A Pox on Baltimore

Posted by Alan Caruba @ Warning Signs

Thanks to an infection and the antibiotics taken to rid myself of it, I have had several days of being able to do little more than watch the news on television, listen to it on the radio, and reading about it in my daily edition of The Wall Street Journal. If there was anything else happening in the world, you would not know it because it was 24-7 Baltimore, Baltimore, Baltimore.

Specifically, it was about the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, a known drug dealer and user with an extensive rap sheet. There are different descriptions of the manner of his death, but the details of the autopsy are still obscure beyond a reference to having received a blow to his spine. This is attributed to having been placed in the police van, shackled hand and foot, but not having a safety belt applied.

The response from a certain element of Baltimoreans was to begin to loot, vandalize and set fire to their own neighborhoods by way of protesting alleged police brutality. This followed his funeral on Monday. The Mayor’s response was to tell the police to stand down and let the protesters have their way. When that predictably did not work, the National Guard was called in and a curfew imposed.

Capping these events was the indictment of the six arresting officers by the State’s Attorney General, Marilyn Mosby that included charges of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. That seemed to appease the mob that passes for Baltimore’s citizens.

I wish I could say I have sympathy for Freddie Gray and his family, but I don’t. I wish I could say that I feel sorry that Baltimore has been a state of decline and decay since the last riots in 1968, but no one asks why the trillions of dollars poured in comparable cities since the days of Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” hasn’t demonstrated any results.

I wish I could say that the connecting factor between Baltimore, Detroit, and other Democrat-controlled cities was the primary reason that their citizens suffer unemployment, why their children attend schools that fail to teach them even fundamental skills, but what has evolved in these distressed cities is a culture that does not emphasize the traditional family, demand better education, and replaces the work ethic with the “entitlement” check. The Baltimore mother who chastised her son to keep him from participating in the riot is single and has five other children.

These cities are daily crime scenes. The riot was a crime scene.

And who is accused of Freddie Gray’s death? Members of the Baltimore Police Force who initially spotted Gray, a 25 year old with a criminal record, and went to investigate what they had observed. He ran. They ran after him. That’s what we want and expect our police to do.

The indictment, a purely political act intended to quell the angry mood of those Baltimoreans who protested by committing crimes, is an attack on every police officer in America. Most are good men and women, but like any other profession, there are some bad ones. The legion of police who protect us do not go around murdering suspects indiscriminately.

Tell that to State Attorney Mosby. Then consider that Freddie Gray’s attorney, William H. Murphy, Jr. donated $5,000 to her campaign. Consider that her husband, Nick Mosby, is a Baltimore city councilman with lots of reason to see the riots quelled.

What these cities and the decades reaching back to the 1960s all represent is a vocal resentment of police authority. Back then they were called “pigs.” America has been drifting away from the traditional respect and regard we have had for our police.

The problem isn’t the police.

It’s liberal notion that raising taxes and heavily regulating businesses large and small will somehow attract them to our cities. It doesn’t work that way. Our cities have become great dumping grounds for people who interest the Democratic Party only around election time.

And that is a problem for the police. It will be a growing problem for everyone if we cannot return to a decent respect for our police.

So, for now, a pox on Baltimore and on all the politicians from the President on down who keep telling us the police are the problem, not the world of Freddie Gray’s roaming our city’s streets.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Holding the Voters in Contempt

Posted by Alan Caruba @ Warning Signs

Today’s lead story in The Wall Street Journal is about the result of its latest poll regarding Hillary Clinton. It says a lot about why she and the leaders of the Democratic Party must surely hold its core members in contempt. “Support for her among Democrats remains strong and unshaken.”

In the seven weeks since she announced her candidacy to be the next President of the United States and then virtually vanished from view, the news about her destroying private emails that should have been public records and the shenanigans of hers and Bill’s foundation have taken their toll.

The share of people with a negative view of Hillary says the Journal “jumped to 42% from 36%” and “only a quarter of registered voters said they view her as honest and straightforward, down from 38% last summer.” Only a quarter? You mean that many people still think she’s honest?

As Peter Wehner opined in Commentary “the depths of the Clinton’s corruption and avarice is stunning” noting that “The Clintons have known for years that Hillary would run for president—and yet they still undertook this transparently unethical and potentially politically catastrophic action” referring to their foundation’s actions and the “deletion of 30,000 emails, another breathtaking inappropriate, and possibly illegal act.”

The track record of the Democratic Party at this early point in the 2016 campaigns makes one ask why anyone would still support it, its lone candidate, and its representatives. The economy has been in the tank for the whole of the Obama administration, the same one that a Democrat-controlled Congress foisted ObamaCare on the nation without ever having read the bill.

The President’s primary obsessions these days are making sure Iran gets to have a nuclear arsenal, extending diplomatic recognition to Cuba, the leading Communist nation in our hemisphere, and making sure that our southern border remains so porous that thousands of illegal aliens can gain access.

I would be happy to tell you what Hillary’s objectives and policies are, but other than repeating the same old, failed liberal crap of the past, there’s nothing specific to identify. Does she want to “help the poor”, “protect the middle class”, et cetera? Well, sure she does. As to anything else, her opinion today is often in direct opposition to her opinion of yesterday. She’s not saying much and with reason; as often as not she makes a fool of herself in the process.

If you were a leader in the Democratic Party would you take a dim view of those who vote to keep your candidates in office? Would you, however, even once ask why the Party is unable to produce more than one candidate for President (forget Bernie Sanders—he’s a Socialist who votes with the Democratic caucus) at this point?

And who is that candidate? It is a former First Lady who has spent her entire life in politics riding the coattails of her husband, a charming rascal who has cheated on her for decades. Together they have been in more scandals than can be listed here.

They may have been “dead broke” when they left the White House, but they now own two houses and are worth millions, not the least because as Obama’s Secretary of State the foundation took in millions in donations and Bill took in millions to give speeches, often from the same donors. Was the U.S. foreign policy purchased over her four years? Was the security of the emails she was sending breached? Definitely. Can you name a single treaty or major foreign policy achievement of Hillary Clinton’s service as Secretary of State? Neither can she.

Pause now and compare that the dynamism of the Republican Party. As Gov. Mike Huckabee announces today, its slate of presidential candidates is as lively a group as one can imagine. The Party has asserted control in Congress to the point where the White House knows it no longer has free reign to destroy the nation in every imaginable way.

That’s why voters will in 2016 likely rebuke the Democratic Party in an electoral bloodbath. It’s why the voices within and beyond the Party should be calling for Hillary to step aside. It won’t happen, but it should.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

The Truth About Baltimore

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog  8 Comments

The real victim in Baltimore is not Freddie Gray, a repeat loser who eventually died as he had lived, being arrested by the police. The real victims are not the thugs smashing and looting stores. It isn’t the young black men disproportionately stopped by the racist majority black police force in Baltimore under a racist black police commissioner for doing nothing wrong except the usual drug and weapons charges.

It’s not even the “majority of law-abiding Baltimore families” referenced by politicians.

85% of Baltimore voters came out for Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who gave the muggers and looters “space to destroy”, and then apologized for calling them thugs, defending them instead as “misguided young people” who “need support”.

Rawlings-Blake was a former City Council speaker who got a promotion when Sheila Dixon, the first black female mayor of Baltimore, was convicted of stealing gift cards intended for the poor. During her time in the City Council, Dixon had become notorious for waving her shoe at white colleagues and shouting, “You’ve been running things for the last 20 years. Now the shoe is on the other foot!”

It was indeed. At least some of the stolen gift cards were used to buy clothes. And the shoe is still on the other foot. Just ask the criminals who smashed and grabbed while the police did nothing.

Dixon had won 87% of the vote. And she wants to get back into politics. After the riots, she popped up to complain that white people were going about with business as usual while black anger grew.

"We have some major inequities in the city," she said. "We have to put more focus in those areas."

There are probably no inequities in Baltimore that can’t be solved by giving Dixon some more gift cards intended for the poor.

What is the difference between Sheila Dixon stealing gift cards to buy an Xbox and thugs smashing up stores to grab saxophones, candy and liquor? Baltimore’s former mayor had climbed high enough to be able to steal without breaking the glass.

While Dixon and Rawlings-Blake didn’t do much for the inner city youth whose plight we never stop hearing about, they did dismantle the tougher policing put in place by Martin O’Malley. Now Baltimore has become one of the few cities whose murder rate keeps rising.

Today it has the fifth highest murder rate in the country. And since Dixon and Rawlings-Blake, the city also has 20,000 fewer people. Baltimore has been bleeding population almost as badly as Detroit. The city has gone from having 900,000 residents in the 70s to the low 600,000s today.

Dixon and Rawlings-Blake made Baltimore a haven for criminals. They switched out crimefighting for community policing. Now we have to listen to sanctimonious speeches about how we need to make Baltimore even more criminal friendly as if the city were a police state, instead of a thug playground whose mayor calls muggers and looters “misguided young people” and gives them space to destroy.

Baltimore does not have a policing crisis. It has a crisis of criminals. And those criminals aren’t just the ones who smash stores. They also run the city.

 

When asked about Baltimore, Obama mentioned that, “There's some bad politicians who are corrupt.” He ought to know. Sheila Dixon was an early endorser and a Valerie Jarrett pal. Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is the secretary of the Democratic National Committee. At Obama’s second inauguration, she said, “My hope is that we can carry forward the momentum of the Obama administration and that we can continue to grow the Democratic Party.”

But Rawlings-Blake can’t even grow Baltimore. The only momentum that Obama’s administration is carrying forward is that of the racist mobs who voted for it.

