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Alleged Iraqi sleeper agent/naturalized citizen arrested

From the WaPo:

An Iraqi-born man was arrested yesterday for allegedly lying on his application to become a naturalized U.S. citizen and failing to disclose that he was a member of the former Iraqi intelligence service.

Sami Khoshaba Latchin, 57, pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court in Chicago to making false statements to immigration officials in July 1999.

The charges relate to his application for citizenship, on which he failed to include Saddam Hussein's Baath Party when asked to list organizations to which he belonged, according to the indictment.

He also did not disclose that he had been a member of the Iraqi intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, for five years before July 22, 1999, and he told immigration authorities that three overseas trips he made between 1994 and 1997 were vacations. The indictment alleges that he took the trips abroad to meet his handler and receive payment for his services.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 09:36 PM | Comments (0)

"GOP Immigration Idiocy In Illinois"

As you may recall, before choosing Alan Keyes to run against Barack Obama, the IL GOP held a ludicrous search for a candidate. About the only person they didn't consider was Chitown's own Bozo the Clown. Eventually they settled on Alan Keyes, who now trails Obama by a whopping 41 points.

At the time, the story that failed to gain any traction was that there was a perfectly good challenger available and he even lived in the state in question: Jim Oberweis. He finished second in the primary behind Jack Ryan.

So, why wasn't Oberweis picked? Because he made the mistake of opposing illegal immigration and criticizing Bush's amnesty plan. Imagine that! A legislator who wanted to uphold our laws? Imagine the scandal.

The article "GOP Immigration Idiocy In Illinois" has the scoop, and it includes this bit that I didn't know before:

Hastert didn’t attend Keyes’ announcement because he was busy lying during his appearance on NBC’s "Meet the Press." Hastert said that he personally worked for five weeks to find homegrown replacement for Ryan but "couldn’t find any takers."

See also "Illinois’ Oberweis: “Bush Runs Tight Ship On Immigration.” But It’s Sinking", which includes an interview with Oberweis:

No other conclusion can be drawn: George W. Bush’s Republican Party is more willing to take a licking in crucial November Senate elections than to allow its candidates to discuss illegal immigration.

Nationwide, there are at least three such cases—New York, California and Illinois. In all three, the Republican challenge is so feeble that the incumbents are essentially running unopposed...

[Oberweis says:] "Individuals interested in the Senate job were told to submit a paragraph to the Central Committee outlining their credentials. Those credentials would be reviewed and those candidates considered qualified would be invited to make a presentation to the Committee.

"I submitted a paragraph and never heard a word. Keyes never submitted anything and he’s running for Senate."

Posted to Immigration2004 at 09:28 PM | Comments (0)

"If 250,000 New York Driver's Licenses Do Not Match Social Security Data, How Many Voters are Illegally Registered?"

That's what FAIR wants to know:

In light of recent revelations that New York Department of Motor Vehicles has issued as many as 250,000 driver's licenses to individuals who provided Social Security numbers that do not match information in the Social Security Administration's database, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is calling upon the state's Board of Elections to conduct a county by county review of voter rolls. Under the Motor Voter law, it is reasonable to "assume that large numbers of individuals have also been unlawfully registered to vote," state FAIR in a formal demand letter to Board of Elections Chair Carole Berman...

Posted to Immigration_dls at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)

Bootius to the Maximus!

Irony? Trying to pull the readers? #4, you're the dickens!

There are Serena Williams galleries here and here. Here's a picture with her legs slightly spread. Wider! And, who can forget this classic booty shot?

Posted to WackyHumor at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

"Immigration issue yanked off GOP agenda"

Newsday has a report similar to, but not as good as, the one in the previous post:

Even as Michael Bloomberg heralded New York's diversity Monday, President George W. Bush's controversial plan to put in place a temporary worker program is getting no major billing at the Republican National Convention.

The party's platform that was formally adopted by delegates at the Republican National Convention Monday briefly mentions Bush's call for granting temporary legal status to millions of undocumented workers. The proposal, viewed by many as a bid to woo growing ranks of Hispanic voters, met fierce opposition from party conservatives almost immediately.

"It seems very clear to us that the White House got the message. There just does not seem to be very much of an appetite there to pursue this," said John Kelley, a spokesman for the Center for Immigration Studies, a non-partisan think tank on immigration issues. "Is any single speaker going to mention the "I" word? I don't think so."

...In unveiling his proposal on Jan. 7 to kick off the election year, Bush gave no details and urged Congress to come up with specific legislation. The White House has since done little to advance the issue.

Apparently Newsday hasn't been watching the news. The Bush administration has made its generally Open Borders positions quite clear, even if it hasn't stressed the amnesty plan.

UPDATE: See also the Denver Post's "Unbowed, Tancredo keeps pushing immigration issue". It includes this double helping of Kool-Aid flavored doublespeak:

"The Republican Party is our nation's majority party and represents individuals with many different ideologies," said Danny Lopez Diaz, Bush campaign spokesman for the Southwest region. "The president's ... balanced approach to reform will help create a safe, humane, orderly and legal program that meets homeland security needs and that of our 21st-century economy."

It's also opposed by the great majority of American citizens, but who are they to complain?

Posted to Immigration2004 at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)

The Topic that can't be mentioned

TNR has the scoop on Tom Tancredo's failed attempt to get something about immigration into the GOP platform:

You would think that as a member of Congress, Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo would enjoy special privileges at this convention. And, for the most part, you'd be right: Tancredo has invitations to lots of parties; he has access to the convention floor. But, in one very important respect, Tancredo is just like the rest of us: He's totally in the dark as to who served on the Republican platform committee. And there's no privilege Tancredo would like more than that one...

Not surprisingly, Tancredo had hoped that this year's Republican platform would include some of his immigration reform proposals. And when the platform committee met last week to craft the document--to be ratified by delegates at the convention--Tancredo put forth three immigration-related amendments: one calling on states to refuse to grant drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants; the second opposing amnesty for illegal aliens already in the United States; and the third opposing an agreement with Mexico granting Mexicans in the United States, including those here illegally, access to the U.S. Social Security system. Just as quickly as Tancredo proposed them, the platform committee voted down all three amendments.

This essentially spelled the end to Tancredo's hopes of having a strong immigration reform plank in the GOP platform, but he did have one last hope: a floor fight at the convention...

...This latter route seemed doable to Tancredo, save for one problem: The congressman couldn't find out who, exactly, was on the platform committee. Running the platform process with all the discipline and secrecy that's come to be expected from the Bush White House, the RNC, citing security concerns, refused to divulge the identities of the handpicked delegates who served on the platform committee--even, in some cases, to other members of the platform committee...

Posted to Immigration2004 at 05:39 PM | Comments (1)

It wouldn't be a protest without Susan "Medea" Benjamin getting arrested

Yep, she did it again.

Since there are no permalinks at this site, let's try this play-by-play account:

Tuesday 31 August 2004

4:10PM: Medea Benjamin has just been arrested, and the crowd is turning very ugly...

4:20PM: Medea Benjamin has been taken away, and the crowd is swelling. The buzz of violence seems to have dissipated for the moment...

4:50PM: Medea Benjamin has been released, is shaken up, but is OK.

Whew! As a special bonus, they have a video interview with Medea.

Previous Medea coverage starts here.

(Via TalkLeft)

Posted to ThePeaceMovement at 05:18 PM | Comments (1)

Arnold will veto the illegal alien driver's license bill

So says Dan Weintraub:

The latest rumor racing around the talk radio circuit is that Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, acting governor while Schwarzenegger is in New York, will sign SB 1160, the bill giving drivers licenses to illegal immigrants. It's not going to happen, folks...

[Schwarzenegger's] Communications Director Rob Stutzman, speaking on KTKZ radio this morning, says his boss fully intends to veto the bill and won't let anyone else get their hands on it before he does so.

Posted to Immigration_dls at 11:56 AM | Comments (1)

Fanboys and fangirls at the [other] convention

Earlier I said the blogger coverage of the DNC sucked. Then, I said it again, only that time I tried unsuccessfully to solicit a large mass of questions the bloggers could ask of delegates, politicians, and street people.

Look, it's not that I'm disinterested in Miss Americas, but I - and hopefully many other people - would be interested in bloggers who attempt to ask a few slightly uncomfortable questions, gently ruffle a few feathers, get a scoop, make some news, represent the average voter, that kinda thing.

UPDATE: Salon weighs in. Although their commentary might seem similar to mine, the difference is I'm not a humorless liberal prat.

Posted to Bloggage at 10:26 PM | Comments (0)

TalkLeft, deep end; deep end, TalkLeft

Sure there have been warning signs, but TalkLeft seems to have officially gone off the deep end:

Guiliani: Could You Just Gag?

If anyone is the personnificaton of the opposite of freedom, it's former federal prosecutor and Mayor Rudy Guiliani. Herr Guiliani is a more apt name for him...

Posted to Bloggage at 10:18 PM | Comments (1)

Spawn of Rall

8/30/04 NYT:

Outside a hotel in Times Square, delegates to the Republican National Convention were swarmed by protesters dressed in black and swearing at them. Blocks away, delegates engaged in shoving matches with protesters seeking to spoil their night at the theater. And outside "The Lion King" on 42nd Street, a delegate was punched by a protester who ran by.

Although the organized protests yesterday and Sunday have been largely peaceful, there has been a starkly different tone to smaller incidents in Midtown and elsewhere: angry encounters and planned harassment of convention delegates as they go out on the town.

When marchers approached the Garden, a police detective was knocked off his scooter. He was then repeatedly kicked and punched in the head by at least one male demonstrator, the police said.

The detective, William Sample, was listed in serious condition...

As delegate buses arrived at the Garden yesterday afternoon, protesters who had gathered for a demonstration screamed obscenities and gestured rudely at them...

Outside "Bombay Dreams" demonstrators shouted at and videotaped people standing outside for intermission.

At "Aida," a group of protesters unfurled a banner and hurled invective at delegates leaving the show. Some looked nervous, but a few shouted back, "You're sick, sick."

8/19/04 Ted Rall, at "Common Dreams":

Tourists are pleasantly surprised when New Yorkers act as friendly and polite as the people back home in Mayberry. However, delegates to this month's Republican National Convention shouldn't expect to be treated to our standard out-of-towner treatment. The Republican delegates here to coronate George W. Bush are unwelcome members of a hostile invading army. Like the hapless saps whose blood they sent to be spilled into Middle Eastern sands, they will be given intentionally incorrect directions to nonexistent places. Objects will be thrown in their direction. Children will call them obscene names. They will not be greeted as liberators...

Indeed.

Posted to Politics at 09:29 PM | Comments (0)

Everything the NYT thinks is wrong

The NYT editorial "A Platform for Immigrants" supports the "original" Bush plan for immigration "reform." In so doing, they get so many things wrong it's hard to know where to begin. As a first start, let's examine this paragraph:

Anybody who has watched the Republicans wrestling with this explosive issue this year knew it would be difficult to please both the Republican moderates who realize that the system is "broken" - as Mr. Bush put it in January - and ideologues like Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado, who has not only opposed easing rules for undocumented workers but has even favored a "time out'' on legal immigration. Mr. Bush will gain more support in that wider middle ground if he sticks with his original proposal to mend the immigration system and begins supporting bipartisan proposals in Congress.

The system is "broken" only in so far as we've become unable and unwilling to enforce our own laws. The so-called "fix" will just make the problem worse. We need to return to first principles and enforce the law before talking about any "reforms."

Also, the "wider middle ground" is a lot narrower and farther off to either side than the NYT's myopic Manhattan vision could understand:

[Tancredo] added: “I am astounded that my position on an issue that commands somewhere near 75 percent support from the general public is perceived as being problematic for the party. Most Americans want secure borders. Most Americans want an end to illegal immigration. These have to be addressed — even when people call you names.”

As an example of that name-calling, the NYT editorial - which was probably reviewed by several people - uses the phrase "anti-immigrant."

I'm considering sending a letter to the editor, and if you want to do so go here or try their forums.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 01:40 PM | Comments (1)

"Businesses take pledge not to hire illegal immigrants"

The North County Times reports on a website that lists companies in the Temecula, CA area who pledge not to hire illegal workers. So far, there are only 22 companies on the list, but if the coverage area was broadened there might be many more.

The NC Times report includes this bit:

[Seymour & Son Landscaping owner] Mark Seymour said Friday that the rampant employment of illegal immigrants for yard and landscape work represents a significant threat to his business. He said that contractors who hire illegal immigrants have an unfair competitive advantage.

"They drive down the price of labor," he said. "I think that all (business owners) should play on the same playing field and follow the law."

...UC Riverside Professor Armando Navarro... said that he is not surprised that someone has started up an illegal-immigrant-free business registry, especially in the Temecula area.

"It seems like Temecula and the surrounding areas have become the bastion of the anti-immigrant movement," he said.

He added that he believes that people who sign up for the listing service are using their emotions, not their brains. "It's anger and frustration; in reality it's not going to have much of an effect," he said. The profit motive is too strong for many business owners to resist, he said.

"Businesses are driven by profit and most business people want to get the biggest bang for their buck; consumers look for the cheapest price, that's the nature of the market," said Navarro...

I hate to rain on Navarro's free market parade, but one of the fundamental ideas behind a free market is that people are using legal business practices. If they aren't, then that could be unfair business competition as defined by various state codes and the U.S. code.

See "FAIR: RICO Laws Becoming the Last Resort of American Workers Facing Onslaught of Illegal Aliens in the Work Place", "RICO Lawsuit Against Employer of Illegal Aliens Succeeds!", and 2001's "Psst! Wanna Join A Class Action Suit Against Employers of Illegal Immigrants?". I don't want lawyers to enforce our immigration laws, but as a last resort I'll take it. There are probably billions to be made by those lawyers, and it's cleaner and more patriotic money than many other Private Attorney's General-style suits.

Also, there used to be a sticker in the window of the Yoshinoya at San Fernando and Los Feliz in Glendale/Atwater saying that Yoshinoya only employed legal workers. I don't think it's still there. I might be wrong, but I got the impression it was part of a larger Buy American-style campaign. Researching...

Posted to Immigration2004 at 01:19 PM | Comments (3)

"Bush nephew backs off on INS"

I think at this point we can assume he's representing the administration's viewpoint:

Presidential nephew George P. Bush, campaigning in Tucson Thursday, backed off his weekend charge [that would be 8/21/04 --LW] that the U.S. Border Patrol's use of pepper-ball guns is "reprehensible" and "kind of barbarous."

In Mexico City Saturday, the youngest George Bush blamed the policy on "some local INS guy who's trying to be tough, act macho."

Bush did not apologize Thursday for his remarks [Thu. 8/26/04 --LW] but acknowledged that he misspoke in Mexico City, because there is a formal policy and agreement between the United States and Mexico covering the use of these less-than-lethal weapons. He said he didn't fully understand the U.S. policy when he attributed it to some local tough guy in the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

"I made an error and I accept it, but I think the larger issue is that it is something that shouldn't be happening, there shouldn't be this use of arms..."

"There needs to be substantive reform so that folks can move back and forth, work and pay taxes and achieve the American dream. The amount of violence on the border is terrible and we just need more focus on the issue."

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:46 PM | Comments (0)

"Rights Groups Take On Deportation Program"

A new joint program from the U.S. and Mexico flies some deported illegal aliens back into central Mexico, rather than dropping them off at a border city. The L.A. Times reports that so-called "rights groups" are up in arms about this new program. To get the plane ride, the alien has to waive his rights to a hearing. And, no coincidence at all, no hearing means no immigration lawyer to pay. As previously discussed this is basically subsidized vacation pay for their employers, as many of those deported say they'll just try again. Note that the LAT itself reported that many of those on the maiden flight said they're try again.

If you're like me, your first thought on seeing this in the LAT would be to take a look at the so-called "rights groups":

"If there's no opposition, they always have the option of taking it to Texas and to California and expanding it inland," said Angela Sambrano, a representative for the Los Angeles Committee Against the Raids and for Rights of Immigrants. "We don't want them to get any idea that we would welcome an extension of [it]. That's why we want to stop it right now."

Sambrano recently joined delegations of other pro-immigration activists to deliver letters to Mexican consulates across the country — including seven in California — urging President Vicente Fox's administration to abandon support for the program. The protesters say that if their quest for dialogue fails, they may stage vigils and demonstrations.

So, who exactly is the LACATRAFROI? A google search reveals nothing. However, the google search for Angela Sambrano brings up this at its first hit:

The Militant reported that, "The Forum took note of the growing immigration from Latin American to the United States and a recent rise in the struggles for immigrant rights in that country. Angela Sambrano, representing CISPES, gave a special presentation at the Forum on the subject." CISPES favored the cause of the communist guerrillas in El Salvador.

That took less than a minute, and you'd think the LAT could have done likewise. Maybe they did, and just didn't report it.

Nevertheless, the "pro-immigration" groups in the article do raise a couple of good points hidden in their forest of bad ideas:

Immigrant rights groups in California say such tragedies underscore why U.S. and Mexican authorities should channel resources into combating the job shortage in Mexico, one of the prime reasons migrants cross the border.

"It's nothing more than a shell game," said Jennifer Allen, executive director of Border Action Network, a Tucson-based immigration advocacy group. "It's just shifting migrants from place to place."

If you'd like to suggest that the L.A. Times teaches its reporters how to use google, refers to "pro-immigration" groups as "pro-illegal-immigration" groups, and reports on the background of "liberal" groups with the same zeal with which they report on the background of centrist or rightwing groups, please send a polite email to Readers.Rep@latimes.com

Posted to Immigration2004 at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)

"Tancredo to fight over immigration"

Thankfully someone has some sense:

Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) plans to start a nasty floor fight at the Republican National Convention in New York this week unless the GOP convention platform includes elements of his immigration proposals. He calls the current platform “weak” and “Clintonesque.”

The third-term former nonprofit-organization executive said he has already enlisted a groundswell of support from sympathetic delegates from border states such as California and Arizona...

Tancredo recalls vividly a conversation he had with President Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, two years ago. Tancredo had given an interview to The Washington Times regarding his hard-line stance on immigration that upset Rove.

“[Rove] called me the next morning,” Tancredo recalled. “I was on my way to work. We had a spirited discussion. He told me never to darken the doorstep of the White House.” To which the congressman replied, “’I don’t remember a welcome mat ever being out, and second, it’s not your house.’”

He added: “I am astounded that my position on an issue that commands somewhere near 75 percent support from the general public is perceived as being problematic for the party. Most Americans want secure borders. Most Americans want an end to illegal immigration. These have to be addressed — even when people call you names.”

Posted to Immigration2004 at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)

I know how Verity feels

The samizdata thread "Multiculturalism versus Security" has a large number of comments, and some are interesting. On the one side is "Verity" and a few others, and on the other are the dhimmis-in-training named Julius and a_t. Here are a few comments from Verity:

Now Robin Cook, a shining example of his ilk and too dim to hide his light under a bushel, makes it even clearer. We are now dependent on Muslim immigrants to make our society - a success by any measure for around, oh, a thousand and more years - a "successful" multiculti mess? A great Gramscian stroke...

In addition, incompetent as it is at governance, this government has a vast army of allied leftists willing to help force its agenda through. The universities, the vast teachers' union, a large number of young students, all the lefties in local government, the lefties at the head of the police service, the lefties at the head of the prisons service, and not least the BBC and all the socialist journalists - numbering, my guess, well over a million soldiers active in the cause of forcing multiculti claptrap on people who never had a chance to vote for it...

What is so attractive to Julian about this? Many lefties cleave to immigrants from less developed cultures because they are able to position themselves as broad-minded saviours. I don't want to accuse Julian because I don't know him, but he certainly fits the pattern...

However, as I said before, there is a vast army of Gramscians more than willing to do their work for them, forcing the British to accept a primitive culture which is anathema in the enlightened west. There are librarians removing books from the shelves that mention pigs; there are teachers training children to respect Eidl Fitri or whatever it's called because 'the Muslim culture has so much to teach us', intense coverage on the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation any time a self-appointed Muslim spokesman for a self-styled 'Muslim Council of Whatever' has something he wants to get off his chest...

So, A_t, no, the Muslims cannot, on their own talent, force Islam on anyone. But they have at least a million helpers in the public sector intent on doing it for them...

Dear old A_t, No, the public sector isn't sitting around thinking up ways to advance the notion of jihad in Britain. It is their woolly left mindset that is the Trojan horse. 'Look how tolerant I am, how appreciative of multiculti, how unthreatened I am by 'foreignness', what a mahatama I am!"

This is fine. Some people have a need to feel they are superior souls and who cares? But their basking in bright sun of their own 'tolerance' blinds them to the agenda being forwarded by Islam. They have constantly said they will conquer Europe, and this time, as they know they can't do it by the sword, they'll do it through births. Most Muslims in Britain did not come to Britain to find a new, more enlightened life. They came to continue their old, bigotted life, but with more comforts.

Islam is toweringly offended that the powerful people of the West do not embrace Islam, and they're going to try to force them to convert. They made a good start in Spain, where they blew up around 100 people and swung the election. The fact that we exist as free, independent spirits and don't acknowledge their Allah, is offensive to Islam.

Believe me, they are not seeking multiculti -- they are working towards uniculti - their culti. And every day, some public service worker - I include BBC employees and denizens as public sector workers - hands them one more tiny victory.

Posted to MultiCultiCult at 10:08 PM | Comments (1)

"Islam is not an exotic addition to the English country garden"

From a column in the Telegraph UK:

One thing we are supposed to welcome in modern Britain is "diversity". The theory is that the mixture of races, cultures and religions which we have more and more become is a source of strength and should therefore be nurtured and celebrated. Although there is a great debate about how strong the overarching idea of Britishness needs to be for the diversity to work, there is clearly much to be said for the theory.

The authorities therefore set to work to accommodate, within reason, the special requests of the minorities...

HSBC now boasts of "Our Sharia Board" stuffed with learned sheikhs and Justices from Arabia and Pakistan. Isn't all this an encouraging example of how the resourcefulness of modern free societies can achieve tolerance and market efficiency?

But when you look a little further into the question of Islamic banking, you find that it is not, in fact, required by Islam...

So what is being proposed with Islamic banking is actually a hardening of the religion, not an accommodation of its existing custom... And when you look at HSBC's Sharia Board you find that a couple of its members have links with the Deoband, the long-standing ultra-conservative group whose schools in Pakistan educated many of the Taliban.

Two others are Wahhabis...

I return to the question of diversity. What happens if an important element of the mixture does not itself believe in diversity, but solely in the advance of its own interest?

...It does not necessarily follow that most Muslims will try to impose their beliefs on this country by violence... But it perhaps does mean that we cannot just regard Islam in Britain as a charmingly exotic addition to the English country garden...

...Once there are Islamic financial institutions, how long will it be before Muslims insist that the state and business direct all their monetary dealings with Muslims through these institutions (boycotting businesses with Jewish connections en route)? How long before Muslims, extending the logic of their concentration in places like Bradford and Leicester, seek to establish their own law within these areas, the germ of a state within a state? And how diverse would such a state be?

Some people will accuse him of racism. Some will attempt to downplay the possibility of a state within a state. The next post's for you.

Posted to MultiCultiCult at 09:53 PM | Comments (1)

"Mexican remittances head for new record"

From the AP:

Remittances sent home to Mexico by workers abroad reached $7.87 billion in the first half of 2004, 25.9 percent higher than the same period of 2003, the country's central bank reported Wednesday.

Experts say remittances are rising, but that some of the increase is due to increasing use of more easily monitored electronic or bank transfers; in the past, many workers sent their money home in cash, which is harder to track.

Remittances rose to four-fifths the value of oil exports in the first half of the year, according to the Bank of Mexico. Remittances have surpassed foreign investment and tourism revenues, and are the second-largest source of foreign income, behind oil...

Nothing like an unhealthy dependency, and nothing like people sending money out of the country. While economists will no doubt say that those who send money out of the country also spend money here, in the international relations context this is quite unhealthy.

Remittances are a huge income source for Mexico, and they're going to fight like hell to make sure that they keep getting that money and more. That means more meddling in our internal politics, and more borderline deals between Bush and Fox. That means they're going to attempt to protect their "trade routes" that they use to send people into the U.S.

Remittances are not a healthy, long-term industry for Mexico. Instead of trying to create jobs and new industries in Mexico, they're just going to send more people to the U.S.

And, those U.S. companies that profit off remittances are going to protect their turf as well. First Data Corp, owner of Western Union, is now opposing Tom Tancredo.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

"GOP Convention Delegate Drops Out Over Bush"

#4 links to this story:

Congressional Quarterly reported Friday that after attending four previous conventions, Philadelphia's Jesse Walters was chosen as a delegate to this year's GOP convention in New York only to resign the position, saying he could not support Bush and expressing concern with the rightward move of the Republican Party.

Calling the decision to drop his position one of the five hardest he has had to make in his life, Walters said he plans to cast his first-ever vote for a Democrat for president in November.

However:

Republican delegation hopefuls [from PA] include... and Log Cabin member Jesse Walters.

And:

At least one elected delegate won’t be making the trip to New York City. Jesse Walters, of Philadelphia, resigned Wednesday, Aug. 18, as a delegate, saying he could no longer cast a vote for Bush.

“It has been weighing on me for months,” Walters said. “I can’t support him.”

While many gay Republicans are rejecting Bush due to his support of the Federal Marriage Amendment, the reason for Walters’ resignation had more to do with the president’s record of high spending, he said.

“I think he’s a train wreck,”Walters said. “Apart from the tax cut and cleaning up the mess in Afghanistan, I can’t think of anything I agree with him on."

"Rightward move" indeed.

Posted to Politics at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)

How soon could we recall the entire California government?

Gil Cedillo might soon get Moter Voter cards driver's licenses into the hands of illegal aliens. The CA Assembly has just passed another bill into which SB1160 - the previous driver's license bill - had been inserted. Now it goes to the governor to be signed into law or vetoed. (Latest report here, out-of-date reports here and here).

Arnold Schwarzenegger has previously said he'd veto SB1160 in its current form; after the bill was passed Arnold reiterated his intent to veto the bill.

Only one problem: Arnold is out of town, and unrepentant MEChA member Cruz Bustamante is our acting governor. And, long-time Californians will remember Mike Curb. From this 10/28/03 article:

Lieutenant governors have taken varying degrees of liberty with their powers over the years.

