IMMIGRATION & EDUCATION - LET IN MORE AFRICAN IMMIGRANTS (BLOOMBERG OPINION COMMENTARY)

EDUCATION & IMMIGRATION - LET IN MORE AFRICAN IMMIGRANTS (OPINION COMMENTARY):

CURRENT RESEARCH SHOWS IMMIGRANTS FROM KENYA, NIGERIA, NEPAL, GHANA AND SAUDI ARABIA ARE OFTEN WELL-EDUCATED & HIGHLY SKILLED.

WHILE IMMIGRANTS FROM MEXICO, HONDURAS, GUATEMALA, CENTRAL AMERICA AND EL SALVADOR ARE OFTEN THE LEAST EDUCATED & LOW SKILLED.


Post Sources: Bloomberg, Youtube


******* Want Educated Immigrants? Let In More Africans


~ Highly skilled? Check. Hardworking? Check. English-speaking? Check. Ready to integrate? Check.

The uproar over White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s comments about illegal immigration in an interview with National Public Radio last week still hasn’t entirely died down. I haven’t found the resulting discussion to be super-enlightening, so, as I did with an earlier Kelly comment about how nobody knows anybody in the military anymore, I decided to see if a few charts might clear things up.

To review, Kelly argued that most undocumented immigrants are “not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society.” He went on:

They're overwhelmingly rural people in the countries they come from — fourth, fifth, sixth grade educations are kind of the norm. They don't speak English, obviously that's a big thing. They don't speak English. They don't integrate well, they don't have skills. They're not bad people. They're coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws.

So … let’s dig into the data. More than 70 percent of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are from Mexico and Central America, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Mexico is by far the most common country of origin, but the population of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. (both documented and undocumented) actually fell 6 percent from 2007 to 2015, according to the Pew Research Center, while the numbers of Salvadorans, Hondurans and Guatemalans in the U.S. continued to grow.

So when we talk about illegal immigration into the U.S., we’re mainly talking about immigration from those four countries, with El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala playing a growing role and Mexico a huge but shrinking one.

And yes, most of those who have come to the U.S. from these countries are probably of rural origin, although (1) there’s not much good data on that and (2) there are indications that the rural share has been getting less “overwhelming” in recent years as Mexico and El Salvador, the two biggest sources of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S., have urbanized.

Much better data is available on the characteristics of foreign-born people here in the U.S., most of it from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, an annual survey of about 2 million households first conducted in 2005.

The ACS does not sort immigrants by whether they have permission to be in the U.S. or not. 1 (Estimates of the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., in fact, are arrived at by taking the totals from the ACS and subtracting out the numbers of temporary and permanent lawful residents provided by the Department of Homeland Security.)

Still, it offers much insight into the characteristics of different immigrant groups. To get back to Kelly’s comment, here are the countries from which immigrants in the U.S. have the least formal education, according to the 2016 ACS:

So yes, the people who have come to the U.S. from Mexico and Central America tend not to have a lot of schooling.

The European nations of Portugal, Italy and Greece are also on this list, although most immigrants from those countries arrived in the U.S. a long time ago so there’s understandably not much grumbling about them.

Meanwhile, the countries from which the most-educated foreign-born U.S. residents hail make for quite a diverse bunch.

Next, let’s examine Kelly’s comments about non-English-speakers. He’s right that immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras struggle with the language, although this time around, they cede first place to Myanmar:

The list of countries from which immigrants in the U.S. are least likely to struggle with English are, unsurprisingly, all English-speaking countries, so I’m not going to bother with a chart. Extra credit, though, to the Netherlands and Germany for making the top 10 despite having their own languages, and to Trinidad & Tobago for beating out the U.K. for first place.

It’s important to remember, though, that immigrants from non-English-speaking countries have always struggled with the language. Many millions of immigrants from Germany, Italy and other European countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries never did become fluent in English. But their children did!

The kids of today’s immigrants are learning English, too: Of people born in the U.S. who speak Spanish at home, reports the Census Bureau, 83 percent also speak English very well. The percentage is slightly higher — 87 percent — among those who speak other Indo-European languages at home, and is again 83 percent for those who speak Asian and Pacific languages at home.

Finally, there’s Kelly’s assertion that undocumented immigrants don’t integrate well. Language ability is one measure of integration. Employment is surely another one. When I ran a list of the countries from which immigrants in the U.S. have the highest employment-to-population ratio, some familiar names popped up:

The employment-population ratio for Mexican-born U.S. residents, by the way, is 65.5 percent, which ranks it 28th out of the 80 countries for which there’s data.

There are some caveats I should trot out here:

The immigrant populations from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are younger and more male than the overall U.S. population, which skews employment ratios upward, and since this data covers everyone age 16 and up, college and even high school students count against the total — which brings the ratio down among groups likely to pursue higher education. Still, their strong employment performance isn't a fluke; the Cato Institute's David Bier offers up lots of other evidence that Central Americans are integrating pretty well.

The foreign-born residents with the lowest employment-population ratios hail mainly from countries (Hungary, Italy, Greece, Germany) from which most immigrants arrived decades ago and are now in their 60s or older. The very lowest employment-population ratio, though, is for those born in Saudi Arabia, most of whom are in the U.S. for college or graduate school.

And while no other country of origin has a majority of its U.S. residents currently enrolled in higher education, Kenya, Nigeria, Nepal and Ghana have the highest percentages after Saudi Arabia. So immigrants from Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana are near the top in both employment-population ratio and higher-education enrollment, and those from Nigeria are also near the top in educational attainment.

With that, let me offer my two cents on Kelly’s statement: It appears to be factually accurate in most of its characterizations of today’s undocumented immigrants, and I think the people decrying it as “racist” are for the most part just devaluing the term “racist.” His “they don’t integrate well” comment grates, though, given that Kelly and most other Americans are descended at least in part from rural people with limited education who didn’t speak any English when they got here.

And while there is a case to be made that education and English are far more important to success in the U.S. than they were a century ago, one certainly can’t depict Central Americans in particular as sitting around twiddling their thumbs wondering how they will ever integrate into U.S. society. They’re too busy working.

Also — and nothing Kelly said contradicted this, but some things his boss has reportedly said certainly have — what the charts above tell me is that if we want more high-skilled, hardworking, English-speaking, ready-to-integrate immigrants, it looks like the most obvious place to find them is in African countries where English is widely spoken.

