Notes from America

Memorial Day 2011 Taps for the Fallen

2011-05-30T13:56:00.000-07:00

War 1914-1918
In Flanders Fields
by John McCrae, May 1915

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

In honor of two brothers and a sister who are among the deceased veterans from all of our wars, here is an expanded version of the original "taps."

Dee Perez-Scott: Soros is like you, he doesn't believe in the freedom of speech

2011-05-18T16:48:00.000-07:00

Billionaire George Soros is using his money to co-opt and control the liberal media -- reshaping the news to suit his ultra left wing views!

We need to demand that the media tell the truth about George Soros’s plan to undo the U.S.
Soros has spent more than $48 million to gain influence at journalism schools, and journalism organizations.

+ + Soros’ influence over the media is undermining our nation

The well-funded tentacles of George Soros go far beyond his funding of Columbia University’s School of Journalism – one of the most famous journalism school in the nation, he’s also bankrolling: The National Federation of Community Broadcasters, The Committee to Protect Journalists, and the National Association of Hispanic Broadcasters and more.

But that’s just the tip of Soros’ ultra left iceberg.

Those angered by his control of the media might be tempted to voice their concerns to the Organization of News Ombudsman -- a group of 57 media professionals devoted to “monitoring accuracy, fairness and balance.” Unfortunately, that group is also funded by Soros!

The group’s membership reads like a media “Who’s Who” including: Brent Jones of USA Today, Alicia Shepard, NPR, Patrick Pexton, The Washington Post, Deirdre Edgar of the Los Angeles Times ...

Liberal academic programs, left-wing investigative journalism and supposedly neutral news organizations, are all being funded by a man who despises the right, and seeks to take down the U.S.A.!

Soros’ plan is obvious.

The bigger question is, will Americans rise up and confront the Soros threat?

We need to take aggressive action. Some analysts and researchers are committed to exposing Soros’ agenda, but we all need to spread the word about this very dangerous man.

Left unchecked, Soros has the means to destroy our freedom and our way of life! That’s why right now, we must leverage our effots against the left-wing media, bludgeoning them with the truth about Soros, and alerting the nation to this terrible threat!

Kos has a hemorrhage over Prosser's victory in Wisconsin

2011-04-08T07:04:00.000-07:00

Chris Bowers writing for the Daily Kos, an extreme Left Wing blog, indicated that the vote totals in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race swung back and forth for a time but that the final count favored incumbent Justice David Prosser. Kos/Bowers had a hemorrhage because late votes in Waukesha County favored Prosser 11,008 to Kloppenburg’s 3,426 giving Prosser a winning total in the election. Left Wing Kos found that very upsetting and is desperately trying to find something wrong with those additional votes to rescue Kloppenburg from the egg on her face she got as a result of her premature victory announcement when she had a temporary scant hundred or so vote margin with more to be counted.

Kos also criticizes Brookfield, a conservative community in Waukesha County, because of its desirable life style and demographics. One wonders whether Kos would actually prefer to live in a crime and graffiti-ridden neighborhood or is simply envious of Brookfield citizens.

It would also be interesting to review Kos’s blog when the Saturday Night Live village idiot stole the election in Minnesota. Wasn’t there a report that more votes were cast in some counties than there were registered voters? Didn’t Coleman, the Republican, lead until more Franken votes were found in some precincts? Reminds one of Chicago-style politics, doesn’t it? Wait until the preliminary vote is in and then “find” enough votes to win, even if you have to register and create ballots for local cemetery residents. I doubt that Kos raised a fuss about that outcome.

Wisconsin wins; unions not so much!

2011-04-07T20:46:00.000-07:00

Kudos to the Wisconsin voters for re-electing Judge Prosser and restoring control of the state to the governor, the legislature and the people rather than turning it over to the Left Wing unions. The unions now need to change course and show a willingness to accept the law as written as long as state benefits exceed the national average. Then when they fall below that level that will be the time to make their case, if they have one.

--ex-Wisconsinite

Pay Attention: Dee Perez-Scott: 2012 Federal Budget

2011-04-07T20:29:00.000-07:00

Democratic and Republican lawmakers are running out of time to reach an agreement on the 2011 budget.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, is looking beyond this Friday's midnight deadline. He has announced plans for blockbuster legislation for fiscal year 2012.

The plan will cut the budget by more than $4 trillion over the next decade, bringing spending back to 2008 levels.

"Look, we intend to not only cut discretionary spending and put caps on spending, you have to address the drivers of our debt," Ryan told "Fox News Sunday."

"We need to engage with the American people on a fact-based budget, on stopping politicians from making empty promises to people, and talk to the country about what is necessary to fix these problems," Ryan added.

In a recent interview on The 700 Club, Ryan said America has a choice between two futures.

"Do you want the historic American idea, the 'exceptionalism,' that opportunity society with a safety net?" Ryan asked. "Or do you want to go down the path that the president has put out for us, which is putting us down towards a debt ridden crisis, a cradle to grave, European-style, social welfare state?"

At the top of Ryan's To Do list is making changes to Medicaid and Medicare. The Wisconsin congressman says that's the key because spending on those programs will skyrocket in coming years.

"The key is this -- There is nobody saying that Medicare can stay on its current path. Even "Obamacare" acknowledges that," Ryan said. "So we should not be measuring ourselves against some mythical future of Medicare that isn't sustainable."

Ryan also proposes pro-growth tax changes, including lower tax rates and broadening the tax base.

"We want job creation," he said. "Pro-growth tax reform is a key ingredient to getting this economy working again, getting this economy growing again."

In the meantime, the 2011 budget still hasn't been resolved. Republicans and Democrats are trying to strike yet another deal to avoid a government shutdown.

Lawmakers are running out of time to reach an agreement. Funding for the government expires at midnight Friday.

"We control one-half of one-third of the government here," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, noted. "But we're going continue to fight for the largest spending cuts that we can get."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. suggested GOP lawmakers were under the thumb of the Tea Party.

"The Republican leadership in the House has to make a decision whether they're going to do the right thing for the country or do the right thing for the Tea Party," Reid said.

While Democrats have agreed to make over $30 billion in spending cuts over the next 6 months, the Tea Party members say there's no room for compromise -- especially on issues like Planned Parenthood.

"If liberals in the Senate would rather play political games and shut down the government instead of making a small down- payment on fiscal discipline and reform, I say shut it down," Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., said.

The Death of Common Sense

2011-01-14T08:51:00.000-08:00

An Obituary printed in the London Times - Interesting and sadly rather true.

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend,Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:
- Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
- Why the early bird gets the worm;
- Life isn't always fair;
- and maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children.

It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or a paracetamol to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims.

Common Sense took a beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement.

Common Sense was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son, Reason.

He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers;
I Know My Rights
I Want It Now
Someone Else Is To Blame
I'm A Victim

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on.

New Ford's New Plant in Brazil -- UAW Idiocy

2010-12-25T07:53:00.000-08:00

Ford's New Plant in Brazil -- UAW Idiocy

Destroying America's Christian Heritage

2010-12-02T07:17:00.000-08:00

Now here is the rest of the story. Makes you think… ‘Tis time to wake up America!
I know everyone has seen and laughed at this commercial, to steal a line from Paul Harvey, "Now for the rest of the story!" Read below.

Important FYI - PROGRESSIVE AUTO INSURANCE

This is a heads up regarding Progressive Auto Insurance. You know who they are. They’re the ones with the clever television ads featuring the perky brunette actress all dressed in white.

What you might not know is that the Chairman of Progressive is Peter Lewis, one of the major funders of leftist causes in America.

Between 2001 and 2003, Lewis funneled $15 million to the ACLU, the group most responsible for destroying what’s left of America’s Christian heritage.

Lewis also gave $12.5 million to MoveOn.org and America Coming Together, two key propaganda arms of the socialist left.

His funding for these groups was conditional on matching contributions from George Soros, the America-hating socialist, ultra leftist, and chief financier of the Obama political machine. Lewis made a fortune as a result of capitalism, but now finances a progressive movement that threatens to destroy the American free enterprise system that is targeting television shows on Fox News.

Peter Lewis is making a fortune off of conservative Americans so that he can help dismantle the very system that made him wealthy. He’s banking on no one finding out who he is.

Please boycott Progressive Insurance. (I’ve wondered about them for quite sometime)!! Let’s get the word out!

Happy Veterans' Day

2010-11-11T17:48:00.000-08:00

Dee Perez-Scott: Multiculturalism has Utterly Failed

2010-10-22T15:45:00.000-07:00

Dee Perez-Scott often touts multiculturalism but here's what German chancellor Angela Merkel had to say about that.

"Somebody eventually had to say it -- and German chancellor Angela Merkel deserves credit for being the one who had the courage to say it out loud. Multiculturalism has "utterly failed."

Multiculturalism is not just a recognition that different groups have different cultures. We all knew that, long before multiculturalism became a cult that has spawned mindless rhapsodies about "diversity," without a speck of evidence to substantiate its supposed benefits.

In Germany, as in other countries in Europe, welcoming millions of foreign workers who insist on remaining foreign has created problems so obvious that only the intelligentsia could fail to see them. It takes a high IQ to evade the obvious.

"We kidded ourselves for a while," Chancellor Merkel said, but now it was clear that the attempt to build a society where people of very different languages and cultures could "live side-by-side" and "enjoy each other" has "failed, utterly failed."

This is not a lesson for Germany alone. In countries around the world, and over the centuries, peoples with jarring differences in language, cultures and values have been a major problem and, too often, sources of major disasters for the societies in which they co-exist.

Even the tragedies and atrocities associated with racial differences in racist countries have been exceeded by the tragedies and atrocities among people with clashing cultures who are physically indistinguishable from one another, as in the Balkans or Rwanda.

Among the ways that people with different cultures have managed to minimize frictions have been (1) mutual cultural accommodations, even while not amalgamating completely, and (2) living separately in their own enclaves. Both of these approaches are anathema to the multicultural cultists.

Expecting any group to adapt their lifestyles to the cultural values of the larger society around them is "cultural imperialism" according to the multicultural cult. And living in separate neighborhoods is considered to be so terrible that there are government-financed programs to take people from high-crime slums and put them in subsidized housing in middle-class neighborhoods.

Multiculturalists condemn people's objections to transplanting hoodlums, criminals and dysfunctional families into the midst of people who may have sacrificed for years to be able to escape from living among hoodlums, criminals and dysfunctional families.

The actual direct experience of the people who complain about the consequences of these social experiments is often dismissed as mere biased "perceptions" or "stereotypes," if not outright "racism." But some of the strongest complaints have come from middle-class blacks who have fled ghetto life, only to have the government transplant ghetto life back into their midst.

The absorption of millions of immigrants from Europe into American society may be cited as an example of the success of multiculturalism. But, in fact, they were absorbed in ways that were the direct opposite of what the multicultural cult is recommending today.

Before these immigrants were culturally assimilated to the norms of American society, they were by no means scattered at random among the population at large. On New York's lower east side, Hungarian Jews lived clustered together in different neighborhoods from Romanian Jews or Polish Jews -- and German Jews lived away from the lower east side.

When someone suggested relieving the overcrowding in the lower east side schools by transferring some of the children to a school in an Irish neighborhood that had space, both the Irish and the Jews objected.

None of this was peculiar to America. When immigrants from southern Italy to Australia moved into neighborhoods where people from northern Italy lived, the northern Italians moved out. Such scenarios could be found in countries around the world.

It was in later generations, after the children and grandchildren of the immigrants to America were speaking English and living lives more like the lives of other Americans, that they spread out to live and work where other Americans lived and worked.

This wasn't multiculturalism. It was common sense.

Thomas Sole

Good Muslims can never be Good Americans

2010-09-18T17:17:00.000-07:00

Peace is never achieved in states that are mostly Muslim. The most radical Muslims intimidate and spew hatred, and satisfy their blood lust by killing less radical Muslims, for a variety of reasons.

'Before I was nine, I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; the tribe against the world, and all of us against the infidel. -- Leon Uris,
'The Haj'

It is important to understand that in some countries, with well under
100% Muslim populations, such as France, the minority Muslim populations
live in ghettos, within which they are 100% Muslim, and within which they live by Sharia Law. The national police do not even enter these ghettos. There are no national courts, nor schools, nor non-Muslim religious facilities. In such situations, Muslims do not integrate into the community at large. The children attend madrasses. They learn only the Koran. To even associate with an infidel is a crime punishable with death. Therefore, in some areas of certain nations, Muslim Imams andextremists exercise more power than the national average would indicate.

Today's 1.5 billion Muslims make up 22% of the world's population. But their birth rates dwarf the birth rates of Christians, Hindus,Buddhists, Jews, and all other believers. Muslims will exceed 50% of theworld's population by the end of this century.

Well, boys and girls, today we are letting the fox guard the henhouse. The wolves will be herding the sheep!

Obama appoints two devout Muslims to Homeland Security posts. Doesn't this make you feel safer already?

Obama and Janet Napolitano appoint Arif Alikhan, a devout Muslim, as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano swore in Kareem Shora, a devout Muslim who was born inDamascus, Syria, as ADC National Executive Director as a member of the
Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC).

NOTE: Has anyone ever heard a new government official being identified as a devout Catholic, a devout Jew or a devout Protestant...? Just
wondering.

Devout Muslims being appointed to critical Homeland Security positions? Doesn't this make you feel safer already??

That should make the US ' homeland much safer, huh!! Was it not "Devout Muslim men" that flew planes into U.S. buildings years ago?

Was it not a Devout Muslim who killed 13 at Fort Hood ?

Also: This is very interesting and we all need to read it from start to finish. Maybe this is why our American Muslims are so quiet and not speaking out about any atrocities. Can a good Muslim be a good American?

This question was forwarded to a friend who worked in Saudi Arabia for 20 years. The following is his reply:

Theologically - no . . . Because his allegiance is to Allah, The moon God of Arabia.

Religiously – no… Because no other religion is accepted by His Allah.

except Islam (Quran, 2:256)(Koran)
Scripturally - no… Because his allegiance is to the five Pillars of Islam and the Quran.

Geographically – NO… Because his allegiance is to Mecca , to which he turns in prayer five times a day.

Socially - NO… Because his allegiance to Islam forbids him to make friends with Christians or Jews..

Politically - NO…Because he must submit to the mullahs (spiritual leaders), who teach annihilation of Israel and destruction of America, the great Satan.
Domestically - NO… Because he is instructed to marry four Women and beat and scourge his wife when she disobeys him (Quran 4:34)

Intellectually - NO… Because he cannot accept the American Constitution since it is based on Biblical principles and he believes the Bible to be corrupt.

Philosophically - NO… Because Islam, Muhammad, and the Quran do not allow freedom of religion and expression… Democracy and Islam cannot co-exist. Every Muslim government is either dictatorial or autocratic.

Spiritually - NO… Because when we declare 'one nation under God,' the Christian's God is loving and kind, while Allah is NEVER referred to as Heavenly father, nor is he ever called love in The Quran's 99 excellent names.

Therefore, after much study and deliberation.... we should be very suspicious of ALL MUSLIMS in this country… They obviously cannot be both 'good' Muslims and good Americans.

Call it what you wish, it's still the truth. You had better believe it. The more who understand this, the better it will be for our country and our future. The religious war is bigger than we know or understand.

Can a Muslim be a good soldier??? Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, opened fire at Ft. Hood and Killed 13. He is a good Muslim!!!

The Muslims have said they will destroy us from within.

SO FREEDOM IS NOT FREE.
We Live In The Land Of The Free,
Only Because Of The Brave!
"A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined,but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition tomaintain a status of independence from any who mightattempt to abuse them, which would include their own government." -- George Washington

Enjoy life now - It has an expiration date!
________________________________________

George Soros - Arch Villain & Puppet Master

2010-09-18T11:32:00.000-07:00

"George Soros is one of the most corrupt men of our generation, or should we say "the godfather of evil

Most of us have heard of him. Few really know who he is or what he's got planned for us (or the rest of the world). Apparently, Obama knows him well. Here is some information to sink your teeth into.
Some time ago Steve Kroft wrote an article questioning who might be the power or puppet master behind Barack Hussein Obama. It has to be someone because of his meteoric rise to power, with experience at virtually nothing, with questionable wisdom, and with a mysterious past that has been carefully erased and hidden where no one can check it. This puppet master, whomever he is, apparently paid for Obama's education and his travels to Pakistan for some mysterious purpose, and promoted him into Illinois then national politics.

"I (Steve Krost) once suggested it might be billionaire George Soros. I now believe that to be the case more than ever.

George Soros might be the most evil man in the world, with intent to destroy America and every value we have held dear. Obama seems to be in lockstep with Soros' philosophies and simply a tool in Soros' world-changing strategies. Both must be stopped.

Read the below article and judge for yourself. It is from http://www.resistne t.com/profiles/ blogs/George- soros-obamas- puppet .

"Who is behind Barack Obama? Who is pulling the strings?"

Here is what (CBS') Mr. (Steve) Kroft's research has turned up.........bit of a read, but it took 4 months to put it together...

"The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States." George Soros

"George Soros is an evil man. He's anti-God, anti-family, anti-American, and anti-good." Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson.

Is it possible to lay the global financial meltdown, the radicalizing of the Democratic Party, and America 's moral decline, at the feet of one man? YES, It is indeed possible.

If George Soros isn't the world's preeminent "malignant messianic narcissist," he'll do until Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot are reincarnated.

What we have in Soros, is a multi-billionaire atheist, with skewed moral values, and a sociopath's lack of conscience. He considers himself to be an elitist world class philosopher, despises the American Way, and just loves to do social engineering (change cultures).

Soros is the power behind the throne of Obama. I accuse George Soros of being the PUPPET MASTER that is pulling Obama's strings.

Gyargy Schwartz, better known to the world as George Soros, was born August 12, 1930 in Hungary. Soros' father, Tivadar, was a fervent practitioner of Esperanto, a language invented in 1887, and designed to be the first global language, free of any national identity.

The Schwartz's, who were non-practicing Jews, changed the family name to Soros, in order to facilitate assimilation into the gentile population, as the Nazis spread into Hungary during the 1930s.

When Hitler's henchman Adolf Eichmann arrived in Hungary, to oversee the murder of that country's Jews, George Soros ended up with a man whose job was confiscating property from the Jewish population. Soros went with him on his rounds.

Soros has repeatedly called 1944 "the best year of his life."

"70% of Mr. Soros's fellow Jews in Hungary, nearly a half-million human beings, were annihilated in that year yet he gives no sign that this put any damper on his elation, either at the time or indeed in retrospect."

During an interview with "Sixty Minute's" Steve Kroft, Soros was asked about his "best year:"

KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.

SOROS: Yes. Yes.

KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from your fellow Jews, friends and neighbors.

SOROS: Yes. That's right. Yes.

KROFT: I mean, that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?

SOROS: Not, not at all. Not at all, I rather enjoyed it….

KROFT: No No feeling of guilt?
SOROS: No., only feelings of absolute power.

In his article, Muravchik describes how Soros has admitted to having "carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me in trouble."

Be that as it may. After WWII, Soros attended the London School of Economics, where he fell under the thrall of fellow atheist and Hungarian, Karl Popper, one of his professors. Popper was a mentor to Soros until Popper's death in 1994. Two of Popper's most influential teachings concerned "the open society," and Fallibilism.

Fallibilism is the philosophical doctrine that all claims of knowledge could, in principle, be mistaken. Then again, I could be wrong about that.

The "open society" basically refers to a "test and evaluate" approach to social engineering. Regarding "open society" Roy Childs writes, "Since the Second World War, most of the Western democracies have followed Popper's advice about piecemeal social engineering and democratic social reform, and it has gotten them into a grand mess.

In 1956 Soros moved to New York City, where he worked on Wall Street, and started amassing his fortune. He specialized in hedge funds and currency speculation.

Soros is absolutely ruthless, amoral, and clever in his business dealings, and quickly made his fortune. By the 1980s he was well on his way to becoming the global powerhouse that he is today.

In an article Kyle-Anne Shiver wrote for "The American Thinker" she says, "Soros made his first billion in 1992 by shorting the British pound with leveraged billions in financial bets, and became known as the man who broke the Bank of England. He broke it on the backs of hard-working British citizens who immediately saw their homes severely devalued and their life savings cut drasticallyâ€¦almost overnight."

In 1994 Soros crowed in "The New Republic" that "the former Soviet Empire is now called the Soros Empire." The Russia-gate scandal in 1999, which almost collapsed the Russian economy, was labeled by Rep. Jim Leach, then head of the House Banking Committee, to be "one of the greatest social robberies in human history." The "Soros Empire" indeed.

In 1997 Soros almost destroyed the economies of Thailand and Malaysia . At the time, Malaysia's Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, called Soros "a villain, and a moron." Thai activist Weng Tojirakarn said, "We regard George Soros as a kind of Dracula. He sucks the blood from the people."

The website Greek national Pride reports, "[Soros] was part of the full court press that dismantled Yugoslavia and caused trouble in Georgia, Ukraine and Myanmar [ Burma ]. Calling himself a philanthropist, Soros' role is to tighten the ideological stranglehold of globalization and the New World Order while promoting his own financial gain. He is without conscience; a capitalist who functions with absolute amorality."

France has upheld an earlier conviction against Soros, for felony insider trading. Soros was fined 2.9 million dollars.

Recently, his native Hungary fined Soros 2.2 million dollars for "illegal market manipulation." Elizabeth Crum writes that "The Hungarian economy has been in a state of transition as the country seeks to become more financially stable and westernized. [Soros'] deliberately driving down the share price of its largest bank put Hungary's economy into a wicked tailspin, one from which it is still trying to recover.

My point here is that Soros is a planetary parasite. His grasp, greed, and gluttony have a global reach.

But what about America? Soros told Australia 's national newspaper "The Australian":

"America, as the centre of the globalised financial markets, was sucking up the savings of the world. This is now over. The game is out," he said, adding that the time has come for "a very serious adjustment" in American's consumption habits. He implied that he was the one with the power to bring this about….

Soros: "World financial crisis was" stimulating" and "in a way, the culmination of my life's work."

Obama has recently promised 10 billion of our tax dollars to Brazil, in order to give them a leg-up in expanding their offshore oil fields. Obama's largesse towards Brazil, came shortly after his financial backer George Soros invested heavily in Brazilian oil (Petrobras).

Tait Trussel writes, "The Petrobras loan may be a windfall for Soros and Brazil, but it is a bad deal for the U.S. The American Petroleum Institute estimates that oil exploration in the U.S. could create 160,000 new, well-paying jobs, as well as $1.7 trillion in revenues to federal, state, and local governments, all while fostering greater energy security and independance."

A blog you might want to keep an eye on is SorosWatch.com . Their mission: "This blog is dedicated to all…who have suffered due to the ruthless financiaal pursuits of…George Soros. Your stories are many and varied, but the theme is the same: the destructive power of greed without conscience. We pledge to tirelessly watch Soros wherever he goes and to print the truth in the hope that he will one day be made to stop preying upon the world's poorâ€¦that justice will be served."

Back to America. Soros has been actively working to destroy America from the inside out for some years now. People have been warning us. Two years ago Bill O'Reilly said on "The O'Reilly Factor" that "Soros [is] an extremist who wants open borders, a one-world foreign policy, legalized drugs, euthanasia, and on and on. This is off-the-chart dangerous…."

In 1997 Rachel Ehrrenfeld wrote, "Soros uses his philanthropy to change or more accurately deconstruct the moral values and attitudes of the Western world, and particularly of the American people. His "open society" is not about freedom; it is about license. His vision rejects the notion of ordered liberty, in favor of an PROGRESSIVE ideology of rights and entitlements."

