Constitwofaced

Post-Dispatch is rightly upset that a State Senator from Southeast Missouri wants to water down ex post facto in order to force pre-1995 sex offenders to have to register. Recently, the Missouri Supreme Court found that doing so did qualify as ex post facto, and was unconstitutional.

This coming from the Post-Dispatch that tolerates every abrogation of the 2nd Amendment that the left wing can concoct. This coming from the same Post-Dispatch that couldn’t understand “plenary power” as it related to the constitutionality of Missouri’s CCW provisions and the clause dealing with Right To Bear Arms in the Missouri Bill of Rights. This coming from the same Post-Dispatch that probably turned its head when, twice in 2006, the U.S. JustUs Department and a Jim Talent-sponsored Senate bill each tried to go on an ex post facto witch hunt of anyone or anything it could find to charge something with in the 1955 murder of Emmett Till.

It’s Okay For Them To Do It

For the past few days, local MSM sources have been drooling over a meeting that was held in East St. Louis a few nights ago. Apparently, some of the city’s citizens are indignant over “gun violence.” I would be mad too, if all these dang guns started growing arms and legs, and evolving free will, and deliberately invading and assaulting my community.

This meeting, whose organizers were hoping for about a hundred in attendance, but which had fewer than two dozen, was one where the organizers and attendees brainstormed over ideas to squelch violent crime in East St. Louis.

One of the ideas was to organize something of a private, civilian parapolice patrol that would scour city streets and report criminal activity to the cops.

Hmmm, let’s think really hard here. Civilian patrols, monitoring high crime areas, reporting instances of crimes to relevant authorities. I think I’ve heard that tune before.

I know. They’re called the Minuteman Project.

Like the Minuteman Project, I doubt that this East St. Louis analogue will be any more successful in actually stopping violent crime, because their efforts depend on East St. Louis cops doing their proper jobs, which isn’t a given, and it also assumes that juries will do their jobs, and black juries all too often do not.

Likewise, the real Minuteman Project is stymied by the fact that we have a fifth column U.S.eless Border Patrol that is uninterested in enforcement by-and-large, and by a government-corporate-media complex that benefits from and covets cheap labor.

If these ESL “Minutemen” are interested in doing something more than spinning their wheels, then they, like the real “Minutemen,” have to expand into political and social advocacy relevant to their paraenforcement efforts, into areas like ending police corruption, and discouraging race-based jury nullification.

Otherwise, I’m glad to hear that black people are taking some initiative to solve black people’s problems, and not asking for white people for another massive handout.

A Little Immigration Can Be A Dangerous Thing

John Lott, responding to the Washington Post:

It would have been helpful if they had put the numbers in per capita rates, rather than comparing numbers 10 years apart. For example, I guarantee you that Idaho’s population grew by more than 14 percent, though less than 174 percent. Thus it would appear the crime rate did fall as the prison population grew.

Idaho also had a high Hispanic growth rate in the 1990s.  As of the 2000 Census, it was 7.5% Hispanic, and probably more right now.

Primary Color

Mayor Slay is in favor of making seat belts a “primary enforcement” category, rather than a secondary one, which is currently the case in Missouri.  What that means is that, in a “secondary” state like Missouri, while one must wear the seat belts, a cop can’t pull you over just for no seat belts.  S/he has to have another, “primary” reason to pull you over, and then cite you for seat belt violation if s/he notices no belts in the process of the stop.  In a “Primary” seat belt state like Illinois, no seat belts is good enough probable cause by itself for a stop.

Slay’s opinion here is ironic, considering his racial pandering.  The only reason that seat belts aren’t already a primary violation is that black legislators fear that, if it were, it would only give cops another excuse for racial profiling.

Self Esteem

One will be a sitting U.S. Senator starting next week. One is a college basketball coach. If you can’t tell, then maybe the basketball coach could be the Senator’s proxy during the hoops offseason, or the Senator could be the one going on the recruiting trips.