The survey asks respondents whether they are citizens but does not ask the non-citizens to go into further detail.

These aren’t necessarily all immigrants who are planning to stay in the U.S. for good — a 25-year-old from India who is working on a doctorate at a U.S. university and planning to head home afterwards shows up, too. But close enough.

TRUMP'S 2018 STATE OF THE UNION SPEECH - 9pm EST (LIVE VIDEO); MILESTONES FOR THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION

TRUMP'S 2018 STATE OF THE UNION SPEECH - 9pm EST:

EXPECTED TOPICS -

MILESTONES FOR THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION

HOW TO UNIFY OUR NATION

MORE TRAINING FOR U.S. TROOPS

UPDATES ON IMMIGRATION REFORM

GOP TAX PLAN

MORE FUNDING FOR SMALL BUSINESSES

WALL STREET & THE STOCK MARKET

AFFORDABLE EDUCATION & HEALTH CARE

SANCTIONS ON NORTH KOREA & RUSSIA

SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN THE WORKPLACE

ETC.,


Sources: NY Times, Youtube


******* State of the Union: Trump to Declare a ‘New American Moment’


• President Trump will deliver his first State of the Union address tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern, and The New York Times will be streaming it live on our website and on our app. Follow our coverage for the latest updates and analysis.

• The White House has released excerpts from the speech.

• The president will arrive at the Capitol amid remarkable tumult: Anger that he has declined to impose sanctions on Russia and worry over a Republican memo on the origins of the Russia investigation.

White House releases excerpts — “the New American Moment.”
The White House released excerpts from the State of the Union address, a tradition that gives the president a few hours’ head start to highlight what he wants the audience to focus on.

Here are a few, as prepared for delivery:

“We want every American to know the dignity of a hard day’s work; we want every child to be safe in their home at night, and we want every citizen to be proud of this land that we love.”

“Since we passed tax cuts, roughly 3 million workers have already gotten tax cut bonuses — many of them thousands of dollars per worker.”

“This is our New American Moment. There has never been a better time to start living the American dream.”

“For the last year we have sought to restore the bonds of trust between our citizens and their government.”

“In our drive to make Washington accountable, we have eliminated more regulations in our first year than any administration in history.”

“America has also finally turned the page on decades of unfair trade deals that sacrificed our prosperity and shipped away our companies, our jobs and our nation’s wealth.”

“America is a nation of builders. We built the Empire State Building in just one year — isn’t it a disgrace that it can now take ten years just to get a permit approved for a simple road?”

“I am asking both parties to come together to give us the safe, fast, reliable, and modern infrastructure our economy needs and our people deserve.”

“Struggling communities, especially immigrant communities, will also be helped by immigration policies that focus on the best interests of American workers and American families.”

“As we rebuild America’s strength and confidence at home, we are also restoring our strength and standing abroad.”

“Last year I pledged that we would work with our allies to extinguish ISIS from the face of the earth. One year later, I’m proud to report that the coalition to defeat ISIS has liberated almost 100 percent of the territory once held by these killers in Iraq and Syria. But there is much more work to be done. We will continue our fight until ISIS is defeated.”

Sonny Perdue, agriculture secretary, designated survivor.
Yeah, there’s the first lady’s clothes or which big wig will fall asleep this year. But the State of the Union proceedings also have this bit of intrigue: Which cabinet official will earn the distinction of designated survivor?

The mystery this time was solved two hours before Mr. Trump was due to give his address on Tuesday, when the White House said that the honor would go to Mr. Perdue, the former governor of Georgia and the president’s agriculture secretary.

Glamorous in title but, thankfully, not so far in practice, the designated survivor does not attend the president’s address, and is poised to take over the commander-in-chief’s responsibilities in the event that catastrophe strikes the Capitol and wipes out most of the government. If tradition holds, Mr. Perdue will be watching from a distant and secure location while Mr. Trump speaks.

The short tenure of the designated survivor has an oversize presence in the public imagination: There is a TV series by the same title, about a low-profile cabinet member who suddenly assumes the presidency after a terror attack.

How might he measure up in the Oval Office? Mr. Perdue, a conservative Republican, shares something in common with Mr. Trump: As governor of Georgia, he faced ethical criticisms for not appearing to fully separate himself from his business interests. He once ran a grain and fertilizer business.

— Katie Rogers

“You’ve gotta have heart.”
Hours before his first State of the Union address, President Trump told a group of news anchors at a lunch in the White House that his first year in office has taught him that the biggest difference between excelling in business and performing his current job is that governing takes compassion.

“I’ve really learned a lot,” Mr. Trump told the reporters, according to a partial transcript of an off-the-record lunch released publicly by the White House. “In doing what I’m doing now, a lot of it is heart, a lot of it is compassion, a lot of it is far beyond money — such as immigration.”

Mr. Trump, who is expected to use Tuesday night’s speech to call for a bipartisan compromise that pairs legal status for a group of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children with funding for a border wall, tougher enforcement and new restrictions on legal immigration, recently said he was hoping to sign a “bill of love.”

That tone is sharply at odds with the president’s approach on immigration thus far, which has included a travel ban against visitors from six countries, slashing refugee resettlement and revoking temporary protected status for people from El Salvador and Haiti. He has been more publicly conflicted about his decision last fall to rescind DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that has given legal status to certain people brought illegally to the United States as children.

“I’m telling you, the immigration is so easy to solve if it was purely a business matter, but it’s not,” Mr. Trump said. “And I think that’s something that I’ve learned maybe more than anything else: You have to — you govern with all of the instincts of a businessperson, but you have to add much more heart and soul into your decisions than you would ever have even thought of before.”

Dreamers head to the Capitol — despite the risk.
Democratic lawmakers have decided to put a face on the difficult negotiations happening in Congress over the fate of young, undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children. They are bringing scores of such “Dreamers” to the Capitol for Tuesday night’s State of the Union address.

Representative Nancy Pelosi’s guest, Melody Klingenfuss, is just one of them. Born in Guatemala, she was brought to Los Angeles when she was 9, earned a degree in communications and political science from California State University, Los Angeles, a master’s degree from the University of Southern California, then won protection under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2015.

“Tonight, when President Trump looks into the gallery during his State of the Union, he will see the dignity, courage and patriotism of dozens of Dreamers,” said Ms. Pelosi, the House Democratic leader.

But there is a flip side. Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, has called the cops.