Perhaps the most important of these "whistle blowers" are David Horowitz and Richard Poe. Their book "The Shadow Party" outlines in detail how Soros hijacked the Democrat Party, and now owns it lock, stock, and barrel.

Soros has been packing the Democrat Party with radicals, and ousting moderate Democrats for years.

The Shadow Party became the Shadow Government, which became the Obama Administration.

DiscoverTheNetworks.org (another good source) writes, "By his [Soros'] own admission, he helped engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, Georgia, and Yugoslavia. When Soros targets a country for "regime change," he begins by creating a shadow government a fully formed government-in-exile, ready to assume power when the opportunity arises. The Shadow Party he has built in America greatly resembles those he has created in other countries prior to instigating a coup."

November 2008 edition of the German magazine "Der Spiegel," in which Soros gives his opinion on what the next POTUS (President of the U.S.) should do after taking office. "I think we need a large stimulus package….." Soros thought that around 600 billion would be about right.

Soros also said that "I think Obama presents us a great opportunity to finally deal with global warming and energy dependence. The U.S. needs a cap and trade system with auctioning of licenses for emissions rights."

Although Soros doesn't (yet) own the Republican Party, like he does the Democrats, make no mistake, his tentacles are spread throughout the Republican Party as well.

Soros is a partner in the Carlyle Group where he has invested more than 100 million dollars. According to an article by "The Baltimore Chronicle's" Alice Cherbonnier, the Carlye Group is run by "a veritable who's who of former Republican leaders," from CIA man Frank Carlucci, to CIA head [and ex-President] George Bush, Sr.

In late 2006, Soros bought about 2 million shares of Halliburton, Dick Cheney's old stomping grounds.

When the Democrats and Republicans held their conventions in 2000, Soros held Shadow Party conventions in the same cities, at the same time.

Soros has dirtied both sides of the aisle, trust me. And if that weren't bad enough, he has long held connections with the CIA.

And I mustn't forget to mention Soros' involvement with the MSM (Main Stream Media), the entertainment industry (e.g. he owns 2.6 million shares of Time Warner), and the various political advertising organizations he funnels millions to. In short, George Soros controls or influences most of the MSM. Little wonder they ignore the TEA PARTY, Soro's NEMESIS.

As Matthew Vadum writes, "The liberal billionaire- turned-philanthropist has been buying up media properties for years in order to drive home his message to the American public that they are too materialistic, too wasteful, too selfish, and too stupid to decide for themselves how to run their own lives."

Richard Poe writes, "Soros' private philanthropy, totaling nearly $5 billion, continues undermining America's traditional Western values. His giving has provided funding of abortion rights, atheism, drug legalization, sex education, euthanasia, feminism, gun control, globalization, mass immigration, gay marriage and other radical experiments in social engineering."

Some of the many NGOs (None Government Organizations) that Soros funds with his billions are: MoveOn.org , the Apollo Alliance, Media Matters for America, the Tides Foundation, the ACLU, ACORN, PDIA (Project on Death In America), La Raza, and many more. For a more complete list, with brief descriptions of the NGOs, go to DiscoverTheNetworks.org.

Poe continues, "Through his global web of Open Society Institutes and Open Society Foundations, Soros has spent 25 years recruiting, training, indoctrinating and installing a network of loyal operatives in 50 countries, placing them in positions of influence and power in media, government, finance and academia."

Without Soro's money, would the Saul Alinsky's Chicago machine still be rolling? Would SEIU, ACORN, and La Raza still be pursuing their nefarious activities? Would Big Money and lobbyists still be corrupting government? Would our college campuses still be retirement homes for 1960s radicals? Yes, yes, yes, and yes

America stands at the brink of an abyss, and that fact is directly attributable to Soros. Soros has vigorously, cleverly, and insidiously planned the ruination of America and his puppet, Barak Obama is leading the way.

The words of Patrick Henry are apropos: "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!"

These days, Patrick Henry's sentiment is more than just some quaint hyperbole from long ago it's a slow burning, but intense, glow that fires our courage and heart.

Sometimes evil wilts and dies when exposed to direct sunlight. Let's try to shine as much light as possible on this.

I have suspected Obama is the Manchurian candidate.

Soros was the original funding behind the Global Warming Hoax. For every 10 million Gore makes, Soros makes a billion.

What a cleaver plan to trick us into destroying our economy with a CO2 hoax and get us to pay trillions to a select few who will control the planet.

I have spent the last couple of hours jumping about and following and reading the links embedded in the articles. It is enough to turn your stomach as the total (big picture) story unfolds.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=589"

Twas the night before elections

2010-09-11T19:50:00.000-07:00

'Twas the night before elections

And all through the town

Tempers were flaring

Emotions all up and down!

I, in my bathrobe

With a cat in my lap

Had cut off the TV

Tired of political crap.

When all of a sudden

There arose such a noise

I peered out of my window

Saw Obama and his boys

They had come for my wallet

They wanted my pay

To give to the others

Who had not worked a day!

He snatched up my money

And quick as a wink

Jumped back on his bandwagon

As I gagged from the stink

He then rallied his henchmen

Who were pulling his cart

I could tell they were out

To tear my country apart!

' On Fannie, on Freddie,

On Biden and Ayers!

On Acorn, On Pelosi'

He screamed at the pairs!

They took off for his cause

And as he flew out of sight

I heard him laugh at the nation

Who wouldn't stand up and fight!

So I leave you to think

On this one final note-

IF YOU DONT WANT SOCIALISM

GET OUT AND VOTE!!!!

Amen

Oshkosh Air Show 2010

2010-09-11T19:35:00.000-07:00

Illegal Aliens, the New Roma -- Not!

2010-09-10T18:31:00.001-07:00

The Roma. In the past, they spoke their own language. They disregarded local law and national laws. They practiced suspicious professions - fortune tellers, dancers, fiddlers, horse traders, living a mysterious romantic lifestyle. They suffered centuries of persecution at the hands of those who found them strange, disturbing, and alien. But, paradoxically, the very societies that castigated gypsies, or the Roma as they prefer to be called, have also revered their special skills, and ascribed mysterious magical powers to them. Romantic to some, threatening to others, always seen from a distance by outsiders' eyes, the gypsy ways are largely hidden to us. But there is one place where insider and outsider meet, where we catch a true glimpse of the joy, the pain and the longing of the gypsy experience - in their music. Based on linguistic evidence (the similarity of the Romany language to Hindi, Panjabi, and related languages of Northern India) and anthropological evidence, body habitus and ABO blood group distributions closely approximating those of the warrior classes of northern India, there is now a clear consensus of opinion that the modern day Roma of the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and the Americas originated in Northwestern India. There is also a general consensus regarding the approximate timing of their emigration in the 11th century, or at least the bulk of it if you believe in more than one wave of emigration.
Spain, Romania, the British Isles, the US - gypsies live in all these places but most do not consider themselves to be OF these places. And that is another reason why they have not been better accepted. Many still speak their own language as well.
"Nostalgia is the essence of the gypsy song, and seems always to have been, but nostalgia for what? Nostos is the Greek word for a return home but the gypsies have no home. And perhaps uniquely among peoples, they have no dream of a homeland. To traditional gypsies history is not an important concept. The gypsy language, Romany has no written form, and few of the world's gypsies have acquired literacy in other languages. Knowledge of past events often does not extend beyond what the oldest gypsy in a community can recall."
Many East European gypsies knew nothing of their people's origins or even of their recent history. For example, most did not know that half a million gypsies had been killed in the Holocaust 50 years ago, nor were they particularly interested. Without history there is no happy past for the gypsy to fondly recall. Instead gypsy songs tell of present joys and of present sorrows. Their music is passionate blend of melancholy and independence, as in this song from Spain, "We the Gypsies, we were meant to be wanders, no one will change our ways..."
Even to this day the Roma are perhaps best known for their music and dance. Others point to a major wave of emigration taking place at the time of Muslim invasions of Northern India in the early 800's. Several further invasions during the 10th to 13th centuries resulted in subsequent emigrations.
Many attempts to summarize their appearances in Europe are available, most of which report them in Southeastern Europe sometime in the early 1300's, Central/Eastern Europe in the 1400's and in Western and Northern Europe later in the 1400's into the early 1500's. Since that time, their history is one of attempts at banishment, forced assimilation, persecution, deportation, slavery, and attempted extermination. As recently as the 1930's and 1940's, the Nazis of the Third Reich imprisoned and murdered on the order of 500,000 Roma. They continue to be victims of persecution, especially in the eastern European countries of the former Soviet bloc countries of that area.
Their story is not that much different from others who at one time were persecuted for their “differentness” or as representatives of countries with which we were at war. It happened to the Italian, the Germans, the Japanese, the Irish, the Chinese, and the Mexicans and other Latinos. However, because of their dispersal across Asia and Europe and even to North America, the story of the Roma is much more akin to that of the Jews who through their Diaspora, which in a more general sense is the dispersion of any religious or political sect after the conquest of its homeland. It apparently was the incursions of the Muslims in Northern India that led the Roma to disperse across several continents.
The dispersion of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking peoples across the world was more a case of the conqueror rather than the vanquished. The Spaniards and the Portuguese, of course, have long since abandoned their imperialist designs but their languages and cultures remain intact in all of Latin America as they intermarried with indigenous populations and only reluctantly gave up their colonial ambitions there.
Some now see a parallel between the dispersion of the Roma and the Jews the new “reconquistas” in non-Latin North America. Yet, they come not as the vanquished in their own lands but as the new conquerors through their unarmed invasion of the North and its deadly consequences for American character, language, culture, society and sovereignty. They are not a group who has been forced from its homeland in a modern Diaspora. To the contrary, they have, in fact, forced Anglo and other Californians, Arizonans, Texans and New Mexican to leave through intimidation and other influences of a similar nature. The similarity between the Roma and illegal aliens from the South begins and ends with their disregard for local and national laws.

Open Letter to President Barack Obama, Honorable Members of Congress

2010-09-04T10:09:00.000-07:00

As a citizen, I am deeply concerned about the safety and security of our nation. I believe illegal immigration poses a dire national security crisis of the highest order and a long-term threat to the American way of life. Mr. President, to win the war on terror, it is essential that the border fence—the one authorized by Congress and promised to the American people--be built in its entirety. All illegal aliens apprehended at the border or internally should be sentenced to serve a minimum of 6 months working on the border fence to help reduce its cost. I am also urging you and the Congress to responsibly address what has become an illegal alien crisis by considering the following other key issues as well:

#1 -- Secure our borders. As first priority, America must stop the hemorrhaging at the border and stop the flow of illegal aliens by investing all the resources necessary to secure our borders. However, improvements in border infrastructure and staffing must be buttressed with vigorous internal enforcement. Mandatory E-verification across the board for all employers, public and private, and all employees, current and new hires, is an essential element of internal enforcement. No more foot-dragging on E-Verification; implement it now! Also, existing immigration laws must be enforced as a vital component of our Homeland Security.

#2 -- No Amnesty. I oppose any form of amnesty for illegal aliens, including the “temporary worker” proposal or any proposals that grant legal residency status or a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens. Rewarding illegal behavior is certain to increase that behavior. Amnesty, with or without conditions, is a bad idea and sends the wrong message. Amnesty was granted to 1.3 million illegal aliens in 1986. Now we have 12 million, a compound rate of growth of 9.7% per year. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to calculate where that rate will lead in the future if it is allowed to continue or is promoted with yet another amnesty.

1. Build The Fence. As a first priority, America must stop the flow of illegal aliens by investing all of the resources necessary to secure our borders. The 843 miles of double-layered fencing authorized by Congress and promised to the American people has not been built. Yet such a barrier is truly the backbone of any plan to gain control of our border and the illegal aliens threatening our land.

2. Aggressive deportation. Immediate investment in aggressive effort to deport the 12million illegal immigrants currently within our borders – if you’re caught, you are sent back after serving 6 months working on border infrastructure, 2 years if you are a repeat offender. There must not be any official provision to allow self-deportation; if an illegal alien wishes to return to his homeland on his own, his departure must still be classified as "involuntary" so that if he returns he will be classified as a repeat offender/felon. Otherwise, many will ask to be released from detention so they can return home under their own power but they could easily be back the same day if they leave at all. If they are apprehended again, it will be just as if they were not repeat offenders if we allow "voluntary" self-deportation.

3. No benefits. Erect a wall of separation between illegal aliens (and their children) and tax-dollar paid benefits reserved for U.S. citizens and legal aliens. I support The Real I.D. Act (H.R. 418) that prohibits illegal aliens from being issued drivers licenses and prevents terrorists from abusing the asylum laws of the United States. Benefits for birthright citizen children is a huge inducement for border violations. The amount large families of such children can receive represents a cornucopeia of benefits unheard of in Latin America.

4. No work. Stricter punishment of U.S. businesses that knowingly or unknowingly employ illegal aliens. Mandatory E-verification will eliminate any excuse for hiring illegal aliens with false identity papers. Congress needs to establish a national database of legal immigrants to assist both public and private sectors in this effort. The same system should include a provision for the tracking of visa overstays so that they can be promptly apprehended and deported without recourse.

5. Official English. Legislation that establishes English as the Official Language of the United States to be used for all governmental proceedings, publications, and documents at all levels of government. E.O. 13166 must be repealed. Public Interpreters should be provided to those who cannot afford one and who do not have a family member who can serve that function. All other interpreters and translators may be made available but only on a billable basis in hospitals, emergency rooms, police stations and other public facilities. Public and private sectors cannot be required to provide services in alternative languages. True fluency in English must be required for citizenship not just the knowledge of a few words and phrases.

6. No Birthright Citizenship. Illegals flood into the U.S. and then have babies which are granted birthright citizenship. In the U.S., one of the strongest incentives for border violations is the 14th amendment which grants citizenship to anyone who is born in this country. It is difficult to imagine a more irrational and self-defeating legal system than one which makes unauthorized entry into this country a criminal offense and simultaneously provides perhaps the greatest possible inducement to illegal entry. The implementing law for the 14th Amendment must be changed to eliminate this inducement for border violations.

The inducements for border violations include: birthright citizenship, welfare benefits for the families of birthright citizens, inadequate border security and internal enforcement, the lack of adequate sanctions for illegals and their employers, and the availability of jobs. If we deal with all of these effectively, border violations will become unattrative.

Raising the Bar for Dee Perez-Scott

2010-08-24T14:50:00.000-07:00

Reforming our nation’s immigration laws is the key to progress and prosperity

Almost a quarter of a century has elapsed since the failed amnesty bill of 1986. We now have an historic opportunity to overhaul our federal immigration laws by building on our past experiences and recognizing our past failures. I strongly believe that immigration is an issue on which we can and must rise above petty ethnocentric concerns and pandering politics. No one can argue--from the right or the left--that we can strengthen America’s economy and democracy without controlling our borders and enforcing the law.

We are a nation of laws and that has been one of the secrets of our success. Yet, we are clearly losing ground on the immigration front as powerful special interest groups and their allies in Congress continue to push for yet another amnesty bill under the broader umbrella of comprehensive immigration reform (CIR). But many now recognize that amnesty and CIR are virtually synonymous. Obama apparently has decided to usurp the authority of the Congress to set immigration policy by taking action to simply excuse illegal aliens en masse in an end run that will cost him in 2012.
We are losing ground to other countries because population growth here is largely among the uneducated, some of whom have not even mastered their native tongues. Forty-seven percent of high school students fail to graduate. What we need is a fully educated workforce to enable us to recapture the manufacturing jobs sent overseas. Allowing large numbers of the uneducated to enter our country illegally and remain here and work is counterproductive to that goal. Moreover, it places extra demands on the schools for bi-lingual education and other special programs. This involves the use of resources that could better be employed in improving the graduation rate and preparing students to be productive members of society.
Our national security is threatened by the weakness of our border and port security efforts and by the sheer volume of daily pedestrian and vehicular traffic at the ports of entry. Any observer of that traffic would soon realize that the Border Patrol is faced with an impossible task. If we are to meet everyone’s goal of secure borders, we must act now with a sense of urgency.
We knew early on that the amnesty bill of 1986 had many shortcomings because the promises in the bill to secure the border were never kept. The 1.3 million illegal aliens granted amnesty in 1986 has now grown to 12 million, a compound rate of increase of 9.7% per year. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see where another amnesty will lead. If the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill had been passed in 2006, we would be debating anew today whether to provide amnesty for the 4 million to 5 million illegal aliens who have entered since. And if an amnesty were enacted tomorrow, five years from now, Congress would be debating what to do with the additional 5 million who would have entered by that time. What's more, the tens of millions of newly amnestied citizens legally would be able to bring in their next of kin through chain migration, swelling the overall number to potentially more than 50 million within a decade of the amnesty.
Although our nation cannot wait any longer, I am not optimistic about real reform because President Obama and DHS Secretary Napolitano are pushing a different agenda. While they support some additional resources, some of them temporary in the form of National Guard troops, they have yet to come to terms with the simple fact that some of what we’ve been doing is not working and more of the same is not likely to help. Business as usual is simply unacceptable. They have yet to accept that internal enforcement is an essential element of in depth border security. The lack of real interventions and adequate investment doesn’t just apply at the border and doesn’t just apply to hardened criminals. If we focus on the larger problem, we will be able to sweep up the hardened criminals along with all of the other illegals.
The East Germans found to their dismay that people would brave machine gun towers, mine fields, and multi-layered fences and walls to escape to the West, Why? Because they knew if they were successful, they would never be repatriated.
Similarly, illegal aliens know if they can escape the immediate environs of the border, they will be home free. Under the Administration’s policies, the probability of being apprehended and repatriated is extremely low. What the Administration refuses to admit is that to secure the borders requires more than just staffing and infrastructure improvements at the border itself; it requires vigorous and continuous internal enforcement coupled with the expeditious repatriation of all of those who are apprehended. That is the missing ingredient of border security in depth. Under current policies the borders can never be completely secure.
Despite the persistent and alarming failures of our current border security measures, an understanding of the East German experience can show us the way. A six month term working on border infrastructure followed by immediate repatriation is the sine qua non of border security. Our failure to expedite repatriation is the primary cause of many of our border problems. If an illegal alien pays a coyote to help him negotiate the border but is promptly apprehended and repatriated, he will soon realize that that this is a losing proposition.
We need a bipartisan open and transparent effort to strengthen our immigration laws. CIR is not the answer. Instead of a thousand page bill written by lobbyists and special interest groups containing all manner of mischief and loopholes, we need a series of shorter simpler bills that everyone can read and understand well before any votes are taken. We may have one last chance to deal with the difficult immigration issues and critical challenges facing us before the die will be cast and the political climate will change. We need to take head-on the barriers to solving the illegal alien problem. Building on what works and fixing that which doesn’t, we can develop an immigration system tuned more precisely to the exact needs of our economy and nothing else.
We will need better data systems beginning with a visa-overstay tracking system and the mandatory implementation of the E-verification of work status across the board for all employers, public and private, and all employees, both current employees and potential new hires. The loophole in the present law that permits an employer to get off the hook by claiming he didn’t “knowingly” hire any illegal aliens must be closed. An employer must be held accountable for the work or immigration status of all of his employees. The E-verification system permits him to do so while the applicant is busy filling out employment forms. Wireless communication systems installed in police cruisers should permit local authorities to instantly check the bona fides of anyone stopped for other violations using the E-verification system which could be expanded to include the names and numbers on drivers’ licenses, green cards, and other such documents.
It has been said that the president is looking for the “elusive middle ground” on immigration reform. If we think in terms of a football field, one goal line represents mass legalization or amnesty for 12 million illegal aliens and the other the mass deportation of all illegal aliens. The middle ground lies somewhere near the 50 yard line. The proponents of amnesty or CIR have not moved an inch away from their goal line. They have added certain conditions, largely unenforceable, which illegal aliens would have to meet to be eligible for a pathway to citizenship. They believe these conditions represent compromise but they have not moved an inch away from full amnesty for all illegals who choose to meet those conditions. To reach the 50 yard line the amnesty proponents would have to agree to the removal of a large number of illegal aliens. The opponents would have to accept that a large number would be allowed to stay and work.
Raising the bar means expecting more from both camps. It means providing strong incentives for those who wish to stay to become socially integrated and culturally and linguistically assimilated. They must also be in jobs citizens won’t take if they are offered a living wage. Other illegals must be repatriated systematically and humanely over some period of time with the objective of creating a significant disincentive for future border violations. This is the only way in which such a disincentive can be established. Without the threat and the actuality of repatriation for a large number of illegals, there will be no disincentive.
We know beefing up border infrastructure and staffing by itself has failed to stem the tide of illegal entries. While necessary, these improvements at the border will continue to be insufficient without vigorous internal enforcement. We need to scale up both efforts.
The operators of detention facilities have been paid on the basis of detainee days. That needs to be changed so that they are rewarded on the basis of throughput numbers. The government needs to make sure there are enough immigration judges or justices of the peace (JOPs) embedded in the detention facilities so that the initial immigration decision can be made within 24 hours of the detainee’s arrival. Appeals should be limited to only one week. There should be a rigid set of criteria for immigration decisions and appeals so that most of the workload can be handled by JOPs with judges required only for the most difficult cases such as those involving requests for political asylum. Other cases should be straightforward; the individual is either in the U.S. legally or he or she is not. Visa overstays fall into the latter category the day that their visas expire, regardless of any pending requests for extensions that may have been made. Maintaining family unity can never be considered as an adequate basis for a successful appeal. Minor children, regardless of citizenship, must accompany parents under a removal order. The parents are not permitted to abandon their children in the U.S. That would be child abuse.
The winning formula for immigration reform with regard to those aliens who are already here is a process by which it can be determined whether they are holding jobs citizens would take if offered a living wage. Employers must make a good faith effort to re-advertise all jobs currently held by illegals, offering a union-certified living wage and a hiring preference for citizen workers. This process must be handled through the local employment offices to avoid any gaming of the system by unscrupulous employers. Temporary migrant farm workers may be granted an exception to this general process. Illegals who survive this process may then be offered a green card which specifies the type of work they are authorized to do. Most green cards should specify agricultural work only.
Other immigration reforms that should be considered in short, separate, single-subject bills are as follows: (1) require English to be used for all government publications, documents, ballots, and proceedings at all levels of government (EO 13166 should be repealed.) Public Interpreters should be provided for those who cannot afford one or who do not have a family member who can serve in that capacity; (2) require true fluency in English before citizenship can be awarded; (3) designate English as the official language of the United States; (4) birthright citizenship limited to the children of citizen mothers; (5) chain immigrations limited to the spouses and minor children of citizens and counted against the overall immigration quota; (6) reduce the overall quota for legal immigrants to no more than 200,000 per year (exclusive of tourists, students, and temporary migrant farm workers) or whatever number is necessary to achieve a stable population; (7) establish a national goal of a stable population to be achieved through tax and immigration policies; (8) institute cap-and-trade for family size; women who wish to have more than two children must buy credits from those who wish to have fewer; (9) focus legal immigration quotas on those who have the education, entrepreneurial spirit, a record of inventiveness and innovation, and ideas most likely to help the U.S. maintain its competitiveness in the global economy; (10) provide fast track citizenship for foreign students who successfully complete a PhD degree in the physical sciences, engineering, math, or medicine and those who enlist in the armed forces for not less than 4 years and who have served at least one tour in a combat zone; (11) tie immigration quotas to the unemployment rate by sector. If the unemployment rate is above the benchmark, suspend legal immigration and expedite repatriation in that sector; (12) reduce cross border vehicular and pedestrian traffic; if you work here and you are a citizen, you must live here -- no cross border commuters; (13) unhitch foreign trailers at the border and re-hitch them to American tractors; (14) eliminate most favored nation designation for any country that does not enforce its borders in both directions; (15) recognize the right of states to enact implementing immigration laws within the scope of federal statutes; (16) devise an ID system that would enable local authorities to easily separate illegal aliens from Hispanic citizens to avoid accusations of racial profiling; (17) change the rules of engagement so that anyone apprehended at the border or internally receives a six month sentence working on border infrastructure; (18) make it clear that no amnesty or other actions will be taken until a confidential survey of all border patrol and ICE agents, administered by an outside agency, indicates conclusively that the borders are secure; and (19) issue generic birth certificates indicating the place of birth as the homeland of the mother.

