Pedro Martinez Says Goodbye to Shea Faithful

By Nicholas Stix

(See also: The Tears of Pedro Martinez)

A couple of starts ago, Mets announcers Gary Cohen, Ron Darling, and Keith Hernandez were speculating on Pedro Martinez’ future. One of them thought that the Mets might try to sign Martinez for only one season, but that Pedro would want at least a two-year deal. I wondered what planet they were on.

By tonight’s start against the Cubs, they’ve arrived at the opposite extreme, expecting the worst, with excuses at the ready. The once almost unhittable Martinez comes in with an astronomical 7.88 ERA in his previous three starts, a 5.50 ERA for the season, and a 5-6 record. He’s never endured a season remotely this awful, and if he fails to win tonight, his last start of the year, he will have suffered the first losing season of his career.

In 2005, the first year of his four-year, $53-million free agent contract, Martinez went 15-8, turning around a franchise then in a tailspin, which at 83-79, posted its first winning season since 2001. In the intervening three seasons, however, the 36-year-old Martinez has been plagued by injuries, and has compiled a record of only 17-15.

Two starts ago, against the pathetic Nationals, with the bases loaded, two out, and a 2-2 tie in the sixth, Martinez had two strikes on Anderson Hernandez, who during his brief time with the Mets, was a worse hitter than the team’s pitchers. And yet, Martinez made Hernandez look like Manny Ramirez, giving up a game-winning, two-run single to him.

With Cubs’ skipper Lou Piniella having given his big guns the night off, Martinez has gotten a reprieve, yet one announcer suggests surreally, “Today, Pedro is facing a B lineup. If you’re a big-time pitcher, does that make it harder to prepare?”

Oh, sure. Give me Derek Lee and Aramis Ramirez anytime, instead of whats-his-name and who-ja-ma-wass-is.

Gary Cohen notes, “And Pedro’s struggled in the first inning all year.”

And so he does. Pedro has his usual, disastrous first inning, giving up two runs, including a home run to late-season call-up Micah Hoffbauir, and barely gets out of the inning with his life. His “fastball” is a misnomer—it takes all his will to get it up to 85 mph, and Hoffbauir crushes that one—and he isn’t hitting his spots. He’s wild, in and out of the strike zone. After Hoffbauir’s blast, former Mets pitching star Ron Darling observes, “It just seems like every time [Pedro] makes a mistake in the first inning, they never miss it.”

“Well, the first inning jumps up and bites Pedro once again.”
Although the wind is gusting in powerfully, Darling waxes poetic of Hoffbauir’s blast, “That just turned the wind around.”

Hoffbauir has the game of his life, going 5 for 5, with two home runs, a double, and five RBI. Against Pedro in his prime, the youngster would more likely have struck out five times.

At this point, Martinez is a $13 million-a-year batting practice pitcher. Gary Cohen had the most insightful comments: “This has not been a Pedro Martinez-like season…. You’re talking about a guy who was the best pitcher of his generation, who may have reached the end of the line.” Darling adds, “He used to dominate big games, and big games are dominating him.” Cohen again: “It’s really been a lost season for him, and the question is whether the lost year is his last year.”

And yet, as he has done so many times this year, Martinez finds a way to get men out, and stay in the game. Notwithstanding a third-inning run he gives up, Martinez settles down. His fastball recovers some velocity, getting as high as 91 mph, and stays close enough to the corners to benefit from home plate umpire Jerry Layne’s huge strike zone. He changes speeds on his change-up, from which he at times gets screwball-type action. Martinez is also able to get away with mixing in the occasional breaking ball, and gets through six innings with a season-high nine strikeouts, but also with four walks, another sign of the decline of the pitcher who used to be one of the best control pitchers in baseball.

After the game, Mets skipper Jerry Manuel says, “I thought Pedro had some of his best stuff tonight, but they had one guy that was on fire…”

That’s true, relative to the season Martinez has had, but he is a shell of the pitcher he was in the late 1990s and early aughts.

Even though Martinez has thrown 93 pitches through six innings, Manuel runs him out to start the seventh inning, with the score tied, 3-3. A single and a walk later, Manuel runs out to the mound to take the ball.

Pedro walks off the mound, and as is his custom, holds his index finger at his gut, pointed heavenward, and softly hits his chest. The capacity crowd rises as one to give him a standing ovation, and he responds with a raised fist, and now points that same index finger at them, waving it from left to right, to return the respect to the the entire crowd.

It’s an emotional moment for any baseball fan.

* * *

Martinez is relieved by 38-year-old Ricky Rincon, fresh from the Mexican League. Rincon’s first pitch to the 28-year-old Hoffbauir, a hanging slider, lands about 400 feet away, for a three-run Cubs lead, still with no one out in the seventh inning. Two of those runs count against Martinez, giving him a line for the night of six innings, seven hits, five earned runs, nine strikeouts and four walks. During the late 1980s, as Steve Carlton sought to forestall the inevitable, he was having lines like that for the Twins: Lots of strikeouts, lots of home runs, lots of earned runs.

(By the way, Mets GM Omar Minaya is looking for bullpen help. If you can throw a baseball 60-feet-six inches to one batter per day, he would like you to call him.)

In the bottom of the ninth, batting with two out and two strikes, Carlos Beltran hits a cut fastball over the first base bag that Hoffbauir fails to handle, and Jose Reyes scores from second, for a 7-6 Mets win.

In the NL East, the Mets are one game behind the Phillies, who play their last three regular season games against the hapless (59-99) Nats this weekend. After Milwaukee’s ten-inning victory on a Ryan Braun walk-off grand slam, the Mets remain tied with the Brewers for the wild card playoff spot, and live to play another day. The Mets close out the regular season with three games at home this weekend against the feisty Marlins.

After the game, a reporter asks Martinez what went through his mind as he left the game.

“What went through my mind, actually, the fans, and I appreciate their support, just in case this might be my last game as a Met, or my last start as a Met.”

Another reporter: “Had you been thinking at all about that?”

“No, not really. I’m not even worried about any of that. I wish I could come back and continue on with the Mets. This is the wrong time to start thinking about those things but at the time I left the mound, I, once I was done, I quickly realized that was my last outing of the season… I couldn’t just pass by without saying thanks to the fans and all of you guys for the support [unclear], and actually say goodbye to Shea. It’s been a fun place for me….

Reporter: Were you surprised [by the standing ovation]?

“It doesn’t surprise me at all from the fans here. Ever since I got here, I’ve been treated the same by the fans, and it’s something that I will never forget. It’s always going to be with me, whether I come back or not, the appreciation that they showed for me, the respect that they showed for me, it’s been my deepest impression of playing for the Mets. I don’t have no words to thank everybody that’s been around. It goes from the last fan to probably the lowest security guard, or the lowest employee that there is at Shea Stadium, and I haven’t seen anything different since I got here. I couldn’t pass by without saying thanks for the time.”

But will Pedro Martinez live to pitch another day? He thinks so, but I hope not. Seeing him as he now plays, I am reminded of the frail 80-year-old Harry Truman’s last public meeting with journalists, whom he told, “Remember me as I was, not as I am.”

The Tears of Pedro Martinez

(September 26, 2008:
Pedro Martinez Says Goodbye to Shea Faithful)

By Nicholas Stix
September 16, 2006, 12:34 a.m.

When New York Mets ace Pedro Martinez came out of tonight’s game in Pittsburgh after only three innings and 68 pitches, and with his team losing 4-0, he sat down at the end of the dugout bench and held his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking.

“Is he crying?” blurted out Mets announcer and former great, Keith Hernandez. Then, thinking better of it, Hernandez went silent.

It has been a rough season for the future Hall of Famer. The 34-year-old righthander was sidelined for much of spring training with a toe injury. Due to a strained right calf, he hadn’t started a game since August 14. And earlier, due to a freak hip injury, he had missed a month wrapped around the All-Star break. Thus was his record only 9-5 coming into tonight’s game, in which the Mets had the opportunity to clinch the NL East Division title with a win or a Philadelphia loss.

But then, as a young player in the early 1990s’ Dodgers organization, Martinez’ frail little body (5’10” and maybe 160 lbs.) was considered inadequate to the rigors of being a big league starting pitcher – which it was – and thus the Dodgers used him as reliever, before unloading him to the Montreal Expos. You might say that Pedro Martinez has been defying nature ever since.

The hip injury had come during a game in which Martinez donned a long sleeve shirt under his jersey. The home plate umpire decided the shirt was too long, and ordered Martinez to go into the clubhouse, and cut the sleeves. While following the ump’s orders, Martinez slipped on the clubhouse floor. Thereafter, he pitched a few ineffective starts, before being sat down, and getting treatment for the hip.

Note that “freak” injuries and aging pitchers (see also: aging quarterbacks) go together. And Pedro is an old 34. In other words, those “freak” injuries aren’t freaky, but rather signs of a body that is breaking down after over 2600 innings on the mound. After the game, Mets announcer Gary Cohen observed, “It’s been one thing after another this year for Pedro: The toe, the hip, the calf.”

One of the Mets announcers had just observed that Martinez had “the weight of the franchise on his shoulders.” Mets skipper Willie Randolph had just announced that Martinez would be the Game 1 starter in the playoffs.

After watching the scene on the bench, Gary Cohen asked if Martinez was just unhappy with his performance. His partner, Keith Hernandez, responded, “Unhappy with your performance to the point of tears? You’re a professional. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Later in the game, Mets reporter Chris Cotter informed fans, “He just reached his pitch count … some pretty high-level sources said there was no indication” that the calf strain had been aggravated. [A pitch count of 68? Gimme a break, Chris.]

