Jewish woman and by doing so, you disconnected yourself from the Jewish people, and your children will not be Jewish, even though their last name will be Zuckerberg; even if they’re cute and get a lot of ‘likes’, they will remain non-Jews in every respect.
“I believe that you won’t pay any attention to this letter, but I’m writing anyway, not only to you, but through you to many more Jewish men and women who don’t see anything wrong with assimilation, to those Jews and Israelis who gave a ‘like’ to the wedding, to the media who got all excited. I’m here, on behalf of the Jewish people, to spoil the party.
“Golda Meir, who was Israel’s Prime Minister, said that any Jew who assimilates is essentially a partner to the Nazis’ work, since through assimilation you yourself are exterminating the continuation of the Jewish people. Assimilation is bringing the extermination of the Jews to the seventh million!
(Read more)
Tel Aviv has been hit by the most violent protests in its recent history after more than 1,000 Israelis took to the streets in the city’s south to demand the deportation of African immigrants and asylum seekers.
The predominately black neighbourhood of Hatikva was ransacked by groups of nationalist protesters who had attended a demonstration on Wednesday night against illegal African migrants.
The protesters claim the Africans are responsible for a rise in crime, bearing signs saying “This is not Africa” and “Stop talking, start expelling”.
“Blacks out!” shouted demonstrators in the crowd, while others yelled “Send the Sudanese back to Sudan”, as other protesters derided the “bleeding-heart leftists” working to help them.
The mob set cans of rubbish on fire, smashed the windows of shops owned by Eritrean migrants and beat up Africans walking through the streets.
TJ, a 29-year-old migrant from Nigeria, watched the violent chaos from his rooftop having been chased and pelted with rocks when he attempted to leave his house. (Read more)
Video of a protest against African immigrants in Israel. I’m not sure if it’s the same one described in the article above. One guy arguing with the protests says something like “Is it okay for you to come to Uganda?” referring to the plan to create a Jewish homeland in Uganda.
I’M a Palestinian who was born in the Israeli town of Lod, and thus I am an Israeli citizen. My wife is not; she is a Palestinian from Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Despite our towns being just 30 miles apart, we met almost 6,000 miles away in Massachusetts, where we attended neighboring colleges.
A series of walls, checkpoints, settlements and soldiers fill the 30-mile gap between our hometowns, making it more likely for us to have met on the other side of the planet than in our own backyard.
Never is this reality more profound than on our trips home from our current residence outside Washington.
Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport is on the outskirts of Lod (Lydda in Arabic), but because my wife has a Palestinian ID, she cannot fly there; she is relegated to flying to Amman, Jordan. If we plan a trip together — an enjoyable task for most couples — we must prepare for a logistical nightmare that reminds us of our profound inequality before the law at every turn.
Even if we fly together to Amman, we are forced to take different bridges, two hours apart, and endure often humiliating waiting and questioning just to cross into Israel and the West Bank. The laws conspire to separate us.
If we lived in the region, I would have to forgo my residency, since Israeli law prevents my wife from living with me in Israel. This is to prevent what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once referred to as “demographic spillover.” Additional Palestinian babies in Israel are considered “demographic threats” by a state constantly battling to keep a Jewish majority. (Of course, Israelis who marry Americans or any non-Palestinian foreigners are not subjected to this treatment.)
Last week marked Israel’s 64th year of independence; it is also when Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” during which many of Palestine’s native inhabitants were turned into refugees.
In 1948, the Israeli brigade commander Yitzhak Rabin helped expel Lydda’s Palestinian population. Some 19,000 of the town’s 20,000 native Palestinian inhabitants were forced out. My grandparents were among the 1,000 to remain.
They were fortunate to become only internally displaced and not refugees. Years later my grandfather was able to buy back his own home — a cruel absurdity, but a better fate than that imposed on most of his neighbors, who were never permitted to re-establish their lives in their hometowns.
Three decades later, in October 1979, this newspaper reported that Israel barred Rabin from detailing in his memoir what he conceded was the “expulsion” of the “civilian population of Lod and Ramle, numbering some 50,000.” Rabin, who by then had served as prime minister, sought to describe how “it was essential to drive the inhabitants out.”
Two generations after the Nakba, the effect of discriminatory Israeli policies still reverberates. Israel still seeks to safeguard its image by claiming to be a bastion of democracy that treats its Palestinian citizens well, all the while continuing illiberal policies that target this very population. There is a long history of such discrimination.