The most extreme in recent history was Republican Lt. Gov. Mike Curb, who appointed an appellate judge while Gov. Jerry Brown was out of state exploring a presidential run in 1979.

Brown was able to withdraw the nominations, only to have Curb resubmit them the next time he left California.

Will Bustamante try a Mike Curb?

Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante said he would "not be a Mike Curb."

"He feels it is unseemly for the acting governor to act like the governor, " said Bustamante spokesman Ardie Zahedani.

That's what he said then. Will he make an exception? If he does, will Arnold immediately overturn his decision? Could it all have been an Arnold-"One Bill Gil" conspiracy that would allow the bill to be signed into law while giving Arnold plausible deniability? When exactly will the bill be submitted to the governor's office, while he's away or will it take a week and will Arnold be back by that time? Stay tuned.

If this bill passes, expect a very large backlash that would hopefully end a few careers.

You can call Arnold at 916-445-2841. He previously had had an automated poll that would allow you to vote on whether illegal aliens should have driver's licenses. However, strangely enough, the poll seems to have been removed. Nevertheless, you can still call 24/7 and leave a message. Or, send an email to governor@governor.ca.gov

UPDATE 2: There's a more recent AP report here. The L.A. Times weighs in with "Driver's License Bill Clears Legislature but Faces Veto", which includes this laughable bit among others:

Cedillo also included a number of efforts intended to be conciliatory toward critics who said having licenses would make undocumented immigrants think they could serve on juries, vote or buy a gun: The bill would ensure that the names of illegal immigrants not be sent to court clerks for jury pools, and would provide all licensees with a form underscoring the prohibitions.

Like as not, the form with the prohibitions would remind the "immigrant" to pick up his Motor Voter form.

Posted to Immigration_dls at 10:06 PM | Comments (0)

Handouts? Go Beyond the Usual [Canards and Suspects]

In one or two columns, Steve Lopez of the L.A. Times was starting to make some sense. See April's "Way Too Many People in Paradise".

However, with his latest discussion of illegal immigration he's reverted to the usual LAT set of canards and "experts". From "Handouts? Go Beyond the Usual Scapegoats":

...even if the claim [in the recent CIS study regarding the costs of illegal immigration] is completely true, let's keep in mind that $10 billion is less than one-half of 1% of the federal budget. And considering this outfit's agenda, only a fool would accept its findings as the whole truth and nothing but the truth...

[Quote from National Immigration Forum deleted...] You don't have to trust the [National Immigration Forum], which has its own ax to grind in favor of legalization for some undocumented immigrants. Daniel Griswold, an economist with the libertarian Cato Institute, agrees that the study's analysis is incomplete.

"It doesn't take into account the broader economic context, which is the ability of employers to hire workers who are important to broad sections of the economy, from hotels to construction to retail, and agriculture as well," he said.

I don't trust the NIF, and I certainly trust Dan Griswold far less. (See "Dogmatic Libertarians"). He is, after all, the author and/or inspiration for the Bush/Fox Amnesty. (Watch the beginning of the video here). And, he isn't identified as such in Lopez' column.

"They argue that a legalization program under President Reagan made immigrants more productive and raised their salaries, making them less of a drain."

It also resulted in millions of illegal aliens coming here, but, who's counting?

"Ruben Beltran, Mexican consul general in Los Angeles, noted that illegal immigrants often do jobs that others aren't dying to do. Come to think of it, I don't know a lot of native-born Californians of European descent who are clamoring for a chance to pick strawberries."

Another fine source. I wonder how many members of Mexico's European elite are picking strawberries in Mexico. And, perhaps instead of encouraging serf labor we should be finding ways to harvest strawberries that don't involve people being forced to retire at 45. (See "In the Strawberry Fields") Remember: plantations bad, technology good. (See "In Florida Groves, Cheap Labor Means Machines" and "The Mirage of Mexican Guest Workers")

If that doesn't work, I'm more than willing to allow all strawberry production to move offshore. Farmers can plant other crops.

"One thing people don't think about is the cost of consumer goods if these immigrants weren't working in certain sectors," Beltran said. "For the sake of discussion, if you have an iceberg lettuce on the shelf right now for 95 cents, what would the price be" if cheap labor were unavailable?

Wow. I have no idea. $10? $100? Wait, that doesn't make any sense, because labor costs account for 10% of the price of a head of lettuce. Watch those sources!

Please send him a short, polite letter: steve.lopez@latimes.com

Posted to Immigration2004 at 03:01 PM | Comments (1)

"George Bush�s Immigration Non-Policy"

LaShawn Barber has a long post about Bush, immigration, the 9/11 report, and "compassion" here.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 01:20 PM | Comments (1)

Are they border guards or stuffed poodles?

The department of Customs and Border Protection - part of the DHS - wants our border guards to stress the customer services aspects of their job. You'd think they would want to stress, oh, I dunno, security instead of etiquette, but I guess that wouldn't be "compassionate."

Remember, this is not an article from the Onion. The WashTimes' "Border agents put on happy face" has excerpts from a new CBP memo detailing new training sessions for border guards:

"First impressions are lasting impressions. Whether it is a traveler from a weary flight, the trade community needing an entry cleared, the importing public or simply a passer-by that may have an opportunity to observe you, the image you portray may form a lifelong view of CBP," the memo said. "It is vital that you mind your manners."

The training sessions will include instructions on etiquette, which the memo describes as "saying and doing the right thing at the right time;" grooming and body language, including posture; housekeeping and maintaining food or perishables in the workplace; and communication skills, including the use of the words "may I" and "would you please" instead of "you have to" or "give me."

The memo also said CBP officers will greet people with "welcome to the United States or welcome home," will interact with the public, trade community and others by saying, "Good morning. How may I help you?" and will bring closure to an encounter by saying, "Do you have any questions?" "It is a pleasure to serve you" and "Have a nice day."

According to the memo, CBP border officers also will exercise discretion when making decisions on whether to admit a person to the United States and that discretion will be applied on a case-by-case basis...

[The memo says] the officers must consider the situation and weigh all factors. It said, "Put yourself in the alien's shoes. Would you not want the officer to consider all flexibility within the law? Compassion goes a long ways."

There's more in the article, but the subtext is: "just wave them through. And, make sure you're smiling while you do it."

It's certainly nice when employees of the U.S. are nice. It's even better when they're nice and they protect the rest of us. But, if we have to choose, let's concentrate on the security part. The Bush administration appears to have come down on the nice side and forgotten about the security part.

See also "Border officials say they are unprepared to protect nation", "Poll Finds Low Morale for Border Officers", "Border Patrol union says new rules 'muzzle' critics of the agency", and "Why don't you let us do our jobs?".

(Via Hit & Run)

UPDATE: Someone who I believe is a CBP employee says this is all standard operating procedure, and much ado about nothing.

Note, however, that this might be a union or political thing, or it might not be. The recent survey ("Poll Finds Low Morale for Border Officers") was conducted of 250 Border Patrol agents and 250 immigration inspectors.

The WashTimes article includes this:

"We are highly trained and skilled law-enforcement professionals who carry out our duties in a professional manner," [Charles Showalter, president of the National Homeland Security Council] said. "It appears this program is an admission they are more concerned about meeting and greeting commerce and tourism than in protecting our nation's borders from terrorists, illegal aliens, criminals and others who would do us harm."

And:

The agents and inspectors said they lack proper training, equipment and access to up-to-date databases on terrorists and criminals. They criticized the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security, with three of every five saying flawed policies keep them from making the borders safer.

The AFGE represents about two-thirds of border-patrol agents and customs inspectors. Only union members were polled by the organization, which has backed Democrat John Kerry for president.

Homeland Security officials called the poll biased and said it didn't reflect massive manpower increases and technological advances on the border...

And:

"They want us to be meeters and greeters instead of enforcement officers," one was quoted responding to the [survey linked to above].

Note that Showalter's National Homeland Security Council is part of the AGFE union.

Based on the overwhelming evidence offered by other data points, I'm going to stick with the post's original tenor.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)

"Committee Adopts Draft; Some Grumble"

From the NYT:

...Yesterday morning, leaders of the platform committee fought to fend off a last-ditch effort by conservatives to challenge a plank supporting Mr. Bush's proposal for a "guest worker" program that would be open to some currently illegal immigrants, which some conservatives denounce as a form of amnesty.

In an effort to counter the president's plan, conservatives proposed adding a call for a federal law to encourage law enforcement agencies to collaborate with immigration officials to expel illegal aliens.

But Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, who heads the platform committee, sent the amendment to be merged with a similar, less strident proposal, and the two were revised to urge continued cooperation "in securing our borders to prevent illegal entry." It passed decisively.

Richard Lessner, executive director of the American Conservative Union, called the language weak. The issue, he said, "is a place where the president is out of step with his base, which is why the president does not want any discussion of it here."

Let a thousand points of compassion shine, etc. etc.

Yesterday's report containted the following:

In a statement, Richard Lessner, executive director of the American Conservative Union, called the platform "a bland and uninspiring document" that lacked "solid conservative meat." Although most conservatives enthusiastically support the lengthy platform section on fighting terrorism, Mr. Lessner said, its "open-ended commitment" to keeping troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is troubling.

His harshest criticism fell on President Bush's plan for the new temporary worker program.

"This unfortunate initiative allows those who enter America illegally to become legal residents and apply for citizenship,'' he said. "This idea was D.O.A. among conservatives when the president first broached it, and it is still offensive."

...In a private e-mail message that circulated among conservatives at the platform hearings and on Capitol Hill, Paul S. Teller, legislative director of the conservative House Republican Study Committee, forwarded Mr. Lessner's statement, adding:

"It confirms, as was made so clear to me during the time of President Reagan's funeral and laying in state, that President Bush has no broad vision - and certainly no conservative vision - for the United States of America. All he has is a random assortment of policy prescriptions, many of which contradict one another. And let's not forget his primary goal on federal spending, to cut the deficit in half in five years. Wowwee."

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)

Well... alright!

We're happy you won too!

USA's Kerri Walsh, bottom, and teammate Misty May celebrate after beating Brazil in the gold medal beach volleyball finals during the 2004 Summer Olympic Games...

Other celebratory pictures here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Previous Olympics volleyball coverage starts here.

Posted to WackyHumor at 10:27 PM | Comments (0)

Is the Onion based in Minneapolis?

And, did one of their stories get loose and end up in a Minneapolis indie paper? The article "Mexicans Anticipate Consulate: Proposed center would be boon to immigrant community" would be funny if it weren't so sad. I've saved off a copy in case it gets re-written, and here are some excerpts:

...Mexican president Vicente Fox announced in June that Minnesota would be the next state to host a Mexican consulate.

For Fox, the first Mexican head of state to visit the region, the trip was intended not only to strengthen trade relations between Mexico and Minnesota, but also to strengthen his connection to Minnesota’s roughly 96,000 Mexican immigrants.

...Mexican community [...] turned out in such force to see Fox that he made his announcements in Spanish instead of English as planned...

[...a member of a Racial Identity group explains things to our reporter...]

Consulates help provide immigrants with anything involving government authorization, including identification, marriage certifications and work permits -- any legal papers necessary to obtain an education, reunite a family or find a good job.

“In addition to general immigration-type authorizations, one of the strongest services it provides is a matricular consular [MC], which is a Mexican government-issued ID,” Fuentes said. ["FBI Official Says Matricula Consular Card Is Security Threat"; see also this backgrounder --LW] “This ID is very helpful because many immigrants don’t have access to state-issued IDs. In Minnesota, if you need a driver’s license, they ask you for your social security number, so if you don’t have a number and the two other forms of ID they require, you don’t have access to a driver’s license. In the absence of a driver’s license, then, what can you use to get basic things like a bank account? The matricular consular serves this purpose.”

Why all the subterfuge then? Oh, yeah, I forgot. They aren't "immigrants," they're illegal aliens. Sorry, I momentarily forgot that semantic game we were playing.

Here are the excerpts about the city's "leaders:"

In recognition of the growing Mexican population and in anticipation of the potential consulate, in 2003 the city passed a resolution deeming the MC as valid for all city purposes... [once again: "FBI Official Says Matricula Consular Card Is Security Threat" --LW]

Minneapolis city officials had offered the consulate 5,000 square feet of rent-free space in Lake Street’s renovated Sears building, but were turned down. (WHEN?) City officials said they will put together another official offer soon.

The "WHEN?" is in the original article; I assume the author meant to fill that in at a later date but was so excited about the new consulate she forgot.

What about an unintentionally scary quote? Here's one:

“We could start a new country called US-Mexico … with all of the Mexicans that are here,” laughs Teresa Ortiz, a worker’s rights program director with the Resource Center of the Americas.

Yeah, that's funny.

The article provides a comments section; at post time there are five comments. They're all mostly responsible comments detailing what trouble Minneapolis is setting itself up for. The comment I left is in the extended entry.

From this: Los Angeles County school districts recently received a gift of 27,000 textbooks written for 1st- through 6th-graders in Mexico. "About 45% of our students are Hispanic," a Los Angeles County elementary school teacher specialist said. "It's beautiful for all of our kids to have access to that." Colorado schools received 90,000 textbooks last year, the most of any state. The Mexican consul general has contacted Wyoming to offer Spanish books and instruction guides there, on subjects ranging from math to geography.

Do we really want "immigrant" children learning about history and other subjects from a Mexican perspective?

From this: At a ceremony commemorating the opening of a new $8 million Mexican Consulate [in Chicago], Fox also called on municipalities to recognize cards handed out by Mexican consulates as legal forms of identification... Opponents contend the ID cards, called matricular consular, allow illegal immigrants access to services they aren't eligible for... "We are Mexicans that live in our territories and we are Mexicans that live in other territories," he said in a 20-minute speech in Spanish. "In reality, we are 120 million people that live together and are working to construct a nation."

So, Fox is saying that all Mexicans - even Mexican-Americans - are part of the Mexican Nation. Note also that the Matricula Consular cards are considered a security threat by the FBI.

From this: in the 1990s, Mexico embarked on a campaign of extending its political authority into the United States - not just over Mexican immigrants, but also naturalized and native-born Americans of Mexican ancestry. There are 10 million Mexican-born people in this country (including 5 million illegals) plus more than 10 million additional Americans of Mexican descent...

There's nothing secret about this effort. President Vicente Fox once referred to himself as president of all 118 million Mexicans - the 100 million in Mexico and the (then-)18 million in the United States, the majority of whom are U.S. citizens. And this is a long-term proposition for them: In June 2001, Juan Hernandez, former head of Fox's cabinet-level office for relations with Mexicans abroad, said on ABC's "Nightline," "I want the third generation, the seventh generation, I want them all to think, 'Mexico first.'"

Wake up Minneapolis.

Posted to Immigration_consul at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)

"U.S. military beefing up its presence on borders"

From Knight-Ridder:

There's a growing sense of urgency among those who police America's long, porous borders that tighter control is needed to prevent terrorists from slipping into the flood of illegal immigrants entering the United States.

The Sept. 11 Commission found that the nation's borders are largely unprotected and recommended that border security become an integral part of national security policy. Now that airline security has been improved, terror suspects increasingly are being detected trying to enter the country on ships or overland...

Where does one begin?

First of all, perhaps we should try to prevent the "flood" from coming here in the first place. With Bush administration-mandated interior enforcement practically non-existant, the "flood" is going to keep coming.

Cynically speaking, perhaps the "growing sense of urgency" is a sense that CYA pieces like the one above need to be fed to as many newspapers as possible.

Posted to Immigration_terror at 09:09 PM | Comments (1)

Welcome impeached federal judges turned international election observers!

CalBlog provides word that the leader of the international election monitors who'll be making sure that this November's elections are fair and transparent is Alcee Hastings. He's currently a representative from Florida. In a prior life he was a federal judge.

Oh, by the way, he's a Bush-bashin' Dem who represents Broward County and:

In 1988, The U.S. House of Representatives voted almost unanimously (413-3) to approve 17 articles of impeachment amounting to "high crimes and misdemeanors" against Hastings, who at the time was a federal judge. While sitting on the federal bench, an FBI bribery sting caught Hastings conspiring to obtain a $150,000 bribe in exchange for granting leniency to a pair of convicted racketeers. The Senate convicted Hastings of perjury and conspiracy to take a bribe. He is one of only a handful of judges ever to be impeached in the history of the U.S.

See their post for more. See also the earlier post "Welcome UN Observers!".

Posted to Politics at 09:01 PM | Comments (0)

Splintered Plank: The White House spins and misses on immigration

Mark Krikorian of CIS offers a must-read article on the draft GOP platform in "Splintered Plank: The White House spins and misses on immigration:"

The administration's effort to choreograph the platform's approach to immigration — an exertion greater than those undertaken in behalf of other platform issues — clearly shows that the White House knows its views are not shared by most Republicans. David Frum tells of being on tour for his most recent book when the president made his amnesty speech in January, and in Frum's radio interviews "it was like being there on the first day of the Somme when the machine guns opened; I mean, every show you did, every question." He and many, many others called the administration to tell them, in Frum's words, that "there's a problem up here in Americaland; the Americans are unhappy about this."

...There's only so long a party can divorce itself from the views of "Americaland" without losing support. The White House understands it has an immigration problem, but is trying to stage-manage its way out. The simpler solution would be to embrace better immigration policies.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)

That's enough Kato-Aid, thanks though

The Inland Empire's Daily Bulletin has a report on the recent CIS study that found that illegal immigration costs the U.S. $10 billion per year and legalizing those illegal immigrants would cost $29 billion per year. A Cato Institute economist tries to offer a talking point, but, thankfully, the Daily Bulletin lets CIS respond. From "Study: Illegal immigrants cost billions":

Some experts questioned the findings.

"Take this study with a grain of salt," said Stephen Moore, an economist with the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. "This contradicts what most other studies have shown, which is that immigrants help the economy. Overall, they use less government services than they pay in taxes."

Moore pointed to a 1997 National Research Council report that shows the typical immigrant and his or her children pay an estimated $80,000 more in taxes than they will receive in federal, state and local benefits during their lifetimes.

Camarota said that conclusion is misleading because the report included legal and illegal immigrants and projected the earnings of an immigrant family more than 300 years...

It also includes some lovely quotes from a [presumably illegal alien] day laborer:

"We contribute more to the economy than the Americans who were born in this country... We do all the heavy work because the Americans don't like to do it... If all the immigrants got together and decided not to work for two days, the economy of this country would fall apart."

I'd imagine there are quite a few American citizens who would disagree.

The day laborer also said he himself wasn't a user of public services. However, not only is that false - you can't live here without using a multitude of public services - but any attempt to generalize from that would also be faulty logic.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)

"[GOP] Draft backs 'guest worker' plan"

The WashTimes has excerpts of the draft GOP platform:

The draft's immigration section, titled "Supporting Humane and Legal Immigration," backs the president's case for giving some illegal aliens temporary legal status under a guest-worker program, a position vehemently opposed by immigration-control forces in the party.

"A growing economy requires a growing number of workers, and President Bush has proposed a new temporary workers program to match willing foreign workers with willing U.S. employers, when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs.

"[The Bush/Fox Amnesty] would allow workers who currently hold jobs to come out of the shadows and to participate legally in America's economy..."

The draft language goes on to say that the plan "would allow men and women who enter the program to apply for citizenship in the same manner as those who apply from outside the United States."

The draft repeats [Bush's Orwellian claim that his program isn't an amnesty], saying flatly that the proposal "does not grant amnesty, which we oppose, because it would have the effect of encouraging illegal immigration and would give an unfair advantage to those who have broken our laws."

In addition to scoring big points against Bush's inability to provide border security, Kerry could also score big points about Bush's attempts to allow the world to bid on American jobs. See this post:

"We do envision that [the Bush/Fox guest worker program] would be open to any type of employee and any type of employer, such as nurses, teachers, high-tech workers, low-skilled workers. This is a concept that can apply broadly" [Bush's assistant said]

Can't you just hear Kerry saying, "President Bush wants to put American jobs on eBay and see who can provide the lowest bid..."

Posted to Immigration2004 at 11:31 AM | Comments (1)

"GOP Platform Draft Turns Left"

NewsMax has an overview of the kinder, gentler, more "compassionate" GOP platform:

Calls for expensive federal social programs, backtracking on big government, pandering on "women's health," backing off on illegal aliens – is this the Democratic or the Republican platform? Except for a stand against abortion, the GOP draft platform released Thursday blurs the distinction between the two major parties.

This year's preliminary platform shows a turn to the left from the conservative 1996 platform on many issues... [list deleted]

Let a thousand points of compassion shine!

UPDATE: Man, this is embarassing. Apparently this article is from 2000, not 2004. Can you blame me for not noticing?

Posted to Politics at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)

Should you tell the GOP what you think of the Bush/Fox Amnesty?

The GOP Convention website has a form letting you suggest items for the platform. That form has a nice popup menu on which you can select the topic that's most important to you: Homeland Security, Crime, Education, etc. etc.

Only one tiny problem: immigration isn't on that popup, despite being one of the key issues of the convention.

Perhaps if thousands of citizens went to that form and pointed out that omission they might get a clue. But, as we've seen time and time again, what the citizens want doesn't seem to mean much to the GOP leadership.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)

"Mexico may sue U.S. over pepper-ball projectiles"

As previously posted, a small number of paintball-style non-lethal weapons have been used by the Border Patrol to non-lethally protect themselves against rock-throwing illegal aliens and smugglers.

Mexican politicians complained, "high-level" meetings were held. Then, Presidential Nephew George P. Bush went to Mexico and dissed the Border Patrol and their use of the weapons.

Now:

Mexican Foreign Relations Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez said Tuesday his government will consider helping migrants sue U.S. officials for improper use of so-called "pepper ball" non-lethal projectiles...

With "friends" like these, we need a new president who isn't so friendly with them.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 11:55 PM | Comments (0)

"Mexico arrests top migrant smuggler"

From this:

The alleged leader [was arrested in Mexicali where he] was caught with a group of Iraqis and Iranians en route to the United States, according to Mexican officials Montoya is reportedly also wanted by the FBI.

In case you missed that, he was caught with a group of "Iraqis and Iranians en route to the United States." Hey, maybe they were just coming here to work. Or, maybe not. But, should we really be putting human smugglers in charge of determining whether someone should be admitted to the U.S.?

Posted to Immigration2004 at 11:42 PM | Comments (1)

Spot the error, Part #4932

Can you spot the error(s) in the following newspaper report from Torrance, CA's Daily Breeze?

Cedillo pushes immigrant license bill

PROPOSAL: L.A. Democrat hopes to rally support today with a new plan to give driving privileges to illegal residents.

By Michael Gardner, Copley News Service

SACRAMENTO -- Gil Cedillo agonizes over two yellow voting cards taped to his desk, each representing where fellow senators stand on his contentious campaign to allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver licenses.

The Los Angeles Democrat has reached the time to start counting votes, pondering whether last-minute concessions and tactical maneuvers will be enough to accomplish his six-year mission to put driver licenses in the hands of those here illegally...

The answer will come within the next 72 hours as he pursues delicate negotiations with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and as lawmakers steam toward an expected session-closing marathon Friday...

[...his latest proposal might have a non-visible mark in the magnetic strip on the back or similar rather than the visible mark that Schwarzenegger supports...]

A bold, visible mark would be nothing more than a scarlet letter that invites discrimination, much like the Star of David on Jews in Nazi Europe, Cedillo maintained.

Cedillo was still unsure whether to drop the matricula -- a card issued by the Mexican consulate -- as an acceptable form of identification in the application process. ["FBI Official Says Matricula Consular Card Is Security Threat"; see also this backgrounder] Schwarzenegger had expressed concerns over forged matriculas...

OK, that's enough. Did you spot the error(s)? Yes, that's right! Everything in the article was just plain wrong.

Since it's more or less a "local" call and they're a small paper, rather than sending an email I'm just going to give them a call at (310) 540-5511. The rest of you can send an email to their Editor Sue Schmitt: sue.schmitt@dailybreeze.com

Posted to Immigration2004 at 11:18 PM | Comments (1)

Playing cards in Maine

Waterville, Maine mayor Paul R. LePage sent an email to the governor of Maine complaining about the governor's support for what amounts to an illegal alien sanctuary law. From the article "Immigration status law irks LePage":

LePage charged that the move encourages illegal immigration, which he said presents security risks and a social-service burden. Public services, he said, should only be for legal residents.

"It's a basic fundamental question," he told the Morning Sentinel on Tuesday. " 'Are you legally or illegally here in the United States?' If you're not, we should either help you become legal, or you've got to go."

..."I was appalled," he said. "The taxpayer can't afford it at the state or local level. I don't have a problem dealing with immigrants. We're all immigrants. I have no problem providing assistance if they're legal. My point is, if they're not, they should be reported."

...LePage said that the governor's order amounts to Baldacci committing a crime.

"If he turns his head on this, he's breaking the law," LePage said...

The amount of hysterical race-card playing that ensued has to be read to be believed:

[Governor John E. Baldacci replied] "The interests of public health and safety in Maine are not served when we have certain communities that feel they must live in some form of seclusion."

"This is not an act that will provide some sort of sanctuary for those that would do our communities harm," he wrote. "It is condescending to our communities of color to suggest that they are a haven for criminals."

..."If we receive a call for services ... our first duty is to respond to that call," [Public Safety Commissioner Michael Cantara] said. "Our first duty is to maintain public safety. To engage in second-guessing as to who's calling and why, and to have something remotely resembling racial profiling as an excuse to deny public safety services, would be contrary to law."

"When it comes to public safety, no one deserves to be beaten, no spouse or child deserves to be physically or sexually abused," he said.

"No one should have that (right) stolen from them. Regardless of their status, we must take action and we must keep the door open for the people we need to protect."

Here's Baldacci's record on immigration votes from when he was in Congress.

If you're upset about Baldacci's policies and his remarks, please send him a short, polite email: governor@maine.gov

Posted to Immigration2004 at 11:01 PM | Comments (1)

Drinking Kato-Aid on my veranda

From "Daniel Weintraub: Lawmakers sit on study praising offshoring jobs":

A new analysis commissioned by the Legislature suggests that sending American jobs overseas, far from being a blow to employment, can actually help preserve existing jobs and create new ones.