THERE IS NO UPSIDE TO AMNESTY FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS

2010-08-21T09:37:00.000-07:00

By Tom Garcia
The Washington Times
Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Throughout his partnership with President George W. Bush, Karl Rove argued that a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens would be a political winner for the Republican Party. His argument, so it went, was that because the so-called Hispanic segment of the population was growing faster than other parts of the body politic, it would be foolish to block amnesty for illegal aliens that those voters wanted.

Furthermore, so his logic contended, this growing minority would punish Republicans for not going along with the Democrats' amnesty proposals. In other words, the Republican Party should itself co-opt these proposals for amnesty and make them their own, thereby eroding the Democrats' share of this voting public.

But on what premise is this theory based?

First, it assumes that all U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent favor a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens, whether those aliens come from Malaysia, Ireland, Kosovo, Somalia or Russia. While it obviously is true that the leftist, top-down, unelected leadership of the ethnocentric advocacy organizations La Raza, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund and the League of United Latin American Citizens, as well as their organized masses of illegal alien street marchers, are boisterous in their clamor for "comprehensive immigration reform," it isn't equally clear how many ordinary, everyday U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent share those passions.

Illegal immigration impacts Hispanic-American communities first and foremost, because foreign nationals from south of the border naturally congregate in already-established enclaves. Those communities therefore sustain the brunt of crime; gang infestation; and competition for already scarce jobs, housing, education and social services.

While it may be true that some Hispanic-Americans might nurture a solidarity with their more recently arrived ethnic cousins, is this where their own true interests lie? Are their real-world interests associated with the illegal arrival of millions of neighbors from their old countries or with their fellow American citizens, with the old world they left behind or the new society of which they are a part? Isn't the ethnic demagoguery associated with the so-called "pathway to citizenship" in effect a pathway to Balkanization?

Instead of descending into a competition with Nevada Sen. Harry Reid in a watered-down imitation of liberal Democrats' pandering for the votes of "Amnesty-Hispanics," wouldn't it be more prudent as well as more respectful to Hispanic-Americans for the Republican Party to offer a clear alternative, to appeal to their American patriotism and their own real self-interests as U.S. citizens? Why lump the entire Hispanic-American community, with ancestors from a host of Latin American countries, with a diversity of histories, cultures, traditions, languages and interests, into one homogeneous group as if they all marched to the same drummer? How about offering this vibrant cross section of American citizens an option other than blind obedience to La Raza and the Democrats?

Second, Mr. Rove's theory rests on the assumption that newly amnestied voters will remember that the Republican Party helped pave their pathway to citizenship and reward the party with future support. But let's look at the facts. The overwhelming majority of illegal aliens have less than a high school education, and many are not even literate in their own languages. This doesn't mean they aren't good people, but it does mean they are natural recipients of the welfare state. Once they receive citizenship in the United States, will they be more likely to favor the big-government, wealth-transferring, multiculturalist nanny state promised and promoted by the Democrat Party or the smaller-government, self-reliant, lower-taxing, entrepreneurial, assimilative society championed by the Republican Party?

What's more, the tens of millions of newly amnestied citizens legally would be able to bring in their next of kin through chain migration, swelling the overall number to potentially more than 50 million within a decade of the amnesty - constituting a permanent Democratic majority.

We've become fond of Mr. Rove's cable-TV chalkboards. Here's a four-liner he hasn't shown us yet:

•If 12 million-20 million illegal aliens are amnestied, it can be estimated conservatively that a majority of these new citizens will vote Democrat.
•If there is no amnesty, none of these illegal aliens will vote, period.
•If there is an amnesty, current U.S. citizens of Hispanic origin will vote as they have been voting anyway.
•If there is no amnesty, current U.S. citizens of Hispanic origin will vote as they have been voting anyway.
A majority of U.S. citizens of Hispanic origin (with the exception of Cuban-Americans) have consistently voted Democratic. Many of those within this voting population who ardently support amnesty will blame the Democrats for not getting one because the Democrats will be the ones who did not push through an amnesty when they had the political power and the unprecedented opportunity to do so. So where is the political upside for the Republican Party to support an amnesty, in either the short or long run?

Had there been an amnesty in 2006 or 2007, as Sen. John McCain and the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy proposed, millions more would have entered the country illegally since then, as, in fact, they have anyway. The border wasn't secured before the amnesty votes and hasn't been secured since those votes. Visa violators continued to remain illegally in the country before those votes, and many more recent arrivals have continued illegally to do so since those votes. The federal government under Mr. Bush and President Obama contented itself with cosmetic measures and halfhearted initiatives, abdicating its responsibility to enforce existing immigration law effectively and to secure our borders. Even with the successful passage of McCain-Kennedy in 2006, we would be debating anew today whether to provide amnesty for the 4 million to 5 million illegal aliens who have entered since. And if an amnesty were enacted tomorrow, five years from now, Congress would be debating what to do with the additional 5 million who would have entered by that time.

If the history of past amnesties has taught us anything, it is this: Talk of amnesty, the promise of amnesty - especially the enactment of amnesty legislation as in 1986 - simply encourages more and more illegal immigration. Limited or general, amnesties act as flashing green lights to the likely hundreds of millions on earth who would like to move to America.

Until the borders are really secured, workplace laws are really upheld and the benefits of the welfare state are restricted to U.S. citizens and legal immigrants, any consideration of amnesty is a perilous venture into a fantasyland of false promises, unrealistic expectations, the abrogation of the rule of law and the perpetuation of an immoral, systematic exploitation of unending waves of cheap labor from Third World countries. We already have federal laws in place to get the illegal immigration fiasco under control. Congress has not abdicated its responsibility by failing to enact new laws favored by open-borders utopians. No such laws are required, comprehensive or otherwise. The problem is with the executive branch and the Obama administration, which has turned itself into the greatest collection of scofflaws in the country.

The way to increase the percentage of American-Hispanics voting for the Republican Party is

(1) To raise their standard of living (and everyone else's) by a return to free-market principles;

(2) by an open appeal to their shared American patriotism and

(3) by clearly and unapologetically stating the unequivocal rejection of amnesty in any guise, shape or form. U.S. citizens of Hispanic origin don't love the rule of law less than other Americans and understand that the United States already has the most generous legal immigration policy on earth. Given a clear choice and a positive appeal, many will rally.

These positions won't get Republicans a majority of these voters right away, but they will diminish the Democrats' share of the vote in the short run and hasten the integration of the Hispanic-American community into the great melting pot that is America. A time will come in the not-too-distant future when hyphens matter to Hispanics no more than they do to any of the immigrant groups who preceded them. It is the best path for America and the only practical path for the survival of the Republican Party as a majority party worthy of the electorate.

Tom Garcia is a Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Florida's 24th Congressional District.

NumbersUSA's blogs are copyrighted and may be republished or reposted only if they are copied in their entirety, including this paragraph, and provide proper credit to NumbersUSA. NumbersUSA bears no responsibility for where our blogs may be republished or reposted.

Views and opinions expressed in blogs on this website are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect official policies of NumbersUSA.

Jackie Evancho 10 year old phenomenon

2010-08-12T18:07:00.000-07:00

Jackie Avancho 10 year old phenomena

2010-08-12T17:58:00.000-07:00

Dee's Distortions and Lies

2010-08-09T19:09:00.000-07:00

Commentary on Dee’s Tirade

1. Economy: They say they support an improved economy, yet they favor tax cuts for the rich. They favor de-regulation for big business. Under their last administration, they came in with the biggest surplus and, due to their programs, left with the largest deficit.
Many democrats agree with the Republicans that any tax increases during a recession are counterproductive. I expect the compromise that will be reached is to postpone ending all tax cuts for two or three years and then eliminate the tax cuts for the rich. Businesses, big (like the Fortune 500) or small, provide the jobs needed to put America back to work. The more our businesses are freed of taxes, the more competitive they can be in the global marketplace and the more jobs they can create.
The deficit is due to at least three things: Bush’s War, Obam's War, and the deficit. No matter what the Administration says Obamacare will add to the defict.
2. Christian Values: They say they support Christian Values, yet they support an agenda of HATE
This of course is hyperbolic nonsense and sensationalism. This is just another example of a leftwing nut misusing the word Hate for every position they disagree with. Dee is getting hysterical and it shows. Over the years she has become increasingly shrill and unreasonable. She is simply wrong about this. No sane person would even say "...they support an agenda of HATE.". She has become the purveyor of Hate. Any reasonable person can see that from her rants and outright lies repeated ad nauseum. She must be off her Lithium again.
3. American People: They say they are for the American People, yet they are against so-called “entitlement programs.” They want to end social security and Medicare. In order to do so, their first plan is to raise the retirement age to 70.
Republicans are not against all entitlement plans but have opposed any new ones in view of the fact that the existing ones are underfunded. It is a matter of fiscal discipline. Everyone knows that entitlements eat up most of the budget leaving the federal government with little discretionary money for other worthwhile projects. Candidates who suggest doing away with either program have little chance of being elected. If Dee, had been paying attention, she would have seen that people from both sides of the aisle fully recognize this problem but in general have been unable to do anything about it for fear of crossing the public that understandably considers Social Security and Medicare as sacred cows If the objective was to end Social Security, that would obviate the need to raise the retirement age to 70. Raising the age is a simple recognition that unless we increase revenues or decrease expense or a combination of both, Social Security will never be able to cover its unfunded obligations. I have long advocated removing the cap on taxable earnings so everyone pays the same percentage of their earnings into the system while freezing the maximum benefit at the present level as adjusted annually for inflation. That would be a balanced approach with more affluent paying much more without a commensurate increase in benefits. Others would just have to work longer if they can to reduce costs. If that doesn't do it, we will have to raise the combined employer/employee tax rate to 15%. Raising the Social Security tax on the rich rather than the income tax would be more palatable to the people because they could see the benefit. I believe there must be a provision to allow those who are unable to work effectively at age 70 to retire earlier with a small reduction in the benefit in accordance with the standards of the current law.
4. Jobs for Americans: They say they are for American Jobs, yet they want to reduce jobs and cut pay for teachers, police and firefighters.
This is a ridiculous statement. Some states are struggling with grave budgetary problems as a result of their profligate spending driven by the public unions who have no regard for the fiscal discipline that would allow their states to live within their means. When the country of Greece was threatened with bankruptcy for the same reasons, the European Union laid down strict rules Greece had to comply with before any loans would be forthcoming. The Republicans were asking nothing more. They want the states to step up and show what actions they have taken to put their budgets on a sustainable basis before any federal funds are provided. There are many state employees who could and should be laid off first before firemen, teachers, and police but their unions are protecting them just as the teachers’ union is trying to protect their jobs And indeed part of the plan must involve pay cuts for some who are clearly overpaid in comparison with what other states pay their employees. The governor has recognized this and attempted to take action but was thwarted by the courts and the Democrat controlled legislature. Again the greedy unions are at fault. When prison guards make six figures, part of the solution is clear.
5. Immigration: They say they support legal immigration and it is not about being “anti-Latino”, yet they support anti Latino racial profiling bills like sb1070, they support a border fence ONLY on the Mexico border, they support a racial profiling sheriff (apricot), his volunteer masked goons, his suppression sweeps, they support future immigration levels being reduced, but only from Latino or Minority countries, they support English Only, they support Mass Deportation and approve of racial profiling of Latinos; they call citizen Latino children “anchor babies” and delivering babies – “dropping them”; etc. etc.
More hyperbole. Most Americans agree that anti-illegal alien SB 1070 was badly needed and similar measures should be adopted by other states burdened with the costs of illegal aliens. Florida and Missouri have already done so.

The investment in border infrastructure and staffing obviously has to be focused where the problem is the greatest and that is clearly the Mexican border where the drug cartels’ smuggling efforts are most rampant and where millions of illegals find their way across the border. Anyone who claims to have worked for a Fortune 500 company, like Dee, certainly should have at least a minimum appreciation for the optimum deployment of resources.

A major reduction in legal immigration levels from all countries is in the best interests of our country. Since Dee favors a CIR that would increase the number of such immigrants, she is not an unbiased judge of Republican proposals. In the past, various immigration laws have focused on establishing quotas that were representative of the existing population. It is not clear what they are based on now but if the United States is being overrun with illegals from the South it would make sense to reduce the legal quota from those countries to bring the total back into balance. Nevertheless, I am not aware of any Republican proposal that would achieve that goal.

As usual Dee distorts the GOP position on a national language which is shared by many democrats by calling it “English Only” instead of “Official English.” This is an old distortion that Dee has repeated innumerable times. The Spanish language is well-preserved in many other countries of the world. Mexico does not conduct any official business in English. It just makes common sense to eliminate the cost of government publications, materials and ballots that are curently being produced in many languages, especially now that the deficit has gotten completely out of control and will go higher under the Obama Administration.

Mass deportation has never been the policy of the GOP and isn’t now. This is another of Dee’s perennial lies or distortions. The GOP recognizes that some level of foreign labor is needed in the U.S. but would like to make sure Americans have first dibs on jobs.
6. Constitution: They say they believe in and abide by the Constitution, yet this is only when it is convenient for them to do so. They advocate changing the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, and want to end birthright citizenship; they support racial profiling which is against the law.

Republicans believe in and abide by the Constitution even more than the Obama Administration. As I have patiently explained to Dee, the Constitution has been amended 27 times. This is the time for a new amendment or action to reinterpret the words “under the jurisdiction of…” to exclude the children of tourists and illegal aliens. Every developed country in the world, except the U.S. and Canada, has abandoned the concept of birthright citizenship. France did in 1993.
The 14th Amendment has been abused by those who violate the border to drop their babies on American soil. She may not like that phrase but it has been in used since time immemorial. Moreover, if it is a pejorative term, that merely reflect the level of anger at the tourists and illegals who enter our country for the sole purpose of delivering an instant citizen. The GOP merely seeks to curb the abuse of the 14th and obviously will continue to abide by the Constitution until it is changed, not just when it is convenient as Dee suggests.

Racial profiling is illegal but it inhibits the optimum deployment of resources. If one is looking for illegal aliens from the South, it is unlikely you will find them anywhere except in the Hispanic communities or among those who share their features. From a practical point of view, there are many things that can be done to avoid any imposition on Hispanic citizens who wish to cooperate with the law in apprehending illegals.
7. Pro-Life/ANTI Women’s' Choice: They say they are Pro-Life and want to end a woman’s right to choose, however they support the Death Penalty, they advocate wars (e.g. Iraq – no WMD), they advocate assault weapons. They also advocate using torture on prisoners, violating the Geneva Convention.
Everyone knows there is a deep division in the United States over the abortion issue. It was only when several anti-abortion democrat members of the House caved in at the very end, that the Health Care Reform bill was passed. Many of them will regret their change of heart in the upcoming election. It is indeed strange for a Catholic to go against the teaching of her church to advocate for Choice. The church has and may again ex-communicate those who do so. It illustrates how easily some people make up their own rules and indulge in mindless distortions.

It is a mistake to think that all members of the NRA are Republicans. The democrats voted along with everyone else to undertake the war in Iraq, after opposing it later when it became convenient to do so. Now they are trying to claim that they were responsible for the success in Iraq, even though, under the Obama Administration, Iraqis still enjoy only five hours of electricity each day and the car bombings continue -- some success!
8. Pro-Marriage/ANTI Gay Marriage: They say they are Pro-Marriage between a man and a woman, and they rally against Gay Marriage, yet they have the highest rate of members who engage in illicit affairs with male pages, interns, prostitutes and strangers. (eg: larry craig; mark foley, ed schrock; Charlie crist, jim mccrery, david dreier, etc )
Gee Dee, for a moment there I thought you were going to come right out and state your approval of gay marriages or would that be another violation of the Catholic church’s beliefs? I won’t bother to list the illicit affairs of the democrats. Everyone knows this aberration has nothing to do with party affiliation. So what is your position on gay marriage? Don’t keep it a secret from us.
9. Intelligent President: They claim they support intelligent candidates for the Presidency, yet they nominated Sarah Palin for VP.
Palin was a pure poltical choice that brought excitement to the ticket but in the end it was a big mistake. Lieberman would have been a better choice. There have been plenty of dunces and tax evaders in democratic administrations as well. Stupidity has no party boundaries.

The Other Hydra - A Gallery of Dishonor

2010-08-07T14:37:00.000-07:00

Some people are so shortsighted that they see no reason why any average American should oppose illegal aliens. Their total focus is on the illegal aliens rather than the national interest. Anyone who disgrees with them must by definition be racists or hate mongers, even distinguished United States Senators. The thing that this other hydra misses is that "leaving the borders open to unlimited illegal entry will ultimately, and it won't take long, reduce the social, political, economic life of the United States to the level of Juarez,Guadalajara, Mexico City, El Salvador, Haiti,India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Sub-Saharan Africa. To a common peneplain of overcrowding, squalor, misery, torture, crime, corruption and rape." Does this vision of America bother them? Apparently not.

Can these folks be considered loyal to the best interests of the U.S.? Hardly! And yet they find it easy to engage in their own brand of hate mongering -- insulting U.S. Senators, the elected representatives of millions of Americans.

A Lawyer Plays the Race Card

2010-07-18T14:43:00.000-07:00

A bottom-feeding immigration lawyer we know about favors illegal aliens over his own nation and the wishes of his own fellow citizens. It isn’t much of a stretch from there to what we would call gross disloyalty. He places more value on his immigrant law business than he does on the national interest, the national character, our national sovereignty, quality of life, and standard of living. He seems to believe that the U.S. can accommodate all the impoverished peoples of the world without any adverse impact. Alternatively, he must believe that we should endure the negative effects of excessive immigration in good spirits as a humanitarian gesture to the rest of the world. He must know that we already take more immigrants than any other country in the world.

To support his immigration law practice, he argues for what amounts to open borders based on a belief that our common humanity transcends what he considers to be arbitrary accidents of geography. The borders of a sovereign nation are hardly arbitrary accidents of geography. They were the result of conflicts, negotiations, or purchases. For example, when the Allies acquiesced to the movement of the USSR border westward to the Vistula River in what was formerly Eastern Poland that was hardly an accident of geography. In fact, the irony is that this is the same boundary that was established when the Soviets and the Nazis carved up Poland in 1939. The Louisiana and Alaska purchases are two other examples that established national boundaries that obviously were not arbitrary accidents of geography.

This lawyer believes that realization of our common humanity can lead us toward policies that benefit migrants and citizens alike in the best tradition of this migrant nation. Indeed, such policies already exist as temporary migrant workers are admitted to the U.S. to help with the planting, cultivation, and harvesting of fruits and vegetables. This policy enables them to earn more than they could in their homelands and enables Americans to have a greater variety in their diets.

The U.S. was once a nation where slavery was legal, where women were denied the vote, and which began as a nation of immigrants. We abolished slavery almost 150 years ago and granted woman suffrage in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

In the early days of our Republic, a vast, largely unsettled continent lay before the Founding Fathers and their successors. Natural resources like arable land, timber, fish, water, and minerals seemed limitless. Immigrants were welcomed in large numbers. Now we know natural resources are not unlimited and our policies have changed to reflect that fact. The last major wave of immigration ended in the early 20th century. Those who keep referring to our “immigrant past” are missing the point that the operative word is the word “past.” Our country is now fully developed, settled, and populated. We therefore have a very limited need for more immigrants.

We should, of course, treat immigrants exactly as their status warrants. We allow them to perform a service for us in the fields and in return they earn much more than they could in their homelands or they would not be here. We accord them basic human rights but not all the rights of citizens or legal residents. In return we ask them to abide by our laws and to leave our country before their visas expire. And we ask that they enter our country only if they have the proper authorization.

The immigration lawyer believes that we should focus all our Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement resources on the apprehension of just the drug and weapon traffickers, as if they would be willing to self-identify to make that approach possible. He would let the others go and not worry about them.

The Governor of California has been singularly negligent in his failure to aid the federal government in the discharge of its duty to secure our borders and prevent the establishment of sanctuary cities. He has finally seen the light and has recently deployed some National Guard troops to the border. Schwarzenegger's office said the governor believes more Border Patrol agents are needed to reduce illegal border crossings, human trafficking and the influx of narcotics. The point that he and so many others have failed to recognize is that, without vigorous internal enforcement, more agents or troops at the border will only minimally reduce, not stop, the flood of illegals.

The East Germans found to their dismay that people would brave machine gun towers, mine fields, and multi-layered fences and walls to escape to the West, Why? Answer: because if they were successful, they knew they would never be repatriated.

Similarly, illegal aliens know if they can escape the immediate environs of the border, they will be home free. Under the Administration’s current nonenforcement policies, the probability of illegal aliens being apprehended and repatriated is extremely low unless they run afoul of the law by committing serious crimes. What the Administration refuses to admit is that to secure the borders requires more than improvements in staffing, infrastructure, and the rules of engagement; it requires vigorous and continuous internal enforcement with expeditious repatriation of all of those who are apprehended. That is the missing ingredient of border security in depth. Under current policies the borders can never be secure. Without the threat and the actuality of repatriation, border violations will continue.

The immigration lawyer seems to think that it is easy to tell a drug smuggler from a run-of-the mill illegal alien when they appear at the border or are found in the Arizona desert. According to the immigration lawyer, as soon as a Border Patrol officer has made this easy distinction, he can turn the illegal alien loose and just arrest the drug smuggler. I can hear their conversation now. The illegal alien, who has the drugs on his person or in his vehicle, turns to the agent and points at the other alien and says, “He forced me to carry his drugs.” So the agent says, “Of course, I understand, you are free to go” and proceeds to clap the handcuffs or restraints on the other guy who is actually just a routine border jumper.

This lawyer further asserts that to sort out the drug smugglers from the legitimate tourists and visa holders at the airport ports of entry, we would have to do a body cavity search of everyone including citizens. The most important distinction that he overlooks here is that those apprehended in the desert are not likely to have papers of any kind. Those arriving at an airport would certainly have appropriate documents that could easily be checked. The two cases are entirely different in that sense and that makes it easier to hold those apprehended near the borders for processing. At the airport, those with legitimate papers may still be recognized as smugglers by experienced agents who understand how they act and the subterfuges they employ.

Young people who get into the trade are often asked to swallow many condom-wrapped packages of drugs. After they arrive in the U.S., they go to the specified address to deliver the goods. Of course, if the packages break and release the drugs, the courier could die of an overdose.

The lawyer adds that anyone who wants to enforce the law has an unspoken agenda based on the proposition that if you can’t tell drug dealers from basketball players from rappers, because they all look alike, then we should lock ‘em all up. This, of course, is a ridiculous statement on the face of it. As a lawyer, he knows that no one is suggesting that because it would be illegal and would infringe on the civil rights of citizens. That is quite a different story from those apprehended at the border or internally who have fraudulent documents or no papers at all and who may be subject a law like SB 1070. But he knows that. He, like so many others, sees everything through a glass darkly and when he has no substantive arguments, he plays the race card, or as he put it “I find it hard to be civil in the face of straight racism.”

Anyone, especially a word merchant or lawyer, who uses the term “racism” should at least be conversant with its definition. My dictionary provides the following definition: Racism--“An excessive and irrational belief in or advocacy of the superiority of a given group, people, or nation, usually one’s own, on the basis of racial differences having no scientific validity.”