After the game, which the Mets lost, 5-3, for Martinez’ sixth loss, SportsNet NY again showed the image after Martinez came out of the game, of Mets skipper Willie Randolph with his arm around his shoulder, talking to him, and patting him on the back, followed by Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson. Then the two men left Martinez, and the shoulder-shaking began. [For SNY’s sports round-up following the postgame show, it would cut out that part of the tape, and just show Martinez heading for the showers.]

After the game, Keith Hernandez opined, “If it’s just from a bad game, it’s an overreaction …,” while Gary Cohen observed, “It’s unusual to see elite athletes react in this way.”

After the game, speaking from SNY’s Manhattan studio, postgame show host Matt Yaloff said, “The champagne is on ice, as is Pedro Martinez’ right calf.” So much for those “high-level sources.” (As Ron Darling would later note, “The Mets play everything close to the vest.”)

Continuing, Yaloff recalled that we’d seen Pedro get creamed before, and even lose in the playoffs. “We’ve never seen THAT.”

Yaloff cautioned Mets fans against becoming hysterical, although as both hosts observed, the team’s postseason chances depend to a large degree on Martinez’ health.

Yaloff’s studio co-host, former Mets pitching great Ron Darling, said of Martinez, “Seeing that scene in the dugout lets me know that he is not in the place he wants to be on September 15.”

“He’s the only guy in the Mets rotation that has a cape, like Superman, when he’s good. Tonight, he wasn’t.”

Yaloff spoke to the irony of the Mets being one game away from clinching the divisional championship, while the player who had turned around the franchise in two short years was “hanging his head” in the Mets dugout.

In Mets manager Willie Randolph’s routine post-game meeting with the press, he repeated the company line: “He’s fine.”

When asked if Martinez would be making his next start, Randolph said, “Yes, he is.” Randolph responded to a rephrased version of the same question, “No, I said he’s fine.”

Randolph also tried to deflect attention from Martinez’ reaction, saying that players often become emotional in the heat of battle (“he’s a warrior”), citing the recent case of Mets rookie pitcher Brian Bannister.

“Like I said, he’s a competitor, a warrior. I see that all the time. Guys can’t do anything on the bench, without it being reported.”

From the studio, Ron Darling reacted with, “We report that as the truth. But the fact is that he couldn’t get the Pirates out over three innings…. And that’s a sign – not the sign – that he’s not ready yet.” [The Pirates are the second-worst team in the league.]

Then the show returned to Pittsburgh, where Pedro Martinez answered questions from reporters.

The first question was about the condition of his calf.

“No, no, I’m fine, I’m fine. I was just a little frustrated, and I was about to snap, and Willie [Randolph] had to ….

[Martinez would later contradict himself to a different reporter, admitting that he could not push off from the calf, and that since in pitching, everything starts with the legs, he could not command his pitches; thus did pitching at all become a risky matter.]

Reporter [each following question came from a different reporter]: You’ve pitched badly before [unclear] – why tonight?

“Because I worked my ass off, and I didn’t see the results that I was expecting. And only I know what I go through everyday, working, and I tried to get back on track, and now, you know, I [unclear] an opportunity to show my teammates and show the team that I’m going to be back, and it wasn’t quite as high as I was expecting, and my physical body didn’t feel quite as well as I was expecting, you know, for the time being, and the performance also was a little bit off from what I was expecting….”

“I was expecting to have a little better command, have better breaking balls, and have more command of my pitches, and I didn’t have any of them.”

[With only two weeks left in the regular season, a reporter asked Martinez if he is concerned as to whether he can be ready in time for the playoffs.]

“I’ll have to say I still have plenty of time to do it. It’s just that when you come off so many days without throwing the ball, you want to make a statement. You know, you want to look better for your teammates. Today was a special day – is a special day for us, and I wanted to do a little bit better.”

Reporter: Were you actually crying?

“I was about to, I was about to snap, and later on [garbled], thank God, Willie was there, and told me, ‘It’s going to be o.k.’ I was just about to snap, … and actually, I felt like crying at that time, out of frustration, but I kept my composure….

[A reporter asked a question about players crying.]

“You just don’t see [players crying]. Normally we do it in the locker room….”

Reporter: You know, a lot of people have been waiting for you to get back, a lot of Mets fans, waiting for that division, they see this game, and there’s probably going to be some, “Oh, no”s. What is your response?

“‘Oh, no’? Well, they need to be patient, because, three innings in what, thirty days? Isn’t it enough … They’d be impertinent to ask for that. [A reporter laughs.] My first three innings, I’m trying to get back, and I’m going to be back. If they want to throw the white towel now on me? It’s up to them. I’m not throwing it yet.”

I hope that Martinez’ proud, defiant attitude pulls him through. I don’t recall him weeping after either of his defeats in league championship games at the hands of the Yankees in 2003 and 2004. But an elite athlete may exhibit the “unusual” reaction of which Gary Cohen spoke, if his body betrays him in such a way as to cause him to fear that his time may be up. After all, since the 2004 postseason, Pedro Martinez has been pitching – and pitching very well – on little more than personal pride and a defiance of nature.

Feminism and the Brian Nichols Case: Aiding and Abetting

by Nicholas Stix
March 24, 2005

See Part I: Brian Nichols in Atlanta: PC Kills … Again

Tiny women may kick butt against big, bad guys in the movies, but in the real world, sending women against ultraviolent criminals is a suicide mission.
 

Without the marriage of political convenience of feminism and anti-white racism, Brian Nichols would never have been in Fulton County Superior Court on March 11, and four people would still be alive today.

It is due to feminism that a female, Deputy Cynthia Hall, was given the responsibility for guarding a male suspect charged with violent crimes, and who had already been caught with weapons on his person. (I addressed racism’s role in the Nichols case in Part I.)

It is due to countless frivolous lawsuits and incessant academic propaganda that has worked its way into court decisions, that women have forced their way into jobs where they are a danger to public safety: “Firefighter”; “military person”; “police officer.” Deputy Hall had no business being within fifty feet of Brian Nichols.
 

“No difference!”

For over thirty years, feminism has insisted that “no innate differences” distinguish women from men. In a complementary, if contradictory strategy, feminists argue that what seems like innate differences are more than offset by compensatory mechanisms.
 

Truth Differences

The “no innate differences” claim has been accompanied by claims that differences in strength between men and women are due not to fundamental biological differences, but to sexist socialization. Feminists have replaced sex differences with “gender differences.” They claim that “gender” is a purely social construct, invented by men to oppress women.

(The only place the term “gender” properly belongs is in a discussion of foreign languages. Since the English language has no genders, no one should ever have made gender an issue in the English-language world. In the English-speaking world, one may properly debate the relations between the sexes. But that feminists would impose their dogmas, of all place, on the English-language world first, illustrates their linguistic ignorance, their utter divorce from reality, and their conviction that they can rape reality, if they do not like it. Every time a self-styled conservative writer uses the term “gender,” as opposed to “sex,” score another victory for feminists, who believe that if they can force their terms on people, they can thus force their “consciousness” on them.)

The “compensatory mechanism” strategy is typically accompanied by claims that women are more empathetic, cooler under fire, less prone to macho over-reactions, and somehow more intelligent than men. Such claims contradict the claim that men and women are alike, but feminists can contradict themselves at will, since they will make the life of any man who dares to point out their contradictions miserable. And of course, no feminist ever got into trouble for claiming that women are superior to men.

If we accept the “no innate differences” claim, the existence of sexual disparities in any profession or workplace can only be explained by reference to anti-female sexual discrimination.
 

Truth=Violence Against Women

Feminists have never supported their positions with empirical research. Rather, their response to contrary facts and claims has typically been to publicly excoriate, sue, charge with sexual harassment, and demand the dismissal of any man who disagrees with them. As Steve Sailer has observed in the Lawrence Summers case, powerful men who are thus targeted by feminists typically beg forgiveness, pay blackmail to incompetent feminists, and then discriminate against qualified men.

During the 1980s, hundreds of colleges and universities instituted hate speech codes, such that any man student, staffer, or faculty member who contradicted a feminist’s lies about female abilities, or merely sought to tell the truth about biological sex differences, could be brought up on sexual harassment charges and suspended, expelled, formally reprimanded or fired. Although the federal courts have long since struck down the speech codes in the case of public institutions, most public campuses simply ignored the rulings and maintained the codes, or introduced codes where none had previously been in place.

As my old grad school logic teacher, Michael Levin, showed in Feminism and Freedom (1987), already in 1982 court decisions in lawsuits brought by female applicants in male-dominated fields took the “no innate differences” claim for granted, in arguing that the inability, for instance, of any female applicant to pass the New York Fire Department’s strength test was the result of invidious discrimination. (In 1989, leftist professors and grad students in the City University of New York system, most of whom had never read Levin’s work, and none of whom could refute it, sought to have him fired, as revenge for his research.)

In an example of hypocrisy typical of feminism, the judges contradicted themselves by imposing dual standards for men and women, rather than by eliminating the strength test altogether.

The same arguments are used on behalf of lady police officers and soldiers. Feminist activist Lory Manning promotes the no-innate-difference strategy, in seeking to get women placed in military combat positions. Rather than counter all the scientific evidence—much of it assembled by the Pentagon—that women are not physically able to function in combat, Manning’s feminist shills in the press act as if the evidence did not exist, refuse to quote Manning’s opponents, and quote her as saying that her opponents have “given up” arguing that women cannot function in combat situations. Meanwhile, the socialist MSM suggest that female soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are the equals, if not the superiors, of their men counterparts.
 