So much for the warm welcome.

Mr. Gosar’s fellow Arizona Republican, Senator Jeff Flake, didn’t take kindly to his colleague’s citizen’s arrest.

Are we facing a “Constitutional crisis”?
The Trump administration’s announcement on Monday that it would not impose sanctions on countries that buy Russian military equipment sparked an angry response in Congress, where the Senate and House overwhelmingly approved the sanctions to punish Russia for interfering in the 2016 election.

Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri who faces a difficult re-election campaign this year, set the tone with a blast on Twitter.

That concern is bipartisan, at least in some quarters of the Republican Party. Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, was flummoxed by the administration’s decision:

“That bill passed with only two dissenting votes in the Senate. It was not partisan in the least,” she said on CNN. “The one thing we know for sure already is the Russians did attempt to meddle in our elections, and not only should there be a price to pay in terms of sanctions, but also we need to put safeguards in place right now for the elections for this year, because we know that the Russians have not given up on their disinformation campaign and their attempt to sow discord in this country and also to undermine faith in democratic institutions.”

Testifying before a Senate panel on Tuesday morning, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said his department had followed instructions under the sanctions law and drawn up a list of Russian targets for sanctions. An imposition of sanctions could still follow.

Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and one of the authors of the sanctions legislation, declined to criticize the administration’s actions. He did say, “I look forward” to the implementation of the sanctions.

Speaker Ryan weighs in on Russia memo.

Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin spent part of the morning before Mr. Trump’s speech tamping down expectations about a secretive Republican memo that some House members have claimed contains evidence that could undercut the Russia investigation.

In a closed-door meeting of House Republicans this morning, Mr. Ryan “implored” his fellow lawmakers not to overstate the facts of the memo, which the House Intelligence Committee voted to release Monday night. And he urged them not to tie the contentious document — which Democrats call dangerously misleading — to the work of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, according to a person in the room.

Mr. Ryan reiterated some of those points during a public news conference an hour later, saying that he had faith in the F.B.I. and Justice Department’s broadly and that he thought Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, the man overseeing the Russia investigation, was “doing a fine job.” Still, Mr. Ryan defended the Republicans’ overall approach, saying that they were following proper processes and that only transparency would lead to accountability at the agencies.

That was not enough to quiet the most ardent proponents of the notion that federal law enforcement agents have conspired to bring down the Trump White House. Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, called on the president to release the memo during the State of the Union.

NORTH KOREAN CHILDREN TRAINED TO HATE USA ("AMERICAN BASTARDS")

NORTH KOREAN CHILDREN ARE TRAINED TO HATE USA ("AMERICAN BASTARDS"):

NORTH KOREAN GOVT STARVES ITS CHILDREN AND TEACHES HATRED OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION.

THIS EXPLAINS KIM JONG UN'S GREAT DISDAIN FOR AMERICA.

REGIME CHANGE STARTS WITH THE YOUTH.

THE UNITED STATES MUST HELP TO LIBERATE NORTH KOREA'S CHILDREN (PRAY).


Sources: Newsweek, CNN, ATI, NTDTV, Youtube


*** HOW NORTH KOREAN CHILDREN ARE TAUGHT TO HATE AMERICANS


Most North Korean children have never seen an American in person. But they get an eyeful of them at a massive museum in the town of Sinchon that is devoted to educating them on U.S.-North Korean history.

It’s not baseball and apple pie here. At the ominously named Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities, Americans are a sinister lot: scheming missionaries, marauding soldiers, and masters of torture.

This is a museum in a farming town south of Pyongyang that has been rebuilt as a mecca to anti-Americanism. All spring and summer, North Korean schoolchildren will be making field trips here to cement what is an integral part of their education: hatred of the United States military and a mission to seek revenge.

For North Koreans, the 1950–53 Korean War that pitted the North Koreans and Chinese against U.S.-led United Nations troops — known in Pyongyang as the Fatherland Liberation War — remains in full tilt. The two sides may have signed a ceasefire in 1953, but the war still looms large in the North Korean psyche.

We in the United States often call the Korean conflict the “Forgotten War.” My high school history textbook in Minnesota devoted barely a paragraph to it, and, growing up as the child of Korean immigrants, I knew almost nothing about a war my own parents survived as children. But the war is very much alive and present in North Korea, and the standoff with the United States figures prominently in their propaganda, identity, and policy.

Understanding how North Korea sees the United States is integral to divining how to change the tenor of the tense U.S.–North Korea relationship, which persistently threatens to erupt again into military conflict.

The arrival of a new president, a Republican, in Washington after eight years of a Democrat in the White House means that there is an opening for change. How best to take advantage of that opening, however, is a tricky question when 25 years of U.S. bids to negotiate with North Korea have not stopped Pyongyang from building nuclear weapons.

The North Koreans have been waiting and watching to see what the Trump administration comes up with. But Pyongyang’s patience will be limited.

In November 2008, as the Associated Press news agency’s Seoul bureau chief, I made my first trip to North Korea just weeks after Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election. Knowing that I was a journalist, and no doubt instructed to pump me for information about the president-elect, our North Korean tour guide latched onto me and grilled me: What did Obama think about North Korea? Would he be open to meeting the leader of North Korea?

During his presidential campaign, Obama had suggested he would be open to engaging North Korea if the situation were right, an interpretation that I relayed to the North Korean guide. But just months into Obama’s presidency, North Korea launched a banned long-range rocket and followed that up by testing a nuclear device, making it difficult for the U.S. administration to do anything but lead the chorus of international condemnation of Pyongyang for its defiance of UN Security Council resolutions explicitly barring such activity.

Washington tends to look at North Korea’s behavior solely from the view of the message Pyongyang is trying to tell America. But at the time, in April 2009, Pyongyang had reason at home for staging such theatrical provocations: then-leader Kim Jong Il had emerged from a coma and had just made his first public appearance after months of speculation about his health and North Korea’s stability.

The regime needed something big to reassure the people that the republic was intact, and still feisty, and that Kim was able to defend them against the United States.

North Korea systematically uses the fear of an outside threat to spur and inspire national pride and unity. And often, that need to rally the people in order to ensure stability outweighs any advances that North Korea’s diplomats have made in repairing relations with the United States.

In December 2011, I reported exclusively that North Korea and the United States were negotiating a groundbreaking dealthat promised food and aid in exchange for a freeze of Pyongyang’s nuclear program. The news hit the wire as Kim Jong Il lay dead from a heart attack, unbeknownst to me and the rest of the world.