We Know Where He’s Coming From

And that title has a double meaning.

Former Sen. John Edwards (“Breck Girl” — Rush L.), one-termer from North Carolina, announced his 2008 Presidential Campaign today.  He did so from the lower ninth ward of New Orleans.

That tells you everything you need to know.  Skip him.

Somebody Agrees With Him Not

And this person who disagrees happens to be a Chief of Police in a big city. From Fox News:

After many years of decline, the number of murders climbed this year in New York and many other major U.S. cities, reaching their highest levels in a decade in some places.

(snip)

Browne blamed the rise in part on the availability of guns, particularly weapons from out of state. The city this year sued dozens of out-of-state gun shops that it says are responsible for many of the illegal weapons on the streets of New York.

Honestly, anyone who has lived for a long time and knows the situation will agree that guns were more easily accessible fifty years ago than today.

Even St. Louis City Police Chief Joe Mokwa disagrees. He was on Jaco’s show Saturday night on KTVI-Fox-2 talking about the increase in the city crime rate. Jaco tried to press Mokwa into falling for this old “availability of guns” liberal bromide, and Mokwa actually took the initiative on several instances to disagree, stating reasons that sounded more like these given in the Fox News article re NYC:

…a disturbing tendency among young people to pull guns when they do not get the respect they demand…

This represents a 180 for Mokwa on guns. Used to be that he was one of the bigger mouths in this city against CCW. This probably means he’s getting ready to retire. We might really starting hearing some truths, especially racial truths, from his mouth, once he is actually out the door.

As far as the last quote, I think it’s accurate as an explanation. The egalitarian left has been trying for years, to find some magic potion to undo racial differences in academic achievement and other things, and one of their stock bromides is that black self-esteem is too low.

Of course, blacks had the highest self-esteem of any group, because dumber people are too dumb to be aware of their own failings, and thus don’t ever feel badly about themselves. The inverse is also true, which is why suicide is largely a “white” thing.

Nevertheless, this didn’t preclude the leftist public education system from pumping the self-esteem mantra into the heads of already over-self-esteemed black children, and they eventually became adults whose default mental state expected to be loved and adulated constantly.

So when a slight happens, (“he dissed me,”) keeping in mind their gravitation toward violence and rapid retribution, the rod comes out and gets used.

And While We’re On The Subject of Mokwa

He came out today with a new plan to reduce rapes and other sex crimes in the city, which are up by two-thirds over last year.  Mainly it revolves around an “education program” so that women can understand what rape really is, so that they are better tooled to report incidents to law enforcement.

However, all that ignores the problem of juries and judges.  Rape and sexual assault, like nearly all crimes in this city, are almost universally a black thing, and nullification-happy juries and lenient judges will make moot anything that could be done in the realm of smarter and more pinpoint-accurate law enforcement.

Same Rathole, New Management

Letter to the Editor in the St. Louis American:

State control is not the answer to solving the St. Louis Public Schools’ academic, financial and administrative quandary. A change in our priorities and focus on the kids are the first steps we must take to solve SLPS’s problems.

“Focus on the kids.” Just what does that mean? What is supposed to be done to accomplish that imperative?

Taking away local control of the SLPS will invariable shift the responsibility and accountability for its success or failure to people who’s vested interest is not the same as those who live in St. Louis, grew up here and may have children in the SLPS.

As if the people who “live in St. Louis, grew up here and may have children in the SLPS” are doing a great job. The only hope the SLPS had was between 1987 and 1993, and the “community” and the liberal plutocracy, which is usually opposed to each other, joined forces to repress the anti-deseg movement.

What can the state do for SLPS that it can’t do for itself?

I agree with that question. The state won’t accomplish anything more.

Does the state have intimate knowledge of the needs, wants, abilities and social factors affecting our students? I would argue that they don’t understand our problems like we do.

