California nears passage of a law whose effect, if not actual intent, will decimate the private nanny/caregiver industry in California.  Not coincidentally, it will simultaneously benefit unions and the powerful institutional nursing/caregiver lobby.  Cynically titled the “Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights,” AB 889 imposes a massive unfunded mandate on families and parents, and its indirect victims will be thousands of minorities who mostly populate the domestic worker ranks.  In short, Democrats have declared war on California families and minorities in favor of Big Business and the SEIU.

AB 889 declares any person who hires a nanny, babysitter, or in-home caregiver an “employer” who must comply with a mountain of regulatory red tape such as buying workers comp insurance, maintaining meticulous time records, hiring “back up” workers to fill in during state-mandated breaks, and subjecting mom and dad to a dizzying and expensive array of legal hellfire penalties for compliance miscues.  Imagine hiring a babysitter for a night then later being sued for an array of penalties because you failed to hire a second babysitter to cover during the first’s required breaks and dinner.

Parent-employers must also document and prove identification and citizenship with the worker’s social security number.  The indirect effect will be massive unemployment among illegal immigrants – mostly Hispanics and minorities – who comprise a significant proportion of the domestic workforce.

So, parents, minorities and the poor stand to lose big under this law.  Who stands to win?  Big business, lobbyists, and unions.

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The FBI arrested fiery New York columnist, Vicky Pelaez in late June.  An editor and writer for the Spanish language newspaper El Diario/La Prensa, she was charged with being an unregistered agent of the Russian government.  Her far-left, anti-American columns won accolades from American progressives, and from the Hispanic diaspora in the U.S.  Released on bail to home detention during the Fourth of July long weekend, she was part of the spy swap in Vienna today that saw ten confessed Russian agents exchanged for four Russians accused of working for the U.S.

A sample from a Pelaez editorial in El Diario, translated from Spanish scorched the policies of her adopted country:  “…refusing to hear … the popular resistance and the opinion of the majority of countries in the world, the Big Boss [the United States] supported the putschists’ … illegal [Honduran] presidential elections…” Pelaez finished her Dec. 1, 2009 anti-American rant, written in her comfortable suburban house in Yonkers, N.Y., with a tired revolutionary screech, “as long as injustice and poverty remain dominant, the struggle will continue.”

Soviet intelligence operatives (the KGB and its successor, the SVR), starting in the 1920s, recruited agents in the press to influence American opinion.  The goal of the communist influence messages, as directed by Vladimir Lenin, was to destroy “the Main Enemy” from within.  Lenin used this tactic, learned in his own Revolution, because he knew the Soviet army was too weak to take on the American military.

The influence message, boiled down to its essence was, and is, “America is an irredeemably racist, sexist, foreigner-hating, imperialistic, war-mongering country that deserves to be destroyed.”  Repeating this message over and over, like an advertising campaign, rooted the message deep in the psyches of the past several generations.  The ultimate result of decades of propagating this message through the press, education and academia, and Hollywood has been the attitude known as Political Correctness. (more…)

When most people think of junk science, they picture test tubes and laboratories. But not all junk science emanates from the stuff that comes out of Petri dishes or Erlenmeyer flasks. In this case, I’m talking about a research report that claims the SAT is biased against minorities, particularly African-Americans.

This report, authored by Maria Veronica Santelices with Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Mark Wilson from the University of California at Berkeley, ostensibly looked at the results of SAT tests, examined which kids got which questions right and which questions wrong, and concluded that African American students didn’t do as well on the test as white students because the SAT people used certain words that minorities have a hard time understanding.

The Santelices/Wilson report was published by the Harvard Educational Review in April and idled around the Internet for a couple of months until Washington Post blogger Jay Mathews  decided to write it up for his blog. His post revealed shocking details and ramifications involving the SAT:

“The confirmation of unfair test results throws into question the validity of the test and, consequently, all decisions based on its results,” said Maria Veronica Santelices, now at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago, and Mark Wilson of UC Berkeley. “All admissions decisions based exclusively or predominantly on SAT performance–and therefore access to higher education institutions and subsequent job placement and professional success–appear to be biased against the African American minority group and could be exposed to legal challenge.”

Legal challenges to college admissions decisions! Could anything be more dire? As a matter of fact, things could be much more dire because this report is nothing more than junk science masquerading as scholarship. (more…)

An entire generation of Democrat voters failed to vote in Massachusetts Tuesday night.  The same generation of Democrat voters failed to thwart recent GOP victories in New Jersey and Virginia.  But no one’s reporting on them.  They’re the silent generation.

The Silent Generation is between the favored ages of 18 and 37 years old.   There are over 49 million of them, and they make up approximately 15% of the American population, certainly enough to swing any election in any state in any race.  Problem is this:  they have been denied the right to vote in these elections.

That’s because, thanks to Roe v. Wade, which was decided 37 years ago today, they’re not even here.

Ironically, the ACLU does not concern itself with them.  They are never interviewed and are rarely mentioned by Democrat candidates.  No one knows for sure how many of them are Democrats or Republicans or independents for that matter because they are invisible and unregistered.  They are those Americans, those voters, who have been aborted since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalized their demise.  They cannot vote because they were denied lives as American citizens. (more…)