The word "superiority" may be the key word in that that definition. That definition didn't stop the lawyer from drawing his own biased conclusions and labeling just about anything he disagrees with as racism. Nevertheless, we can say with certainty that in accordance with the definition none of the following beliefs constitute racism.

1. The belief that, as President Obama put it in his immigration speech, “Our nation, like all nations, has the right and obligation to control its borders and set laws for residency and citizenship. And no matter how decent they are, no matter their reasons, the 11 million who broke these laws should be held accountable."
2. A belief in national sovereignty, the national interest, and national character.
3. A belief that America is fully settled and developed and has a limited need for more immigrants.
4. A belief in or advocacy of a reduction in quotas for new immigrants to about 250,000 per year in all categories except tourists, students, and temporary migrant farm workers but including the number of all chain immigrations and family reunifications.
5. A belief that chain (family unification) immigrations should be limited to the spouses and minor children of citizens and that adult relatives of citizens should compete with all other applicants for admission on an even playing field.
5. A belief that the “limit” of finite natural resources per capita as population increases without bounds is zero. (The more there are of us, the less there is for each of us.)
6. A belief that the environment will be severely damaged by a doubling of our population.
7. A belief that homophilia is often mistaken for homophobia.
8. A belief that one can prefer his own culture to one that is loud and obscene without being a racist; and that culture can cut across races and ethnicity.
9. A belief that nations have no obligation to accept more immigrants than they can readily assimilate and who are needed by their economies.
10. A belief that the focus on immigration enforcement in the states bordering Mexico is fully justified by the great preponderance of illegal aliens and drug smugglers who come from that direction.
11. A belief that internal enforcement is an essential element of border security.
12. A belief that E-verification should be mandatory across the board for all employers, public and private, and all employees, current and prospective.
13. A belief that individuals who have been unlawfully present in the United States for a continuous period of more than 180 days, but less than one year, and who voluntarily depart the U.S. should barred from re-entry for 3 years and those who have been here longer should be barred for 10 years. (This is the current law.)
14. A belief that all individuals who have been unlawfully present in the U.S. or who have attempted to enter unlawfully should serve a six month sentence working on border infrastructure before they are repatriated with the admonition that if they return they will do hard time for a minimum of two years.
15. A belief that all local law enforcement authorities should be required to check the immigration status of anyone who is stopped for another infraction and who the officer has reason to believe could be in the U.S. illegally.
16. A belief that minor children, regardless of citizenship, should accompany their parents under a removal order as the best way to maintain family unity.
17. A belief that population growth in the U.S. is due almost solely to legal immigrants, illegal aliens, their higer fertility rates, and their progeny.
18. A belief that to reduce the future demand for energy we must stabilize our population.

I think this lawyer must be one of those small-minded, bleeding heart liberals, the ones who care nothing about the welfare of their country and whose myopia will surely destroy the greatest country on earth. I'm sorry but I find it hard to be civil in the face of straight incivility and name-calling.

Is this your president?

2010-07-17T10:54:00.000-07:00

If this is factual in every respect, we have a lot to worry about. Generally, a person's values are pretty well established by age 11. In Obama's case we can see what that would have done for him. Add to that the effect of his associates later in life and it just confirms that there is a sound basis for all of the criticisms laid at his feet.

Dutch lawmaker forms anti-Islam group

2010-07-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

Thu Jul 15, 2010 10:17 AM EDT
At last someone has seen the light and is starting an anti-islamic movement to stop immigration from Islamic countries because the Koran encourages violence and intolerance and sanctions the stoning of women accused of adultery. Geert Wilders poses during an interview with The Associated Press in The Hague, Netherlands, Thursday, July 15, 2010. Maverick Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders says he is launching an international "freedom alliance" to spread his anti-Islam message across the West. He said he will launch the international movement late this year, initially in five countries: the United States, Canada, Britain, France and Germany.
An anti-Islam lawmaker in the Netherlands is forming an international alliance to spread his message across the West in a bid to ban immigration from Islamic countries, among other goals.
Geert Wilders told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday he will launch the movement late this year, initially in five countries: the U.S., Canada, Britain, France and Germany.
"The message, 'stop Islam, defend freedom,' is a message that's not only important for the Netherlands but for the whole free Western world," Wilders said at the Dutch parliament.
Among the group's aims will be outlawing immigration from Islamic countries to the West and a ban on Islamic Sharia law. Starting as a grass-roots movement, he hopes it eventually will produce its own lawmakers or influence other legislators.
Ayhan Tonca, a prominent spokesman for Dutch Muslims, said he feared Wilders message would fall on fertile ground in much of Europe, where anti-Islam sentiment has been swelling for years.
"So long as things are going badly with the economy, a lot of people always need a scapegoat," Tonca said. "At the moment, that is the Muslims in Western Europe."
Tonca called on "well meaning people in Europe to oppose this."
Known for his bleached-blond mop of hair, Wilders is a shrewd politician who has won awards in the Netherlands for his debating skills and regularly stands up for gay and women's rights.
But he rose to local and then international prominence with his firebrand anti-Islam rhetoric that has led to him being charged under Dutch anti-hate speech laws and banned from visiting Britain — until a court there ordered that he be allowed into the country.
He said he hopes to position the alliance between traditional conservative parties and far-right wing groups, saying that in Britain there is "an enormous gap" between the ruling Conservative Party and the far-right British National Party.
"The BNP is a party that, whatever you think of it, it's not my party — I think it's a racist party," Wilders said.
Wilders, who calls Islam a "fascist" religion, has seen his support in the Netherlands soar in recent years, even while he has been subjected to round-the-clock protection because of death threats.
His Freedom Party won the biggest gains in a national election last month, coming third with 24 seats in the 150-seat Parliament, up from the nine before the election.
However, mainstream parties will not form a coalition with Wilders, leaving him on the margins of Dutch politics for the next parliamentary term.
Wilders is due to stand trial in October on hate speech charges stemming from his short Internet film "Fitna," which denounced the Quran as a a fascist book that inspires terrorism. The film aroused anti-Dutch protests around the Muslim world, and he was banned for several months from entering Britain.
But he is unrepentant and said he now wants to take his message outside the Netherlands.
"The fight for freedom and (against) Islamization as I see it is a worldwide phenomenon and problem to be solved," he said.
Wilders declined to name any of the other founders of the organization he is calling the Geert Wilders International Freedom Alliance. He said he would hold speeches in the five countries where the alliance will first launch in coming months to drum up support.
Wilders has been criticized in the Netherlands for running his party as a one-man show that is shrouded in secrecy because he holds all the reins.

Illegals have no allegiance to America

2010-07-12T20:23:00.000-07:00

There is a huge amount of propaganda and myths circulating about illegal aliens,
particularly illegal Mexican, Salvadorian, Guatemalan and Honduran aliens. Here's the truth about them.

1. Illegal aliens generally do NOT want US citizenship. Americans are very vain
thinking that everybody in the world wants to be a US citizen. Mexicans, and
other nationalities want to remain citizens of their home countries while obtaining
the benefits offered by the United States such as employment, medical care,
instate tuition, government subsidized housing and free education for their
offspring. Their main attraction is employment and their loyalty usually remains
at home. They want benefits earned and subsidized by middle class Americans.
What illegal aliens want are benefits of American residence without paying
the price.

2. There are no jobs that Americans won't do. Illegal aliens are doing jobs
that Americans can't take and still support their families. Illegal aliens take
low wage jobs, live dozens in a single residence home, share expenses and
send money to their home country. There are no jobs that Americans won't
do for a decent wage.

3. Every person who illegally entered this nation left a home. They are NOT
homeless and they are NOT Americans. Some left jobs in their home countries.
They come to send money to their real home as evidenced by the more than 20
billion dollars sent out of the country each year by illegal aliens. These illegal
aliens knowingly and willfully entered this nation in violation of the law and
therefore assumed the risk of detection and deportation. Those who brought their
alien children assumed the responsibility and risk on behalf of their children.

4. Illegal aliens are NOT critical to the economy. Illegal aliens constitute less
than 5% of the workforce. However, they reduce wages and benefits for lawful
US residents.

5. This is NOT an immigrant nation. There are 280 million native born
Americans. While it is true that this nation was settled and founded by
immigrants (legal immigrants), it is also true that there is not a nation on
this planet that was not settled by immigrants at one time or another.

6. The United States is welcoming to legal immigrants. Illegal aliens are not
immigrants by definition. The US accepts more lawful immigrants every year
than the rest of the world combined.

7. There is no such thing as the "Hispanic vote." Hispanics are white, brown,
black and every shade in between. Hispanics are Republicans, Democrats,
Anarchists, Communists, Marxists and Independents. The so-called "Hispanic
vote" is a myth. Pandering to illegal aliens to get the Hispanic vote is a dead end.

8. Mexico is NOT a friend of the United States. Since 1848 Mexicans have
resented the United States. During World War I Mexico allowed German Spies
to operate freely in Mexico to spy on the US. During World War II Mexico
allowed the Axis powers to spy on the US from Mexico. During the Cold War
Mexico allowed spies hostile to the US to operate freely. The attack on the Twin
Towers in 2001 was cheered and applauded all across Mexico. Today Mexican
school children are taught that the US stole California, Arizona, New Mexico
and Texas. If you don't believe it, check out some Mexican textbooks written
for their school children.

9. Although some illegal aliens enter this country for a better life, there are 6
billion people on this planet. At least 1 billion of those live on less than one
dollar a day. If wanting a better life is a valid excuse to break the law and sneak
into America, then let's allow those one billion to come to America and we'll turn
the USA into a Third World nation overnight. Besides, there are 280 million native
born Americans who want a better life. I'll bet Bill Gates and Donald Trump want
a better life. When will the USA lifeboat be full? Since when is wanting a better
life a good reason to trash another nation?

10. There is a labor shortage in this country. This is a lie. There are hundreds
of thousands, if not millions, of American housewives, senior citizens, students,
unemployed and underemployed who would gladly take jobs at a decent wage.

11. It is racist to want secure borders. What is racist about wanting secure
borders and a secure America? What is racist about not wanting people to sneak
into America and steal benefits we have set aside for legal aliens, senior citizens,
children and other legal residents? What is it about race that entitles people to
violate our laws, steal identities, and take the American Dream without paying
the price? For about four decades American politicians have refused to secure
our borders and look after the welfare of middle class Americans. These
politicians have been of both parties. A huge debt to American society has
resulted. This debt will be satisfied and the interest will be high. There has
already been riots in the streets by illegal aliens and their supporters. There will
be more. You, as a politician, have a choice to offend the illegal aliens who have
stolen into this country and demanded the rights afforded to US citizens or to
offend those of us who are stakeholders in this country. The interest will be steep
either way. There will be civil unrest. There will be a reckoning. Do you have the
courage to do what is right for America? Or, will you bow to the wants and needs
of those who don't even have the right to remain here? There will be a reckoning.

It will come in November of this year. We will not allow America to be stolen by third world agitators and thieves.

David J. Stoddard
US Border Patrol (RET)
Hereford, Arizona less

Bankrupting America

2010-07-09T08:32:00.000-07:00

A Lay Critique of U.S. vs. Arizona

2010-07-07T18:47:00.000-07:00

The statements in quotes are from the U.S. vs. Arizona lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ).
“In our constitutional system, the federal government has preeminent authority to regulate immigration matters.”
No one denies this but within the Constitutional and other authority reserved to the federal government states may exercise their police power in a manner that affects aliens as long as that exercise is consistent with the federal immigration laws.
“The nation’s immigration laws reflect a careful and considered balance of national law enforcement, foreign relations, and humanitarian interests …. The DOJ argues further that SB 1070 will “…interfere with vital foreign policy and national security interests by disrupting the United States’ relationship with Mexico and other countries.”
This seems a little farfetched since the U.S. relationship with Mexico is already ruptured by Mexico’s unwillingness to secure its northern border and discourage its citizens from entering the U.S. illegally. This is not a one way street. If Mexico wishes to be treated as a good neighbor, it needs to behave like one and stop the flood of its nationals violating the border.
Our national security interests are severely jeopardized by Mexico’s policies toward the U.S. If we had agents on both sides of the border working together to stem the tide of illegals, that would be a basis for a more favorable foreign policy towards Mexico. Since that is not the case, any complaints from Mexico should be rebuffed with a reminder of its failures to help stop the hemorrhaging at the border.
I find the argument regarding foreign policy and national security to be very weak. It suggests that our government can be bribed into establishing foreign policies inimical to its own best interests. It is neither a sound foreign policy nor in the interests of national security to constrain any enforcement of the laws of our country. Sure we want Mexico’s cooperation in the drug wars because that is in the best interests of both countries. The trade off between vital foreign policy interests and open borders and the abandonment of internal enforcement is not acceptable.
As far as other countries are concerned, we need to make clear that they need to control the illegal passage of their nationals to the U.S. via all means at their disposal and that this is what we expect them to do.
The humanitarian aspect of government policy is well-understood. There are aliens who have a well-founded fear of persecution or who have been the victim of a natural disaster and are therefore of humanitarian interest. These aliens are, nevertheless, not free to roam the U.S. at will before their status has been confirmed and documented. Generally, those requesting political asylum are held in detention until the validity of their fear of persecution can be determined. Victims of natural disasters such as the Haiti earthquake are admissible based on decisions made by the federal government and documented in an appropriate way. They will not remain undocumented.
“The United States understands the State of Arizona’s legitimate concerns about illegal immigration, and has undertaken significant efforts to secure our nation’s borders. The federal government, moreover, welcomes cooperative efforts by states and localities to aid in the enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws.”
The Justice Department has a strange way of showing that it welcomes cooperative efforts to support the federal statutes on immigration. It’s not likely to generate much support of federal efforts in that regard by suing the State of Arizona and its governor. Instead the feds should be supporting the Arizona efforts to solve the problem the federal government has chosen to ignore. The feds could also provide model legislation to the other states patterned after the SB 1070 and that it deems consistent with the federal statutes or within executive power to grant.
The feds want to focus on the “real” criminal elements, the drug runners and dealers, the international gangs, and the other criminals among the illegal aliens. While this is commendable, it is not enough and it is certain to fail unless significant resources are committed to the larger problem. It is not as though the criminal elements within the larger population of illegals can be easily identified or that all other illegals who have already shown their disdain for the rule of law will remain crime free. How many times have we read about crimes like DUI resulting in death or injury that were committed by your ordinary run-of-the-mill illegal?
The DOJ apparently feels that SB 1070 represents “…policy that, in purpose and effect, interferes with the numerous interests the federal government must balance when enforcing and administering the immigration laws and disrupts the balance actually established by the federal government.”
The federal government has not established any sort of balance. There is a gross imbalance between the requirements of the law and the attempts by the Administration to pander to foreign powers. There should be no need to balance anything against enforcing the immigration laws. Whatever balance the feds think they have established is clearly not working and is not consistent with the law. If the there is to be any balance, it must be a balance explicitly spelled out in the law in the national interest not some arbitrary executive department decision to subvert the law and disable our ability to secure our borders. What the DOJ seems to be suggesting that anything that might be more effective than the current policies must be summarily dismissed because “it wasn’t invented here (in Washington).” It has not examined SB 1070 from the point of view of the state nor of its potential for solving the illegal alien problem the feds have chosen to ignore. The feds have placed too much emphasis on just what can be accomplished at the border. They have ignored the obvious fact that if illegals and other criminals believe they will be home free if they can escape the immediate environs of the border, the border will never be secure and the criminal elements will flourish.
The Constitution affords the President of the United States the authority to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed. U.S. Const., art. II § 3.”
Why is it then that the President has failed in that duty? Why has he effectively declined the assistance that the Border States can provide in helping to execute the immigration laws? More specifically, why is it the President has failed to faithfully execute Section 8 USC 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv)(b)(III)?
“A person (including a group of persons, business, organization, or local government) commits a federal felony when she or he: assists an illegal alien she /he should reasonably know is illegally in the U. S., or who lacks employment authorization, by transporting, sheltering, or assisting him or her to obtain employment, or encourages that illegal alien to remain in the U.S. by referring him or her to an employer or by acting as employer or agent for an employer in any way, or knowingly assists illegal aliens due to personal convictions.”
“…the President has broad authority over foreign affairs. Immigration law, policy, and enforcement priorities are affected by and have impacts on U.S. foreign policy, and are themselves the subject of diplomatic arrangements. …. The INA also vests the executive branch with considerable discretion in enforcing the provisions of the federal immigration laws, generally allowing federal agencies to ultimately decide whether particular immigration remedies are appropriate in individual cases.”
Is the DOJ suggesting that the President has or could have a foreign policy or a diplomatic arrangement with Mexico that permits large numbers of illegal aliens to remain in the U.S. with impunity? Federal agencies should have some latitude in deciding the remedies that are appropriate in particular cases but neither the President nor any federal agency should have the authority to impose a blanket remedy for all cases.
“Congress vested substantial discretion in the President and the administering federal agencies to adjust the balance of multiple interests as appropriate – both globally and in individual cases.
In exercising its significant enforcement discretion, the federal government prioritizes for arrest, detention, prosecution, and removal those aliens who pose a danger to national security or a risk to public safety. Consistent with these enforcement priorities, the federal government principally targets aliens engaged in or suspected of terrorism or espionage; aliens convicted of crimes, with a particular emphasis on violent criminals, felons, and repeat offenders; certain gang members; aliens subject to outstanding criminal warrants; and fugitive aliens, especially those with criminal records.”
There is no doubt that the federal enforcement priorities are correct but to use that as an excuse for ignoring the much larger number of illegal aliens in the U.S. is an abdication of responsibility. All the more reason why the feds need the help of state authorities in addressing the broader issues while the feds concentrate on criminals, terrorists, spies and traitors. Both functions can be performed effectively if tools like those contained in SB 1070 are adopted by all of the states and ultimately blessed with appropriate language in the federal statutes. The DOJ seems to be suggesting that it can’t be bothered with run-of-the-mill illegal aliens. In effect, it is declaring open borders for everyone unless they wear badge identifying them as hardened criminals. It is foolhardy to think that by some sort of legal profiling the feds can sort out the hardened criminals without paying any attention to all the other illegals. There is only one way to solve this problem and that is to sort them all out based on the needs of our economy and the ability of needed foreign workers to pass a background check and a medical exam.
Of all the bone-headed ideas, one of the worst is the idea that somehow the border can be secured merely by improving staffing, infrastructure, and the rules of engagement at the border. Vigorous and continuous internal enforcement is the sine qua non of in depth border security. This can be facilitated by mandatory E-verification of immigration status at work locations and by the other measures contained in SB 1070.
“Through the INA, Congress set forth the framework by which the federal government determines which aliens may be eligible to enter and reside in the United States, which aliens may be removed from the United States, the consequences for unlawful presence, the penalties on persons who violate the procedures established for entry, conditions of residence, and employment of aliens, as well as the process by which certain aliens may ultimately become naturalized citizens of the United States. See 8 U.S.C.§ 1101, et seq.”
Familiarity with these provisions enables local authorities to provide the cooperation and assistance INS requires to do its job effectively. To deny this source of assistance undermines the ability of the INS to discharge its responsibilities to the American people. More privately operated detention centers, especially in the Border States, with embedded immigration judges or justices of the peace where local authorities can deliver all the illegals they apprehend will have no impact on the deployment or effectiveness of other government agents or entities. Given a fairly rigid set of criteria for deportation, almost anyone could perform that function and expedite the removal of illegal aliens from the detention facilities and from the U.S.
The DOJ has placed a great deal of emphasis on foreign relations, even suggesting that if we were to enforce our immigration laws that would jeopardize the treatment of U.S. citizens abroad. The difference that needs to be made clear is that U.S. citizens abroad generally follow all the rules and therefore there would be no basis for their ill treatment. Like the U.S., other countries welcome legal immigrants and visitors because they are an important part of their economies. Can you imagine Mexican authorities swooping down on Acapulco and arresting all of the well-heeled American tourists just to get even for our repatriation of illegal aliens? Ridiculous! They would be shooting themselves in the foot and assuring that few, if any, American tourists would visit there again.

The Death if Common Sense

2010-07-04T09:44:00.000-07:00

A LONDON TIMES OBITUARY: (Adapted and paraphrased)
This is interesting and sadly true.
Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.
He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:
- Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
- Why the early bird gets the worm;
- Life isn't always fair; get used to it; and maybe it is your fault.
- Personal responsibility
- The world doesn't care about your self-esteem.
- If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
- No honest work is beneath your dignity.
- Don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
- Having as many times as you want to get the right answer bears no resemblance to anything in real life.
- In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
- It’s not what’s someone else is doing to you. It’s what you’re not doing.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you can earn), in the economic realm, you cannot legislate the poor independence by legislating the wealthy out of it. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. Government cannot give to the people what it does not first take away from the people. What one man receives without working for, another man must work for without receiving. He endorsed reliable strategies like: adults, not children, are in charge.

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened the condition of Common Sense.

He lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children. It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense was depressed as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims. Common Sense took a beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault; when illegal aliens marched in the streets for rights they did not earn; when governments failed to enforce the laws they enacted.

Common Sense was disheartened when fellow citizens gave precedence to the interests of foreigners. Common sense wondered what happened to enlightened self-interest when citizens succumbed to an all too common American mindset: short on vision, mired in denial and unable to comprehend nature’s limits.

Common Sense was finally weakened by the failure of Americans to recognize, as the eminent demographer, Joel Cohen, put it, “…the world [and the U.S.] cannot easily and comfortably accommodate an unlimited number of people at any desirable level of material, mental and civic well-being.”

Common Sense recalled the beautiful quotation from John Stuart Mill, “There is room in the world, no doubt, and even in old countries [in 1848], for a great increase in population, supposing the arts of life to go on improving, and capital to increase. But even if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it. The density of population necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest degree, all the advantages both of cooperation and of social intercourse, has, in all the populous countries been attained. A population may be too crowded, though all be amply supplied with food and raiment. It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his own species. A world, from which solitude is extirpated, is a poor ideal.”

Now more than 150 years later, Common Sense realized that the supply of food, clothing, and shelter is threatened in many corners of the world and in the niches and crannies of the U.S. economy. He saw that the need to stabilize world and U.S. populations is now urgent. He knew that population-driven economic growth is ultimately unsustainable.

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot, spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement; when criminals were allowed to testify against those charged with their apprehension; and when politicians reached new heights of hypocrisy, perfidy, mendacity, and corruption.

Common Sense was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his three sons, Reason, Loyalty, and Lawfulness.

He is survived by his 6 stepbrothers: I Know My Rights; I Want It Now; Someone Else Is To Blame; Amnesty Now; Open Borders; and I'm A Victim. Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing.

Korea: The "Forgotten War" still remembered

2010-06-28T12:13:00.000-07:00

A Mexican American Veteran and hero of the Korean War speaks about the war and illegal immigration.

Barrientos said "A first-generation American, he blames the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America's lax immigration policy. He thinks if Mexicans or Iraqis or anyone else aren't happy, they ought to overthrow their own governments rather than burdening ours.

His grandparents, who were rich Mexican ranchers, used to hide Poncho Villa in their barn during the Mexican Revolution, and his parents only crossed the border in 1914 when fleeing for their lives."

Ex-Marine TEA Party member sings

2010-06-21T10:27:00.000-07:00

Poll

2010-06-19T11:01:00.000-07:00

Please take the poll at this location

Jobs

2010-06-12T07:37:00.000-07:00

The spectacular loss of American jobs is devastating to more Americans than the oil spill in the Gulf, but Barack Obama still doesn't get it. This month he bragged to an audience of truckers in Hyattsville, Maryland, that our economy is "getting stronger by the day."

