Thin Blue Line: America's Police Under Assualt

A 38-year old police officer was viciously gunned down last year during a bank robbery in Mississippi.  A nine year veteran of the Tupelo Police Department, Kevin Stauffer left behind a young wife and two children. There were no national headlines about his death.

As the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, demonstrates, the news media are more interested in covering racially charged events.  The death of a police officer hardly rates national mention.  In the last ten years, more than 1,500 police and detectives have died in the line of duty, including 568 by gunfire.

Crime fighting has taken its toll on America's police.  Since the first recorded police death in 1791, there have been more than 20,000 officers killed in the line of duty.  Violent crime, although down in recent years, still exceeds 1 million incidents nationwide every year.

Police not only are gunshot victims.  Others die in motor vehicle accidents while chasing suspects, drownings, vehicle assaults, accidental shootings, stabbings and illnesses related to their duties. It is a hazardous profession with very little room for error.  

The deadliest year since the dawn of the new century was 2001, when 71 officers were killed during the September 11 terrorist attacks alone.  For that year, 140 officers were slain, including three who were ambushed by criminals.

Despite those numbers, the 1920's were far worse for law enforcement officers.  That decade ended with with 2,390 police officers losing their lives in deadly shootings. The deadliest year, however, was 1930, when 297 officers were killed.      

Thousands more police officers are assaulted every year in the line of duty.  During the last decade, there were more than 519,000 assaults, resulting in injuries to 154,836 police officers, according to FBI statistics.  The average over that period was 57,892 assaults each year.

Although shooting deaths of police are on the decline, even one fatality is too many for the thin blue line that maintains the peace in communities throughout America.  The most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate there are 780,000 police and detectives keeping the country safe each day.

As a result of police deaths, many departments have purchased body armor to help protect the men and women in blue.  However, body armor is not a panacea.  In 2012, a total of 51 police officers died while wearing body armor.  But the gear has been credited with the reduction in gun deaths.

The number one killer of police officers is not gunfire.  More than twice as many law enforcement officers every year die from suicide than are killed in traffic accidents or assaults, according to a 2012 national study underwritten by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP).

Astonishingly, for every one suicide, the study's authors estimate there are 25 attempts.  Those sobering numbers are testimony to a high risk occupation where law enforcement officers are exposed to the worst human atrocities while dealing with often potentially life threatening confrontations.

Unfortunately, the media seldom paint a fair and unbiased picture of police.  Good police work goes unreported, but there is nothing like the scent of scandal or wrongdoing to get the media digging for details to expose the dirty blue laundry.

This does not mean police should not be scrutinized and held to high standards.  Those officers who break the law they are sworn to uphold deserve swift and vigorous justice.  What is lacking is balance in the reporting of incidents involving police.

That equilibrium has been missing in most news media coverage, particularly in reports that involve use of police force.  That fact has not gone unnoticed by the chiefs of police.

"In large part, the public perception of police use of force is framed and influenced by media depictions which present unrealistic and often outlandish representations of law enforcement and the policing profession," the IACP group said in a 2012 report.

What was true then is still true today.  Just look at the one-sided, incendiary media coverage coming out of Ferguson, Missouri.

Memo to Jesse: Focus on the Critical Issues

MEMORANDUM: To Jesse Jackson regarding your campaign to shine attention on Silicon Valley's dismal record of hiring blacks and Latinos for high tech jobs.

Even for a man who has made a career of shaking down businesses, you have stumbled to a new low with this attempt to shame the icons of America's technology industry into adopting hiring quotas, nonsensical diversity measurements and racial sensitivity training.

Your civil rights playbook needs some serious updating.  For starters, there would be more African-Americans and Hispanics in Silicon Valley if they pursued degrees in engineering, computer science and other technology fields.

The Washington-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies issued a recent report detailing how blacks and Latinos in particular "fall short in preparedness for jobs in the technology sector."  In its report, the center called for increasing the number of minorities majoring in science and engineering in college to address the issue.

Apparently, Reverend Jackson, you must have been too busy jetting around the country to hustle a few million more dollars for your Rainbow PUSH organization to be bothered with the facts.

