End of Issue #56 |

Any Questions?
Editorial and Rants
I don't know whether to laugh or cry...

This is the photo which was attached to the November 28, 2008 New York "Wal-Mart stampede death" story by the Associated Press on the ABC News website:

http://a.abcnews.com/images/Business/ap_black_friday_04_081128_ssh.jpg
Note that this picture is not from a Wal-Mart, the vast majority of the people are white, and everyone seems to be acting civilized. Now, this is what actually took place outside that Wal-Mart:

The liberal media blamed the death on everything from economic recession, President Bush, 9/11, capitalism, Wal-Mart, etc. Never once did they mention it was just a bunch of niggers acting like savages with your tax-funded welfare checks.
More photos at:
More dirty spic violence... at a Toys "R" Us!
Witnesses: Fatal Shooting Followed Toy Store Brawl
November 29, 2008 - From: apnews.myway.com
By Gillian Flaccus
PALM DESERT, Calif. (AP) - The shooting occurred in a crowded toy store on the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, but authorities say it wasn't related to the bargain-hunting frenzy. Instead, two men pulled guns and killed each other after the women with them erupted into a bloody brawl, witnesses said.
Authorities released few details about the mayhem that broke out at the Toys "R" Us store around 11:30 a.m. Friday, sending scared hoppers fleeing. Riverside County sheriff's Sgt. Dennis Gutierrez said the fight was not over a toy and that handguns were found by the men's bodies. He refused to say whether the shooting was gang-related.
The victims were identified as Alejandro Moreno, 39, of Desert Hot Springs, and Juan Meza, 28, of Cathedral City. No one else was hurt.
Witnesses Scott and Joan Barrick said they were checking out of the store when the brawl began between two women, each with a man. The women were near the checkout area, but the Barricks did not think the women had purchases.
One woman suddenly started punching the other woman, who fought back as blood flowed from her nose, said Scott Barrick, 41. The man who was with the woman being punched pulled a gun halfway out of his pocket, then shoved it back in, he said.
"He pulled his gun right next to me. I turned to look for my wife, and she was already hiding," Scott Barrick said.
"I was scared," said Joan Barrick, 40. "I didn't want to die today. I really didn't want to die today, and I think that's what we were all thinking."
The other man pulled a gun and pointed it at the first man but forgot to cock it, Scott Barrick said. The first man tried to run but was blocked by the line of people, then ran back toward the store's electronics section as the other man fired his gun, he said.
The first man reached a dead-end in electronics, turned around and ran toward an exit, pulling his gun and firing back, Scott Barrick said.
"He went up to the cash register, he went to put his hand on the thing and he just went phoomp," he said, indicating the man fell.
He said he did not see what happened to the other man.
Palm Desert Councilman Jim Ferguson said police told him two men with handguns shot and killed each other.
"I think the obvious question everyone has is who takes loaded weapons into a Toys "R" Us?" he said. "I doubt it was the casual holiday shopper."
Ray Turner, 20, said he was two aisles away when two women began shouting and screaming at each other and he had a clear view of the fight until a crowd clustered around them. Both women had children, he said.
"We thought it was just a fight and then someone yelled: 'He's got a gun! He's got a gun!' You really couldn't see nothing because there was a crowd," Turner said.
Rafael Gomez, 11, said he and his father had been in the store about 20 minutes before the shooting but were in a nearby Pizza Hut when they saw people pouring out of the store screaming.
"We just saw them running and crying. I was kind of scared," Rafael said. "We got lucky."
Toys "R" Us issued a statement expressing outrage over the violence.
"We are working closely with local law enforcement officials to determine the specific details of what occurred," the statement said. "Our understanding is that this act seems to have been the result of a personal dispute between the individuals involved. Therefore, it would be inaccurate to associate the events of today with Black Friday."
Let me guess... you didn't hear about this one?