The U.S. Labor Department reports a very different picture. The number of long-term unemployed, defined as Americans out of work for 27 or more weeks, is at its highest level since the Labor Department began collecting such data in the 1940s.

More bad news comes from the Labor Department. In May, 431,000 jobs were added, but nine-tenths of them were government jobs.

Unemployment of young men is the highest in 61 years of record-keeping, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. The numbers for minority teenagers are tragic.

Obama's $787 billion federal stimulus program was packaged in mental images of construction workers in hard hats. However, most of those hired with Stimulus dollars were government employees.

More than half of stimulus jobs were in education, mostly women, which was part of his payoff to the feminists. Many states expanded staff for teaching and education administration at the same time that they had a declining enrollment of students.

The rest of America may be suffering from a recession, but it's boom time for federal employees. On average, federal employees are paid $71,206 per year compared to $40,331 for private sector workers.

Those figures are just the start of the comfort of being a federal employee. When you include benefits such as health care and retirement, federal employees make almost double what private sector employees receive: $119,982 versus $59,909.

Stay tuned: federal employees receive raises practically every year. From December 2007 through June 2009, average federal government salaries increased 6.6 percent while private sector salaries increased 3.9 percent. Most federal workers also get periodic pay hikes, called steps, which average 1.5 percent per year.

Federal employees don't spend much time worrying about being laid off, or about their jobs being transferred to China or Mexico, the worry that hangs over private sector workers. Under Obama, federal jobs keep increasing in number, not diminishing.

And there's more. Nineteen percent of federal employees make more than $100,000 a year. That's before benefits, overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

One of the reasons why government employees are so well paid is that they enjoy the advocacy of the richest and most powerful unions, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Last year was the turning point when government employee unions were able to boast more members than private sector unions.

According to an article in The Hill, the SEIU expects to spend $44 million to influence the 2010 elections, and AFSCME will spend $50 million. Most will be spent to help Democrats keep control of Congress and to implement Obama's agenda.

The best way Obama could create jobs is to cut taxes on those who create jobs (corporations and investors), but that's absolutely not his game plan. He wants redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to non-taxpayers and a larger percent of our population economically and attitudinally dependent on government.

The second best way to create jobs would be to stop importing foreign workers. Has Obama no regard for the 15 million unemployed Americans and the additional 10 million who have given up looking or are able to get only part-time jobs?

Each year, a million and a half foreigners are brought into our country and given work permits. That's a million and a half jobs a year that do not go to Americans.

At least 8 million illegal aliens also have jobs in the United States. The enforcement of E-Verify would make those jobs available to our own unemployed.

Don't let the liberals get by with the lie that Americans won't do those jobs. Illegal aliens work less than half of the jobs in every one of the categories where they cluster.

It's not only low-paid jobs that aliens take from Americans. The Census Bureau found that 34 percent of all software engineers are immigrants, despite the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers reporting that 48,000 U.S. software engineers are unemployed.

This is the 20th year of the H-1B program, which was supposed to admit only foreigners who can work jobs that require special expertise for which no U.S. employee can be found. From the start, this program has been a racket to allow big corporations to bring in cheap workers with limited skills to work ordinary jobs.

The Times Square would-be bomber, who was only a "B" student, once entered the United States on an H-1B visa. We haven't heard about any bureaucrat being fired for that mistake or even admonished.

Common Sense 2010

2010-06-01T19:03:00.000-07:00

In the 1700s, patriot Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet called "Common Sense" which made the case against King George III's tyranny and for the independence of the colonies. Apparently, at some point, the British people recognized the merit of his arguments and honored him with a statue in the city of his birth, Thetford, Norfolk, Great Britain.

One of his memorable quotes is , “A long habit of not thinking a thing right gives it the superficial appearance of being wrong." This reminds me of our misguided friends who favor illegal aliens over their fellow citizens. Their long habit of thinking secure borders and the rule of law are not very important, tends to give these issues a superficial appearance of being wrong.

It is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants is the liberty of appearing. Consistent with that idea, our objectives have been to (1) allow the truth to appear about immigration's unarmed invasion and its deadly consequences, and (2) to give precedence to the national interest and the rule of law over illegal aliens or even prospective legal immigrants.

The anti-America,pro-illegals rebel against reason. They blithely ignore the long-term consequences of the support they provide for the illegal aliens in America. Few have even given those consequences a second thought and those who have, gloat about the future when minorities will be the majority and Hispanics will control the political processes of our country. They nod with approval knowing that comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) as a code term for amnesty, will mean 12-30 million instant citizens, leaving any thoughts about border security a mere façade. CIR clearly has come to mean "amnesty." They clothe their support of foreign interests in ethnocentric, quasi-humanitarianism, disregarding the broader national interest and yet, facetiously, claim to be loyal Americans. They object to any effective technique or procedure for identifying and sorting out illegal aliens. When they say they are worried about some imposition on or profiling of Hispanic citizens, they are just indulging in an artifice or "red herring." Their real objective is to prevent any meaningful effort to apprehend and repatriate a significant numbers of illegals, after they have served six months working on border infrastructure.

We believe in the equality of man; and we believe that religious and secular duties consist of doing justice, extending mercy, and endeavoring to live in harmony with our fellow-citizens. Some believe that when you look in a man's eyes you will see a divine spark that proves he is a man not a horse to be treated as a beast of burden. Others question that idea and ask, "Where have you seen this divine spark in operation? Where have you noted this magnificent equality?" No two things on earth are equal or have an equal chance, not a leaf or a tree. Many work all their lives exercising their right to prove that they are better than others through their achievements, the jobs they have held, or the esteem in which they are held by their bosses and their peers. They may not think of it in that way. They may see it only as striving for success.

What really matters is equality of opportunity and justice for our citizens. Justice is generally defined in terms of the laws which govern all civilized societies, that justice is the legal system, or the act of applying or upholding the law. Justice can also be thought of as fairness or reasonableness, especially in the way people are treated or decisions are made. In this regard, the fairness or reasonableness with which people are treated is measured against the objective standard of the law, equally and evenly applied. Thus, he that would make his own justice secure, must guard even illegal aliens from a miscarriage of justice; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself. But the concept of justice has already been breached in the case of illegal aliens who have violated our borders and are present in our country illegally. If we do not use the objective standard of the law, the rule of law becomes meaningless and we are thrown into anarchy.

It is the business of a little mind to shrink from his or her duty and from the loyalty to their country expected of citizens. In their search for some rationale for their dereliction of duty and disloyal behavior, they are unable to obscure that they value common blood over all else without regard to its ultimate cost to the country they profess to know and love. It is an affront to treat this ethnocentric behavior and false humanitarianism with complaisance. It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry into the motivation and rationale of these latter day apologists for illegal aliens. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe.

How can anyone believe that allowing our population to increase without bounds will be a good thing? How can anyone believe that reducing the diversity of immigrants entering our country will increase its diversity? How can anyone believe that finite natural resources can somehow be stretched to serve twice as many people without any impact on the quality of life? These are infidelities that characterize those who favor illegal aliens, open borders, and more legal immigrants over the national interest.

It is not a few hardworking illegal aliens that we are worried about; we are defending a country, an idea, a national culture, a national character, a national language, the national interest, the national sovereignty, and the quality of life. As many as 30 million illegal aliens and their progeny may be waiting for the Congress to betray our country for their own shortsighted, selfish interests. If Congress yields to that temptation, there will be no turning back. If amnesty is passed, the 30 million will use the outrageous "family reunification provision" to bring in their large extended families, swelling the immigrant ranks to as many as 150 million, many of whom will line up immediately to begin collecting welfare, Aid to Dependent Children, Earned Income Credits, free education, Medicaid, Medicare and even the Social Security one presidential candidate promised them in 2008. Within a year, they will have been organized by the radical Hispanic lobby groups and prepared to use the ballot box to take over our country. Already, we see on the blogs, "Voto Latino". Wouldn’t a loyal American simply ask everyone to “Vote!”. The result might be the same but at least it wouldn't be so flagrantly disloyal.

When our politicians wake up to discover what their greed and stupidity have done, it will be too late to do anything. They will be turned out of office and our country will no longer be under the control of the American people. It is this concern that motivates the opponents of amnesty and open borders, not the nativism, bigotry, xenophobia, racism or the persecution of minorities and immigrants of which they are often falsely accused in ad hominem attacks. Those are not the features of the mainstream opposition to illegal aliens and excessive legal immigration. They may play some role in the fringe organizations on the extreme left and extreme right. Some would argue that they are features of MALDEF, MEChA, La Raza and at least some of the 800 hate groups identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (based on undisclosed criteria).

The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. In the case of immigration's unarmed invasion, the anti-American,pro-illegals often inadvertently provide the facts that permit us to reason about the future of our country. For example, they gloat about the expected minority majority. They point out the population and demographic trends that show Hispanics to be the fastest growing ethnic group in America. It has been shown that Mexicans and their progeny alone account for as many new immigrants as the next ten countries combined. How does that add to the diversity of our nation? Obviously, it has just the opposite effect.

What they studiously avoid is any analysis that would show what this means in terms of our country's future. Victor Hansen has given us a glimpse of that future in his book, "Mexifornia: A State of Becoming". Having lived among Mexicans, taught them, intermarried with them, and observed them first hand, Hansen is in a excellent position to draw the obvious conclusions about where we are headed. These are the conclusions the legal immigration and illegal alien proponents seem incapable of discerning. It is both the direction and the magnitude which are to be taken into consideration not the individual hard working alien. Our country is clearly headed in the wrong direction on immigration and the magnitude of that problem boggles the mind. We can only reason from what is; we can only reason on actualities, not on shortsighted and unwarranted expectations without basis or a certain complacency about America's future. Bankrupt California is the harbinger of America's future.

In Arizona, citizens frustrated by the failure of the federal government to enforce our immigration laws have done the only thing left for them to do. They have fashioned a new state law that closely follows the federal statutes in a final attempt to get control of its borders by making some acts violations of state law as well as the federal law. This is an excellent law that will enable local authorities to do what the Administration has refused to do, get a handle on the illegal alien problem. Some say this will divert the police and sheriffs from their primary duties to serve and protect. On the contrary, activities under the new law will be incidental to their primary duties. The law will reinforce the ability of authorities to serve and protect.

However, the illegal alien problem cannot be solved by the border patrol or ICE agents alone. They need the full support of local government and local authorities. New laws are needed to deny illegals sanctuary in the cities and in the rural areas.

The anti-America, anti-rule of law, pro-illegals among Arizona citizens have tried, out of desperation, to associate the new law with racial profiling which is illegal or other violations of human rights. When confronted with the question of where best to look for illegal aliens particularly those from Mexico, they stutter and stammer, because they know the answer is within the Hispanic community and at the locations typically populated by illegals. They are not really concerned about racial profiling. Their real concern relates to the fact that this law might actually turn the corner on illegal aliens and begin their repatriation.

There are many ways to reduce the extent to which the new law would represent an imposition on Hispanic citizens. But some citizens prefer to remain a part of the problem rather than become a part of the solution. One of most obvious ways is to issue a new comprehensive, counterfeit-proof, machine-readable, biometric ID to all who wish to avoid any imposition. Embedded on such an ID could be all of information found on other conventional IDs like Social Security cards, library cards, parking permits, drivers licenses, green cards, proofs of auto and health insurance, thumb prints, photos and other physical descriptors, perhaps even a coded DNA sample, and a record of honorable military service. This single universal ID would then serve many purposes from checking out a book, cashing a check,to proving a license to drive and one's immigration or workstatus. Showing this single card would be no more burdensome than showing a drivers license. The new ID could be issued by trustworthy employees at designated state and local government offices based on a thorough verification of the documents presented by the citizen, permanent resident, or other applicant. The E-verify system could be expanded to include all of the relevant information so that the bona fides of any applicant could be quickly checked. Police cruisers could also have devices for reading the biometric card. Problem solved.

The only missing ingredient is the cooperation of Hispanic citizens to help their country solve this pressing problem. Their willingness or unwillingness to provide this cooperation is a measure of their loyalty and how valid their concerns about racial profiling really are. If the police knew that most if not all Hispanic citizens in the state had such a validated ID, there would be little incentive to willy-nilly accost every Hispanic they came across. After all there must two or three million Hispanic citizens in Arizona versus perhaps only 500,000 illegals. If every Hispanic was stopped, there would be less than a 20% chance that each stop would uncover an illegal. This would not be a very wise use of the officers' time. So the police would mostly likely focus their efforts on routine traffic stops or on the use of checkpoints like those employed to catch those not wearing their seatbelts (click it or ticket) or DUIs. Neither of these approaches is remotely related to racial profiling and yet both would be very effective in identifying illegals and a beginning of a solution to the problem.

When men and women yield up the privilege of thinking and reasoning, the last shadow of liberty and the uniquely American experiment quits the horizon. When we fail to recognize the most elementary facts about our present situation and fail to draw the obvious conclusions, we have abandoned reason in favor of demagoguery. When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary. When we plan for posterity, we need to remove our rose-colored glasses and objectively assess what that future nation will be like for our children and our children's children. If there must be trouble regarding immigration and illegal aliens, let it be in our day, that our children may have peace and prosperity and the same quality of life as we have enjoyed. That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly. That which we value so little, we will quickly lose.

Again paraphrasing Thomas Paine: these are the times that try the souls of men and women alike. The summer citizen and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from opposing excessive legal immigration and the flood of illegal aliens; but he or she who stands now for the national interest and the rule of law, deserves the love and thanks of all. Those who expect to reap the blessings of America must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it. Perhaps in this case time will make more converts than reason but by then it will be too late. The America we know and love will be gone. If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately.

The Disconnect between the Will of the American People and Congress

2010-05-15T13:47:00.000-07:00

Rep. Jared Polis, (D., 2nd CD) writing in the Denver Post on May 13, 2010 starts out well with the statement, “I have never seen such a disconnect between the will of the American people and Congress.” Polis claims that “the American people have had it with our broken immigration system” but in actuality, as all the polls show, the American people have had it with the Congress and the Administration, not our immigration system. Polis further states that “across the ideological spectrum, no one is happy with the status quo.” Of course, voters are unhappy with the status quo for a multitude of reasons. Foremost among those reasons is the fact that the Administration has done little or nothing to enforce the immigration laws already on the books. Instead of a broken immigration system, it is a failure of enforcement that has created the disconnect Polis speaks of.

Polis seems to think that states like Arizona are diverting their police officers to enforce immigration laws. This is a misrepresentation of what the new Arizona immigration law requires. Since the state is overrun with illegal aliens and the federal government has failed in its duty to the people, Arizona has enabled police officers to check the bona fides of anyone they stop for other law infractions. The officers are not being diverted from their regular duties. They are merely being allowed to check legal residency status at the same time as they check other forms of identification such as drivers’ licenses and proof of insurance. The ability of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to apprehend illegal aliens is seriously compromised when the local law enforcement authorities in sanctuary cities are directed not to cooperate or assist in the task of apprehending illegal aliens. Given the huge size of the problem and the sheer volume of illegals in some communities, ICE agents are simply overwhelmed without the help of the police. There is no other solution than the one enacted in Arizona. ICE is dependent on the active assistance of local enforcement agencies in the performance of their regular duties.

In the absence of any effort by the current Administration in Washington to deal with the problem, States like Arizona are providing the leadership needed to turn the tide of illegal aliens by enabling local authorities to provide the assistance needed by ICE to do its job. Polis, using a very unfortunate choice of words, says, “Unless Congress acts, more states, counties, and cities will likely pass thuggish and spiteful laws that scare and scapegoat American citizens of certain ethnic heritages.” These laws passed by states like Arizona are neither thuggish nor spiteful. They are legitimate attempts by duly-elected local and state representatives of the people to deal with a problem that both the Congress and the Administration have chosen to ignore. To call these efforts thuggish and spiteful is an insult to the American people. The misguided use of such words is indicative of those with a mindset that favors illegal aliens over citizens and who therefore are responsible for the disconnect.

Both the Congress and the Administration have been deaf to the pleas of citizens for the immigration laws to be vigorously enforced. The E-verification system languishes because Congress has failed make it mandatory across the border for all employers, public and private, and all employees, both current employees and potential new hires.

Every member of congress has taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic and bear true faith and allegiance to the same. They swear or affirm that they take that obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that they will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which they are about to enter. When it comes to illegal aliens, it becomes clear that the Congress has no intention of honoring that oath. They have a different agenda and the American people are just an impediment to that agenda.

Liberal “Sens. Harry Reid, Charles Schumer and Robert Menendez (RSM) recently released a conceptual proposal for immigration reform with a simple theme: If you obey our laws, learn our language and pay our taxes, we will welcome you to America.” Not so fast there, senators! We don’t need or want anymore impoverished immigrants to burden our social, educational, and medical services budgets and add to our crushing national debt. Instead, we need a national objective of a stable population to be achieved with a soft landing for our economy within twenty years.

The senators say nothing about the failure of the federal government to enforce the laws already on the book. Instead they trot out the tired cliché about “fixing our broken immigration system.” Before we can reach any conclusions about the effectiveness of the current immigration system, we must first make a comprehensive effort to enforce the existing immigration laws.

If the Senate proposal is turned into a bill and brought to the floor, we will see which members of Congress have the backbone to stand up for the national interest, national sovereignty, and national character and which will pander to special interest lobbies like La Raza and cheap labor interests. Polis talks about the disconnect between the Congress and the American people but fails to recognize that the RSM framework is a perfect example of that disconnect. Poll after poll has shown that the voters are opposed to amnesty for illegal aliens. Yet, Reid, Schumer, and Menendez have ignored those results and opted instead to include a form of amnesty in their framework. This will extend the disconnect not mend it.

Similarly, the House is working to pass some form of comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) that, like earlier laws, purports to secure our borders, restore the rule of law to our country, create jobs for Americans, prevent illegal immigration from occurring in our country, and provide for a new amnesty. In the minds of these legislators “CIR” is erroneouslyconsidered to be synonymous with “amnesty.”

Some argue that what is being proposed is not amnesty. Technically, it is not amnesty if any penalty is imposed, even if it is just a slap on the wrist or some requirements that will never be enforced. However, the common understanding of amnesty is any measure that allows illegal aliens to remain in this country and work, thereby rewarding them with the object of their illegality.

The Senate outline is a tired rerun of the same provisions and promises of the bills that failed in 2007 and 2008. The senators have tried to repackage those provisions to make it look like they have made some important compromises. But the amnesty provision that most Americans object to is still there in one form or another. A bill that omits the amnesty provision would garner widespread support. The other elements of the House version are important and would have a good chance for quick passage if the provisions for amnesty were removed. Our long experience with the existing laws has clearly demonstrated that none of the House provisions can be achieved without vigorous and continuous internal enforcement based on electronic verification of the work status of all employees. While adding more border patrol agents, improving border infrastructure, and revising the rules of engagement are all important, internal enforcement remains the sine qua non of in depth border security. Without internal enforcement, secure borders will remain a pipe dream. The failure of Congress to recognize this fact is part of the disconnect from will of the people.

Typically, Congress tries to candy coat each new proposal to assuage hunger of the voting public for real border security. But most of the proposals turn out to be just another snow job consisting of empty promises that will never be enforced.

No one is suggesting that all illegals should be deported en masse. Some fireugn workers are important to our economy. If it can be shown that illegals in certain jobs have not displaced citizen workers, then green cards should be issued on a selective basis. However, foreign workers who have entered the U.S. illegally must never be eligible for citizenship. That is the least penalty that must be imposed to create the disincentive to violate our borders. However, if their foreign-born children remain in school and learn English and civics, they could become eligible for naturalized citizenship at age 21. Illegal aliens are more interested in legal status than they are in citizenship. They mainly want to be out from under the threat of deportation.

There is no reason why E-verify cannot be implemented immediately. We need it right now to detect Social Security name and number mismatches, duplicate and fraudulent Social Security numbers, and other fraudulent identification cards so that employers will no longer have any excuse for hiring or retaining individuals who are here illegally. It is against the law to “knowingly” hire illegal aliens. But employers can get off the hook easily by saying, “I didn’t know” so that loophole must be closed.

The fine for those who have worked here illegally should be based on the applicable tax bracket times the average earnings of illegals times the number of years worked. For example, if the applicable tax bracket is 15% and the average earnings of illegals is $30,000 per year and a particular individual has worked here for 10 years, his fine should be 0.15 x $30,000 x 10 or $45,000 payable over a 10 year period at $4,500 per year.

Polis quotes Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies immigration, as saying the Senate proposal "shows how far the Democrats have moved in terms of tougher and tougher enforcement" and that "across the board you see language that would be very comfortable in a proposal written by Republicans." If the Administration gives as much attention to enforcing the senate proposals as it has those already on the books, the new enforcement ideas will remain useless and meaningless. With no intention or mechanism for enforcement, the new proposals are just hoodwink the public and facilitate the passage of the bill. As long as the bill contains anything that looks like amnesty it will not represent a true effort to solve the problem.

The RSM framework represents no significant departure from the existing unenforced statutes. It is just another cynical attempt on the part of the Congress to assuage the concerns of the voting public without any real plan to enforce the result, except for any amnesty provison. If the Congress really wanted to enact an immgration refom bill, the first step should be to remove anything that an ordinary citizen would consider to be tantamount to amnesty.

Polis asks, “Why does this disconnect persist? Should we blame the xenophobes who scream 'amnesty' at any reform effort? Or the civil libertarians who oppose any real type of verification of employment status?” The answer is: None of the above! Polis is simply indulging in insulting hyperbole when he refers pejoratively to “screaming xenophobes.” He doesn't mention those who fly foreign flags and demonstrate in the streets for rights they are not entitled to.

The disconnect persists because Congress has its own agenda and is not listening to the people. It would not be difficult to pass any necessary immigration reforms but the devil is in the details. If the Congress were to omit any amnesty considerations or pathways to citizenship, make internal enforcement the centerpiece of a reform bill, and make failure to enforce immigration laws an impeachable offense, the bill would have smooth sailing.

No matter what it is called or what penalties are imposed, amnesty is a nonstarter for the immigration debate. Amnesty, per se, is not immigration reform. Immigration reform is: (1) flexible immigration quotas tied to the total unemployment rate by sector; (2) a national objective of a stable population; (3) an end to chain immigrations except for the children and spouses of citizens; (4) a requirement for at least one parent to be a citizen before citizenship is granted to the child; (5) a delay in the award of citizenship until one’s 21st birthday; (6) English as the official language of the U.S.; (7) a system that requires employers to provide irrefutable evidence of need before any foreign worker can be hired; (8) a label on green cards that specifies what kind of work the aliens can perform; (9) a six month term working on border infrastructure for illegal aliens apprehended at the border or internally; (10) a rigid set of criteria for immigration decisions that excludes family separation as a valid basis for appeal; (11) a limit of no more than 250,000 legal immigrants per year in all categories including chain immigrations but excluding visas issued to students, tourists, and temporary migrant farm workers; (12) fast track citizenship for those who enlist in the armed forces for not less than 4 years and who have served at least one tour in a combat zone; (13) legal immigration quotas focused on those who possess innovative or entrepreneurial skills or who have successfully completed a PhD in a physical science, engineering, math or medicine; (14) a prohibition against citizenship for anyone who has entered the U.S. illegally; and (15) a requirement for true fluency in English before citizenship can be granted.

