Turkey's Erdogan sues opposition leader over dictator remark

Turkey is not a free country as its Islamist president proves.

From Reuters:

Lawyers for Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan filed a lawsuit against the main opposition leader on Monday for implying that Erdogan was a dictator, presidential sources and the opposition party said.

Erdogan, Turkey's most popular politician, is known for his intolerance of criticism and his readiness to take legal action over perceived slurs. Last week he urged prosecutors to investigate scores of academics for signing a declaration criticizing military action in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey.

"Academics who express their opinions have been detained one by one on instructions given by a so-called dictator," Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu said on Saturday, referring to the petition's signatories, who oppose the military crackdown on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and have urged an end to curfews.

"You may not agree with the content of the declaration. We also have issues with it, we also have our disagreements. But why limit freedom of speech?" Kilicdaroglu said in comments to his party's congress in Ankara.

Chiraq: 4 dead and at least 24 wounded over weekend

Douglas Park

The return of bitter cold didn't do much to calm people in Chicago. In shootings across the city four people were murdered and at last 24 others were wounded.

Shootings in the new year are up more than 200 percent from 2015.

Stay home instead: Russian tourists eager to replace Turkey and Egypt with Iran says the Tehran Times

It used to be said of Russia that is wasn't a country, it was a world.

Why don't the Russians just stay home then.

From the Tehran Times:

Russian tourists are eager to replace Turkey and Egypt with Iran, the deputy head of the Cultural Heritage, Tourism, and Handicraft Organization of Iran, Morteza Rahmani-Movahhed, said.

With flights to Egypt banned on November 14 and a de-facto ban on selling package tours to Turkey in place from November 24, Russians’ two preferred destinations in the first half of 2015 were canceled.

Rahmani-Movahhed travelled to Moscow last week to discuss further cooperation in the field of tourism between the two countries.

Iran has a Cultural Heritage, Tourism, and Handicraft Organization department? Handicraft?

CPS doesn't know what happened to stuff from 50 closed schools

Disney II Magnet School
Northwest Side

My guess is that the missing items were stolen and then fenced. CPS bonds are rated as junk. They need every penny they can get.

From the Better Government Association and the Chicago Sun-Times:

Two years after Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed a record 50 schools over low enrollment, officials say they don't know where many of the computers, desks, books and other items from those buildings ended up.

After being pressed for more than six months on what happened to the classroom equipment, Chicago Public Schools officials now say they don’t have an answer.

They blame bad record-keeping under Barbara Byrd-Bennett, Emanuel's disgraced former schools chief, who awaits sentencing after pleading guilty in October to steering millions of dollars in CPS contracts to her former employer in exchange for what prosecutors said were promises of kickbacks.

"BBB" previously worked for Detroit's deeply troubled public school system. On the other hand, bureaucrats are adept at shifting blame to someone else. There are many other crooks working for CPS.

Related post:

Bankruptcy? Detroit Public Schools could be next

From Da Tech Guy: You’re Iran. You take hostages. It’s what you do.

You've seen those GEICO commercials, right? From my weekly post at Da Tech Guy: You're Iran. You take hostages. It's what you do.

(Video) Hillary dodges on whether Rahm should quit

Watch as Hillary Clinton not answer Chuck Todd's query as to whether Rahm Emanuel should resign over the Laquan McDonald shooting and the coverup.

Michael Moore says Flint water crisis is intentional

Lake Huron

Always one to play loose with the facts, left-wing rabble-rouser Michael Moore, who wrongly claims to have grown up in Flint, Michigan, returned to his "hometown" today as the rust belt town copes with a drinking water lead poisoning crisis.

Moore claimed today that the Flint water debacle was intentional.

The background--Yes, this will take a while: Since 2011 Flint has been run by an emergency manager appointed by Republican governor Rick Snyder. In essence because of malfeasance Flint is in receivership. Three years ago in a 7-1 vote the City Council voted to get its drinking water from a new pipeline endeavor and stop buying it from Detroit, although the water would still come from Lake Huron. But Detroit, which at the time was also run by an emergency manager, told Flint it would stop the flow of water to Flint within several months. But because the new Lake Huron pipeline wouldn't be ready for a few years, Flint was compelled to get its water from the Flint River.

Almost immediately after the switch to the river water in 2014 there were taste and odor complaints about the water, and four months into the river era the was a boil order because of high fecal coliform counts in the water.

Last fall it was discovered that the water, because it wasn't properly treated for road salt runoff into the river, was corroding the lead-soldered pipes of Flint and this was causing high levels of lead in the blood of children.

Horrible stuff--and the worst part is we may not know the damage to the children for years. And lead poisoning is irreversible--it can cause mental retardation among other things.

And there have been ten recent fatalities in Flint from Legionnaires' disease, although the link to the river water has not been established.

Back to Michael Moore: "This is not a mistake," he barked in Flint today. "Ten people have been killed here because of a political decision. They did this. They knew."

Moore also said that the water infrastructure of Flint "has been destroyed by the governor of this state." Remember, Snyder is a Republican.

Hey Moore: Not a mistake? Killed because of a political decision? Moore of course brings up that Flint is a majority African American city and it has very high levels of poverty.

Gross incompetence does not equal intentional, Moore. Shut up.

Flint has been using Detroit-supplied water since October but the pipes in Flint haven't changed.

(Photo) Snow covered gravestones in Skokie, Illinois

Two days after the most recent snowfall in 2016 this is how St. Peter's United Church of Christ Cemetery in Skokie, Illinois looked.

The Obama presidency explained in one photograph

On the day President Obama gave his last State of the Union address, our enemies in Iran seized 10 United States sailors who they claimed drifted into their waters.

They Islamo-supremacist state released photograph or our national humiliation, including this one.

And Obama didn't even mention this incident during his address.

The state of the union is not sound.

A day later when the sailors were released Secretary of State John Kerry thanked the mullahs for releasing the Americans they kidnapped.

Buddhist monk donated entire $36K for California Reagan statue

Yes, the Republican Party is the party of diversity.

From the Orange County Register:

When Orange County Supervisor Andrew Do arranged for a bronze statue of Ronald Reagan to be installed at Mile Square Regional Park in Fountain Valley last year, he listed the sculpture’s donor as anonymous, raising questions about secrecy and propriety.

Do’s office released the donor's identity last summer as Thich Chon Thanh, chief abbot of the Lien Hoa Temple in Garden Grove.

Chon Thanh, a Buddhist monk, said he donated all of the $36,000 needed for the 6-foot-tall statue and its new 5-foot-tall foundation because "President Reagan is a Superman all over the world."

Chon Thanh, born Thu Van Nguyen, grew up in the south of Vietnam. He moved to Japan in 1970 to study Buddhism, and has never visited his home country since.

If communism is gone from Vietnam, Thanh says he'll consider returning there.

Related posts:

• Report from Tampico, Illinois on Reagan's 100th birthday
• Marathon Pundit's Ronald Reagan Trail