Folks from away moved here by the bus load and wanted to do things their way. Now Charlotte has become a haven for welfare cheats, corporate scammers and illegal immigrants.
The elected and appointed geniuses now running this once wonderful place to live, have not enough sense to know their ass from a hole in the ground or to sense when they are being sold a "pig in a poke".
Our middle class is fleeing and soon what will be left will be pockets of prosperity among a blanket of despair.
The White House admitted a major faux pas was made when President Obama snubbed the people of France and basically the entire world.
"I think it’s fair to say that we should have sent someone with a higher profile to be there,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters, Monday. “We here at the White House should have made a different decision,” he added, though he insisted the president was not consulted personally on the decision.
Seventeen people died in Paris last week when Islamist terrorists attacked the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people, and a kosher supermarket, killing four; a police officer was also shot dead by the man who attacked the supermarket.
But the Obama administration is so dysfunctional that US secretary of state, John Kerry, at the same time dismissed concerns about the conspicuous absence of US politicians among other world leaders at the march in honour of the victims as “quibbling”
So who stood with Charlie? Who stood with France? Who are the world leaders who joined French President Francois Hollande?
For starters, British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Foreign Ministers from Japan, South Africa, Ireland, and Australia.
Mali's President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, European Council President Donald Tusk, Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and Switzerland's President Simonetta Sommaruga.
Richmond Mayor Dwight Jones held a press conference on Friday officially announcing that Police Chief Ray Tarasovic will retire again next month.
Tarasovic a one time side kick to CMPD Chief Rodney Monroe, served in a civilian capacity in Charlotte but returned to Richmond and became chief of police in 2013.
Mayor Jones offered kind words regarding Tarasovic: “You’ve carried yourself like a young man: energetic, enthusiastic, committed and interested,” Mayor Jones said about the police chief. “He has had the community at the very heart of his work and I think that he has done a fine job.”
Tarasovic, who worked under Monroe, in Richmond retired from the RPD in 2008. Mayor Jones brought Tarasovic, 66, out of retirement and hired him as chief in February 2013.
Tarasovic said the decision to leave was not an easy one.
“There’s a lot of selfishness in this decision to leave. I want to begin the next part of my life. I want to be a better husband a better father and a better grandfather,” Tarasovic said. “These two years have been the most gratifying and rewarding of my career.”
While the city planned to post the police chief job opening, the mayor indicated he did not want to hire someone who planned to change direction. He said he anticipated being able to promote from within the Richmond Police Department.
“Whoever is going to be our chief has got to have a strong commitment to community policing. I might venture to say that we have not had some of the problems that other cities have had because of our connection to the community,” Jones said. “We are not looking to change courses, we are looking to make sure that we continue the same kind of progress that we have. And those persons are on the team. So that’s what we are looking to do, to keep this good thing going.”
The mayor conceded while homicides were up last year, all other city crimes stats were down. The mayor also said he would be opened to putting body cameras on Richmond Police officers.
How about you indict black culture, hateful rap lyrics that promote killing cops, fathers who abandon their sons and brag about how many baby's mommas they have to support.
Why don't you indict a nation that accepts African Americans short comings and gives them welfare over justice and equality.
Indict Sharpton and Jackson who scream for equality while they drive their Mercedes and fly in their private jets to create more hate.
Indict a mindset that says cops deserve no respect and that acting up and mouthing off will keep you from being arrested (has that ever worked).
Indict a lifestyle of lying, thieving and posting Facebook photos of your mugshots like they are some sort of badge of honor.
And finally indict the main stream media who play fast and loose with the facts, and fail to point out that the Garner grand jury was randomly selected from the citizens of the State of New York, and that no doubt each of the 23 members of the grand jury had seen the video of Eric Garner's arrest and death, and still knowing that it only took a simple majority to indict the NYPD Officer saw that facts did not warrant an indictment.
Indict a President who refuses to say, stop resisting arrest, stop being noncompliant, stop saying Fuck The Police, stop acting like animals.