Kim Jong Il’s death was announced the next day as I was en route to North Korea to open the AP’s new Pyongyang bureau, a project I was told that Kim had personally approved. Some read North Korea’s willingness to allow the U.S.-based news agency into Pyongyang as a sign of new openness toward Washington.

His death, and the rise of his young son, Kim Jong Un as leader, seemed to offer another chance at changing the tone of the relationship. Two months later, on February 29, 2012, envoys from Pyongyang and Washington signed a pact on restrictions on North Korea’s missile development programs that became known as the Leap Day Deal.

But it was only a matter of weeks when, as part of celebrations marking the centenary of the birth of his late grandfather, President Kim Il Sung, North Korea launched a long-range rocket in bold defiance of the United States and their Leap Day Deal — not to mention the UN and the Security Council’s ban on rocket activity considered to be a test of missile technology.

The Obama administration eventually adopted a policy of “strategic patience” on North Korea‬, refusing to get riled up by Pyongyang’s rhetoric and avoiding overtures that would appear to reward bad behavior. The aim was to discourage North Korea from using provocations as a bartering chip.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury Department turned the screws on the North Koreans with a series of increasingly specific sanctions aimed at thwarting its ability to build bombs and missiles and putting a financial pinch on members of the party elite.

But bomb-making materials continued to slip through China’s porous border into the country, and the missile test-launches and nuclear tests continued — at a much faster pace with Kim Jong Un in power than ever before.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump suggested that he would take a very different approach on North Korea. “I would speak to him,” he told Reuters that May.

That certainly got the apparatchiks’ attention in Pyongyang.

In 1994, Kim Il Sung met with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter at the height of a nuclear crisis. And Kim Jong Il managed to sit down with Bill Clinton in 2009 when the former U.S. president flew to Pyongyang to negotiate the release of two American journalists.

However, no sitting U.S. president has held a summit with a North Korean leader, and the optics of an American head of state shaking hands with Kim Jong Un would be propaganda gold for the North Koreans. That would be the antithesis of strategic patience, and the North Koreans relished the notion. For four months, there were no missile or nuclear tests in North Korea.

Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign comments worried South Koreans, who do not want to be left out of decisions relating to the North. After all, they have the most to lose if the “thermonuclear” war that the North Koreans threaten breaks out.

Many South Koreans also bristled at Trump’s campaign characterizations of their country as a rich nation that is freeloading off the United States in trade and military support. But South Koreans were also preoccupied by political upheaval at home: a corruption investigation reaching the presidential Blue House and top corporations; months of protests in downtown Seoul; the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye; and campaigning in advance of a snap election set for early May.

Since taking office, President Trump has reaffirmed the longstanding U.S.–South Korean alliance. He has taken a tougher approach on North Korea, with his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, saying, “All options are on the table” — including military strikes.

On April 7, Trump ordered an airstrike on a Syrian airfield, which Tillerson said was meant to send a strong message to America’s adversaries, including North Korea. That shift in attitude has won over conservatives in South Korea. However, with progressive Moon Jae-in winning the May 9 elections in a landslide, South Korea now has a leader who advocates engagement with the North.

Having a liberal government in the Blue House after nearly 10 years of a conservative administration will prompt a shift in alliances and policy across the region.

Those of us who watch North Korea knew there was a narrow window of opportunity — and that this young man who rules the nation is not a paragon of patience. When Kim vowed on New Year’s Day to perfect a ballistic missile designed to strike the mainland United States, Trump blasted back with a tweet: “Won’t happen!”

Three weeks later, the North Koreans fired off a warning salvo — a test-launch of a new intermediate-range ballistic missile — just as Trump was sitting down with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. A series of missile tests has followed, and satellite imagery suggests North Korea may be poised to detonate another nuclear device underground.

Kim Jong Un clearly is enjoying having these big guns at his disposal — and is basking in the show of strength the missiles and nuclear weapons provide. Garnering global attention is part of the strategy.

Is he truly willing to get rid of the one “treasured sword,” as state media calls the nuclear program, that has been so useful in pulling the country together? Without nuclear weapons and the pretext of defense, North Korea would have to rely on its own economy to keep the country intact.

Instead of setting the stage for improved relations, North Korea imprisoned two Americans on espionage and anti-state charges. Kim has also poured resources into amping up the propaganda against the Americans, suggesting that hatred of the United States would become an even bigger part of North Korean education and policy.

North Korea needs an enemy. The regime needs a villain for its people to hate. There is no indication that the regime will let go of that hatred anytime soon.

The museum in Sinchon is a prime example. Tucked down a street in south Hwanghae Province, the original museum was created to serve as a repository of alleged American atrocities. Plain and unassuming, the old building housing the relics was flanked by massive mosaics that hinted at the anger contained within: a grandmother in traditional dress, hair askew, shaking her fist at the “wily Americans” and calling on fellow North Koreans to seek “a thousandfold revenge.”

Inside, room after room catalogued the alleged war crimes committed by Americans, from the Presbyterian missionaries accused of seeking to brainwash Koreans with religion to the “Hitlerite” American soldiers they claim systematically tried to exterminate the townspeople in the early months of the Korean War.

Display cases offered what they called proof: some 3,000 artifacts dug up from the soil, including skulls, bones, ID cards, simple woven shoes. A 2009 book on the museum published by Pyongyang’s Foreign Languages Publishing House says that more than 35,000 people, a quarter of the county’s population, were killed during a 52-day rampage.

After a 2014 visit to Sinchon, Kim Jong Un called for an upgrade. The simple building on a grassy knoll was replaced by a palatial museum that is a veritable house of horrors, with room after room graphically bringing to life the gruesome atrocities attributed to the Americans.

The renovated museum opened in late July 2016, in time for the anniversary of the Korean War ceasefire (which the North Koreans call “Victory Day,” even though the fighting ended in a truce).

A visit there is like walking through the set of a horror movie; visitors can walk right up to the tableaus and can practically smell the blood and hear the screams.

In one tableau shown in photos published by Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency in July 2016, a life-sized American soldier yanks the hair of a young Korean woman tied to a tree as another American sinks a knife into her heart. In another room, suffused in red light as though drenched with blood, American soldiers drive nails into a Korean woman’s head. Rabid glee distorts their faces.