The paper, prepared by the Public Policy Institute of California, warns lawmakers against trying to stem the practice by prohibiting offshoring in state contracts, noting that such a ban would drive up the cost of services and take money away from other programs in the budget...

"Because of the dynamics of the U.S. economy and offshoring's expected effect on productivity, the overall, longer-run effect of offshoring may be to increase living standards at home," [the report says].

I scanned the report, and I didn't see anything in there supporting the long-term benefits of outsourcing. It doesn't address the problem of technological innovation being sent offshore. And, it doesn't address the problems described in Students saying no to computer science:

This fall, there are just under 200 new undergraduate majors in MIT's electrical engineering and computer science department, down from about 240 last year and roughly 385 three years ago.

The Rutgers University computer science department has canceled some course sections and expects total enrollment in classes in the major this year to be thousands less than its peak of 6,500 several years ago. Saul Levy, chair of the undergraduate computer science program, said the ongoing decline stems from the way students perceive career prospects.

"They don't believe in the job market in computers anymore," Levy said.

Because of offshoring, those in India do believe in the job market in computers. In fact, I'm sure Indian colleges are rapidly teaching their students all about computer programming even while Rutgers is reducing the number of classes. If that disparity accelerates, how long before schools start dropping CS programs? At that point in time, the long-term problems with offshoring might become clear to many people. But, fully expect the usual suspects to come out with yet another cheery, rosy report.

It's strange how many of the wonderful new programs proposed by our "leaders" - whether in offshoring or immigration - tend to have a whiff of Saudi Arabia or Latin America about them. I guess I should just top up my glass of Kato-Aid and sit on my veranda.

Posted to Politics at 10:15 PM | Comments (1)

"Bonilla demands review of OTM release policy"

This is about a month old, but I apparently didn't provide a link to it at the time:

Releasing undocumented immigrants to roam freely in the U.S. is "a terrible policy," U.S. Rep. Henry Bonilla told Del Rio [Texas, right on the border in the middle of nothing] and Eagle Pass leaders during a press conference in Del Rio Friday, and announced he is asking the Department of Homeland Security to take a hard look at the issue.

"If these people were being released in your neighborhood I am sure you would be outraged. This is happening in the communities I represent and I am outraged," Bonilla said in a letter Thursday to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge...

Posted to Immigration_terror at 12:44 PM | Comments (0)

"Study Says Illegal Migrants Cost U.S. $10 Billion a Year"

From the LAT:

Illegal immigrants cost the federal government more than $10 billion a year, and a program to legalize the undocumented would nearly triple that figure, a study released today concludes.

The analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes efforts to legalize an estimated 8 million to 12 million migrants, comes as Republicans are bracing for a fight over immigration at their convention next week in New York.

Some Republican conservatives are pushing for language in the party platform that strongly opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants. But business-oriented Republicans want to significantly loosen immigration restrictions.

In the middle is President Bush, who has proposed a massive guest worker program granting temporary legal status to the undocumented, of whom a majority are Mexicans...

Well, he's not really in the middle. He's obviously in the WSJ camp.

Anyhoo, the study is entitled "The High Cost of Cheap Labor".

Quoting from the Executive Summary:

If we are serious about avoiding the fiscal costs of illegal immigration, the only real option is to enforce the law and reduce the number of illegal aliens in the country. First, this would entail much greater efforts to police the nation’s land and sea borders. At present, less than 2,000 agents are on duty at any one time on the Mexican and Canadian borders. Second, much greater effort must be made to ensure that those allowed into the country on a temporary basis, such as tourists and guest workers, are not likely to stay in the country permanently. Third, the centerpiece of any enforcement effort would be to enforce the ban on hiring illegal aliens. At present, the law is completely unenforced. Enforcement would require using existing databases to ensure that all new hires are authorized to work in the United States and levying heavy fines on businesses that knowingly employ illegal aliens. Finally, a clear message from policymakers, especially senior members of the administration, that enforcement of the law is valued and vitally important to the nation, would dramatically increase the extremely low morale of those who enforce immigration laws.

UPDATE: In addition to the "liberal" talking points outlined in the LAT article, I heard one in a brief radio report. The gentleman was named Gutierrez and he was with some group. Maybe he was the guy from UCLA. He said that illegal aliens utilize no social services except emergency medical services. Which is a blatant lie. Tell it to the residents of California who signed up for a $10 billion school bond, a very large chunk of which is going to build classrooms to educate citizens of other countries. His other big talking point was the CIS was [cue ominous music] a conservative think-tank masquerading as independent. CIS says they're independent, but, what praytell does their affiliation have to do with whether the facts in the study are accurate or not?

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)

Party above all

The draft GOP platform, according to the NYT:

...it also supports the expansion of legal immigration, a position that is already drawing opposition from some in the party's conservative base...

On immigration, the platform supports Mr. Bush's call for a new temporary worker program that would also be open to some current illegal immigrants...

It's definitely time for new GOP leadership. Perhaps even a new party that would put the country's interests ahead of those of a small elite.

Why would Bush and Rove encourage millions of people who want real immigration reform and real border control to stay home or even vote for someone else? Their calculation is that those people will hold their nose and vote for Bush; perhaps we should call their hand.

Maybe Karl Rove has been too smart by half. This would be a perfect opportunity for the Democrats to come out in support of real immigration enforcement. If they did that, how many millions of votes could they pick up?

See "Hillary: 'Secure our borders'", "Conservative gets immigration plank" and "Aliens program costs Bush".

If the Democrats could start making real immigration reform and real border control a campaign issue, that might force Bush to take the pledge.

UPDATE: Responding to the first comment: Reagan regretted his amnesty and he also built enforcement provisions into it that were gutted by Ted Kennedy. The latter-named great American is now nosing around the Bush/Fox Amnesty. In the unlikely event that the Bush/Fox Amnesty included stronger immigration enforcement, expect Teddy to work his magic on that just like he did before.

And, the Democrats could not only come out in favor of real immigration reform, they could do it successfully and use it to win the election. By pledging to support border control - and I mean a real pledge, not just happyspeak - they could severly undercut Bush's supposed homeland security advantage. They could show that he's endangering the country, and any talk of TANG would fade from the headlines.

By supporting the rule of law they would gain millions of new voters - both centrist and conservative - who are aghast at Bush's policies.

And, their numbers are the opposite of Bush's. The vast majority of the GOP opposes Bush's plans, but only a small but vocal segment of Democrats supports Open Borders.

The Democrats would lose the support of MALDEF, but where are they going to go? This is the opposite of the "Rovian" calculation: he thinks those who support real immigration reform have nowhere to go. On the other side, those in the Democratic party who support massive immigration are small in number and if the Democrats supported real reform they would be forced to choose between the Green party and holding their noses and voting the Kerry.

See "It takes a Democrat to raise an issue": "Senator [Zell] Miller could energize not just the 82 percent of Republicans who support tighter immigration policies, but he could end up helping Republicans make huge inroads with the 76 percent of Democrats and the 76 percent of Independents who also support tighter immigration policies".

UPDATE 2: Furthermore: The Dems could do this without appearing to be "mean-spirited racist xenophobic anti-humans." They'd simply explain that we need real immigration reform. Kerry came out against driver's licenses for illegal aliens. MALDEF had a hissy fit, but it doesn't seem to have hurt his chances one bit.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:11 PM | Comments (1)

"Bipartisan betrayal at the border"

Michelle Malkin's latest column touches on George P. Bush's comments about the Border Patrol:

George P. Bush calls it "barbarous" that we arm Border Patrol agents with plastic pellet guns. The true disgrace is that we have rendered our border guards defenseless, handing them toy guns instead of real weapons. The criminals in Mexico who traipse across our border have no problems with "macho" displays of barbarism. Park Ranger Kris Eggle was murdered by an AK-47-wielding Mexican drug smuggler two years ago this month. Kris was 28 when he was gunned down -- the same age as George P. Bush.

You want to talk about "reprehensible"? What is reprehensible is a prominent American citizen disrespecting our federal immigration enforcement officers on foreign soil while scraping for expatriate votes. Border Patrol agents and Park Rangers on the southern border put their lives on the lines every day to protect us from harm. They should be thanked, not trashed...

My discussion of GP's comments is here.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 11:36 AM | Comments (1)

"Poll Finds Low Morale for Border Officers"

From the LAT:

Front-line U.S. border security officers are divided over whether the nation is safer from terrorism than it was before the Sept. 11 attacks, and many say morale in the Department of Homeland Security is low, according to a poll released Monday.

A slim majority — 53% — of Border Patrol agents and immigration inspectors say they believe the country is safer, and 44% believe it is no safer or less safe, the survey of 1,000 officers found. Unions representing about 16,000 agents and inspectors sponsored the poll, which was conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates.

"The bureaucratic bungling that plagued and hampered the old Immigration and Naturalization Service has not only survived, it has thrived in the new Department of Homeland Security," said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, one of the unions that participated in the poll. "Bureaucrats are not listening to the front-line border-protection personnel."

The poll results and a summary are in the PDF files here. See also "Border Patrol union says new rules 'muzzle' critics of the agency".

Posted to Immigration2004 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

"Purging illegal aliens from voter rolls not easy"

From the WashTimes:

Maryland election officials have been stymied in their efforts to purge illegal aliens from the state's voting rolls.

They have begun compiling a database of the state's 3 million registered voters, then they "hope to compare our data with the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service]," said Linda H. Lamone, the state's elections administrator.

Just one or two problems: the INS/DHS only tracks legal immigrants, and they apparently can't give out information on them due to confidentiality. So, are the election officials not entirely "with it," do they know something the INS doesn't know, or are they intentionally spinning their wheels?

The article also contains this charming bit:

"Why would immigrants vote illegally when it puts them at risk?" [Ron Hayduk, professor of political science at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York] asked. "There is little evidence that immigrants actually do vote. It seems to me that the burden of proof is actually on those who claim illegal immigrants are voting."

What the article fails to mention is that Hayduk is an advocate of non-citizen voting. See the editorial he co-authored entitled "Let legal immigrants vote in [NYC]".

Compare his comments to that from the earlier article "Md. Elections Officials Vow To Purge Noncitizen Voters From Rolls":

Kim Propeack, an immigrant advocate who works for CASA Maryland and sought to defeat Dwyer's legislation, said elections officials are worrying about a problem "that doesn't exist."

"I know hundreds of Maryland residents who are not yet citizens, and none of them have ever registered to vote," she said. "They know they're not supposed to vote, and they don't vote."

Why, it's almost as if they're reading from the same script. If "immigrant advocates" tell us there isn't a problem, there probably is.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)

Reading the 9/11 Commission Staff Reports: Chapter 3

Below are some excerpts from Chapter 3: Terrorist Entry and Embedding Tactics, 1993 to 2001. That chapter describes the various techniques used by terrorists to travel not just between foreign countries, but to enter and remain in the U.S. It provides several examples of the different ways that terrorists have done the latter: using several visas, overstaying visas, using student visas, getting married to U.S. citizens, applying for asylum, ad infinitum. The common theme is that they were very familiar with our immigration policies, and they used loopholes and lack of enforcement to their advantage.

Quoting from Page 46:

Although there is evidence that some land and sea border entries without inspection occurred, these conspirators mainly subverted the legal entry system by entering at airports.4 In doing so, they relied on a wide variety of fraudulent documents, on aliases, and on government corruption. Because terrorist operations were not suicide missions in the early to mid-1990s, once in the United States terrorists and their supporters tried to get legal immigration status that would permit them to remain here, primarily by committing serial, or repeated, immigration fraud, by claiming political asylum, and by marrying Americans. Many of these tactics would remain largely unchanged and undetected throughout the 1990s and up to the 9/11 attack. Thus, abuse of the immigration system and a lack of interior immigration enforcement were unwittingly working together to support terrorist activity.

That was pre-9/11. But, have we learned our lesson? See the earlier posts "Potential terrorists released due to lack of jail space, congressman says" and "Why don't you let us do our jobs?" for an answer to that question.

Continuing with the report, in the sidebar 'Exploring the Link between Human Smugglers and Terrorists' (p. 61)

We have already seen that documents are critical to terrorists—they are needed by those wishing to plan and carry out attacks. Documents are similarly critical to human smugglers, who have access to document vendors able to obtain genuine passports and visas from corrupt government officials. [Footnote 151 quoted below] Corrupt officials are also paid off to allow illegal migrants to pass through travel and security checkpoints.152...

Finally, there are uncorroborated law enforcement reports suggesting that associates of al Qaeda used smugglers in Latin America to travel through the region in 2002 before traveling onward to the United States.155 To date, only one human smuggler with suspected links to terrorists has been convicted in the United States. [Footnote 156 quoted below]

Footnote 151: One smuggler, Salim Boughader-Mucharrafille, smuggled Lebanese nationals sympathetic to Hamas and Hizbollah into the United States and relied on corrupt Mexican officials in Beirut, Mexico City and Tijuana to facilitate their travel. Specifically, Boughader obtained Mexican tourist visas from an official at the Mexican embassy in Beirut to facilitate the travel of humans to Mexico...

Footnote 156: Boughader was charged with human smuggling and sentenced to 11 months in prison. After serving his sentence he was deported to Mexico where he was arrested along with several other members of his smuggling ring. They face criminal charges and if convicted could serve lengthy jail times.

The 'Ajaj and Yousef: A Case Study in Fraud' sidebar (p. 47) contains too much to quote, but it's a must read:

Upon [WTC1 perpetrator] Ajaj’s arrival at Kennedy [International Airport], the immigration inspector noted that he was traveling on a photo-substituted Swedish passport. Ajaj was sent to secondary immigration inspection, where he claimed he was a member of the Swedish press.12 His luggage was searched and officers found a partially altered Saudi passport and a passport from Jordan, the documents supporting their alias identities, a plane ticket and a British passport in the name of Mohammed Azan, bomb-making manuals, videos and other material on how to assemble weapons and explosives, letters referencing his attendance at terrorist training camps; anti-American and anti-Israeli material, instructions on document forgery, and two rubber stamp devices to alter the seal on passports issued from Saudi Arabia.13 The immigration inspector called an agent on the FBI Terrorist Task Force to tell him about Ajaj, but the agent declined to get involved, instead requesting copies of the file. The inspector also called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which was “not interested...”14

Ajaj was detained then jailed for six months for using an altered passport. Then... well, read the rest for yourself.

There's a summary of this chapter in "Al-Qaeda 'travel agency' revealed".

I excerpted part of Chapter 4 here, and I'll return with a longer post later.

Other excerpts from the report are in the extended entry. Click MORE directly below to read them.

p. 47
Once terrorists had entered the United States, their next challenge was to find a way to remain here. Their primary method was immigration fraud. [The next names are perpetrators of the 1993 WTC attack --LW] For example, Yousef and Ajaj concocted bogus political asylum stories when they arrived in the United States. Mahmoud Abouhalima, involved in both the World Trade Center and landmarks plots, received temporary residence under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers (SAW) program, after falsely claiming that he picked beans in Florida. [Footnote 7: His application was later denied. Abohalima was indicted as an accessory after the fact for assisting the WTC1 attackers.] Mohammed Salameh, who rented the truck used in the bombing, overstayed his tourist visa. He then applied for permanent residency under the agricultural workers program, but was rejected.8 Eyad Mahmoud Ismail, who drove the van containing the bomb, took English-language classes at Wichita State University in Kansas on a student visa; after he dropped out, he remained in the United States out of status.9

p. 52
Atlantic Avenue Subway Plot, July 1997. Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer committed serial immigration fraud during his planning to destroy the Atlantic Avenue subway in Brooklyn with explosives in 1997.49 Mezer was arrested on his third illegal entry into the United States along the northwest border with Canada. He asked to be deported to Canada, but Canada refused to accept him. He then filed a political asylum claim in the United States and was released on bond. Mezer withdrew the application, claiming he had returned to Canada when in fact he was in Brooklyn. His co-conspirator, Lafi Taisir Mufleh Khalil, was originally issued a C-1 transit visa; but upon his arrival at JFK Airport in New York, the immigration inspector incorrectly treated him as a tourist, which allowed Khalil to stay in the United States for six months. Khalil overstayed his visa and was arrested along with Mezer on July 31, 1997, the morning of the planned attack50.

p. 54
Thus, despite evidence that difficulties with travel documents restricted terrorist movement, no agency of the U.S. government was analyzing terrorist travel patterns or immigration abuses before 9/11.62 Because the government simply did not know what it knew, it missed opportunities to disrupt terrorist mobility and, therefore, terrorist operations. Conversely, by 2000, when al Qaeda began inserting participants in the September 11 plot into the United States, their operational knowledge of our immigration, visitor, and border systems was considerable.

p. 58-59
Document vendors provided al Qaeda with a wide range of bogus and genuine documents and were valued for their forgery skills. Through these vendors, al Qaeda operatives had access to an “impressive range of fraudulent travel, identification and other documents,” including passports from countries in almost every region of the world, travel cachets, blank visas, foils, stamps, seals, laminates, and other material.122 Some of these forgers are dedicated to al Qaeda’s cause and tend to be located along main travel routes; others are interested only in profit.123

Corrupt government officials have facilitated terrorist travel by selling genuine travel documents. Ramzi Yousef, convicted of attempting to blow up a tower of the World Trade Center in 1993, claimed he bought an Iraqi passport from a Pakistani official for $100.124 Two of the 9/11 hijackers, Waleed and Wail al Shehri, reportedly received new Saudi passports from a relative in the passport office.125 Al Qaeda also relied on bribery to get passports and the special plastic used inside them to protect biographical information.126 Moreover, corrupt officials have been known to take bribes at the border from a terrorist lacking proper documentation.127

There is also evidence that terrorists used human smugglers to sneak across borders.129 Smugglers were typically paid to make all logistical arrangements, including mode of travel and lodging, and to pay off corrupt officials if necessary.130 A typical smuggling scheme aided jihadist youth wanting to travel through Iran to Afghanistan to train in al Qaeda’s camps.

Posted to Immigration_terror at 11:37 PM | Comments (1)

Redeeming blogdom

For the most part the blogger coverage of the DNC sucked.

Hopefully those bloggers that are covering the RNC can do better.

I posted threads at RedState (redstate.org/story/2004/8/23/184419/535) and the CommandPost suggesting that people post the questions the RNC should ask, and what they should cover. Please leave your questions or suggested coverage at either or both locations.

Posted to Bloggage at 10:04 PM | Comments (0)

At The Lonewacko Blog, we keep you coming back

Brazil's Ana Paula Connelly (R) and team mate Sandra Pires hug after losing their match to team Brazil Adriana Behar and shelda Bede after the women's quarter-final beach volleyball event at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games

Previous coverage here and here.

(Via this)

Posted to WackyHumor at 09:42 PM | Comments (0)

"GOP to finesse immigration issue"

From the WashTimes:

The Republican Party's platform will oppose amnesty for illegal aliens, predicts Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, the platform committee chairman.

"I believe it likely there will be a strong statement against amnesty," the Tennessee Republican said in an interview with The Washington Times...

Sounds good! Coincidentally enough, I biked up 2000' a couple days ago, and I'm suddenly feeling like I did just before I started the downhill run:

The problem for Mr. Frist, he acknowledged, is that, in order to avoid a possible convention floor fight, the platform's immigration plank has to be written in such a way as to reconcile, or at least appear to reconcile, the irreconcilable. That is, it has to oppose amnesty, but not oppose the president's plan, which includes a temporary amnesty that also, as some critics claim, can lead to citizenship for those granted amnesty.

"The document," Mr. Frist acknowledged, "has to reflect the president's principles and at same time the party's principles and policies."

So, you want one company to be fined for immigration violations in the first five months of the year, but, at the same time, you're opposed to illegal immigration and amnesty? I can't wait to see that wording.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 04:57 PM | Comments (0)

"Immigration Laws Might Have Stopped Sept. 11 Plot"

From the LAT:

All of the Sept. 11 hijackers broke U.S. immigration laws and some of those violations could have led to their detection and arrest, according to a new staff report from the bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks.

The detectable violations included fraudulent passports presented by as many as seven of the 19 hijackers, the report said. Also, U.S. intelligence had linked at least three of the hijackers to terrorist groups, but officials never placed their names on the watch lists used by border inspectors.

Moreover, the report said, ringleader Mohamed Atta was allowed back into the United States in January 2001, even though he had previously overstayed a tourist visa and was not eligible for admission...

See also the AP's "9/11 staff report focuses on immigration".

The report is available here. A brief look at 'Chapter 4: Immigration and Border Security Evolve, 1993 to 2001' reveals the following discussion of "immigrant advocacy" groups and sanctuary laws:

Friction also existed in these relationships. It mainly arose from the INS's inability to respond to all requests for assistance, ambiguity regarding the role of state and local law officers in enforcing immigration regulations, and the discomfort many various immigrant advocacy groups had with local enforcement of immigration law. Despite these difficulties, many police officers continued officially and sometimes unofficially to work with the INS by identifying criminal aliens and turning them over to the INS. Many county officials sought to prevent criminal aliens from returning to the streets, and frequently pressured their congressional representatives to force local INS offices to deport them.

...In 1996, a new law enabled the INS to enter into agreements with state and local law enforcement agencies through which the INS would provide training and the local agencies would exercise immigration enforcement authority. [281] Terrorist watchlists would not be made available to them. Such agreements were voluntary, and only Salt Lake City unsuccessfully attempted to take advantage of the law. Moreover, in prior years mayors of cities with large immigrant populations sometimes imposed limits on city employee cooperation with federal immigration agents. [282]

Footnote 282: This "sanctuary" policy was first published by Mayor Edward Koch on August 7, 1989, and directed city "line workers" who had contact with the public to not transmit information respecting any alien to federal immigration authorities. However, it exempted the police and the Department of Corrections and directed them to continue to work with federal authorities "in investigating and apprehending aliens suspected of criminal activity." Koch, executive order, Aug. 7, 1989.

See this for more information on L.A.'s Special Order 40. The previous post "License Crackdown Stirs Sharp Debate at Hearing" has more information about the 9/11 hijacker's use of driver's licenses.

Posted to Immigration_terror at 11:07 AM | Comments (1)

"Nanny Nuisance"

I can't figure out whether this NY Post blurb is a satire or is based on real comments:

Housewives in Westchester and other wealthy suburbs are in a tizzy because their housekeepers and nannies are about to lose their driver's licenses. Letters recently went out from the Department of Motor Vehicles in a crackdown on illegal aliens who are using bogus Social Security numbers. "It's a nightmare," complained one disgruntled housefrau. "What good is it having a servant if she can't do the shopping, or pick up the kids at school?" Thousands of immigrants from Mexico and Central America may lose their jobs once the DMV strips them of their license to drive. "I can't allow the family car to be driven by an unlicensed driver," one homemaker explained. "I'll just have to hire someone else..."

See the earlier post "License Crackdown Stirs Sharp Debate at Hearing", which featured the following excerpt from the NYT:

[The AILA rep tugged at our heart strings with tales about a] working mother in Westchester County, [who] is frantic because her devoted Uruguayan babysitter, who has lived in New York since she was 12, will lose her license for lack of a Social Security number or valid visa; an elderly woman is going to lose the immigrant home health care aide who drives her to her doctor... [Assemblyman Barry Grodenchik] said he had met with Korean greengrocers and florists whose businesses are heavily dependent on immigrant truck drivers now losing their licenses.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 10:12 AM | Comments (1)

Maryland company fined for immigration violations

One tiny, teensy-weensy, itty-bitty problem. That was the only company in the entire U.S. that was fined for immigration violations in the first five months of the year.

"Employer fines plummet for hiring illegals":

Since 1998, the federal government has fined just four companies in San Diego County and none in Riverside County for hiring illegal immigrants ---- and those statistics seem to paint a very different picture than the one recently described by Undersecretary of Homeland Security Asa Hutchinson.

At an Aug. 13 town-hall meeting on illegal immigration held in Temecula, Hutchinson touted the more than 500 investigations of companies the federal government has recently conducted nationwide. Of those, 179 were in Southern California, he said.

And while a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman said last week that the number of investigations has increased since 2001, he acknowledged the number of fines has dropped dramatically in that same period.

Federal records show that in 2001, 141 companies across the country were hit with fines, 15 of them in California. By 2002, those numbers had dropped to 73 and one, respectively. In 2003, 15 companies in the United States were fined ---- none of which were in California. And as of May, just one company ---- in Maryland ---- was fined this year.

In Southern California, the numbers are even smaller. Thirteen companies received fines for violations of immigration laws in 2001 ---- and only two since.

In this region, not a single Riverside County company has been fined in the past decade. ["By 1992, the County was "home" to over 1.3 million residents...more than the entire population of 13 states"] In San Diego County, just four companies have received fines since 1998...

Posted to Immigration2004 at 10:13 PM | Comments (0)

"Head of Dolly clone lab is found hanged"

The head of the science lab which created Dolly the sheep has been found hanging in his holiday home.

Professor John Clark, who was believed to have been suffering from depression was found in his remote cottage in the village of Cove, north of Eyemouth, on the Berwickshire coast.

Prof Clark lead the Roslin Institute in Midlothian, one of the world’s leading animal biotechnology research centres.

[He was apparently suffering from depression, he had taken time off work, one of his spin-off businesses had failed, etc.]

This appears to be somewhat less suspicious than other recent suicides and accidental deaths of top scientists.

UPDATE: There are a lot of links about the dead scientists here. Just remember the Lonewacko Linking Policy: linking doesn't imply endorsement.

Posted to Terrorism at 10:02 PM | Comments (0)

"The Earth is going to disappear" very soon

Brain-hungry ETs are out of luck. Due to our increasing use of digital cable and directed broadcasts, the amount of radio frequencies we broadcast into space is greatly diminishing, making any attempts to find us much less likely, boffo scientists say.

Sorry, ET, but I hear Alpha Centaurians are quite tasty.

Posted to Miscellania at 09:41 PM | Comments (0)

"Border officials say they are unprepared to protect nation"

Although the 9/11 commission cited the need for increased border security, the majority of the nation's customs and border officials say they are ill-equipped to prevent another terrorist attack, according to a survey planned for release on Monday.

"The vast majority of America's front-line border protection personnel do not believe that they have been given the proper tools, training and support to be effective in stopping potential terrorists from entering the country," a nationwide survey of U.S. Border Patrol agents and Customs and Border Protection officers concludes...