Claire

Consider New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Two years ago, celebrating a coed in uniform in Iraq, who wore flowers in her helmet (I kid you not!) while bearing a machine gun, Kristof claimed that she was thoroughly “intimidating” the Iraqi men who saw her. In the same column, Kristof claimed that the enemy would perceive female soldiers as less threatening. (Which is it, “intimidating” or “less threatening”? Both! In feminism, everything is “dialectical”—“Heads we win, tails you lose.”)

Unfortunately, Kristof failed to understand that in warfare, as in police work, you want your people to be as threatening as possible to the enemy. When bad guys or enemy soldiers do not feel threatened, they feel emboldened. Bad guys and enemies do not feel threatened by girls with flowers in their helmets.

Kristof argued that women would make excellent soldiers (in this context, cops), because:

•    They will cause the most bloodthirsty enemy troops to show compassion, and perhaps not bomb vehicles occupied by both women and men;

•    They can pat down women; and

•    Hey, female journalists function fine at the front lines, so why not as infantrypersons?

Back in the real world, in 1992, Pentagon research determined that the average man has 81.8% more upper body strength than the average woman, can run much faster and much longer than the average woman, and that only 3.4% women achieved a score equal to the male mean score for physical strength and endurance.
 

The Mommy Track

In military, police, and fire training, female recruits run an easy mommy track, while the men run a marathon. Think of the difference between a real golf course, and miniature golf.

And bad guys and enemy soldiers alike tend to be much stronger and faster than the average man. On TV and in the movies, tiny women may kick butt against big, bad guys, but in the real world, sending women against enemy soldiers or ultraviolent criminals is a suicide mission, or a case of asking men to die defending women. (That is why, after experimenting with sexually integrated combat units in the 1948 War of Independence, the Israeli military dropped the idea.)

During the early 1990s, I had a chat with a chubby, 4’11” NYPD policewoman in a subway train. As she walked along, smiling and greeting all manner of criminals, she told me it wasn’t worth it to get into confrontations with people. But New York’s taxpayers were paying her to do just that. Although the lady surely had a partner at the other end of the train, he could not have gotten to her in time, had she been attacked, and as a law enforcement officer, she was laughable.
 

“Life is Unfair”

Steve Sailer is a foot taller than me. Now, I’d love to say, a la Fred Sanford, “Hey, Sailer, you big dummy!” but the truth is, he probably has about 20 IQ points on me. (Postscript 2008: Alright, I was exaggerating.) As Jack Kennedy said, “Life is unfair.” God or nature does not necessarily compensate for a person’s deficiencies by giving him offsetting strengths. In the NBA, for instance, some players are great defenders, while others are great scorers. And yet, some players are great at both ends of the court. For a time, Michael Jordan was not only the greatest offensive player in the game, but its greatest defensive player, as well. Most unfair.

Sure there are big, dumb, bully cops; I’ve been shoved around by a couple in my time. But there is no correlation between being small and being smarter, more courageous or more professional. In any event, all the courage, intelligence, and professionalism in the world won’t help you, if you don’t have the necessary physical equipment. There’s a reason there are different weight classes for boxers and wrestlers.

In the case of 6’1” Brian Nichols and 5’1” Deputy Hall, it wouldn’t surprise me if Nichols had 30 IQ points on the deputy. Not that she’s necessarily a dummy, but he’s that smart. People stereotypically think of violent men as having low IQs, because the stereotype is generally true. But Nichols proves an exception to the rule.

In any event, it is the voice of reason that tells a violent felon that he can have his way with a female officer.

There has always been police work for females, but it used to be exclusively in subordinate roles: Matron, police administrative assistant, etc. But now, women want the power, privileges, and pay of being policemen, even though they lack the ability.

Some feminists have sought to get around refutations of the “no innate differences” strategy by claiming that that notion is only operative for “radical” feminists, but as Michael Levin showed, all feminists at least imply it. (Even a libertarian like Wendy McElroy does!)

As if feminist dogma hadn’t been responsible for enough bloodshed the previous day, it dominated the coverage of Nichols’ March 12 re-arrest. TV news viewers were treated to endless repetitions of the videotape of the handcuffed Nichols being led to a police vehicle by a slender, female, Gwinnett County police officer (surrounded by beefy, shotgun-wielding men!), as if she’d taken him in.

The “no innate differences” strategy also made an appearance in the person of DA Paul Howard, who the following Monday told reporters, “I think women are capable of doing anything a man is capable of doing.”
 

1=19

And yet, at Nichols’ next court appearance one day later, he was surrounded by 19 officers, and was shackled, to boot. What is the truth today, DA Howard?

Brian Nichols in Atlanta: PC Kills … Again

By Nicholas Stix

Part II: Aiding and Abetting: Feminism and the Brian Nichols Case

March 16, 2005
Last updated 6:50 p.m., March 20, 2005.

It wasn’t a tragedy. We’ve been hearing about what a “tragedy” Brian Nichols’ “alleged” murders of four people and brutal beatings of several others were. Bull. According to the ancient Greek definition, tragedy is what happens when a great man’s strength turns into his own worst enemy and undoes him, e.g., pride. A more modern definition is of a terrible incident that was no one’s fault, and could not have been avoided. Say, a driver following the traffic laws loses control of his vehicle, and kills a pedestrian crossing the street.

When people use the term “tragedy” to describe a heinous act, they often seek to diminish its moral significance, as per the second definition. Thus, ever since 911, anti-American lefties have described the terrorist attacks of that day as “the tragedy of 911.”
There is nothing tragic about what Brian Nichols “allegedly” did on March 11. If anything, the way he “allegedly” carried out his deeds suggests a diabolical criminal mastermind out of a novel, who painstakingly planned out his escape and his initial murders. And yet, we can lay four corpses and several brutalized though living victims at the feet of incompetence that was the product of feminism and racism. For had the Fulton County district attorney’s or sheriff’s office shown any professionalism, as opposed to being guided by feminist and racist practices, Brian Nichols would never have been in the Fulton County Superior Court on March 11, and Judge Rowland Barnes, court reporter Julie Ann Brandau, Sheriff’s Deputy Sergeant Hoyt Teasley and ICE Agent David Wilhelm would all still be alive today.

To get a preliminary look at the role of the politically correct mentality at work in the Nichols case, let’s contrast the depiction of the case as it unfolded on Saturday, March 12, between CNN and the Fox News Channel.
 

Cable News Follies

On March 12, I bounced back and forth between CNN and Fox News’ coverage of the case. On CNN in the early afternoon, the on-air personalities were concerned as to how Nichols could have “snapped.” They emphasized that he came from a “good” (read: middle-class) family, had a “good” job at UPS, was intelligent (he had supposedly taught himself a high level of computer savvy and how to play a musical instrument), and polite. CNN’s personalities spoke of Nichols having been guarded by only “one deputy,” taking pains to avoid the issue of the deputy’s sex.

At the Fox News Channel, a very different profile emerged, of a man who had been involved in crime, albeit petty crime, his entire adult life. Nichols was a linebacker at Kutztown State University, but was caught stealing, arrested, and expelled. He had been arrested several times over the years. Rather than saying Nichols had a “good job,” the Fox hosts noted that he had bounced from job to job. And Fox News’ personalities repeatedly asked how a woman could have been charged with guarding a tall, powerfully built man charged with violent crimes.

Eventually, the Fox News personalities also got around to the “how did he snap?” nonsense.

Fox News reporter Geraldo Rivera saw a strong parallel to the DC Sniper case in how a shooter terrorized an area, but the parallel was frivolous. In the DC Sniper case, initially no one knew the identities of the shooters, but Montgomery County Police followed a false lead that the shooters were white males. When Montgomery County Police Chief Dr. Charles Moose was able to determine through a telephone conversation with one of the killers that the latter was black, he withheld that crucial new information from law enforcement and the public alike. And so, while everyone looked for the wrong people, more victims were murdered.

In the Nichols case, law enforcement did the opposite: They broadcast the best information they had. (In both cases, the police officials were black.) The problem was that Nichols cleverly misled law enforcement into thinking that he was driving Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Don O’Briant’s green Honda Accord. (Nichols carjacked the Accord, parked it on another level of the same parking garage, walked across the street and boarded a MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) subway train to a nearby shopping center.)
 

Funny Papers

But if CNN was guilty of politically correct coverage of the Nichols case, they were pikers, compared to alleged reporter Beth Warren, also of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who embodies what I call the banality of bias.

In an article in which Warren listed one example after another of Nichols’ racism, she concluded that his crimes were not racially motivated. Right. Just like with Colin Ferguson, the Long Island Railroad mass murderer.

Brian G. Nichols considered himself a “soldier on a mission” the day he terrorized a courthouse and a city with a gun, according to a law enforcement official who witnessed Nichols first statement to authorities.

The official said Nichols, who was being tried in a rape case when Friday’s deadly shooting spree occurred, considered himself a wrongly accused man in a legal system unfair to African-Americans….
In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the official said Nichols described how he had been stewing in jail while awaiting retrial on charges that he held his ex-girlfriend hostage and sexually assaulted her. The first jury couldn’t agree and the judge declared a mistrial.

Nichols said he was angry that many of the inmates around him were also black and he wondered how many were innocent.

[Based on what former Fulton County Assistant DA Denise A. Sorino told me in a telephone interview, one could more accurately conclude that Nichols had been surrounded by violent, persistent felony offenders, who typically had “over a page of priors.”]

“He called it systematic slavery,” the law enforcement official said.