If you understand your own problems like you say you do, it certainly isn’t translating to solutions. Couldn’t you “focus on the kids” right now?

William Danforth and Frankie Freeman and the others on the panel I’m sure have good intentions.

I disagree. When I hear “Danforth,” my suspicion meter ramps to to a 9.

Educational Taboos

A post today on American Thinker deals with the overhyping of the “education crisis” and American society’s overappreciation of universal formal education. However, the writer leaves the most obvious taboo out:

It is nearly a quarter century now since the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its somber warning about the nation’s education system: “A Nation at Risk.”Luckily it was at that moment in 1983 that the US economy struggled out of the 1980-82 recession on the back of Reaganomics and never looked back. So it turned out that the nation wasn’t at risk, at least not then.

Yet the education system has, if anything, got worse in the years since. Reforms come and go-your Goals 2000, your No Child Left Behind-yet nothing seems to change. For instance, despite all the reform, our kids still need remedial courses before they can start college.

“Though higher education is now a near-universal aspiration, researchers suggest that close to half the students who enter college need remedial courses.

“The shortfalls persist despite high-profile efforts by public universities to crack down on ill-prepared students.”

The problem here is that too many people are going to college. The reason for that is that the standards at all levels of education have been so diluted in order to allow less intelligent (i.e. more non-white) people to pass. Also what hasn’t helped is the deliberate de-industrialization of America, which, through popular perception, fuels the need to maximize time spent in formal education and the number of people receiving formal education.

But before we sign on the dotted line we should ask some tough questions. Why is it that the United States with its nation-at-risk education system continues to lead the world economically?

Because, at this moment, the United States of America has the highest number of white people of any sovereign country in the world.

Most of the rest of the article is an advocacy for “school choice,” which most white people reject, and whose only natural constituency are blacks outside of the mental orbit of the teachers’ unions and the elected left-wing. I oppose vouchers, because they would only result in a backdoor deseg of the private school system.

Roll Out The Press Releases

Cliff Kincaid, in AIM:

That’s an overly harsh assessment, and talk radio has emerged as an important part of the “new media” which threaten liberal dominance. But one of the prominent conservative hosts, Rush Limbaugh, has made a fascinating admission. Responding to questions about how he felt in the wake of the Democratic Party victories, he said, “The way I feel is this: I feel liberated, and I’m going to tell you as plainly as I can why. I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don’t think deserve having their water carried. Now, you might say, ‘Well, why have you been doing it?’ Because the stakes are high! Even though the Republican Party let us down, to me they represent a far better future for my beliefs and therefore the country’s than the Democrat Party and liberalism does.” That was preceded by his statement that “There hasn’t been ideology in the Republican Party, any conservatism, for at least two to maybe four years.”

This would seem to suggest that Limbaugh understood that Republicans had abandoned their conservative principles but he decided to back and promote them anyway because he feared the Democrats would take power. Now the Democrats have taken power in part because the Republicans abandoned their principles. So the vicious circle has come back to bite Limbaugh, giving him “freedom” in the process. It would have been better to hold Republicans to their principles, rather than apologize for their misbehavior.

During one point before the elections, Limbaugh remarked that he didn’t believe something he read on RNC fax network press releases sent to and received by most conservative talk hosts. That was a tacit admission that most conservative talk hosts are (or the RNC thinks they are) Republican Party shills, and that the RNC tried to ride herd.

It’s no wonder that the website of “independent conservative” Michael Savage seized on Limbaugh’s comments, saying they constituted an admission that he had been deceiving his listeners about the Republican betrayal. Call it a double-whammy.

The trouble is, I don’t think Savage’s motives are entirely pure. I think that his frequent barrage of criticism of other conservative hosts isn’t just based on pure principle; if it were, then I would agree with him. But I also think the element of personal jealousy and the desire for mainstream media attention are just as much motives. Then again, he has attempted other deliberate PR stunts in the very recent past.

