One of the interesting aspects of the Treehouse is the international readership and how they contribute to our understanding of events. A recent link from a South African reader was sent to us outlining accuracy within a particular regional article was. So here it is:

[…] In South Africa, the signing man told the world, you don’t actually have to know what you are doing in order to get a job. You don’t have to have any ability whatsoever, as long as it looks, to most, as though you can go through the motions — whether you are a teacher, a police officer, a bureaucrat, a government official or (as some have suggested) a state president.
There are those who see through you and complain, but they are ignored. Ours is not a culture of accountability. So one gig leads to the next. You’ve done it before so you get to do it again, because everyone in a position of power agrees that the emperor’s new threads are stylish.
You stand there and tell us that the appearance of something becomes more important than the substance of it. Your obvious inability to do your job does not prevent you from getting ahead, until you reach the most prominent stage in the world, and then pretending suddenly isn’t enough. Too many people noticed — too many people who couldn’t just be dismissed because of their politics or race, which is how criticism is normally dealt with. (more…)

Denying the existence of evil does not protect you from it.

NEW YORK –  A Queens man broke his leg Thursday in a horrific, unprovoked daytime attack similar to a “knockout game” strike, the Daily News has learned.
Clifford Wong, 52, was leaving his job at a New York Lottery office in Harlem and was nearing his car on W. 126th St. near Lenox Ave. at about 2:30 p.m. when he saw a group of black teens watching him.
“Something didn’t feel right so I crossed the street,” he said. “I took a few steps and in an instant one guy was in front of me.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” the suspect — believed to be about 15 — asked before he and several of his pals started lobbing haymakers at him.
“Basically they were trying to aim at my face,” said Wong in an interview at Harlem Hospital Saturday. “I had my hands up, but they hit my nose.”
The goons pummeled Wong until he fell to the ground and then ran off. (more…)

HatTip to iOTW.  Who Shares –  The latest book by Jack Cashill uses the Zimmerman case to explain how the  left gins up a story in order to serve the narrative they need to create at the  time.
His insightful discussion on his book airs early tomorrow morning at  1:15 am on BookTV (CSPAN2).  I found the first 10 minutes of his  presentation on YouTube.  It’s an eye-opening peek at how the left created  the concept of Agitprop and how it is used today.
There is a 10 Minute Preview Available HERE – Jack Cashill argues that President Obama and the liberal media worked overtime to convince the public that George Zimmerman unlawfully killed Trayvon Martin on the night of February 26, 2012,, even though neither knew what really happened. He writes that Martin was a drug user and streetfighter who was legitimately confronted and shot by Zimmerman. Mr. Cashill spoke at the Platte County Resource Center in Kansas City, Missouri.

Peoria Local Media are shocked, shocked I tell ya, shocked. The mythical knock out assaults, they are programmed to deny exist, all of a sudden show up on their doorsteps. The video -available at the link- tells it all.  The answer to the obvious is “YES”.
Illinois – […]  Daniel Wilson says he was walking home last night from the bus stop on Harrison. When he got to Folkers Avenue across from Trewyn middle school, he was blind sided by two attackers.
Luckily for Wilson, a nearby youth program officer, an ELITE officer, Bill Cannon, was able to identify the attackers.
The victim says he’s shocked at who they were.
“I never thought in a million years that grade school students would try to knock me out,” said Wilson.   (read more with VIDEO REPORT)

We’ve been anticipating an increasing frequency of illegal immigration stories in the media headlines.   Examples specifically selected by the media to highlight a narrative portraying illegal aliens as “innocent victims”.    Consider it “The Dreamers 2.0” – only, on steroids.
We fully expect this narrative will be seeded through the upper echelon of leftist news outlets.   Upper tier media conglomerates, individual executive boards, owners and Hollywood working together with political connections to position storylines favorable to illegal alien sympathy.   
[We shall call this “Operation Brown Dream“] 
The “Brown Dream” strategy is intended to build momentum toward the upcoming State of The Union speech where President Obama will demand a comprehensive immigration reform agenda, including amnesty, for 2014.    The politics are strategically aligned to aid in the November mid-terms, but also to act as a distraction to Obamacare.   The Amnesty Bill will create anxiety and divide ranks – this allows the process to move forward and create a Win/Win.    Here’s one example: (more…)

Allow me to establish from the outset that what Rand Paul is trying is valiant, admirable, and needed.   However, simultaneously he is up against a massive institutional complex which has designed the architecture of dependency and need it to remain.

“It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system.
For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones.”  (link)

Some may dismiss what Rand Paul is actually trying to promote, I do not.
Beyond policy is something more important – engagement.
The greatest consideration a person or enterprise can give is the gift of understanding. As much as Rand Paul is offering policy suggestions to improve inner cities, he is engaged and listening.
However, one of the unfortunate realities he faces, which actually establishes the slope of the climb he is attempting, is the reality of dependency.
(more…)

Tampon Earring Lady was back on TV this weekend telling folks that if you say “ObamaCare” what you really mean is “Niggers”.  Yup, the word police is trying to make “Obamacare” as racist as Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches.  
It’s True. I can’t keep up.
(Via Daily Caller)  MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry suggested the term “Obamacare” and the N-word are interchangeable, claiming both were “conceived by a group of wealthy white men who needed to . . . render [a black man] inferior and unequal and diminish his accomplishments.”
Harris-Perry opened her show Sunday morning with a sober monologue on President Obama’s push to rebrand his failing healthcare law:

HARRIS-PERRY: “I want to talk today about a controversial word. It’s a word that has been with us for years. And like it or not, it’s indelibly printed in the pages of American history. A word that was originally intended as a derogatory term, meant to shame and divide and demean. The word was conceived of by a group of wealthy white men who needed a way to put themselves above and apart from a black man, to render him inferior and unequal and diminish his accomplishments. (more…)

The ironic thing is that Marcellus Jones is mostly correct.    If Marcellus “Ant North” Jones was actually seventeen,  instead of his current age of 35, his self identification could be considered highly appropriate.
Five Years ago Marcellus murdered a 23-year-old naïve, young and very white school teacher, Beau Zabel, who moved from Minnesota to Philadelphia to “make a difference by teaching black youth in the inner city”.   
White boy Zabel was murdered by Black-man, Marcellus Jones, because whitey only had an iPod and Jones was looking to jack  iPhones for reparations.     The Cracka’  was carrying the wrong gadget and that frustrated his robber – so Marcellus Jones shot him.

PHILADELPHIA – The suspected killer stewed in Interview Room D as detectives prepared charges against him in a crime that he could not escape – the five-year-old killing of Beau Zabel.
Marcellus Anthony “Ant North” Jones had been “mouthy,” as one detective put it, during Wednesday morning’s drive from Graterford Prison to Police Headquarters.
Investigators had retrieved Jones so they could book him in the 2008 killing of Zabel, a teaching student from Minnesota gunned down for his iPod near the Italian Market as he walked home from his night shift at a Starbucks.
The killing of a young man who had come to Philadelphia just six weeks earlier to teach math in the inner city pulled at the conscience of the community five years ago. (more…)

He’s nothing, if not predictable….  ‘Keep Hope A Lie’ !

WASHINGTON DC – Rev. Jesse Jackson said Sunday apartheid still exists in the United States as he reflected on Nelson Mandela’s effect on American politics.

“Apartheid remains. Apartheid gaps in poverty, healthcare and education. We’re in the middle of the end of the apartheid struggle now, but it’s just changed phases,” he said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”
“For almost 30 years, we had a lead jump on the right to vote and used that right to vote to empower allies in South Africa,” Jackson said. (more…)