This framework for immigration reform that would eliminate the disconnect between the people and the Congress on this issue. It would sidestep the contentious issue of amnesty. Anyone opposing or delaying these immigration reforms will be seen as directly responsible for making the problem worse. Without swift and bold action, we will undoubtedly have many more illegal aliens living and working within our borders. In 1968 there were about 1.3 million illegals in the U.S. On the occasion of the 1968 amnesty bill Senator Ted Kennedy stood up and said,

“This amnesty will give citizenship to only 1.1 -- 1.3 million illegal aliens. We will secure the borders henceforth. We will never again bring forward another Amnesty Bill like this."

Now Rep. Polis, Senators Reid, Schumer, and Menendez and others are proposing another amnesty. It is déjà vu all over again.

If the 1.3 million in 1968 has grown to 12 million today, that would represent a compound rate of increase of 9.7% per year. At that rate the 12 million will become 12 million x 1.097^40 years = 487 million by mid-century. That is a staggering figure! No wonder Congress wants to sweep the 12 million under the carpet with a mass legalization and then begin to count all over again from zero. Although the math is correct, the demographers insist that our population will be “only” about 485 million by 2050. However, unless something is done besides putting words on paper in another useless bill, the U.S. population could easily exceed 1 billion by the end of this century.

Colorado Senators Michael Bennet and Mark Udall have ignored the cries from Main Street and have called upon Senate Majority Leader Reid to promote the same old amnesty ideas. Represenatives Ed Perlmutter, Diana DeGette and John Salazar have joined Representative Polis as co-sponsors of HR 4321, a new amnesty bill.

People shouldn't be able to cross the border without the proper documents, or to overstay their visas, and businesses shouldn't be able to exploit cheap labor off the books. This continues to happen because the Congress has yet to realize that internal enforcement is the essential ingredient. If the illegals believe that if they can escape the immediate environs of the border, they will be home free, they will keep coming no matter how many agents we assign to the border. East Germans were willing to brave mine fields, machine gun towers, and multi-layered fences and walls to escape to the West because they knew they would not be repatriated. With no such deterrents to contend with, illegal aliens will keep flooding across our borders because they know the probability of being apprehended and repatriated is nil under the current no enforcement policy. Polis is right when he says, “We must stop playing politics with a problem that we should have fixed long ago.” The fix is clear: no amnesty -- vigorous and continuous internal enforcement based on E-verification of work status. E-verify works and will become even better once we implement it across the board for all employers, public and private, and all employees, current and potential new hires.

Politicians in both parties have been barking up the wrong tree and need to come to grips with the fact that while improvements in border staffing, infrastructure, and rules of engagement are necessary, they are not sufficient without internal enforcement that conveys the message: “If you come here illegally, we will catch you and you will serve a minimum of six months working on border infrastructure before you are repatriated with the admonition that if you return you will do a minimum of two years of hard time. The East Germans found out that fences, walls, and mine fields are not enough to deter illegal border crossings. We need to take that lesson to heart and implement a bold program to apprehend and repatriate illegal aliens. Fences and border patrols are not enough.

“So let's not replay this Republican vs. Democrat game with immigration. Good ideas and solutions transcend party.” This issue is too important, and it's time for us to get behind a plan that provides border security in depth and denies jobs, citizenship, and sanctuary to illegal aliens. We know what will work. It is time to get off the amnesty bandwagon and get on with border security.

Crime in Arizona

2010-04-30T15:42:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, a young park ranger was murdered in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, presumably by drug smugglers. Now our pourous borders and go soft approach to illegal aliens have resulted in yet another murder.

Posted on line was the following: "Forwarded to me by a friend of a friend who retired from Border Patrol. As you know, one of the local ranchers was murdered in Douglas two weeks ago. His funeral is tomorrow. I received three messages similar to the one below from different officers within the Rangers and law enforcement. Yesterday afternoon I talked to another rancher near us who is a friend of ours and whose great grandfather started their ranch here in 1880. These are good people. He told me what really happened out at the Krentz ranch and what you won't read in the papers. The Border Patrol is afraid of starting a small war between civilians here and the drug cartels in Mexico. Bob Krentz was checking his water like he does every evening and came upon an illegal who was lying on the ground telling him he was sick. Bob called the Border Patrol and asked for a medical helicopter evac. As he turned to go back to his ATV he was shot in the side. The round came from down and angled up so they know the shooter was on the ground. Bob's firearm was in the ATV so he had no chance. Wounded he called the Cochise County Sheriff and asked for help. Bleeding in the lungs he called his brother but the line was bad so he called his wife but again the line was bad. Several ranchers heard the radio call and drove to his location. Bob was dead by this time. The ranchers tracked the shooter 8 miles back towards Mexico and cornered him in a brushy draw. This was all at night. The Sheriff and Border Patrol arrived and told them not to go down and engage the murderer. They went around to the back side and if you can believe it the assassin managed to get by a BP helicopter and a Sheriff's posse and back to Mexico. So much for professional help when you need it. One week before the murder Bob and his brother Phil (who I shoot with) hauled a huge quantity of drugs off the ranch that they found in trucks. One week before that a rancher near Naco did the same thing. Two nights later gangs broke into his ranch house and beat him and his wife and told them that if they touched any drugs they found they would come back and kill them. The ranchers here deal with cut fences and haul drug deliveries off their ranches all the time. What ranchers think is that the drug cartels beat the one rancher and shot Bob because they wanted to send a message. Bob always gave food and water to illegals and so they think they sent the assassin to pose as an illegal who was hungry and thirsty knowing it would catch Bob off guard. What is going on down here is NOT being reported. You need to tell people how bad it is along the border. Texas is worse. Near El Paso it's in a state of war. 5000 people were killed in Ciudad Juarez last year and it's over 2000 so far this year. Gun sales down here are through the roof and I get emails from people wanting firearms training. Something has to be done but I don't hold out much hope. These gangs have groups in almost every city in the US. This is serious business. The Barrio Azteca and their sub gangs are like Mexican Corporations and organized extremely well. If this doesn't get dealt with down here you guys will deal with it on your streets."

He's no environmentalist!

2010-04-23T13:26:00.000-07:00

Immigration-Reduction Report Card for Sen. Mark Udall (D, CO)

Served in House: 1999-2009, Served in Senate: 2009-

Immigration reduction grade in this Congress -- F-Recent

D -- Career, D -- Earth Day Sustainability Record

The grades above indicate how well this Member of Congress has been performing on one of the most important public policies affecting the United States' ability to become an environmentally sustainable society.

President Clinton's Task Force on Consumption and Population concluded that it is not possible to have environmental sustainability without dramatically reducing overall immigration to allow for a stabilizing U.S. population.

Instead, Congress has maintained immigration numbers quadruple the traditional average. Immigration policies result in new immigrants and births to immigrants that account for nearly all of the population explosion that currently challenges all U.S. environmental efforts.

Until the 1970s, the United States admitted about 250,000 immigrants each year. This policy helped make this country a great nation. However, Congress' decision to allow immigration to spiral out of control has created an unsustainable situation.

Currently, around 1 million legal immigrants and 1 million illegal aliens come to the United States each year. If Congress does not act to reform immigration, America's population will reach 458 million by 2050. However, the immigration reform ideas currently being discussed in Congress would increase rather thant curb immigration, further exacerbating the problem.

Immigration helped make America what it is today. However, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Our immigrant past is exactly that, "past!" is the operable word in that phrase for all those who wish to save our environment.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters Spills the Beans about the Democrat agenda

2010-04-20T18:49:00.000-07:00

TEA Party Being Hijacked by La Rouche Extremists

2010-04-08T11:11:00.000-07:00

The dangerous Lyndon LaRouche cult is attempting to hijack the TEA party movement. This cult consists of fanatical followers of LaRouche's peculiar brand of Marxism. Interestingly, one of LaRouche's former high level associates, Webster Tarpley, is now openly working with self-described "patriot" Alex Jones, who runs the infowars and prision planet web sites. Tarpley appears in two of Jone's films, "The Obama Deception" and "Fall of the Republic." Many conservatives have bought these films, thinking they have critical information abougt the threats to freedom that face us today. But the films are actually thinly-disguised propaganda meant to deceive and distort the real situation.

The TEA Party must wake up -- and wake up fast -- before these political extremists carry out a strategy that will divide and discredit the movement. We have already seen some evidence of that in the extremist signs held by some participants in the TEA party demonstrations in Washington and elsewhere.

Lyndon LaRouche is a former member of the Trotskyite Communist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and his first political organization, the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), began as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the same group that laid seige to college campuses in the 1960s. This is the group that spawned terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. The NCLC became the U.S. Labor Party.

In the 19602, La Rouche built a political intelligence network with about one thousand operatives stationed in North America, Europe, and South America. In a series of lectures in 1976, titled "What only Communists Know," La Rosuche described his network as the "world's Marxist labor movement."

The network created a series of front organizations and publications that included the National Democratic Policy Committee, the New Solidarity International Press Service (NSIPS), the National Anti-Drug Coalition, the Fusion Energy Federation, and the Executive Intelligence Review - all directed by Lyndon LaRouche. He ran for president under the US Labor Party banner; and then again in 1980 as a Democrat.

In 1978, following the presidential election of Jimmy Carter, LaRouche began a new effort to spread his influence by attempting to create ties to the American Right. Through the US Labor Party, LaRouche followers began to fan out across the nation, contacting conservative leaders. One of themes was that they possessed documentation that Carter had stolen the election and that there was a possibility the election results could be overturned. This was a blatant attempt by LaRouche to infiltrate the conservative movement. His followers continued in this mode to date successfully helping to discredit the Right or promote the Soviet position.

The strength of the LaRouche appeal to some TEA partiers was dramatically demonstrated in a recent election when LaRouche-Democrat Congressional candidate Kesha Rogers won the nomination in the 22nd District in Texas. She campaigned on one main issue -- impeach Obama. That message had great appeal to many in the freedom movement and they came across party lines to nomimate her.

Rogers victory has done massive harm to the freedom movement by giving LaRouche the one thing he lacked - his own political foothold on the elective battleground. He used the TEA party movement to give him what he never had - legitimacy.

Wake up TEA partiers and toss out this ugly LaRouche philosophy!

Obama Taxes Middle Class

2010-04-02T07:28:00.000-07:00

By 2013, investment taxes for the wealthiest Americans will rise to roughly 24% from the current level of 15% -- the highest level since the Reagan era. The tax applies to roughly 1 million individuals who earn over $200,000 and 4 million couples who rake in more than $250,000.

While this group makes up just 2% of the population, it's a far bigger driver of market activity than the other 98%. In addition, the higher rates aren't tied to inflation, meaning middle-class Americans will eventually price into the group.

American Capitalism Gone With A Whimper

2010-03-27T16:11:00.000-07:00

The irony of this article appearing in the English edition of Pravda

(Russian newspaper) defies description. Why can a Russian newspaper print the following yet the American media can't/won’t see it?
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American
descent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against
the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past
century, especially the past twenty years... The initial testing
grounds was our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was.

But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms
and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured to the
fists of the Marxists. Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and
substandard education system based on pop culture, rather than the
classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas than
the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more
for their "right" to choke down a McDonald’s or Burger King burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blinds the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all
tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more than Sunday circuses and their
televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more than
happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side
of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may
complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning"
side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for
earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously
liberalized in America.
The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His
speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His
spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in
America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for
more than another year, and there is no sign that it will not,
America at best will resemble the Weimar Republic and at worst
Zimbabwe .

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First
came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American
Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll
their thefts, losses, and swindles of hundreds of billions of
dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more than
ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beaten our own thieves in their sheer numbers. Should we congratulate them?

These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of
appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their
henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American
dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the
rights, duties, and powers of the American congress (parliament).
Again, congress has put up little more than a whimper to their
masters.

Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motors)
president step down from leadership of his company. That is
correct in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self-given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions. So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less than two months ago, warned Obama and UK 's Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism; it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride. Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper...but a "free man" whimper.

So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democrat-controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum salaries, evaluate performance, and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses.

Representative Barney Frank, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort.. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.

The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible.. In other words, divest while there is still value left.

The proud American will go down into his slavery without a fight, beating his chest, and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/pravda.asp

Apparently written by a Russian who can say "been there, done that!"

Thomas Paine Common Sense

2010-03-25T10:38:00.000-07:00

Smoke and Mirrors

2010-03-25T10:29:00.000-07:00

Everyone needs a copy of this sign!

2010-03-16T12:59:00.000-07:00

Where do you fit on the Political Map?

2010-03-16T12:27:00.000-07:00

http://www.theadvocates.org/quizp/index.html

Jobs

2010-03-10T11:02:00.000-08:00

The Real McCain

2010-03-05T15:57:00.000-08:00

A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty

TIM DICKINSON

Posted Oct 16, 2008 7:00 PM

At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation's capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. It's the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.

McCain is studying at the National War College, a prestigious graduate program he had to pull strings with the Secretary of the Navy to get into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own merit, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the building next door.

There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam — call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a "confession" to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn't survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service's highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as "one of the toughest guys I've ever met."

On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.

"I'm going to the Middle East," Dramesi says. "Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran."

"Why are you going to the Middle East?" McCain asks, dismissively.

"It's a place we're probably going to have some problems," Dramesi says.

"Why? Where are you going to, John?"

"Oh, I'm going to Rio."

"What the hell are you going to Rio for?"

McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.

"I got a better chance of getting laid."

Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. "McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man," Dramesi says today. "But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."

McCAIN FIRST

This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

This, of course, is not the story McCain tells about himself. Few politicians have so actively, or successfully, crafted their own myth of greatness. In McCain's version of his life, he is a prodigal son who, steeled by his brutal internment in Vietnam, learned to put "country first." Remade by the Keating Five scandal that nearly wrecked his career, the story goes, McCain re-emerged as a "reformer" and a "maverick," righteously eschewing anything that "might even tangentially be construed as a less than proper use of my office."

It's a myth McCain has cultivated throughout his decades in Washington. But during the course of this year's campaign, the mask has slipped. "Let's face it," says Larry Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. "John McCain made his reputation on the fact that he doesn't bend his principles for politics. That's just not true."

We have now watched McCain run twice for president. The first time he positioned himself as a principled centrist and decried the politics of Karl Rove and the influence of the religious right, imploring voters to judge candidates "by the example we set, by the way we conduct our campaigns, by the way we personally practice politics." After he lost in 2000, he jagged hard to the left — breaking with the president over taxes, drilling, judicial appointments, even flirting with joining the Democratic Party.

In his current campaign, however, McCain has become the kind of politician he ran against in 2000. He has embraced those he once denounced as "agents of intolerance," promised more drilling and deeper tax cuts, even compromised his vaunted opposition to torture. Intent on winning the presidency at all costs, he has reassembled the very team that so viciously smeared him and his family eight years ago, selecting as his running mate a born-again moose hunter whose only qualification for office is her ability to electrify Rove's base. And he has engaged in a "practice of politics" so deceptive that even Rove himself has denounced it, saying that the outright lies in McCain's campaign ads go "too far" and fail the "truth test."

The missing piece of this puzzle, says a former McCain confidant who has fallen out with the senator over his neoconservatism, is a third, never realized, campaign that McCain intended to run against Bush in 2004. "McCain wanted a rematch, based on ethics, campaign finance and Enron — the corrupt relationship between Bush's team and the corporate sector," says the former friend, a prominent conservative thinker with whom McCain shared his plans over the course of several dinners in 2001. "But when 9/11 happened, McCain saw his chance to challenge Bush again was robbed. He saw 9/11 gave Bush and his failed presidency a second life. He saw Bush and Cheney's ability to draw stark contrasts between black and white, villains and good guys. And that's why McCain changed." (The McCain campaign did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Rolling Stone.)

Indeed, many leading Republicans who once admired McCain see his recent contortions to appease the GOP base as the undoing of a maverick. "John McCain's ambition overrode his basic character," says Rita Hauser, who served on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 2001 to 2004. But the truth of the matter is that ambition is John McCain's basic character. Seen in the sweep of his seven-decade personal history, his pandering to the right is consistent with the only constant in his life: doing what's best for himself. To put the matter squarely: John McCain is his own special interest.

"John has made a pact with the devil," says Lincoln Chafee, the former GOP senator, who has been appalled at his one-time colleague's readiness to sacrifice principle for power. Chafee and McCain were the only Republicans to vote against the Bush tax cuts. They locked arms in opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And they worked together in the "Gang of 14," which blocked some of Bush's worst judges from the federal bench.

"On all three — sadly, sadly, sadly — McCain has flip-flopped," Chafee says. And forget all the "Country First" sloganeering, he adds. "McCain is putting himself first. He's putting himself first in blinking neon lights."

THE NAVY BRAT

John Sidney McCain III has spent most of his life trying to escape the shadow of greater men. His grandfather Adm. John Sidney "Slew" McCain earned his four stars commanding a U.S. carrier force in World War II. His deeply ambitious father, Adm. "Junior" McCain, reached the same rank, commanding America's forces in the Pacific during Vietnam.

The youngest McCain was not cut from the same cloth. Even as a toddler, McCain recalls in Faith of My Fathers, his volcanic temper was on display. "At the smallest provocation," he would hold his breath until he passed out: "I would go off in a mad frenzy, and then, suddenly, crash to the floor unconscious." His parents cured him of this habit in a way only a CIA interrogator could appreciate: by dropping their blue-faced boy in a bathtub of ice-cold water.

Trailing his hard-charging, hard-drinking father from post to post, McCain didn't play well with others. Indeed, he concedes, his runty physique inspired a Napoleon complex: "My small stature motivated me to . . . fight the first kid who provoked me."

McCain spent his formative years among the Washington elite. His father — himself deep in the throes of a daddy complex — had secured a political post as the Navy's chief liaison to the Senate, a job his son would later hold, and the McCain home on Southeast 1st Street was a high-powered pit stop in the Washington cocktail circuit. Growing up, McCain attended Episcopal High School, an all-white, all-boys boarding school across the Potomac in Virginia, where tuition today tops $40,000 a year. There, McCain behaved with all the petulance his privilege allowed, earning the nicknames "Punk" and "McNasty." Even his friends seemed to dislike him, with one recalling him as "a mean little fucker."

McCain was not only a lousy student, he had his father's taste for drink and a darkly misogynistic streak. The summer after his sophomore year, cruising with a friend near Arlington, McCain tried to pick up a pair of young women. When they laughed at him, he cursed them so vilely that he was hauled into court on a profanity charge.

McCain's admittance to Annapolis was preordained by his bloodline. But martial discipline did not seem to have much of an impact on his character. By his own account, McCain was a lazy, incurious student; he squeaked by only by prevailing upon his buddies to help him cram for exams. He continued to get sauced and treat girls badly. Before meeting a girlfriend's parents for the first time, McCain got so shitfaced that he literally crashed through the screen door when he showed up in his white midshipman's uniform.

His grandfather's name and his father's forbearance brought McCain a charmed existence at Annapolis. On his first trip at sea — to Rio de Janeiro aboard the USS Hunt — the captain was a former student of his father. While McCain's classmates learned the ins and outs of the boiler room, McCain got to pilot the ship to South America and back. In Rio, he hobnobbed with admirals and the president of Brazil.

Back on campus, McCain's short fuse was legend. "We'd hear this thunderous screaming and yelling between him and his roommate — doors slamming — and one of them would go running down the hall," recalls Phil Butler, who lived across the hall from McCain at the academy. "It was a regular occurrence."

When McCain was not shown the pampering to which he was accustomed, he grew petulant — even abusive. He repeatedly blew up in the face of his commanding officer. It was the kind of insubordination that would have gotten any other midshipman kicked out of Annapolis. But his classmates soon realized that McCain was untouchable. Midway though his final year, McCain faced expulsion, about to "bilge out" because of excessive demerits. After his mother intervened, however, the academy's commandant stepped in. Calling McCain "spoiled" to his face, he nonetheless issued a reprieve, scaling back the demerits. McCain dodged expulsion a second time by convincing another midshipman to take the fall after McCain was caught with contraband.

"He was a huge screw-off," recalls Butler. "He was always on probation. The only reason he graduated was because of his father and his grandfather — they couldn't exactly get rid of him."

McCain's self-described "four-year course of insubordination" ended with him graduating fifth from the bottom — 894th out of a class of 899. It was a record of mediocrity he would continue as a pilot.

BOTTOM GUN

In the cockpit, McCain was not a top gun, or even a middling gun. He took little interest in his flight manuals; he had other priorities.

"I enjoyed the off-duty life of a Navy flier more than I enjoyed the actual flying," McCain writes. "I drove a Corvette, dated a lot, spent all my free hours at bars and beach parties." McCain chased a lot of tail. He hit the dog track. Developed a taste for poker and dice. He picked up models when he could, screwed a stripper when he couldn't.

In the air, the hard-partying McCain had a knack for stalling out his planes in midflight. He was still in training, in Texas, when he crashed his first plane into Corpus Christi Bay during a routine practice landing. The plane stalled, and McCain was knocked cold on impact. When he came to, the plane was underwater, and he had to swim to the surface to be rescued. Some might take such a near-death experience as a wake-up call: McCain took some painkillers and a nap, and then went out carousing that night.

Off duty on his Mediterranean tours, McCain frequented the casinos of Monte Carlo, cultivating his taste for what he calls the "addictive" game of craps. McCain's thrill-seeking carried over into his day job. Flying over the south of Spain one day, he decided to deviate from his flight plan. Rocketing along mere feet above the ground, his plane sliced through a power line. His self-described "daredevil clowning" plunged much of the area into a blackout.

That should have been the end of McCain's flying career. "In the Navy, if you crashed one airplane, nine times out of 10 you would lose your wings," says Butler, who, like his former classmate, was shot down and taken prisoner in North Vietnam. Spark "a small international incident" like McCain had? Any other pilot would have "found themselves as the deck officer on a destroyer someplace in a hurry," says Butler.

"But, God, he had family pull. He was directly related to the CEO — you know?"

McCain was undeterred by the crashes. Nearly a decade out of the academy, his career adrift, he decided he wanted to fly combat in Vietnam. His motivation wasn't to contain communism or put his country first. It was the only way he could think of to earn the respect of the man he calls his "distant, inscrutable patriarch." He needed to secure a command post in the Navy — and to do that, his career needed the jump-start that only a creditable war record could provide.

As he would so many times in his career, McCain pulled strings to get ahead. After a game of tennis, McCain prevailed upon the undersecretary of the Navy that he was ready for Vietnam, despite his abysmal flight record. Sure enough, McCain was soon transferred to McCain Field — an air base in Meridian, Mississippi, named after his grandfather — to train for a post on the carrier USS Forrestal.

With a close friend at the base, an alcoholic Marine captain, McCain formed the "Key Fess Yacht Club," which quickly became infamous for hosting toga parties in the officers' quarters and bringing bands down from Memphis to attract loose women to the base. Showing his usual knack for promotion, McCain rose from "vice commodore" to "commodore" of the club.

In 1964, while still at the base, McCain began a serious romance with Carol Shepp, a vivacious former model who had just divorced one of his classmates from Annapolis. Commandeering a Navy plane, McCain spent most weekends flying from Meridian to Philadelphia for their dates. They married the following summer.

That December, McCain crashed again. Flying back from Philadelphia, where he had joined in the reverie of the Army-Navy football game, McCain stalled while coming in for a refueling stop in Norfolk, Virginia. This time he managed to bail out at 1,000 feet. As his parachute deployed, his plane thundered into the trees below.

By now, however, McCain's flying privileges were virtually irrevocable — and he knew it. On one of his runs at McCain Field, when ground control put him in a holding pattern, the lieutenant commander once again pulled his family's rank. "Let me land," McCain demanded over his radio, "or I'll take my field and go home!"

TRIAL BY FIRE

Sometimes 3 a.m. moments occur at 10:52 in the morning.