Nichols didn’t feel he was mistreated by deputies at the jail or courthouse, the official said. But he also didn’t care that the deputies he would soon hurt were black. His anger was focused more on the legal system than race. And the main target was Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, who was preparing to resume hearing Nichols’ rape trial.

But Warren admits that Nichols said that “the attack [on Judge Barnes] wasn’t personal. In fact, he told authorities he thought Barnes had been fair to him during court proceedings.”

Warren hears ‘race, race, race,’ but concludes, ‘not race.’ Why, if Nichols felt that Judge Barnes had been fair to him, would he kill him anyway? Because the judge was a white authority figure. Why would he kill the white court reporter, but none of the blacks in the room with her? Because she was white. And she wasn’t even an authority figure!
 

Atlanta: A Felons’ Paradise

As for Nichols’ claim that criminal justice is a case of “systematic slavery” against black men, in reality, Atlanta is closer to paradise for the city’s predominantly black felons, though not for their majority-black victims. In recent years, tens of thousands of crimes have gone unprosecuted due to “lost” 911 calls, “disappeared” crimes by police, and incompetence and preferential treatment given certain classes of suspects (athletes and clergymen) by DA Paul Howard. Denise A. Sorino, who worked in Howard’s office for three years, and who supports the movement to have him recalled, told me that in 1999, she and her colleagues were working on thousands of cases going back as far as 1994, all of which were dropped, and thousands of which never even reached the indictment stage.

There are over 80 ADAs, and each one of them has over 100 cases to plea and arraign…. This is a guess, but 90 percent of these indictments, each of these defendants had more than one page of priors, and it was incredible that half of these people were still walking out on the street.

Why the backlog? When Howard was elected DA in 1996, most of the DA’s staff consisted of experienced, white attorneys. According to Sorino, who is white, Howard fired most of the whites, and replaced them with blacks who were inexperienced, and often incompetent.

Other critics of Howard have made the same charge, though in more circumspect language. Local white talk show host and former Atlanta Journal Constitution writer Dick Williams says, for instance, that “the District Attorney’s Office under Paul Howard has fallen apart, ‘cause he replaced all the old guys and brought in his people.”
 

The Magic Word

Note Brian Nichols claim that one of his white carjacking and assault victims, AJC reporter Don O’Briant, called him a racial epithet. O’Briant said in his defense, “Nichols pistol-whipped him because he refused orders to get in the trunk.

The only other thing I said besides “No” is “Please.” When someone has a gun pointed at you, the last thing you’re going to do is taunt them. All I was trying to do was get away.

Don O’Briant is a middle-aged, white reporter at a politically correct newspaper, in a majority-black city ruled by apartheid. He is more likely to sprout wings and fly, than to call a large black man pointing a gun at him a racial slur. Then why did Nichols make such a claim?

In New York, where I have lived since August 1985, such phony claims by black racists have long been an everyday occurrence. Black racists call whites racial epithets, harass them, and assault them. (In 1991, a white NYPD detective confirmed that black-on-white racial assaults are a daily occurrence, adding that the NYPD covers up the attacks racial character.) Then, should a white victim complain or call the police, the black perpetrator says that the victim called him a racial epithet. Even if a witness should corroborate the white victim’s story, the phony charge functions as the black perpetrator’s get-out-of-jail-free card. Never mind, that everyone in New York knows that whites virtually never call blacks racial epithets, or that, as a matter of law, it would be irrelevant, even if they did.

I have only witnessed a white calling a black a racial epithet twice, and can recall hearing whites use a racial epithet to describe blacks in private only three times. All five times involved the “n” word. During the same period, I have heard the “n” word uttered in public approximately one million times—at least 95 percent by blacks, and perhaps five percent by Puerto Ricans.

The first white who I heard publicly call a black the “n” word was a teenaged drug dealer in Far Rockaway, Queens, one of America’s most racist, violent slums. That was in 1995 or ‘96. Interestingly, no blacks in the neighborhood who heard the white thug shouting the term down the block at a black competitor from outside the neighborhood, accused the white of racism or assaulted him.

The second case was in 1998, and involved a wheelchair-bound, septuagenarian patient in the nearby nursing home, Rockaway Care, where I was moonlighting as a certified nurse aide. The elderly patient only used the epithet after his powerfully-built, approximately 30-year-old black roommate had terrorized and assaulted him for three days, often in front of the staff. When I asked the black registered nurse in charge (though the patients were predominantly white, the staff was almost entirely black) whether she was going to protect the old white man, she muttered that he had used the n-word, so he was getting his due. (In New York, just about any time a black racially assaults a white, black witnesses will say that the white “deserved” it, even when they don’t claim that the white said a racial epithet. Conversely, the 1989 Yusuf Hawkins racial murder was only solved because white witnesses immediately cooperated with police.) The assaults finally (to my knowledge) ended after I had a confrontation with the black attacker, he complained about me to the aforementioned nurse, and she gave the white victim his own room.

The first time I encountered the “he-called-me-the-n-word” defense, was in 1993. At 1:30 a.m. on a Manhattan subway platform, an 18-year-old black girl called ME the n-word, as a prelude to stabbing me with a scissors. Unbeknownst to me, someone called the police, whose officer in charge of the crime scene later told me that a witness (the same person?) had corroborated my story.

And yet when I was interviewed, weeks later, by a white assistant DA named Kunkel, Kunkel denied that I was a crime victim at all. Kunkel ignored the witness report, the fact that someone else had called the police, the police photograph of the bloody defensive wound on my hand, and the report by the crime scene officer. Instead, he acted as if the girl’s incredible charge that I had called her the “n” word were gospel, and insinuated that I was a racist who went around getting innocent young blacks arrested. “Because of you, two black girls spent a night in jail!” he thundered at me. (The attacker was accompanied by a girlfriend.)

During the mid-‘90s, a spate of such phony claims by racist New York blacks actually made it to the SMSM (socialist mainstream media). In each case, the white “racist” in question was supposed to have called blacks the “n” word not in a white racial redoubt, but in a black-dominated environment.

One case was initiated by school staffers, teachers, administrators and parents at P.S. 80, in Jamaica, Queens who were followers of black supremacists the Rev. Al Sharpton and the late extortionist-kidnapper-murderer Sonny Carson, in an attempt to get white teacher Rita Altman fired. Another case was a shakedown attempt by two black businessmen, who made the charge against a white waiter at black ex-model Barbara Smith’s restaurant, B. Smith. A third case was manufactured by black aide Marshall Mitchell, who worked for black then-New York City Cong. Floyd Flake (D-Queens).

The institutionalized understanding in New York at the time (and since) was that all a black racist had to do was claim a white had called him a racial epithet, in order to get the law, morality, and common sense suspended. The whites who play this particular game, use it to wage class war against white crime victims. For instance, the one bit of honesty I got out of ADA Kunkel, was his admission that he never took the subway at night. He lived out of taxicabs.

For New York’s Kunkels, white guys like me, who have to ride the subway, are “losers.” The Kunkels take taxicabs driven overwhelmingly by non-whites, who avoid picking up black men. The Kunkels take cabs in order to avoid black men, who scare the bejeesus out of them, while publicly condemning taxicab drivers as “racist.”

The following year, when I told the above story to a black New Jersey (NJTransit) bus driver who had recently fled Brooklyn, he asked rhetorically of my encounter with Kunkel, “Did you bring a lawyer?” The driver knew better than I did, that a crime victim must show that he has a well-paid attorney, thus signifying his social class. When the Kunkels see that they are dealing with a class peer or even superior, they take pains to respect one’s rights as a crime victim.

While New York is 25 percent black and already a bastion of black apartheid, Atlanta is much worse. According to the 2000 census, Atlanta is 62 percent black and 34 percent white, and as conservative commentator and radio host Dick Williams put it in his genteel way on the March 14 O’Reilly Report on the Fox News Channel,

[Atlanta] is mostly concerned with things African-American. Ever since Mayor Jackson was elected mayor back in the ‘70s, everything has swung toward the political correct idea, the black idea. You gotta have a black police chief, you gotta have a black sheriff, and they won elections to the Sheriff’s Office on their own merit, but, but everything, like Paul Howard’s comment [that a woman can guard a male suspect charged with violent crimes just as well as a man can], which was just silly, of course, that’s the way the world works in the City of Atlanta, aided and abetted by the newspapers.

Williams also noted that while “the jury is out” on Atlanta police Chief Richard Pennington, “The police departments been in chaos” for years.

Also appearing on the show, Michael King, of the black conservative group Project 21, concurred with Williams’ appraisal.

Absolutely. Atlanta has been portrayed as this black Mecca of black development, of black leadership around the country, and as a whole, especially on the business side, that’s certainly correct. But when you extend that into the government sector, and when you ignore competent individuals, in place of or in favor of making sure that someone black is in place, then you end up with situations like this, you end up with Paul Howard, you end up with a sheriff like Myron Freeman sitting there, twiddling their thumbs, if you will, as opposed to things getting done properly.

 

Prof. Moriarty vs. the Keystone Kops?

Already on March 12, “experts” began blaming the Atlanta PD for not finding the green Accord or catching Nichols sooner, saying police were “too reactive, and not pro-active enough.” Aside from the imbecilic thought processes and redundancy of such clichés, given the rank incompetence of the Fulton County Sheriff’s and District Attorney’s offices, and Nichols’ combination of brilliance and ruthlessness, I don’t see how someone can talk that way. Nichols did everything but eat his victims’ livers.

It turns out that Chief Richard Pennington’s men did screw up, though not in the sense of the slogans being bandied about. If anything they were overly aggressive.