The grisly scenes are meant to be lifelike. But are they accurate? Many in South Korea and the United States question the veracity of the claims that such killings were carried out by American troops. While the bones and personal artifacts appear genuine, on my own visits to the museum I did not see any items that directly proved or implicated American involvement.

With few, if any, formal challenges to the claims, North Korea has forged ahead in attributing the deaths to the “American imperialists.” In a 2010 North Korean book called The Sinful American Aggressors’ Imperialism of Korea , a grainy, black-and-white photo is characterized as showing one American soldier scrawling the phrase “I can’t sleep without killing” in a notebook. “The Americans are slaughterers who brutally massacred our people,” the book informs the reader over 308 pages of unattributed allegations.

“American bastards”

Throughout my visits to the Sinchon Museum, our North Korean guide repeatedly referred to Americans as miguk nom, or “American bastards.” He knew I was American, but did not even blink in using this epithet to my face in nearly every sentence he spoke.

Because I am an ethnic Korean and did not look anything like the blond scarecrows depicted on the walls of the museum, I did not appear “American” to him, and the slur was never meant to offend me. The phrase is simply so fixed in his mind that the two words are inextricable.

However, the North Koreans I met in the street loved meeting Americans. Whenever they spotted my non-Korean colleagues, the children called out, “Hello, how are you? Hello, how are you?” They were always excited to practice their English, and usually more curious than scared of the foreigners in their presence. Like children everywhere, they loved America’s cultural exports, Winnie the Pooh and Snoopy, in particular.

In my years traveling to North Korea, almost never did I hear a North Korean refer to an “American” without automatically attaching the word “bastard” to it. It was a constant reminder of the psychologically rooted hatred of the United States that remains so deeply entrenched in the North Koreans’ education, culture, and ideology — even if what they crave is a chance to sit at the table with the Americans.

UMAR JOHNSON HAS REDEEMED HIMSELF; SPECIAL ED IS LEGAL SEGREGATION

UMAR JOHNSON HAS REDEEMED HIMSELF; SPECIAL EDUCATION IS LEGAL SEGREGATION

DR JOHNSON HAS CHOSEN TO KEEP GOING AND NO LONGER WASTE TIME BEING DISTRACTED BY HATERS.

Sources: Breakfast Club 105.1, Black News, Youtube

A year ago I slammed Dr Umar Johnson after he allowed himself to be distracted and disgraced by a Stripper.

Today I offer my apologies as it is apparent Umar has redeemed himself and realigned himself with the divine assignment of helping educate BLACK parents about the dangers of Ritalin being prescribed to young children and Racial Segregation legally practiced in public school districts via Special Education programs.

****** Rethinking School Desegregation: Was It A Curse Or Cure For Black Male Students?

By Dr. Umar Johnson, Psy.D., CSP, M.Ed.

-- The year was 1954, the United States Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision stating that racism had no place in education. 

Although more of an empty symbol than a true legal mandate, at the time, many of the states, both northern and southern, refused to listen, knowing full well that neither the legislative or executive branches of government had no real intent of telling White Americans that the time had come for them to allow Black children to sit next to their own. 

However, such a refusal began to expose the American homeland as a hypocrite that enjoys telling foreigners how to treat their citizens while neglecting their own back home in North America. 

Slowly but surely, White reaction began to settle after passage of the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHCA), which formally gave birth to the United States' first federal special education law.

Although never documented in any educational law writings, special education was the panacea that gave calm to White school districts assuring them that they wouldn't have to truly integrate their schools, but only give the appearance of doing so. 

When forced busing policies really began to heat up, especially in northern states, in the late '60s and early '70s, white schools were able to get away with "cosmetic integration" policies that forced Black children, who rode in on cheese buses, to remain together for the entire school day. 

To outside observers, the school appeared integrated, but inside the building, it was business as usual. 

When community leaders began to push back against the "cosmetic integration" practices of principals and superintendents, coincidentally, special education was born. 

Now these very same racist public school officials had the ability to legitimize their "Separate But Equal" schooling by slave-stamping the cheese-bus-riding-Blacks with "learning disability" and "mental retardation" labels.

 This new program, federal special education, the legal right to segregate learning disability students, allegedly, for their own educational benefit, was just the weapon to fix the race problem. 

For the past 37 years special education has been used to hold in check the promises of the1954 Brown decision. 

Who has been the greatest victim of this modernized segregation policy disguised as special education? 

Clearly, Black boys have had to bear the greater portion of the burden for their communities forcing them to attend schools where they were not wanted. 

Had it not been for forced integration, special education may have never been created. 

Yes, children with true disabilities, like blindness & autism, would have had to receive the services they needed. 

Nonetheless, the use and abuse of the "Specific Learning Disability" classification, disproportionately applied to Black learners, wouldn't be half the problem that it is today for Black parents. 

In fact, the "Emotional & Behavioral Disturbance" classification, created specifically to castigate Black boys who refused to accept White Rule, would have never been manufactured out of thin air. 

The most interesting fact of the so-called school desegregation process is that it only focused on the desegregation of student populations, it never address desegregation of the teaching ranks. 

That's right, Black children today, as was the case in the '60s & '70s, are still almost exclusively taught by white educators. 

Why didn't the Supreme Court address the issue of desegregation within the teacher ranks? After all, isn't it only fair that if we are to expect Black children to be taught by White teachers, that White children should have to be taught by Black ones? 

Or better yet, wouldn't it be a benefit if Black children, attending racially hostile schools, can have the opportunity of being instructed by someone who looks like them – at least once in a while? 

The reason for the silent treatment surrounding teacher desegregation has to do with the White female control of the public school, and the quality of life opportunities that come with being an educator. 

Yes, despite the meager pay, there are some pretty good benefits to being a public school teacher: retirement, healthcare, summers off and year-round regular vacation days, are just a few. 

Add to that list that teachers, those who belong to unions, enjoy one of the greatest job security professions in the country - almost never being fired for failure to perform adequately on the job; not to mention that teachers have one of the highest fluid professions in the world - meaning finding a job after relocating to another city is usually not a problem at all, even amidst the current financial meltdown. 

Not to lose sight of the purpose of this article, the point that I am making is that the teaching profession is heavily guarded by political gatekeepers to ensure that the color of American education forever stays White – not purely for educational reasons, but for financial and employment reasons as well. 

One of the failures of the Black push to integrate schools was failure to ensure that the same process applied to teachers and principals. 