It was July 29th, 1967, a hot, gusty morning in the Gulf of Tonkin atop the four-acre flight deck of the supercarrier USS Forrestal. Perched in the cockpit of his A-4 Skyhawk, Lt. Cmdr. John McCain ticked nervously through his preflight checklist.

Now 30 years old, McCain was trying to live up to his father's expectations, to finally be known as something other than the fuck-up grandson of one of the Navy's greatest admirals. That morning, preparing for his sixth bombing run over North Vietnam, the graying pilot's dreams of combat glory were beginning to seem within his reach.

Then, in an instant, the world around McCain erupted in flames. A six-foot-long Zuni rocket, inexplicably launched by an F-4 Phantom across the flight deck, ripped through the fuel tank of McCain's aircraft. Hundreds of gallons of fuel splashed onto the deck and came ablaze. Then: Clank. Clank. Two 1,000-pound bombs dropped from under the belly of McCain's stubby A-4, the Navy's "Tinkertoy Bomber," into the fire.

McCain, who knew more than most pilots about bailing out of a crippled aircraft, leapt forward out of the cockpit, swung himself down from the refueling probe protruding from the nose cone, rolled through the flames and ran to safety across the flight deck. Just then, one of his bombs "cooked off," blowing a crater in the deck and incinerating the sailors who had rushed past McCain with hoses and fire extinguishers. McCain was stung by tiny bits of shrapnel in his legs and chest, but the wounds weren't serious; his father would later report to friends that Johnny "came through without a scratch."

The damage to the Forrestal was far more grievous: The explosion set off a chain reaction of bombs, creating a devastating inferno that would kill 134 of the carrier's 5,000-man crew, injure 161 and threaten to sink the ship.

These are the moments that test men's mettle. Where leaders are born. Leaders like . . . Lt. Cmdr. Herb Hope, pilot of the A-4 three planes down from McCain's. Cornered by flames at the stern of the carrier, Hope hurled himself off the flight deck into a safety net and clambered into the hangar deck below, where the fire was spreading. According to an official Navy history of the fire, Hope then "gallantly took command of a firefighting team" that would help contain the conflagration and ultimately save the ship.

McCain displayed little of Hope's valor. Although he would soon regale The New York Times with tales of the heroism of the brave enlisted men who "stayed to help the pilots fight the fire," McCain took no part in dousing the flames himself. After going belowdecks and briefly helping sailors who were frantically trying to unload bombs from an elevator to the flight deck, McCain retreated to the safety of the "ready room," where off-duty pilots spent their noncombat hours talking trash and playing poker. There, McCain watched the conflagration unfold on the room's closed-circuit television — bearing distant witness to the valiant self-sacrifice of others who died trying to save the ship, pushing jets into the sea to keep their bombs from exploding on deck.

As the ship burned, McCain took a moment to mourn his misfortune; his combat career appeared to be going up in smoke. "This distressed me considerably," he recalls in Faith of My Fathers. "I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal."

The fire blazed late into the night. The following morning, while oxygen-masked rescue workers toiled to recover bodies from the lower decks, McCain was making fast friends with R.W. "Johnny" Apple of The New York Times, who had arrived by helicopter to cover the deadliest Naval calamity since the Second World War. The son of admiralty surviving a near-death experience certainly made for good copy, and McCain colorfully recounted how he had saved his skin. But when Apple and other reporters left the ship, the story took an even stranger turn: McCain left with them. As the heroic crew of the Forrestal mourned its fallen brothers and the broken ship limped toward the Philippines for repairs, McCain zipped off to Saigon for what he recalls as "some welcome R&R."

VIOLATING THE CODE

Ensconced in Apple's villa in Saigon, McCain and the Times reporter forged a relationship that would prove critical to the ambitious pilot's career in the years ahead. Apple effectively became the charter member of McCain's media "base," an elite corps of admiring reporters who helped create his reputation for "straight talk."

Sipping scotch and reflecting on the fire aboard the Forrestal, McCain sounded like the peaceniks he would pillory after his return from Hanoi. "Now that I've seen what the bombs and napalm did to the people on our ship," he told Apple, "I'm not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam." Here, it seemed, was a frank-talking warrior, one willing to speak out against the military establishment in the name of truth.

But McCain's misgivings about the righteousness of the fight quickly took a back seat to his ambitions. Within days, eager to get his combat career back on track, he put in for a transfer to the carrier USS Oriskany. Two months after the Forrestal fire — following a holiday on the French Riviera — McCain reported for duty in the Gulf of Tonkin.

McCain performed adequately on the Oriskany. On October 25th, 1967, he bombed a pair of Soviet MiGs parked on an airfield outside Hanoi. His record was now even. Enemy planes destroyed by McCain: two. American planes destroyed by McCain: two.

The next day, McCain embarked on his fateful 23rd mission, a bombing raid on a power plant in downtown Hanoi. McCain had cajoled his way onto the strike force — there were medals up for grabs. The plant had recently been rebuilt after a previous bombing run that had earned two of the lead pilots Navy Crosses, one of the force's top honors.

It was a dangerous mission — taking the planes into the teeth of North Vietnam's fiercest anti-aircraft defenses. As the planes entered Hanoi airspace, they were instantly enveloped in dark clouds of flak and surface-to-air missiles. Still cocky from the previous day's kills, McCain took the biggest gamble of his life. As he dived in on the target in his A-4, his surface-to-air missile warning system sounded: A SAM had a lock on him. "I knew I should roll out and fly evasive maneuvers," McCain writes. "The A-4 is a small, fast" aircraft that "can outmaneuver a tracking SAM."

But McCain didn't "jink." Instead, he stayed on target and let fly his bombs — just as the SAM blew his wing off.

To watch the Republican National Convention and listen to Fred Thompson's account of John McCain's internment in Vietnam, you would think that McCain never gave his captors anything beyond his name, rank, service number and, under duress, the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line. His time in Hanoi, we're to understand, steeled the man — transforming him from a fighter jock who put himself first into a patriot who would henceforth selflessly serve the public good.

There is no question that McCain suffered hideously in North Vietnam. His ejection over a lake in downtown Hanoi broke his knee and both his arms. During his capture, he was bayoneted in the ankle and the groin, and had his shoulder smashed by a rifle butt. His tormentors dragged McCain's broken body to a cell and seemed content to let him expire from his injuries. For the next two years, there were few days that he was not in agony.

But the subsequent tale of McCain's mistreatment — and the transformation it is alleged to have produced — are both deeply flawed. The Code of Conduct that governed POWs was incredibly rigid; few soldiers lived up to its dictate that they "give no information . . . which might be harmful to my comrades." Under the code, POWs are bound to give only their name, rank, date of birth and service number — and to make no "statements disloyal to my country."

Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the window. "I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital," he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral. What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out: McCain told them. According to Dramesi, one of the few POWs who remained silent under years of torture, McCain tried to justify his behavior while they were still prisoners. "I had to tell them," he insisted to Dramesi, "or I would have died in bed."

Dramesi says he has no desire to dishonor McCain's service, but he believes that celebrating the downed pilot's behavior as heroic — "he wasn't exceptional one way or the other" — has a corrosive effect on military discipline. "This business of my country before my life?" Dramesi says. "Well, he had that opportunity and failed miserably. If it really were country first, John McCain would probably be walking around without one or two arms or legs — or he'd be dead."

Once the Vietnamese realized they had captured the man they called the "crown prince," they had every motivation to keep McCain alive. His value as a propaganda tool and bargaining chip was far greater than any military intelligence he could provide, and McCain knew it. "It was hard not to see how pleased the Vietnamese were to have captured an admiral's son," he writes, "and I knew that my father's identity was directly related to my survival." But during the course of his medical treatment, McCain followed through on his offer of military information. Only two weeks after his capture, the North Vietnamese press issued a report — picked up by The New York Times — in which McCain was quoted as saying that the war was "moving to the advantage of North Vietnam and the United States appears to be isolated." He also provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid.

THE CONFESSION

In the company of his fellow POWs, and later in isolation, McCain slowly and miserably recovered from his wounds. In June 1968, after three months in solitary, he was offered what he calls early release. In the official McCain narrative, this was the ultimate test of mettle. He could have come home, but keeping faith with his fellow POWs, he chose to remain imprisoned in Hanoi.

What McCain glosses over is that accepting early release would have required him to make disloyal statements that would have violated the military's Code of Conduct. If he had done so, he could have risked court-martial and an ignominious end to his military career. "Many of us were given this offer," according to Butler, McCain's classmate who was also taken prisoner. "It meant speaking out against your country and lying about your treatment to the press. You had to 'admit' that the U.S. was criminal and that our treatment was 'lenient and humane.' So I, like numerous others, refused the offer."

"He makes it sound like it was a great thing to have accomplished," says Dramesi. "A great act of discipline or strength. That simply was not the case." In fairness, it is difficult to judge McCain's experience as a POW; throughout most of his incarceration he was the only witness to his mistreatment. Parts of his memoir recounting his days in Hanoi read like a bad Ian Fleming novel, with his Vietnamese captors cast as nefarious Bond villains. On the Fourth of July 1968, when he rejected the offer of early release, an officer nicknamed "Cat" got so mad, according to McCain, that he snapped a pen he was holding, splattering ink across the room.

"They taught you too well, Mac Kane," Cat snarled, kicking over a chair. "They taught you too well."

The brutal interrogations that followed produced results. In August 1968, over the course of four days, McCain was tortured into signing a confession that he was a "black criminal" and an "air pirate."

"John allows the media to make him out to be the hero POW, which he knows is absolutely not true, to further his political goals," says Butler. "John was just one of about 600 guys. He was nothing unusual. He was just another POW."

McCain has also allowed the media to believe that his torture lasted for the entire time he was in Hanoi. At the Republican convention, Fred Thompson said of McCain's torture, "For five and a half years this went on." In fact, McCain's torture ended after two years, when the death of Ho Chi Minh in September 1969 caused the Vietnamese to change the way they treated POWs. "They decided it would be better to treat us better and keep us alive so they could trade us in for real estate," Butler recalls.

By that point, McCain had become the most valuable prisoner of all: His father was now directing the war effort as commander in chief of all U.S. forces in the Pacific. McCain spent the next three and a half years in Hanoi biding his time, trying to put on weight and regain his strength, as the bombing ordered by his father escalated. By the time he and other POWs were freed in March 1973 as a result of the Paris Peace Accords, McCain was able to leave the prison camp in Hanoi on his own feet.

Even those in the military who celebrate McCain's patriotism and sacrifice question why his POW experience has been elevated as his top qualification to be commander in chief. "It took guts to go through that and to come out reasonably intact and able to pick up the pieces of your life and move on," says Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, who has known McCain since the 1980s. "It is unquestionably a demonstration of the character of the man. But I don't think that it is a special qualification for being president of the United States. In some respects, I'm not sure that's the kind of character I want sitting in the Oval Office. I'm not sure that much time in a prisoner-of-war status doesn't do something to you. Doesn't do something to you psychologically, doesn't do something to you that might make you a little more volatile, a little less apt to listen to reason, a little more inclined to be volcanic in your temperament."

"A BELLICOSE HAWK"

The reckless, womanizing hotshot who leaned on family connections for advancement before his capture in Vietnam emerged a reckless, womanizing celebrity who continued to pull strings. The real difference between the McCain of 1967 and the McCain of 1973 was that the latter's ambition was now on overdrive. He wanted to study at the National War College — but military brass turned him down as underqualified. So McCain appealed the decision to the top: John Warner, the Secretary of the Navy and a friend of his father. Warner, who now serves in the Senate alongside McCain, overruled the brass and gave the POW a slot. McCain also got his wings back, even though his injuries prevented him from raising his hands above shoulder height to comb his own hair.

McCain was eager to make up for lost time — and the times were favorable to a high-profile veteran willing to speak out in favor of the war. With the Senate moving to cut off funds for the Nixon administration's illegal bombing of Cambodia, the president needed all the help he could get. Two months after his release, McCain related his harrowing story of survival in a 13-page narrative in U.S. News & World Report, at the end of which he launched into an energetic defense of Nixon's discredited foreign policy. "I admire President Nixon's courage," he wrote. "It is difficult for me to understand . . . why people are still criticizing his foreign policy — for example, the bombing in Cambodia."

In the years to come, McCain would continue to fight the war his father had lost. In his meetings with Nixon, Junior was known for chomping on an unlit cigar, complaining about the "goddamn gooks" and pushing to bomb enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia. His son was equally gung-ho. "John has always been a very bellicose hawk," says John H. Johns, a retired brigadier general who studied with McCain at the War College. "When he came back from Vietnam, he accused the liberal media of undermining national will, that we could have won in Vietnam if we had the national will."

It was the kind of tough talk that made McCain a fast-rising star in far-right circles. Through Ross Perot, a friend of Ronald Reagan who had championed the cause of the POWs, McCain was invited to meet with the then-governor of California and his wife. Impressed, Reagan invited McCain to be the keynote speaker at his annual "prayer breakfast" in Sacramento.

Then, at the end of 1974, McCain finally achieved the goal he had been working toward for years. He was installed as the commanding officer of the largest air squadron in the Navy — the Replacement Air Group based in Jacksonville, Florida — training carrier pilots. It was a post for which McCain flatly admits, "I was not qualified." By now, however, he was unembarrassed by his own nepotism. At the ceremony commemorating his long-sought ascension to command, his father looking on with pride, McCain wept openly.

BOOZE AND PORK

If heroism is defined by physical suffering, Carol McCain is every bit her ex-husband's equal. Driving alone on Christmas Eve 1969, she skidded out on a patch of ice and crashed into a telephone pole. She would spend six months in the hospital and undergo 23 surgeries. The former model McCain bragged of to his buddies in the POW camp as his "long tall Sally" was now five inches shorter and walked with crutches.

By any standard, McCain treated her contemptibly. Whatever his dreams of getting laid in Rio, he got plenty of ass during his command post in Jacksonville. According to biographer Robert Timberg, McCain seduced his conquests on off-duty cross-country flights — even though adultery is a court-martial offense. He was also rumored to be romantically involved with a number of his subordinates.

In 1977, McCain was promoted to captain and became the Navy's liaison to the Senate — the same politically connected post once occupied by his father. He took advantage of the position to buddy up to young senators like Gary Hart, William Cohen and Joe Biden. He was also taken under the wing of another friend of his father: Sen. John Tower, the powerful Texas Republican who would become his political mentor. Despite the promotion, McCain continued his adolescent carousing: On a diplomatic trip to Saudi Arabia with Tower, he tried to get some tourists he disliked in trouble with the authorities by littering the room-service trays outside their door with empty bottles of alcohol.

As the Navy's top lobbyist, McCain was supposed to carry out the bidding of the secretary of the Navy. But in 1978 he went off the reservation. Vietnam was over, and the Carter administration, cutting costs, had decided against spending $2 billion to replace the aging carrier Midway. The secretary agreed with the administration's decision. Readiness would not be affected. The only reason to replace the carrier — at a cost of nearly $7 billion in today's dollars — was pork-barrel politics.

Although he now crusades against wasteful military spending, McCain had no qualms about secretly lobbying for a pork project that would pay for a dozen Bridges to Nowhere. "He did a lot of stuff behind the back of the secretary of the Navy," one lobbyist told Timberg. Working his Senate connections, McCain managed to include a replacement for the Midway in the defense authorization bill in 1978. Carter, standing firm, vetoed the entire spending bill to kill the carrier. When an attempt to override the veto fell through, however, McCain and his lobbyist friends didn't give up the fight. The following year, Congress once again approved funding for the carrier. This time, Carter — his pork-busting efforts undone by a turncoat Navy liaison — signed the bill.

In the spring of 1979, while conducting official business for the Navy, the still-married McCain encountered Cindy Lou Hensley, a willowy former cheerleader for USC. Mutually smitten, the two lied to each other about their ages. The 24-year-old Hensley became 27; the 42-year-old McCain became 38. For nearly a year the two carried on a cross-country romance while McCain was still living with Carol: Court documents filed with their divorce proceeding indicate that they "cohabitated as husband and wife" for the first nine months of the affair.

Although McCain stresses in his memoir that he married Cindy three months after divorcing Carol, he was still legally married to his first wife when he and Cindy were issued a marriage license from the state of Arizona. The divorce was finalized on April 2nd, 1980. McCain's second marriage — rung in at the Arizona Biltmore with Gary Hart as a groomsman — was consummated only six weeks later, on May 17th. The union gave McCain access to great wealth: Cindy, whose father was the exclusive distributor for Budweiser in the Phoenix area, is now worth an estimated $100 million.

McCain's friends were blindsided by the divorce. The Reagans — with whom the couple had frequently dined and even accompanied on New Year's holidays — never forgave him. By the time McCain became a self-proclaimed "foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution" two years later, he and the Gipper had little more than ideology to bind them. Nancy took Carol under her wing, giving her a job in the White House and treating McCain with a frosty formality that was evident even on the day last March when she endorsed his candidacy. "Ronnie and I always waited until everything was decided and then we endorsed," she said. "Well, obviously, this is the nominee of the party."

THE CARPETBAGGER

As his marriage unraveled, McCain's naval career was also stalling out. He had been passed over for a promotion. There was no sea command on the horizon, ensuring that he would never be able to join his four-star forefathers. For good measure, he crashed his third and final plane, this one a single-engine ultralight. McCain has never spoken of his last crash publicly, but his friend Gen. Jim Jones recalled in a 1999 interview that it left McCain with bandages on his face and one arm in a sling.

So McCain turned to politics. Receiving advance word that a GOP congressional seat was opening up outside Phoenix, he put the inside edge to good use. Within minutes of the incumbent's official retirement announcement, Cindy McCain bought her husband the house that would serve as his foothold in the district. In sharp contrast to the way he now markets himself, McCain's campaign ads billed him as an insider — a man "who knows how Washington works." Though the Reagans no longer respected him, McCain featured pictures of himself smiling with them.

"Thanks to my prisoner-of-war experience," McCain writes, "I had, as they say in politics, a good story to sell." And sell it he did. "Listen, pal," he told an opponent who challenged him during a candidate forum. "I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived the longest in my life was Hanoi."

To finance his campaign, McCain dipped into the Hensley family fortune. He secured an endorsement from his mentor, Sen. Tower, who tapped his vast donor network in Texas to give McCain a much-needed boost. And he began an unethical relationship with a high-flying and corrupt financier that would come to characterize his cozy dealings with major donors and lobbyists over the years.

Charlie Keating, the banker and anti-pornography crusader, would ultimately be convicted on 73 counts of fraud and racketeering for his role in the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s. That crisis, much like today's subprime-mortgage meltdown, resulted from misbegotten banking deregulation, and ultimately left taxpayers to pick up a tab of more than $124 billion. Keating, who raised more than $100,000 for McCain's race, lavished the first-term congressman with the kind of political favors that would make Jack Abramoff blush. McCain and his family took at least nine free trips at Keating's expense, and vacationed nearly every year at the mogul's estate in the Bahamas. There they would spend the days yachting and snorkeling and attending extravagant parties in a world McCain referred to as "Charlie Keating's Shangri-La." Keating also invited Cindy McCain and her father to invest in a real estate venture for which he promised a 26 percent return on investment. They plunked down more than $350,000.

McCain still attributes the attention to nothing more than Keating's "great respect for military people" and the duo's "political and personal affinity." But Keating, for his part, made no bones about the purpose of his giving. When asked by reporters if the investments he made in politicians bought their loyalty and influence on his behalf, Keating replied, "I want to say in the most forceful way I can, I certainly hope so."

THE KEATING FIVE

In congress, Rep. John McCain quickly positioned himself as a GOP hard-liner. He voted against honoring Martin Luther King Jr. with a national holiday in 1983 — a stance he held through 1989. He backed Reagan on tax cuts for the wealthy, abortion and support for the Nicaraguan contras. He sought to slash federal spending on social programs, and he voted twice against campaign-finance reform. He cites as his "biggest" legislative victory of that era a 1989 bill that abolished catastrophic health insurance for seniors, a move he still cheers as the first-ever repeal of a federal entitlement program.

McCain voted to confirm Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. In 1993, he was the keynote speaker at a fundraiser for a group that sponsored an anti-gay-rights ballot initiative in Oregon. His anti-government fervor was renewed in the Gingrich revolution of 1994, when he called for abolishing the departments of Education and Energy. The following year, he championed a sweeping measure that would have imposed a blanket moratorium on any increase of government oversight.

In this context, McCain's recent record — opposing the new GI Bill, voting to repeal the federal minimum wage, seeking to deprive 3.8 million kids of government health care — looks entirely consistent. "When jackasses like Rush Limbaugh say he's not conservative, that's just total nonsense," says former Sen. Gary Hart, who still counts McCain as a friend.

Although a hawkish Cold Warrior, McCain did show an independent streak when it came to the use of American military power. Because of his experience in Vietnam, he said, he didn't favor the deployment of U.S. forces unless there was a clear and attainable military objective. In 1983, McCain broke with Reagan to vote against the deployment of Marine peacekeepers to Lebanon. The unorthodox stance caught the attention of the media — including this very magazine, which praised McCain's "enormous courage." It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. McCain recognized early on how the game was played: The Washington press corps "tend to notice acts of political independence from unexpected quarters," he later noted. "Now I was debating Lebanon on programs like MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. I was gratified by the attention and eager for more."

When McCain became a senator in 1986, filling the seat of retiring Republican icon Barry Goldwater, he was finally in a position that a true maverick could use to battle the entrenched interests in Washington. Instead, McCain did the bidding of his major donor, Charlie Keating, whose financial empire was on the brink of collapse. Federal regulators were closing in on Keating, who had taken federally insured deposits from his Lincoln Savings and Loan and leveraged them to make wildly risky real estate ventures. If regulators restricted his investments, Keating knew, it would all be over.

In the year before his Senate run, McCain had championed legislation that would have delayed new regulations of savings and loans. Grateful, Keating contributed $54,000 to McCain's Senate campaign. Now, when Keating tried to stack the federal regulatory bank board with cronies, McCain made a phone call seeking to push them through. In 1987, in an unprecedented display of political intimidation, McCain also attended two meetings convened by Keating to pressure federal regulators to back off. The senators who participated in the effort would come to be known as the Keating Five.

"Senate historians were unable to find any instance in U.S. history that was comparable, in terms of five U.S. senators meeting with a regulator on behalf of one institution," says Bill Black, then deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, who attended the second meeting. "And it hasn't happened since."

Following the meetings with McCain and the other senators, the regulators backed off, stalling their investigation of Lincoln. By the time the S&L collapsed two years later, taxpayers were on the hook for $3.4 billion, which stood as a record for the most expensive bank failure — until the current mortgage crisis. In addition, 20,000 investors who had bought junk bonds from Keating, thinking they were federally insured, had their savings wiped out.

"McCain saw the political pressure on the regulators," recalls Black. "He could have saved these widows from losing their life savings. But he did absolutely nothing."

McCain was ultimately given a slap on the wrist by the Senate Ethics Committee, which concluded only that he had exercised "poor judgment." The committee never investigated Cindy's investment with Keating.

The McCains soon found themselves entangled in more legal trouble. In 1989, in behavior the couple has blamed in part on the stress of the Keating scandal, Cindy became addicted to Vicodin and Percocet. She directed a doctor employed by her charity — which provided medical care to patients in developing countries — to supply the narcotics, which she then used to get high on trips to places like Bangladesh and El Salvador.

Tom Gosinski, a young Republican, kept a detailed journal while working as director of government affairs for the charity. "I am working for a very sad, lonely woman whose marriage of convenience to a U.S. senator has driven her to . . . cover feelings of despair with drugs," he wrote in 1992. When Cindy McCain suddenly fired Gosinski, he turned his journal over to the Drug Enforcement Administration, sparking a yearlong investigation. To avoid jail time, Cindy agreed to a hush-hush plea bargain and court-imposed rehab.

