THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Updates To Previous Posts
† Al Sharpton: Where’s His Beef?: The Rev. Al Sharpton’s non-profit civil rights organization, National Action rakes in big bucks from Anheuser-Busch, Colgate-Palmolive, PepsiCo – its corporate “donors” include 50 of the biggest multinational corporations in the world. The New York Post describes Sharpton’s pitch for “donations”:
A General Motors spokesman told The Post that NAN had repeatedly - and unsuccessfully - asked for contributions for six years, beginning in August 2000.
Then, in December 2006, Sharpton threatened to call a boycott of the carmaker over the closing of an African-American-owned GM dealership in The Bronx, and he picketed outside GM headquarters on Fifth Avenue.
Last year, General Motors gave NAN a $5,000 donation. It gave $5,000 more this year, a spokesman said, calling NAN a "worthy" organization.
The “pitch” – some call it a shakedown – works, writes The Post, because “[t]errified of negative publicity, fearful of a consumer boycott or eager to make nice with the civil-rights activist, CEOs write checks, critics say, to NAN and Sharpton - who brandishes the buying power of African-American consumers.”
Some companies go even further to appease Sharpton and hire him as a “consultant.”
But the gravy train may be derailed by a grand-jury investigation of NAN's finances launched by the Brooklyn D.A. going back to 2004 when Sharpton was an erstwhile presidential candidate – NAN was already under scrutiny by NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for failure to follow financial-disclosure regulations for nonprofits – and now the IRS is churning out numerous subpoenas to the group’s “most generous corporate donors,” reports The Post - including Anheuser-Busch, which “donated between $100,000 and $499,000 to NAN in 2007 alone, according to its Web site, but declined further comment about its relationship with Sharpton.”
The Post also notes, “Personally, Sharpton owes $931,397 in federal taxes and $365,558 in New York City taxes, according to an IRS lien.”
The demonstration at on Route 1 was coordinated by the Traditional Values Coalition, a church lobbying group that accuses the school of using textbooks that teach children to kill.
A recent study by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom found that some of the school's textbooks say it is permissible for Muslims to kill adulterers and converts from Islam.
"These children are being taught to hate," Andrea Lafferty, the coalition's executive director, said in an interview after the protest, during which demonstrators waved signs saying "Honk to Stop Islamic Terrorism" and "This Saudi School Is Anti-Semitic and Anti-Christian."
Meanwhile, Star Tribune (Minneapolis-St. Paul) columnist Katherine Kersten, who wrote about the goings on at the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA) - a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights, MN, that is in the same building as a mosque the Muslim American Society of Minnesota headquarters – asked in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “At what point does a publicly funded charter school with strong Islamic ties cross the line and inappropriately promote religion?”:
After my columns appeared, the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union began an investigation, which is still underway. The Minnesota Department of Education also investigated. Its report, released last month, concluded that the school is breaking the law …
Imagine a public charter located in the headquarters building of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Its principal is a priest and its board chairman is the archbishop … Latin is required, and the cafeteria serves fish during Lent. Students break for prayer and attend Mass during the school day, and buses leave only when after-school Catholic Catechism classes are over. Such a school would never open.
But … Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy … [is] held up as a model, "religiously sensitive" public school. It is justified in terms of culture and "religious accommodation."
Minnesota education officials need both the backbone and the oversight tools necessary to prevent the blurring of lines between Islam and the public schools.
Kersten predicts that if the state department of education doesn’t act decisively to shut the madrassa down, “a separate system of taxpayer-financed education for Muslims may take root here. Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy could be the first of many.”
† Can The Nutrition Police Lay Off Coffee, Already?: Good news for java junkies: A Spanish study that followed 84,214 American women and 41,736 men for 24 years and 18 years, respectively, found that drinking up to six cups of coffee daily may reduce the risk of dying from heart disease, reports Reuters. A recent article in New York Magazine lists more benefits of coffee and/or caffeine:
In the early 1980s, a spate of negative health studies left caffeine with a particularly awful reputation. Reports linked the drug with breast lumps, pancreatic cancer, and birth defects. All of these findings were later discredited, though not before a sort of golden age of decaf came and went. Since then, considerable evidence has been compiled showing that moderate amounts of caffeine, and coffee in particular, can actually be good for you.
Studies touting newly discovered benefits of coffee and caffeine are published every few weeks. (April 8, 2008, bulletin: Caffeine may help prevent autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis.) Drinking moderate amounts of coffee is believed to slash rates of Parkinson’s disease, inhibit the formation of gallstones, and ward off cirrhosis. It may help prevent Alzheimer’s. Caffeine relieves asthma symptoms by acting as a bronchodilator. Researchers who fed mice caffeinated water found that the animals were less likely to develop skin cancer. One large-scale study showed that a person’s suicide risk decreased with each cup of coffee consumed per day, up to seven cups (notably, though, eight cups or more was shown in a separate study to increase the risk substantially). Caffeine is probably not as bad a diuretic as it’s reputed to be; many nutritionists now believe that a cup of coffee hydrates people about as well as a cup of water. The doctors Mehmet Oz and Michael Roizen, authors of the popular You: The Owner’s Manual series, recommend downing 24 ounces of coffee daily. Another study showed that a serving of coffee has more antioxidants than a serving of either grape juice or blueberries.
In fact, just getting a whiff of coffee beans is enough to alter brain activity, according to a paper published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry. In the study, adult male rats “stressed” with sleep restriction and those not similarly stressed were exposed to coffee bean aroma. When researchers examined the rats’ brains they found that in the sleep-deprived animals coffee aroma altered the activity of 17 genes in the brain, changing levels of antioxidant proteins that protect nerve cells from stress-related damage, reports ScienceDaily.
† Updates To Previous Posts (Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II): In an effort to make it easier to compare graduation rates amongst states or even schools in a single district, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings proposed new rules that require states to assign students unique ID numbers to be able to follow them from ninth grade through graduation, or until they drop out, reports The Associated Press. The proposal will be implemented om all 50 states by the 2013-14 school year.
Comments