<-- Aysha Ring
<-- Nigger
Man Charged in Liquor Store Stabbing
November 25, 2008 - From: www.baltimoresun.com
By Jennifer McMenamin
Fingerprints left at a Catonsville liquor store where a woman was fatally stabbed Saturday afternoon led police to the nearby home of a 23-year-old man whose only prior criminal conviction was for burglarizing a house with some friends.
David Aaron Briggs was arrested late Monday night and charged with first-degree murder in an attack that appears to have been completely random.
"Right now, we have no motive," Cpl. Mike Hill, a Baltimore County police spokesman, told reporters Tuesday. Our information does suggest that they did not know each other at all."
Aysha D. Ring, 24, was stabbed in the neck and wrist just before 4 p.m. on Saturday while standing in line at Charing Cross Liquors on Baltimore National Pike. Born into a military family, the Hawaii native was studying business at Anne Arundel Community College and working full-time at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Baltimore while preparing for a career in the U.S. Navy.
"This is a tragic case that has taken the life of a young woman, an innocent victim in our community," Baltimore County Police Chief James W. Johnson said. "The members of our community are rightfully alarmed and concerned."
Police declined to discuss what led them to Briggs, other than to say it was a combination of "the latest in technology" and old-fashioned police work.
Court documents, however, reveal that latent fingerprints lifted from areas touched by the assailant in the liquor store led investigators to Briggs, who lives with his father less than a mile from the shop. Detectives then compared a photo of Briggs on file to surveillance footage.
"This comparison provided a match in approximate height, weight, stature, hair and facial features," homicide detective John Tollen wrote in charging documents.
Surveillance footage from cameras around the shopping center showed a newer model blue Ford F-150 leaving the parking lot within minutes of the stabbing. Through motor vehicle records, detectives learned that Briggs owns a 2008 Ford F-150 truck registered to an address in the 1100 block of Sedgewood Road, between Catonsville and Woodlawn and just barely within Baltimore County's border.
About 11 o'clock Monday night, detectives searched that home, where they found clothes that matched what the suspect had been wearing when Ring was killed, according to court records.
Briggs, a newspaper carrier for The Washington Post, was arrested and questioned at police headquarters in Towson. He told detectives that he had never been to the liquor store, according to court records.
Reached Tuesday night, the defendant's father, Carlton Briggs, was distraught. "Obviously, he has some mental problems," he said of his son. "I just found out what happened. I'm heartbroken. I'm sad. I can't even think straight right now."
According to court papers filed by the lawyer who represented David Briggs last year in a burglary case, the young man has worked as a newspaper deliveryman for eight years and was taking classes in February at Prince George's County Community College.
Less than three months after Briggs was sentenced in November 2007 to 18 months of probation and 80 hours of community service for the first-degree burglary conviction, he had already completed his service hours, defense attorney Arthur M. Frank wrote at the time in a request for his client's criminal record to be wiped clean with a finding of probation before judgment. That request is still pending.
"He seemed like a good kid," the defense lawyer said Tuesday. "He had no mental problems that I knew of. His father was a concerned parent and took a real interest in his son's well-being."
Briggs also received probation before judgment last year for marijuana possession.
Janice Wooten, who lives next door to the Briggs family, said she did not know the father and son well but described her interactions with them as pleasant.
"I hope he didn't do it," the neighbor said. "They seem like very nice people."
At the high school where Ring has worked since June of last year managing logistics for students in corporate internship programs, staff struggled Tuesday to make sense of her death.
"We have a lot of young staff, and this strikes young people particularly hard," said the school's president, the Rev. John W. Swope. "It's important that [the investigation] didn't drag on." Briggs is being held at the Baltimore County Detention Center on no bail. He will likely have a bail review hearing Wednesday in District Court in Towson.
Section 8 housing. Coming soon to your peaceful neighborhood.
