Tuskegee Airmen awarded Congressional Gold Medal.Washington, D.C. gave a capitol salute to the all-Black World War II fighter pilots known as the Tuskegee Airmen on 29 March 2007. In a ceremony beneath the Capitol dome, lawmakers awarded the highest civilian honor, the Congressional Gold Medal, to the Tuskege Airmen.

President George Bush, standing next to General Collin Powell, told those assembled "THe Tuskegee Airmen helped win a war, and helped change our nation for the better. On behalf of the office I hold, and a country that honors you, I salute you for the service to the United States of America".

House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi called the recognition long overdue. "With the Gold Medal today we take another in the long series of steps toward victory at home".

Louis D. Hill,90, from Los Angeles, California said that he did not mind waiting 60 for such an honor.

Hiram E. Little, 88, of Atlanta, Georgia said "I am blessed to live this long to receive a medal from the United States Congress and the President. Now there is a once-in-a-lifetime thing".

William B. Ellis, 90, whom I last saw at the Los Angeles Adventurers' Club, and who fundly refers to himself as "Wild Bill", chuckled to himself as he recalled being told that Blacks like him couldn't cut it as fighter pilots.

The first Congressional Gold Medal was awarded to George Washington by the Continental Congress in 17776. Two-thirds of the House of Representatives must co-sponsor legislation to designate recipients, and a similar proportion of the Senate must do the same before a bill can be considered.

Congressman Charles Rangel and Senator Carl Levin were the main sponsors of the Tuskegee Airmen bills.

Congressman Rangel told those gathered at the Capitol Rotunda "Nobody white or Black in this country can understand how God has given you so much courage from a nation that rejected you because of your color".

GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR. Keep your criminals.

While legal immigrants and illegal aliens come to America for an improved standard of living, those millions of foreigners are decidedly harming the quality of life for many in this nation -- from those who have been displaced in their jobs by cheap immigrant workers to taxpayers paying for endless infrastructure and services, students getting a worse education in radically "diverse" classrooms and crime victims who have suffered at the hands of criminal aliens in this country.
A November 2006 WorldNetDaily piece (ht-Jules Crittenden) reported that twelve Americans are murdered every day by illegal aliens. If those numbers are correct, it translates to 4,380 Americans murdered annually by illegal aliens. That's 21,900 since Sept. 11, 2001. But the carnage wrought by illegal alien murderers represents only a fraction of the pool of blood spilled by American citizens as a result of an open border and un-enforced immigration laws.
While the report says that 12 Americans are murdered daily by illegal aliens, it says that an additional 13 are killed by drunk illegal alien drivers each day - for another annual death toll of 4,745. That's 23,725 since Sept. 11, 2001. And while the actual number of all U.S. accidents caused by illegal aliens aren't tracked by the government, the statistical and anecdotal evidence suggests many of last year's 42,636 road deaths involved illegal aliens.
And the deaths are just the tip of the iceberg. In its Feb. 27, 07 piece titled, "More Americans killed by illegal aliens than Iraq war, study says" Family Security Matters estimates that the 267,000 illegal aliens currently incarcerated in the nation are responsible for nearly 1,300,000 crimes, ranging from drug arrests to rape and murder. So much for the claim that illegal immigration is a victimless crime.
Just as these illegal aliens shouldn't be here in the first place, and the people they killed shouldn't have died and the people the robbed or raped shouldn't have been victimized, Vicente Ignacio Beltran Moreno (or whatever his real name is) shouldn't have been here and 13-year-old Clay Moore shouldn't have been kidnapped, and wouldn't have, if the U.S. government had done its job of keeping the illegal Mexicans from crossing our borders in the first place.
The man suspected of kidnapping a 13-year-old boy and leaving him tied to a tree in the woods in a ransom scheme reportedly is an illegal alien who had already been deported once. Doesn't belong here. Shouldn't be tying people to trees here.



