Disclosure documents show that tea parties organizer, head of FreedomWorks, and former Rep. Dick Armey lobbied in regards to the stimulus plan. The documents don't indicate what the lobbying consisted of, but there's certainly a fair possibility that he wasn't lobbying to reduce the amount of the stimulus.
In her book "Going Rogue", Sarah Palin claims that The Atlantic (meaning Andrew Sullivan) "ran" with the disgusting story claiming that Trig Palin was actually the son of her daughter. Sullivan takes umbrage at her claim, saying that he never "ran" with the story but simply asked questions. This incident is one of the things I've noticed time and time again from many on the rightwing side of things: they don't put a high value on precision and getting things as correct as possible. That allows their opponents to do things like what Sullivan is doing.
Personally, I think Sullivan "ran" with the story, and no doubt every Palin fan would agree. However, what most of the latter don't understand is that there are also plenty of people who would agree with Sullivan, and those are the people who need to either be convinced or counter-acted. In this case, instead of saying that Sullivan "ran" with the story, she should have pointed out that he was obsessed with the issue, that he published a series of passive-aggressive questions, that he is not in any way a journalist, and that he linked to an absurd - and since deleted - post at the DailyKos in order to buttress his claims that the issue was something that needed to be addressed. It's worth bearing in mind that the title of Sullivan's post where he linked to DailyKos was titled "Things That Make You Go Hmmm". That's not exactly journalism, now is it?
And, I don't know if it's in the book or not, but with all the money involved she could certainly have hired a researcher to compile a list of Sullivan's lies, whether about her or about other topics.
From this:
About 1,000 employers nationwide will be audited for possible immigration violations in an escalation of the Obama administration's effort to increase pressure on business owners not to hire illegal immigrants.
The businesses will get a notice that the government intends to audit their compliance with immigration laws, the Department of Homeland Security said. The sweep follows a similar action in July during which authorities audited 654 employers. Agents will check the eligibility of workers at each firm, with violations potentially leading to fines, as well as civil or criminal charges.
As the article points out, this happens at the same time as the Obama administration is pushing comprehensive immigration reform. To whatever extent this is a crackdown, they're trying to appear that they're doing something in order to make amnesty more likely, just as the Bush administration did.
According to a new study (americasvoiceonline.org/pages/the_new_constituents), due to massive immigration particularly by Latinos, the results of the 2010 Census - used to apportion congressional districts - will result in the following changes (chart from the HuffPost article discussed here):
States gaining House seats: Texas (+4), Arizona (+2), Florida (+1), Georgia (+1), Nevada (+1), Oregon (+1), South Carolina (+1), and Utah (+1).
States losing House seats: Ohio (-2), Illinois (-1), Iowa (-1), Louisiana (-1), Massachusetts (-1), Michigan (-1), Minnesota (-1), Missouri (-1), New Jersey (-1), New York (-1), and Pennsylvania (-1).
If you're located in one of the states in the latter group, that means you're going to lose power. In that case, organize a local effort to take smart action to reduce immigration.
Frank Sharry of America's Voice offers "Latinos Poised to Shake Up 2010 Census, Politicians Beware" at the Huffington Post [1] in which he discusses a study showing how massive immigration by Latinos will affect congressional apportionment; more on that here. The piece is basically just a celebration of race-based "raw political power", and later on he quotes from a Washington Post blog post written by Ed OKeefe in which Sharry - someone who's apparently Irish-Italian [2] - says the following:
"This is going to set up a very interesting dynamic, because right now, the kind of bleached districts where candidates can get away with demonizing Latino immigrants -- because they're more worried about a primary challenge than a general election loss -- may end in the next decade."
[1] huffingtonpost.com/frank-sharry/
latinos-poised-to-shake-u_b_362652.html
[2] northamericaninstitute.org/files/symposia/sharrybio.pdf
Per this:
Criminal arrests, administrative arrests, indictments and convictions of illegal immigrants at work sites all fell by more than 50 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009... Fiscal 2008 ran from Oct. 1, 2007, through Sept. 30, 2008. Fiscal 2009 began Oct. 1, 2008, and ran through Sept. 30 of this year.
The exact figures are:
* Criminal arrests: down 60%
* Criminal indictments: down 58%
* Convictions: down 63%
* Administrative arrests: down 68%
The DHS is a bit defensive:
The following is from congressional testimony offered by the American Civil Liberties Union (more on them and questions for them at the link) on April 2, 2008 [1]:
Recommendations: The ACLU urges that ICE:
* Halt entering into future (287g) agreements with states and localities;
* Cease recognition and compliance with 287(g) agreements currently in operation.
* Halt implementation of the Secure Communities plan which seeks to expand state and local law enforcement powers to enforce federal immigration laws.
The Anti Defamation League has a new report entitled "Rage Grows in America: Anti‑Government Conspiracies", which contains at least one major lie. And, it's a lie that you probably won't hear anyone else discuss, namely the one in the section about the "Birther" movement (adl.org/special_reports/rage-grows-in-America/birther-movement.asp):
Despite the fact that government officials in Hawaii and non-partisan groups have all authenticated Obama's birth certificate, the “birther” movement continues to gain adherents.
1. Government officials in Hawaii admit that they've never authenticated the picture on Obama's site that the ADL is referring to; the ADL is lying. The most any official has said is that he was born there, but she gave no further details (other than her AG-reviewed claim that he was a "natural-born American citizen"). None of that is an authentication of the only "certificate" that we've seen, and what we've seen is actually just a "Certification of Live Birth".
2. The only "non-partisan group" that claims to have seen an actual paper copy is FactCheck. As can be seen at the link, they aren't a credible organization and they certainly don't act too very "non-partisan". The most other organizations claim to have seen is what we've all seen: pictures. And, the persons from Fact Check who claim to have seen the document were just their - per them - "staffers"; they didn't call in document experts. Several other issues with the Fact Check "authentication" are listed here; note that Fact Check falsely claimed that Hawaiian officials had said he was born there since November of last year, when in fact the statement from those officials was ambiguous, with the ambiguity only being resolved in late July of this year. In other words, Fact Check lied to their readers for around nine months.
The Huffington Post and the Associated Press are reviving a smear both perpetrated against Sarah Palin about a year ago. At the same time, most of Palin's defenders aren't taking effective steps to counter-act what HuffPost and the AP are doing.
In October of last year, AP writers Garance Burke and Justin Pritchard wrote about one of Palin's resume points, a pipeline deal. As contemporaneously discussed here, the Anchorage Daily News - not exactly a Palin fan - called the AP article "remarkably skewed". The Juneau Empire quoted Democrats coming to Palin's defense over the deal; one Democrat said the AP story was "way off base" and another said "I don't think this story was fair and accurate". (Note that the AP story was printed at the HuffPost among other places).
Flash forward to today, where the HuffPost offers '"Going Rogue": The 18 Biggest Falsehoods In Palin's Book' [1]. They're letting their readers choose the biggest supposed falsehood and the current top choice is based on the misleading AP story from last year. That links to yet another misleading AP story, this one the recent and somewhat infamous story which involved eleven AP writers "fact-checking" Palin's book [2]; one of the "fact checks" was based on the pipeline story.
In a way it's difficult to deal with things like this because of all the noise; the HuffPost link at [1] has thousands of comments. One thing that can be done is to highlight the names of the reporters in order to inform others that they aren't trustworthy; that's one of the things we do here that most others don't do. If others would help tie the names of reporters to examples of them misleading, that would send a message to those reporters that they need to improve their coverage.
While, just for two examples, both Mark Steyn at National Review [3] and Powerline [4] discussed how the AP used eleven writers on the "fact check" and mentioned Garance Burke (linked above) as one of those involved, neither of them made the AP writers themselves the story, and both of their posts will have little long-term effect; both are more or less simply lightweight entertainment. The AP's recent "fact check" would probably be different if they and others had been doing things the right way since last year.
In an editorial, the New York Times is basically admitting how much trouble we're going to be in in coming years due to the massive immigration that the NYT supports. The NYT editorial "Their Future Is Ours" discusses the findings of a recent academic study (link):
There are 16 million children in immigrant families in the United States, one of the fastest-growing segments of the population. It’s an old American story made new in the age of globalization, when waves of human displacement in recent decades have led to immigration on a scale not seen since Ellis Island. But a country that has been so good for so long at integrating new Americans is stumbling under the challenge... ...Dislocation breeds a host of difficulties, starting with family separation...
...The children from separated families were, perhaps unsurprising, more likely to show signs of depression. Those symptoms were often accompanied by poverty, isolation and - despite an early period of hopefulness and engagement - a downward academic slide. Immigrant children lagged in mastering standard academic English, the passport to college and to brighter futures. Whereas native-born children’s language skills follow a bell curve, immigrants’ children were crowded in the lower ranks: More than three-quarters of the sample scored below the 85th percentile in English proficiency...
...This is the great challenge that is forgotten in the heat of the immigration debate. The children of immigrants are Americans. "They" are "us," a cohort of newcomers who will be filling the demographic void left as the baby boomers start fading away. Their future is our country’s future. The job of integrating them is not only unfinished but in many critical ways has hardly begun.