"Hands - Up, Don't - Shoot" is a myth perpetuated by mainstream media. Mike Brown did not have his hands up.
The myth continues with Eric Garner's "chokehold death" again perpetuated by MSM. A recent CNN piece on the Eric Garner grand jury decision, starts by saying "Eric Garner initially has his hands up" which is utter bull shit, unless you count wild gesturing as holding your hands up.
Garner died as police tried to arrest him, but his death was not caused by the chokehold, but rather his own weight, being forced to lie face down and another officer lying on top of him.
The officer who applied the chokehold released Eric Garner from the chokehold after less than 20 seconds, once he was down and rolled on to his stomach. But the other officers failed understand that Garner's diaphram was no match for his 400 pounds and the added weight of one or more officers who where on top of him.
And then there is the myth of the war on young black Americans and that a racist white government is condoning the killing of blacks by white police officers.
"Michael Brown’s death on August 9 was a nationwide wake-up call to the death-by-cop of young minority men at the hands of law enforcement." Claims a New York Times sub headline.
But according to FBI data stretching from 1999 to 2011, African Americans have comprised only 26 percent of all police-shooting victims.
Since Brown’s death, at least 14 other teenagers have been killed by law enforcement in a variety of circumstances. But only six of them were African Americans.
This is the photo used over and over again to illustrate the death of Eric Garner, but this chokehold didn't kill the man.
The attention first daughters Sasha and Malia get over their lack of ceremonial decorum as the father pardons a couple of turkeys, is not surprising or new. This sort of uproar has been going on at the White House for decades.
Democrats were aghast when the Ford White House released a series of photos showing then teen daughter Susan Ford washing her car at the White House complete with barely there shorts and bare feet.
By the way - The GOP would be wise to draft Susan Ford Bales for President in 2016. She's a die hard republican from a well liked presidential family, attractive, smart and lacking the baggage that comes with every other possible GOP contender.
She could very easily become the new face of the GOP that so desperately needs an image makeover.
I'm going to miss the "Cactus" call sign.
US Airways adopted Cactus with the merger of America West, who used the western symbol to avoid confusion with American.
Next year the US Airways logo will join these iconic logos of aviation past.
US Airways
Piedmont
Allegheny
Ozark
Trans Caribbean
Reno Air
Air Cal
Mohawk
Lake Central
PSA
America West
TWA
And so it goes....
A few weeks ago I banged out a half dozen tweets (twitter rant) after seeing 2 near pedestrian vs car accidents within a quarter mile of each other. The victim in each case, a CMS Middle School student trying to cross speeding traffic on South Charlotte's Pineville - Matthews Road (Highway 51 to Native Charloteans).
Main stream media types fail to take notice of such things, unless of course there is the dead body of a 14 year old lying in the road.
Case in point, Park Road where there were no crosswalks or signals until a South Meck freshman was struck and killed while trying to cross the street several years ago.
Even though main stream media types including WCNC's Dianna Rugg blew it off my direct appeal as not newsworthy, South Charlotte Weekly's Ryan Pitkin saw the need to spotlight my concerns.
His in depth look at the situation follows in part here:
Students At A Crossroad
Ryan Pitkin October 31, 2014
Five middle-school-aged children and three adults peer down Pineville-Matthews Road as westbound traffic barrels by at 50 miles per hour. It’s nearing 4 p.m. and traffic levels are starting to increase.
(Note: on the afternoon CP saw two students nearly hit while trying to cross highway 51 they were on their own, with no parents in sight.)
When given a wide enough gap, the entire group walks to the median, which consists of about four feet of concrete. They wait together a few minutes longer before crossing the two lanes of eastbound traffic. This game of “Frogger,” as one parent calls it, is a daily thing for these families.
The kids are students at South Charlotte Middle School (SCMS), which is tucked behind a daycare at the intersection of Strawberry Lane and Pineville-Matthews Road. The subdivisions they live in are just a three-minute walk from the school, save for the minutes spent waiting for traffic to zoom by before giving them a chance to cross the dangerous road.