Kidnapper Of 13 Year-old Florida Boy Is A Previously Deported Illegal Alien.
Of course you'd never know this from the headlines of the AP report which refers to the previously deported illegal Mexican as "Man" (ht-Dan Riehl). You have to read far down in the body of the AP article to learn that the kidnapper, 22 year-old Vicente Ignacio Beltran Moreno, is an "undocumented immigrant" (read as illegal alien, a criminal in the first instance, even prior to kidnapping a 13 year-old boy for ransom).
Beltran, a native of Mexico, had worked at the farm three years ago, but later became a laborer for an aluminum contractor. Beltran-Moreno lived with his girlfriend in a the house, which is in the 3700 block of 17th Street Court East. Authorities executed a search warrant on his home Sunday, March 4 and recovered a rough draft of a ransom note. Obtaining the warrants took longer than expected due to the suspected kidnapper's multiple aliases. Beltran-Moreno is an undocumented immigrant who at one time was deported from the United States.
"The ransom note is at least a ransom note that was prepared to be given to someone or it was a practice ransom note, but we have fitted it to this case and it absolutely pertains to the motive for the abduction of Clay Moore," said Manatee County Sheriff Charlie Wells.
Clay Moore was kidnapped at gun point from his school bus stop. Clay was abducted Friday just before 9 a.m. while he waiting for his school bus with 15 other students. The Manatee School of the Arts student was forced at gunpoint into the truck from the stop at the Kingsfield Lakes subdivision in Parrish. Authorities believe it was planned as a ransom attempt, but Moore escaped on his own. Early Friday morning, Clay was ordered to get into a red Ford Ranger, bound and taken to a wooded rural area about 20 miles away. Clay freed himself after he was left alone and then walked until he found a farm worker with a cell phone.

Authorities said Clay was chosen at random. They believe Beltran-Moreno planned to keep Clay tied up in the wooded area until the ransom was met.
Clay was waiting with about 15 other students when a man pointed a gun and forced him into an older model red pick-up truck.
The abductor drove Clay for about 20 miles to Faulkner Farms off of State Road 64 in Myakka City. He led the boy into a heavily wooded area, where he bound the boy to trees using duct tape and gagged him with one of his own socks.
The man told Clay he would return, before driving from the ranch.
Clay sat for about two hours before using a safety pin to free himself. He stumbled through the rural area until coming upon a farmworker on a tractor, who spoke little English but had a cell phone.
Clay dialed his mother at 1:30 p.m. and told her he was safe.
Deputies traced the boy's call and found him, ending the nightmarish 4½-hour ordeal.

"Obviously what threw everything into a spin was when the kid escaped," Wells said.
Wells credited the teen's keen eye for detail with breaking the case. Clay was driven to a rural area and tied to a tree, Manatee County Sheriff Charlie Wells said.
The boy used a safety pin he had hidden in his mouth to cut through duct tape and other bonds that were holding him, authorities and his parents said. (Full story)
He walked until he came upon some farm workers and was able to borrow a cell phone to call his parents.
Information that Clay gave authorities led them to issue an arrest warrant for Beltran-Moreno on charges of armed kidnapping and aggravated assault.
"He was right on the money with the information that he gave us," Wells said.
Police recovered the red pickup truck allegedly used in the kidnapping at the suspect's home in Bradenton, Florida.
During their investigation, police recovered a handwritten ransom note less than a page long, possibly intended for Clay's parents, that contained unspecified threats, Wells said.
"It was his intention, the suspect's intention, to leave Clay Moore tied in the woods until he got his money," Wells said.




Kidnapper was afraid of being locked up in a Mexican prison, so he turned himself in on the Texas side of the border.

Vicente Ignacio Beltran-Moreno, 22, turned himself over to U.S. authorities after walking across the U.S.-Mexico border at the Hidalgo County crossing, Maj. Connie Shingledecker said at a news conference.
Beltran-Moreno had fled to Sinaloa state on Mexico's Pacific coast soon after the February 23 abduction of Clay Moore, 13, Shingledecker said.
The suspect was with relatives in his native Mexico, and authorities persuaded him to turn himself in Wednesday in Texas through a series of daily phone calls, Shingledecker said.
She said arrangements were being made to extradite Beltran-Moreno from Texas.
Authorities say Beltran-Moreno abducted the boy at gunpoint from a school bus stop in Parrish, Florida, about 30 miles southeast of St. Petersburg, Florida.