I'll link to the report when it's available.

See also "Border Patrol union says new rules 'muzzle' critics of the agency".

Posted to Immigration2004 at 09:29 PM | Comments (0)

"E-Vote Machine Certification Criticized"

From the AP:

The three companies that certify the nation's voting technologies operate in secrecy, and refuse to discuss flaws in the ATM-like machines to be used by nearly one in three voters in November.

Despite concerns over whether the so-called touchscreen machines can be trusted, the testing companies won't say publicly if they have encountered shoddy workmanship...

Although up to 50 million Americans are expected to vote on touchscreen machines on Nov. 2, federal regulators have virtually no oversight over testing of the technology. The certification process, in part because the voting machine companies pay for it, is described as obsolete by those charged with overseeing it...

Critics of reliance on touchscreen machines want not just paper records - only Nevada among the states expects to have them installed in its touchscreens come November - but also public scrutiny of the software they use. The machine makers have resisted...

In Huntsville, the window blinds were closed when a reporter visited the office suite where CIBER Inc. employees test voting machine software. A woman who unlocked the door said no one inside could answer questions about testing...

While this article -despite being posted at NewsMax - has its biases, and despite the fact that most of the people who complain the loudest about touchscreen voting are far-left loonies, this could be a right issue. Perhaps a bipartisan effort could be mounted to clean up the whole system. The right will agree to make sure that e-voting is as accurate as can be, and the left will agree to allow illegal aliens, dead people, and household pets to be removed from the voting rolls.

See also my still-unfinished essay "'Electronic voting will never be 100% secure' - draft zero".

Posted to Politics at 09:23 PM | Comments (0)

You can probably figure out where this story is going

On August 13, Reuters ran "Mexico protests US border agents' pepper weapons":

Mexican opposition legislators are up in arms over the US Border Patrol's use of weapons firing plastic bullets filled with pepper powder against Mexican migrants as they cross the border illegally... nonlethal weapons have been used sporadically for at least two years...

"We will not permit these kinds of acts that violate human rights," Sadot Sanchez, who heads the Senate's human rights commission and is a member of PRI, the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, said Wednesday.

Last week, Zacatecas state Governor Ricardo Monreal fired off a telegram to US President George W. Bush, describing the use of the weapon as "xenophobic and racist" and "reminiscent of the Kristallnacht [purges] in Nazi Germany."

... Agents of the US Border Patrol's Tucson sector in Arizona, the most heavily crossed route for illegal migrants, have had the weapons for the past two years but officials say there are strict regulations on their use.

The weapons "are only ever used to defend yourself, another agent, or an innocent third party from assault," spokesman Andy Adame said on Wednesday.

"They allow us to disarm migrants throwing softball sized rocks at agents, without using deadly force against them."

"High-level" meetings were held:

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega met with Mexican Ambassador Carlos de Icaza in Washington on Friday [August 13], after Mexico demanded high-level diplomatic consultations on the issue, an official at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico confirmed...

"They are using our Mexican countrymen as targets in a modern, almost festive hunt with rubber bullets," Mexican lawmaker Cesar Camacho told local media...

What are some of the cases these non-lethal weapons are intended to address?

Here are some pictures of Border Patrol vehicles damaged by rocks.

And:

Smugglers have been ramming Border Patrol vehicles with cars and chasing down agents while driving or on foot. There also has been a rise in smugglers attacking agents with softball-sized rocks to divert their attention from border crossers...

And:

Steve McPartland, a Border Patrol agent in California, said he can't count the number of times he has been attacked with rocks. The most memorable of those times, though, was three years ago, when a group of illegal immigrants trying to cross in Douglas threw dozens of rocks at him at once.

"I was absolutely terrified," he said. "You're just thinking, 'God, I hope the other guys get here quick.' "

In the past 10 years, McPartland said rockings in San Diego have been occurring almost daily. The rockings and other violent crimes have, however, slowed down somewhat since the 1990s when the Border Patrol launched operations that funneled many smugglers from California and Texas into Arizona...

And:

On July 22, an immigrant smuggler threw five softball-size rocks at an agency helicopter 30 feet in the air before he was arrested. If one of the rocks had hit a main rotor, Adame said the helicopter could have crashed.

And:

Eighty-nine agents have been assaulted so far this year in an escalating series of attacks by the smugglers — some shot at with automatic weapons, while others were attacked with block-sized rocks or had their vehicles rammed by armed smugglers, Border Patrol Chief David V. Aguilar said yesterday...

Right about now, three or four of you might be saying something like, "President Bush is going to go Ike on them! If they don't want to play paintball, how about we switch to RPGs!"

However, the rest of you probably know where this story is going. You can probably already feel the "compassion" welling up. The only slightly surprising thing is the chosen spokesman.

OK, enough keeping you in suspense.

"Bush's Nephew Rips Armed Border Guards":

MEXICO CITY (AP) - President Bush's nephew, campaigning for overseas votes in Mexico on Saturday, called the federal policy of arming U.S. Border Patrol agents with plastic pellet guns ``reprehensible.''

Speaking in a mix of English and sometimes-halting Spanish, George P. Bush said his uncle was not to blame for the gun policy, which has angered Mexicans. He instead blamed it on ``some local INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) guy who's trying to be tough, act macho.''

``If there has been American approval for this policy, that is reprehensible,'' Bush said of the guns, essentially paintball projectiles filled with chile powder. ``It's kind of barbarous.''

The pellet guns, which were approved at the federal level, have been used on a trial basis since 2001 in California and Arizona. The U.S. Border Patrol fired the pepper-balls in 81 instances in 2002-03 and reported no deaths or severe injuries...

The younger Bush, whose father is Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and mother, Columba, is originally from Mexico, acknowledged at a news conference that the war in Iraq is not popular in Mexico but defended the military action, saying ``we're almost done with it.''

He also acknowledged that ``there are some people in our (Republican) party who don't see the benefits of immigration,'' but promised that President Bush was a proponent of immigration reform.

I'm just surprised it took eight days for Bush - or, in this specific case, someone named Bush - to come out against the weapons.

For further reading, see "The Bush Betrayal: Maybe He’s Not Thinking But Feeling—Family Feeling, Mexican Style". Also, the post "Nanci Pelosi, supporter of sweatshops, opponent of citizens and laws" reports on remarks Nanci Pelosi made in Mexico. While her remarks were about the Wal*Mart raids, I could see either her or George P. making each others' comments.

UPDATE: The S.F. Chronical offers "George P. Bush accepts criticism of some U.S. policy during Mexico campaign trip." It's also an AP report from the same author as the one linked above. And, it's fundamentally the same as the report above. The report above is also the same report featured in dozens of papers. For some reason, the AP report in the Chronical has a different title and appears to have been rewritten a bit. It also has a couple additional quotes from GPB:

[GPB] told a news conference Saturday that his uncle, if re-elected, would turn the focus of foreign policy "back to this hemisphere..."

On Friday, speaking upon arriving in Mexico City, the younger Bush noted that "if there's an election like the election of 2000, each vote will count, especially in Florida."

Keep up the outreach!

UPDATE 2: Michelle Malkin comments.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 09:09 PM | Comments (1)

"Al-Qaida Said to Recruit in Latin America"

This AP report mainly focuses on the possibility of AQ conducting attacks in Latin America, but it does mention a few U.S.-specific items:

Governments throughout Mexico and Central America are on alert as evidence grows that al-Qaida members are traveling in the region and looking for recruits to carry out attacks in Latin America - the potential last frontier for international terrorism...

...U.S. officials have long feared al-Qaida could launch an attack from south of the border...

...Mexican and U.S. border officials have been on extra alert, checking foreign passports and arresting any illegal migrants...

In South America, U.S. officials have long suspected Paraguay's border with Brazil and Argentina as an area for Islamic terrorist fund-raising. Much of the focus has fallen on the Muslim community that sprouted during the 1970s, and authorities believe as much as $100 million a year flows out of the region, with large portions diverted to Islamic militants linked to Hezbollah and the Palestinian militant group Hamas...

Concerns increased this summer about whether Mexico was doing enough to screen international visitors after a 48-year-old South African woman arrived in Mexico with a passport that was missing several pages and then waded across the Rio Grande into Texas.

Farida Goolam Mahamed Ahmed was arrested July 19 while trying to board a flight in McAllen, Texas. She pleaded innocent Friday to immigration violations and was under investigation for links to terrorist activities or groups...

"U.S. officials have long feared al-Qaida could launch an attack from south of the border"? So, like, why haven't they tried to, like, you know, prevent as many illegals as possible from coming here? And, "arresting any illegal migrants"? They do arrest about a million a year, but they also let a million a year come here.

Posted to Immigration_terror at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

"Terrorists Eyeing Military Recruiting Sites"

According to FoxNews:

The FBI has received information that U.S. Armed Forces recruiting facilities could potentially be the target of a terrorist attack, sources familiar with the threat told FOX News Friday.

However, the threat information is uncorroborated and unsubstantiated, one law enforcement official warned...

What they didn't mention is the terrorists might have come here via Mexico:

Sierra Vista, Arizona - August 20, 2004 - 2:30 pm -- According to a reliable source, three terrorists crossed the border into the United States from Mexico yesterday. Two were apprehended. The FBI learned that the terrorists came to assassinate the military personnel who work in store-front recruiting offices in the Sierra Vista mall in Sierra Vista, Arizona. -- The recruiters were briefed on the situation and told to be on the alert and to notify local police of any suspicious activity. -- The nationality of the terrorists is not known. -- In the face of American Patrol's skepticism, our source insisted the story is true.

That last "rumor mill" item was supposedly posted before the FoxNews report. (Note that that URL is probably not a permalink.)

Posted to Immigration_terror at 08:02 PM | Comments (0)

Hand overplayed; game over

Since the release of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, Kerry and forces under his command as well as independent operatives have launched a series of strikes, even going as far as hacking Amazon's page. And, of course, the recent Chris Matthew/Keith Olbermann/Michelle Malkin thing.

As regards the latter, I believe it's run its course due to opposing forces having overplayed their hand. Specifically, Keith "Mr. Class" Olbermann is now suggesting that Malkin should "open [her] veins." That is truly beyond the pale, and expect any forces that continue with this battle to have his words used against them.

I suspect that Kerry's forces will recognize that this particular battle should be retreated from and they'll seek to establish new positions. Perhaps they could seek to tie one of the authors' third cousins to wiccanism - better yet, Canadian wiccanism - or something.

There's a good overview of the Matthews/Malkin affair here. (Non-working permalink here).

Posted to Politics at 10:54 PM | Comments (1)

Top 10 NJ Governor McGreevey Jokes

10. The joke's on you: corruption isn't funny.

9.-1. See #10.

OK, now that I've taught you an important, Moesha-style life lesson, the jokes are here and here.

Posted to Politics at 10:34 PM | Comments (2)

"Border Patrol union says new rules 'muzzle' critics of the agency"

Our border enforcement is about to get a lot better. Or, at least, it's about to be made to look a lot better:

New labor rules proposed by the Department of Homeland Security would muzzle internal critics of the Border Patrol by making it easier to punish and fire agents, who have often been vocal critics of management policies, union officials said...

"People aren't going to be willing to talk. It's going to have a very chilling effect," T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, said Wednesday...

The proposed regulations allow the government to fire people for national security reasons under an expedited process; create new mandatory firing offenses and eliminate arbitration for removal, said Mark Roth, general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees.

The new rules would also allow Homeland Security to control pay raises and make it easier to transfer workers to different regions of the country. "They are literally (making them) second class government employees," Roth said...

A week ago there was a townhall meeting about immigration in Temecula, CA. It featured DHS Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson and Congressman Darrell Issa. At the meeting, T.J. Bonner stood up and asked Hutchinson, "Why don't you let us do our jobs?" While these new regulations were apparently proposed months before the meeting, it looks like they're at least partially designed to prevent things like that from happening in the future.

And, in bipartisan news, recall this:

Joanne Peters, a [U.S. Rep. Joe] Baca [D-CA] spokeswoman, said the union members who attacked the congressman are "loose cannons" who have been reprimanded by their superiors...

To tie everything up together nicely, Baca was one of the main people who got Asa Hutchinson to stop the now-infamous minor immigration sweeps.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 03:53 PM | Comments (0)

2 + 2 = separatism

From the Tucson Citizen:

...the University of Arizona was awarded a $10 million grant [from the National Science Foundation] to improve mathematics education among Latinos...

The grant will fund research, professional development of teachers and development of leaders in math education...

Among the goals of the new center are to create teaching materials and ways of teaching that bring in a cultural and linguistic context specific to Latinos, said Ron Marx, dean of the UA College of Education.

"Historically the dominant culture of the country has been western European and English. Curriculum materials reflect (those) cultural patterns, which isn't good or bad, it just means that kids from those kinds of backgrounds tend to have more advantages because the content and the way it is delivered matches the way their culture represents the world and what they learn at home," Marx said.

Educators can take advantage of the way Latinos express concepts of the world and the way they interact with parents and the community to build a better math program for them, Marx said.

"If you build on their home culture, then you are going to have more success," he said.

This is a relatively minor issue - after all, it's just $10 million - but the reason this is here is to offer yet another counterexample for those who insist that the current wave of immigration is just like previous waves. As far as I know, one hundred years ago there was no education establishment creating teaching materials specifically to meet the needs of Italians or Irish. Marx' comments point out that there are powerful forces attempting to prevent the assimilation of some groups to "American" culture.

And, having studied everything up into the lower reaches of "higher" mathematics, I can't recall mathematics texts involving too many things other than numbers and terms. Certainly, at the lower grade levels you might find something like "Jack has two mittens and Jill has two mittens...," but does that really require a culturally-sensitive translation? Aren't non-Hispanics who live in warm climates also disadvantaged?

This could also be viewed as an attempt to create yet another ethnic power center and as a make-work program for Ethnic Studies graduates.

More sinisterly, this could also be seen as an attempt by white elites to keep non-whites in their own neighborhoods, masquerading as an attempt to help those non-whites. See, for instance, John Derbyshire's 'Ditching Diversity'.

If this were a private grant it would be bad enough, but note that the National Science Foundation is a federal agency. The award is #0424983, and the description is here:

The Center for the Mathematics Education of Latinos/as (CEMELA) addresses the mathematics education needs of the largest and most rapidly growing minority group in the country, a diverse group that has one of the most disturbing patterns of academic achievement. Given the unique language, social and cultural factors associated with working-class/low-income Latino/as students and communities, a multidisciplinary approach is necessary to address their education. Although there are well-established scholars who focus on the education of Latinos, their research is in the areas of policy, language and culture, not primarily in mathematics education. Few mathematics education scholars have multidisciplinary expertise in the particular areas relevant to the learning of mathematics by Latinos/as...

You can write to your congressman here.

(Via redstate.org/story/2004/8/19/214648/395; more discussion here)

Posted to Immigration2004 at 11:44 AM | Comments (2)

"License Crackdown Stirs Sharp Debate at Hearing"

Since this is a NYT report, the subtextual subtitle appears to be: "Working woman from Westchester County, immigrant workers hardest hit":

[At the meeting] Raymond P. Martinez, the state motor-vehicles commissioner, began his hour-and-a-half-long testimony by reminding the audience that 18 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 held valid driver's licenses.

"These license documents, issued in states where requirements were less stringent than those here in New York State, allowed the hijackers to board airplanes and execute their acts of terrorism against our nation," he said...

But in one of several sharp exchanges, Assemblyman Noah Nicholas Perry, a Democrat from Brooklyn, challenged the commissioner's references to the 9/11 terrorists, calling the assertion that they had been allowed to board planes because they had licenses "blatantly false," since the men also had valid passports. Other speakers, including Deborah Notkin, president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, noted that since the hijackers had entered the country legally, they would have been able to obtain valid driver's licenses even under New York's restrictions.

I'm going to have to check on that, but one wonders why they went to Florida and Virginia. From Rep. Chris Cox (R-CA):

“On September 11, 2001 al Qaeda slipped into airports in Boston, Newark, and Washington, DC undetected. No less than 7 of these terrorists used authentic Virginia identification cards obtained from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles.

“The terrorists used Virginia identification cards for a reason. Although not a single one of these terrorists was actually a lawful resident of Virginia, they knew the weaknesses of Virginia’s identification process; and they exploited those weaknesses in their plot to kill thousand of Americans...

While Virginia moved swiftly to close the loopholes that made this possible, California has moved to widen them. Recently, the GAO sent three undercover agents into separate offices of the California DMV--each with false identification, purportedly from Texas, which they had manufactured themselves on a desktop computer using PhotoShop. According to the GAO, the documents should have been easily identified as forgeries. To make it especially easy for the California DMV to stop the fraud, each of the three undercover agents used the same fake name. Yet California cheerfully issued California driver’s licenses to all three of them--all based on the same poor quality forged documents, and all using exactly the same name...

For more on the GAO's investigation, see "Fake Documents, Real Drivers Licenses".

And:

As a result of such laxity in licensing, all of the 9/11 hijackers had driver's licenses or state non-driver's identification cards, which they were able to use when renting housing, opening bank accounts, and boarding planes. For example, Hijacker Hanni Hanjour and Khalid Al-Midhar obtained Virginia licenses by hiring an illegal alien to co-sign their residency forms and listing his address as theirs. The day after they got their licenses, they sponsored two other hijackers, Salem Al-Hamzi and Majed Moqed, to get licenses, too...

Why, there was even an NPR report on it (audio at the link):

Robert Siegel reports on the Department of Motor Vehicles in the Commonwealth of Virginia, where a liberal policy for obtaining a driver's license or state identification card has led to years of fraud and corruption. It took the events of Sept. 11 to finally put an end to the policy, when the FBI learned that at least seven of the hijackers had gotten Virginia I.D. cards. Law enforcement officials have concluded that for the past several years, tens of thousands of illegal immigrants were able to get legal driver's licenses or identification cards from Virginia. Applicants didn't need the standard proofs of identity or residency -- such as social security cards or utility bills. Forms that were much easier to fake were accepted. And unscrupulous lawyers and notaries established a thriving illicit market for processing undocumented aliens for hefty fees.

And, as stated in the 9/11 report, 9/11 would not have happened if we had followed our visa rules.

Wouldn't proper coverage of this matter have reported on those last excerpts rather than just quoting the AILA's statements without comment?

Continuing with the NYT report:

[The AILA rep tugged at our heart strings with tales about a] working mother in Westchester County, [who] is frantic because her devoted Uruguayan babysitter, who has lived in New York since she was 12, will lose her license for lack of a Social Security number or valid visa; an elderly woman is going to lose the immigrant home health care aide who drives her to her doctor... [Assemblyman Barry Grodenchik] said he had met with Korean greengrocers and florists whose businesses are heavily dependent on immigrant truck drivers now losing their licenses.

Gosh, you think they could hire legal workers instead? Or, is that thinking too "out of the box" for the AILA and the NYT? And, once again, these people aren't "immigrants," they're illegal aliens. Further on in the report, Nina Bernstein euphemizes yet again, using "newcomers" when "illegal aliens" is the actual term.

Perhaps one of these days the NYT will look into this issue from a perspective based on laws, immigration policies, and the need for security, but I think a more balanced report is going to have to come from another paper.

Previous coverage of NYT immigration coverage starts here, and the previous report has pre-hearing coverage from the NY Post.

UPDATE: The NY Daily News' report is entitled "9/11 kin back
immig ID plan". Based on the last paragraph, I'm going to tentatively assume their use of "undocumented immigrants" and "immigrants" instead of "illegal aliens" is just ignorance and not part of an attempt to hide the truth:

Families of Sept. 11th victims backed yesterday a controversial state plan to revoke driver's licenses from hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who got them using fake Social Security numbers...

Undocumented immigrants and their advocates say they needed driver's licenses to get jobs, and had little choice but to provide phony Social Security numbers to get them.

Posted to Immigration_dls at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)

"N.Y. '9/11' check yanks 300k driver licenses"

Hey, I don't write these headlines.

The N.Y. Post reports on New York state's attempts to take driver's licenses away from those who provided fake social security numbers. Their report is shorter than the NYT report I eviscerated yesterday. Unlike the NYT report it doesn't advocate for illegal immigration. It does, however, include the following quote. See if you can locate the threat:

"There are other options the DMV can follow consistent with existing law that would really lessen the hardship that is happening, and provide more opportunity for immigrants living and working in this community," said Amy Sugimori, staff lawyer for the National Employment Law Project...

I've never heard of the NELP before, but a preliminary google search turns up no less than 138 hits for "National Employment Law Project" "ford foundation".

Posted to Immigration_dls at 10:32 PM | Comments (0)

Interlocking loonies

Front Page Magazine reports on all the people and groups tied into George Soros' network of 527s in the article Soros' "Reform".

The article lists so many names who are tied to Soros it's almost mind-numbing:

Soros believes he is the apostle of something he calls "the open society" under which national sovereignty is subjugated to global "democracy;" a vision that includes the borderless spread of international gun control.

...former Clinton White House operative Harold Ickes’ Media Fund – which scant press reports say will be launching attack ads against President Bush -- can’t be found in a Google Search. Some are merely addresses in nowhere.

...an entity created in Texas called the Sustainable World Corp., incorporated on December 10, 2003. A few days later it split $3.1 million between a "527" called Joint Victory Campaign 2004 and the Ickes Media Fund. The [Washington] Post noted that the only public information available on the Sustainable World Corp. is a Houston post office box, and that its registered agent refused to identify the principals of his client.

..."Campaign for a Progressive Future" (CPF) has expenditures tied to the Million Mom March... Among its donors are George Soros and Soros Fund Management and the Irene Diamond Fund, which helped bankroll the NAACP anti-gun lawsuit. Each Fund gave the CPF $500,000. A Google Search on the CPF produces nothing but an information page under the heading "Silent Partners" from the Center for Public Integrity, which lists the group as an "organization that supports candidates opposed by the National Rifle Association."

...a search on the Democratic National Committee Website for the words "MoveOn.org" produces a few paragraphs that raise instant questions for Soros.

One item says, "The DNC is also conducting a major petition drive in partnership with MoveOn.org. More than 310,000 Americans have signed the petition to protect our courts - with more than 172,000 of those signatures coming in the past 36 hours. The petition calls on Bush and the Republicans to stop nominating judges that are out of step with mainstream Americans and praising the Democrats for standing up for their rights." The DNC website links the petition.

The other announcement involved what the DNC called "a massive public mobilization" in which "The Democratic Party is partnering with MoveOn.org..." to fight President Bush’s tax cuts.

...Sugar-daddy Soros’ America Coming Together is headed by Steve Rosenthal, formerly the Political Director of the AFL-CIO, whose title is now Chief Executive Officer of ACT, and by and Ellen R. Malcom, founder of EMILY’s list, the nation’s most notable pro-abortion "special interest" political action committee. Ms. Malcolm’s title is President, though the ACT website says she will keep her post at EMILY’s List.

In addition the ACT website www.americacomingtogether.com lists:

Minyon Moore, "formerly Chief Operations Officer for the Democratic National Committee;" Gina Glantz, the former national campaign manager for the Bill Bradley for President Campaign; Cecile Richards, "President of America Votes, a coalition of 17 national organizations working together to educate and mobilize voters in the 2004 elections…;" Andy Stern, President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); and Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club. Pope is listed as ACT’s Treasurer.

There’s more. An Internet search produces a press release on the Democratic National Committee website announcing Minyon Moore’s August 2002 departure as the DNC’s Chief Operating Officer to work for Dewey Square Group, a Democratic political consultancy.

According to the DNC, "Moore served as White House political director under President Clinton, as Political Director of the DNC... Moore will continue to serve as a senior advisor to the DNC and to Chairman (Terry) McAuliff." In addition, the chairman said, "I couldn’t be more thrilled than to nominate her to serve as an At-Large DNC member as well as a member of the DNC’s executive committee." The release quotes Ms. Moore: "I look forward to maintaining a close relationship with the DNC in my new position at Dewy Square…"

Cecile Richards is the activist daughter of Anne Richards, the former Governor of Texas who lost her job to George W. Bush. She is a former organizer for the Service Employees [sic; International] Union and is President of America Votes, which just so happen to be another 527 organization getting soft money. Before coming to America Votes, Ms. Richards was Deputy Chief of Staff to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi...

Posted to Politics at 10:22 PM | Comments (1)

Wouldn't it be nice if this problem would just go away?

Reading the SacBee article "License bill is likely headed to veto", I keep thinking one thing. The article is about the acrimonious attempt by Gil "One Bill Gil" Cedillo to give driver's licenses to illegal aliens. Cedillo appears to be calling Schwarzenegger's hand. Schwarzenegger wants a mark on the DL showing the holder to be an illegal alien; Cedillo doesn't want that mark, and, as previously pointed out, they're trying to smear their way to victory.

Wouldn't it be nice if this problem would just go away?

Wouldn't it be nice if Gil Cedillo, Fabian Nunez, and all the rest had far less power and there was no debate over giving legal licenses to illegal aliens? Cedillo and Nunez already have a power base, but at the least we can attempt to prevent them from increasing it.

Obviously, they want to increase their power by bringing in illegal aliens and giving them licenses. If we tried to prevent illegal immigration, not only would there be no such debate, they could be prevented from increasing their power at the expense of everyone else. Perhaps Arnold should consider putting pressure on Bush to enforce our laws.

Posted to Immigration_dls at 12:47 PM | Comments (1)

"Hillbangers"

Serving as an antidote to their other immigration coverage, the NYT provides a report on gangs that are moving into rural areas to take advantage of the illegal aliens who are going there for jobs:

Gang activity has traditionally been a function of immigration and labor-migration patterns. Today, with those patterns changing -- with unskilled jobs shifting from cities to rural regions, with sprawl pushing suburbs and exurbs deeper into the countryside -- gangs are cropping up in unexpected places: tiny counties and quaint villages, farming communities and cookie-cutter developments, small towns and tourist resorts. In Toombs County, Ga., for instance, 10 Hispanic gangs roam an area marked by cotton, tobacco and onion fields, according to Art Villegas, who tracks gang activity there for the sheriff's office.

The blue-collar jobs that do not require much training or fluency in English are increasingly found in the countryside. Thanks in part to the explosive growth of the fast-food industry and the huge agro-conglomerates that service it, giant food factories now dot pastoral America. The plants actively recruit south of the border and in poor Hispanic neighborhoods on both coasts of the United States, drawing legions of immigrants to places barely big enough to register on state maps.

