New York Mayor Blames Billionaires For "The Problems in This Country"

George Soros, billionaire. Is he the cause of the nation's problems?

[From article]
The world is on fire, America is deeply divided and deeper in debt, and many city schools are failure factories — but Bill de Blasio has the answer.
“I think billionaires are a lot of the cause of the problems in this country,” he declares.
It has been said that to a hammer, everything is a nail. So it is with New York’s Leftist-in-Chief, whose warped worldview is shaped by resentment of other people’s money.
He’s got a giant chip on his shoulder about wealth and doesn’t like it when the rich resist his agenda. How dare they spend their money to oppose him!
From there it follows that their politics are illegitimate, and that he has every right to use the power of his office to defeat them. And despite state and federal investigations into whether he sold favors to some of those very same wealthy people, he’s absolutely convinced he’s done nothing wrong.
Those are the main takeaways from the mayor’sbreathtaking remarks to journalist Harry Siegel. His report of the 40-minute chat in de Blasio’s office begins with Siegel noticing a box of vinyl records on the floor, led by The Clash’s 1980 ­album, “Sandinista!”
Hmmm, so the old Warren Wilhelm Jr. changed his name (twice) and put on a suit, but he’s still a Sandinista at heart.
[. . .]
And so de Blasio orders end runs around campaign laws because he’s trying to make the city “more fair.” Or, as he put it after engineering a second consecutive rent freeze for more than 1 million privately-owned apartments, “We are turning the tide to keep this a city for everyone.”
The socialists of yore would confiscate those apartments. The new ones just dictate the terms the owners must follow, as if the laws of economics, or the tides, can be repealed.
The existing impression that de Blasio is consumed with class warfare is reinforced time and again in the interview, as he returns ­repeatedly to his bogeymen — rich opponents.
“When I came into office,” he tells Siegel, “I had every reason to believe, given what I talked about in the campaign and given the many, many voices that spoke up against my agenda that happened to have a lot of money and power, we would soon experience a lot of very strong opposition.”
It began, he claims, “in the spring of 2014 when a number of hedge-fund figures funded an advertising campaign against me in terms of charter schools. So that very real concern that we would experience a kind of moneyed opposition that previous mayors have not was quickly proven real.”
Let’s unpack that lie wrapped in a justification. De Blasio won 75 percent of the 2013 vote, and there was no organized opposition, moneyed or otherwise.
[. . .]
And there is more than a whiff of hypocrisy in his fund-raising. The mayor and his team raised millions for their slush-funds by soliciting donations from the very rich he so obviously detests.
Perhaps his remarks will be a wake-up call to his donors, who serve as useful idiots to his agenda. Of course, the businesses and developers who ponied up the cash wanted a favor in return, and the crux of the investigations is whether the mayor committed crimes in the process.
At least until the probes are resolved, New Yorkers are captive to a mayor who thinks the city would be nirvana if he had no opposition. He wants the city and state to be “like California, where Democrats have consolidated power” and hungers for “the maximum Democratic leadership and the maximum progressive policy.”
Here’s the truth. The People’s Republic of New York is already a one-party town, yet nirvana has never seemed more distant.

http://nypost.com/2016/06/28/rather-than-solve-problems-de-blasio-keeps-blaming-billionaires/

Rather than solve problems, de Blasio keeps blaming billionaires
By Michael Goodwin
New York Post
June 28, 2016 | 10:39pm

Recognizing Muslim Immigration As A Problem

[From article]
During the Republican presidential primary campaign, now-presumptive nominee Donald Trump proposed a temporary ban on Muslim immigration. It was a novel proposal. Of the 16 other Republican candidates for the nomination, and of the 3 Democrats, not one fully embraced Trump's proposal, and most roundly condemned it. And reportedly, a majority of Americans oppose the ban as well. And yet, with the strife we see unfolding in France, Sweden, Belgium, Germany and elsewhere involving Muslim immigrants, it hardly seems to be an unreasonable proposal.
Is it? This is a question that needs to be answered, and answered now. For the longer we wait, the more difficult it will be to even address. The question will be answered for us.
[. . .]
the "debate-like" exchanges, in which a "moderator" -- always a journalist – sets the agenda by asking questions of the candidates. We could, perhaps, wait until September or October, and hope that the moderator asks about this issue, but there is no guarantee that he or she will. But even if the moderator does ask, it isn't likely to be very illuminating, for at least two reasons:
First, the candidates themselves would not necessarily be any special authorities on this issue.
[. . .]
Also, such exchanges would be oral, so that there would be no time to reflect on how to best answer the statements and responses of one's opponent. Answers, or statements themselves, may be irrelevant, incomplete, inaccurate, or simply false.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/05/coming_to_grips_with_muslim_immigration.html

May 14, 2016
Coming to Grips with Muslim Immigration
By Bert Peterson

Dallas, Texas Building Cottages For Homeless, Housing First Then Solving Problems

