The Assignment Desk

Summary (posts follow):

I do so much, but I can't do everything. That's where you come in: choose one of these entries and get answers or write up a report and then post it somewhere. If you can move people to help out, post a thread to a forum looking for research assistance.

Last modified Feb 2, 2009

Discussed in (click each link for the full post):

Obama pledges to do everything he can to create jobs; use leverage to get him asked why he won't enforce immigration laws - 10/15/2009

Per this: Standing at the site of a highway project funded by his economic stimulus plan, President Barack Obama said Wednesday he is committed to exploring all avenues to create jobs. Obama said his administration is going to keep going until "every single American in this country who's looking for work is going to be able to get the kind of well-paying job that supports their families....

Serge Kovaleski, Jim Rutenberg, William Yardley of NYT lie about Sarah Palin hair thinning (per hairdresser) - 7/19/2009

... last page. This post is also an assignment: find others discussing this non-story and take them to task on your own site or in their comments sections.

People for the American Way, TPM begin personal destruction campaign against Frank Ricci (what you can do) - 7/11/2009

... TalkingPointsMemo (link). Your assignment is to watch for others doing the same and then use this technique on the specific reporters involved, as appropriate. UPDATE: On June 9th, Alison Leigh Cowan of the New York Times offered "Here Comes the Judge (Before Sotomayor)" (link). It contains links to the various documents in the 1995 case, but she mainly concentrates on a conflict of int...

FightTheSmears is offline for an unknown reason - 7/09/2009

FightTheSmears.com - the debunking site that's home to a picture of what is supposedly Barack Obama's COLB as well as the home of at least a couple of lies - is currently offline. The last homepage in Google's cache was from July 7, so it's not clear whether this is just a temporary issue or something permanent. A look through the same cache shows that they were hacked by spamm...

Andrea Nill /ThinkProgress misleads about California immigration (Micheal Savage) - 6/23/2009

Andrea Nill of ThinkProgress offers a discussion of Michael Savage using hyperbole and, rather than admitting that he's correct to a good extent she makes several misleading statements (wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/06/23/california-immigration-michael-savage).

Sonia Sotomayor admits she was an "affirmative action baby"; said it's "critical that we promote diversity"; there are "cultural biases built into testing" - 6/11/2009

If we could replace the GOP leadership with the Washington Post and the New York Times, we might be able to block Sonia Sotomayor. As it is, even Charlie Savage of the NYT offering "Videos Shed New Light on Sotomayor’s Positions" (link) probably won't have much of an impact unless regular citizens - i.e., you - send that article to everyone you know and encourage them to do the sa...

Chuck Schumer: Sotomayor is "within the judicial mainstream" on immigration cases; how far off is he? - 6/08/2009

From this: Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), chairman of Judiciary’s immigration subcommittee, assigned his staff to analyze how (Sonia Sotomayor) voted in 955 immigration cases in which she has participated throughout her judicial career, with a special focus on cases that involved foreigners trying to win asylum claims in order to remain in the United States. Of the 848 asylum cases in which S...

Low-wattage radio, TV hosts say dumb things about Mexicans and swine flu; leftwing attacks in order to support illegal activity - 4/30/2009

... the other side. This is in the assignment category because I'm urging you to immediately contact all the local and national radio hosts you can find and suggest that they discuss this topic, but they do so in a way that looks ahead to possible attacks by leftwing supporters of illegal activity like MMFA, ThinkProgress, and the HuffPost. Discussing this in a completely fact-based, sober fashi...

Gordon Crovitz /WSJ: millions of Americans are unemployed, so let's ramp up immigration - 4/27/2009

Former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz offers "We Need an Immigration Stimulus/A recession is exactly when we want innovative outsiders" (link). Bracketed by various absurdities, he offers the following stats: Companies founded by immigrants include Yahoo, eBay and Google. Half of Silicon Valley start-ups were founded by immigrants, up from 25% a decade ago. Some 40% of pate...

America.gov promotes Canada-style multiculturalism (from a melting pot to a "patchwork of cultures") - 4/22/2009

... corporate pluralism system. Your assignment is to take one or more of the pages at the site apart and explain to others exactly why this is the wrong approach, putting it into the historical context and also exploring the political power aspects, such as attempts to divide people into small groups in order to better use them to maintain power. Make sure and take screengrabs and save the full text...

ACLU controlling Obama policy? ("Transition Recommendations" wants most immigration enforcement halted, + much more) - 3/17/2009

In November, the American Civil Liberties Union released "Actions For Restoring America: Transition Recommendations for President‐Elect Barack Obama" (aclu.org/transition) listing things they wanted him to do the first day, within the first 100 days, and within the first year. Several of their proposals would halt immigration enforcement to a great extent, pending "review". T...