As attendants at the parking garage recounted to AJC reporters Bill Torpy and Stacy Shelton, they called police when Nichols showed up at the parking garage. A police motorcycle and two squad cars quickly arrived, but the officers ignored the attendants’ pleas (and Policework 101) to guard the street level, which the attendants explained to police was the only way out of the garage. Instead, all three vehicles sped up the ramps, allowing Brian Nichols to walk down the stairs to freedom.

And how could Don O’Briant tell police that Brian Nichols asked for directions to a nearby shopping mall, where the latter then spent hours meandering about without police, who had his picture, catching him? Note that leftwing and black nationalist journalists, academics, and activists have long spread the canard, according to which all black men look the same to white police and security personnel, while arguing that blacks have no problem distinguishing between different black men.

Other critics have also argued that the Atlanta PD should have shut down MARTA (or indeed, all traffic in the immediate vicinity), and sealed off the parking garage and searched for the green Accord. But I’m going to be modest, and will settle for the 20/100 hindsight of criticizing police for their failure to guard the parking garage’s exit.

The havoc that a highly intelligent, cunning, ultraviolent prisoner can wreak once he has escaped is why it’s so important for everyone at each point along the line to do his job. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or Superman in order to catch a bad guy again, if you don’t let him get away in the first place. But it does help to have an IQ above that of a ditch digger.

When Richard Pennington took over the Atlanta PD in 2002, he formed a non-profit organization which had the department’s 911 calls for 2002 audited. (Pennington had made his name as New Orleans police chief, where he reportedly reformed what had been the nation’s most corrupt force.) Chief Pennington determined that the reports from 22,000 911 calls had been lost during that year alone. Atlanta only has 416,000 residents.

Chief Pennington has admitted that his department screwed up, but his idea of reform is to dumb down the method for calling in incidents. Instead of the shorthand that police departments across the nation use to save time in notifying dispatchers, Chief Pennington is calling for using “plain English.” So, instead of simply saying, “10-13!” officers would presumably say, “Officer in need of assistance!” Why not instead hire men who can understand what a “10-13” is?

The Atlanta PD’s problems run deep, and largely have to do with hiring incompetents based solely on the color of their skin. Like other departments across the country, it has apparently been hiring black applicants who are functionally illiterate and/or personally unsuited for police work. Somehow, I don’t see Chief Pennington or anyone else in Atlanta calling for confronting the department’s real problems.
 

Shoot the Sheriff

Fulton County Sheriff Myron Freeman, wounded Deputy Cynthia Ann Hall’s boss, ought to be recalled by voters post haste. At the Saturday afternoon press conference following Brian Nichols’ arrest, Sheriff Freeman said “My first priority was the families … my second priority was getting Mr. Nichols back in jail.” That was designed to show his compassion, but if Sheriff Freeman hadn’t been so incompetent, he wouldn’t have had to console the victims’ families. The sheriff kept repeating that he had only been on the job for two months, but the problems with the sheriff’s office had been public knowledge in Atlanta for years. There was no need for four murders to serve as a wake-up call, and Freeman is unlikely to change for the better.

The sheriff’s lack of urgency regarding catching a heinous criminal, is unfortunately typical of an entire city, in which police officials have long seen their job as not fighting, but covering up crime, so as to help the tourist trade, and where in an opinion survey of Atlantans, much to Chief Pennington’s chagrin, “only 27 percent saw crime as the city’s No. 1 problem.” Meanwhile, Atlanta vies for the dubious distinction of being known as the nation’s most violent city. I think racial solidarity is the reason so many Atlantans claim to be relatively unconcerned about crime.

Sheriff Freeman kept emphasizing that he had only been on the job for two months. That’s two months too long. At first, I thought that perhaps the Sheriff was in shock or exhausted. After hearing him a while, however, I realized he’s simply a dim bulb. If Brian Nichols had the sense to figure out the holes in courthouse security, but Sheriff Freeman didn’t, maybe the authorities need to switch the two men. Put Freeman in jail and charge him with murder, etc., and make Nichols sheriff. If that sounds insane, it’s no crazier than a world in which a Myron Freeman can be responsible for court security.

DA Paul Howard should also be recalled, along with Sheriff Freeman.
Indeed, there is already a movement afoot to recall Howard, who was first elected in 1996. The DA’s office botched the first Nichols prosecution, leading to the retrial. Although Nichols was found to be in the possession of ten pounds of marijuana and two assault weapons when he was arrested, he was tried for rape, sodomy, and kidnapping. The jury never heard about the weapons or the drugs, and Howard’s incompetent, lazy ADAs provided them with little corroborating evidence, even though they had access to massive amounts of evidence. As a result, the jury almost acquitted Nichols, deadlocking with eight jurors out of twelve voting to acquit. As Brian Nichols’ defense attorney Barry Hazen noted, the state put on a “much more muscular” presentation in the retrial: “In the second trial, there was a lot more evidence that was corroborated,” which is why Nichols knew he was going down. (To do justice to DA Howard’s documented incompetence and venality would require much more space than I have at present.)

Thus, Brian Nichols wasn’t fighting injustice; he was fighting justice!

(Some people are convinced that Nichols was innocent of the rape charges against him. Note that AJC reporters Cameron McWhirter, Bill Rankin, and Steve Visser have suggested that the method that March 12 hostage Ashley Smith reported that Nichols used in binding her with duct tape, and initially putting her in the shower, matched the method that his ex-girlfriend charged him with using during his alleged kidnapping and rape of her on August 19.)
 

Nichols: Breaks with Criminal Stereotypes

I am convinced that while not all of Nichols’ plans worked out, he nonetheless put a great deal of planning into his crimes. The safest thing for him to do, in terms of escaping the court house, would have been to flee immediately, once he had disarmed Deputy Hall, after perhaps handcuffing and gagging her. That way, using his method of rapid, serial carjacking, he might well have made it out of the state on Friday. Instead, he made a point of GOING to Judge Barnes’ chambers, and proceeding to murder Barnes and Julie Ann Brandau. Sgt. Hoyt Teasly’s killing clearly was unplanned. The sergeant just got in Nichols’ way; he was “collateral damage.”

When criminals seek to escape from the police, they tend to think with their feet, not their heads, which is one reason why they usually get caught so quickly. Often, the panic starts before the crime has even been completed. How many times do you hear, in what journalistic boilerplate calls “botched robberies,” of a mugger who panics and kills his intended victim, running off without even getting the latter’s money or valuables? Some of those cases were surely racial murders, in which robbery was a secondary or non-existent goal, and the “botched robbery” cliché was a journalistic diversion tactic to avoid reporting the truth, but many were cases of criminals who simply lost their heads. As a rule, violent crime has never attracted a particularly high-class sort of individual. In contrast, Nichols’ defense attorney Barry Hazen described Nichols as “very analytic” and a “very quick learner.”

However, many procedures broke down, providing Nichols with one opportunity after another:

• The office of District Attorney Paul Howard provided no serious additional security, despite a request from presiding Judge Rowland Barnes for additional “beef,” after Nichols had been caught with two “shank” weapons in his shoes that he had fashioned from hinges. (Judge Barnes was more concerned with the dangers posed to Nichols’ defense attorney, Barry Hazen, than with his own protection.) In a telephone interview, Denise A. Sorino told me that the only reason Nichols was in that changing room, was because DA Howard’s office had so thoroughly botched the first trial. Sorino’s judgment of Nichols’ first trial was implicitly supported by Nichols’ attorney, Hazen;

• Sheriff Myron Freeman had entrusted a 5’1” female deputy with guarding a former college linebacker whose body was “solid muscle,” who was charged with violent felonies, and who was facing a possible life sentence; and

• The deputies entrusted with monitoring the changing room via closed circuit TV were criminally negligent. They were absent or off doing God knows what (one report has them fetching breakfast for a superior), while Deputy Hall was getting beaten half to death on camera, and when Nichols was running out of the court building.
Sheriff Freeman, DA Howard, and Chief Pennington might just as well have given Nichols a law enforcement escort out of the city.

Part II: Aiding and Abetting: Feminism and the Brian Nichols Case

The Lester Garnier Case: Have Investigators Solved 20-Year-Old Murder of SF Cop?

By Nicholas Stix

Early on Monday, July 11, 1988, a mall worker called the Walnut Creek Police Department. An "unconscious" man was slumped against the steering wheel of a blue Corvette, in a parking lot in the San Francisco suburb’s downtown shopping area. The man had been shot dead.

Colleagues surmised that after the “vic” caught the first bullet in the stomach, he went for the gun, and the shooter delivered the “coup de grace” to his head.

The “vic,” Lester Garnier, was a dedicated, 30-year-old, San Francisco vice cop who’d been on the job for eight years, half of that time in vice.

(Pictured below, in descending order: Officer Lester Garnier, Catherine "Scotty" Kuntz, and Garnier's Corvette.)

A witness reported having seen two blondes , one of whom exited the passenger side of Officer Garnier’s car, leave the immediate area of the car and drive away in separate vehicles at 11:30 p.m., Sunday night. Police believe Garnier was killed then. Garnier was found unarmed, with his window open, and his car keys missing.

Perhaps one blonde leaned into the driver’s side window, chatting up Garnier to distract him, while the one whom he had come to meet, sitting next to him, drew her weapon, and shot him. They must have stolen his gun; I can’t see a cop traveling around naked.

Walnut Creek police had three main pieces of evidence: They determined that the murder weapon was an AMT .380 semiautomatic pistol, favored as a backup weapon by some SFPD officers; partial descriptions of the blondes; and a partial fingerprint lifted from the passenger-side window of Garnier's Corvette that forensics could do nothing with.