The other failure was not forcing any oversight provisions, nor putting any checks & balances in place, to ensure that special education wouldn't be used to override the Supreme Court promise of 1954, and the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. 

Special education has been, and continues to be, the iron fist of segregation cloaked in the velvet glove of a support system for disabled learners. 

One year before Congress approved "Special Re-Segregation," during 1974, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) would begin work on the DSM-III. Ultimately published in 1980, at the start of the CIA's Crack Cocaine war against the Black community - to dissipate revolutionary activity, the inclusion of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) into the DSM-III would justify the brain drugging of an entire generation of Black boys "for their own good," with drugs as toxic as the ones used to send their fathers to prison, even while then President Ronald Reagan was busying carrying out former President Nixon's so-called "War on Drugs." 

If you ask which weapon of mass destruction is worse, special education or ADHD, the answer would be to choose your own poison. 

It is no coincidence that these two "psycho-racial strategies" have their roots in the school desegregation efforts of the 1970s, and are at the top of the list in reference to what's wrong with public school in this country. 

Yes, Black public schools did lack some of the material resources of the White public schools.

 However, on the other hand, White schools lacked then, and now, some of the immaterial resources of the Black schools - namely love, commitment, fair play, and confidence that our children can learn. 

When it's all said and done, the Black community must ask itself, "Was school desegregation in the best interest of our children? Would it had been better if we continued to teach them ourselves?"

REPARATIONS EQUAL FAIR OPPORTUNITIES FOR 21st CENTURY BLACK AMERICA (AFFIRMATIVE ACTION)

@Reparations

REPARATIONS EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR 21st CENTURY BLACK AMERICA:

BLACK VOTERS NEED TO ABANDON THE IDEA OF REPARATIONS & FOCUS ON FAIR OPPORTUNITIES.

~ Reparations are defined as Monetary Compensation from the Federal Govt for current BLACK descendants of previously enslaved BLACK Human Beings.

While it's true several other ethnic groups received types of Reparations from the U.S. Federal Govt due to centuries of Institutional Racism, it's highly unlikely 21st century BLACK American citizens will ever receive Reparations in monetary form.

The only in-kind type of Reparations awarded BLACK American citizens was via AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, which is a Federal program.

However considering the growing number of SCOTUS legal challenges opposing AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, it's clear this Federal program will soon become extinct.

So what can BLACK American citizens realistically expect to receive as a substitute for Reparations?
What about FAIR OPPORTUNITIES?

I'm referring to real OPPORTUNITIES.

Complete OPPORTUNITIES to receive a proper Education, to become gainfully Employed, to become Homeowners and Small Business owners without fear of unnecessary REGULATIONS & TAXATION.

Complete OPPORTUNITIES for real Legal Representation, and for Ex-Offenders to become Employed ("Ban the Box") immediately after being released.

When Human Beings are granted a true FAIR OPPORTUNITY to SUCCEED in life, they have no one to blame for Failure but themselves.~


*** Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Hits Bernie Sanders Over Slavery Reparations They Don’t Support

For social justice-minded liberals of a certain age, it has always been an impossible dream that something as politically radioactive as slavery reparations would ever become an issue in a presidential campaign, but here we are.

For good or for bad, insurgent Democratic primary candidate Bernie Sanders is feeling the heat over his offhand dismissal of reparations in a recent interview, and now, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s campaign has surfaced the issue on national television as a means of attacking Sanders.

It all began about a week ago when Sen. Sanders was asked if he would support slavery reparations. He quickly responded in the negative:

No, I don’t think so. First of all, the likelihood of getting through a Congress is nil. Second of all, I think it would be very divisive.

I think the real issue is, when we look at the poverty rate among the African American community, when we look at the high unemployment rate within the African American community, the incarceration rate within the African American community, we have a lot of work to do.

So I think what we should be talking about is making massive investments in rebuilding our cities and creating millions of decent paying jobs, and making public colleges and universities tuition free, and working on child care.

Basically, targeting our federal resources to the areas that it is needed the most.

And where it is needed the most is in impoverished communities, often African American and Latino.
That response drew intense pressure from The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates, who penned a viral essay asking “Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?”

On Wednesday night’s All In, Coates explained why Sanders’ response perturbed him, and also why it took nearly a week for him to publish the piece:

When I see somebody just wave away reparations on pragmatic concerns, when your campaign itself is not based on pragmatism, when your campaign is based on, as I said before, what is politically imaginable. And that’s a really, really good thing, I’m defending that, by the way. I’m not against that. I’m for candidacies based on that.

That’s the tonal difference. It’s not that, hey, we have a bunch of great ideas here, but only some of them look like they can actually happen. or some look more likely to happen than others, so these are the ones we’re going to advocate.

First of all, they didn’t even return my numerous calls or my e-mail. So let’s start there, there was no even back, you know — back channel conversation about that at all. They just, you know, left it be and felt it shouldn’t be responded to. That’s fine, but then I have to write what I think about that.

The reaction from Sanders supporters has been vitriolic, and sounds an awful lot like the summation being given by unlikely Sanders defender Tucker Carlson on Fox News, who described someone named “Tah-Nah-HEE-zee Coates” as a “Clinton minion”:

How worried are they? They’re sending minions to make the case Bernie sanders is bigot.

There is piece of a Hillary minion saying Bernie Sanders is, in effect, a racist because he is not for reparations.

I don’t know many “Hillary minions” who would attack Chelsea Clinton in defense of Bernie Sanders, and of course, Coates said nothing to remotely suggest that Bernie is a bigot or a racist, unless that’s what “anti-racism moderate” means.

The timing of this brouhaha is bad for Sanders, but then it wasn’t Coates who gave that quick “no” and then refused to engage followups. As has been his pattern with Black issues, Sanders has handled this poorly.

Not content to just let the flaming tire around Bernie’s neck burn, though, the Hillary Clinton campaign decided that they were the right messengers to press this attack, and not because he’s wrong about reparations, but because it demonstrates a political weakness.

Here’s Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon on CNN:

"We’ll see over the coming weeks if he can explain these plans that he has laid out on health care.

He hasn’t said how he would achieve a single payer system. He couldn’t even get a public option with an entirely Democratic congress. When it comes to something like reparations, he dismisses it as completely unfeasible."