First, not all of them are citizens, and some or many of the citizens are the children of recent illegal aliens. In any case, the NYT has played its own role in bringing about the situation they whine about, and they should be held accountable in order to minimize any more damage that they can do. One way to do this is to go to public events where NYT editors and officials appear and really press them on the situation they helped cause on video.
As could be expected, the NYT proposes a laundry list of solutions, which I guess we're going to have to do. At the same time, we're also going to need to prevent the situation from getting any worse by reducing immigration overall. For that effort it's important to keep in mind that, while most of the "liberal" support for massive/illegal immigration is because they want to obtain money or power, some of it is also because they wanted a "project". Some "liberals" encouraged massive numbers of low-skilled workers to move to the U.S. so that they could them feel high-minded and in order to give them oppressed groups to look after. Instead, those "liberals" should be encouraged to support low-skilled workers staying in their countries while working towards reforming those countries' policies. It shouldn't be that difficult to discredit "liberal" leaders by pointing out to them on video at their public appearances just how faulty their policies are.
Speaking earlier today, Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio supported attrition (enforcing our immigration laws in order to encourage illegal aliens to leave on their own) and made statements that seemed to indicate that he opposes amnesty (aka comprehensive immigration reform). That's definitely a far better position than that of those in his general network, such as Karl Rove and Jeb Bush. And, it makes more clear his position; it wasn't entirely obvious.
However, he still probably supports some form of major guest workers program and probably increased legal immigration. He proposed something that might become a national ID card (see this and this). And, he supported fining employers of illegal aliens; what exactly that means isn't clear since we're already doing that to some extent. Maybe he means he'd increase the penalties and actually impose them, or maybe it was just empty talk. On a less important note, he also committed what in some peoples' minds must be heresy, criticizing Ronald Reagan for signing the 1986 amnesty.
Some of his remarks are here and below:
Ruben Navarrette of the San Diego Union Tribune offers an anti-Lou Dobbs editorial (mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_13808533), which includes this in the middle:
Earlier today, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick released a state-sponsored report making recommendations about how to deal with immigration both in that state and in the U.S. as a whole. The report is from "The Governor's Advisory Council for Refugees and Immigrants", which is basically a joint venture between his office and the far-left, illegal immigration-supporting Massachusetts Immigration and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (the current leader of the National Immigration Forum, Ali Noorani, used to head MIRA). You can get a copy of the report from miracoalition.org, and a local news report is here:
Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute was one of the inspirations for George W Bush's incredibly anti- and un-American guest workers program, one that would have reduced previously middle-class wages by flooding the labor market with lower-wage, skilled foreign labor (video here: peekURL.com/vsaprax).
Now, Griswold offers "Will Democrats err in immigration reforms?" (link), complaining that in her recent speech Janet Napolitano didn't call for a guest workers program. Griswold's proposal is built on a fantasy; he's peddling snake oil:
Daniel Tencer of RawStory offers "Tea partiers punk’d into supporting removal of white people from US" (rawstory.com/2009/11/tea-partiers-punked-white-people video at peekURL.com/v5h3vrp). Both the underlying story and his treatment of it are explicitly anti-American:
A speaker at an anti-immigration rally in Minneapolis this past weekend got the crowd to support more than just the deportation of all illegal immigrants -- he got them cheering for the eviction of all European-descended immigrants to America who "stole this land through genocide and ethnic cleansing."
...One of those protesters, going by the alias "Robert Erickson," got a speaking spot at the rally and used it to argue for the eviction of all descendants of European immigrants -- in other words, that contingent of white Americans who these days see themselves as "real" Americans...
..."Let's send these European immigrants back where they came from," he said to wild cheers. "We need to send every one of them back home. ... They stole this land through genocide and ethnic cleansing."
There are a few angles to this story:
1. The event was organized by ALIPAC (againstamnesty.com) and, as can be seen by their name they were trying to piggyback anti-amnesty on the wider tea parties movement. Whether they got any help from any other tea party groups isn't known, but neither Glenn Reynolds nor Pajamas Media nor FreedomWorks nor other usual suspects promoted them; this illustrates once again that those pulling the strings on the tea parties movement are libertarians who at the least are weak on immigration if not outright open borders loons.
2. The "partiers" bend over backwards to point out that their movement isn't just for white people; Tencer is just smearing them.
3. The tea parties - because they have little or no intellectual footing - were unable to do the effective thing and point out - on video - how "Erickson" was wrong.
4. This puts "liberals" once again on the side of corrupt businesses and governments, enablers of illegal activity, and enablers of lowering wages for low-wage American workers.
5. The tea partiers should have pointed out that "Erickson's" speech was explicitly anti-American: he was disputing the authority of the United States over its territory, and doing so in a racial way. They could have asked him whether those from Central and South America had a right to move to the U.S. territory at will, and then ask him whether, for instance, someone of completely German extraction from Argentina also has that right. If not him, what about someone with native blood? "How much native blood? One drop?" And so on. They could have turned the tables on him and made him look the fool, showing him to be the anti-American racist he is.