In the 1950s new laws permitted the state to take control over Palestinians’ land by classifying them “absentees.” Of course, it was the state that made them absentees by either preventing refugees from returning to Israel or barring internally displaced Palestinians from having access to their land. This last group was ironically termed “present absentees” — able to see their land but not to reach it because of military restrictions that ultimately resulted in their watching the state confiscate it. Until 1966, Palestinian citizens were governed under martial law.
Today, a Jew from any country can move to Israel, while a Palestinian refugee, with a valid claim to property in Israel, cannot. And although Palestinians make up about 20 percent of Israel’s population, the 2012 budget allocates less than 7 percent for Palestinian citizens.
Tragically for Palestinians, Zionism requires the state to empower and maintain a Jewish majority even at the expense of its non-Jewish citizens, and the occupation of the West Bank is only one part of it. What exists today between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is therefore essentially one state, under Israeli control, where Palestinians have varying degrees of limited rights: 1.5 million are second-class citizens, and four million more are not citizens at all. If this is not apartheid, then whatever it is, it’s certainly not democracy.
The failure of Israeli and American leaders to grapple with this nondemocratic reality is not helping. Even if a two-state solution were achieved, which seems fanciful at this point, a fundamental contradiction would remain: more than 35 laws in ostensibly democratic Israel discriminate against Palestinians who are Israeli citizens.
For all the talk about shared values between Israel and the United States, democracy is sadly not one of them right now, and it will not be until Israel’s leaders are willing to recognize Palestinians as equals, not just in name, but in law. (Read more)
B’Tselem releases video of clashes between settlers and Palestinians near Itzhar on Saturday; 24-year-old Palestinian wounded as a result of the shooting.
The incident took place on Saturday, around 4:30 P.M, when a group of settlers, apparently from the nearby settlement of Izhar, came to the Palestinian village.
In the video distributed by B’Tselem, a group that examines Israeli human rights violations in the West Bank, the settlers are seen throwing rocks at the village houses and residents.
A few minutes into the video, some Palestinian youths arrive at the scene and start throwing rocks back at the settlers. Shortly after, as gunfire is heard in the background, soldiers arrive and stand beside the settlers.
In the video, two of the settlers are armed; one with a pistol and one with an M-16 automatic rifle. They are seen aiming their weapons at the Palestinians and one seen firing at them, while soldiers do nothing to stop them. (Read more)
I really liked Steffen Molynieux’s observation that these actions totally blow away all that bullshit about a social contract. Leftists like to say, if you don’t like it, leave. But now the government says, you can’t!
Internet message boards bristled with denunciations of Saverin’s “treachery” and promises to renounce Facebook. “Way to defriend America, [expletive deleted],” one annoyed American taxpayer tweeted. Another Twitterer, who happened to be outspoken rich guy Marc Cuban, told his followers that “if i could realistically stop using facebook, … I would. Just wrong.”
(MORE: This is your Life (According to Your New Timeline))
The story behind Saverin’s move is a little more complicated than the headlines suggest. The Brazilian-born, Singapore-based investor with the cherub face was one of Mark Zuckerberg’s original backers during Facebook’s Harvard days; while no longer involved in the company as an executive, he retains a 4% stake, which could be worth as much as $4 billion after Facebook goes public.
There’s no question that by giving up his American citizenship and settling down in Singapore, an investor-friendly tax haven with no capital gains taxes, he’ll spare himself a hefty bill from Uncle Sam. He’s not going to escape the IRS entirely, though; the US charges citizenship-renouncers an “exit tax” which could add up to as much as $150 million in his case, one tax expert contacted by the Los Angeles Times estimates.
Saverin maintains that his renunciation of American citizenship, which actually took place last September, wasn’t a ploy to skip out on American taxes, but rather an attempt to free himself from burdensome restrictions on American investors abroad. “U.S. citizens are severely restricted as to what they can invest in and where they can maintain accounts,” the Wall Street Journal quotes a spokesman for Saverin saying. “Many foreign funds and banks won’t accept Americans. This was a financial rather than a tax motive.” (Read more)
Ilyse Hogue of The Nation is incensed:
In making this decision, the Brazilian native did more than expose his blind disregard for all that his adopted country has done for him. He has made himself the poster child for the callous class of 1 percenters who are all too happy to use national resources to enrich themselves, and then skate, or cry foul, when asked to pay their fair share. The story evokes the image of the marauding aliens from the movie Independence Day, who come to Earth to take what they can get before moving on to another planet.
Wait a second! Did Eduardo Saverin plunder us? Are we now a desolate husk of a country, sucked dry by Eduardo Saverin’s rapine? Well, no. Facebook created wealth. Mr Saverin is leaving having deployed his capital in a manner that made America better off than it was when he arrived. But will he escape without rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s? Well, no. Both Mr Manjoo and Ms Hogue mumble in passing under their breath while coughing that Mr Saverin will have to pony up an “exit tax”. So what’s this woefully insufficient tribute come to, such that Mr Saverin may be so bitterly denounced for exploitation and despoilment? According to Danielle Kucera, Sanat Vallikappen and Christine Harper of Bloomberg:
Saverin won’t escape all U.S. taxes. Americans who give up their citizenship owe what is effectively an exit tax on the capital gains from their stock holdings, even if they don’t sell the shares, said Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, director of the international tax program at the University of Michigan’s law school. For tax purposes, the IRS treats the stock as if it has been sold.
Got that? Mr Saverin’s on the hook for the amount his capital-gains tax would have come to had he sold all his American stock holdings. Tim Worstall sketches it out on his napkin:
[T]he net effect of his citizenship renunciation on his immediate tax bill is to increase it, hugely. For it will, at minimum, start with the idea that he’s just made a $3.5 billion or so profit (adjusted downwards for the difference between the private market value of Facebook last fall and the IPO price) on his Facebook stock which he got originally for minimal amounts of money. At the standard 15% long term capital gains rate that’s near $500 million right there.
Half a billion dollars! That is not scot-free. Did the marauding aliens in “Independence Day” leave behind a half billion American dollars after having successfully invested in Earth? They did not! One wonders how many pounds of flesh Mr Manjoo and Ms Hogue think Mr Saverin owes for the privilege of having Uncle Sam’s hooks out once and for all.
Senator Charles Schumer: Eduardo Saverin Can Never Set Foot in U.S.
Ron Paul: The Egregious Ex-Patriot Act Has No Place in a Free Society
EU foreign ministers have “warned” Israel they will take a tougher approach to exports originating in illegal settlements on Palestinian land.
The ministers in a statement on Monday (14 May) detailing Israel’s long-term campaign to expropriate Palestinian farmers in the West Bank said: “The EU and its member states reaffirm their commitment to fully and effectively implement existing EU legislation and the bilateral arrangements applicable to settlement products.”
Under EU law settler products are excluded from preferential import tariffs in the 12-year-old EU-Israel association agreement. (Read more)
A Palestinian elementary school was shut down last week after Israel’s Civil Administration confiscated the vehicle used to transport teachers to it.
Teachers initially tried coming to the school, located in the Jinba cave village in the southern Hebron hills, by donkey, but this proved disruptive since they were often late.
On Sunday, the administration also confiscated the car of a veterinarian employed by the Palestinian Authority when he came to the village to vaccinate sheep. The vehicles were seized as part of a stepped-up enforcement campaign in Area C, the part of the West Bank under full Israeli control.
The Civil Administration also issued a demolition order against the school, though residents have no access to any other school: The nearest is in Yatta, 20 kilometers away.
In addition, it ordered an access road, tents, mud huts, sheepfolds and solar energy facilities razed, reinstating demolition orders frozen by agreement with the state prosecution in 2007.
In 1999, the area was declared a live-fire exercise zone by the Israel Defense Forces, meaning people aren’t allowed to live there. (Read more)
A unique way of life in the West Bank is under threat after Israel renewed a legal bid to evict more than 1,600 cave-dwelling Palestinian farmers from their land in the desert hills near the Biblical city of Hebron.
srael’s defence ministry is expected to seek court approval this week to destroy up to 12 traditional “fellaheen” communities situated in an area designated as a training zone for the occupying Israeli army.
The issue has threatened to heighten tensions with the Palestinian leadership, which has refused to resume peace talks with Israel as long as it continues to build settlements on land it occupied in the Six Day War of 1967.
It has also set the Jewish state on a collision course with European powers, particularly the British government which funded the construction of cisterns and sanitation facilities for the cave-dwelling communities, home to some of the poorest Palestinians in the West Bank. (Read more)