My Personal Rants, Raves, and Ramblings

Fifteen-year-olds in the U.S. ranked 25th among peers from 34 countries on a math test and scored in the middle in science and reading, while China’s Shanghai topped the charts, raising concern that the U.S. isn’t prepared to succeed in the global economy.

The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development, which represents 34 countries, today released the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment. For the first time, the test broke out the performance of China’s Shanghai region, which topped every country in all academic categories. The U.S. government considers the test one of the most comprehensive measures of international achievement.

The results show that U.S. students must improve to compete in a global economy, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said yesterday in a telephone interview. President Barack Obama’s administration is promoting national curriculum standards and a revamping of teacher pay that stresses performance rather than credentials and seniority.

“The brutal fact here is there are many countries that are far ahead of us and improving more rapidly than we are,” Duncan said. “This should be a massive wake-up call to the entire country.”

"I want you all to understand the value of your children,” Cosby said. “Your children happen to be helpless. They need you."

He says too many parents expect too much of the schools and that pouring more money into them won't solve all of the community's problems.

"To try to get the adults to seriously throw off the apathy and recognize that the revolution is in the home,” the actor, producer and activist continued.

Nigel Farage: "You are very, very dangerous people indeed. Your obsession with creating this Euro-State means that you're happy to destroy democracy. You appear to be happy for millions and millions of people to be unemployed and to be poor. Untold millions must suffer so that your Euro-Dream can continue.

We don't want that flag, we don't want the anthem, we don't want this political class. We want the whole thing consigned to the dustbin of history."

UNIONDALE, N.Y. (CBS 2) — He was arrested for protecting his property and family.

But it’s how the Long Island man did it that police say crossed the line.
He got an AK-47 assault rifle, pulled the trigger and he ended up in jail, reports CBS 2’s Pablo Guzman.

George Grier said he had to use his rifle on Sunday night to stop what he thought was going to be an invasion of his Uniondale home by a gang he thought might have been the vicious “MS-13.” He said the whole deal happened as he was about to drive his cousin home.

“I went around and went into the house, ran upstairs and told my wife to call the police. I get the gun and I go outside and I come into the doorway and now, by this time, they are in the driveway, back here near the house. I tell them, you know, ‘Can you please leave?’ Grier said.
Grier said the five men dared him to use the gun; and that their shouts brought another larger group of gang members in front of his house.

“He starts threatening my family, my life. ‘Oh you’re dead. I’m gonna kill your family and your babies. You’re dead.’ So when he says that, 20 others guys come rushing around the corner. And so I fired four warning shots into the grass,” Grier said.

Grier was later arrested. John Lewis is Grier’s attorney.

“What he’s initially charged with – A D felony reckless endangerment — requires a depraved indifference to human life, creating a risk that someone’s going to die. Shooting into a lawn doesn’t create a risk of anybody dying,” Lewis said.

A would-be home invasion victim shot and killed an intruder in northwest Atlanta Thursday night, police said.

The shooting happened shortly before midnight at a home on Abner Place.

Atlanta police spokeswoman Kim Jones told the AJC that arriving officers found a man with a gunshot wound to the chest.

"Officers were advised that the victim attempted to break into the home and the person at the home shot the intruder," Jones said.

A Henry County man shot two people trying to break into his home Monday, police said, killing a man and injuring a woman.

Police found the body of 27-year-old John David Griffen of Clanton, Ala., in the front yard of a home located on the the 6000 block of Ga. 155, according to a press release issued by the Henry County Police Department Tuesday.

Approximately two hours later, Monica Johnson Allen, 40, called 911 from her Covington home and said she had been shot, the news release said. Newton County police transported her to Atlanta Medical Center where she was treated. She was later taken to the Henry County Jail and charged with robbery.

Police have not identified the shooter.

Just before noon Monday, Henry County police responded to an emergency call from a man who told police he had shot a home invasion suspect.

The victim told police he heard loud banging on his front door. The victim told police he grabbed his shotgun, and, as he approached the door, a man and woman came barging through. The victim said he fired one shot at the man and woman as they ran toward their car. The man fell to the ground, and the female fled the scene in a vehicle.

Police said they found a crow bar dropped by one of the suspects at the front door.

Janice Wells called the Richland Police Department when she feared a prowler was outside her clapboard house in the rural west Georgia town.

The third-grade teacher had phoned for help. But within minutes of an officer coming to her backdoor, she was screaming in pain and begging not to be shocked again with a Taser. With each scream and cry, the officer threatened her with more shocks.

"All of it's just unreal to me. I was scared to death," Wells said in an interview with the AJC. "He kept tasing me and tasing me. My fingernails are still burned. My leg, back and my butt had a long scar on it for days."