Susan Slade, a resident of the Alexsis subdivision and mother of a seventh-grader at SCMS, spent nearly two years contacting the Charlotte Department of Transportation (CDOT) and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) to advocate for road projects that would ensure the safety of children in her neighborhood.
After hitting a wall of red tape from government agencies and not hearing anything back from the school system, Slade became discouraged and is now skeptical any such project will come. She and her neighbors rotate turns, acting as a walking carpool, to meet their children on the south side of the highway and help bring them back home safely.
“I come out here because I’m a parent,” Slade said. “A lot of kids are impulsive. They want to get across safely but sometimes they just don’t make good decisions. They will do these dashing efforts, and sometimes they can’t anticipate a car’s speed. It’s just a bad scene.”
Although there is a crosswalk across Pineville-Matthews Road from Strawberry Lane, no students from the Alexsis or nearby Windswept subdivisions use it because it does not lead to their neighborhoods. Kids who use the crosswalk would walk through grass that slopes toward the highway and is often either muddy or covered in a green dye applied by the nearby golf course.
Parents have decided that crossing closer to their own neighborhood was safer, as the existing crosswalk is at the top of a slope for westbound drivers and the lack of a school zone on Pineville-Matthews Road means most drivers have no reason to slow down as they approach the intersection.
School zones are placed according to the school’s “frontage,” meaning the pieces of property that face the street. SCMS’s only frontage is on Strawberry Lane, and that’s where the school zone lies.
SCMS hired crossing guards on Strawberry Lane in the past to help children who live in the Raintree neighborhood cross safely, but the number of kids crossing to Alexsis and Windswept is comparatively low, and no crossing guard has been employed to help children cross Pineville-Matthews Road.
SCMS administration did not return calls by South Charlotte Weekly’s press deadline.
Kevin Earp, director of safety for CMS, said that a bus is available for residents of Alexsis or Windswept, if requested. Parents have said they don’t consider using the bus, which comes more than an hour before they would normally leave for class to take them one-fifth of a mile to school.
Parents have been told the relatively low amount of foot traffic between the school and the small neighborhoods on the north side of Pineville-Matthews Road is also a reason a crosswalk will probably not be placed in front of the subdivisions.
The rest of Ryan's article is here: http://www.thecharlotteweekly.com/news/2014/10/students-at-a-crossroad/
A little Halloween Tale without the macabre horror.
There’s a small bay on the Maryland side of the Potomac River, 30 miles south of Washington, D.C., that is an eerie final resting place for hundreds of ships. More than 230 were scuttled here, and most of them were never put into service.
In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson rallied the nation to join World War I. Germany’s submarine offensive was fearsome, and the United States was woefully unprepared.
To counter the Kaiser’s forces, the nation would have to launch the greatest shipbuilding program in history; 1,000 wooden steamships would need to be built within 18 months. Each vessel in the fleet would be 240 to 300 feet, the total built from 1.5 million board feet of yellow pine or Douglas fir.
On Dec. 1, 1917, the first ship was launched in the Pacific. Almost a year later, only 134 wooden steamships had been built and 263 were less than half-finished. When Germany surrendered, a grand total of zero had crossed the Atlantic.
A congressional inquiry soon followed. Vessels were alleged to have been poorly designed, the construction was shoddy and the boats leaked. Years of debate followed about what to do with the obsolete armada. After many twists and turns, the wooden fleet was towed to Mallows Bay and torched.
You can visit Mallows Bay today by kayak and see the eerie remains of the largest shipwrecked fleet in the Western Hemisphere. It has been nominated to become a National Marine Sanctuary.
For much more on this spooky story, read Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay and Other Tales of the Lost Chesapeake by Donald G. Shomette.
A search of Mallows Bay on Google Earth might also be in order.
GDid you get one of these bogus bills for The Charlotte Observer last week?
Of course it is a scam, but the interesting twist is they got my name from the Business Journal!
Seems the CBJ sold this this scammer my name!
You see my CBJ subscription has this odd little typo unique only to that once a week bit of USPS Mail!
Which prompts me to say WTF ( well that's funny)!