In 2002, just 13 companies were fined for immigration violations. If that number could be raised back to 1000 or more, these companies would be forced to recruit legal workers and this problem could be reduced before these gangs become a permanent part of rural life. Don't expect the Bush administration to do that any time soon however.

See also "The Immigrant Gang Plague" and "The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave".

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:29 PM | Comments (0)

A pre-edited version of Ted Rall's latest screed

By now, you have probably seen Ted Rall's latest screed: "NYC to GOP: Drop Dead". Our sources have uncovered the version before it was edited by Common Dreams:

Tourists are pleasantly surprised when New Yorkers act as friendly and polite as the people back home in Maybury [ed: it's "Mayberry"]. However, untermenschlich delegates to this month's Republican National Convention shouldn't expect to be treated to our standard out-of-towner treatment. The Republican Untermenschen here to coronate George W. Bush are unwelcome members of a hostile invading army. Like the hapless saps whose blood they sent to be spilled into Middle Eastern sands, dieser Untermenschen will be given intentionally incorrect directions to nonexistent places. Objects will be thrown at diesen Untermenschen. Children will call dieser Untermenschen obscene names. Dieser Untermenschen will not be greeted as liberators.

(The preceding pre-edited post is a parody only. There is no pre-edited version, I simply made that up as parody of the original piece.)

Posted to Politics at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

"Immigrants Face Loss of Licenses in ID Crackdown"

Oh no. Immigrants are being subjected to some form of crackdown? Let's read this NYT article:

Legislatures across the country have been wrestling publicly with a hot-button issue: whether to make it harder or easier for illegal immigrants to be licensed as drivers. The struggle to reconcile public security, road safety and the reality of millions of illegal immigrant workers has led to fierce disagreement and widely different laws - even as the 9/11 commission has urged the adoption of national standards.

As with other papers, the headline isn't telling the truth: these aren't "immigrants," they're illegal aliens. And, there are more things that need to be reconciled than those three listed above. Such as, should we really be giving legal driver's licenses to illegal aliens?

...officials at the [New York] State Department of Motor Vehicles have begun a crackdown on license fraud that will take away the driver's licenses of as many as 200,000 immigrants who cannot prove that they are here legally... Fear and protest spread in places like Westchester County and Staten Island as the letters reached longtime immigrant drivers... the outcry grew as immigrant advocates learned of cases in which bewildered immigrants who responded in person to motor vehicle offices had their licenses confiscated on the spot for lack of a Social Security number.

Today the protests, and explanations by the crackdown's authors, will be presented in Manhattan at the first public hearing on the policy...

Shorter version: the authors of this crackdown certainly owe all of us an explanation for spreading fear in the immigrant community.

State officials say 250,000 licenses are in line to be suspended... "The public is going to be shocked when they find out how many people's Social Security numbers were used by other people unbeknownst to them," [Raymond P. Martinez, the state motor vehicles commissioner] said, putting the figure at more than 100,000, including one number that was used by 57 people...

..."Nobody has considered the bureaucratic nightmare that they're creating," said Margaret Stock, an associate professor of national security law at the United States Military Academy at West Point...

[...more complaints from Stock deleted...]

[...interviews with two illegal aliens deleted...]

Nowhere in the article does it state the simple, fundamental fact that perhaps we shouldn't be giving legal licenses to illegal aliens. After all, if we presumably want to disencentivize illegal immigration, not giving driver's licenses to illegal aliens is one good place to start.

If you were trying to evaluate the tone and content of this article for bias, here's a simple test: how different is this article from one that would have been written by one of those "immigrant advocacy" groups mentioned above? If you saw this article printed in a handout from one of those groups, wouldn't you think it had been written by someone from that group?

While the article contains two interviews with illegal aliens, it does not contain an interview with someone whose social security number was used by an illegal alien. Given the numbers above, someone like that shouldn't be too hard to find.

And, while we're treated to a long stretch of Margaret Stock's opinions, we don't hear from anyone who takes a contrary view. Perhaps Nina Bernstein could have interviewed one of the Florida sheriffs who opposed Jeb Bush's attempt to give driver's licenses to illegal aliens:

"It's incomprehensible to me that you would legitimize through the issuance of a driver's license someone who is here illegally," said Marion County Sheriff Ed Dean, who heads the law-enforcement arm of the task force. "I'm sure the governor has his reasons. From strictly a law-enforcement viewpoint, I would have to respectfully disagree..."

"This law is very poorly crafted and flawed from a domestic security standpoint. I strongly oppose it and cannot support the conceptual intent, either," [Collier County Sheriff Don Hunter] wrote in an e-mail.

Or, perhaps she could have interviewed the Commisioner of Minnesota's Department of Public Safety:

...advocates argue that they want to give drivers licenses to illegal immigrants so they will be safer drivers. This argument is completely without merit and is a transparent attempt to turn the illegal immigrant problem into a public safety issue. There is no evidence that if illegal immigrants received drivers licenses, they would enroll in driver education programs, obtain insurance, and refrain from fleeing the scene of an accident. Common sense dictates that an individual on the run from the law would not wait around at an accident site for the police to arrive... The Department of Public Safety will not facilitate illegal immigration...

(That quote is also in this article about DLs for IAs.)

Note also that this article was written by Nina Bernstein, who was featured here just a few days ago as the author of the PIIPP ("pro-illegal immigration puff piece") entitled "From Immigrants, Stories Of Scrutiny, and Struggle". In that article she used the following phrase:

longtime immigrant workers who cannot prove that they are working legally

In this article, she uses the following:

200,000 immigrants who cannot prove that they are here legally

Maybe she's got a macro or something.

Please send a polite email to the NYT's Public Editor and suggest they do a better job with their immigration coverage: public@nytimes.com

1/11/05 UPDATE: The NYT article includes a quote from Margaret Stock. She's described as "an associate professor of national security law at the United States Military Academy at West Point, who is writing a paper on the driver's license issue... who is also a lieutenant colonel in the military police of the Army Reserves".

On April 1, 2004 she testified before congress, "on behalf of the American Immigration Lawyers Association".

Along with her other qualifications, one would think the AILA link should have been mentioned in the NYT report.

Which raises the question: are other quote sources for the NYT's immigration stories who have undisclosed affiliations with the AILA, NIF, ACLU, PFAW, MALDEF, NCLR, etc. etc. etc.?

Posted to Immigration_dls at 11:52 PM | Comments (0)

"Who is Maurice Strong?"

Here's a flashback to September 1, 1997, courtesy of National Review and Ronald Bailey (also a writer for Reason Magazine). Note that the article is from NR, despite the URL:

'THE survival of civilization in something like its present form might depend significantly on the efforts of a single man," declared The New Yorker. The New York Times hailed that man as the "Custodian of the Planet." He is perpetually on the short list of candidates for Secretary General of the United Nations. This lofty eminence? Maurice Strong, of course. Never heard of him? Well, you should have. Militia members are famously worried that black helicopters are practicing maneuvers with blue-helmeted UN troops in a plot to take over America. But the actual peril is more subtle. A small cadre of obscure international bureaucrats are hard at work devising a system of "global governance" that is slowly gaining control over ordinary Americans' lives. Maurice Strong, a 68-year-old Canadian, is the "indispensable man" at the center of this creeping UN power grab...

Strong blurted out that he'd almost been shut out of the Earth Summit by people at the State Department. They had been overruled by the White House because George Bush [The Elder --LW] knew him. He said that he'd donated some $100,000 to the Democrats and a slightly lesser amount to the Republicans in 1988. (The Republicans didn't confirm.)...

More links here.

And, returning to the present day, see "Global Taxes Are Back, Watch Your Wallet":

Like a bad sequel to a rotten horror movie, the debate over global taxation once again is rearing its ugly head — courtesy of the United Nations. And, despite lacking the requisite hockey mask and chain saw, the seemingly countless proposals for the imposition of global taxes are truly terrifying.

In July, Inter Presse news service reported that a top U.N. official was preparing a new study that will outline numerous global tax proposals to be considered by the General Assembly at its September meeting. The proposals will likely include everything from global taxes on e-mails and Internet use to a global gas tax and levies on airline travel. If adopted, American taxpayers could wind up paying hundreds of billions of dollars each year to the United Nations...

Posted to Politics at 07:59 PM | Comments (0)

Lucilla e la Gatta!

Italy's Lucilla Perrotta (R) and team mate Daniela Gattelli hug each other after winning a point in a women's preliminary beach volleyball match at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games

Che bella!

Piu foto qui, qui, e, in particolare, qui.

In piu:

"Dancers from the Spanish Canary Islands practice at the beach volleyball venue in Athens, August 12, 2004"

Also, this, and this.

Posted to WackyHumor at 07:40 PM | Comments (0)

Why is Olympic mascot "Athina" walking with a limp or something?

Answer below:

The beach volleybal dancers are joined by the Olympic mascot Athina as they entertain the crowd during the 2004 Olympic Games (news - web sites) at the Olympic Beach Volleyball Centre in Athens, Greece on Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2004. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)

Posted to WackyHumor at 07:17 PM | Comments (0)

"Any imminent threat to our security will be dealt with swiftly and severely."

"Imminent threat"? Where have we heard that before?

Except, this time it's from John Kerry:

We will use superior military force to overcome any enemy. Let me be clear: like you, I defended this country as a young man. And I will defend it as president. I will never hesitate to use force when it is required. Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response. Any imminent threat to our security will be dealt with swiftly and severely. I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security. And I will build a stronger American military.

(Via Operative #5)

Posted to Politics at 07:10 PM | Comments (0)

"Gee wiz - what a commotion."

Br'er Drudge links to the site of one of Kerry's former paramours: HedgeFundMistress.com. And, no, it's not Alex Polier. Her name is Lee Roystone, and apparently she accompanied Lurch to Earth Day 1990 or some such and she's selling a fiction book or something.

Apparently the books aren't selling, because this is her latest "blog" entry:

August 18, 2004. Gee wiz - what a commotion. Perhaps
this was a bad idea. No one is even buying any books. So
what is the point? Democrats and Republicans are all
sending me hate mail. I concede defeat. I'm a wimp. This
was a bad idea.

UPDATE: I should have saved off the site, because it's down.

This post seems to think there's something fishy going on here: is she a plant or a scam?

Interviews with her (under her supposedly real name "Lee Whitnum") are here and here.

At the post, I provide the following example of John Kerry's bedside chat: "Je t'aime... je t'aime... mais, j'ai besoin de l'argent... de beaucoup de l'argent... je t'aime... mais, je cherche une femme riche... tres riche..."

Also, as noted, her name doesn't come up in google searches, and, while she claims to live in Nevada, the WHOIS for her site lists an address in Greenwich, CT. Also, in the Boston Herald article she says their affair was secret and they never went out together. But, last night I swear I saw outside pics of them together at her site.

UPDATE 2: Another URL for her site is www.alphabluepublishing.com, but that's "temporarily disabled" too. Also, her business address is given as:

Alpha Blue Publishing
4535 W. Sahara Ave.,
Suite 217
Las Vegas, NV 89102

That appears to be not a PMB, but a mail forwarding service.

UPDATE 3: Her "scrapbook" is even creepier when you look at it sans pictures via google's cache.

Posted to Politics at 07:07 PM | Comments (0)

Investigating wacky practical jokes...

How's this for a practical joke: put a partially-full 2 liter of soda in the freezer for a few minutes until it's partially frozen. The tricky part is it can't be frozen all the way through, but it needs to be frozen enough so there's a plug of ice in the neck of the bottle. And, that ice plug has to be frozen enough so no liquid can get through.

Your thirsty victim will try to suck out some soda without luck. So, he'll try shaking the bottle a little bit, or maybe warming the neck of the bottle. None of that will work.

Then, the fun will start! While the victim continues trying to drink some soda, the ice plug will suddenly fly out of the bottle. Soda will go everywhere: over the refrigerator, on the counter top, all over the floor, even covering the walls several feet away. The stunned victim will momentarily wonder what happened before setting to work cleaning up the mess.

What fun!

Posted to WackyHumor at 07:00 PM | Comments (0)

Kerri Dunn to get probation, write book, give lectures, appear on Oprah...

Former Claremont visiting professor Kerri Dunn has been convicted of insurance fraud charges. Dunn staged a phony hate crime by slashing her own tires and writing racist graffitti on her own car.

She won't be sentenced until Sept. 17, so the rest of the title is just speculation. But, I don't think the sentence is going to involve much prison time, if any.

There are reports on the testimony here and here, and previous coverage starts here.

12/15/04 UPDATE: Dunn's been sentenced to 1 year.

Posted to MultiCultiCult at 05:11 PM | Comments (1)

Finally, a second reason to go to Orange County

It used to be the only reason to go to Orange County was Little Saigon.

Now, an Indian gaming resort is being proposed just blocks from Disneyland. As can be expected, legal shenanigans are involved.

(Via this)

Posted to Los_Angeles at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)

"The Open Borders Lobby and the Nation's Security After 9/11"

The long, footnoted article "The Open Borders Lobby and the Nation's Security After 9/11" shows the ties between various Open Borders groups. The article came out in January 2004 and, while I might have linked to it before, a second link won't do any harm.

If you want to know about the Ford Foundation, MALDEF, AILA, ABA, and other such organizations, it's a gold mine.

Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here.

Posted to Immigration_terror at 09:17 PM | Comments (0)

"Tax-number loans help immigrants buy homes"

Sounds good so far! Let's keep reading this Chicago Tribune story:

Several Chicago-area banks are leading rapid growth in a new, more flexible type of home loan that allows immigrants without Social Security numbers to secure a mortgage.

Hmmm... Why don't they have SSNs? That's curious...

Lenders have become more willing to use individual taxpayer identification numbers--issued by the Internal Revenue Service to allow undocumented workers and others without a Social Security card to pay federal taxes--to gauge the income history of a borrower.

Backers of such loans say the interest from the financial community is a response to the growing number of undocumented immigrants living, working and paying taxes in the United States.

Oh. They aren't "immigrants," they're illegal aliens.

So, who should we boycott?

...two large banks--Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bancorp and Wayzata, Minn.-based TCF Financial Corp.--announced they would begin offering these loans in all of their markets...

Such loans are also getting backing from other entities such as the Milwaukee-based Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corp., the nation's biggest provider of private mortgage insurance...

Mortgage Guaranty Insurance is testing a "Building a Life in America" program in Wisconsin, Chicago, and several cities in Texas along the Mexican border...

What about the part where they tug at your heart strings? Shouldn't that have been in the first paragraph? [Remember: it's not a PIIPP unless the victim appears in the first paragraph.] Oh well, better late than never:

For Maria Madrigal, the loans are a dream come true...

Could there ever be a downside to such a wonderful program? Well, apparently, [cue ominous music], some people don't want these poor immigrants to have homes:

Not everyone supports such programs, however.

Critics of such lending say it's wrong to make loans to people who are in this country illegally and subject to deportation if they're found.

Susan Tully, Midwest field director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, calls mortgages based on tax numbers a "ridiculous notion," noting that immigrants are being granted the same privileges as American citizens.

"It's ridiculous for financial institutions to look the other way on federal laws," she said. "Banks don't really know who they're dealing with. And what's hokey about the whole thing is that immigrants often use a variety of names and identifications, and they can be who they want to be."

While the debate continues...

Wait! Come back here! What debate? This article has 45 paragraphs. Poor Maria appears in paragraph 31. The cavils from FAIR begin in paragraph 36. Only four paragraphs are given to complaints about the program, and they're bracketed by paragraphs describing how wonderful it is.

I propose we all contact the Chicago Tribune's Public Editor and complain. Use either this form or contact him directly at publiceditor@tribune.com

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:41 PM | Comments (4)

"Md. Elections Officials Vow To Purge Noncitizen Voters From Rolls"

It may be, of course, too late:

Maryland elections officials, alerted this week that a greater number of people who aren't American citizens may be voting than previously thought, ordered their staff to find ways to purge the rolls of illegal voters.

"There appears to be a resignation that noncitizens are indeed on the list. That's not acceptable," said Gilles Burger, chairman of the state Board of Elections. "We want to remove all names of people not eligible to vote."

...The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, known as the Motor-Voter law, requires that everyone who applies for a driver's license be given a chance to register to vote. The paperwork warns that noncitizens who register to vote can be prosecuted, but the act provides no method for elections workers to make sure new voters have citizenship status, elections officials and experts say...

Burger said he was "shocked" to learn that the rolls include noncitizens, although it's something local elections supervisors acknowledge and say is difficult to prevent. They say there's no way to know how many immigrants may be voting illegally.

"We take for granted," that new voters are truthful when they say they are U.S. citizens, Burger said. "We don't really have a way of validating that. We need to do that. We need to regularly scrub our list, and we need to keep noncitizens from coming onto the list."

[...bit about there being no mechanism to verify citizenship deleted... PC concerns about "racial profiling" deleted... comments from an "immigration advocate" saying there's not a problem and perhaps threatening a law suit deleted...]

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)

TalkLeft, hackers to help elect Bush, end "liberalism"

Via TalkLeft comes the Wired News report "Hackers Take Aim at GOP":

Online protests targeting GOP websites could turn out to be more than symbolic during this month's Republican National Convention, possibly blocking a critical communications tool for the party...

So it's no surprise that hardened electronic activists are planning to jam up the servers of GeorgeWBush.com, GOP.com and related websites, once the Republican National Convention gets underway Aug. 29.

"We want to bombard (the Republican sites) with so much traffic that nobody can get in," said CrimethInc, a member of the so-called Black Hat Hackers Bloc. It's one of several groups planning to distribute software tools to reload Republican sites over and over again. These FloodNet programs are similar to hackers' distributed denial-of-service attacks, which overwhelm a server with thousands and thousands of simultaneous requests for information.

The author's blog has a nearly incomprehensible excerpt from Steve Gilliard, last mentioned in relation to the Glenn Reynolds-TShirt action.

TalkLeft itself/herself doesn't state whether she approves of the hacking, so I guess pending clarification we'll have to assume it/she thinks it's all good fun.

UPDATE: TalkLeft has issued the following diktat:

So Cal is right, I wasn't online today due to work. I do not condone this activity. Not in any way. I wouldn't want anyone hacking TalkLeft so I wouldn't wish it on anyone else. It's news worth reporting though.

Posted to Politics at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)

Congrats to Operative #843!

In a previous post, I disclosed how Operative #843 had said the Touro/Torricelli/Kushner connection would become important.

The Old Grey Lady reports in "Inquiry Said to Be Focusing On Plan for Touro College":

The federal investigation into Gov. James E. McGreevey's accusation that a former aide tried to extort him by threatening to reveal their extramarital affair is now focusing on a strange, last-minute offer to keep the matter secret if the governor agreed to approve a plan for a new medical school in New Jersey, according to three people involved in the inquiry.

Just 10 minutes before Mr. McGreevey was scheduled to announce his resignation last Thursday, a member of his inner circle received a telephone call from a lawyer who identified himself as an intermediary for Golan Cipel, the aide who was threatening to sue the governor for sexual assault and harassment.

The caller, Timothy Saia, reportedly said that Mr. Cipel would agree not to go public with his charges if Mr. McGreevey granted a charter to Touro College, a New York City institution that has been unsuccessfully seeking to open a medical facility in New Jersey for months...

In its effort to get approval of a charter, Touro was also represented by former Senator Robert G. Torricelli, who now works as a political consultant...

"Neither Senator Torricelli nor myself have ever spoken or met with Mr. Cipel," [a Torricelli spokesman] said.

Posted to Politics at 09:58 PM | Comments (0)

"Guess the mark"

What's that mark?

If you give up, click here.

I realize this is in the WackyHumor category, despite this story (or related stories) having some tragic elements. And, I don't want to minimize the lady's current condition. Nevertheless, I believe the lady in question will not only have an interesting conversation starter, she'll also be several thousands of dollars richer in the near future.

Posted to WackyHumor at 03:15 PM | Comments (0)

"Conservative gets immigration plank"

The Washington Times offers a confusing article:

Pennsylvania Rep. Melissa A. Hart will lead the Republican Party platform subcommittee that will tackle politically sensitive immigration issues, The Washington Times has learned...

"I'm still getting up off the floor. This is great for those of us interested in a more moderate immigration policy," said Craig Nelson, director of Friends of Immigration Law Enforcement.

Mr. Nelson said Mrs. Hart "is much more closely aligned with the American people on immigration than Washington lobbyists representing corporations that profit from the cheap labor provided by excessive immigration — and than those aligned with the Karl Rove and the Wall Street Journal extremists."

Last week several Republicans associated with the platform committee described an effort by the Bush camp to head off any language that might seem "unwelcoming" to immigrants or intolerant of homosexuals...

"Unlike the Democrats' platform, which doesn't at all reflect the positions of their party's candidate [John Kerry], our platform is going to reflect our party's principles and [the policies of] President Bush," said the source close to the committee.

Pressed for specifics on what the immigration plank will say, the source said: "The president's position on these issues is well-known — and is reflected in the platform working document."

The president's position on these issues runs counter to traditional conservative values and it's not shared by the great majority of Americans. If there's a power struggle going on here, hopefully the good guys will win. However, note that the party's platform is non-binding; even if it comes out in favor of immigration enforcement, don't expect the Bush administration to pay any more than lip service to it.

The article also offers this cut-out-and-keep summary of the WSJ:

The Wall Street Journal... long has been calling for no restrictions on immigration. Its editorial page advocates making the United States a nation without borders to let the forces of supply and demand freely determine who enters seeking work.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)

Reports on the Temecula townhall meeting

Three more reports about the Temecula townhall meeting where DHS Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson was repeatedly booed by over 1000 citizens are available:

The North County Times' "Cheers, jeers at immigration town hall meeting": A town hall meeting that was supposed to ease concerns about illegal immigration in the region left many frustrated with top federal officials... "You've got a group of people here who are very concerned, and they're not getting any straight answers," [Former Lake Elsinore Mayor Kevin Pape] said. "They're (Hutchinson and Issa) speaking in generalities with no specifics. People are concerned and their concerns are not being addressed correctly."

The Press Enterprise's "Vocal crowd presses for renewed sweeps": "Our operations to enforce the immigration laws have not been halted, they have not been stopped, they have not been intimidated," [Hutchinson] said... Throughout the two-hour meeting, members of the audience verbally assaulted Hutchinson and Issa... "Put the military on the border," "Stop lying!" and "Arrest and fine the people who hire them," people yelled from their seats... Border Patrol agents attending Friday's meeting said they weren't convinced that the administration is doing everything it can to stem the surge of undocumented immigrants into the United States... "They're dodging the questions," said Christopher Bauder, executive vice president of the San Diego chapter of the National Border Patrol Council, a union of Border Patrol agents. "Their answers make the public believe we're doing our job when we really aren't."

The L.A. Times highlights T.J. Bonner's "Why don't you let us do our jobs?" quote in "Unfetter Border Patrol, Angry Group Demands": "Whenever you're getting criticized by both sides of the immigration debate, it probably means you're doing this [fairly]," Hutchinson said... "We have to ask 'mother may I?' all the way to Washington, D.C., in order to conduct an operation in San Diego," Bonner said... "These mobile patrol arrests were actually having an impact in Mexico. Word was getting around that you weren't necessarily OK once you got past the border."

UPDATE: The WashTimes report "Limits sought on Border Patrol" mentions the meeting and a few other items.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)

"Mexico revives dual nationality"

From the El Paso Times:

Mexico-born U.S. citizens who missed their chance to reclaim their Mexican nationality last year can try again starting today...

[El Pasoan Maria Caballero] was naturalized seven years ago but last year she decided she wanted her Mexican rights back, she said...

"The big one would be voting. It bothers me to lose this right as a Mexican," Caballero said...

That's confusing. In the second paragraph it said she was a naturalized U.S. citizen, but in the last paragraph she says she's a "Mexican [citizen]". Perhaps to avoid such confusion we should seek to prevent this practice; one can't maintain allegiances to two countries at the same time. But, of course, that's what the Mexican government wants and, of course, the Bush administration won't do anything about it.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 11:13 AM | Comments (2)

Olympic officials: tourism to "Brasil" expected to increase

More Olympics coverage here, here (Virna Dias, also below), and here (Leila Barros, also here).

UPDATE: Yes, "Tourism to Brasil expected to spike" would have been a better title. Or, for something short and punchy, "Boom Boom!"

Also, I shouldn't need to remind you that I'm not the one out there taking these pictures, I just provide a powerful filtering service.

Continuing:

Rumania's Catalina Ponor has a pretty face and her form is quite impressive as well. Plus, she's 5'1" and 101 pounds, making her quite portable.

What about Argentinian field hockey, you say? This picture gets points for invoking images of Ivy League girls playing lacrosse, plus points for being Argentinian, and minus points for thighs being slightly too large. This picture offers an interesting view of two other players.

Wang Fei or Tian Jia, Tian Jia, and Wang Fei show their form, and Lu Wang shows her winning strategy and an even more impressive action shot.

Italy's Manuela Leggeri tenses every muscle in her body. I'll take the short one.

Virna Dias shows how she'd ride, er, a balance bar.

Greece's Effrosyni Sfyri has a bit of the Monica Seles to her.

In group action, stroke! and, while not from the Olympics itself, I don't really care.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I know I'd like to "sync" up with these lovely ladies from the Land of the Rising Sun.

FINAL UPDATE: Phwoar!

A COUPLE MORE NOTES: My math was off. It's not 5 days, it's 370 days.

Blondes are available here and here.

ANOTHER FINAL UPDATE: More photos here.

Posted to WackyHumor at 02:18 PM | Comments (2)

"Arab terrorists 'are getting into the US over Mexican border'"

The Telegraph UK offers a report similar to the one in the previous post and previously covered here.

The exception is they do it from a completely gullible perspective:

President Bush has launched a drive to halt illegal immigration across America's porous southern border, amid growing fears that terrorists may be using Mexico as a base camp before heading to Arizona, Texas and California.

A string of alarming incidents has convinced Bush administration officials that lax immigration rules, designed to cope with the huge numbers of illegal entrants from Mexico, have become a significant loophole in the war on terror...