Ironically, her drug addiction became public only because she and her husband tried to cover it up. In an effort to silence Gosinski, who was seeking $250,000 for wrongful termination, the attorney for the McCains demanded that Phoenix prosecutors investigate the former employee for extortion. The charge was baseless, and prosecutors dropped the investigation in 1994 — but not before publishing a report that included details of Cindy's drug use.

Notified that the report was being released, Sen. McCain leapt into action. He dispatched his top political consultant to round up a group of friendly reporters, for whom Cindy staged a seemingly selfless, Oprah-style confession of her past addiction. Her drug use became part of the couple's narrative of straight talk and bravery in the face of adversity. "If what I say can help just one person to face the problem," Cindy declared, "it's worthwhile."

FAVORS FOR DONORS

In the aftermath of the Keating Five, McCain realized that his career was in a "hell of a mess." He had made George H.W. Bush's shortlist for vice president in 1988, but the Keating scandal made him a political untouchable. McCain needed a high horse — so his long-standing opposition to campaign-finance reform went out the window. Working with Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, McCain authored a measure to ban unlimited "soft money" donations from politics.

The Keating affair also taught McCain a vital lesson about handling the media. When the scandal first broke, he went ballistic on reporters who questioned his wife's financial ties to Keating — calling them "liars" and "idiots." Predictably, the press coverage was merciless. So McCain dialed back the anger and turned up the charm. "I talked to the press constantly, ad infinitum, until their appetite for information from me was completely satisfied," he later wrote. "It is a public relations strategy that I have followed to this day." Mr. Straight Talk was born.

Unfortunately, any lessons McCain learned from the Keating scandal didn't affect his unbridled enthusiasm for deregulating the finance industry. "He continues to follow policies that create the same kind of environment we see today, with recurrent financial crises and epidemics of fraud led by CEOs," says Black, the former S&L regulator. Indeed, if the current financial crisis has a villain, it is Phil Gramm, who remains close to McCain. As chair of the Senate Banking Committee in the late 1990s, Gramm ushered in — with McCain's fervent support — a massive wave of deregulation for insurance companies and brokerage houses and banks, the aftershocks of which are just now being felt in Wall Street's catastrophic collapse. McCain, who has admitted that "the issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should," relies on Gramm to guide him.

McCain also did his part to loosen regulations on big corporations. In 1997, McCain became chairman of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the insurance and telecommunications industries, as well as the CEO pay packages of those McCain now denounces as "fat cats." The special interests with business before the committee were big and well-heeled. All told, executives and fundraisers associated with these firms donated $2.6 million to McCain when he served as the chairman or ranking member.

The money bought influence. In 1998, employees of BellSouth contributed more than $16,000 to McCain. The senator returned the favor, asking the Federal Communications Commission to give "serious consideration" to the company's request to become a long-distance carrier. Days after legislation benefiting the satellite-TV carrier EchoStar cleared McCain's committee, the company's founder celebrated by hosting a major fundraiser for McCain's presidential bid.

Whatever McCain's romantic entanglements with the lobbyist Vicki Iseman, he was clearly in bed with her clients, who donated nearly $85,000 to his campaigns. One of her clients, Bud Paxson, set up a meeting with McCain in 1999, frustrated by the FCC's delay of his proposed takeover of a television station in Pittsburgh. Paxson had treated McCain well, offering the then-presidential candidate use of his corporate jet to fly to campaign events and ponying up $20,000 in campaign donations.

"You're the head of the commerce committee," Paxson told McCain, according to The Washington Post. "The FCC is not doing its job. I would love for you to write a letter."

Iseman helped draft the text, and McCain sent the letter. Several weeks later — the day after McCain used Paxson's jet to fly to Florida for a fundraiser — McCain wrote another letter. FCC chair William Kennard sent a sharp rebuke to McCain, calling the senator's meddling "highly unusual." Nonetheless, within a week of McCain's second letter, the FCC ruled three-to-two in favor of Paxson's deal.

Following his failed presidential bid in 2000, McCain needed a vehicle to keep his brand alive. He founded the Reform Institute, which he set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit — a tax status that barred it from explicit political activity. McCain proceeded to staff the institute with his campaign manager, Rick Davis, as well as the fundraising chief, legal counsel and communications chief from his 2000 campaign.

There is no small irony that the Reform Institute — founded to bolster McCain's crusade to rid politics of unregulated soft money — itself took in huge sums of unregulated soft money from companies with interests before McCain's committee. EchoStar got in on the ground floor with a donation of $100,000. A charity funded by the CEO of Univision gave another $100,000. Cablevision gave $200,000 to the Reform Institute in 2003 and 2004 — just as its officials were testifying before the commerce committee. McCain urged approval of the cable company's proposed pricing plan. As Bradley Smith, the former chair of the Federal Election Commission, wrote at the time: "Appearance of corruption, anyone?"

"HE IS HOTHEADED"

Over the years, John McCain has demonstrated a streak of anger so nasty that even his former flacks make no effort to spin it away. "If I tried to convince you he does not have a temper, you should hang up on me and ridicule me in print," says Dan Schnur, who served as McCain's press man during the 2000 campaign. Even McCain admits to an "immature and unprofessional reaction to slights" that is "little changed from the reactions to such provocations I had as a schoolboy."

McCain is sensitive about his physical appearance, especially his height. The candidate is only five-feet-nine, making him the shortest party nominee since Michael Dukakis. On the night he was elected senator in 1986, McCain exploded after discovering that the stage setup for his victory speech was too low; television viewers saw his head bobbing at the bottom of the screen, his chin frequently cropped from view. Enraged, McCain tracked down the young Republican who had set up the podium, prodding the volunteer in the chest while screaming that he was an "incompetent little shit." Jon Hinz, the director of the Arizona GOP, separated the senator from the young man, promising to get him a milk crate to stand on for his next public appearance.

During his 1992 campaign, at the end of a long day, McCain's wife, Cindy, mussed his receding hair and needled him playfully that he was "getting a little thin up there." McCain reportedly blew his top, cutting his wife down with the kind of language that had gotten him hauled into court as a high schooler: "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." Even though the incident was witnessed by three reporters, the McCain campaign denies it took place.

In the Senate — where, according to former GOP Sen. Bob Smith, McCain has "very few friends" — his volcanic temper has repeatedly led to explosive altercations with colleagues and constituents alike. In 1992, McCain got into a heated exchange with Sen. Chuck Grassley over the fate of missing American servicemen in Vietnam. "Are you calling me stupid?" Grassley demanded. "No, I'm calling you a fucking jerk!" yelled McCain. Sen. Bob Kerrey later told reporters that he feared McCain was "going to head-butt Grassley and drive the cartilage in his nose into his brain." The two were separated before they came to blows. Several years later, during another debate over servicemen missing in action, an elderly mother of an MIA soldier rolled up to McCain in her wheelchair to speak to him about her son's case. According to witnesses, McCain grew enraged, raising his hand as if to strike her before pushing her wheelchair away.

McCain has called Paul Weyrich, who helped steer the Republican Party to the right, a "pompous self-serving son of a bitch" who "possesses the attributes of a Dickensian villain." In 1999, he told Sen. Pete Domenici, the Republican chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, that "only an asshole would put together a budget like this."

Last year, after barging into a bipartisan meeting on immigration legislation and attempting to seize the reins, McCain was called out by fellow GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. "Wait a second here," Cornyn said. "I've been sitting in here for all of these negotiations and you just parachute in here on the last day. You're out of line." McCain exploded: "Fuck you! I know more about this than anyone in the room." The incident foreshadowed McCain's 11th-hour theatrics in September, when he abruptly "suspended" his campaign and inserted himself into the Wall Street bailout debate at the last minute, just as congressional leaders were attempting to finalize a bipartisan agreement.

At least three of McCain's GOP colleagues have gone on record to say that they consider him temperamentally unsuited to be commander in chief. Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, has said that McCain's "temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him." Sen. Domenici of New Mexico has said he doesn't "want this guy anywhere near a trigger." And Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi weighed in that "the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded."

McCain's frequently inappropriate humor has also led many to question his self-control. In 1998, the senator told a joke about President Clinton's teenage daughter at a GOP fundraiser. "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?" McCain asked. "Because her father is Janet Reno!"

More recently, McCain's jokes have heightened tensions with Iran. The senator once cautioned that "the world's only superpower . . . should never make idle threats" — but that didn't stop him from rewriting the lyrics to a famous Beach Boys tune. In April 2007, when a voter at a town-hall session asked him about his policy toward Tehran, McCain responded by singing, "bomb bomb bomb" Iran. The loose talk was meant to incite the GOP base, but it also aggravated relations with Iran, whose foreign minister condemned McCain's "jokes about genocide" as a testament to his "disturbed state of mind" and "warmongering approach to foreign policy."

"NEXT UP, BAGHDAD!"

The myth of John McCain hinges on two transformations — from pampered flyboy to selfless patriot, and from Keating crony to incorruptible reformer — that simply never happened. But there is one serious conversion that has taken root in McCain: his transformation from a cautious realist on foreign policy into a reckless cheerleader of neoconservatism.

"He's going to be Bush on steroids," says Johns, the retired brigadier general who has known McCain since their days at the National War College. "His hawkish views now are very dangerous. He puts military at the top of foreign policy rather than diplomacy, just like George Bush does. He and other neoconservatives are dedicated to converting the world to democracy and free markets, and they want to do it through the barrel of a gun."

McCain used to believe passionately in the limits of American military power. In 1993, he railed against Clinton's involvement in Somalia, sponsoring an amendment to cut off funds for the troops. The following year he blasted the idealistic aims of sending U.S. troops to Haiti, taking to the Senate floor to propose an immediate withdrawal. He even started out a fierce opponent of NATO air strikes on Serbia during the war in the Balkans.

But such concerns went out the window when McCain began gearing up to run for president. In 1998, he formed a political alliance with William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, who became one of his closest advisers. Randy Scheunemann — a hard-right lobbyist who was promoting Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi — came aboard as McCain's top foreign-policy adviser. Before long, the senator who once cautioned against "trading American blood for Iraqi blood" had been reborn as a fire-breathing neoconservative who believes in using American military might to spread American ideals — a belief he describes as a "sacred duty to suffer hardship and risk danger to protect the values of our civilization and impart them to humanity." By 1999, McCain was championing what he called "rogue state rollback." First on the hit list: Iraq.

Privately, McCain brags that he was the "original neocon." And after 9/11, he took the lead in agitating for war with Iraq, outpacing even Dick Cheney in the dissemination of bogus intelligence about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. "There's other organizations besides Mr. bin Laden who are bent on the destruction of the United States," he warned in an appearance on Hardball on September 12th. "It isn't just Afghanistan. We're talking about Syria, Iraq, Iran, perhaps North Korea, Libya and others." A few days later, he told Jay Leno's audience that "some other countries" — possibly Iraq, Iran and Syria — had aided bin Laden.

A month after 9/11, with the U.S. bombing Kabul and reeling from the anthrax scare, McCain assured David Letterman that "we'll do fine" in Afghanistan. He then added, unbidden, "The second phase is Iraq. Some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq."

Later that month on Larry King, McCain raised the specter of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction before he peddled what became Dick Cheney's favorite lie: "The Czech government has revealed meetings, contacts between Iraqi intelligence and Mohamed Atta. The evidence is very clear. . . . So we will have to act." On Nightline, he again flogged the Czech story and cited Iraqi defectors to claim that "there is no doubt as to [Saddam's] avid pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. That, coupled with his relations with terrorist organizations, I think, is a case that the administration will be making as we move step by step down this road."

That December, just as U.S. forces were bearing down on Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora, McCain joined with five senators in an open letter to the White House. "In the interest of our own national security, Saddam Hussein must be removed from power," they insisted, claiming that there was "no doubt" that Hussein intended to use weapons of mass destruction "against the United States and its allies."

In January 2002, McCain made a fact-finding mission to the Middle East. While he was there, he dropped by a supercarrier stationed in the Arabian Sea that was dear to his heart: the USS Theodore Roosevelt, the giant floating pork project that he had driven through over President Carter's veto. On board the carrier, McCain called Iraq a "clear and present danger to the security of the United States of America." Standing on the flight bridge, he watched as fighter planes roared off, en route to Afghanistan — where Osama bin Laden had already slipped away. "Next up, Baghdad!" McCain whooped.

Over the next 15 months leading up to the invasion, McCain continued to lead the rush to war. In November 2002, Scheunemann set up a group called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq at the same address as Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. The groups worked in such close concert that at one point they got their Websites crossed. The CLI was established with explicit White House backing to sell the public on the war. The honorary co-chair of the committee: John Sidney McCain III.

In September 2002, McCain assured Americans that the war would be "fairly easy" with an "overwhelming victory in a very short period of time." On the eve of the invasion, Hardball host Chris Matthews asked McCain, "Are you one of those who holds up an optimistic view of the postwar scene? Do you believe that the people of Iraq, or at least a large number of them, will treat us as liberators?"

McCain was emphatic: "Absolutely. Absolutely."

Today, however, McCain insists that he predicted a protracted struggle from the outset. "The American people were led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach," he said in August 2006, "which many of us fully understood from the beginning would be a very, very difficult undertaking." McCain also claims he urged Bush to dump Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "I'm the only one that said that Rumsfeld had to go," he said in a January primary debate. Except that he didn't. Not once. As late as May 2004, in fact, McCain praised Rumsfeld for doing "a fine job."

Indeed, McCain's neocon makeover is so extreme that Republican generals like Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft have refused to endorse their party's nominee. "The fact of the matter is his judgment about what to do in Iraq was wrong," says Richard Clarke, who served as Bush's counterterrorism czar until 2003. "He hung out with people like Ahmad Chalabi. He said Iraq was going to be easy, and he said we were going to war because of terrorism. We should have been fighting in Afghanistan with more troops to go after Al Qaeda. Instead we're at risk because of the mistaken judgment of people like John McCain."

MR. FLIP-FLOP

In the end, the essential facts of John McCain's life and career — the pivotal experiences in which he demonstrated his true character — are important because of what they tell us about how he would govern as president. Far from the portrayal he presents of himself as an unflinching maverick with a consistent and reliable record, McCain has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to taking whatever position will advance his own career. He "is the classic opportunist," according to Ross Perot, who worked closely with McCain on POW issues. "He's always reaching for attention and glory."

McCain has worked hard to deny such charges. "They're drinking the Kool-Aid that somehow I have changed positions on the issues," he said of his critics at the end of August. The following month, when challenged on The View, McCain again defied those who accuse him of flip-flopping. "What specific area have I quote 'changed'?" he demanded. "Nobody can name it."

In fact, his own statements show that he has been on both sides of a host of vital issues: the Bush tax cuts, the estate tax, waterboarding, hunting down terrorists in Pakistan, kicking Russia out of the G-8, a surge of troops into Afghanistan, the GI Bill, storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, teaching intelligent design, fully funding No Child Left Behind, offshore drilling, his own immigration policy and withdrawal timelines for Iraq.

In March, McCain insisted to The Wall Street Journal that he is "always for less regulation." In September, with the government forced to bail out the nation's largest insurance companies and brokerage houses, McCain declared that he would regulate the financial industry and end the "casino culture on Wall Street." He did a similar about-face on Bush's tax cuts, opposing them when he planned to run against Bush in 2001, then declaring that he wants to make them larger — and permanent — when he needed to win the support of anti-tax conservatives this year. "It's a big flip-flop," conceded tax abolitionist Grover Norquist. "But I'm happy he's flopped."

In June of this year, McCain reversed his decades-long opposition to coastal drilling — shortly before cashing $28,500 from 13 donors linked to Hess Oil. And the senator, who only a decade ago tried to ban registered lobbyists from working on political campaigns, now deploys 170 lobbyists in key positions as fundraisers and advisers.

Then there's torture — the issue most related to McCain's own experience as a POW. In 2005, in a highly public fight, McCain battled the president to stop the torture of enemy combatants, winning a victory to require military personnel to abide by the Army Field Manual when interrogating prisoners. But barely a year later, as he prepared to launch his presidential campaign, McCain cut a deal with the White House that allows the Bush administration to imprison detainees indefinitely and to flout the Geneva Conventions' prohibitions against torture.

What his former allies in the anti-torture fight found most troubling was that McCain would not admit to his betrayal. Shortly after cutting the deal, McCain spoke to a group of retired military brass who had been working to ban torture. According to Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former deputy, McCain feigned outrage at Bush and Cheney, as though he too had had the rug pulled out from under him. "We all knew the opposite was the truth," recalls Wilkerson. "That's when I began to lose a little bit of my respect for the man and his bona fides as a straight shooter."

But perhaps the most revealing of McCain's flip-flops was his promise, made at the beginning of the year, that he would "raise the level of political dialogue in America." McCain pledged he would "treat my opponents with respect and demand that they treat me with respect." Instead, with Rove protégé Steve Schmidt at the helm, McCain has turned the campaign into a torrent of debasing negativity, misrepresenting Barack Obama's positions on everything from sex education for kindergarteners to middle-class taxes. In September, in one of his most blatant embraces of Rove-like tactics, McCain hired Tucker Eskew — one of Rove's campaign operatives who smeared the senator and his family during the 2000 campaign in South Carolina.

Throughout the campaign this year, McCain has tried to make the contest about honor and character. His own writing gives us the standard by which he should be judged. "Always telling the truth in a political campaign," he writes in Worth the Fighting For, "is a great test of character." He adds: "Patriotism that only serves and never risks one's self-interest isn't patriotism at all. It's selfishness. That's a lesson worth relearning from time to time." It's a lesson, it would appear, that the candidate himself could stand to relearn.

"I'm sure John McCain loves his country," says Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar under Bush. "But loving your country and lying to the American people are apparently not inconsistent in his view."

Some U.S.- Mexican Border Crossing Statistics/Year

2010-02-22T17:24:00.000-08:00

Is it any wonder that we cannot protect our country form terrorists?
4,276,000 Trucks

72,356,000 Cars

Illegals caught 540,865 (I wonder how many were released.)

Legal crossings 194,133,000

Petroleum & natural gas $23,155,896,000

Marijuana seized $1,147,584,000

Cocaine seized $422,037,000

Strawberries $144,957, 000

Cattle $349,053,000

Cheese $15,436,000

Border Agents 17,324

Border length 1,993 miles

Marijuana seizures per agent $66,263

Cocaine seizures per agent $24,361

Agents per mile of border 8.69

2010-02-22T15:36:00.000-08:00

February 22, 2010

Open Letter to Rep. Luis Gutierrez:

In your introductory remarks for H.R. 4321 you made a number of statements that warrant a response. What you call “real immigration reform” in your bill turns out to be a complete emasculation of our immigration system and immigration laws. The kind of Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) most Americans will support is a far different thing from what you propose and what was previously proposed in the CIR bills that failed in 2007 and 2008.

The key question is whose or what CIR concept is best for our country? You have chosen to present a bill which you may believe to be best for you and for your illegal ethnic brethren but it is not what is best for our country. Your bill places the interests of foreigners above those of your fellow citizens. If you consider yourself a loyal American, the ethnocentrism evident in H.R. 4321is totally inappropriate.

There are many important and significant facts that you and the Hispanic Caucus have either chosen to ignore or are completely oblivious to. While the negative impacts of illegal aliens and excessive legal immigration on the 10-17% unemployment rate and the rising health care costs play an important role in America’s antithesis to your version of CIR, they are not the only considerations by any means. Nevertheless, in these times of high unemployment it is unconscionable to suggest that we need more rather than fewer legal immigrants and that we should grant amnesty to illegal aliens rather than expediting their removal.

The legal immigration quota should be reduced to the historical level of about 200,000 per year exclusive of tourists, students, and migrant farm workers who are willing to return to their homelands when the harvest is in. What you propose is just the opposite and, if enacted, would surely have an adverse effect on the long term well-being of our country and the future of our descendents.

Illegal aliens flood our emergency rooms and hospitals and soak up Medicare funds that are badly needed by citizens. Certainly this drain must have some bearing on health care costs, the health care crisis, and the billions of dollars that are spent on Medicaid. Are illegal aliens responsible for all health care cost increases and all unemployment? Of course not! Are they important undeniable factors in both Medicaid costs and the number of citizens unemployed? Of course!

The immigrants America is attracting these days are mostly poor and badly educated. They reproduce, fall ill, struggle with school, require hiring of paid interpreters, multi-lingual ballots and other government publications, and create instant citizens who drain the welfare and Medicaid budgets of states like Texas and California. Fifty three percent of immigrant households with children collected welfare from at least one government program in 2008. These programs include food stamps, Medicaid, Aid to Dependent Children, and free school lunches.

These are not people doing "jobs Americans won't do." These are people getting benefits that drain the coffers of states already in deep financial difficulty.

Each day at Parkland Hospital, Dallas, Texas some 32 babies of illegal alien parents, mostly Mexican, are born into instant U.S. citizenship. In fiscal 2006, that was 75 percent of the 16,489 deliveries. Medicaid pays the bill—or at least some of it, some of the time. Do you suppose there is any relationship between this and the need to increase the Medicaid budget every year draining funds from other important programs?

One wonders where all of this Medicaid expense and the emergency room losses are factored into the calculations of those who praise the illegal aliens as a good labor source. Isn’t it time we required all employers to provide full family health care insurance for all of their foreign employees? Is it any wonder that our nation faces a health care crisis, that Medicare is all but bankrupt, and that gazillions have to be paid out in Medicaid? Does anyone believe Gutierrez-brand CIR will solve these problems?

Your sarcasm regarding global warming and traffic congestion is misplaced. Americans produce 20 metric tons of pollutants per capita annually. Adding another 300 million people by the end of this century will produce another 6 billion tons of pollutants annually at the present rate. Even if, by some technological miracle, we were to be able to reduce our per capita output by half, to that of Mexico’s 10 metric tons per year, we would still have made absolutely no progress toward reducing the present unacceptable level as our population doubles. Have the Hispanic Caucus and the immigration lobbies thought about that or are they ignoring this inconvenient truth?

The “limit” of finite natural resources per capita as population grows without bounds is zero. The more there are of us, the less there is for each of us. How much farther down that road does the Caucus think we should go? I hope the answer is, “No más.”

There is a limit to the amount of the water that is available for domestic and agricultural uses, especially here in the Southwest where many Hispanics live. The burgeoning populations of cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Denver are soaking up the water resources needed to grow the food needed to feed the additional people. If you check out an atlas of California, you’ll notice that Owens Lake is filled in with white, not blue. That’s because Los Angeles sucked it dry decades ago. Las Vegas is considering similar plunder of groundwater elsewhere in Nevada. And there are many other cities—Houston and Tampa, to name a couple—that have chosen to push nature’s limits. We continue to plunder the Great Plains’ Ogallala Aquifer, the largest underground reservoir in the United States and one of the largest on the planet. It once held as much water as Lake Huron. It is a treasure that took millennia to accumulate. Remarkably, it could cease to be a water resource within another generation. We are left with yet another illustration of an all too common American mindset: short on vision, mired in denial and unable to comprehend nature’s limits.

Water rights bought up by cities means there will be land that can no longer be productive. This is clearly a losing proposition that needs recognition in any proposed immigration reform bill. With immigration, legal and illegal, adding up to 2 million people a year to a population that is already too large, we are setting ourselves up for a disaster.

Legal immigrants in excess of the historic level of about 200,000 per year, illegal aliens, their progeny, and their higher fertility rates are the main factors in population growth and the depletion of finite natural resources. The fertility rate of American women is near the replacement level of 2.1. It follows that immigration and tax policy reforms are needed to address population growth as an issue of vital importance to the future of our country. