U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time

While the budget deficit is slowly being reduced, the country's debt continues to climb out of control.

U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time

State Fair Race Riots

I find it awkward watching and listening to accounts of the state fair race riots from outlets clearly practicing revisionism. Some absorb and report watered-down police propaganda without challenge. They refer to the incidents as "Fair Fights". I'd like to know in which universe an assault is referred to as a fight.

Don't forget more than a week passed between the events and the news reports.

We know the assaults were done by one racial group and the victims were of another. When a group of similar racial makeup that bands together and travels to another neighborhood for the common goal of deliberately assaulting people of another racial makeup, that's racial violence. In fact it's a riot by any definition. Numerous witness accounts, backed by at least one police report, articulated scenes with knives, fists and chants of "beat white night", a racially-flavored nod to "east side night". Fact or fiction? I think the evidence is compelling enough for the media to report it in that way.

I've spend hours listening to, reading and watching the evidence and I'm convinced that we have an issue that is hate-based and morally deprived -- and not one to which adding five squad cars is the appropriate police response.

Hate is primal and no "conversation" will quel the anger. What fuels this violence is not as important as the resolve with which it is met. We must put a brick wall between the attackers and the innocent population. We must smack down the agressors swiftly and painfully.

Police Chief Judy Bradshaw says the violence was random and unplanned, adding (after prompting from one reporter) that things just "got out of hand". These members of the community would be well advised to remember whose interests they're indentured to serve.

People want to spend too much time analyzing the root causes. I don't care who hates who enough to cause the violence. You can have conversations and discuss all you like, but when someone's rights are violated, we, the members of this community, must compel an end to it quickly and effectively, by whatever means or force necessary.

To the leaders: end the crime now and worry about feeling good about yourselves later.

Des Moines Police investigating one of its own

Reginald White was arrested for his involvement in the Aug 14 state fair riots. "Reggie" White is a Hoover basketball player, along with Dwight Sistrunk, whose mother is Lillie Miller-Sistrunk, Des Moines' first African-American female police sergeant, who asked White's arresting officer to reduce his felony charges (assault with injury) to a misdemeanor and be released. When the arresting officer declined that request, Miller stated she'd bond White out herself, which we've
now learned she subsequently did.