So often, we get caught up in a debate over political semantics and end up ignoring the hard-shell realities of what we're talking about. According to ImmigrationCounters.com, here are some of the realities that Flake-Gutierrez Bill would airbrush out of the picture:

Number of Illegal Aliens in the Country
20,807,645

Money Wired to Mexico City since January, 2006
$22,213,001,672.00

Cost of Social Security Services for Illegal Aliens since 1996
$397,450,739,563.00

Number of Children of Illegal Aliens in Public Schools
3,958,789

Cost of Illegal Aliens in K-12 Since 1996:
$13, 965,063,431.00

Number of Illegal Aliens Incarcerated
332,594

Cost of Incarcerations Since 2001
$1,398,127,429.00

Number of Illegal Aliens Fugitives
642,799

Skilled Jobs Taken by Illegal Aliens
9,872,838


Figures can trick your eyes. Take particular note that items 2,3,5, and 7 reflect BILLION not millions of dollars -- and that item 3 exceeds one-third of a TRILLION dollars.

Can you imagine how much it will cost taxpayers if we triple the number of Illegals entering this country!!

****************


So, What's in a Billion?.......

Granted................. this is from the US!

The next time you hear a politician use the word "billion" in a casual manner, think about whether you want the "politicians" spending your tax money.

A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, but one advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective in one of its releases.

A. A billion seconds ago it was 1959.

B. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.

C. A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.

D. A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.

E. A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate our government is spe nding it.

While this thought is still fresh in our brain, let's take a look at New Orleans. It's amazing what you can learn with some simple division . . .

Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D), is presently asking the Congress for $250 BILLION to rebuild New Orleans. Interesting number, what does it mean?

a. Well, if you are one of 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every man, woman, child), you each get $516,528.

b. Or, if you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans, your home gets $1,329,787.

c. Or, if you are a family of four, your family gets $2,066,012.

Washington, D.C. .... HELLO!!! ... Are all your calculators broken??

This is too true.........And these numbers don't lie.........and, it's not funny!!!

The Dumbing-Down of America

According to Pat Buchannan, fifty years ago this October, Americans were jolted by the news that Moscow, one year after drowning the Hungarian Revolution in blood, had put an 80-pound satellite into Earth orbit.
In December, the U.S. Navy tried to replicate the feat. Vanguard got four feet off the ground and exploded, incinerating its three-pound payload. America was humiliated. Khrushchev was Man of the Year. Some of us yet recall the Vanguard newsreels and the humiliating laughter.
Stunned, America went to work to improve education in math and science, and succeeded. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores of high school seniors began to rise, reaching a high in 1964.
However, test scores for high school students have been falling now for 40 years. In 1984, the Reagan administration issued "A Nation at Risk," documenting the deterioration of American public education.
More trillions of dollars were thrown at the problem. And if one judged by the asserted toughening up of courses and rising grades of seniors, it appeared we had made marvelous progress. On March 4, The Washington Times reported:
"In 2005, 17 percent of graduates had completed a 'standard' curriculum, 41 percent completed a 'midlevel' curriculum, and 10 percent completed a 'rigorous' curriculum. Fifteen years earlier, the percentages were 9 percent (standard), 26 percent (midlevel) and 5 percent (rigorous). Grade point averages (GPA) increased, as well. The average overall GPA increased from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 (virtually a B level) in 2005.
However, it is all a giant fraud, exposed as such by the performances of high school seniors on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams known as the "nation's report card." An NAEP test of 12th-grade achievement was given to what The New York Times called a "representative sample of 21,000 high school seniors attending 900 public and private schools from January to March 2005."
What did the tests reveal?
-- Since 1990, the share of students lacking even basic reading skills has risen by a third, from 20 percent to 27 percent.
-- Only 35 percent of high school seniors have reached a "proficient" level in reading, down from 40 percent.
-- Only 16 percent of black and 20 percent of Hispanic students had reached a proficient level in reading.
-- Among high school seniors, only 29 percent of whites, 10 percent of Hispanic students and 6 percent of black students were proficient in math.



Anna Nicole Smith was born Vickie Lynn Hogan
Born Vickie Lynn and raised in Texas, Smith dropped out of high school like most of her peers and first married at the age of 17.
This is only the half of it. Among the kids whose test scores on reading and math were not factored in were the 25 percent of white students and 50 percent of black and Hispanic kids who had dropped out by senior year.
Factor the dropouts back in, and what the NAEP test suggests is that, of black kids starting in first grade, about one in eight will be able to read at the level of a high school senior after 12 years, and one in 33 will be able to do the math. Among Hispanic kids, one in 10 will be able to read at a high-school senior level, but only one in 20 will be able to do high-school math.
Yet, as columnist Steve Sailor writes on VDare.com, the Bush-Kennedy No Child Left Behind Act mandates "that all children should reach a proficient level of academic achievement by 2014."



We're not going to make it. We're not even going to come close. American schools have become "killing fields". Students are afraid to go to school. Some students are afraid they will not live through the day. They are afraid of each other. Even teachers are afraid of some students. Teachers must spend so much time on discipline, there is no time or energy left for academics.
The Columbine High School massacre occurred on Tuesday, April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in unincorporated Jefferson County, Colorado, near Denver and Littleton. Two teenage students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, carried out a shooting rampage, killing 12 fellow students and a teacher, as well as wounding 24 others, before committing suicide. It is considered to be the deadliest school shooting and the second deadliest attack on a school in United States history after the Bath School disaster.

The massacre provoked debate regarding gun control laws, the availability of firearms in the United States, and gun violence involving youths. Much discussion also centered on the nature of high school cliques and bullying, as well as the role of violent movies and video games in American society. Several of the victims, who were portrayed as having been killed for their religious beliefs, became a source of inspiration to others, and some lamented the decline of religion in public education and society in general, often blaming the tragedy on insufficient government endorsement of religion. The shooting also resulted in an increased emphasis on school security.

The Platte Canyon High School shooting was an incident that occurred at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colorado, on September 27, 2006. 53-year-old[1] Duane Roger Morrison entered the school building, claiming to be carrying a bomb. He was initially reported as a bearded 35-year-old man with a camouflage backpack[2] and dark hooded sweatshirt.[3] Morrison took six female students hostage and sexually assaulted them, later releasing four. When police entered the classroom, Morrison opened fire before shooting hostage Emily Keyes in the head. The other remaining hostage escaped unharmed, and paramedics confirmed that Morrison had committed suicide.

The Amish school shooting occurred on the morning of Monday, October 2, 2006, when a gunman took hostages and eventually killed five girls (aged 7–13) and then killed himself at West Nickel Mines School, a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, a village in Bart Township of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, United States.[1][2][3][4][5] Police report that the gunman was Charles Carl Roberts IV,[5][6] a 32-year-old milk-tank truck driver who lived nearby.

The Lancaster County shooting was the third deadly school shooting in the U.S. in less than a week.


A 16-year-old schoolgirl was killed in Bailey, Colorado, the week before when a gunman took six hostages at a school before opening fire and turning the gun on himself as police stormed a classroom.


Then the principal of a Wisconsin high school, shot by a student on Friday, died of his wounds a day later.


Pennsylvania is one state that has had its share of school violence. In April 2003, a 14-year-old boy fatally shot his school principal in the chest with one gun and then shot himself in the head with another in the Red Lion Area Junior High School cafeteria packed with students. This incident took place in York County, which borders Lancaster County. York County was also the site of a machete attack on a kindergarten class that wounded 11 children, the principal, and two teachers at Winterstown Elementary School in February 2001.
On March 7, 2007 a 17-year-old boy shot and wounded his ex-girlfriend at a central Michigan high school before fatally shooting himself in the head, police said.