There are real victims in Baltimore. They are the hundreds of thousands of people who have been forced out by riots, crime and misery. You can see some of the real victims still hanging on, trying to run stores on thin margins, sweeping up broken glass and talking about how they called the police and no one answered.

They, and not Freddie Gray and his fellow criminals, are the real victims.

They’re not just the victims of the thugs threatening their lives and destroying their livelihood. They’re also the victims of wealthy and powerful politicians like Sheila Dixon, Rawlings-Blake and Barack Obama.

The tattered remnants of Baltimore’s middle class are trying to hang on despite a national consensus by Democrats and even some Republicans that instead of fighting crime, we ought to be going easier on criminals, that instead of prisons we need more social workers, and that the real victims are not bleeding baseball fans or hospitalized cops, but mobs of thugs who wanted to act out a movie they saw.

The last thing that Baltimore, or any other place on earth, needs is more community policing, sentencing reform and political pandering to violent mobs. But pro-criminal politicians like Obama want to make Baltimore worse while turning the rest of the country into Baltimore. What would that look like?

If the country had Baltimore’s murder rate, around 120,000 Americans would be murdered every year. Not to mention 2.3 million assaults, 1.8 million robberies and 160,000 rapes by “misguided youth”.

And we can have that country. All we have to do is listen to the voices clamoring for criminal justice reform and America can look like Rawlings-Blake’s “space to destroy” Baltimore.

All we have to do is ignore the fact that the real victims in Baltimore are not the thugs in the streets, they are the people being assaulted by them.

The worst of the Baltimore violence didn’t begin with Freddie Gray’s death. It began with a meme about “The Purge”, a reference to an Anti-American movie which depicts a society where crime has been temporarily legalized, “allowing citizens to roam the streets and vent their rage for a 12-hour stretch, to rob, rape and kill with impunity.”

That should sound familiar. It’s what happened in Baltimore with Rawlings-Blake’s “space to
destroy”. It’s what happened in Ferguson. It’s what has been happening around the country as Obama and his associates have targeted police departments on behalf of criminals.

The Obama Purge legalizes crime. It legalizes theft, vandalism and assault. Baltimore, like Ferguson, shows us what that looks like. The solution to crime isn’t less law enforcement, it’s more law enforcement. You don’t make society better by empathizing with criminals. All you do is create more criminals and more crime.

You fill morgues, hospitals and cemeteries. You create a nation under siege by violent criminals. The Democrats and Republicans championing “criminal justice reform” have chosen to ignore the lessons of the sixties and seventies. They have decided that sympathizing with criminals will fix everything. Meanwhile the real victims, the people who work hard, especially the working poor, are disdained because they aren’t rioting in the streets.

The muggers and looters, the thugs and criminals, are not disenfranchised or forgotten, no matter how often the media tells you that. We see their smirks and hear their voices all the time. It’s their victims who are brushed aside and forgotten. We are told to sympathize with criminals and forget their victims.

A moral society doesn’t sympathize with criminals. It sympathizes with their victims. It doesn’t license criminality because it cares about the people who suffer when criminals run wild.

Ohio Employer's Law Blog Daily Update

 

In This Issue...

Failure to accommodate may not equal retaliation, says federal court

Search Ohio Employer's Law BlogIn Neely v. Benchmark Family Services (S.D. Ohio 4/21/15), the plaintiff claimed that his employer retaliated against him for failing to accommodate his undiagnosed alleged sleep disorder. His symptoms included averaging two or three hours of sleep per night, and randomly falling asleep during the day, including while at work. The court dismissed Neely’s ADA discrimination claim and failure to accommodate claim, in large part because there was no evidence that his sleep issues had a medical root. Then the court turned to Neely’s retaliation claim:

One might wonder how retaliation claim in the absence of a disability can be squared with the text of the statute…. The line of cases relied upon by the Sixth Circuit explains that “[a]n individual who is adjudged not to be a qualified individual with a disability may still pursue a retaliation claim under the ADA as long as [he] had a good faith belief that [a] requested accommodation was appropriate.” Thus, “although ‘[i]t is questionable’ whether an employee who merely requests a reasonable accommodation ‘fits within the literal language of the statute,’ we are bound … to conclude that making such a request is protected activity….”

Plaintiff would have the Court extend this reasoning even further to himself, a litigant who was not disabled under the act, unlike the cited cases, did not request an accommodation and had not yet filed a formal charge…. Other courts have refused to extend retaliation claims to employment actions taken after an employee’s complaints of health conditions to a manager, and so will this Court.

What does this mean for you, as a practical matter? When an employee complains about a health problem at work, do your diligence. Determine if the employee is requesting an accommodation. If so, seek and gather from the employee medical information in support of the claimed disability and the requested accommodation. Then, make an informed decision about whether the employee is disabled and if you should offer an accommodation. These steps will put you in the best position to defend against discrimination, accommodation, and retaliation claims under the ADA.