Rather than lacking possible suspects, police had a surfeit of them: Though reportedly a low-key type, the good-looking, San Francisco-born Asian Garnier was a ladies’ man who had just broken up with a fairly long-term girlfriend. His hot-tempered “ex” had visited his home only hours before his murder. When word got out that blondes were sought, she dyed her frosted blonde hair black, and got into an altercation at Garnier’s funeral;

Garnier got two calls at the home he had bought for his parents nine years earlier, at least one of them from a woman, before leaving around 9 p.m.;

Garnier and his partner, Patrolman Chuck Lofgren, had recently kept Patrick Roberts under surveillance while Roberts, who with his wife, Kelly Loyd, ran one of San Francisco’s most exclusive, and ultimately scandalous brothels, moved his business. Lofgren “suspected their covers had been ‘burned’ by Roberts”;

Like many another vice cop, Garnier is known to have crossed the line, and patronized at least one massage parlor; and

Based on the murder weapon, detectives suspected that a colleague might have killed Garnier, and looked at a blonde IRS agent who lived in Walnut Creek, who was involved with a rising SFPD officer, and whose own car was “mysteriously bombed” shortly after Garnier’s murder. (The rising officer, Alex Fagan, would eventually make it to SFPD deputy chief.)

Advances in forensics since Garnier’s murder permitted detectives to match the partial print to a convict serving time in Florida State Prison in Ocala, Catherine “Scotty” Kuntz, who represents that underserved group, Scottish immigrant criminals.

Scotty Kuntz is tall, lean, and rough-looking. No one is ever going to confuse this crack aficionado and veteran working girl with past Miss Illegal Immigrant Felon USAs like France’s Vanessa Etourneau

and Germany’s Corinna Kowalsky.

Scotty’s first husband, Navy officer Gregory Kuntz, had brought her over from Scotland, in 1985. Catherine Overend, her maiden name, was working as a barmaid, when Gregory Kuntz met her. Soon after Kuntz brought her home and married her, Scotty began —or more likely, went back to—hitting the crack pipe, turning tricks, and drifting from one small, northern California town—including Walnut Creek—to the next, while her husband was at sea.

It’s yet another tale of immigrant heartbreak.

Then it was on to Virginia, where in 1991, she was charged with soliciting to have her husband murdered. Divorcing him would have cost her her green card, plus his death was worth $15,000 in life insurance to her. Scotty hired a 17-year-old runaway, Malinda Cooper, who shot her husband, but Scotty got off because he “had survived an attempt on his life but remained loyal to her.” Virginia is for lovers. The young shooter and another accomplice went to prison. And then it was on to the Sunshine State, where Scotty presently enjoys the taxpayers’ hospitality, due to her having violated probation stemming from a drug possession conviction.

Gregory Kuntz having served his purpose, Scotty divorced him in 1992. She married a younger man, Timothy Wise, the next month, divorcing him in 1995. Before divorcing Wise, Kuntz charged him with domestic violence and got him convicted, which won her the green card jackpot.

The first Garnier investigation was hamstrung by jurisdictional beefs between the Walnut Creek and San Francisco departments.
ICE has placed an immigration hold on Kuntz, who was due to be released from Ocala on June 19. Walnut Creek PD watch commander, Sgt. Hill, confirmed for me that Kuntz is still in prison in Florida. While Sgt. Hill couldn’t divulge too much about an active investigation—

Stix: Do you have any other suspects, or just Kuntz at this time?
Sgt. Hill: “I can’t really say.”

—he confirmed the “two blondes” story. He told me further that he was unaware of any tie to the former San Francisco brothel keepers; “we’re working with San Francisco P.D.”; “we have contacts with federal agents, as well”; and replied to my question whether investigators had interrogated Kuntz, “She has been spoken to [in prison] in regard to this case.”

The attorney for the girl convicted of shooting Scotty’s first husband said of Scotty, “This lady is so sinister, so maniacal to pull this young girl in.”

What a xenophobe!

If Kuntz is proven to be the shooter in the Garnier case, perhaps it was just a case of an immigrant doing one of those jobs George W. Bush says Americans won’t do.

Did an Anti-Censorship Organization Censor News of the Jeremiah Munsen Petition?

By Nicholas Stix

It sure looks that way. Checking Google minutes ago for new Web sites and blogs that posted news of the Free Jeremiah Munsen petition, I came across two entries at Index on Censorship, page 560, “Trademark troubles,” which was originally posted on August 28, and page 598, “Wilders and eleven others indicted in Jordan,” which was posted on September 11.

In both cases, the link referred to my WEBCommentary version of the column/petition, which had only gone up today.

1. Index on Censorship » Trademark troubles
Free Jeremiah Munsen - WEBCommentary • Opinion: Open books, open minds - San Jose Mercury News • MALKIN: Book ban myopia - Washington Times ...
www.indexoncensorship.org/?p=560 - 35k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

2. Index on Censorship » Wilders and eleven others indicted in Jordan
Readers obsessed with anti-Islam video - News & Observer • Free Jeremiah Munsen - WEBCommentary • Opinion: Open books, open minds - San Jose Mercury News ...
www.indexoncensorship.org/?p=598 - 31k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

That means the Munsen link had likely just been posted to Index on Censorship’s main page, and then, just as quickly, and doubtless for purposes of political censorship, deleted.

Like most of us, “anti-censorship” organizations like Index on Censorship are adamantly opposed to censorship, when it is their ideas and allies being censored, and exuberantly support censorship, when it means silencing ideas and people they oppose.

Please take this opportunity to sign the petition calling on President Bush to pardon Jeremiah Munsen, and to tell your family and friends what Index on Censorship doesn’t want them to know about.

Free Jeremiah Munsen!

By Nicholas Stix



The following text is that of the petition I have posted at ipetitions.com, plus hyperlinks to supporting material. I urge all of my readers to hit the link, sign the petition, and forward the petition text and its ipetitions link to all of their friends, relatives, and acquaintances, as well as any other people and organizations they think might support and promote it. For more information on the Munsen case, please read the hyperlinked articles.


Free Jeremiah Munsen!

We, the undersigned, call on President George W. Bush to pardon Jeremiah Munsen, immediately freeing him from the four-month federal prison sentence he began serving on September 15, 2008; thereby nullifying that sentence, as well as Munsen’s sentences of one year of supervised probation, 125 hours of “community service,” and five additional years of unsupervised probation; and to dismiss Justice Department officials Grace Chung Becker and Donald W. Washington, who engineered the malicious, illegal prosecution of Munsen.

Jeremiah Munsen was arrested and prosecuted for engaging in symbolic speech that is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and thus was not guilty of any crime.

On September 20, 2007, approximately 20,000 predominantly black protesters rallied in Jena, Louisiana, in support of Mychal Bell and his five co-defendants, all black, all of whom had been arrested and charged for a December 4, 2006 gang attack on their white high school classmate, Justin Barker.

Bell, who had already been convicted four times prior to the attack on Barker, twice for crimes of violence, sucker punched Barker from behind, and then, as his victim lay unconscious, stomped on him, while in organized fashion as many as nine accomplices blocked students and teachers alike from coming to Barker’s aid.

Bell, et al., were initially charged with attempted murder. However, political pressure exerted through the Jena Race Hoax, which was scripted by white racial activist and Baptist preacher, Alan Bean, and which depicted the attackers as victims and the victim as deserving of his fate, succeeded in getting the charges reduced to second-degree battery. On December 3, 2007, In exchange for testifying against five of his accomplices, Bell would plead guilty to the lesser charge as a juvenile.

The September 20, 2007 rally’s call was “Free the Jena 6”; the protesters sought, through their race hoax and national political pressure, to get Bell and his accomplices off, scot-free, for their crimes.

After the rally, the then 18-year-old Munsen hung extension cords fashioned to resemble nooses from the back of his pickup truck and, accompanied by an underaged friend, repeatedly drove past a crowd of black protesters who were waiting for buses home to Tennessee. Prosecuting Munsen under two unconstitutional federal “hate crime” laws under which he could have faced 11 years in federal prison, Becker and Washington coerced him into accepting a plea bargain.

Jeremiah Munsen may have been a jerk, but no more so than those who rallied on behalf of violent criminals, and who defamed the criminals’ victim. In any event, the First Amendment decrees that both sides had a constitutional right to be jerks.

The illegal prosecution of Munsen was intended to have a chilling effect on whites’ freedom of speech to criticize anti-white racism, and will have an emboldening effect on blacks to racially assault whites, and promote ever more race hoaxes.

Just as the countless race hoaxes of the past 20-odd years, including the Duke Rape Hoax, have led to racially-motivated violent crimes and the political persecution of whites, with the media’s support, the Jena Race Hoax led to a wave of noose hoaxes by blacks nationwide, and the persecution of additional, innocent whites.

We demand that President Bush pardon Jeremiah Munsen, and dismiss Grace Chung Becker and Donald W. Washington. America is not a dictatorship … yet.

(End of petition text)

* * *

If you care about justice and freedom of speech, I urge you to please call the White House switchboard at (202) 456-1414, contact your congressman and U.S. senators, and write and call your local newspapers and TV news divisions, with these demands. Thank you.

CNN Promo for Dunham/Soetoro/Obama

By Nicholas Stix
Last updated at 12:13 a.m. on Wednesday, November 12, 2008.