Tent City Dallas To Be Destroyed

[From article]
For rent: brand new one-bedroom apartments in the shadow of downtown Dallas, a short walk from one of the city’s trendiest areas. On-site concierge. Successful applicants will be homeless, mentally ill and possess criminal records.
These are strange-sounding tenant requirements, but The Cottages at Hickory Crossing is an unusual kind of project. It is a “housing first” strategy: find the homeless a permanent place of their own before trying to solve their problems, rather than the other way around.
The fifty 400sq ft units are set to open in April in north Texas. Despite its bucolic name, Hickory Crossing is wedged between freeways a mile from the city’s high-rises, with railroad tracks, warehouses and the nightlife of the Deep Ellum district close by. One of the nonprofits that has raised the funds for the multimillion dollar project, CitySquare, has an Opportunity Center across the road offering a variety of services for low-income Dallas residents.
“In order to live across the street you have to be chronically homeless, disabled, with some presenting mental health issue, typically drugs or alcohol, and you have to have a criminal background. If you haven’t been in jail you can’t stay in our houses,” says Larry James, CitySquare’s CEO.
The process of selecting tenants is under way. It began by identifying the 300 most expensive homeless people in the county, based on their cost to city services such as the health and prison systems.


The Cottages at Hickory Crossing 

“We will have 50 of the most expensive homeless persons. The average cost per person on this list of 300 to the county alone, not counting the city or nonprofit organisations, is over $40,000 a year to stay outside. We’re going to provide a gated community with security, seven day a week mental health services, really good housing – platinum LEED certified – every house has a bedroom scaled to queen-sized furniture, a living room, kitchen and a bath, a nice front porch. Less than $15,000 a year is what it costs to provide that kind of housing,” James says.
All for a rent of 30% of the tenant’s monthly income – whether it is $1,000 or $10. The only requirement? “Be a good tenant,” James says. That means no criminal or disruptive behaviour; but no pressure on residents to immediately go sober if they are addicted to alcohol, for example. Help will be on hand when they are ready.
“I’ve heard stories of people getting ‘housing first’ and sleeping with the door open because it’s such a massive shift, it took months or even a year for them to be able to shut and lock the door,” says Jonathan Grace, a pastor who works with the homeless in Dallas.
Other models for housing that focus on mental illness and alcoholism have been credited with reducing chronic homelessness in Utah by 91% and have been tried in cities including Seattle, Los Angeles and New York.
[. . .]
Some 40% of homeless adults in Dallas are severely mentally ill.
[. . .]
The sprawling homeless encampment beneath a freeway overpass grew to be so large that it encompassed hundreds of tents and distinct neighbourhoods: the alcoholics, the drug users, the young people, clustered on a dusty patch of wasteland close to the shimmering glass skyscrapers of downtown and a giant billboard advertising a banana-yellow Ford Mustang. Clothes hung on a metal fence, pigeons pecked at the ground and portable toilets stood in a corner near a truck providing medical services.
[. . .]
James believes the cottages could promote a more enlightened approach to homelessness in Texas, one that emphasizes trust, time and collaboration. “People given resources and opportunities typically work hard to solve their own problems. We just don’t respect that enough,” he says.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/20/tiny-home-dallas-homeless-housing-first-strategy

'Housing first': Dallas's new strategy for the city's most costly homeless people
Selection process for tenants is under way as project seeks to provide permanent place to live before solving issues such as mental health, drugs or alcohol
Tom Dart in Dallas, Texas
@Tom_Dart
Sunday 20 March 2016 08.00 EDT

Americans Lack Problem Solving Skills, War On Poverty Continues

[From article]
The Wall Street Journal has an article titled “Americans Rank Last in Problem-Solving With Technology,” with very bad news for the economy.
The results build off a global survey conducted in 2012 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. To better compare the skills of younger and older adults and the unemployed, researchers did additional surveys in 2014. The countries that scored the highest on the problem-solving with technology criteria were Japan, Finland, Sweden and Norway. Poland scored second to last, just above the U.S.
One stark revelation is that about four-fifths of unemployed Americans cannot figure out a rudimentary problem in which they have to spot an error when data is transferred from a two-column spreadsheet to a bar graph. And Americans are far less adept at dealing with numbers than the average of their global peers.
“This is the only country in the world where it’s okay to say ‘I’m not good at math,’ ” said Mr. Provasnik. “That’s just not acceptable in a place like Japan.”
Perhaps a key cause of the problem is the kind of free-spending, vote-buying Democrats who do not want to have to deal with the fiscal realities and therefore encourage innumeracy in our public schools. The kind of politicians who might say, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” or who promise “free” college tuition to everyone. What good is a free college education if the “graduates” can’t do simple math and therefore can’t get a paying job?
[. . .]
Nobel laureate for physics (1965), Richard Feynman had something to say that now seems prophetic
There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
[. . .]
It seems the War on Poverty has greatly exceeded the cost of the Vietnam War and the combined cost of all other wars in American history! Is it time to declare defeat and give those dollars back to the American taxpayers, who earned them in the first place?