The officer in question is Ryan Smith of the Lumpkin Police Department. Smith was called to back up an officer from the Richland Police Department because the sheriff's office in the county, Stewart, had no deputies to send.

Smith resigned as a result of the incident. The other officer involved, Tim Murphy of Richland PD, was fired for using pepper spray while trying to arrest Wells.

Democrat County Supervisor Peggy West of Milwaukee is proud to be the "first Latino/Hispanic American to be elected to the Milwaukee County Board". During the debate on a measure boycotting the state of Arizona she asserts an uneasy knowledge of US geography.

A NYC Cop Officer David London, Beat an Iraqi War Veteran Walter Harvin, Senseless for not showing him his ID. Prosecutors have released potentially explosive evidence against an NYPD officer on trial for beating a man with his baton.

The video taken from security cameras shows the 45-year-old housing cop beating an Iraq war veteran with is baton.
It happened at an Upper West Side public housi More..ng development. The victim, 28-year-old Walter Harvin had just returned from Iraq and was at his mom's apartment complex.
The video is high quality and crystal clear that Housing Officer David London led an unprovoked attack on the Iraqi war veteran.Even beating the ex-soldier after he's cuffed.

The officer is charged with 2nd degree assault and filing false records. Prosecutors say London tried to cover-up the July 2007 assault by lying on official documents.Right now the Manhattan criminal jury is tackling the question on whether London committed an act of police brutality or used necessary force to subdue a suspect.

The Iraq veteran suffers from PTSD. If the officer is convicted, he faces 7 years in prison

"There's a thing called 'Due Process', my friends!"

"You can reach out to your fellow young people, and make it clear to them that, where they may not be satisfied with everything we've done... the way to cure that is to give us more authority and more ability"

"It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives." - John Adams, Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1756

If future taxes are held at the historical average, spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will consume all revenues by 2052. Because entitlement spending is funded on autopilot, no revenue will be left to pay for other government spending, including constitutional functions such as defense.

During my last shift in the ER, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient with a shiny new gold tooth, multiple elaborate tattoos, and a new cellular telephone equipped with her favorite R&B tune for a ring tone.

Glancing over the chart, one could not help noticing her payer status: Medicaid.

She smokes a costly pack of cigarettes every day and, somehow, still has money to buy beer.

And our president expects me to pay for this woman's health care?

Our nation's health care crisis is not a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. It is a crisis of culture - a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on vices while refusing to take care of one's self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance.

Life is really not that hard. Most of us reap what we sow.

Starner Jones, MD

Drug cartels tighten grip; Mexico becoming 'narco-state'

MEXICO CITY - For months, the leaders of Tancitaro had held firm against the drug lords battling for control of this central Mexican town.

Then one morning, after months of threats and violence from the traffickers, they finally surrendered.

Before dawn, gunmen kidnapped the elderly fathers of the town administrator and the secretary of the City Council. Within hours, both officials resigned along with the mayor, the entire seven-member City Council, two department heads, the police chief and all 60 police officers. Tancitaro had fallen to the enemy.

Across Mexico
, the continuing ability of traffickers to topple governments like Tancitaro's, intimidate police and keep drug shipments flowing is raising doubts about the Mexican government's 3-year-old, U.S.-backed war on the drug cartels.

Far from eliminating the gangs, the battle has exposed criminal networks more ingrained than most Americans could imagine: Hidden economies that employ up to one-fifth of the people in some Mexican states. Business empires that include holdings as everyday as gyms and a day-care center.

And the death toll continues to mount: Mexico saw 6,587 drug-related murders in 2009, up from 5,207 in 2008 and 2,275 in 2007, according to an unofficial tally by the respected newspaper Reforma.

Cartels have multiplied, improved their armament and are perfecting simultaneous, terrorist-style attacks.

Some analysts are warning that Mexico is on the verge of becoming a "narco-state" like 1990s-era Colombia.

"We are approaching that red zone," said Edgardo Buscaglia, an expert on organized crime at the Autonomous Technological University of Mexico. "There are pockets of ungovernability in the country, and they will expand."

For the past decade, he said, parts of Mexico have been sliding toward the lawlessness that Colombia experienced, in which traffickers in league with left-wing rebels controlled small towns and large parts of the interior through drug-funded bribery and gun-barrel intimidation.

In the latest sign of the cartels' grip, on Wednesday the National Action Party of President Felipe Calderón announced it was calling off primary elections in the northern state of Tamaulipas because drug traffickers had infiltrated politics.

And in Chihuahua, the government is redeploying troops from the embattled city of Juarez to the countryside because of fears that the cartels are cementing their control in smaller border towns.

Even Calderón, who a year ago angrily rebutted suggestions that Mexico was becoming a "failed state," is now describing his crackdown as a fight for territory and "the very authority of the state."