Frankly, African-Americans and Latinos have more pressing problems than scoring a corner office at some technology firm.  It might be a more productive use of your time if you spent considerable energy tackling these urgent issues:

1.  Blacks lead all ethnic groups in unemployment.  According to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment among African-Americans is 11.4 percent.  Just for the record, Hispanic occupy second place in the unemployment line.  July statistics pegged the unemployment rate for Americans at 6.2 percent.

2. Blacks have the lowest high school graduation rates of all ethnic groups.  Department of Education figures estimate that 66.1 percent of African-American students graduated from high school.  Hispanic graduation rates were 71.4 percent.  By comparison, 83 percent of whites achieved high school diplomas.

3.  More than 60 percent of the people in state and federal prisons are racial and ethnic minorities.  For black males in their 30's, one in ten is incarcerated in a prison on any given day.  These figures are from the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group for imprisoned minorities. Firearm violence rates for blacks aged 12 and older were 40 percent higher than Hispanics and 200 percent more than whites, reports the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

4.  More black children are raised in a single parent household than other ethnic groups.  In the African-American community, 72 percent of children are raised by a single parent.  For the country as a whole, 25.8 percent of children are brought up by one parent, based on studies by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

5. Blacks are more likely to receive welfare assistance than other groups.  Department of Health and Human Services data confirms that 39.8 of all Americans who receive food stamps, unemployment insurance or other forms of welfare are African-Americans.  White recipients comprise 38.8 percent of those collecting federal aid and Hispanics constitute 15.7 percent.  In the most recent U.S. Census, 72.4 percent of Americans were white, 12.6 percent were African-American and 16.4 percent were Hispanic or Latino.

Start with these five issues if you want to improve the plight of minorities, especially African-Americans.  Stop trying to make them victims and do something that actually provides blacks and other minorities opportunities to share in America's prosperity.

Sorry, but you have no right to grumble about hiring practices in Silicon Valley until you have done more than just blame others for the serious problems that are ravaging the minority community.  Just being a racial profiteer isn't enough to claim the mantle of Martin Luther King.

Society's Most Discriminated Against Group

They are the butt of cruel jokes.  They attract unwelcome stares. They are routinely portrayed in movies and on television as boobs. They are shunned by photographers.  They are often mistaken for someone else because they all look alike.  They are a hair salon's worst nightmare.

They are bald men, discriminated against by a society that believes a thick head of hair is next to godliness. Lesbians, gays, native Americans, African-Americans and even dwarfs are represented by anti-discriminatory groups.  Laws have been written to protect them from hate crimes.  

But bald men wallow in the shadows, unloved, vulnerable, indefensible and powerless.   They are victims who suffer silently the barbs of the insensitive and malicious.  "That glare bouncing off your head is blinding me," is the insult repeated ad nausea by amigos and antagonists alike.     

Bald is not beautiful unless you are a movie star with your own yacht, a 20,000-square foot mansion and fire-engine red Maserati.    Even then, you better don a hat.  For every Bruce Willis, there are a 100 Tom Cruise clones on screen flaunting their flocculent follicles.

Gays, lesbians and transsexuals represent about 2.5 percent of the population according to a new study by the Center for Disease Control.  Yet they have far more clout that bald males, who outnumber them by millions.  By age 50, six out of every 10 men will have suffered some degree of baldness.

Just based on those figures, bald men deserve at least as much protection as gays.  But they need to be better organized, more vocal and downright pushy.  For starters, they need a lobby with a catchy abbreviation.  How about Follicle Organization Lividly In Crisis or FOLIC?

Every special interest group needs a headquarters location.  The small town (pop. 2,897) of Bald Knob, Arkansas, would nicely serve that purpose.  The perfect front man for the organization would be Vin Diesel, an actor with an intimidating presence and a seriously gravelly voice.

Despite voters objections to gay marriage, the courts have struck down bans approved in most states.  Surely, that precedent can be used to rule that a bald man can marry a bald woman without suffering stares, insults and society's scorn.  It only seems fair.