Related Stories

• Asymptomatic HIV is a “disability,” no matter what one appellate court said
• A shy employee, a drug test, and the ADA meet in a bar…
• Some thoughts on accommodations and flexible workplaces

Eyes on Education

Bill Ayers and the Legacy of '60s Radicals in Education  On the evening of May 7 at the Luxe Hotel in Los Angeles, Dr. Mary Grabar, who taught college English for 20 years and has been writing about education for the last 10 years, will discuss the influence of 1960s radical Bill Ayers and his comrades, and offer strategies for fighting it.  Mary Grabar was born in Slovenia but her parents took her and fled the communist regime to Rochester, New York. She went on to teach in colleges and universities in Georgia for 20 years, earning a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia in 2002.  Today she is a dissident to the reigning political correctness on our college campuses. She came to conservatism after witnessing the deliberate destruction of our literary heritage and our respect for the West and for the United States by radical professors in her graduate seminars. In 2011 she founded the Dissident Prof Education Project, Inc., dedicated to “resisting the re-education of America.”   I recently posed to Ms. Grabar some questions about her book and the upcoming presentation.

Mark Tapson: Tell us about your own experience as a professor surrounded by radical colleagues on campus......

 

American Children Continue to Fail History  - The latest national test scores in U.S. history and civics are out, and they continue to tell a depressing tale. More than four in five American children are still not proficient in their national history. This means eighth graders had difficulty with multiple-choice questions asking them to identify leading abolitionists, explaining how the role of government changed because of the New Deal, choosing the most significant reason early Americans formed the Continental Congress, and identifying which war the United States entered to prevent the spread of Communism.  The story today is the same as when national history instruction leader Will Fitzhugh wrote concerning the 2007 release of the same data:.....

The Lady is a Hag

By Rich Kozlovich

I originally posted this on November 12, 2011, but in light of the article, NY Times Slanders Victims of Texas Attack, I’ve decided to repost this blast from the past with some updates.  The thinking at the NYT is irrational, misanthropic, morally defective and mentally deranged.  Just like the groups they support.   

On November 11, 2012 John Ransom wrote an article entitled; The New York Times Gets Life Support, saying that; “the common stock of the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) plunged from $10.87 last week to a close of $8.19 on Friday after the liberal mouthpiece announced that its 3rd quarter net income dropped 85 percent. While analysts are blaming soft advertising revenues, I think something more ominous is happening at America’s national, bleeding-heart newspaper. For sure, advertising revenues are dropping nationally as economic conditions have deteriorated over the last two quarters.”

He continued saying; “But still advertising revenues for the NYT are plunging in industries where we have been told by no less an authority than –gasp!- the New York Times: “Hurray! The recovery is finally on its way!” However, the economy isn’t the problem at the "Old Gray Lady”, who claims to publish “all the news fit to print"! Apparently that is as long as it fits their leftist agenda. They have an agenda? Really?

Mark this down. I predict the day will come when the New York Times will cease publication. Newspapers and magazines all over the country have failed their readers, as a result many have ceased physical publication, and either disappeared, or have gone to the internet - as Newsweek is doing soon. The internet has given society the means to find out what's true and what's spin, and now we know they've not told us the truth on virtually every issue of signifigence.  They have deliberately misrepresented the facts or obfuscate the facts with emotional arguments and logical fallacies - and emotion will outweigh logic every time. Fantasy is far more attractive than reality, that’s why works of fiction are so popular.

But in the information business fiction is called by a different name; it’s called “lying”.  And most of what passes for news can be construed as lies of omission.

The media, as a whole, are filled with leftists and the left has never had a close relationship with the truth. The left is more than willing to change itself into an angel of light if that is what works to get them power. Whatever is popular is what it is they believe – just so long as it suits their goal for attaining power.

The Progressive Movement in United States was socialism American style. When Woodrow Wilson was President of the U.S. the binding force for the Progressive Movement in America was - believe it or not - religion. European socialism was atheistic in nature and that just wouldn’t float in America, so it became the Progressive Movement with the rationale that socialism was the practical application of Christian ethic. It was later called Liberalism and by that time the true socialists within the movement was able to kick the religionists to the curb because they didn’t need them any longer. After WWII the binding force for Liberalism was psychology. If you disagreed with them you were insane.

Do these media types have any idea what it is they are promoting? I wonder, but let’s us assume they really do know what leftism really means. If that is true then we have to assume many of them must be insane. If they don't know what they are promoting that means they are stupid, and I don't believe that - deliberately self-delusional perhaps, but not stupid. To think they are stupid is to underestimate them. Their efforts to thwart the truth makes it obvious that they must know the truth. Strong language? Yes, but I would like for everyone to think about this. Outside of the small elite running socialist societies, who really benefits from a nation that either embraced socialism or had it imposed on them? It certainly isn’t humanity as a whole!  We have, starting with the French Revolution, almost 225 years of history to prove that dystopia is the handmaiden of socialist thinking and policies.

 How could they possibly not know that?