It's good to see the Telegraph picking up on this story, but perhaps they should take what they hear from the administration with the tiniest grain of salt.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:53 PM | Comments (1)

"Illegals from terrorist nations are crossing the border into Arizona."

Tucson TV station KVOA reports:

Tom McNamara and the Eyewitness News 4 Investigators have spent the last three months talking to experts and eyewitnesses...

And in just one hour, during this stake-out along the border between Douglas and Bisbee, The Investigators count 198 illegals in five different groups crossing into the U.S. with no resistance...

[Maybe they're just coming to do the jobs Americans won't do! --LW]

...The investigators found that on this day, several [OTMs] were being detained [at the federal detention center in Florence, Arizona], including some from Sudan, Iran, and even Iraq.

These are just the ones who were caught.

...But some ["Special Interest Aliens"] disappear very quickly, usually before they even reach this center or other holding facilities. They're taken away by tight-lipped federal agents to who-knows-where.

...[Ben Anderson, a retired U.S. Army Colonel] says these Special Interest Aliens originate in the Middle East or Northeast Asia. They travel through Spain to what's called the tri-border area of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, then, to Mexico City.

They pay to learn Spanish language skills, and by the time they reach the U.S., they're acting and talking like Mexicans to fool border agents...

And here's the shocking part: if they are caught, they are often released on their own recognizance, never to be seen again...

[Bbbut, they're just here to do the jobs Americans won't do! --LW]

Posted to Immigration_terror at 12:45 PM | Comments (1)

Democrats to register homeless voters

The NYT reports in "Campaign Hopes to Turn Out the Homeless Vote".

I just scanned the article, but it doesn't look like cigarettes ("Cigarette 'Bribe' Prompts Call For Criminal Charges") or beer ("Free beer if you register to vote") are involved, at least so far.

(Via TalkLeft)

Posted to at 12:07 PM | Comments (0)

ACT921NJMCGR79: Watch Touro/Torricelli/Kushner connection

Operative #843 informs me that this is important:

Golan Cipel's demands also included a last-minute push to have McGreevey's administration approve development plans for a private medical college in the state...

Investigators were notified after Cipel's lawyer asked that McGreevey intervene with a plan by Touro College to build a medical school in New Jersey...

The school's board members include Charles Kushner, a real estate developer who gave millions to Jewish organizations and politicians, including McGreevey and former Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J.

Posted to Politics at 11:41 AM | Comments (1)

PIIPP spotted in NYT

"PIIPP" refers to a "pro-illegal immigration puff piece," and a classic of the genre has been spotted in the NYT.

The author is Nina Bernstein, and the article is entitled "From Immigrants, Stories Of Scrutiny, and Struggle":

As a Muslim immigrant growing up in New York, Navila Ali, 20, felt safe and almost American until Sept. 11, 2001, she said yesterday, speaking out at an unusual public hearing led by the bishop of Brooklyn to highlight the impact of enforcement crackdowns on the city's immigrants...

Such sentiments are sweeping immigrant communities in New York, Bishop DiMarzio said, and not only among Muslims, who have borne the brunt of antiterrorism measures. A wide spectrum of foreign-born residents feel the ripple effects, from ballooning immigration application backlogs to the denial of driver's licenses for longtime immigrant workers who cannot prove that they are working legally...

Lonewacko comments: This is truly a classic of the genre. I originally spotted this article here, and, based on not just the text of the article but on the headline which used the word "struggle," I held a brief internal debate: was this article from the CPUSA or from ANSWER? I was (slightly) surprised to find out it was from the NYT. And, the experienced PIIPP-spotter will note how the NYT twice works around the fact that most of those concerned are here illegally. It's truly a master stroke to euphemize "illegal alien" as "[those] who cannot prove that they are working legally." My congratulations to the NYT and, if you want to encourage their future efforts, you can buy the full article here.

Other examples of PIIPs are provided here.

Posted to Immigration_piipps at 12:57 PM | Comments (0)

"Hey, you! Yes, you! Caption my picture!"

"Never get into a rubber-band fight with a Southerner, y'all hear?"

"I never should have attented that John Kerry facial pumping party!"

"Yes, you're right! This is a frozen fake smile!"

"I want you to join the Kerry Army!"

Posted to Politics at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)

"Why don't you let us do our jobs?"

Congressman Darrell Issa held a townhall meeting about immigration in Temecula earlier today. Special guests included DHS Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson and KFI's John & Ken. Hundreds of KFI listeners and other immigration reform supporters showed up.

The meeting lasted an hour and a half and the audio will probably be available soon. It would be a tremendous public service if a transcript were produced as well.

If you've heard the John Kobylt interview with Asa Hutchinson, you can imagine what happened and how poorly Hutchinson was received.

One of the people who asked a question of Hutchinson was T.J. Bonner of the Border Patrol Agents' union National Border Patrol Council. He asked Hutchinson, "Why don't you let us do our jobs?" Hutchinson's response mentioned the recent rule regarding Other-Than-Mexicans; Bonner replied that that was just a "baby step."

The AP's biased, lede-buried report is here. The final few paragraphs are the worst; they use "immigrants" when they should have said "illegal immigrants." And, the final quote from Hutchinson could have been spoken by an AILA spokesman.

Related: T.J. Bonner is quoted in "Customs chief denies link between more immigration arrests and Bush plan" saying that the Bush administration is in denial about the effects of their amnesty plan. As described in "Illegals acted on rumors of amnesty", Bonner was right. He's also quoted in this transcript of the 7/16/04 Keith Olbermann show "What homeland security?"

UPDATE: See also "Meeting on illegal immigration gets heated: U.S. official heckled; 'sweeps' return urged", which includes this priceless Hutchinson quote:

"The thing about the illegal population in the U.S., most of them work hard, they love their family," Hutchinson said to boos and jeers that quickly turned to cheers when he ended with, "but they have no legal status in the U.S."

Perhaps he's an AILA plant.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 10:03 PM | Comments (0)

Who's coming over our southern border?

And, what countries are they coming from? While that can't be determined, we can look at who gets caught.

Based on the (uncorroborated) FY2003 information here, this is a breakdown by region of those who were caught trying to cross illegally from Mexico:

• <500 from Caribbean countries
• <100 from smaller former Soviet countries
• <500 from Europe (28 countries; 4 from Norway, 1 from Sweden)
• 125 from non-Arabic Africa (including 26 from Nigeria)
• 650 from Asia (including 286 from China)
• 190 from Arabic/Muslim/Middle Eastern countries (3 from Afghanistan, 40 from Pakistan, 2 from Saudi Arabia, 7 from Yemen)
• 10 from Australia
• 26 from Canada
• 4 from New Zealand
• over 900,000 from Latin America (95% of that number from Mexico)

Posted to Immigration_terror at 09:29 PM | Comments (0)

"I am a Corrupt American"

NJ Gov. McGreevey did it all wrong. He should have declared himself a "Corrupt American." Then, the big skeleton "in the closet" would be the fact that he's also a "Gay American." The fact that he was indeed a "Gay American" would have then overshadowed the claim to be a "Corrupt American," and Barney Frank and others would have rushed to his defense, making everyone forget about that minor bit about hiring a foreign national for a homeland security job.

Machiavellian? You bet your ass.

In releated stories, the Old Gray Lady makes a little bit of sense for a change: "Personal Crisis, but an Old Theme of Patronage."

"He wanted to have a place that was in close proximity to where the governor was because he was a personal adviser on call 24 hours a day..." Uh huh.

In the same theme as the link in the previous post that kept referring to 'Straight Talk', the 10/6/02 column "Why can't the rest of us get jobs as easily as Golan Cipel?" refers to Cipel as his "special friend."

Special note to VRWC members (AV level and third echelon and above): get as many Dems as possible to support McGreevey, then wait for the revelations about fund raising, Kushner, etc. to come pouring out in the days and weeks ahead...

UPDATE: Special note to operatives #17, #23, and #84325: Excellent work! Call for his immediate resignation, forcing Democrats to come to his defense. Well done!

Posted to Politics at 12:36 AM | Comments (0)

Kerry to vote against Yucca mountain (after having voted for it seven times)

For future reference. It's now a Bush talking point, so it doesn't much bear repeating.

Posted to Politics at 12:17 AM | Comments (0)

Can't we move beyond this?

Unfortunately, we haven't yet reached the age where simply cheating on your wife with another man (or trying to coerce your TV star wife into giving you a Lewinsky in a sleazy Paris sex club) is commonplace and only of note for the Star and the National Enquirer? Apparently not.

While this is a sad, tragic affair, life goes on. For my future enjoyment and yours, here is a (356k) picture of soon-to-be-former New Jersey First Lady Dina Matos McGreevey Wacko jumping rope.

And, for those who want a flashback, here's a picture of Arianna Huffington.

UPDATE: Silly me. Here I thought this was just about him being gay, etc. Now, it turns out that there was probably much more going on here. But, as regarding the gay bit, perhaps we all should have read between the lines of this May 2, 2002 column regarding McGreevey's 'Straight Talk' campaign slogan.

Posted to Politics at 02:25 PM | Comments (0)

"A flawed approach on immigration"

From a WashTimes editorial:

When it comes to immigration, the administration is laboring to come up with a coherent formula to protect the nation's borders. Judging from recent actions and statements by Department of Homeland Security's Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson, the administration hopes to solve the problem by putting out the welcome mat for millions of illegal immigrants. They ought to go back to the drawing board because this proposal is not in our national interest and will never be passed by a Republican Congress...

... [Mr. Hutchinson's] statements came in response to questions from Sen. Edward Kennedy, who suggested that the Mr. Bush's plan was not generous enough in permitting illegal immigrants to stay in the country.

Compounding the situation is the administration's cave-in to political pressure from open-borders advocates in California, who object to the fact that the Border Patrol enforcers have been too vigorous...

To be certain, John Kerry's approach would be even worse. But that doesn't get the Bush administration off the hook for tilting toward the Kennedy-Pelosi crowd on a critical issue like safeguarding our borders. The administration is courting a platform fight — and further political trouble down the road with the Republican Party's conservative base — with its ill-considered approach on immigration.

See also this DHS press conference, with questions: www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/display?content=3934

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)

"Legalization for all. Licenses for all."

That's what's on the signs in the picture on this report of Gil Cedillo's latest attempt to get driver's licenses for illegal aliens:

Cedillo issued a news release Wednesday in Sacramento stating that he received a proposal from Schwarzenegger listing conditions under which the governor would support Senate Bill 1160.

But Schwarzenegger aides denied any such proposal. "I have no idea what they're referring to," Schwarzenegger press secretary Margita Thompson said, adding that the governor believes SB 1160 does not adequately address concerns about security.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)

"How did Teresa get her hands on the Heinz fortune?"

Here's an interesting post about colonialism in Mozambique:

Teresa Heinz grew up the daughter of a rich dentist in the slave holding Portuguese territory of Mozambique. I spent some time there in Lorenzo Marques and Beira back in the 60s and have a pretty good idea of the life of the colonial Portuguese community she belonged to.

The blacks were considered Kaffirs which meant not quite human to them. I'll never forget viewing several hundred blacks shovelling urea from the deck of my ship the SS African Mercury at the dock in Lorenzo Marques. The burning sun beat down on a urea dust blurred scene of these poor souls singing there hearts out while they shovelled in unison to the haunting and powerfully primitive tune that eminated from their throats.

I must confess that the seafood was wonderful - lobster tails and shrimp in particular - and the service was superb for us white folks...

Posted to Politics at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)

Terror in the Skies: Part VXXXXIDCXXXVCDIII

Annie Jacobsen is back with "Another Passenger from Flight 327 Steps Forward With Disturbing New Details":

A few days ago, WomensWallStreet.com received an important email. It was from Billie Jo Rodriguez, another passenger who was on Northwest Airlines flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on June 29. Billie Jo is a Certified Public Accountant living in Oxnard, California. She had some additional, disturbing information about flight 327 that she felt someone needed to know. She had been so terrified by what happened on the flight that she sent two emails to the Department of Homeland Security telling them about the experience, but she hadn't heard back from them. Then, through a series of events, she heard about my article, "Terror in the Skies, Again?" She and I have had numerous conversations and she is willing to share her story on the record. The following interview is based on conversations Billie Jo and I have had, as well as a discussion she had with my editor...

She has an editor?

As is my usual practice, I only looked at the first page of this latest reincarnation of Flight 327. However, there might now be three other passengers - maybe two, maybe four - who noticed something strange.

Once again, these Syrians might have been terrorists, or they might have been playing a harmless prank, or their actions might have been completely innocent. Over and above that, the response of our government is quite interesting. Are they just playing dumb, or are they in fact dumb?

Check out the article if you want. I'm just fatigued by Flight 327. It's like the Kerry Cambodia thing. I just want to hear the bottom line, I don't care about the intervening bits.

Posted to Terrorism at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)

"Wreckage of alien device reportedly discovered at Tunguska Meteor site"

Breaking news:

Experts of the Tunguska Space Phenomenon public state fund in Siberia announced that they have discovered wreckage of an alien technical device in the place where the Tunguska meteor fell almost 100 years ago...

Researchers argue that they have discovered parts of an alien device which they believe crashed on June 30, 1908. They also found a rock weighing about 50 kilograms and sent it to Krasnoyarsk for analysis...

Holy moley. They found a 110 pound rock?

An expedition to Tunguska is described here, and there are several pictures here. And, here's an overview of the X-Files.

UPDATE: Surprisingly, Drudge picked up on this story. That has, naturally, lead to the MIBs and their lizardian helpers working overtime:

The latest claim was written up by news wires and was making the Internet rounds Thursday morning. [Dear reader: check the post time -- LW]

..."I'm afraid this is a rather stupid hoax," said Benny Peiser, a researcher at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK. "The Russian team stupidly stated long before they went to Siberia that the main intention of their expedition was to find the remnants of an 'alien spaceship!' And bingo! A week later, that's what they claim to have found."

Yeah, that's what all the lizards say.

Posted to WackyHumor at 09:00 PM | Comments (1)

There must be some brilliant plan I'm missing here

From this:

Even though most environmental groups are determined to oust President Bush from office this November, those groups are benefiting from an unprecedented level of federal assistance, according to a Washington, D.C., research group...

The audits, according to CRC's David Healy, show that in the fiscal year 2004 budget, $143 million was channeled to environmental groups that disclose their finances. That's nearly twice as much as the $72 million that the groups got in fiscal year 1998...

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Sierra Club and League of Conservation Voters (LCV) all received taxpayer dollars from the Bush administration, yet the groups have been working together to mount an anti-Bush "Environmental Accountability Fund," Healy wrote.

For example, according to Healy, the groups have organized "anti-Bush efforts in key battleground states. In New Mexico ... LCV is recruiting volunteers in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, while the Sierra Club has added two full-time campaign staffers, and NRDC has aired at least two radio spots..."

Perhaps being "compassionate" is the wrong approach.

Of course, perhaps this is all part of some Karl Rove plot. Send money their way in the hopes that they'll discredit themselves.

The original source of this info has a post about it here.

(Via DailyPundit)

Posted to Politics at 08:25 PM | Comments (0)

"Tall, successful, very active 59yo man seeks S/DWF who can keep up!"

I'm posting this for a friend:

Hi ladies! I'm a tall, very successful 59-year-old male in the prime of his life and loving every minute of it! I own (or co-own, or will shortly own) several luxury homes, I have a few SUVs, and two smart daughters with good personalities.

ABOUT ME:
I enjoy an active lifestyle: skiing, snowboarding, hunting, even wind-surfing! My life is a fast-paced whirlwind of activity - almost all of it in the public eye - and I'm looking for someone who can keep up!

ABOUT YOU:
You need to enjoy a very fast-paced lifestyle, be well-spoken, and have traditional American values (at least most of the time!) Because of my current wealth and prestige, I'm searching for a lady who is very financially secure. If you're even more financially secure than I am, so much the better. Please like puppies, babies, and be able to tolerate Southerners.

If you'd like to "report for duty," send an AIM to NamVet20510.

Posted to Politics at 08:32 AM | Comments (1)

The Bush administration is keeping you safe

Splashed in 48 point font on Drudge, comes the New York Times article "U.S. to Give Border Patrol New Powers to Deport Illegal Aliens":

Citing concerns about terrorists crossing the nation's land borders, the Department of Homeland Security announced today that it planned to give border patrol agents sweeping new powers to deport illegal aliens from the frontiers abutting Mexico and Canada without providing the aliens the opportunity to make their case before an immigration judge...

"We recognize that we have to secure [the borders] and that's the president's first principle of immigration reform," Mr. Hutchinson said. "America must secure its borders and this is a part of that effort."

I have one word: bull[bleep!]

Read the three links in the previous post. Seriously, go read them. Then, tell me whether the Bush administration takes illegal immigration and border security seriously. A certain number of people might believe what the Bush administration says on this issue, but that number is shrinking each day.

Posted to Immigration_terror at 06:31 PM | Comments (0)

"[Bush] Immigration plan envisions 'incentives' to illegal aliens"

The Washington Times has all the disturbing, previously undisclosed details on the Bush/Fox Amnesty:

Millions of illegal aliens in the United States would be free from arrest and deportation, have access to tax-deferred savings accounts and Social Security credits, and get unrestricted travel to and from their home countries under President Bush's guest-worker program.

According to previously undisclosed details of the president's plan, which some critics have described as a limited amnesty, the proposal offers numerous "incentives" for the 8 million to 12 million illegal aliens to come "out of the shadows," Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson, the nation's border and transportation security czar, told a Senate panel...

The end of the article mentions Teddy Kennedy. Any amnesty plan that involves increased enforcement would probably see its teeth removed due to his wise and diligant legislative efforts.

If you're considering voting for Bush, read the whole thing.

And, if that doesn't worry you, check out the older post Bush "guest worker" program to be "open to any type of employee".

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:36 PM | Comments (1)

"Democratic leader calls for ending racial profiling of US Muslims"

Guess who's back in the news:

US House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, on Thursday called for an end to racial and religious profiling of American Muslims since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the United States. [via various legislation including: the End Racial Profiling Act, the Security and Freedom Ensured Act, and the Safe, Orderly, and Legal Visas Enforcement Act].

At a meeting in Washington with American Muslim leaders, Ms. Pelosi voiced her concern over the problems being faced by Muslims in the country.

Democratic Congressmen John Dingell and John Conyers of Michigan as well as Charles Rangel of New York and other congressional Democrats took part in the discussion...

The Pakistan Daily Times titles their report "Civil liberties body comes to aid of harassed Muslims". Earlier, Chief Charles "white man in a white van" Moose came out in support of the bill: "Famed ex-cop fights racial profiling". WND has the scoop on meeting in "Pelosi meets with group tied to Hamas".

Posted to Terrorism at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)

Mexican agents in the state houses? Part 2

Almost six months ago I blogged about Georgia Rep. Pedro Marin and his ties to the non-profit Mexican Center of Atlanta. The Mexican Center had had ties to the Mexican consulate before Marin was selected to be their director. That job paid him $50,000 per year. However, before he was hired the Center moved out of the Mexican consulate's offices and appeared to have disolved its links to the Mexican consulate.

A couple months ago, the Georgia State Ethics Commission declared that everything was on the up and up. They fined Marin a whopping $150 for failing to disclose his membership in that organization, but they rejected the claim that he was lobbying for the Mexican government. It looked to me like the Mexican Center might be a front, but then again I didn't have all the facts and I'm sure the Georgia State Ethics Commission did an in-depth investigation.

See also the Pedro Marin Watch and search for 'maus' here.

Posted to Immigration_consul at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)

Today's THK news bites

Both from this.

1. ..."last night, Teresa took the microphone and said, "Hello, Nevada!" Kerry leaned into his fatigued wife quickly and said, "Arizona." "Oh, Arizona!" she replied. "We're in Arizona. We're still in Arizona. and we are going to Nevada..."

That's OK, I get all those states confused too.

2. three Republican members -- Reps. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, his brother Mario and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen -- will charge that Teresa Kerry's foundation has "connections" to and has helped finance "Fidel Castro's Internet network."

[... CNN explains it away ...]

[... Heinz Endowments' Maxwell King explains it away ...]

That claim is described in more detail in the older article "Canadian arm of Heinz-Kerry electronic octopus hooked Cuba up to Worldwide Net". It all boils down to the definition of "fungible."

UPDATE: "Tides Foundation Statement Regarding Planned News Conference by Florida Congress Members" has the party line.

Posted to Politics at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

Rep. Joe Baca is making sense

As previously blogged, Rep. Joe Baca (D-CA) claimed credit for making Asa Hutchinson cave on the recent minor immigration sweeps (the government of Mexico probably played a part too).

In a recent interview ("Lawmaker reasserts criticism of Border Patrol"), Baca reiterated what he considers acceptable immigration enforcement:

If you do two things, increase security on the border and enforce the law against employers that are hiring (illegal immigrants). Some of these employers are the ones that are paying the (smugglers) and others to make sure they obtain the false Social Security cards. They're the ones we should go after.

I agree. There should be illegal alien sweeps, but the employers should be the first priority. Employers aren't going to get much sympathy from racial demagogues (cough, cough), Racial Identity groups, and the non-liberal media. The only thing politicians need to worry about is losing campaign contributions and the like. That's why voters need to make it clear that it's either lose some of the contributions or lose a lot of votes.

However:

You can't go after employers and then just let the aliens go free. And, I'm pretty sure that somehow Rep. Baca wants a fantasy prosecution where the employers are punished and the illegals get automatic amnesty or similar.

The rest of the article makes quite clear that he sees nothing wrong with illegal immigration, and it gets a bit out there, so to speak. He plays semantic games, he plays the race card, he plays the Christian card, he plays the Gangs of New York card, he plays so many cards they probably had to send out for extra decks. You can almost hear his inner voice shouting "Aztlan!"

Compare Baca's remarks about going after employers with Nanci Pelosi's remarks about the "terrorizing raids" at Wal*Mart. I believe she also believes in miraculous prosecutions.

P.S. Ed Laning is running against Joe Baca if you'd like to, for instance, move to the Inland Empire and vote Baca out.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 11:48 PM | Comments (2)

"Kerry: Immigration reform would make 'Protect Arizona Now' unnecessary"

Should John Kerry be elected, I have no doubt that vocational schools will spring up to retrain Kremlinologists to be Kerryologists.

As near as I can figure out, Kerry is promising that his somewhat secret immigration reform plan (a.k.a. a general amnesty for millions of illegal aliens) will solve all present and future immigration-related problems. And, specifically, the Protect Arizona Now initiative will no longer be necessary under Kerry's Plan.

Other things I think I understand:

- states can decide for themselves whether to have PAN-style initiatives or not. However, under the Grand Plan, PAN and other similar initiatives would not be necessary

- the Feds bear some responsibility to pay for illegal alien services, but that might not translate into disbursing money

- there will be a "a decent, fair, realistic guest worker program"

- there will be more border security and more enforcement against those who employ illegal aliens. The fact that both were promised as part of the 1986 amnesty and then gutted by Kerry's less liberal colleague Teddy Kennedy apparently didn't come up in his speech

The quotes in the article "Kerry says immigrant aid up to states" provide a little more information for the aspiring Kerryologist:

Kerry said Sunday his immigration proposal would include tighter border security and tougher enforcement against employers who hire illegal immigrants.

“When I say broad reform, I’m not talking about just trying to please one group or the other,” Kerry said. “I’m talking about comprehensive reform, which means border security. It means application of the law with respect to hiring illegally. It means earned legalization so that we are dealing fairly with people. We need a decent, realistic, fair guest worker program.

“Unless you do all of these comprehensively, the governors and everybody else are just swimming upstream.” Kerry sidestepped the issue of whether he would guarantee the federal government would fully reimburse states for their costs of dealing with illegal immigration, such as prison and hospital care. “We have to look at it on a state-by-state basis, and see if we need assistance,” said Kerry, who did thenews briefing with Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano at his side.

"The governor has raised the issue with me. I’m very aware of what the pressures are in your budget here because of it. I think the federal government bears some responsibility, but what kind of formula or how we will work it out remains to be seen," Kerry said. Napolitano said after her brief appearance with Kerry that she understands his answer, given the huge federal deficit.

I'm vaguely reminded of the small part of the Foundation Trilogy where some kind of ambassador comes to some settlement and spends a few days meeting and greeting. After he leaves, they analyze everything he said and they come to the conclusion that he said absolutely nothing.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 11:16 PM | Comments (0)

Gas prices...

Have you noticed that gas prices have been coming down a bit lately? What do my regular commentators think about this? Could it be part of Bush's reelection plans? If I were skeptical, I'd think that Bush's oil company buddies had raked in enough money and now, in a desperate attempt to get him elected, are lowering the prices.

Fellow blogger "Lonewacko" informs me that on his 'Blogging Across America' tour, he was almost ecstatic to pay $1.50 a gallon in Elkton, MD about 10 months back. But, then he got to western Virginia and he paid the lowest price he paid during the whole trip: $1.36 per gallon. Imagine that!

Lonewacko also informs me that the Arco station at Fletcher and Riverside - right off the 5 - is at $2.01*, and there are reportedly other L.A. area gas stations even a little lower. After paying almost $2.50, breaking the $2 mark is going to seem like a miracle.

Why, it's almost as if Bush planned it this way... What do you guys think?

P.S. I'll have a special, 194 page report on President Bush's ANG records tomorrow, and it'll be required reading!

*It comes at a price however. They used to have a soft serve ice cream machine and - whatever you want to call me that I am - I moved the tray that was under the nozzle and designed to catch dripping ice cream... Anyway, so there was this metal tray there and I slid it out so I could keep filling up the ice cream cone as high as it would go. They told me if I did that again they'd have to charge me extra. That caused a bit of bad blood.

Posted to WackyHumor at 10:53 PM | Comments (2)

President Bush don't need no take-out grilled diver sea scallops, pardner

According to U.S. News & World Report, President Bush is challenging John Kerry to a peasant food eat-off:

Don't be surprised if fitness freak President Bush starts showing up at Dunkin' Donuts. Seems the prez thinks what people like about him over Sen. John Kerry is his ability to be one of them, and his staff is figuring out ways to show that off. So they want to steer the campaigning prez to cafes, gas stations, and, of course, barbecue joints. "He wants direct contact with people," says a Bushie. "We don't have to prove he's a strong leader. Voters already know that. We have to prove he 'gets it,' that he understands what everyday Americans are going through." Easier said than done. Turns out the Secret Service doesn't want Bush mixing it up and providing a fat target for enemies...