Housing Vouchers Sparking Conflicts
September 12, 2008 - From: news.cincinnati.com
By Gregory Korte
Thousands of poor people have moved out of Cincinnati's inner-city ghettos and settled into homes on middle-class, suburban streets - exactly the result a federal housing program intended.
But that victory comes at a cost: Poor families with government subsidies that help pay the rent are creating new pockets of low-income housing in places like Mount Airy, Westwood, Price Hill, Springfield Township, Colerain Township and Forest Park.
Fair-housing advocates say the rent-voucher program - better known as Section 8 - has created opportunities for jobs and good schools that poor families could only dream of in the projects. But critics in the neighborhoods at the receiving end of this outward migration say the vouchers are lowering property values while increasing blight and crime.
An Enquirer analysis of 15 years of local and federal housing statistics shows the unequal relocation of poor families in Hamilton County, home to 60 percent of all Section 8 housing in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky.
The migration pattern helps explain an escalating rancor pitting homeowner against renter, city against suburb and East Side against West Side. It also shows why political pressures are pushing another housing shift - moving low-income housing into wealthier neighborhoods that have none.
The number of Section 8 vouchers in Hamilton County has doubled since 1994 to about 11,000 today, costing taxpayers $62 million last year alone.
But not all neighborhoods have felt the impact equally:
Section 8 renters are clustering in a handful of working - and middle-class neighborhoods, but are being priced out of others. In Springfield Township, South Fairmount and Golf Manor, the government is helping pay the rent for a quarter or more of all rental units. But some communities with hundreds of apartments - such as Mount Lookout, Mount Adams and Mariemont - have no subsidized units because market-rate rents are beyond government pay limits.
About 60 percent of Section 8 units are on the West Side of Hamilton County, which has 51 percent of the region's rental units. That's a 5-percentage-point increase since 2003, when 55 percent of Section 8 units were west of Vine Street.
Although complaints about Section 8 are most vociferous in Westwood and Price Hill, some neighborhoods are seeing even bigger increases. Colerain Township, Columbia Township, Mount Airy, College Hill and Forest Park allhave seen triple-digit increases in the number of Section 8 renters in just the past four years.
'Flooding our community'
All this is the result of federal housing policies intended to break up large-scale public housing projects and the high crime, failed schools and desolation often associated with them. Instead, the government gives a low-income family a Section 8 voucher, which it can use wherever a private landlord will take it.
Over the past eight years, 800 low-income residents who used to live in the Lincoln Court and Laurel Homes housing projects of the West End, and in a 700-unit complex in English Woods, have used vouchers to rent new homes on nearly a thousand different streets.
Thousands more poor people received vouchers when smaller subsidized units shut down in Over-the-Rhine.
Conflict has been common.
"A community is only as strong as its weakest link," Colerain Township resident Valerie Heimkreiter protested last month, addressing the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority, the independent agency responsible for overseeing Section 8 in Hamilton County.
"You're flooding our community with low-income properties. Is it fair to take a middle-class neighborhood and over a short period of time turn it into another English Woods?"
But tenant advocates say Section 8 unfairly gets blamed for neighborhood ills that go far deeper than who pays the rent. Foreclosures and aging housing stock all can contribute to a neighborhood's decline - making it more profitable for Section 8 landlords to move in.
"Critics of Section 8 tend to put the chicken before the egg and incorrectly assume the Section 8 is causing the crime. But a lot of neighborhoods are already in decline for different reasons," says Jessica L. Powell, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society of Southwest Ohio who often represents public housing residents.
In theory, the government doesn't decide where Section 8 tenants go; the market does. But in practice, government pricing policies stack the deck for or against neighborhoods.
The housing authority, for example, will pay a maximum of $560 a month for one bedroom. Many apartments in Hyde Park, Mount Adams and Kenwood rent for twice that, effectively pricing voucher holders out.
The housing authority will pay a 10 percent premium in higher-rent neighborhoods, but still not enough for many Section 8 tenants. For years, the federal government also has been pressuring the authority to pay even more toward the rent of single-family homes.
Single-family houses are the most desired of subsidized units - making up about 30 percent of the Section 8 housing stock in Hamilton County. It's in those single-family neighborhoods where Section 8 tenants and homeowners live side-by-side - and where tensions are most pronounced.
Take Colerain Township.
Two or three new Section 8 families move into Colerain Township each week. Last month, a dozen Colerain Township residents and all three township trustees pleaded with the housing authority to freeze any new vouchers.
Colerain's vouchers have increased 20 percent in the past year - and almost tripled since 1994.
The Colerain neighborhood of Compton Estates consists of about 300 small, brick Cape Cod houses built in 1958 and 1959. Thirteen houses have sold this year, at prices of $40,000 to $115,000. Four were foreclosure sales.
As of May, there were 13 Section 8 families in the neighborhood.
"Just take a trip to Over-the-Rhine, Evanston - those places - and bring that to your neighborhood. That's what you see," says Dallas Childress, 60, a resident who says the housing authority has offered to buy his house. "They walk in the middle of the street, and if someone blows their horn, they'll get cussed at and stuff.
"And I do have a problem, actually, with the government subsidizing what they're doing. They all have cell phones. They all have satellites."
Neighbor Patricia Allen, 62, tries to see it from the other side.
"What they do to these poor people, in their defense, is they put them in a house where before they were living in Over-the-Rhine, and they don't acclimate them to the community. They just give them the house. This is the saddest situation," she says.
"They also come with their traits and their habits that come with them from where they were, which don't fit the culture and the workings of the community. What it narrows down into is a clash of society. Who's right, who's wrong? I don't know. I just don't know."
Judy Hinterlong, 47, says she started finding baseball bats, golf clubs and other melee weapons stashed in the bushes several yars ago. She heard gunshots at night.
The local elementary school was tagged with gang graffiti. Lawn mowers went missing. One family couldn't afford their Rumpke bill, she says, so they stashed their trash in a shed out back.
"There were kids dressed to the nines with $180 gym shoes on, but yet they're begging for bus fare and they're hungry," she says. "You couldn't go out to your car without getting panhandled."
Two years ago, Hinterlong made up fliers and posted them all over Colerain Township. Hundreds of residents converged on the Township Hall demanding action.
Officers interviewed residents in 43 Compton Estates households. Two-thirds said speeding and stop-sign running were their biggest concerns.
Police also devoted almost 31 hours to intensive patrols of the neighborhood and wrote 26 tickets - an operation that resulted mostly in traffic citations.
"The overriding theme of the 30.7 hours was that there wasn't as large of a problem as we were led to believe," says Police Chief Dan Meloy, who was a lieutenant at the time. "There's a stigma attached to it, and perception became a reality in a lot of people's minds. In policing, we have to deal with the fear as much as the actual crime."
Meloy says he's willing to canvass the neighborhood again, but won't single out Section 8 families.
"We don't get out our map and say, 'There's four subsidized units on this street, let's find out what they're up to,' " the chief says. "What people are suggesting is profiling. It's not race-based, it's subsidy-based."
Most Section 8 recipients decline to talk on the record, saying they fear a backlash from their neighbors. Some say their friends and neighbors don't know theyre on Section 8. One says she lied to neighbors about owning her home.
Shannon Wynn, 32, agreed to talk last week, just moments after police left her home. She had called police over an incident at school involving her child and another child who lives in a Springfield Township subdivision behind her house.
"It's quiet - despite what you see here today," she said. "We've been here two years and haven't had any problems, except for the raccoons.
"I love it. You don't have to be scared to go out at night."
She pays $581 of her rent; the housing authority pays $365.
Wynn, a home health-care nurse, also is on the Section 8 Family Self-Sufficiency Program. As her earnings increase, she pays more in rent, but the increase goes into an escrow account that shell use as a down payment on a house after five years.