No group needs hate crime protection more than bald men.  The endless jokes are reason enough.  "Bill is so bald you can see what's on his mind."  "What's the difference between a prince and a bald man? A prince is an heir apparent and a bald man has no hair apparent." The gags are demeaning and hateful.

Have you ever noticed there are more gays on television shows than bald men?  And, if the script calls for a bald actor, chances are he will be the show's buffoon.  Meanwhile, the gay guy is smart, suave and oozes charm.   The bald guy never gets the woman or the man.

Researchers in Germany and Japan found that people view bald men as being older, although socially mature.  Men with a flowing locks were perceived as being more aggressive and less mature.  The study, conducted in 2001, would have been produced far different results if it was done in the U.S.

In America, bald men are held in such low esteem every president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 has sported telegenic heads overflowing with hair.  The optics of a bald man addressing the nation are just too frightening for many Americans.

But all that is about to change.  Once organized, bald men will reclaim their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of Hair Club memberships.  

Exposing IRS Lies About Lost Emails

Congressional investigators have been stonewalled, stiff-armed and stalled at every turn in their efforts to get to the bottom of the IRS scandal.  As a result, the probe has dragged on as precious little details have dribbled out of the agency at the heart of the controversy.

Just when investigators thought things couldn't get worse, Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen dropped a bombshell. Thousands of potentially incriminating emails from former IRS official Lois Lerner disappeared into thin air after a computer crash, he informed Congress.   

Lerner, who directed the IRS targeting of conservative groups, was not the only agency employee whose emails dropped from sight.  Five more IRS employees also claimed their email correspondence had gone missing.  Koskinen contended none of the emails could be recovered.

This is worse than sheer nonsense.  It is a damnable lie.  Koskinen and the Obama Administration are depending on Americans' unfamiliarity with technology to perpetuate the deceit.  Republican committee members could have easily exposed the fabrication if they had been better prepared.

Ed Glotzbach, former vice chairman of Information Services Group, Inc., reviewed Koskinen's testimony and charitably called the commissioner's explanation "not credible." Glotzbach's view carries weight because of his information technology experience.

He is the former chief executive officer of TPI, Inc., a Houston based firm that is a leading sourcing advisory firm in the U.S.  Prior to that, Glotzbach served five years as the chief information officer for SBC Communications.  His duties included overseeing data center operations for the telecom firm.

"The fact that Lois Lerner's hard drive crashed is irrelevant," Glotzbach explains.  "Today virtually every large organization backs up every email on file servers.  Almost always, those servers have back-ups that shadow them.  Those emails never leave the servers."

In layman's terms, servers are like super-sized computers.  Every user's computer in the organization is linked to file servers, which store and retrieve files.  Every document and email created is stored on the server.  Most large businesses are required by federal regulations to archive correspondence for at least five years.

Federal government agencies, including the IRS, have similar document retention policies.  An examination of the IRS guidelines confirms that the agency is supposed to provide for "backup and recovery of records to protect information against loss and corruption."  

The IRS even employs a chief technology officer (CTO) who is responsible for the 400 systems operated by the agency. Inconceivably, Republicans have never called the CTO on the carpet to testify before the Congressional committee.  

That has left the pedestrian Koskinen to justify why Lois Lerner's emails cannot be retrieved.  His explanations, frankly, are dubious. "Her hard drive could be wrecked or her computer disc scratched.  It doesn't matter.  Those emails exist on the file server," Glotzbach asserts.

The emails could be easily reclaimed, Glotzbach maintains. Businesses and federal agencies are required often to produce emails and documents created by their employees as part of regulatory proceedings, lawsuits and law enforcement inquiries.  

Could IRS officials have erased the emails from the servers?  Not likely, Glotzbach explains.  "It would require more than a handful of people and there would be a trail of mechanized process control steps," Glotzbach says.  "The trail would consist of authorizations to make changes."

If Lerner's emails were not backed up on a server, then the IRS has an ever larger problem, according to Glotzbach.  "It is unfathomable that an agency with such voluminous and essential data did not regularly conduct disaster recovery exercises and evaluate the outcome," he says.