I should run for "prez." I wouldn't even need my staff to show that I was one of the common folk, as it unfortunately comes quite naturally to me.

If the "prez" really "got it," he wouldn't make proposals that are opposed by the great majority of Americans, such as his various Open Borders plans.

At least John Kerry and "Ter" aren't fooling too many people with their various fast-food related stunts. Bush seems to be a bit better at hiding his Northeast establishment upbringing.

Previous Wendy's coverage starts with the extremely funny "What happened to Ben?"

Posted to Politics at 08:33 PM | Comments (1)

"if something doesn't go boom, nothing is going to be done"

From USA Today's "U.S. didn't warn Las Vegas of terror threats":

A year after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Justice Department obtained video surveillance tapes suggesting terrorists were targeting Las Vegas casinos but authorities never alerted the public as they discussed whether a warning might hurt tourism or increase the casinos' legal liability, internal memos show.

[Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman] said Monday he was never told about the tapes uncovered in Detroit and Spain in 2002, and had been assured by the FBI there were no credible threats against his city. "If I were told, I would certainly tell the public..."

But memos and e-mails between federal prosecutors, obtained by The Associated Press, say Las Vegas authorities were alerted to some of the footage by Aug. 30, 2002. Later, numerous local law enforcement officials were invited by a senior FBI agent to view the footage, but most spurned the invitation [out of a fear of incurring liability], the memos say...

The prosecutor said he later asked a Las Vegas police officer, who had seen the tape and flown to Detroit to help, why more wasn't done. "This officer told me that the amount of money that travels through Las Vegas on a daily, weekly and monthly basis — if something doesn't go boom, nothing is going to be done," he said.

Neither the mayor, the casinos, nor the local cops come off too good in the rest of the report.

Posted to Terrorism at 07:13 PM | Comments (0)

How to think like a "liberal"

The story about the private California high school that was teaching its students that there are 53 states, four branches of government, and two houses of congress: one for Democrats and the other for Republicans has finally hit blogdom.

Now, you might wonder why this school would teach such inaccuracies. Let's think like a "liberal" here and come up with some possibilites. Did the person who wrote their teaching materials simply make things up as they went along? Or, were they just playing a cruel joke?

If you were thinking like a "liberal", are there other explanations you could come up with?

Bingo! It's all a RepugnantCon plan by $hrub and his NeoCon minders to keep the Immigrants of Color down:

ChrisJ: "it would be worthwhile to suppose that the test was designed by some Pat Buchanon type, seeking to sabotage immigrants' attempts to obtain citizenship."

Abby: "This is something only conservatives would do."

Scotian: "First off, this is a con job pure and simple, and the conners only needed things to look right superficially and did not care how accurate the information really was. Then there is the more sinister explanation, that being this was deliberate to make it more difficult for immigrants to assimilate into American society and to obtain citizenship."

DNS: "Precisely. It's to subvert the new-citizen process."

raj: "Silly question. Because they don't want the immigrants to pass the citizenship exam."

ahem: "One wonders whether the founder was, in fact, a Rush fan wanted to make sure that those poor Latinos flunked the cit-test."

Jon H: "The best reason to go through the trouble of custom-writing erroneous content is precisely to misinform people seeking citizenship."

I stopped when the scrollbar was halfway down the page. And, bear in mind this isn't Duncan B. Black's comments, they're those of Kevin "Records" Drum.

UPDATE: MSNBC has a short bio of Daniel Gossai, a.k.a. VRWC Member #8432287-B:

An immigrant from British Guyana, Gossai, 53, arrived in the United States at age 17 to go to college. He studied at a number of colleges and universities, including the Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Ind., and earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from Bethany College in Kansas.

And, other members of VRWC Operation KEEP_UP_THE_OPPRESSION_34212_B include:

...Paramount-based West Side Education Corporation, the organization that ran the school. West Side president David Soto and West Side director Noel Brito could not be reached for comment.

And:

The lawsuit also names David Soto, president of West Side Education Corp., which bought the rights to operate school sites; Nel Brito, director of an affiliated school; Fabricio Sandoval, director of admissions; and Janira Jacobs, a teacher and administrator.

Posted to Politics at 05:16 PM | Comments (0)

Exhibit #38432 for limiting all forms of immigration

The NYT reports on one of the fronts in the attempt to chip away at U.S. sovereignty: "Immigrants Raise Call for Right to Be Voters". If you've seen other recent reports on non-citizen voting, it will seem familiar. It, like the others, mentions Takoma Park's non-citizen voting law. It includes the usual whines, only the names are different.

"It will happen," said Tamrat Medhin, a civic activist from Ethiopia who lives here. "Don't you believe that if people are working in the community and paying taxes, don't you agree that they deserve the opportunity to vote?"

No, Tamrat, I don't. In fact, if I moved to Ethiopia I'd try to do things the Ethiopian way. If Ethiopia only allowed citizens to vote, and I wanted to vote, I'd work at becoming a citizen. And, if I didn't like their rules, well, there are other countries, right?

Further:

They argue that immigrants will still aspire to citizenship because it is the only way they can vote in federal elections.

But, Tamrat works in the community, and that community is part of the U.S. And, Tamrat pays taxes which support the U.S. Don't you agree that Tamrat deserves the opportunity to vote in federal elections?

And:

And having the right to vote, they argue, will help noncitizens feel more politically engaged and committed to this country.

Once again, it doesn't work that way. You prove you're engaged and committed by becoming a citizen. Then you vote. Not the other way around.

Someone who wants to do a good deed should compile a list of all cities where non-citizen voting has been discussed, together with the local politicians who support and oppose the proposals.

It's proposals like these that could sour a lot of people on massive immigration. While the chutzpah of people who are invited into a country and then start telling those who were there first how to do things might be admired in a certain way, I think the backlash will be a bit stronger than "civic activists" like Tamrat might realize.

Previously: the non-citizen voting proposal in San Bernardino and CA State Assemblyman Leland Yee's support of the S.F. non-citizen voting proposal.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 09:54 PM | Comments (1)

Starring Tom Ridge as "Armin Tanzarian"

Hey kids! How'd you like to be a Ready Deputy!

Ready Deputies work with the America Prepared Campaign to keep us all safe. And, we're holding a contest! Your school could win Tom Ridge as your Principal for a Day!

No, it's not a joke. Not only is there such an organization, and not only are they offering up Tom Ridge as Principal for a Day, but they seem to have taken a trip into the near future and come back. From their PDF:

The likelihood of this Campaign failing is high—so high, in fact, that only its potential to save thousands of live makes it worth trying.

Everything the Campaign does will have to overcome the obstacles of complacency, cynicism and ridicule.

It's kind of hard not to be cynical when I see the stellar cast who make up this organization. Sure, it's fairly balanced: they not only have Mary Matalin, they have James Carville. They've got Miramax' Harvey Weinstein and Fox' Bill O'Reilly. They've even got the Editor in Chief of Good Housekeeping.

But, they also use phrases like "civilian population" and say things like: "Marketing Efforts To Put Preparedness Materials In Citizens’ Homes" and "The Campaign will create preparedness materials for distribution in consumer magazines, outdoor venues, such as buses and billboards, and broad-based websites." And, they promise to produce 15 to 30 second PSAs telling us (yet again) what to do and what not to do. And, they're using kids to infect their parents with the Preparedness bug.

It's just the same old same old from the same old faces. Perhaps they should trying something a bit more real next time.

UPDATE: I think a winning idea for the APC could be Preparedness Camps. Each child, starting at age 5, will be required to attend a state-sponsored Preparedness Camp for two weeks per year. The Camp could teach the citizen-child about safety tips and other fun stuff.

Posted to Politics at 08:18 PM | Comments (0)

Welcome U.N. Observers!

They're coming to America to make sure our elections are fair and transparent.

And, they need your help.

This fall, U.N. observers will be coming to the U.S. from countries from Albania to Zimbabwe. They'll be making sure that voting in November's election is completely fair and that all votes are counted.

Many observers will be coming thousands of miles and will need your assistance. They will arrive in a new country and will need shelter and food.

MoveOut.org is now seeking American citizens who will provide quarters for our friends from abroad and who will make their stay as comfortable as possible. If you cannot provide shelter, please send in cans of food.

Yeah, it kinda got bad at the end, but the beginning's not so bad. I'll work on this and post a new version. Perhaps I'll post it somewhere else...

After that, we need big signs that Citizens can wave along our roadsides as the observers arrive. Yes, those signs will be serious. Or, at least the messages will be serious.

Note that they're coming at the request of the State Department. And, this is something I didn't know:

In November 2002, OSCE sent 10 observers on a weeklong mission to monitor the U.S. midterm elections. OSCE also sent observers to monitor the California gubernatorial recall election last year.

And, raining on our comic parade, the Washington Times informs us that these are not exactly United Nations observers. Rather, they're from the OCSE:

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the largest regional organization in the world with 55 participating nations, will monitor the U.S. election on Nov. 2. Members include Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain and the United States.

That article also includes word that at least someone - if not the Bush administration - opposes foreign election observers:

"For over 200 years, this nation has conducted elections fairly and impartially, ensuring that each person's vote will count. ... Imagine going to your polling place on the morning of November 2 and seeing blue-helmeted foreigners inside your local library, school or fire station. The United Nations has sent monitors to Haiti, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique ... and now the United States?" [Rep. Steve Buyer, Indiana Republican] said on July 15.

"The constitutional authority to ensure the integrity of U.S. elections rests with the states and the Congress..."

Posted to Politics at 07:28 PM | Comments (1)

Thanks for stopping!

The video of this was quite funny, but I don't have a link, just the picture and "No train stop confuses Kerry supporters in Kansas. Inadvertent snub blamed on miscommunication":

"We raised our hand [perhaps they had Wendy's cups in the other hand --LW] to wave, but the engineer hadn't slowed, and by the time we had waved even a little to the signs and cheers and camera flashes, it was dark again," wrote Edwards' wife, Elizabeth, on the campaign's Web log. "We sat frustrated, but we knew we were not as frustrated as the people of Lawrence, Kansas."

She forgot to mention the part where John Kerry took immediate command of the situation, demoting the engineer and vainly trying to apply the brakes to no avail.

UPDATE: #19 told me that #5 has a much more detailed report - including a few small pictures - here.

Posted to Politics at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

Presidente Fox wants to raise the (legal) immigration limits from Mexico

From the Washington Times:

Presidente Vicente Fox yesterday called on Congress to increase the number of Mexican immigrants allowed into the United States, but conceded his plan to relax immigration has little chance of passage in an election year.

"I support raising the quotas on certain population groups, like the Mexican nationals, on who can become a citizen," Mr. Fox told a convention of minority journalists. "In order to solve the logjam for citizenship, Congress has got to raise the quotas."

This just in... I've been handed a note... Apparently, it was not Presidente Fox who made those remarks, it was U.S. President George W. Bush.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 04:31 PM | Comments (1)

More fun with Disinfopedia

A while back, I posted about how I'd updated Disinfopedia's report on the Ford Foundation.

Looking at that last link, I notice two changes.

First, someone else seems to have updated the bit about Henry Ford: "The Ford Foundation was founded in 1936 by Henry Ford, well known anti-Semite and receiptant of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle by Nazi diplomats in 1938."

And, more to the Lonewacko-related point, my links about the Ford Foundation have been moved to a new page: "Conservatives target the Ford Foundation".

I don't really like my links having been moved off the front page into the "evil conservative" section, but at least the links are still there and people can read them and make up their own mind.

Posted to MultiCultiCult at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)

ABA criticizes immigration policies; blogger offers translation

The ABA has released a report criticizing our immigration policies. I haven't read the full report, but I will present a partial translation of the press release:

Low-level immigration officers are making what can be life-and-death decisions with no standards of due process or judicial oversight.

Translation: "We are more than willing to provide a pool of immigration lawyer$ on call 24/7. Plus, we want to hamstring the system."

The federal government ought not ask or require other institutions, including local and state police, to assume enforcement responsibility for federal immigration laws.

Translation: "We don't care about public safety. Yes, we know about L.A.'s Special Order 40. That order prevents LAPD cops from arresting someone who they know to have been deported for committing a felony. Instead, the LAPD must wait until that person commits another felony before they can be deported. Again, rinse and repeat.

And, we are fully aware that John Lehman of the 9/11 commission has said that the terrorists know which cities have such policies.

The report was funded by grants from the Ford Foundation...

Translation: Don't let that $top you from $ending us more money however. And, yes, we're well aware that the Ford Foundation funds a bunch of far-left, Open Borders, Racial Identity groups. In fact, we knew that the Ford Foundation "created" multiculturalism. We've seen the links.

(The foregoing "translation" is my opinion only and does not reflect the actual statements made by the ABA, its representatives, its members, or other affiliated organizations. The excerpts from the ABA press release are "Fair Use" as defined by Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 of the U.S. Code. If there are any more disclaimers I need, please send me the name of a good lawyer.)

(Link via TalkLeft)

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)

"'Sanctuary' practice in Houston draws fire"

From the Houston Chronicle:

September 11 Commission member John Lehman Thursday criticized so-called "sanctuary" practices in Houston and elsewhere that restrict cooperation between local police and federal immigration officials as an invitation to terrorists looking to enter the United States.

"It is ridiculous that five cities in the United States do not allow local police to cooperate with the federal immigration service," said Lehman, visiting Houston to lobby for Sept. 11 commission report recommendations.

"The terrorists know" which cities have such policies, Lehman said, naming Houston and Los Angeles among those cities.

Posted to Immigration_terror at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)

Update on the illegal alien with the South African passport

An update on the woman with the South African passport and the suspected terrorism ties who was caught after having successfully entered the U.S. illegally:

WESLACO, Texas -- For the first time since the arrest of a woman carrying a South African passport on immigration charges in McAllen, the FBI confirms it is investigating her...

Previous coverage - including complaints about releasing Middle Eastern illegal aliens on their own recognizance - starts here.

See also "U.S. warns of al-Qaida from South Africa":

Fearing al-Qaida may try to sneak operatives into the U.S. using South African passports, the Department of Homeland Security has put inspectors at major airports and seaports across the nation on high alert for suspicious travelers from that nation, which U.S. officials say has become a breeding ground for terrorists.

The order to "increase scrutiny" of South African travelers, contained in a closely held bulletin obtained by WorldNetDaily, comes on the heels of the arrest of four South Africans with alleged links to terrorism. [the lady mentioned above, plus one in Mexico and two in Pakistan --LW]...

Dated July 30 and marked "For Official Use Only," the bulletin was sent to field operations directors at four major international airports and two seaports on both coasts. WorldNetDaily has elected to withhold the names of the cities for security reasons...

Needless to say, Los Angeles has an international airport and a major seaport, but so do San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego, and Seattle.

UPDATE: "Grand jury to hear case of women caught with altered passport" tells us: "A grand jury in Houston is scheduled to hear her case on Aug. 16, said Michael Shelby, the United States attorney prosecuting the case." It also has several details on this case and a "she just came to work" defense from her relatives.

Posted to Immigration_terror at 07:52 PM | Comments (0)

"Feng Shui, non-citizen voting, and invasive plant species?"

Carnac takes a long, disturbing look at the envelope and says: CA State Assemblyman Leland Yee.

Yee is the guy who I had previously associated only with his call to Feng Shui Sacramento. I couldn't recall his name, only referring to him as "Feng Shui guy." However, he seems to deserve a bit more scrutiny.

He's a former San Francisco councilman, and the article "Latest Open Borders Fad: Non-Citizen Voting" says:

...state Assemblyman Leland Yee, says he’ll introduce statewide legislation to strengthen the school board measure’s legality.

The school board measure in question would allow non-citizens - including illegal aliens - to vote in school board elections. There's more about it in "S.F. supes flunk citizenship". And, there's a bit more about Yee here (copy here).

OK, so we've covered Feng Shui and non-citizen/illegal alien voting. What about the "invasive plant species" bit?

This thread links to this hysterical blast from Leland Yee's recent past:

It seemed like a noble mission when a group of gardeners set out five years ago to restore native plants, bugs and animals to San Francisco's few remaining green spaces.

But when they began killing hundreds of eucalyptus and cypress saplings, roping off popular hiking trails and talking about spearing bullfrogs with pitchforks, some fellow environmentalists complained they'd gone too far...

The dispute rose to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which clamped down in September, ordering the group to stop its work until a citizens advisory committee can be formed to oversee it.

One supervisor, Leland Yee, took umbrage at the notion that only native species should be kept, and exotic ones eradicated, comparing it to racial cleansing or ``xenophobia.''

``Plants and trees without the proper pre-Mayflower lineage are called `invasive exotics' and are wrenched from the soil to die,'' Yee wrote in a local newspaper editorial. ``How many of us are `invasive exotics' who have taken root in the San Francisco soil, have thrived and flourished here, and now contribute to the diversity of the wonderful mix that constitutes present-day San Francisco?''

We should get this guy a blog.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 01:18 PM | Comments (2)

"Oakland's Bilingualism - No Americans Need Apply"

Here's a flashback to April 21, 2001. I don't know if there's been more recent legislation, but the article does provide some interesting background. Of first note, he links to his S.F. Chronical editorial "Oakland may recognize 2 official languages -- and neither of them will be English":

...the proposal would require the city to fill in city government "public contact" job openings with employees who are bilingual in either [Spanish or Cantonese]. Though technically race-neutral, the practical effect is likely to be that the city staff will become virtually all Latino and Chinese.

...taking high school Spanish or Chinese certainly won't qualify one for these jobs. Indeed, even U.S.-born Latinos and ethnic Chinese, with their limited foreign vocabularies and English-laced "Spanglish" and "Chinglish," will not be able to compete for the jobs with the far more linguistically sophisticated immigrants...

Moreover, the policy could be one more example of a few ethnic activists pushing policies which enhance their own political power at the expense of their putative constituents. Policies that make it too easy to avoid learning English bring great harm to immigrants. As noted often by Latino and Asian social workers, lack of English economically imprisons immigrants, as it is a major cause of poverty, exploitation by employers and so on.

...Since monolingual Chinese speakers rely on the Chinese press for news, politicians not favored by the Chinese press are unable to compete for their votes.

Amplifying on that, the first link provides this:

[Oakland councilman Danny] Wan, who is Chinese, was basically pushing an agenda long pursued by Chinese political activists: Concentrate Chinese immigrant seniors in major cities, in order to gain political clout. Though some of you might be surprised to hear this, it has been used quite effectively in San Francisco, and to some degree in Oakland, Monterrey Park (LA suburb) and New York. Some of us have been observing this for years, and finally Yvonne Lee, a Chinese-American on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, said it in public (AsianWeek, May 16, 1997):

People are forecasting that [Asians] are the fastest-growing minority group due largely to immigration...But [since given the new restrictions against welfare use by future immigrants] how many people are going to take the risk of sponsoring someone [for immigration] and what long-term impact will that have on our social status and political empowerment?

See also the next entry, which is about Leland "Feng Shui" Yee and his support of non-citizen voting.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:47 PM | Comments (3)

Phishing in troubled waters

From InfoWeek:

Phishing scammers have gone political, message-filtering firm SurfControl said Wednesday.

For the first time, phishers have targeted people who contribute to political campaigns, SurfControl said as it rolled out an alert about a pair of messages that masquerade as contribution come-ons for the Kerry-Edwards ticket...

The messages, complete with legit-looking logos, carried subject heads of "President John Kerry, please vote and contribute," and included links to Web sites where users could use their credit cards to make a contribution. In reality, the sites were bogus--one hosted from the United States, the other from India--and have since gone offline.

Posted to Politics at 09:42 AM | Comments (0)

"Kerry Stresses Government's Role in Helping Minorities"

This would be so very funny if it weren't so sad:

John F. Kerry today said entertainer Bill Cosby's recent admonition that black Americans need to take greater personal responsibility for poor education and high crime was "excessively exclusive" and ignored the government's role in helping minorities.

I understand exactly where Bill ["Bill?" Do they know each other? Or, is Kerry just "down"?] is coming from in his comment," Kerry said, measuring his words carefully as he spoke to a convention for minority journalists in Washington. "It may be excessively exclusive in the breadth of it, in the sense that it sort of targets just the responsibility side, but that's an important side."

[Kerry promised] to run a more inclusive White House and [Kerry promised] to fund federal programs targeting every group from Native Americans to veterans from the Philippines. He even promised to fight to increase the number of minorities in prominent media jobs, which government has no control over.

The Democratic nominee said he is the candidate who feels the pain of minorities. "I am also aware -- how can you live in America and not be aware? -- of the special challenges facing people of color." As president, Kerry promised a mixture of affirmative action, government spending and meetings with minority groups to end racial imbalances.

[Kerry also said] "The harsh fact now is that in the last election more than 1 million African-Americans were disenfranchised in one of the most tainted elections in history."

When you've finished laughing, click on over to "Running on Urban Mythology: Before Kerry plays the race card, he should check the facts in his deck.". That explains how Kerry is lying about the 1 million disenfrachished voters.

EXTRA HUMOROUS BONUS: Enjoy this flashback from the NAACP conference:

UPDATE: The empty space you see above was the picture of Kerry at the NAACP conference giving the Black Power salute. The link appears to have gone bad; if I find it elsewhere I'll provide an update.

Posted to Politics at 10:13 PM | Comments (0)

PIIPP spotted by accident

I ran across yet another PIIPP ("pro-illegal immigration puff piece"), and it's a classic of the genre. Not only is it a virtual advertisement for the DREAM Act, and not only does it mention only one minor dissent, it features a quote from the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

From the April 21, 2004 Brownsville (TX) Herald's "Group rallies in support of Dream Act":

Even with her new high school diploma, Lupita Rojas’ future will take her back to the fields where she used to pick tomatoes, she said as she cradled her baby.

Six more PIIPPs are provided starting here. When you compare the first sentence of each article you will be amazed. Finding all of these PIIPPs required almost no work; one can only wonder how many I could find if I started actively searching for them.

Posted to Immigration_piipps at 08:43 PM | Comments (1)

Keyes accepts

Story here.

Posted to Politics at 07:50 PM | Comments (0)

"Radio hosts to 'sacrifice' GOP waffler"

From the WashTimes:

John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, hosts of "The John & Ken Show" on KFI-AM, have enlisted their audience to identify and target for defeat one local Republican congressman they deem soft on issues such as border security and benefits for undocumented aliens.

The duo, who call their plan a "political human sacrifice," say it is meant as a wake-up call to Republican leaders who ignore their constituents' pleas for stronger border enforcement for fear of offending Hispanic voters or the agriculture industry.

"We're overwhelmed by illegal immigration in Southern California. The Republican Party just doesn't understand the level of anger out here," Mr. Kobylt said. "They just say [to conservatives], 'Who else are you going to vote for?' "

Their audience has narrowed the field to five finalists: California Republican Reps. Mary Bono, Christopher Cox, David Dreier, Darrell Issa and Dana Rohrabacher. Four of the five already have appeared on the afternoon radio program to defend their records; Mr. Dreier is negotiating an appearance.

Actually, I believe the negotiations with Dreier have broken down. He also received over 50% of the initial voting. So...

This attempt will probably succeed (unless all the congressmen give in), and it will send a clear message to other politicians. However, for maximum impact, it's too bad this can't be exported to a swing state.

And, bear in mind you don't need to be in SoCal to hear John & Ken. I've heard KFI as far away as Utah. And, even if you can't get their signal on the radio you can stream it at kfi640.com

Posted to Immigration2004 at 07:02 PM | Comments (0)

Terror in the Skies, Part 3.4035^100: My word processor doesn't have footnoting capability

Annie Jacobsen is back with a new roundup.

At the end of that article, she mentions Stuart Taylor's "Rashomon in the Skies: The Tangled Tale of Flight 327." I just scanned the first part of both, but I'd strongly suggest starting with Taylor's article before reading Jacobsen's. He provides a source who denies almost everything Jacobsen, her husband, and the two other passengers who've made statements have reported. I don't know who's telling the truth anymore, I just want out.

Frankly, it's not that I don't care, it's just the level of detail is a bit too much for someone who isn't personally invested in this matter.

Posted to Terrorism at 04:57 PM | Comments (0)

Yes, it was "comedy gold." Indeed.

Indeed you might have heard of blogdom's latest fad: call Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds names because of his new job as a T-shirt model. See Duncan Black's post here, and - the perhaps even funnier - Steve Gilliard's post here.

Now, as we know, Hatrios'/Duncan B. Black's comment section is like stumbling upon a far-left circle jerk without the joy. However, reliable sources informed me it was even worse than usual. And, for reasons previously posted, I have a bit of a problem with my former 'lancher Glenn ("An audience with the Pope of Blogton"). Nevertheless, a VRWC order is a VRWC order, so I swung into action.

Reading the Duncan B. Black comments, I stopped when I got to one that mentioned "splotchy white trash" or similar. (That comment - along with dozens more - has since disappeared.)

Reading further, I happened upon this later comment:

Ric, you're obviously an ignorant plant designed to sap our energy away from our discussion.

[sigh]

Don't you realize Ric, we believe in diversity in all things. What we don't believe in is hate. And, Ric, your post was dripping with hate. We also believe in - and ardently seek - the truth.

There are too many people like you who - let's be frank - lie. We will not tolerate lies, or those who tell lies. We will not tolerate hate or those who hate.

Go away, you racist splotchy white cracker trash.

I did not post that comment, I swear. Although, I will note that "Art is my God" assuredly meant to direct users to the wsws.org rather than the generic search site at wsws.com. And, I will note that that comment could have been much better. Nevertheless, that comment has received rave reviews:

Sean M.: "I wish I could make this stuff up."

Kevin Baker: "I concur, Sean M.

Unfuckingbelieveable."

Sean M. again: Hey Art, if the rest of the posters here weren't so hand-wringingly serious about finding racist boogeymen to be offended by I might not have thought you were being serious.

I still think your comment sums up the thread quite nicely, though...pure (unintentional) comedy gold.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Apparently comments might not have been deleted, their hit counter is just off. And, I found the post that "Art [Garfunkel] is my God" presumably used as his source:

Not that many black folks in eastern Tennessee, of course. (Western NC is also pretty darn white, too.) Knoxville may have a decent-sized black and Hispanic population, but get outside Knoxville and head out towards Johnson City, and you're in the land of the pale and blotchy. (Although Johnson City is surprisingly gay-friendly.)