We Know Of A Very Bad Thing He Did

This blogmeister has a general policy of not saying the names of most judges, because their unpopular decisions might make them a target of violence on the part of people who might fanatically disagree with such decisions. This article references someone who used to be a Federal judge, and I will do everything but say his name.

The local MSM, in President Ford’s postmortem, have dug up a certain ex-Congressman from Missouri who happened to work with Gerald Ford on House committee work during the 1960s. While this person and Ford were of different political parties, this person highly respected Ford for his “integrity.”

Local MSM tells us that he was later appointed as a Federal district level judge for the Eastern Missouri circuit by President Jimmy Carter. But they leave it at that.

I’m here to tell you that, while this person served as a Federal judge, he made a very unpopular decision that had negative ramifications for several decades in the St. Louis region. With one bang of his gavel, he fueled the growth of St. Charles County, which continues to this day; though the issue this unnamed judge brought to the forefront of public debate has now died down, its negative consequences on St. Louis County will not soon be undone.

Which is why I’m sad that local MSM has felt it necessary to drag this person out of the woodwork.

Doubting The $50 Billion Thomas

On the heels of last night’s post in reaction to the Brokaw special on immigration, where I said that the $50 billion paid into the Social Security system by illegal aliens working legit jobs was still underfunding the S.S. system, I just assumed that the $50 billion was true, because I assumed the “study” Brokaw cited encompassed several fiscal years.

The study, as it turns out, was done and released by New York University, and its contention is that the $50bn figure is yearly.

Now I’m starting to have my doubts.  Let’s get out the calculator.

President Ford Passes

The only American President never to have been elected either President or Vice-President.  Also the only person that Ronald Reagan ever lost to in an electoral sense.

Though history will remember him as a moderate-to-liberal Republican for his day, there are two minor but sparkling accomplishments of his political career that stand out in my mind.

One, while he was a member of the U.S. House in the late 1960s, he reacted to semi-serious globaloney chatter that NASA would/should plant U.N. flags instead of American flags on the moon before the manned Apollo missions by pushing legislation requiring the American.  The other was that, as President, he signed legislation undoing the draconian Roosevelt (F., not T.) era law prohibiting American citizens owning bullion and numismatic (i.e. non-jewelry) gold.

On the other side of the ledger, he was House Minority Leader in 1965, and his refusal to corral opposition to the 1965 Immigration Invasion Act is a significant reason why it passed.

When $50 Billion Isn’t As Much As It Seems

No, I didn’t watch his special on immigration tonight, seen locally on KSDK-NBC-5 at 7 PM, at least not on purpose. I landed on it by channel-surfing accident. I landed on 5 at the moment when Brokaw mentioned a study that illegal aliens have paid $50 billion in Social Security taxes as a result of their working in otherwise legitimate employment situations. After a few more liberal platitudes, I started channel surfing again.

Here’s the flaw in that statement and that study.

From the History Books to the News Pages

Read this story.  Subtract 1600 years from the timestamp, and change the dateline to Rome.  Then change a few words in the body.  Then change the byline to something on the order of “Gaius Tiberius.”

Makes sense now?

The ‘C’ Is Silent

Who is this man, and why is he important?

Since the Duke Lacrosse scandal broke earlier this year, and eventually we found out that Durham County (N.C.) District Attorney Mike Nifong pushed false rape accusations on the part of a stripper/ho, even though he knew there was no evidence, just to earn brownie points among the county’s black voters, I have been wondering why the office of the state Attorney General has been out to lunch.

After all, the (false) charges Nifong filed were state charges, and the state AG has the ultimate responsibility over state legal matters. One would hope that a decent AG would step in, drop the charges, then issue sanctions against, push to disbar, and/or prosecute Nifong himself.

The man above is North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper. He’s an elected Democrat, who apparently has gubernatorial ambitions.

If he’s not going to do anything to rectify the situation, I think he has made the political calculation that he’s not about to step on black toes, because those black toes are going to lead black feet to the polls to vote for him for Governor one of these days.