Now, aside from the fact that they are appropriating this serious issue to score cheap political points, which is, itself, not a good look for a campaign that has had to work hard to fight off an entire Samsonite showroom’s worth of baggage with Black voters (and largely succeeded), there’s also the inconvenient fact that Hillary’s position on this issue is nearly identical to Bernie’s.

When Hillary was asked about reparations, she managed to articulate almost the exact same position, but managed to make it sound like a “yes.”:

I think we should start studying what investments we need to make in communities to help individuals and families and communities move forward. And I am absolutely committed to that.

There are some good ideas out there. There’s an idea in the Congressional Black Caucus about really targeting federal dollars to communities that have had either disinvestment or or no investment, and have had years of being below the poverty level.

That’s the kind of thing I’d like us to focus on and really help lift people up.

Now, as Coates explained, there is a major qualitative difference between the two candidates’ responses, which forms the entire basis of his legitimate critique, but substantively, there is no difference.

That makes the Clinton campaign the wrong folks to press this attack, unless they want to explain why their position is exactly the same as Bernie’s.

They’d be better off sitting this one out, and so would those Hillary supporters who haven’t uttered the word “reparations” since they fried the starter in their Audi, but now behave as though this is a lifelong crusade.

They’re going to be put to the test when this issue becomes part of the debates, because if Clintonworld thinks Republicans are drooling to put Bernie in an ad with a hammer and sickle, they’ve got a steel cucumber in their pants over the prospect of Hillary in a red, black, and green dashiki.

As for Sanders, he ought to at least explain why he was so quick to dismiss reparations when he’s happily advocating for forty acres of health care and a college tuition mule, because on its face, it seems to indicate a real difference in the way these two candidates think about racial justice.

And Sanders’ supporters ought to ease up on Coates, because they’re not helping their guy. It’s not a “smear” to quote someone accurately and ask for an explanation.

It’s to his credit that he has begun a discussion about an issue he’s long championed, but unfortunately, that discussion will be more about how the issue of reparations makes candidates look than it will be about reparations themselves.


Sources: Mediaite, Racism Review, Youtube

BLACK LOUISIANA SENATOR ELBERT GUILLORY SWITCHES TO REPUBLICAN PARTY

BLACK LOUISIANA SENATOR ELBERT GUILLORY SWITCHES TO REPUBLICAN PARTY:

HE WAS BORN BLACK, NOT A DEMOCRAT.

GUILLORY EXPLAINS WHY HE SWITCHED FROM DEMOCRAT PARTY TO SUPPORTING THE GOP.

Louisiana Senator Elbert Guillory (R-Opelousas) explains why he recently switched from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party. He discusses the history of the Republican Party, founded as an Abolitionist Movement in 1854. Guillory talks about how the welfare state is only a mechanism for politicians to control the Black community.

~ Elbert Guillory switches parties, now first Black GOP state senator since Reconstruction (CIRCA 2013)

Louisiana state Sen. Elbert Guillory has switched political parties to become the first black Republican senator in the state since Reconstruction. The now-former Democrat from Opelousas made the announcement Friday in Baton Rouge at the @large conference, an event aimed at attracting black conservatives to the GOP.

"Is it a surprise, or is it the worst-kept secret in Louisiana? I am, as of this day, joining Frederick Douglass as a Republican," Guillory said at the event, after accepting the group's "Frederick Douglass" award.

This isn't the first time Guillory has made the party switch -- he became a Democrat in 2007 when he first ran for the state House of Representatives. However, his voting record remained staunchly conservative.

Last year Guillory, who heads the Senate Retirement Committee, carried the bills containing Gov. Bobby Jindal's proposed retirement overhaul, which was strongly opposed by Democrats.

On Friday, Guillory said he had come to disagree with the direction of the Louisiana Democratic Party, which he referred to as "the party of disappointment." He expressed his opposition with the party's stances on abortion, the Second Amendment, education and immigration.

"Today, the party of disappointment has moved away from the majority of Louisiana.

They have moved away from the traditional values of most Americans," he said. "Their policies have encouraged the high teen birth rates, high school drop out rates, high incarceration rates and very high unemployment rates."

After the event, Guillory shed some light on his decision, saying remarks by the state party chair this week influenced his decision.

During debate Wednesday on a bill to expand Medicaid coverage in Louisiana, Sen. Karen Carter Peterson said fellow lawmakers had told her they based their opposition to the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, on the race of the president and not on policy.

"The accusations of racism this week certainly helped push me over the edge. I thought that they were over the edge," Guillory said in an interview Friday. "It just showed me just how far out of tune I was, I am, with the Democrat Party."

The remarks were made Wednesday, the same day Guillory filed his paperwork to change parties.

Speaking after Guillory at the conference on Friday, Louisiana Republican Party Chair Roger Villere again called on Peterson to resign as head of the state Democratic Party.

"The bottom line is that it's never appropriate to demonize and even infer someone is racist for disagreeing with the president," Villere said. "Trust me, we have plenty of reasons to oppose Obamacare and race is not one of them."

The Democratic Party reacted swiftly to the announcement, characterizing Guillory's defection "a craven display of political opportunism" and calling on him to resign.

"This move isn't surprising given Guillory's record of saying one thing to his constituents and then voting another way," Stephen Handwerk, executive director of the Louisiana Democratic Party, said in a statement Friday.

"He should do the right thing and step down from his seat immediately since he has chosen to abandon the Democratic Party values that the voters elected him to represent."

Katrina Jackson, head of the Legislative Black Caucus also responded to the news, saying Guillory remains a "full-fledged member" and that inclusion in the group is not based on political party.

Guillory will be the only Republican member of the caucus.

With just one week of the 2013 session left -- and with a conservative voting record as precedent -- it is unclear what impact, if any, Guillory's party switch will mean for this year's remaining legislation.

Republicans already held a majority of the 39 seats in the state Senate. With Guillory, their numbers will increase to 25.

Sources: NOLA.com, Youtube

BLACK OLDER DEMOCRATS HATE CHANGE - 2016 ELECTION (INSANITY POLITICS)

BLACK OLDER DEMOCRATS HATE CHANGE - 2016 ELECTION:

(INSANITY POLITICS)

The late Scientist Albert Einstein once defined the word "INSANITY" as doing the same thing over and over again, while expecting DIFFERENT results.

The word "CHANGE" is defined as Being DIFFERENT.

However for most BLACK Democrat voters the word "CHANGE" is a dirty word especially as it relates to Politics.