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/03/the_mathematics_of_ending_the_endless_war_on_poverty.html

March 11, 2016
The mathematics of ending the endless war on poverty
By Bruce Thompson

Can't Solve A Problem Unless You Know What It Is

[From article]
The enemy, in case you need a scorecard, is Islamic expansionist jihad. The tactic is terrorism waged with shameless barbarity, and the goal is worldwide domination in the form of a Sharia-law-based caliphate.
That may seem like a ridiculous and overly ambitious aspiration, and one not worthy of response, but consider this: At the start of World War II, Germany had a population of 79 million compared to a world population of 2.3 billion people. If you want to, go ahead and throw in another 72 million to represent the population of Japan, and another 44 million for Italy. Those three Axis powers, in other words, had a combined population of 195 million to use to seek to impose their will (and their empire) over a world population of 2.3 billion people. That represents approximately a 1 to 12 ratio.
If that 1:12 threat was “credible” — and the deaths of 60 million people during World War II suggest it was — then how much more seriously should we take the threat of Islamic jihad? Muslims, after all, represent nearly one-fourth of the world’s population, and they zealously seek to expand the influence of their religion across the entire globe. This is not something new either. There have been repeated attempts by Muslim armies to conquer Europe in the last 1,300 years.
[. . .]
President Obama loves to defend Islam, and there’s no doubt that he is right about the fact that most Muslims have no interest in waging war. But by denying the self-evident truth that millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of Muslims want to crush Israel, the United States and our European allies, he has turned himself into the Charles Lindbergh of American presidents.
Lindbergh, who like Barack Obama, was an international hero and a role model for millions of children because of his youthful accomplishments, became an ardent apologist for Germany before World War II and toured America in a vainglorious quest to keep us from going to war against the Nazis.
[. . .]
Likewise, President Obama lacks the vision or the intestinal fortitude to comprehend just how dangerous the ideology of Islamic jihad is to the rest of the world. No matter how many good Muslims there are, they are not willing nor able to hold back the angry, vengeful “true believers” willing to die for their cause.
[. . .]
Those of us who recognize the evil of the Islamic State and are prepared to do anything necessary to stop it do now have a leader, but sadly it is not President Obama. It is King Abdullah II of Jordan, who — when just one of his citizens was killed in that fiery execution — declared eternal war against the jihadis and vowed never to give up.
If President Obama is today’s Lindbergh, then we can only hope that Abdullah will prove to be this generation’s Churchill, who told Britain’s wartime schoolchildren, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

http://www.dailyinterlake.com/members/islam-history-and-the-failure-to-recognize-a-world-threat/article_9a9119dc-af2f-11e4-8549-fbb4f2c8a2f7.html

Islam, history and the failure to recognize a world threat
Posted: Saturday, February 7, 2015 7:00 pm
FRANK MIELE/Daily Inter Lake

Romney's true personality and colors

Romney's true personality and colors

Sometimes, this facet of Romney’s personality isn’t so subtle. In July 1996, the 14-year-old daughter of Robert Gay, a partner at Bain Capital, had disappeared. She had attended a rave party in New York City and gotten high on ecstasy.

Three days later, her distraught father had no idea where she was. Romney took immediate action. He closed down the entire firm and asked all 30 partners and employees to fly to New York to help find Gay’s daughter. Romney set up a command center at the LaGuardia Marriott and hired a private detective firm to assist with the search. He established a toll-free number for tips, coordinating the effort with the NYPD, and went through his Rolodex and called everyone Bain did business with in New York, and asked them to help find his friend’s missing daughter. Romney’s accountants at Price Waterhouse Cooper put up posters on street poles, while cashiers at a pharmacy owned by Bain put fliers in the bag of every shopper. Romney and the other Bain employees scoured every part of New York and talked with everyone they could – prostitutes, drug addicts – anyone.

That day, their hunt made the evening news, which featured photos of the girl and the Bain employees searching for her. As a result, a teenage boy phoned in, asked if there was a reward, and then hung up abruptly. The NYPD traced the call to a home in New Jersey, where they found the girl in the basement, shivering and experiencing withdrawal symptoms from a massive ecstasy dose. Doctors later said the girl might not have survived another day. Romney’s former partner credits Mitt Romney with saving his daughter’s life, saying, “It was the most amazing thing, and I’ll never forget this to the day I die.”

So, here’s my epiphany: Mitt Romney simply can’t help himself. He sees a problem, and his mind immediately sets to work solving it, sometimes consciously, and sometimes not-so-consciously. He doesn’t do it for self-aggrandizement, or for personal gain. He does it because that’s just how he’s wired.

Many people are unaware of the fact that when Romney was asked by his old employer, Bill Bain, to come back to Bain & Company as CEO to rescue the firm from bankruptcy, Romney left Bain Capital to work at Bain & Company for an annual salary of one dollar. When Romney went to the rescue of the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics, he accepted no salary for three years, and wouldn’t use an expense account. He also accepted no salary as Governor of Massachusetts.

Character counts!!