Note: the story is also at the following; seeing if you can find any pro-American comments is left as an exercise:
dailykos.com/story/2009/11/16/804849/-MN-Tea-Party-Punkd-UPDATED
UPDATE: Others supporting the incident include Amanda Terkel of ThinkProgress ("Interloper tricks Tea Party audience into an anti-European immigrant chant of 'Columbus go home!'", thinkprogress.org/2009/11/16/columbus-go-home), Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic (links to the preceding, saying only "An anti-immigration rally gets punk'd by an impostor", andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/11/columbus-go-home.html), Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks radio show (peekURL.com/vrfeu4y), and Dawn Teo of the Huffington Post ("Tea Partiers Punked, Prankster Leads Chant "Columbus Go Home" (VIDEO)", huffingtonpost.com/dawn-teo/tea-partiers-punked-prank_b_360693.html).
Independent, in-depth coverage of immigration, politics, and media bias since 2002. Also: multiculturalism, Los Angeles, California, privacy, and occasionally celebrities and wacky humor...
If you can't find what you're looking for, see the About page or use the navigation features to the right.
Atom feed · RSS 2.0 feed · RSS 0.91 feed · WML
twitter.com/24AheadDotCom
|
2 hours ago #teaparty honcho Dick Armey did stimulus bill lobbying: peekURL.com/zishk9f Was he trying to reduce it? #glennbeck #sgp #iamthemob |
|
2 hours ago How come you never see Ron Paul organizers and #teaparty organizers in the same room at the same time? Hmmm... #pattyduke |
|
2 hours ago What sort of "patriots" support those who push massive immigration while millions of Americans are out of work? #teaparty #glennbeck #sgp |
|
2 hours ago #teaparty could've blocked #hcr by asking tough questions. Instead, their leaders just urged them to throw tantrums. #glennbeck #sgp |
|
3 hours ago What do you get when you combine Ayn Rand, Homer Simpson, and a smalltown dinner theater doing the 1776 musical? #teaparty #sgp #glennbeck |
|
3 hours ago Preview of a #TeaParty movie: peekURL.com/vjmshow Drama! Delusion! Paranoia! Costumes! Bags of corporate cash! #glennbeck #sgp #tcot |
|
17 hours ago Finally, the safe and sane way to go postal: peekURL.com/zfkysg2 (Drink, noodles involved) |
|
18 hours ago Beltway elites are incredibly vulnerable on illegal immigration, but #teaparty isn't interested in exploiting that. Not too #sgp. #glennbeck |
|
19 hours ago #teaparty: millions of Americans out of work, and you whine about TEA instead of taking smart steps to reduce immigration. #glennbeck #sgp |
|
19 hours ago If I were Rachael Ray, in addition to doing that all day, I'd say: "Martha, you nouveau riche &#&#, go see if the Rockefellers need a cook." |
|
22 hours ago It's on! Martha Stewart: "[Rachael Ray is] a totally different kind of cook than I am. I don't know if she has a garden; I don't think so." |
|
1 day ago OH,IL,NY,NJ,PA,IA,LA,MA,MI,MN,MO to lose House seats, power due to massive immigration: peekURL.com/zfpqsbq #teaparty #glennbeck #sgp |
|
1 day ago Voting machines in NY23 (Doug #Hoffman) had viruses: peekURL.com/zugpe98 #teaparty #tcot #tlot #p2 #glennbeck #sgp |
|
1 day ago Getting 100s of hits for risque Alexandra Kerry pic: peekURL.com/zp9jm12 My apologies for being Objectifying Patriarchical Oppressor. |
|
1 day ago Frank Sharry supports race-based "raw political power" based in part on illegal imm.: peekURL.com/zunqit7 Losing states: fight back. |
Immigration 2008a · Immigration 2007b · Immigration 2007a · Immigration · Immigration (6/05 to 12/05) · Immigration (1/05 to 6/05) · Immigration (8/04 to 12/04) · Immigration (before 8/04) · Immigration & Terrorism · Immigration & Driver's Licenses · Immigration & Consuls · Immigration & Media Bias · Immigration & Europe · North American Union
Blogging Across America
MultiCulti Madness ·
General Politics ·
Privacy ·
Miscellaneous ·
The "Peace" Movement
Los Angeles ·
California ·
Outdoors and sports ·
Celebrities ·
Wackiness ·
Inside Blogging
Iraq ·
Beltway Sniper ·
Terrorism & Extremism ·
The Saudis ·
Warblogging ·
War On Drugs
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