Around 5 p.m. today, CNN aired a campaign advertorial for the man who presently calls himself Barack Obama* (Race-IL). The organization presented the advertorial as a news report, but I doubt they fooled anyone. After all, if you watch CNN, you’re likely either a socialist or a communist, in which case you would vote for D/S/O,* even if he were filmed killing and devouring human babies raw, or you’re opposed to him, and are watching for the entertainment value or because you’re a political junkie. (No Republican politician would ever sink to the level of depravity of eating human babies raw; a GOP pol would first cook the babies. Sarah Palin (Pioneer Women-AK), however, wrestles grizzly bears to the death, and eats them raw.)

Wolf Blitzer was the host, with most or all of the out-of-studio commentary supplied by Democratic operative Dana Bash King, who is married to Democratic operative John King, who is also stationed at CNN. The ad bashed Sen. John McCain (Media-AZ) and Sarah Palin. It claimed that experts on the Right and Left alike had denounced McCain’s newest political ad as dishonest, and King emphasized of Palin, “And what she says is carefully scripted with teleprompter.”

And what Barack Obama says is also carefully scripted with teleprompter, but Dana King forgot to mention that.

The “conservative” expert in question was Karl Rove. I wonder what angle Rove is working by attacking McCain?

I tried unsuccessfully to find Dana King’s ad at CNN’s web site, but did find another “Obama” advertorial that said,

Obama has rejected public financing, calling the system “broken” -- a decision that frees him to continue raising money for November.

McCain has accepted federal matching funds for his general election campaign, giving him $84 million to spend for November. The money comes with strict spending limits, but the Republican National Committee's victory fund can continue to raise and spend money on his behalf.”

Well, not exactly. The truth of the matter is that D/S/O supported public financing, until he opposed it. Public financing is a pillar of Democratic Party dogma, and D/S/O dutifully supported it, until he saw that he was getting more money in contributions than he would by accepting public financing, and, opportunist that he is, “evolved” beyond such “principles.” But you won’t learn that from CNN.

D/S/O’s media operatives have been so despicable in their twisting of reality for their One, that recently I caught myself feeling sorry for McCain, until I read a new series of blogs by VDARE writer, Patrick Cleburne, on McCain’s Hispandering and intention to pass an amnesty for the over 20 million illegal immigrants presently in the country, plus every “cousin” they can bring in through family reunification and chain migration. And so, I’m back to Square One, planning to either vote for a third party candidate, or to make my undervote count.

Hey, Sen. McCain, I hope you’re enjoying the bitter fruits of all those years sucking up to the socialist MSM. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!


*When “Obama” was a citizen of Indonesia during his Moslem childhood, while living with his Moslem Indonesian stepfather, his legal name was “Barry Soetoro.” However, since his mother's first marriage, to his natural father, was bigamous and thus invalid, his proper legal surname at birth would have been "Dunham," his mother’s maiden name. Unless he has since legally changed his name to "Barack Hussein Obama," the candidate's name is "Barry Soetoro."

Who is Jeremiah Munsen, and What Does He Mean to You?

By Nicholas Stix



In 1979, I was arrested while visiting my hometown of Long Beach, New York. Not only had I not committed any crime, but no one had even accused me of committing a crime.

While I was picking up some things at the local Waldbaum’s supermarket, the manager took an instant dislike to me, followed me around the store, and started an argument with me at the cash register. (That’s the dead giveaway that I must be black, because as we all know, only innocent blacks get followed around stores by vicious white managers.)

It was a slow day at Waldbaum's.

I bought a pack of hot dogs, a few cans of tuna that were on sale, and some bagels. Instead of letting the cashier pack my bag, the manager took over the matter, and tried the novel grocery-packing method of throwing my bagels at the paper shopping bag. The bagels bounced off the bag, and on to the floor, whereupon I said, “I’m not paying for dirty bagels!” The manager responded, “That’s it, call the cops!”

I kid you not.

When the cop came, the manager told him to arrest me, but didn’t say that I’d committed any crime. On the way to the Long Beach Police Department, only a few blocks away, the policeman lectured me repeatedly from the front seat.

“None of this would have happened, if you hadn’t been a wiseass.”

“But I didn’t do anything!”

Fortunately for me, the Long Beach PD had a Solomonic desk sergeant on duty on that shift. (Although I knew half the department—Long Beach was a small town; I got around; I’d had some scrapes with the law as a kid; I had not one but two guardian angels in uniform, one white and one black; and I’d interned in the department’s records room—I didn’t know him or the arresting officer.) A good desk sergeant is worth his weight in gold. From his seat on high, the Sergeant delivered his verdict, which was not open to appeal:

“Look, you’re both going to have to give a little. You’re paying for the bagels, and you’re dropping the charges.”

So, I paid for the bagels—I don’t remember if I put the money down on a table, or had to hand it to the manager—and then dramatically threw them into a stationhouse garbage can in the same area. As a matter of law, since there is no paper trial, the arrest never even happened.

But what if the incident happened today, and there were no Solomonic desk sergeant? And what if the manager had been black, and had made up some story in which I had called him a racial epithet? He would have had the entire, totalitarian apparatus of the U.S. Justice Department’s Division of Civil Rights behind him, to grind me down.

Which brings me to Jeremiah Munsen.

On September 15, Munsen will enter federal prison, to start serving a four-month sentence, to be followed by one year of supervised probation and 125 hours of community service, to be followed by five more years of unsupervised probation. In other words, he could potentially spend over six years in prison. Indeed, he was originally up for eleven years' hard time!

Since even six years is more time than most murderers serve, you must be wondering who Munsen killed. Well, he didn’t kill anyone. In fact, according to the U.S. Constitution, he didn’t commit any crime at all.

Read all about it, in my VDARE.com blog, “Oh, Canada! Modern Show Trials.” And then read Patrick Cleburne’s follow-up piece, which appeared only minutes ago, “The Jeremiah Munsen/Jena 6 Atrocity: Who, whom?”

The Empty Black Suit

A friend sent along a copy of the above-named essay by his friend, academic Joseph Kay, which was published by Lawrence Auster at his blog, View from the Right. Auster’s introduction follows.

Joseph Kay, a professor at a prominent university, explores a fascinating and familiar phenomenon that to my knowledge has never before been analyzed at length: the black who through imitation of an intellectual manner is able to create a convincing but false appearance of intellectual ability and build a career on that basis. Prof. Kay has previously written an article at VFR on why many Third-World immigrants cannot be assimilated.

Upon reading Kay’s essay, two figures immediately came to mind: MLK and Cornel West.

King’s academic career and reputation as an “intellectual” rested on plagiarism. From his teen years on, he stole other people’s words, and plagiarized one-third of his dissertation from his classmate, Jack Stewart Boozer’s dissertation. And as his best friend, Ralph Abernathy, wrote in his memoirs, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, King was a gifted mimic, who privately did dead-on impressions of other prominent black preachers that had his closest followers in stitches.

When West first became a celebrity during the early 1990s, he was often invited to speak on TV. What immediately became apparent to me was his lack of any ideas of his own. He combined what I’ve called the black school of rhetorical bombast—the use of big words and a pompous style, to give the impression of erudition—with the robotic use of English translations of phrases from German intellectual guru Jürgen Habermas, himself a vastly overrated leftist, though of course never giving credit to his source.

Achieving Racial Balance in Education

By Nicholas Stix

Jim Bowman writes of how 40 years ago in white Oak Park, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, school board members were able to neutralize opposition to the building of junior high schools by claiming the need for “racial balance.” The old "racial balance" Trojan horse. Perhaps it hasn't yet worked in Oak Park, but that trick has been used, stage-wise, to educationally, economically, and legally dispossess millions of whites across the country.

Working and middle-class white parents work overtime and go into hock so that they can move away from blacks, but public school officials, who protect their own children, still inflict the racist monsters on white children, discriminating against white district families, on behalf of racist blacks from outside the district.

Walking home after putting your child on the school bus, a bus full of black kids stops at the light in front of you. At the sight of a white face, the little racist monsters, ten and eleven years old, jump up and, sticking their heads and hands out of the windows, scream, “Fuck you!” and give you the finger. A neighbor tells me of her ten-year-old son being randomly assaulted by a strange black boy on the school playground, who just walked up and sucker-punched him. Her friend’s child suffered the same sort of assault. Nothing happened to either of the black cowards, but the school has regulations that protect all students against “racial discrimination.” English translation: Racist black students enjoy license, while white students have no rights.

Stage 1: "Racial balance" requires the busing in of hundreds of racist black kids from outside the district, the legal rights of district parents be damned.

Stage 2: The racist black kids make a sport of ganging up on and assaulting and robbing—and sometimes raping—white kids, but the authorities refuse to do anything to the racist criminals, and the newspapers refuse to report on them. White kids who fight back, however, are subjected to draconian “justice,” and their parents depicted as “racists” by the local press.

Stage 3. Token black employees demand the hiring of more such employees, and claim that they are the victims of racial discrimination. The authorities, who contemptuously refuse to consider the interests of the white district parents, cave in to the blacks like a cheap suitcase.

Stage 4. White parents start to pull their brutalized kids out of the school, and now pay twice for their education: Once through their property taxes, and again through private school tuition. Adding insult to injury, the press and black parents demonize them with the racist code phrase, “white flight.”

Stage 5. As the white kids are replaced with ever more racist black kids from outside the district, the black employees demand ever more incompetent, racist blacks be hired, insisting that only blacks can understand black children or have a right to educate black children, that blacks must be hired in numbers at minimum proportional to the numbers of black students, and that the white staffers are racist incompetents. At the same time, the black employees begin a racial terror campaign against their white colleagues, harassing and assaulting them, and encouraging the black students to do the same.

Stage 6. The white employees are variously chased out or fired via trumped up charges, by the blacks.