Let’s do some history on the media and the number one socialist dictator in the world….Fidel Castro. At the death of CBS news guru Don Hewitt Humberto Fontova wrote an article calling him a Castro Enabler because of “his media advance-work helping install a Stalinist regime in Cuba”.

He went on to say that; “Hewitt of CBS still seemed proud of his work as a Castro media auxiliary. During that interim, over 20,000 Cubans were murdered by firing squad and beaten or starved to death in forced labor camps. Another 70-80 thousand were ripped apart by sharks or drowned in the Florida straits (attempting to flee a nation that previously took in more immigrants per-capita than the U.S.” (Please follow the link to see the truth about Hewitt’s deliberate chicanery over the interview with Elian’s father by Dan Rather. If you had doubts that there is such a thing as leftist corruption amongst “journalists” this would certainly dispel them.)

What does that have to do with the New York Times you may ask? This is merely demonstrating how badly infested the main stream media is with leftist thinking, and has been for decades.

Fontova went on to say that New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews “made Fidel Castro an international pop star on the front page of the world's most important newspaper.” “The February 1957 NYT's headline article proclaimed that, "Fidel Castro has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore Cuba's Constitution....this amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic and therefore anti-Communist."

That was a lie and they all knew it.

But it shouldn’t surprise anyone the NYT would lie about socialist dictators. Walter Duranty,  is in my opinion, the epitome of infamy when it comes to journalistic corruption in favor of leftism.

So, who was Walter Duranty?

In this article by Roger Simon; “Announcing the Winners of the Inaugural Walter Duranty Prize", (a prize for journalistic mendacity) they state that Duranty deliberately “whitewashed the repressive evil deeds of the Soviet Union”…. most prominently in the case of the Ukrainian Holodomor: the forced starvation of between 1.2 and 12 million ethnic Ukrainians, depending on whose estimates you believe. In other words, a lot of people. Duranty called that genocide “an exaggeration and malignant propaganda”. This appeared in” newspaper of record”, the New York Times. British author Malcolm Muggeridge called Duranty: “The greatest liar I have met in fifty years of journalism.” Duranty also made sure that the Soviets knew that the New York Times would “vet all reports about” the Soviet Union before it appeared in the NYT; “effectively making that newspaper a U.S. branch of Pravda, for a time anyway.” Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize for his mendacity - a prize that the NYT refuses to return, and the prize committee refuses to revoke - in spite of the now known truth of his lies and his actions.

Simon notes that polls have shown that sixty percent of the general public has little trust in the media. He wonders who are the other forty percent? Good question since it is clear that the media supports a movement that has murdered over one hundred million people, kept them starved, disease ridden, down trodden, abused and tyrannized since the terrible beginning of that movement, The French Revolution. What kind of person would have confidence in them?

For the media, who beats their chests publically, self-righteously and unendingly proclaiming they support the downtrodden, to support leftist thinking is unconscionable. Big media is at the center of the informaiton universe.  They have to know the truth which means they must be insane, otherwise how could they possibly support such thinking? And now society begins to understand. The people have been lied to by these powerful entities and it’s clear those who really want the truth will not forget or forgive.

As for the “Old Gray Lady”! I keep hearing seemingly conservative commentators who feel saddened the Times is dying. I think perhaps leftist insanity is an infectious disease in journalism, or perhaps they don't have the courage to be a rock in the current.

Heterodoxy isn't for the faint of heart!

No one can be characterized as a lady who, for all of these decades, has been guilty of promoting such a vile cancerous philosophy as socialism. She's not a lady, she's a hag. When the “Old Gray Hag” disappears that will be a day for rejoicing. Not only for ourselves and our children and grandchildren, but also for the 100 million poor suffering people who were slaughtered by the socialist monsters of the 20th century. Monsters they supported!

Featured Article: Race, Politics and Lies

Thomas Sowell

Among the many painful ironies in the current racial turmoil is that communities scattered across the country were disrupted by riots and looting because of the demonstrable lie that Michael Brown was shot in the back by a white policeman in Missouri — but there was not nearly as much turmoil created by the demonstrable fact that a fleeing black man was shot dead by a white policeman in South Carolina.

Totally ignored was the fact that a black policeman in Alabama fatally shot an unarmed white teenager, and was cleared of any charges, at about the same time that a white policeman was cleared of charges in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.

In a world where the truth means so little, and headstrong preconceptions seem to be all that matter, what hope is there for rational words or rational behavior, much less mutual understanding across racial lines?......The “legacy of slavery” argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century.......You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large......To Read More.....

The Pope embraces the religion of global warming

By Marita Noon

Perhaps you missed the Vatican-sponsored international symposium on climate change held in Rome on April 28. It was a busy news day. The horrific earthquake killed thousands in Nepal and riots broke out in Baltimore.