"The crime has stopped being a low-profile activity and has become defiant . . . . plainly visible and based on co-opting or intimidating the authorities," he told a group of Mexican ambassadors last month. "It's the law of the 'bribe or the bullet.' "


Towns on the ropes

In places like Tancitaro, population 26,000, the battle already may be lost.

In the past year, gunmen killed seven police officers, murdered a top town administrator and kidnapped others, said Martin Urbina, a city official. The reasons were unclear - most of the town leaders are in hiding and could not be reached for comment - but the drug traffickers were apparently demanding the removal of certain police officers, Urbina said.

When the traffickers kidnapped the two officials' fathers on Nov. 30, it was the last straw.

"If someone comes and puts a pistol to your head, what are you going to do?" said Gustavo Sánchez, who was appointed by the Michoacan state governor as interim mayor after the mass resignation. "It's happening in all of the states, not just here."

In Vicente Guerrero, in Durango state, 34 of 38 police resigned after the police chief and four officers were kidnapped. The victims have not been found.

In the border town of Puerto Palomas, the police chief fled to the United States and asked for asylum in March, saying Mexican officials could not protect him. In October, traffickers killed the town administrator in Puerto Palomas.

In the northern town of Namiquipa, traffickers killed the mayor and two top town officials last year. Police there are woefully outgunned, police Chief Jesus Hinojosa said. There are only 15 weapons for 39 police officers.

Often the cartels target city officials they believe are cooperating with federal authorities, said Juan Manuel Bautista, the City Council secretary in the western town of Novolato, where traffickers have killed 25 police, two city councilmen and a town administrator in the past two years.

Other times, they are simply lashing back at the most convenient targets, he said.

"In these small-town governments, everyone knows your business and who you are," Bautista said. "If they want to take revenge on you, it's easy."

Even when governments replace police chiefs, mayors and town councils, it's often only a matter of time before the replacements are bribed, intimidated at the barrel of a gun or killed, and the scenario repeats itself, said Bernardo Gonzalez Arechiga, an expert on crime at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Advanced Studies.

In May, federal officials arrested 10 mayors in Michoacan state on charges of protecting smugglers.

In June, Mauricio Fernández, a mayoral candidate in the wealthy Monterrey suburb of San Pedro Garza Garcia, was recorded telling a meeting of supporters that he had negotiated a truce with the Beltrán Leyva gang as a way of guaranteeing security in the town. Fernández later denied any contact with the gang. He easily won the July 2 election.

• MOST SNOW ON RECORD IN DC...
• BLIZZARD NEW YORK CITY..
• It's official: Baltimore Snow Record!
• Washington Builds a Snow Mountain...

"I want my daughter to live in a world where EVERYONE'S decisions are respected."

"My mom showed me that women are strong and wise. She taught me that ONLY women can make the best decisions about their health and their future."

"It is dead wrong. An Absolute Abuse!"

Watching the Mysterious Islands together... Rosie rubbing her brother William's head and enjoying the movie together.

"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them." - Thomas Jefferson, Summary View of the Rights of British America, 1774

"...and we have a failed K thru 12 education system"

"Now, it's a long-term trend," Allison said. "We will have some kind of economic recovery and we'll have some economic growth. I think the most likely intermediate scenario is stagflation like the 1970s."

President Obama is leading an extreme, left wing crusade to bankrupt America -- leaving the bill with our children and grandchildren. I stand in his way every day in an effort to serve as a voice for the millions of Americans who disagree with the direction he is taking our country.

"President Obama, Senate and House leaders, many of your rank-and-file members, and the nation's editorial pages have all talked about the value of transparent discussions on reforming the nation's health care system," he wrote. "Now that the process moves to the critical stage of reconciliation between the chambers, we respectfully request that you allow the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every single American."

Pelosi emerged from a meeting with her leadership team and committee chairs in the Capitol to face an aggressive throng of reporters who immediately hit her with C-SPAN’s request that she permit closed-door final talks on the bill to be televised.

A reporter reminded the San Francisco Democrat that in 2008, then-candidate Obama opined that all such negotiations be open to C-SPAN cameras.

“There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail,” quipped Pelosi, who has no intention of making the deliberations public.

"I think that Jesus Christ offers Tiger Woods something that Tiger Woods badly needs."

"If Tiger Woods were to make a true conversion, we would know it! It would show through in his being, and he would know it above all."

...Whether he can recover as a person depends on "his faith. He's said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redeption that is offered by the Christian faith. So my message to Tiger would be, "Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world."

I certainly want to pursue my faith more ardently than I have done. I'm not claiming it's impossible to do when you work in this business. I was kind of a nominal Christian for the longest time. When my son died (by suicide in 1998), I came to Christ in a way that was very meaningful to me. If a person is a Christian and tries to face up to the implications of what you say you believe, it's a pretty big thing. If you do it part time, you're not really living it.