The trouble with that calculation is that there’s nothing anybody can do to make the Democrats lose their usual 99% share of the black vote. A similar analogy can be drawn to our own state’s AG of the Democrat Party with gubernatorial ambitions. Jay Nixon has a bad reputation among blacks for his once-upon-a-time opposition to school desegregation, but that won’t prevent him from getting 99% of the black vote when he challenges Matt Blunt in November 2008 (assuming that Blunt will be the R that Nixon faces, that’s another set of gossipey chatter for another day).

Don’t forget, when Nixon challenged Kit Bond for the Senate seat in 1998, the deseg issue was a lot fresher in the minds of black voters, but it only decreased Nixon’s take of the black vote to 84%. Even if it were 99%, that margin wouldn’t have been enough for Nixon to beat Bond.

However, the white voters of North Carolina should pay attention to AG Cooper’s actions or non-actions vis-a-vis Nifong and the Duke Lacrosse scandal. Any non-action or wrong actions should be interpreted as racial pandering of the wrong sort. Since the Duke Lacrosse players’ defense attorneys now want a FEDERAL investigation of Nifong’s perfidy, it just throws another lacrosse ball into AG Cooper’s end of the field.

What Of Those 72 Virgins, Keith?

Detroit Free Press:

Speaking in Dearborn late Sunday night, the first Muslim elected to Congress told a cheering crowd of Muslims they should remain steadfast in their faith and push for justice.

“You can’t back down. You can’t chicken out. You can’t be afraid. You got to have faith in Allah, and you’ve got to stand up and be a real Muslim,” Detroit native Keith Ellison said to loud applause.

Many in the crowd replied “Allahu akbar” — God is great.

In most circumstances, when you hear Muslims yell “Allah U Akbar,” then you better duck, or hide, or run.

The convention, which ended Monday, drew more than 3,000 Muslims from across the country for the event aimed at revival and reform.

There’s that number again, three thousand.

But Ellison, speaking at the annual convention of the Muslim American Society and the Islamic Circle of North America, said that Muslims can help teach America about justice and equal protection.

Sure, because they know a lot about those concepts themselves, as the images of women forced to don burquas run through my head, and the numerous stories I read daily on Jihad Watch and Dhimmi Watch blogs about anti-Christian and anti-everything else but Muslim persecution in the Middle East, north Africa and southern Asia are rushed back into my memory.

It’s Those Damned ‘Youths’ Again

I guess this is what they mean by the Kwanzaa Spirit:

Yesterday evening, on C*******s Day, there was fight in the lobby at the movie theater in Fairview Heights, among an indeterminate number of “youths,” as the media describe them. The melee was serious enough such that the theater management shut down operations for the rest of C*******s.

Yesterday night, at the Delmar Metro Link station, a security guard was shot while trying to break up a fight between “two groups of youths,” as the media describe them.

Question: We know the racial composition of these “youths,” simply by virtue of the fact that we’re not being told. If we’re not allowed to know that these “youths” are black, or not white at the least, because doing so would contribute to racial discrimination and prejudice, then why even tell us that these people are young in age? Wouldn’t that contribute to age discrimination and prejudice?

UPDATE 5:30 PM CST: KSDK-NBC-5 news at 5 PM tonight reported that the number of “young people” (still not telling the racial truth) involved in the fight was around 200. That’s not a fight, that’s a war. Henceforth, the incident shall be referred to as The Battle of Fairview Heights.

Also, KSDK’s file images at 5 PM tonight related to the Metro Link security guard showed most of a sign posted at the entrance to the station that reads, “Concealed Weapons Are Prohibited On These Premises,” with the no pistol symbol prominent for the benefit of the literacy optional crowd.  A lot of good the weapons prohibition did — last night’s events were the perfect reason why that sign shouldn’t have been there.