Or, maybe, you just didn't care to tune in. In Crisis magazine, which bills itself as "a voice for the faithful laity," William M. Briggs, a Catholic, in a post titled: "Vatican Burns with Global Warming Enthusiasm," writes: "Used to be in the West when the Catholic Church spoke, people listened....The church was an influence. And it liked being one." Briggs continues: "Not so now. The West has these past fifty or so years assumed an adversarial stance towards our ancient and venerable institution."

The one-day "Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity" conference, according to BloombergBusiness, "brought together more than 150 accomplished scientists and spiritual leaders from more than a dozen faiths." The Economist described the event this way: "the Pontifical Academy of Sciences [PAS], an important part of the Vatican's intellectual armoury, convened a brainstorming session with the UN secretariat and a gaggle of NGOs, including the New-York based Earth Institute, a study centre which advises the UN on sustainable development."

The summit served as a teaser of what to expect next month when it is predicted that the Vatican will release a papal encyclical on the "human ecology"--the first time a Catholic leader has dedicated an entire encyclical to environmental issues. Public Radio International's reporting explained an encyclical as: "the highest teaching issued by a pope. It is essentially a church policy paper, meant to offer guidance on specific issues for the bishops, priests and faithful that make up the family of about 1.2 billion Roman Catholics worldwide."

In its reporting on the day-long event, The Financial Times (FT) cites Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, who the newspaper calls "a member of the pope's inner circle" and who wrote an early draft of the encyclical, as saying: "Today, the ever-accelerating burning of fossil fuels that powers our economic engine is disrupting the earth's delicate ecological balance on an almost unfathomable scale." The FT refers to Turkson's statement as "a sign that Pope Francis will aggressively push for climate action." Turkson also "suggested it was a sin for 'humans to degrade the integrity of earth by causing changes in its climate.'"

Regarding the encyclical's content, the same FT coverage quotes UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, who met privately with Pope Francis before the conference: "It will convey to the world that protecting our environment is an urgent moral imperative and a sacred duty for all people of faith and people of conscience."

But there is concern that Pope Francis is focused too much on politics and not enough on faith, as those who are shaping his views veer from widely accepted biblical truths. Addressing the dilemma, BloombergBusiness states: "The Encyclical is expected to insert the pope into an American political problem."

In teaching his followers how to identify other true believers, Jesus Christ, in Matthew 7:16, states: "You will know them by their fruits." Then 2 Corinthians 6: 14-15 warns the followers of Christ: "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness?" A more modern version, states: "You are not the same as those who do not believe. So do not join yourselves to them. Good and bad do not belong together. Light and darkness cannot share together."

Following the summit, the PAS released a declaration that states: "The Catholic Church working with the leadership of other religions..." The listed authors include known abortion advocate Jeffrey Sachs. Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General and a supporter of abortion, also addressed the Vatican conference.

While the Catholic Church, and all of Christianity in general, support life, one has to wonder why the Vatican would invite "darkness" in to advise it on climate change. While the abortion issue is one point of obvious conflict, others involved in the one-day event likely endorse a variety of views that disagree with a biblical perspective. When the advisors' beliefs are the antithesis of the church's, why should their opinions be invited and accepted as fact on one narrow topic? Why would the Pope join himself with those who are not Christ followers? The scriptural admonishment is similar to a parent who worries about the people his children run around with because, if they don't share the same beliefs, the crowd often becomes the influencer--and not the other way around.

A thorough examination of the Declaration's authors is bound to reveal a cadre of secular humanists--who place man above God and nature higher than man. Which, once again, is contrary to the biblical view presented in Genesis 2:15: "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it (NIV)." In the Wall Street Journal, William McGurn addresses this passage: "Plainly this imposes on mankind an obligation of stewardship. ...Still, the first part of that Genesis passage means something too: that the earth is to be worked, and that this work and the fruit it bears are also blessed. After all, what is work but the application of human ingenuity and labor to God's creation to increase God's bounty?"

McGurn continues: "All too often the vision of man here is as the despoiler, speeding the planet along the path to doom and destruction. In this reading, modern technology is almost always an enemy, progress is illusory and more babies mean more carbon footprints melting the ice caps where polar bears live. Indeed, the number of environmentalists who end up embracing population control is astounding."

One cannot help but admire Pope Francis' concern for the poor--a totally biblical view. However, the proposed fix for perceived manmade catastrophic climate change (climate change is real and has been happening long before humans burned fossil fuels), the elimination of fossil fuels will create more poor people, not fewer. McGurn posits: "when we measure the costs of fossil fuels, shouldn't we include the human costs that result when restrictions on fossil fuels would mean denying hundreds of millions of people in the developing world the life-enhancing improvements that come from cheaper energy?" Likewise, Marc Morano says: "One of the greatest friends of poor people around the world-an estimated 1.3 billion people who lack running water and electricity--is carbon based fuels."