In other words, the IRS has to employ a back-up system or it could lose all taxpayer data if its computers crashed.  No business, let alone an agency dependent on records like the IRS, could risk losing all its data in the event a fire, earthquake or other disaster destroyed its computers or servers.

Despite the obvious lies, Democrats call the Congressional inquiry a political stunt.  The lemmings in the news media have refused to lift a finger to investigate the IRS commissioner's claims.  However, their efforts to squelch the Congressional investigation may have backfired. 

Now the courts are involved.  Cases have been filed with two federal district courts over the lost email issue.  In at least one instance, the judge has already demanded an explanation from the IRS.  Koskinen's coverup may about to be exposed.  

Democrats Battle Cry: Republicans Hate Women

Saddled with an increasingly unpopular president, a pedestrian economy and a loathsome health care law, Democrats are desperate to find an issue to avoid the carnage of another mid-term election.   Unless they are successful, Republicans will tighten their grip on the House and claim the Senate.

Faced with dire electoral prospects, strategists in the Democrat Party have hatched a plan to trot out a tried-and-true false accusation: "Republicans have declared war on women."  The evil GOP wants to control a woman's reproductive organs, dictate their sexual behavior and steal their free contraceptives.    

It is easy to dismiss this Democrat obsession with a woman's libido as nothing more than political skulduggery.  However, Republicans cannot shrink from rebutting the charges.  In 2012, the presidential election tilted to Obama on the basis of the female vote.

According to Gallup polling, Republican Mitt Romney won 44 percent of the women's vote while Obama racked up 56 percent.  Romney took the male vote 54 to 46 percent. The 20-point gender gap represented the largest ever recorded since Gallup began compiling the vote by subgroups in 1952.

Hoping to capitalize on that success, Democrat operatives will fan out across the country arming their candidates with attack ads that portray their GOP opponents as Neanderthals who want to enslave women.  As preposterous as the charge sounds, many women are inclined to believe the rhetoric.

Unfortunately, Republicans have only themselves to blame.  Too many candidates carrying the GOP banner have waded into the abortion quicksand and been swallowed up by their own stupidity. Ill advised comments about rape, sexual promiscuity and female reproduction have soured women voters.

Republicans have often taken the abortion bait dangled by Democrats. GOP candidates should make it their mantra to refer to the Supreme Court decision on abortion.  Nothing more needs to be or should be said.  It seems imbecilic to focus a campaign on abortion when the world is imploding.

If Democrats want to debate abortion, then Republicans can turn the issue back on their opponents.  In overwhelming numbers, females are against late term abortions.  Witness last year's grisly trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell.  No abortion-rights advocate leaped to his defense.

Only the Democrat far left believes crushing a baby's skull in mid-delivery is justified.  The rest of the nation, including most women, are horrified by the prospect.

Abortion is just one issue Democrats will employ to flummox Republicans. Expect the party of donkeys to bray about the gender pay gap and tie it to the minimum wage hike opposed by Republicans. Although the two are separate issues, that won't stop Democrats from linking them.

A Pew Research analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics found that minimum wage earners are predominantly women: 62% versus 38% who are men.  However, they represent less than three percent of all workers.  Already, 21 states have adopted higher minimum wage laws than the federal level.

Each state should have the right to decide the minimum wage in their locality based on living costs, economic conditions and prevailing pay scales.  The federal government has no business telling a Texas cafe owner the appropriate wage for a waitress. Republicans should support each state's right to decide.

On the larger issue, equal pay is federal law.  Every Republican should support the same pay for women and men.  Companies that allow a disparity in pay should be prosecuted with the full force of the law. The gap persists because the government has sat on its hands instead of enforcing the law.

Ironically, some of the biggest offenders are the same Hollywood crowd that opens its wallets to Democrats.  The Women's Media Center recently issued its third annual report on the Status of Women in the U.S. Media.  The results were eyeopening.

The report found women represented just 28.8 percent of the roles in the top grossing films , held just 16 percent of the movie executive jobs and the top 16 paid actors were all men. In other media, such as talk radio and television, women are lower paid and less visible than their male counterparts.