Most older BLACK Democrats appear to be resistant to CHANGE and lack Objectivity in their thinking.

Perhaps this explains why Pres OBAMA targeted Younger voters in 2008 and 2012.

In fact most Older BLACK Democrats would rather DIE from a terrible disease then to consider supporting a REPUBLICAN candidate, even if voting for that GOP candidate is in the best interest of BLACK voters.

Will Older BLACK Democrat voters open their minds to CHANGE?

Or will they allow their Stubbornness to Silence and Devalue the voices of future BLACK Democrat voters?

~ Blacks, Democrats, and Republicans (CIRCA 2011)

Thomas Sowell discusses Black voters’ allegiance to the Democratic party and the failure of the GOP to make a robust case for black votes.

Blacks have been the Democrats’ most reliable voting bloc for the last 50 years.

And let’s face it, with Barack Obama in the White House, that’s not going to change in the near future.

On the national level, Democrats typically get around 90 percent of the black vote, even when a black man isn’t running for president as a Democrat.

Al Gore got 92 percent of the Black vote in 2000; John Kerry got 88 percent in 2004.

These percentages aren’t just impressive; for Democrats, they’re imperative.

Since 1980, the percentage of white votes received by the Democrats’ candidate for president has usually hovered around 39 percent.

Unless Democrats maintain a vise grip on at least 90 percent of the black vote, the party’s presidential prospects usually fade to oblivion. Both parties know this.

If the GOP peeled off just 5 or 10 percent of the black vote, Democrats would be in perpetual electoral jeopardy, and not just at the presidential level.

Dr. Sowell discusses a few of the reasons why blacks who support Democrats are voting against self- interest (and makes a more persuasive case than Thomas Frank did in What’s the Matter with Kansas? regarding Kansans’ support of the Republican party).

There are many more reasons. Consider just the following: Large, Arbitrary Minimum Wage Increases.

Milton Friedman once said that “We regard the minimum wage as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books.” (A good argument can be made that the minimum wage vies for this title with the Davis-Bacon Act — uniformly supported by Democrats — mandating that prevailing wages be paid on government construction projects and passed for the express purpose of preventing blacks from competing with whites on public-works jobs.)

Sharp increases in the minimum wage price unskilled workers out of the labor market, a dislocation that falls most heavily on young black males.

Such increases impair the ability of unskilled workers to get the entry-level jobs that are the first rungs on the ladder of upward job mobility.

As someone once said, a wage, minimum or otherwise, presumes a job. Public Education and School Choice. Millions of black kids are trapped in medieval public schools that are insulated from competition and suffocated by union rules.

Yet Democrats resist meaningful choice, insisting instead on that infallible remedy, “full funding.” ‪#‎more‬#They’re encouraged, apparently, by how well that solution has worked in places like Newark, which spends $18,000 per student — among the most of any major public school system — but where only 30 percent of 8th graders can pass the annual proficiency test in math.

Or perhaps they’re brightened by the example of the D.C. public-school system, which also has among the highest per-pupil expenditures in the nation yet perennially returns among the lowest test scores.

Less than 25 percent of black 17-year-olds can read as well as the average white 17-year-old. 

Nearly 90 percent of black 17-year-olds score below the average white 17-year-old in math.

More than 90 percent of black 17-year-olds score below the average white 17-year-old in science.

The average black 17-year-old has the academic proficiency of the average white 8th grader.

These figures have proven impervious to increased spending. In fact, in some cases the gap has widened as public school spending — in constant dollars — has increased.

But Democrats, beholden to unions, continue to oppose school choice and meaningful reform, thereby consigning another generation of blacks to educational purgatory. Affirmative Action.

Democrats are champions of racial preferences (see Eric Holder’s directive to the Dayton Police Department).

Since racial preferences in, e.g., college admissions most heavily favor blacks, it would appear, at first blush, that black votes for Democrats are indeed self-interested.

But evidence continues to accumulate that affirmative action may be one of the greatest scams perpetrated on blacks.

Studies by, for example, the Center for Equal Opportunity show that the racial preferences employed by some college admissions offices boost a black applicant’s odds of admission over a similarly-situated white comparative by a factor of 200, often much more.

This results in what UCLA law professor Richard Sander calls the “mismatch effect” — i.e., black students being admitted at schools in which they’re poorly qualified to compete.

Consequently, black students are more likely to perform poorly and flunk out.

For example, Prof. Sander found that 50 percent of black law students settle in the bottom 10 percent of their respective classes.

Black law students are two and a half times more likely than whites not to graduate, four times more likely not to pass the bar exam. Welfare and the War on Poverty.

Were this a shooting war, the Democrats would have surrendered in 1965.

As it stands, after 45 years and several trillion dollars, misguided if well-intended liberal policies have contributed to a toxic culture of grievance and dependency that, while not confined to a particular race, has been especially damaging to the black underclass.

The list of issue conflicts between Democrats’ policy positions and the interests of black voters goes on and on: illegal immigration, abortion, Social Security reform, to name a few.

But don’t expect any noteworthy changes in black voter allegiance in the near term.

A comment made by a black law student after an affirmative-action debate in which I participated a few years ago illustrates just one of the many obstacles faced by Republicans.

The student acknowledged that affirmative action often harms its purported beneficiaries and that its proponents are, as he put it, “condescending and insulting.”

Even so, he asked. “How can we (blacks) support Republicans given the Republicans’ history toward blacks in this country?”

I pointed out that it wasn’t the GOP that had opposed Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

Nor was it Republicans who opposed the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery or the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal protection or the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing voting rights.

It wasn’t Republicans who opposed Teddy Roosevelt’s anti-lynching legislation, or that filibustered or otherwise opposed more than a dozen anti-lynching bills in the last century.

Republicans didn’t institutionalize Jim Crow or implement school segregation, poll taxes, or literacy tests. Bull Connor, Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus, and George Wallace weren’t Republicans.

A higher percentage of Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act than did Democrats.

The student and the other black students gathered around looked surprised.

One confessed that she would’ve bet that “Democrats” should be substituted for “Republicans” in each of the examples.

The GOP’s record concerning blacks is far from unassailable, but that doesn’t explain Black allegiance to Democrats.

That allegiance won’t change — Allen West and Tim Scott notwithstanding — as long as President Obama is the Democrats’ standard bearer.

And as long as Republicans don’t make an effort for the vote.

Sources: National Review, Mediaite, Youtube