Stage 7. The now thoroughly dysfunctional school has an all-black student body, all-black staff, gets much more money per student than it did when it was white, due to all of the teachers getting bonuses for special ed kids and such-like, and has the lowest test scores and highest rate of violence in the area. Virtually all of the money comes from white taxpayers. Meanwhile, teachers and administrators teach the black students that racist whites are responsible for all of their problems in life. A goodly number of the students respond by stealing and vandalizing the property of whites in the neighborhood, and robbing, raping, and assaulting white residents.

Stage 8. Racists such as author Jonathan Kozol, and “diversity trainer” Glenn “courageous conversations” Singleton make millions and receive awards for condemning the dispossessed, “racist” whites and “white privilege.”

Detroit’s Gangster Mayor Reportedly to Accept Plea Today: Kilpatrick Era Over … for Now

By Nicholas Stix

Kwame's Mommy vs. Gov. Granholm

I did not attend Governor Granholm's hearing today. I will not attend any of the proceedings started by the Governor. I did not give a statement to any news outlet. I am outraged that The Detroit News would run a story on its Web site that indicates I attended. The paper made an extremely serious error. I expect an apology and a full and immediate retraction.

That was Democratic Cong. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (13th District, Michigan), the mother of 38-year-old Democratic Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) convened the meeting on Wednesday, at the request of the Detroit City Council (by a 5-4 vote), in order to remove Kilpatrick from office, due to his being under felony indictments, having violated the terms of his bond, and after he had already indicted for three felonies, having allegedly assaulted a white sheriff's detective, for which he was indicted for two additional felony counts.


The New Deal

By 9 a.m. Thursday, Kilpatrick's lawyers and Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy hope to announce a plea deal. While few details have been reported, Kirkpatrick's attorneys are negotiating how much jail time the Mayor would have to serve, how long probation might last beyond that, and whether he would be permitted to again run for public office. Any criminal conviction would require that the Mayor resign from office. The parties had sought to announce a plea deal on Wednesday, but negotiations were reportedly held up by Kilpatrick's earlier refusal to countenance jail time.

Kilpatrick is such damaged goods that even Democratic presidential candidate, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, has called on him to step down.


The Civil Suit

As is so often the case, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's undoing proved to be not his initial indiscretions, but his and Beatty's attempted cover up.

The City of Detroit (read: Mayor Kilpatrick) was initially sued by two high-ranking Detroit police officers, Deputy Police Chief Gary Brown and Officer Harold Nelthrope. Nelthrope had been a mayoral bodyguard, while Brown had been in charge of the Detroit PD's Internal Affairs Division. Both officers had been fired in 2003, after Nelthrope had alleged misconduct within the Mayor's security detail to Brown, who in turn had sought to investigate the matter. A third DPD officer, Walt Harris, was another mayoral bodyguard who backed Nellthorpe's charges of misconduct among the security detail, and was also fired. The officers charged that they were whistle blowers who had been fired in retaliation.

Kilpatrick and Beatty had the men fired, in order to squelch the internal affairs investigation, which would have exposed their affair.

During Mayor Kilpatrick's sworn testimony during last year's civil trial, the plaintiffs' attorney, Mike Stefani, asked him and his then-chief of staff, Christine Beatty, whether they were engaged in an extramarital affair. Kilpatrick and Beatty both emphatically denied, under oath, that they were or had been lovers, or that they had fired the officers.

Kilpatrick could have saved the city millions, but stonewalled previous settlement attempts, causing the eventual bill to multiply.

In one text message, Beatty recalled the "decision that we made to fire Gary Brown."


The Old Deal

Taking the Mayor's testimony at face value, the Detroit City Council approved an $8.4 million settlement to the two officers, which with attorneys' fees, ballooned to over $9 million.

In January, however, the Detroit Free Press got its hands on "more than 14,000 text messages sent to and from Beatty's city-provided pager in 2002 and 2003, many of which included explicit recountings of sexual escapades between the two, their planning more such rendezvous, and one in which Beatty recalled the "decision that we made to fire Gary Brown."

(Unbeknownst to the City Council, the settlement deal included a secret agreement to suppress all of the text messages.)


Initial Indictments

Kilpatrick was then indicted for perjury, misconduct, and obstruction of justice, while Beatty was indicted on seven felony charges.

One of the conditions of the Mayor's bond required what was essentially a rubber-stamp procedure, where he would telephone the court before making any trips outside of the city, whereupon he was free to travel the world on city business. But that was too much to ask of "the hiphop mayor." Kilpatrick traveled to Canada, ostensibly on official business, without asking the court's permission. When the trip was discovered, District Court Judge Ronald Giles ordered Kilpatrick to spend one night in jail, the first time any mayor had been jailed while in office in the 307-year history of the stalled former Motor City.

As Los Angeles Times reporter P.J. Huffstutter wrote on August 7,

The ruling, though shocking to prosecutors and allies of the mayor alike, comes after months of the mayor's defiant and sometimes flippant attitude toward his legal woes….

As the case has moved toward trial, Kilpatrick has refused to step down from his mayoral office and, at times, acted as if nothing was wrong.

In the face of Mayor Kilpatrick's indifference to the law and the new assault charges, Judge Giles ruled that he may not travel at all prior to having a court hearing and being granted permission.

In July, white Wayne County Sheriff's deputy Brian White, and his black colleague, JoAnne Kinney, went to the home of Kilpatrick's friend, Bobby Ferguson to deliver a subpoena. According to White, instead of Ferguson, Kilpatrick answered the door, responding with racial taunts and assaulting White, giving him a fractured hip.

According to court papers, Kilpatrick told Kinney, "You should be ashamed of yourself for being a black woman and working this case. How could you even ride in the same car with him, especially someone named White?"

Had a white man been charged with making racial taunts while interfering with and assaulting a peace officer, giving the officer a broken hip, the white would surely be prosecuted on hate crime charges.

When Kilpatrick was jailed, a press release from his office informing the media, "Detroit's government will continue to operate as usual," was hardly comforting. Kilpatrick's new female chief of staff, Deputy Mayor Kandia Milton, ran the city in his "absence."

In 1950, Detroit, then known by whites as "the Motor City" and by blacks as "Motown," had 1,849,568 predominantly white residents; only 16.2 percent of the city was then black. Not only was the city America's fifth most populous, but was by some accounts the nation's most beautiful and affluent major city.

By the 2000 census, the city was down to 951,270 residents, 81.2 percent of them black. As of 2007, Detroit's population is estimated to be 916, 952.

Detroit's point of no return came in 1967. Since the 1950s, the black share of the city's population had been steadily increasing, and with it, the crime rate. Less than one month after black nationalist H. Rap Brown and his comrades demanded that white Detroiters surrender the city to them (Brown: otherwise, "we are going to burn you down"), from July 23-28, blacks committed what would remain the most destructive, 20th century American race riot until the 1992 Los Angles race riot, with 43 dead and 467 wounded. Whites responded by fleeing the city, selling their homes at way below their previous market value, losing everything. In no time, beautiful, safe, white neighborhoods mutated into violent, black slums.

In 1973, black supremacist Coleman Young became Detroit's first black mayor. Young hired convicts fresh out of prison to be police officers, and during his five terms in office, reshaped Detroit into the African-style kleptocracy that it has remained ever since. One of the new local folk ways that grew under Young was "Devil's Night," which black youth celebrated citywide annually the night before Halloween, by committing arson, looting, and rioting across the city. Detroit made a gift of Devil's Night to the nation, as the arson-riots spread across the country. City government was only able to douse the party by employing police state tactics in the 1990s, which they must employ every year anew, or risk a return of the flames.

Kwame Kilpatrick is the most notorious example of Detroit's lawless current officaldom, but Detroiters and Michiganders could rattle off many other such names. In 2004, when Christine Beatty was pulled over by a Detroit police office for speeding, she reportedly demanded of him, "Do you know who the f--k I am?!" Beatty called Detroit's black Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings on her cell phone, and got out of the ticket.

Just last week, while attending the Democratic National Convention, black
Detroit Councilwoman Monica Conyers instigated an incident at the Magnolia Hotel, where she was staying with her husband, Detroit Cong. John Conyers, and their two teenaged sons. Although Mrs. Conyers knew that the hotel's suites carried only one bed, she insisted on having a suite. And knowing that the suite they were in was booked for the following night, Mrs. Conyers agreed to move to a different room, but when hotel personnel came to move her family, she screamed obscenities at hotel staff, and refused to switch rooms. The hotel yielded.

Look for a racial shakedown lawsuit by Conyers to attempt to profit from her own racism, in the same mold as the successful conspiracy by racist blacks to shake down the Adam's Mark hotel chain a few years ago.

Speaking of racist shakedown artists, Mrs. Conyers' husband, Cong. Conyers, is the most notorious one in Congress. For over 20 years, Cong. Conyers has submitted a bill in every session of Congress to shake down white Americans for "slavery reparations," a project which is wholeheartedly supported by the Democratic candidate for president under the euphemism, "education debt."

The reason Cong. Kilpatrick spoke contemptuously of Gov. Granholm is that the Governor is white, while the Congresswoman is black. After all, the idea for the hearings came from Detroit's black City Council.

Today, Detroit does not have a single major supermarket. All the chains have left, in the face of constant theft, robberies, and violence in the aisles. Instead of vying for the title of America's most beautiful, prosperous city, it now competes annually for title of America's murder capital. The auto factories are gone, and much of the city is a vast wasteland that is slowly being reclaimed by the land. Local blacks refer to Detroit as "The D"; most Americans try not to think about the city at all.