Heeding Her Own Words

Sky News (UK):

The Queen has urged people to bridge the generation gap between the young and old in her annual Christmas broadcast.

And she might be taking her own advice, in that she and her husband, Prince Philip, apparently want Prince William instead of their idiot jugear son to succeed her on the throne.  Talk about the generation gap.

There was also a message of multi-faith tolerance in her speech.

The Queen stressed it was easy to focus on the differences between religions rather than what they had in common.

For the first time in its history, the Christmas broadcast featured footage of Muslims praying in a mosque.

Now this might not be an example of her heeding her own words.  If the conspiracy theories about the Royal Family offing Princess Diana in 1997, because of her nearly marrying a Saudi Prince, which might have given a non-white, non-Christian Arab a claim on the Throne, or headway into the Royal line, are true, then her words are far different than her family’s actions.

The irony of Queen Elizabeth II broadcasting a Christmas message reflective of “diversity” is that the only other Elizabeth in English regnal history issued an edict evicting all Negroes from the British isles.

Stick A Fork In It

It’s done.  Or at least the media hype and hoopla.

All and all, it looks like Kwanzaa was just a passing fad.  It seems like the white egalitarian left latched onto it more than blacks themselves.

Tongue Tied Is Back

If you have been trying to visit Tongue Tied Blog (see the Blogroll) over the last few weeks, you will have found a lot of blank space.

It’s back, and has been for awhile, only at a new address.

Lookout, Uncle Sam

Federal Computer Week:

Due to an increased network threat condition, the Defense Department is blocking all HTML-based e-mail messages and has banned the use of Outlook Web Access e-mail applications, according to a spokesman for the Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations.

(snip)

The ban on use of Outlook Web mail will hit thousands of users at Robins Air Force Base, Ga., according to an internal message available on the Internet. The ban on the use of Outlook Web Access “will significantly impact the way we presently conduct business,” due to the fact that that Web mail is the primary means of e-mail access for 4,500 employees at the base, according to the message.

Robins has developed a work-around for these users to access Outlook directly by logging on to government computers with their common access cards, the internal message said.

One gets the feeling that there’s a sense of panic spreading arond Robins AFB, almost as if their personnel will lose the right to breathe.  If they want a real work-around that’s not a run-around, they should click on the blue bird logo above, which will lead them to the answer.

More Iraq-Vietnam Parallels

President Bush is calling for a Rooseveltian style economic “New Deal” for Iraq.

In that, Bush is yielding to liberal assumptions that poverty causes terrorism, as they make the case domestically that poverty causes crime, and in both instances, the poverty is only due to deliberate discrimination of some sort.

During the Vietnam war, President Johnson called for a “TVA on the Mekong” in the same spirit.

What’s The Point?

The International Journal of Human-Computer Studies published a study comparing the technical sophistication of Jihad/terrorist websites to official U.S. Government websites.  The study found that overall sophistication for the former was almost on par to the latter, though the former’s strengths were in social networking and multimedia, and the latter’s strengths were in static content, searchable information and database type information.

I don’t understand the point in this study, except perhaps that the U.S. Government and Islamic Jihad are at odds with each other these days.  Comparing the two isn’t just apples and oranges, it’s apples and goldfish.  The U.S. Government is (surprise) a formal, stable (at least for the time being, anyway) unitary government.  Islamic Jihad is a transnational racio-religious movement that is only partially dependent on partial or wholehearted support from host governments and regimes.  They don’t call the War on Terror an asymmetrical war for nothing.

We may win the War on Terror, or we may not win it, or we may lose in the long run.  But whatever the outcome will be, the technical sophistication of either side’s online content is irrelevant, because ultimately, online presence is not a vehicle that can carry any kind of movement or organization home.  If it were, we would be speaking of President Howard Dean today.

Christmas Is Back. Back Christmas.

The War on Christmas seems to be subsiding just a bit.  I have noticed that a number of big-name retailers are actually starting to use the dreaded C-word in their advertisements again.  One very commendable example is Target.