"An open letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change," from the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation states: "Today many prominent voices call humanity a scourge on our planet, saying that man is the problem, not the solution. ...these voices demand that people surrender their God-given dominium, even if doing so means remaining in or returning to poverty." The letter continues: "Severe poverty, widespread hunger, rampant disease, and short life spans were the ordinary condition of humankind until the last two-and-a-half centuries. These tragedies are normal when-as much of the environmental movement prefers--human beings, bearing the imago Dei, live, and are treated, as if they were mere animals, which need to submit to nature rather than exercising the dominium God gave them in the beginning (Genesis 1:28). Such dominion should express not the abusive rule of a tyrant but the loving and purposeful rule of our Heavenly King. It should thus express itself by enhancing the fruitfulness, beauty, and safety of the earth, to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors."

Pope Francis is not the first pope to opine about the environment. The Economist points out that Pope Benedict XVI's statements often linked to his belief "in the 'respect for the human person.'" To which The Economist adds: "to the ears of secular greens, that sort of talk can appear too focused on the welfare of homo sapiens at the expense of all other forms of life."

And here is the problem, articulated by a commenter in response to Judith Curry's post: "Pope Francis, climate change and mortality." Ticketstopper wrote: "The Church is concerned about souls. Animals and plants don't have souls. I would be very interested to see how a Pope can reconcile the demotion of emphasis on human souls with an emphasis on environmental friendliness."

The forthcoming encyclical will be on human ecology. As McGurn suggests, it is time we put "the human back in human ecology."

One closing thought: If you believe that an all-knowing God created the heavens and the earth, that he gave man dominion over it, and called on man to work the earth, why did God put fossil fuels under our feet when he could have made it all dirt? Do you think He knew that the world would have the vast population we have today and that, for such a time as this, we'd need the dense forms of cost-effective energy that coal, oil and natural gas--even uranium--provide? I do.

The author of Energy Freedom, Marita Noon serves as the executive director for Energy Makes America Great Inc. and the companion educational organization, the Citizens' Alliance for Responsible Energy (CARE). Together they work to educate the public and influence policy makers regarding energy, its role in freedom, and the American way of life. Combining energy, news, politics, and, the environment through public events, speaking engagements, and media, the organizations' combined efforts serve as America's voice for energy.

Ohio Employer's Law Blog Update

 

In This Issue...

Let’s start treating salaried workers like salaried workers

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be a salaried exempt employee. The classification is significant, because it enables an employer not to pay the employee overtime for an hours worked over 40 in week.

To qualify under most of the FLSA’s exemptions, the employee must be paid on a salary basis, which means that the exempt employee must receive his or her full salary for any week in which the employee performs any work, without regard to the number of days or hours worked. For this reason, the FLSA only permits an employer to take deductions from an exempt employee’s salary in very limited circumstances:

For full workweeks in which the exempt employee performs no work.

For an exempt employee who is absent for a full work day for personal reasons other than sickness or accident.

For an exempt employee absent a day or more for sickness or disability, if the company maintains a plan that provides compensation for loss of salary caused by sickness and disability and the employee exhausted that leave.

For penalties imposed for violation of safety rules of major significance.

To offset any amounts received by an employee as jury or witness fees, or military pay.

For unpaid disciplinary suspensions of one or more full work days for workplace conduct rule violations.

For partial weeks worked during the initial or final weeks of employment.

For an exempt employee working a reduced or intermittent work schedule under the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Otherwise, if an employer deducts pay from an exempt employee’s salary for time missed for any other reason, that deduction will cause the employer to lose the benefit of that employee’s exemption for that work week. Moreover, it will also cause the employer to lose the benefit of the exemption for any other employee working in the job classification for the same manager, regardless of whether any of those other employees also suffered improper deductions that week.

As Chris McKinney recently pointed out on his Texas Employment Law Blog, noticeably missing from any discussion of improper salary deductions is deductions from banks of paid time off. Indeed, the FLSA permits an employer to dock vacation time in any increment, and force a salaried exempt employee to use vacation or other paid time off to cover time away from work without jeopardizing that employee’s exempt status.

Perhaps the question employers should be considering, however, isn’t whether the FLSA permits deductions from an employee’s paid time off in increments of less than a full work day, but whether it makes sense to take those deductions at all. Above all else, being a salaried exempt employee means that you work until you get the job done. Some weeks it means that the employee works 40 hours, some weeks 60 hours, and some weeks even more. And, it also means that some weeks, the employee works less than 40 hours. If a salaried exempt employee is performing (that is, getting the job done in a timely and quality manner), then if that employee needs a few hours off to take a child to a doctor’s appointment, or a half-day to attend an event at a child’s school, do we really need to nickel-and-dime that employee over a few hours of PTO? Or, do we recognize the employee’s diligent performance, permit the time off, with the understanding that the time will be “made up” when the employee works to get the job done? You can can which option I prefer.
 