The late-morning incident took place in a parking lot outside the cafeteria at H.H. Dow High School in Midland, said Deputy Chief Bob Lane of the Midland Police Department.

The shooter, who was not a student at H.H. Dow, had called his ex-girlfriend, a 17-year-old student at the school, asking her to meet him in the parking lot, he said.

The girl's mother was present when he shot her four times and then shot himself, Lane said. She was in serious condition but her injuries were not considered life-threatening, Lane said.

Violence is not limited to high school campuses. On Monday, 16 April 2007, almost eight years to the day after the Columbine High School masacre, a gunman(described as "Asian man, about 23, wearing a maroon hat, black leather jacket.") opened fire in a dorm and classroom at Virginia Tech on Monday, killing 32 people and wounding another 21 before he was killed. The shooting started around 7:15 a.m. at a dorm, where one person was killed. More than an hour later, wearing an ammo vest, the gunman went classroom to classroom in an engineering building shooting at will.
Wielding two handguns and carrying multiple clips of ammunition, the killer opened fire about 7:15 a.m. on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston, a high-rise coed dormitory, then stormed Norris Hall, a classroom building a half-mile away on the other side of the 2,600-acre campus. Some of the doors at Norris Hall were found chained from the inside, apparently by the gunman.



Cho Seung-Hui
Virginia Tech police on 17 April 2007 identified the shooter who took 32 lives as well as his own Monday as student Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old English major, a South Korean national and permanent resident alien.
Founded in 1872, Virginia Tech is about 160 miles west of Richmond. With more than 25,000 full-time students, it has the state's largest full-time student population. It is best known for its engineering school

Why are so many Americans ignorant of the depths of failure of so many schools? As Sailor explains, it is due to government deceit.
"Not surprisingly, practically ever single state cheats in order to meet the law" mandating a rising academic proficiency.
"For example, Mississippi ... recently declared that 89 percent of its fourth-graders were at least 'proficient' in reading.
"Unfortunately, however, on the federal government's impartial National Assessment of Education Progress test, only 18 percent of Mississippi students were 'proficient' or 'advanced.'"
Hence, a huge slice of the U.S. educational establishment is complicit in a monstrous fraud that, if you did it in business, would get you several years at the nearby minimum security facility.






This is corruption.
Teachers are handing out grades kids do not deserve. States are dumbing-down tests to make themselves look good. Voters are being deceived about how much kids are learning.
There is no real moral distinction between what teachers and educators are doing on a vast scale and what professional athletes do on a smaller scale when they take steroids to enhance performance.


As The Washington Times noted, according to the Digest of Education Statistics, spending for public education, in constant (inflation-adjusted) dollars, rose from $6,256 a year per student before "A Nation at Risk" to $10,464 in the 2002-2003 school year. Taxpayers have thus raised their annual contribution to education by a full two-thirds in real dollars in a quarter century. More than generous.
Under George W. Bush, U.S. Department of Education funding has risen 92 percent in six years, from $35.5 billion in 2001 to $68 billion in 2007. Sinking test scores are what we have to show for it.
Taxpayers are being lied to and swindled by the education industry, which has failed them, failed America and flunked its assignment -- and should be expelled for cheating.

In China the picture is much different.
Students are eager to learn. Admission offices are inundated on the first day of school. Students are eager to complete the admissions forms.



Discipline in Chinese schools is very high. Students engage in group social activities. They exercise together each morning before the start of classes.
On a recent trip to China, I was allowed to interact with the students in a Hotung School. We read a dialogue in the reading class. All Chinese students are being required to learn English and one other foreign language in addition to their own language and a dialect.


China is our next global competitor.





The threat to America is much greater today than when the Russsians put up Sputnik. We are facing competition from many nations where education is still a priority.








Muslim countries value education and discipline. In this Global economy jobs are being out-sourced to India and Pakistan because American are not qualified to perform them. Aside from economics, and cost savings, there is the competency factor to consider.
The War on Terror must be fought on more fields than just the battle field. While we are trying to win the hearts and minds of the children of our enemies, we must not neglect the minds of our own children. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.