Tip:  Spend your money at places that are using the C-word.

The More They Stay The Same

One hundred years ago tomorrow, the first voice and music radio transmission took place, on a medium that was heretofore entirely morse code.  Canadian engineer Reginald Fessenden transmitted a mix of spoken stories and Christmas music aimed at ships on the Atlantic ocean, where there were working radio receivers.

On December 24, 2006, most terrestrial radio stations will be playing Christmas music.

Katrina Commission

New Orleans Times-Picayune:

On the eve of taking control of Congress, Democrats are interested in forming an investigative panel similar to the 9-11 Commission to investigate who was responsible for the levees that broke during Hurricane Katrina and to probe the government’s efforts to repatriate and rebuild this devastated city.

Don’t waste your breath or your paper.  I can do the job right now:

(1)  There was a direct hit of a high Cat 3 or low Cat 4 hurricane (“Katrina”) on New Orleans.

(2)  Most residential sections of New Orleans city, a majority of the are poor and black, sit beneath geographical sea level.

(3)  Those areas are between Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south.

(4)  The hurricane’s heavy winds were able to topple the floodwalls blocking Lake Pontchartrain’s waters from residential New Orleans, because:

(5)  For years, the city and state, who had prime responsibility over levee maintenance and condition, neglected to do their duty.

(6)  The levee break caused below sea level residential New Orleans to flood, and the flood waters connected the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain temporarily.

(7)  In spite of very quick Federal response (in relative terms), New Orleans’s black population took the occasion of the meterological disaster to loot, riot, and commit all manners of violent and non-violent crime, including hate-motivated assaults of whites at the Superdome, the Morial Convention Center, and other temporary shelters.

(8)  Rapid Federal response was matched by Federal-supervised Pontchartrain levee repair and environmental cleanup of flooded areas far ahead of original schedule.

(9)  A white resident of New Orleans city was more likely to perish as a direct result of the hurricane and its aftermath than a black resident of New Orleans city.

(10)  The cost of rebuilding New Orleans that will be incurred by the U.S. Federal Government is being underwritten by Chinese purchases of American government debt securities.

(11)  In the void of New Orleans being abandoned by around half of the pre-hurricane black population deciding not to return, the city is being repopulated by Mexicans and other Latin American Hispanics.

Their Best Still Isn’t Good Enough

AP:

After a backlash from this liberal city, Clear Channel Radio is keeping its Air America affiliate on the air instead of switching the progressive talk format to sports on Jan. 1.

(snip)

Clear Channel said the station, WXXM-FM, had struggled to attract advertisers despite high ratings and a sports format would be more profitable.

(snip)

The two-year-old station is among the most popular affiliates of Air America, which launched two years ago as an alternative to conservative talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh. It is now undergoing a reorganization after filing for bankruptcy protection in October.

If one of their “most popular affiliates” in a “liberal city” can’t garner enough advertisers to stay on the air without a form of corporate pity and welfare, then that speaks volumes about the whole Air AmeriKa network.

This story matches one from last month that Al Franken’s show was cancelled in San Francisco.

Don’t Roll Out The Red Carpet For 2010 Just Yet

USA Today:

Two weeks before Democrats take control of the U.S. House for the first time in 12 years, new Census estimates suggest they may have to battle demographic tides to keep it.

Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Texas and Utah are projected to gain seats in Congress after the 2010 Census, according to an analysis by Election Data Services. All six tilt Republican: President Bush won all in 2004, ranging from 50% of the vote in Nevada to 72% in Utah.

All of those states, especially AZ, FL, NV and TX, are seeing their growth rate mainly fueled by Hispanic immigration and high Hispanic birth rates.  While they are or lean red now, that will be the thing that turns them solidly blue.  One should note that NC and GA had the highest and second-highest rate of growth of Hispanic population between 1990 and 2000.