Of course, the biggest hypocrite is President Obama.  Data released by the White House in July shows men on Team Obama are paid an average of 13 percent more than women.  This gap has not shrunk one iota since Obama strutted into the White House in 2009.  

Republicans have an opportunity in the mid-term elections to bury the myth of the party's war on women by supporting the things most females care about.  More jobs.  Equal pay.  Advancement opportunities.  Family security.

Let the Democrats prattle about a woman's anatomy.  They view women as nothing more than helpless victims whose only goals in life are free abortions and contraceptives.  If Republicans offer an alternative message, intelligent women will support their candidates.

Border Crisis: Blame Mexico and Obama

They are smuggled by the thousands across the United States' southern border with Mexico.  They arrive malnourished with not much more than the clothes on their backs.  Most are from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.  They are fleeing violence, poverty and drug gangs in their home countries.

Their plight has aroused national sympathy.  Americans are horrified by the pictures and reports of children huddled in crowded facilities in the U.S.  Churches, aid organizations and ordinary Americans have pitched in to help ease the humanitarian crisis created by the influx of unaccompanied children.

But even for a nation with a big heart, the situation has ignited a growing backlash against what many Americans view as a failure of the Obama Administration's effort to secure the border.  A Washington Post/ABC News poll found 58% disapproved of the president's handling of the catastrophe.

Only 28% of those surveyed supported the president's response, one of the lowest ratings on any issues since Obama assumed the nation's highest office.  Americans clearly understand that Obama's laissez- faire policies on illegal border crossing have exacerbated the current dilemma.

The president issued a policy directive in 2012 known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allowed some illegal immigrant children to defer deportation.  Earlier this month, the administration extended the program, empowering illegal aliens to apply for a two-year extension.

Those executive actions created an incentive for Central American parents to ship their children across the U.S. border.  If you doubt this, consider Texas Republican Representative Kay Granger's assessment after she recently visited Central America.

"There is no doubt the message went out: Go across the border, the United States won't do anything about it," she told reporters after meetings with officials and parents in Central America.

Given the green light by Obama, desperate parents dispatched thousands of children into harm's way to seek asylum in the United States by way of Mexico.  The Mexican government for its part turned a blind eye to the torrent of youngsters slipping through the country's porous 600-mile border with Guatemala.

These children clambered aboard the tops of railroad cars for the treacherous trek across Mexico.  No Mexican official stopped them. Many of the children were robbed, raped and some were sold into slavery.  The Mexican police looked the other way.  This would never happen in a civilized country.

Then once the children reached the border, Mexican smugglers operating with impunity demanded thousands of dollars to sneak the bedraggled youngsters into America.  The routes are well known to Mexican officials, but no one stepped in to prevent the human trafficking.

Now it is the United States' problem.  Like Pontius Pilate, Mexico washed its hands of the humanitarian disaster it could have prevented.  For his part, President Obama has done little more that offer to throw $3.7 billion in taxpayer money at a problem he helped create.

Under the president's proposal, most of the dollars would be earmarked for emergency housing, more immigration judges, defense lawyers and overtime pay for border patrol workers.  It is obvious Obama is focused on resettlement of the illegals rather than on deportation.  

Even after Texas Governor Rick Perry offered to usher the president to the Texas border for a firsthand view of the crisis, Obama ducked the invitation and instead attended fundraisers in Austin.  It was his way of raising a one-fingered salute at southern states forced to cope with the issue.

No one, especially Obama, can claim there was no advance warning. This crisis has been brewing for months.  According to Customs and Border Protection, more than 52,000 unaccompanied alien children have been apprehended from October of last year through June 15.

There should be little doubt why the president has dithered.  Now that the waves of illegals have reached epic proportions, he will use this imbroglio to further his agenda of extending amnesty to every illegal foreigner in the country.   He will prey on Americans' good-hearted nature toward abandoned children to achieve his goal.

