Unconfused in the Old North State

The gallused-overall wearing North Carolina farmers from whom I first learned to read a newspaper would have described current Democratic primary coverage in terms that may be best reserved for barnyards.

While I doubt Tar Heels are confused about it, anyone visiting from Mars or an extrasolar planet might be misled by hyperventilating media coverage into believing there is a cliff-hanger race between Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination.

We can enjoy the attention Clinton and Obama give to campaigning here in the Old North State, and will vote with enthusiasm come the May 6 primary, without buying into the myth.

Grandaddy always said "every vote counts," even if you know who's going to win. I believe that were he alive today, he'd observe that Obama is going to win. And to tell the truth, Grandaddy broke fresh starch on khaki trousers every day, but clothing is beside the point.

After what is under the circumstances appropriate sarcasm, Politico runs through the math in nice detail, explaining why Ms. Clinton's candidacy is history.

To maybe, perhaps, just ever so possibly re-create a chance of winning the nomination, some are suggesting Ms. Clinton has to win, well, North Carolina. Us.

Which whiplashes us back to extrasolar journalists and pundits, since the polling news in that regard forecasts no such possibility.

Obama now has and may be consolidating his lead here.

Could it be that "down home": we're collectively smart enough to understand issues like loyalty to one's home church, and make allowances, rather than have our heads turned by the spin?

If I am not being unduly sentimental about my fellow North Carolinians, absent some kind of substantial and unexpected revelation, Ms. Clinton and the extrasolar journalists can relax. Rural and urban Tar Heels alike have this thing sorted out, thank you.

Addendum: A survey by Public Policy Polling showed Obama with 55 percent to Clinton's 34 percent among likely North Carolina voters in the May 6 primary.

That was before Ms. Clinton admitted she "misspoke" about having braved sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996, and before she said she would walk out on her church community rather than endure sermons like those of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Helping troubled teens without killing them

Florida's largest black Baptist organization is trying to reminded us of the death of Martin Lee Anderson, exhaustivelydocumented at Wikipedia, and of the evil done by ideologically driven nonsolutions to serious problems.

Anderson died in a Florida "boot camp" -- a program based on principles military-derived of "shock incarceration", which are somehow ever popular among political conservatives.

North Carolina and a great many other states still run or permit private organizations to operate "boot camps," even though the National Mental Health Association, National Institutes of Health and others have concluded that they don't work.

An Oct. 10, 2007, Government Accountability Office investigation reported a nationwide problem with "Abuse
and Death" of troubled kids in boot-camp programs.

Florida's Progressive Missionary and Educational Baptist State Convention seeks to inspire new programs aimed at keeping young men out of trouble.

State boot camps were shut down in Florida on June 1, 2006, and should be shut down elsewhere. As good empirical data has consistently indicated, they are a form of both private and institutionalized malpractice. Yet they remain resistant to reform, because they are yoked to a tandem political magic -- cheap for government and profitable for private companies.

Ethics Daily reported that the black Baptist organization "pledged to use the 2006 death of a 14-year-old African-American youth at a boot-camp style detention center to inspire new programs aimed at keeping young men out of trouble."

As Florida Social Justice Commission Chairman Walter Williams put it:

In spite of the pain we feel, we will not be traumatized to the extent that our silence be mistaken for social amnesia.

They're right in Florida, and for the sake of trouble teens still alive, we should follow their lead.

DNA-track children and prevent crime (libety)?

The British are debating an outstandingly unproductive, potentially destructive idea: DNA-tracking youngsters.

Our unproductive and sometimes murderous system of public and private teen Boot Camps came from Great Britain amid empirical warnings that they didn't work.

They still don't work, as the National Mental Health Assocation says unequivocally.

Yet we've enshrined Boot Camps as though they were a benevolent industry.

So I'm just a little bothered that another, at least equally bad British idea may eventually take root here.

Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) make it plain that a big chunk of law enforcement there is hungry for permission to put this brand of DNA profiling right to work.

Forces of British good sense are pushing back, as Roger Graef of The Guardian did in his blog The usual suspects: Listing at-risk children on the DNA database risks breeding anger, resentment and defiance.

Shami Chakrabarti director of the British civil rights group Liberty
takes a somewhat harder swing that the proposal, saying:

Targeting innocent children to expand the DNA database is the Government playing the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Any child who is stopped by police, even if under 10, can have his DNA taken and retained for life without being charged or cautioned.
If the Government wants a National DNA Database, they should say so and hold a public debate, not pick on our kids who can’t fight back.

I wonder how effective sound arguments will be against rightist efforts when our turn comes.

| boot_camps | british | dna | dna_tracking | teen_boot_camps | tough_love |

No immigrant crime wave

Date=May 1, 2006 |Author=Jonathan McIntosh |Permission=CC-BY-2.5

Here in North Carolina you'll find all the usual political rhetoric about immigrant-driven crime, and it's wrong.

It is morally wrong, or so I believe, because it fails to meet the "least of these" test.

We know, again yesterday, that it is scientifically wrong as well.

Reuters reports:

Robert Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard University who studied crime and immigration in 180 neighborhoods in Chicago over seven years, found that first-generation immigrants were 45 percent less likely to commit violent acts than third generation Americans.

"They" are once more not the primary problem here. Not even close. Sampson found in fact that during periods of immigration growth, crime rates fell:

Sampson also studied data from police records, the U.S Census and surveyed more than 8,000 Chicago residents. The study showed there was significant immigration growth, including illegal aliens-in the mid-1990s, peaking at the end of the decade.


But during that time the national homicide rate plunged. Crime also dropped in immigration hot spots, such as Los Angeles, where it fell 45 percent overall, San Jose, Dallas and Phoenix.

The data clearly says that political assaults on "them" are a distraction from the real causes of our nation's problems, and from the real solutions.

If we must have a stereotype about "them," we'll come very close to the truth by using phrases like "hard-working" and "law-abiding."

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Addendum: I see now (March 20, 11:30 a.m.) that Talk Left did a good job of addressing the same issue several hours before me.