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Book Review: Climate Hype Exposed [Kindle Edition], by Paul Driessen and edited by Ron Arnold

By Rich Kozlovich

The author starts out saying something that needs saying often and needs to be understood by everyone.  “Buried amid all the hyperventilation and consternation about “dangerous manmade climate change” is a dirty little secret: Governments and environmentalist pressure groups inflate – and sometimes even fabricate – the alleged climate change risks, to justify the costly regulations they want the world to adopt.”

He continues explaining there has been a 17 year hiatus on warming  which activists are calling a “pause” while continuing "to emphasize “manmade catastrophes,” due to the climate’s “extreme sensitivity” to even small increases in atmospheric CO2 and methane. The report insisted that IPCC computer models provide reliable climate forecasts, and that the world must take immediate, drastic actions to prevent “unprecedented” climate and weather events. IPCC co-chair Thomas Stocker declared that human-induced warming “threatens our planet, our only home”'.   These statements of disaster continue to be followed by all sorts of ridiculous claims about what global warming is causing, including an increase in rape cases.

In order to by-pass Congress the President of the United States has “directed his EPA and other agencies to continue issuing rules that restrict hydrocarbon energy use and “greenhouse gas” emissions. Citing climate change, hurricanes, rising seas, endangered species, ocean acidification, and even mercury, soot (carbon particles) and asthma to justify the increasingly draconian rules, federal bureaucrats imposed regulations requiring that vehicles get 54.5 miles per gallon, delayed or prohibited onshore and offshore oil and gas leasing and drilling, further delayed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and closed down hundreds of coal-fired power plants while preventing construction of new coal-based generators.” 

But it gets worse.  In order to be able to change the rules and redefine events as they see fit they’ve created “vague and open-ended “sustainable development” and “social justice” policies to buttress their climate change and other environmental decisions and to justify further expansion of their budgets, personnel, and agency missions.” 

And what’s the real goal of all of this?  “To put the federal government and UN firmly in charge of virtually everything Americans make, grow, ship, eat, drive and do. It means government regulators will control people’s lives, livelihoods, liberties, living standards, health, welfare and even life spans – all in the name of safeguarding Planet Earth from the purported ravages of “dangerous manmade climate change.” This will give the UN the power to spread the world’s wealth around as they see fit, which they’ve admitted.  What will really happen is they will destroy the world’s industrial base causing humanity to suffer poverty and deprivation.

Paul’s book covers all the bases – computer models, Hockey Stick Graph, methane, CO2, water vapor, hurricanes, tornadoes, wild fires, droughts and rising seas followed by real data that’s been deliberately hidden from the public by those promoting manmade climate change.  This book is an impressive outline of the fraud and corruption in government, science and business which he calls the “climate change scientist-government-environmentalist-industrialist complex”.  I can highly recommend it! Five stars!

Climate Hype Exposed [Kindle Edition] by Paul Driessen and edited by Ron Arnold can be purchased here!
 

EU orders Britain's organic farmers to treat sick animals with homeopathy

British organic farmers must treat their animals with unscientific homeopathic remedies under rules from Brussels

Sarah Knapton, Science Editor and Richard Orange

British organic farmers are being forced to treat their livestock with homeopathic remedies under European Commission rules branded ‘scientifically illiterate’ by vets.   Although homeopathy has been branded as ‘rubbish’ by the government’s Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies, organic farmers have been told they must try it first under an EU directive which came into force last year and was extended to fish farming in January.   The regulation means that animals could be left diseased or in pain for far longer than necessary and organic meat could end up containing higher levels of bacteria, vets have warned.

John Blackwell, President of the British Veterinary Association, said: “We should always use medicines which have a strong science base and homeopathic remedies are not underpinned by any strong science.

“Disease is painful and farmers have an obligation to reduce that pain and not allow their animals to suffer so this regulation is troubling. It may lead to serious animal health and welfare detriment.   “If animals are not treated promptly it could lead to an underlying level of pathogen which could mean that the animal was no longer fit for human consumption.” ....... Homeopathy has prominent supporters including the Prince of Wales.....To Read More......

 

My Take - And the Looney Prince Charlie wonders why so many think he's potty!  And there are still some who think the EU is going to survive.  Imagine that!

Sure, that food has the government’s organic label. But that doesn’t mean it was made without man-made chemicals.

By Peter Whoriskey April 28

You might think the USDA "organic" label is reserved for foods produced without any man-made chemicals. But under government rules, "organic" food may be grown or processed with the aid of scores of synthetic substances, as long as those chemicals have been deemed essential.  Exactly which chemicals should be allowed?

This week, in a process that is largely invisible to consumers but that has become a semi-annual ritual of controversy within the world of organic politics, a committee called the National Organic Standards Board is selecting those synthetic substances that organic farmers and processors may use.  For a movement largely built around skepticism toward synthetic pesticides and additives, the task of choosing the exceptions can be particularly delicate.  The 15-member board, composed of farmers, processors and other organic experts selected by the USDA, often finds itself balancing the ideal of chemical-free food against the practical requirements of farming......To Read More......