Americans must resist this politically calculated appeal.  The U.S. opens wide its arms to welcome legal immigrants from ever nation, but America must send the signal that it is no longer acceptable for people to ignore our sovereign borders.

Five Sure Ways To Reduce The Federal Budget

The media and the few Americans paying attention yawned earlier this year when President Obama dumped his 2015 federal budget on the legislative branch's doorstep. The $3.9 trillion fiscal blueprint was officially unveiled during a visit to an elementary school, where kids still believe in fairy tales.

The budget is little more than a child's fantasy.  Obama knows there is zero chance it will be passed by Congress ahead of the mid-term elections.  His purpose became clear when he repeated his hackneyed talking points on GOP fiscal policies that squeeze the middle class.

In his faux proposal, the president claimed his budget would reduce the federal deficit to $564 billion, a notch below the $649 deficit projected for 2014.  However, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office forecasted deficits would rise to $1.1 trillion annually by 2024 based on the proposed budget.  

It is meaningless to discuss the budget in further detail.  After the mid-term elections, the real budget battle will be waged.  Until then, the bulky document will languish unread in the nether land that is the Senate and House.  Budgets only make news when Democrats and Republicans squabble over cuts.

Meanwhile, American taxpayers will have to continue funding excessive government waste embedded in the budget.  It's a growing problem that politicians and bureaucrats duck to avoid exposing a system that never holds anyone accountable for incompetence, abuse and pork barrel spending.

The non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its annual report last month on opportunities to eliminate or better manage overlap, duplication and fragmentation in the federal bureaucracy.  Not a single news organization covered the document in any detail.

In its report, the GAO found 64 opportunities to improve government efficiency across 26 areas that span a broad range of federal operations.  Tens of billions of dollars could be saved if Congress, the executive branch and the government implemented the recommendations in the report.

Yet Democrats and their allies in the media continue to complain about any attempt to shave federal spending.  They want Americans to believe that babies will go hungry, indigent families will be left homeless and schools will be shuttered if a single dime is snipped from the trillions in planned spending.   

Here are five ways to slice billions of dollars from the federal budget without harming any Americans:

• End crop subsidies paid to wealthy farmers.  The government paid $17.5 billion in taxpayers dollars to farmers last year. Eighty percent of that amount went to the wealthiest 15-20 percent of farmers.  The payout was about $14 billion to well-heeled farmers.
• Weed out Medicare fraud.  The Department of Health and Human Services estimated that in fiscal 2011 the Medicare system handed out more than $64 billion in improper payments.  The fraud ranged from overcharges for drugs to bogus insurance claims.  
• Halt the Social Security benefit leakage.  Social Security administrators like to brag that overpayments at the agency are less than half a percent of its budget.  But it's still not chump change.  The Social Security's own inspector general found overpayments were $6.5 billion in a single year. Every year as the budget grows, that number keeps climbing. 
• Stop sending food vouchers to people who do not qualify. Outright fraud accounts for about $1 billion in food stamp program waste.  However, so-called improper payments are more than $3 billion annually.  Those benefits go to ineligible households.  That's a total of $4 billion in waste and fraud.
• Reduce improper payments to individuals who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit.  The treasury lost an estimated $13.3 to $14.6 billion because of errors caused by incorrect information submitted by individuals filing returns.  An investigation revealed the improper error rate for payments was about 22 to 26 percent.  The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration uncovered the mistakes, yet the Internal Revenue Service has done nothing to stop the bleeding.  

Those five ideas, worth more than $100 billion, are just a start. Citizens Against Government Waste, the nation's largest nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating fraud, abuse and mismanagement, has published 557 recommendations to save taxpayers $580.6 billion in just a single year. Over five years, the changes would chop $1.8 trillion from the federal budget.

Federal government tax revenues topped $1.7 trillion at the end of April, setting a record for the first seven months of fiscal 2014.  Yet each federal budget contains higher spending levels that force more borrowing, thus fueling unending deficits.  Tax revenue isn't the problem in Washington.

Americans must demand more accountability from government and elected officials.  Spending is out of control.  More action and less talking is required to reform an fiscally obese government addicted to fattening its budget each year.