Condi Rice promotes immigration "reform", bad policy (why?) - 3/16/2009

Juliana Barbassa of the Associated Press informs us that Condoleezza Rice spoke at Stanford University on Friday and said the following (link):

Colorado: discredit Peter Groff over in-state tuition for illegal aliens (bill passes Senate committee) - 3/06/2009

Colorado state senator Chris Romer is pushing for that state to give in-state tuition to illegal aliens, and yesterday his bill passed a state senate committee (link). CO senate president Peter Groff is quoted as saying: "For me, this is a moral issue, that we should not shackle the future of children because of the sins of their fathers." If you oppose this bill, one of the best ways to...

Assignment: is Daniel de Vise/WaPo telling the truth about "ESOL Students in Md., Va. Leaping Ahead of U.S. Peers"? - 3/01/2009

Daniel de Vise of the Washington Post offers "ESOL Students in Md., Va. Leaping Ahead of U.S. Peers" (link), which is the latest in a sub-genre of American-demoting, immigration/illegal alien-promoting articles from the mainstream media. I have more than a sneaking feeling that DeVise isn't telling the truth about something or isn't revealing something, but since I can't d...

Luis Gutierrez' "National Family Unity Tour" to pull heartstrings in support of illegal immigration; ask him a question - 2/25/2009

Rep. Luis Gutierrez is conducting a nationwide tour where he and his friends will be visiting churches and conducting townhall meetings from coast to coast to push for comprehensive immigration reform. The schedule is below, and what I need you to do is organize a local effort to go to one of these events and make him look bad on video by asking him a tough question designed to show that he's...

Who or what precipitated the financial crisis? (Soros? China? a setup to elect Obama? Did it just happen?) - 2/10/2009

Someone needs to snug their tinfoil hat down tight and try to figure out who or what got us into this financial mess. Did it just happen, or was it a deliberate plan in order to make money or help Obama get elected? Consider the attached video featuring Rep. Paul Kanjorski saying the following: "On Thursday Sep. 15, 2008 [note: he probably means Sep. 18] at roughly 11 AM The Federal Reserve n...

Congressional Research Service reports publicly released (immigration, etc.) - 2/08/2009

Wikileaks has obtained hundreds of previously unreleased reports from the Congressional Research Service, Congress' think tank: wikileaks.org/wiki/CRS_reports_by_date There are several dozen about immigration matters, so if anyone wants to do a good turn choose one of those at random and look through it for anything of interest. They aren't top secret, and if there's anything very d...

Cement: another way stimulus money will flow to China (and Mexico, Canada, Korea...) - 2/08/2009

... shortage in 2005 here and here. Your assignment: find out how much cement we'd have to import for all those stimulus-related projects, and calculate how much more China will be making off us.

Assignment: document Obama, FEMA, MSM response to ice storms in Kentucky - 2/02/2009

... the Bush administration. Your assignment: compare the government response to past incidents, and compare the MSM's coverage to how they covered past incidents including Katrina and others. And, find out whether Barack Obama has paid as much attention to this issue as he would have had it occurred in a state that voted for him. First, on January 29, he signed an emergency declaration: whiteho...

Is Youtube banning conservative videos without cause? - 1/24/2009

There's a discussion of that here, including two videos side-by-side: one from the rightwing side that was deleted by Youtube, and an apparently similar one from the other side that was not. I haven't looked into it, but there are also a series of videos here, some of which may have been deleted by Youtube. On the mitigating side, I believe that widely-watched Youtube vlogger "sxeph...

Challenge: get Hawaii to clarify their 10/31 statement - 1/23/2009

This post assumes you're already thoroughly familiar with the Obama citizenship summary, so please read that through first if you haven't already. If you believe that FactCheck is telling the truth, here's what you need to do: get the state of Hawaii to clarify their 10/31 statement and/or obtain clarification from a recognized legal scholar. For instance, you can call Janice Ok...

Obama will become less popular, and we need to be prepared - 1/20/2009

Barack Obama will probably never reach a George W Bush level of unpopularity, but at some point during his presidency his star will fade. And, that will be an absolutely terrific chance to discredit his current cult-like supporters. For example, let's say Obama (fulfilling Joe Biden's promise) decides to do something unpopular. His current supporters can then be confronted with their pas...

Assignment: did an employee of an Obama-linked firm "cauterize" Obama's passport file? - 1/15/2009

From this: Obama's top terrorism and intelligence adviser, John O. Brennan, heads a firm (The Analysis Corp) that was cited in March for breaching sensitive files in the State Department's passport office, according to a State Department Inspector General's report released this past July. ...During a State Department briefing on March 21, 2008, McCormack confirmed that the contrac...

24Ahead.com

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.

Start here