Posted to Bloggage at 09:21 PM | Comments (7)

Another attempt to give illegal aliens the vote

The latest is from San Bernardino:

City Attorney James F. Penman warned the school board Tuesday evening that it would be in violation of state law if it supported a measure allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections.

Penman's comments came in response to a proposal by education advocate Gil Navarro, who asked the San Bernardino City Unified School District board to put the issue on next month's agenda...

The state elections code and the state Constitution require voters to be citizens, Penman said.

``You don't have any jurisdiction over the election laws of the state,'' Penman told the board...

``We're talking about parents being treated differently,'' Navarro said. `'It's not fair that they don't have a choice in deciding who can represent them on the school board.''

Actually, it's not fair that they're here illegally in the first place. They're still eligible to vote in the countries of which they're citizens.

Note that Gil Navarro is a member of MAPA. The head of MAPA is Nativo Lopez, who was successfully recalled from the schoolboard of the largely-Hispanic city of Santa Ana.

If this passes, expect the Bush administration to work behind the scenes to arrange funding for the voter pamphlets written by the government of Mexico.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 03:07 PM | Comments (0)

"Calif. Petition Aims to Make Legislature Part Time"

From this:

The man who helped launch the recall drive that made Arnold Schwarzenegger governor of California began a campaign on Wednesday to send the state's legislators home for most of the year.

Conservative populist Ted Costa said he was introducing an initiative to make California's Democratic-dominated year-round Legislature a part-time body working just 90 days a year...

UPDATE: I was so excited I forgot the read the fine print:

But strictly speaking, Costa’s proposal wouldn’t create a part-time Legislature so much as it would limit the time they could spend in Sacramento. If the 90 days didn’t include weekends, lawmakers would still be meeting 18 weeks per year, or about four and a half months. The rest of the time, they would be in their districts or holding interim committee hearings (which might also carry a per-diem reimbursement stipend).

For that reason, and especially if the pay were not cut substantially, I doubt the change would have much effect – good or ill -- on the people who run and serve and the product of the body. They would still, as they do now, vote out most of the legislation in the final weeks of the session. They’d just have less time to fuss around with it before getting to that point.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ted Costa says he's going to change the language to make it 90 days every 2 years:

Now Costa says that the initiative will limit their sessions to 90 days every two years. That's a true, part-time Legislature that would fundamentally change the culture in the Capitol, which would probably lead to a pay cut and a different breed of politician running for these offices. Costa says he plans to file the change Friday with the attorney general's office. Stay tuned.

I can't wait. The attempts by the Democrats to fight this should be funny.

Posted to California at 01:29 PM | Comments (0)

Electoral Vote Predictor 2004: Kerry 307, Bush 231

Here's a handy chart showing which states are strongly for Bush, strongly for Kerry, or somewhere in between.

(Via liberaltarian TheAgitator)

Posted to Politics at 12:40 PM | Comments (0)

Today in spam

In addition to emails with single-word titles ("blork" "upsala"), I'm now getting spam with titles in Russian and - believe it or not - Latin. Could the caesars of old imagine that their language would be used to sell penis pills and mortgage ripoffs?

And, the latest US Bank emergency notice suggests "AFTER SUBMITTING, PLEASE DONOT ACCESS YOUR ONLINE BANKING ACCOUNT FOR THE NEXT 48 HOURS UNTIL THE VERIFICATION PROCESS ENDS."

Okalydokaly.

Posted to Miscellania at 12:26 PM | Comments (0)

PAN, but for California

From this:

Moving to capitalize on lingering resentment over legislative efforts to grant driver licenses to undocumented aliens, conservative Republicans plan to launch a broad initiative campaign aimed at barring those here illegally from collecting welfare, college scholarships or food stamps.

"We have to stop the incentives for coming here illegally. This is the only way to do it. The Legislature cannot be trusted," said Mike Spence, president of the California Republican Assembly, a conservative grass-roots wing of the GOP...

Spence's grass-roots group has proven it has the capability to follow through. It collected more than enough signatures on a referendum to overturn a driver license bill signed by then-Gov. Gray Davis...

The titular "PAN" refers to the Protect Arizona Now initiative, which was designed with 187's flaws in mind. Hopefully this initiative will be very carefully drafted and will have been vetted by several legal scholars. And, note that PAN has 70% to 74% support from Arizonans, and Prop. 187 - despite horrendous smears from the far-left and mistakes from the supporters - passed 59-41.

The usual suspects will no doubt whine and smear about this. Unfortunately, some of the usual suspects will self-identify themselves as conservatives. These "compassionate" conservatives will attempt to say that 187 caused the decline of the California Republican party. This is despite the fact that "Prop. 187 was heavily supported by Latinos, 52 percent to 42 percent two months before the vote. But 77 percent of Latinos voted against it. [after the smears and the mistakes--LW]"

In additon to using far-left-proof language, let's hope this campaign is conducated (by the correct side) in a high-minded manner and the supporters represent a wide spectrum of Californians. Let the other side wave the Mexican flags.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)

The fixes are in

1. Wal*Mart is in talks to pay a $10 million fine for (supposedly indirectly) hiring illegal aliens: "If it settles, Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, isn't expected to admit wrongdoing, and criminal charges aren't expected to be brought against the company's top executives. The settlement, however, is likely to include conditions that provide for a stiffer penalty if the retailer is found to hire undocumented workers in the future, these people said."

For those of you who'd like to put this fine in perspective: go to a Wal*Mart store and stand there for 15 minutes. Their total revenues are $1 billion per day, and in that 15 minute period they've probably brought in more money than the fine.

2. The DHS - which "doesn't do politics" - has restricted the Border Patrol to only conducting operations on the border. Another DHS agency, ICE, will supposedly conduct interior operations:

"The Border Patrol will take the lead at the border and on all arrests of illegal immigrants in inland areas as they travel north; ICE agents will focus on enforcement away from border areas and take the lead on all immigration investigations."

Joseph Dassaro — president of the National Border Patrol Council, Local 1613, the union that represents 1,500 agents in San Diego — said ICE was not equipped to enforce immigration law.

ICE agents already conduct investigations of immigrant smuggling rings, in addition to crimes such as terrorism, child pornography, copyright infringement, drug smuggling and customs violations.

"The mission of ICE agents is broad and diluted. They don't know whether they should be going after terrorists, child pornographers or smuggling rings," Dassaro said.

R.C. Martinez, Border Patrol spokesman in San Diego, said his office had received more than 2,000 e-mails and telephone calls applauding the June sweeps. The sweeps were ordered to be stopped by Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for border and transportation security at Homeland Security, who said department officials had to approve them...

(Both links and the one in the following post via the Stein Report)

Posted to Immigration2004 at 11:49 AM | Comments (0)

Is the Illinois GOP making sense?

The Illinois GOP is continuing their fervent search for a competitor to Barack Obama. At post time, they have not yet considered my suggestion that they consider Chitown institution Bozo, but give them time.

Meanwhile, the latest desperate plan from the Illinois GOP is to convince one-time presidential candidate and two-time senatorial candidate Alan Keyes to move from Maryland to Illinois and run against Barack Obama: "GOP wooing Keyes to take on Obama". Not a bad plan, but wouldn't the second place finisher in the primary be a more natural choice? He does, after all, already live in Illinois and the GOP would be spared relocation expenses. Oh, I forgot. Jim Oberweis is against illegal immigration, and that just won't do.

Just in case, this is what Alan Keyes said back in 1996:

We should enforce the immigration laws. I support Prop 187 style legislation to enforce the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. I also support revamping the immigration laws to put more emphasis on allowing people in who have economic skills and are committed to eventual citizenship. I do not support a ban on immigration however, and in this I disagree with people like Pat Buchanan. America represents a hope for people all over the world, and we should not slam the door of that hope in the face of people today. Regulate the flow of immigrants to protect our quality of life and cultural cohesion, but don't ban it, which I believe is against the tradition of the country.

Not that bad of a position, as long as he still holds it and is able to fit that position in with the cheap-labor-lobby-supporting GOP "leadership."

However, for a cautionary tale, try to guess who said the following quote from 2000:

"America is a nation of immigrants; legal immigration is good for America and for those who come here seeking freedom and opportunity. As Governor of a border state, I know firsthand the great richness and benefits that legal immigrants with different cultures, history and traditions bring to America. I support increasing the number of H-1B visas to help meet America's need for more high-tech workers, and I support expanding the H-2A temporary agricultural workers program so that willing workers can help meet America's labor needs. I oppose illegal immigration. The federal government must improve its enforcement of our borders."

That quote isn't from Keyes. It's from George W. Bush, and we know how that worked out.

So, Keyes wouldn't be that bad as long as he holds the same position as before and he's able to avoid being corrupted by the GOP "leadership."

UPDATE: "Illinois GOP Asks Keyes To Run For Senate". He won't decide until Sunday, August 9th. And, there's that little matter of getting money out of the GOP.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 08:33 PM | Comments (0)

We don't do politics at the Lonewacko Blog

On the one hand this is trivial, on the other it isn't. Since this is a blog, let's just go with it.

Compare this:

[DHS Secretary Tom] Ridge denied that the timing of the terror alert was politically motivated...

"We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security," Ridge said...

With this:

Baca and several other legislators in Washington discussed the sweeps with Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for border and transportation security at the Department of Homeland Security. After the meeting, Hutchinson declared the sweeps a violation of agency policy and said future operations far from the border must be approved by the department...

Joanne Peters, a Baca spokeswoman, said the union members who attacked the congressman are "loose cannons" who have been reprimanded by their superiors...

And, keep "Congressman: Terrorists are infiltrating the U.S. via Mexico" and all of its follow-ups in mind.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)

"Couldn't we pass legislation to make Fox News balanced?"

That must have been the (so-called) thought process behind a recent letter sent to Fox News by, among other luminaries, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. and Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif. This is a UPI report on the letter, but I could only find it at this site:

Several members of Congress sent a letter Tuesday to Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, to express their opposition to what they say is the network's "unfair and unbalanced" bias towards the Republican Party.

The group, composed of 38 Democrats and Independents from the U.S. House of Representatives, has requested that Murdoch meet with them to discuss their concerns.

"The responsibility of the media is to report the news in an unbiased, impartial and objective manner," the letter reads.

[I'll pause why you clean the soda off your monitor.]

A spokesman for Rep. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said there were legislative avenues that the group could pursue as a secondary measure but declined to speculate on what those might be.

OK, I'll speculate: the electrification of the countryside, the widespread adoption of worker's councils, and a series of Five Year Plans.

Posted to Politics at 07:30 PM | Comments (0)

World's second dumbest political quiz

The Columbia Journalism Review has a short quiz to test your political knowledge. (If you want to take the quiz, do so now, because spoilers are ahead). Here are the first two questions:

1) In what magazine were the Bush twins recently featured wearing formal gowns?

2) John Kerry wants to increase the minimum wage to what level?

Like I said, there are spoilers ahead.

The odd-numbered questions concern the celebrity side of politics. The even-numbered questions concern the hardcore policy side of politics.

Now, here's my quiz. Besides the celebrity/policy angle, can you spot the difference between these questions and, in fact, between most of the other two sets of questions?

Yes, that's right. The celebrity questions only require you to have seen something once and have made an association. The second set are much more specific. Someone might know that John Kerry wants to raise the minimum wage, but how many people have committed to memory that it's $7/hour?

Likewise, I'd imagine most people know that Bush's No Child Left Behind act requires testing, but few people have memorized that the testing occurs in grades three through eight.

Perhaps we should reconsider our sources for quizzes.

(Via TalkLeft)

Posted to Politics at 06:44 PM | Comments (0)

"Aliens program costs Bush"

The WashTimes reports on conservatives who won't be voting for Bush this time:

Like a small but significant cluster of lifelong Republicans, the Tucson, Ariz., resident plans to make a statement by breaking with the Republican Party this year. The reason: He's furious over President Bush's proposal to grant resident status to illegal immigrants, known by critics as his amnesty program...

Not that Mr. Nixon plans to vote for the Democratic candidate, John Kerry.

"Kerry's no good, and Bush isn't good, either," he said. "I'm going to write in a candidate, [Rep.] Tom Tancredo [Colorado Republican]. Because of his stand on immigration."

..."Right now, there are 30,000 people on our e-mail lists who are planning to write in Tom Tancredo," said Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform...

...the White House has remained mum on the issue since Mr. Bush announced his guest-worker proposal in January...

"I don't think this issue is going to carry a large sway with voters in California," California GOP spokeswoman Karen Hanretty said. "At the end of the day, the two issues that are going to matter the most in California are the ones that matter the most everywhere else: homeland security and the economy."

Strangely enough, I thought the immigration issue was a key part of homeland security and the economy. Silly me, hubristic Karen Hanretty.

Also, Bush has not been entirely mum on the Bush/Fox Amnesty. Just a few weeks ago he continued to push his plan at the LULAC conference. You know, the conference where some of the attendees didn't attend or walked out of his televised speech.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 04:51 PM | Comments (2)

"What happened to Ben?"

"He's in the back, doing Vicky."

"Ter, please."

"Well, that's what he's doing. Where are we going next? I'm tired."

"We'll be in Wisconsin soon. That's America's Dairyland, right John?"

"Yes, John. It's America's Dairyland. They have lots of cows there."

"Bel WA? Is that Canada?"

"No, Ter. It's in Wisconsin. And, they call it Buh LOIT."

"Quelle gauche. Betes."

"Ter, settle down. This is very important to all of us. And, we're in the MidWest. This is different from the coasts or Aspen. So... Ter... I have a favor to ask..."

"John, you know when you ask nice I can't refuse."

"Our lunch stop this time will be at... Arby's."

"What's that?"

"Well, they serve good old American food."

"Is it like that horrid Wendy's place?"

"Well, it's different. They have this... I guess you could call it meat. It's actually, to be technically correct, it's more of an extruded meat product. But, it's thin. Like prosciutto. When I served this country in Vietnam, we didn't have prosciutto. We didn't have Arby's. Could you manage to eat a few slices of some prosciutto kind of thing for the greater good?"

"John, I need real food. The grilled diver sea scallops we had in Maine were fairly good."

"That was New York, Ter. Upstate New York... Look, let's compromise. If you can manage to choke back some Arby's, I'll order take out again..."

"Yes, but ou en Beloit... er, Beloit... I hate that town already... Where in Beloit is there some acceptable food?"

"Here, Ter, you choose the one you like the best. And, remember, this is for the greater good."

Posted to Politics at 08:53 PM | Comments (4)

Yes, I know the Watermelon Party and the Big-L Libertarians are odious, but...

Here's something I support 100%:

Here is an idea that can be the activist centerpiece of the 2004 campaign. It can also be used in gubernatorial, senatorial and future campaigns. It will generate more excitement among activists than anything else we've done. It is a venture that will create bigger audiences, publicity and support at a fraction of the cost and effort of previous efforts.

The vision here is to organize a series of debates with the Green Party. This is not so much to win over adherents from other parties but to win over undecided people who would be attracted to an open debate creating a marketplace for social change.

This can be done with other candidates but it is important that there be many debates organized at a grass roots level (20-50). While the LP has been involved in debates before, these events will generate publicity and attendance because of the synergy of the local activists involved. A multi-party debate among radical yet rational candidates is a better show for the media and students than the Reprehensiblecrats can provide. The Greens and Libertarians, Nader and the Constitution Party have each have unique and complementary roles in this production. The work can be shared with the result being greater than the sum of its parts.

Yes, but, when the mainstream media doesn't cover the debates, will they actually have happened? Perhaps with enough publicity on the Internet, these could be popular events. Sure, both the Watermelon Party and the Libertarians are a bit out there, but any attempt to break the stranglehold of the Democrats and the Republicans (especially of the "compassionate" variety) should be strongly encouraged.

(Via the wacky liberaltarians at Reason)

Posted to Politics at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)

Let's all move to Rep. Joe Baca's district

From the L.A. Times story "Immigration Sweeps Become an Election Issue for Rep. Baca":

Because of his activism [in support of illegal immigrant and in opposition to our laws --LW], [Rep. Joe Baca (D-San Bernardino)] has become a lightning rod of criticism from supporters of the [recent immigration sweeps 100 miles from the border] and from a Southern California Border Patrol union whose members felt the congressman vilified them for detaining the suspects, according to those from both parties watching the election closely...

[...Some think he may have bitten off more than he could chew...]

Baca's stance on the sweeps has brought greater media attention and support to his Republican challenger, Ed Laning, a construction company executive who adamantly supports the Border Patrol operations...

"There is this kernel of just incredible anger about immigration," [UC Riverside political science professor Max Neiman] said. "It does have a potential for exploding."

...[Baca] also declared the sweeps illegal and accused the Border Patrol agents of overstepping their authority.

Baca and several other legislators in Washington discussed the sweeps with Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for border and transportation security at the Department of Homeland Security. After the meeting, Hutchinson declared the sweeps a violation of agency policy and said future operations far from the border must be approved by the department.

...Baca has said that he favors enforcing the law but believes federal immigration authorities should instead hunt down employers who hire illegal immigrants...

[...Border Patrol agents post anti-Baca messages to bulletin boards...]

Joanne Peters, a Baca spokeswoman, said the union members who attacked the congressman are "loose cannons" who have been reprimanded by their superiors...

Short of moving to Baca's district, perhaps we should take him up on his offer. I'm sure he won't mind if we start conducting sweeps against the employers of his "constituents."

Baca might be able to pull strings to silence those "loose cannons," but I have a feeling his attempts to squelch their First Amendment rights will backfire.

Posted to Immigration2004 at 02:34 PM | Comments (0)

"Man charged with meth manufacture after pants explode"

Drudge doesn't have this story yet, so:

LaFAYETTE, Ga. - A Walker County man was charged with manufacturing methamphetamine after his pants exploded while he was talking to social services workers outside his home...

"Finally, while he was sitting in the back seat, the front of his pants exploded," [the commander of the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit Drug Task Force] said Friday...

If you read further, recall that second and third-degree burns aren't as bad as first-degree burns.

Given the name of the "task force," this counts as a WackyHumor and WarOnDrugs two-fer.

UPDATE: The first (and probably only) comment correctly informs me that I have the severity of burns reversed. Third-degree are the worst kind.

Oh.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Racked with guilt, I moved this from the WackyHumor category to the WarOnDrugs category.

Posted to WarOnDrugs at 12:22 PM | Comments (2)

"Illegals acted on rumors of amnesty"

From the WashTimes:

Nearly 35 percent of the illegal aliens captured trying to enter the United States in the 19 days after President Bush proposed a still-pending guest-worker program say they were trying to take advantage of what many saw as amnesty.

According to a confidential Border Patrol report to a Senate committee, 1,000 of 2,881 foreign nationals interviewed by agents after their capture at the U.S.-Mexico border between Jan. 7 and Jan. 26 acknowledged that rumors of an amnesty program — outlined in Mexican press reports and passed on by relatives — had influenced their decision to try to enter the United States illegally...

As we can see, the immigration system in this country is broken... excuse me, what was that? You're saying the immigration system is not broken so much as our politicians not only refuse to enforce the law they make the situation worse with their insane pandering?

Posted to Immigration2004 at 12:17 PM | Comments (1)

Instapundit is confused

Heh:

There is a lot of concern over illegal immigration and its links to terror -- you hear a lot of it on the second-tier talk-radio shows, where the hosts aren't quite as worried about their position in the larger media world, and I've heard a lot of callers express deep dissatisfaction with how the Bush Administration is handling immigration.

To me it seems we have the worst of both worlds. The immigration system is hard and unpleasant for honest immigrants, tourists, and traveling professionals, while being largely porous to criminals and terrorists. I don't know how to fix it, but it pretty clearly needs fixing.

I'm quite pro-immigration, but being in favor of letting in people who want to come here and become Americans (like my delightful sister-in-law Victoria) isn't the same as being in favor of scrutiny-free borders -- much less a system that treats honest folks like criminals while serving as no real impediment to actual criminals. This needs fixing, badly, but I'm afraid that we're suffering from political paralysis on this front.

Henceforth, I am making my entire Immigration category available for Instapundit's perusal and linking. The truth is in there.

(Via Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds)

Posted to Immigration2004 at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)

THK's sparse Wendy's selection solved

PowerLine's post 'The Limits of Populism' directs us to this MidHudson Valley News article:

A member of the Kerry advance team called Nikola’s Restaurant at the Newburgh Yacht Club the night before and ordered 19 five-star lunches to go that would be picked up at noon Friday. Management at the restaurant, which is operated by CIA graduate chef Michael Dederick, was told the meals would be for the Kerry and Edwards families and actor Ben Affleck who was with them on the tour.

The gourmet meals to go included shrimp vindallo, grilled diver sea scallops, prosciutto, wrapped stuffed chicken, and steak salad. The meals came to about $200.

Sure beats Value Menu chili!

Previous Wendy's coverage starts here.

(Via Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds)

Posted to Politics at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)

Which candidate is less "American"?

Or, to put it a few other ways:

Which candidate is less of a "populist?"

Which candidate is less likely to relate to "average Americans" and share their concerns?

To state it cynically, which candidate is slightly less likely to sell the rest of us out to global elites?

And, which candidate makes you yearn more strongly for a viable third party?

1. Bush tries to present a cowboy image, and many people buy it whether they consider "cowboy" a good thing or not. Kerry tries to present a tres sportif image. It works unless there's no wind, the bike store doesn't have his brand of innertube, or a secret service agent makes him fall.

2. John Edwards wowed them at this year's Bilderberger conference, in fact it may have been the imprimatur he needed to be selected as Kerry's VP. Dick Cheney is a member of the Trilateral Commission.

3. Bush and Kerry are both members of the Northeastern establishment. They're both also members of Skull & Bones. Bush attends the super-secret Bohemian Grove conference/party. It's unknown whether Kerry is a "Grover."

4. Bush has a $3100 mountain bike. Kerry has an $8000 road bike.

5. Edward's dad was a supervisor in a mill. Bush's dad ran the CIA and was President of the U.S.

6. Bush is amigos with Vicente Fox. Fox wants to see the border between the U.S. and Mexico disappear and he's doing his darnedest to make that happen. Fox also thinks the millions of Mexicans currently in the U.S. - including Mexican-Americans - belong to the greater "Mexican Nation." George Bush is also amigos with members of the Mexican elite who are even more unsavory than Fox. Kerry would like to be buddies with Chirac and Shroeder.

7. Bush locked horns with the U.N. regarding Iraq, but also supports the Law of the Sea Treaty. That would greatly enrich the U.N. and give them a great deal more power. Kerry told The [Harvard] Crimson in 1970. "I’d like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations."

8. George W. Bush and the Bush family are close to the Saudi royal family. Prince Bandar bin Sultan is commonly referred to (by Bush) as "Bandar Bush." Kerry's connections to the Saudis are unknown.

9. Bush supports CAFTA, Kerry opposes only the current version of it.

10. Bush has proposed an amnesty for illegal aliens. Kerry has proposed an amnesty for illegal aliens.

11. Kerry supports the DREAM Act. That would give illegal aliens a lower college tuition than some U.S. citizens. The group that banged on Karl Rove's windows a few months ago was demonstrating in favor of the DREAM Act.

12. Jeb Bush came out in support of giving Florida driver's licenses to illegal aliens, until several Florida sherriffs came out strongly against it. Kerry opposes giving driver's licenses to illegal aliens.

13. Bush has Halliburton, Diebold, the Christian Right, and others. Kerry has, among others: George Soros, Steve Bing, MoveOn, Hollywood, Michael Moore, and Al Sharpton.

14. Karl Rove supposedly told Congressman Tom Tancredo "never to darken the door of the White House again." Kerry's campaign co-chairman was the president of the UCLA chapter of a racial separatist organization.

15. Bush assistant Margaret Spellings laughed cynically when it was suggested that the U.S. should enforce immigration laws, and Bush appointee Asa Hutchinson stopped enforcing the immigration laws after complaints from Mexico and others. Hillary Clinton said at the Democratic Convention that we need to "secure our borders."

16. John Kerry and party dined at Wendy's in Newburgh NY. Each year, George W. Bush buys empanadas from a company in El Paso.

17. Teresa Heinz-Kerry is worth at least $500 million, perhaps more than a billion. The Bush family is rich, but probably not that rich.

UPDATE: Still confused? Just remember, Kerry is the taller one. If you have even more helpful mnemonics, please leave them in the comments.

Posted to Politics at 12:02 PM | Comments (0)

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All Posts(links to each post by title)

• Alleged Iraqi sleeper agent/naturalized citizen arrested
• "GOP Immigration Idiocy In Illinois"
• "If 250,000 New York Driver's Licenses Do Not Match Social Security Data, How Many Voters are Illegally Registered?"
• Bootius to the Maximus!
• "Immigration issue yanked off GOP agenda"
• The Topic that can't be mentioned
• It wouldn't be a protest without Susan "Medea" Benjamin getting arrested
• Arnold will veto the illegal alien driver's license bill
• Fanboys and fangirls at the [other] convention
• TalkLeft, deep end; deep end, TalkLeft
• Spawn of Rall
• Everything the NYT thinks is wrong
• "Businesses take pledge not to hire illegal immigrants"
• "Bush nephew backs off on INS"
• "Rights Groups Take On Deportation Program"
• "Tancredo to fight over immigration"
• I know how Verity feels
• "Islam is not an exotic addition to the English country garden"
• "Mexican remittances head for new record"
• "GOP Convention Delegate Drops Out Over Bush"

My trip to Alpine County What not to do, again (September 1-2, 2002)

Boston Market Cornbread Temperatures Please help contribute to this important study (August 28, 2002)

Did The Gap Put Celebrities at Risk? An Open Web Letter to The Gap (May 20, 2002)

Humphreys Peak Arizona's highest point (May 19, 2001)

Go Heavy, Go Slow, Get Lost Bay Area highpoints (December 14, 2000)

Hubris in New England The highpoints of RI, CT, and MA (October 8, 2000)

Let's go to Utah Zion, Bryce, and Grand Canyon (August 14, 2000)

Your host, climbing Monkey Face (5.14d)

Your host's arm (circled)

Your host's hopelessly outdated conditioning progress

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