Since 1993, 396 families have saved $2.4 million through the program - an average of $6,000 each.
Jennifer Jackson is on the program, too. A 26-year-old single mother of two, she makes decent money working at a downtown insurance company, but not enough to rent a house with a yard for her kids and to pay their day care.
She chose to use her voucher in Colerain Township because shed lived there growing up. Rent for her three-bedroom house is $800; Section 8 pays $255 of that.
Shes aware of the pushback against Section 8 in Colerain, but is grateful for the suburban option.
I probably wouldnt have taken the initiative to get the assistance if I had to live in a big complex, she says. Not with my kids. I probably wouldve just tried to figure something else out or live with my parents or something.
Jackson assumes her neighbors know shes on assistance because of occasional visits from a Section 8 inspection van.
Before I moved in, my landlord told me, I don't want to see anything in the front yard. I don't want to see your garbage cans on the side of the house. And I understand that.
But many find it difficult to move from city apartment to suburban home.
My landlord, when I first moved in here, she didn't tell me a lot of things, says Lynette, 40, a Section 8 tenant in Compton Estates. She spoke on condition that her last name not be used, out of concern for a backlash.
Im not used to mowing the lawn, fixing the sink. I didn't know what an edger was, or about two-cycle oil. She says the housing authority needs to have a program before you get into a home, because I didn't know these things.
Housing commissioner Lamont Taylor says the housing authority has done a poor job preparing people for the responsibilities of suburban life.
They don't understand that when you pull up to someones house, you don't blow the horn you get out and knock on the door. You don't let your dogs roam free in your yard. You don't have your music blaring at night. You don't have your car up on blocks, says Taylor, who himself grew up in a family on Section 8 and who now owns a home in Kennedy Heights.
Thats the fundamental flaw in Section 8, says Don Driehaus, housing authority chairman. Instead of a government-run social program, its now a loosely regulated service provided by more than 3,600 different landlords some good, some bad and some criminal.
Driehaus leads a new, West Side-dominated majority on the housing authority that's seeking to turn back the Section 8 voucher program. Members want more traditional public housing, owned and managed by the housing authority - but smaller than the large-scale projects of the past. And they want more of it in neighborhoods that have little public housing today.
In February, the authority spent $1.17 million for two apartment buildings at a prominent Hyde Park corner, and will spend another $360,000 to renovate the 24 apartments as public housing. Hyde Park didn't fight the acquisition.
"We looked at each other and said, 'What can we do?'" says Carl Uebelacker, Hyde Park Neighborhood Council president.
"The only inhibiting factor is property values in the neighborhood. That's going to slow (the housing authority) down. Why buy one unit in Hyde Park, when they can get two or three or four somewhere else in Hamilton County?"
Hyde Park has had a half-dozen Section 8 vouchers for decades, but they're so scattered they've caused few complaints.
"When the numbers are smaller, then the accountability of residents is a lot higher," Uebelacker says.
Housing authority members make no secret that they're seeking similar opportunities in Mount Lookout.
"I don't blame Hyde Park. I don't blame Mount Lookout," Driehaus says. "They didn't design the program. It was flawed from the outset. This program needs to be reformed, or it needs to be ended."
That means taking a closer look at the premise: That deconcentrating poverty will help to eliminate it.
It's not working, some say.
"The whole idea of deconcentrating poverty was supposed to be that you would pick up middle-class values. But all it's doing is urbanizing the suburbs," says Hinterlong, the Colerain activist.
"If this really works, why stop at making them middle class? Move them to Indian Hill and make them doctors and lawyers."

"I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites."
"I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's race."
"I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, Dubois and Mandela."
--- Quotes from Barack Hussein Obama in Dreams of My Father.

This is from a November 8, 2008 article on the KHQA website. Note that it mentions Obongo met with Gov. Blagojevich.
Guess what that webpage says now?
Hey!
It's gone!
Change You Can Believe In!
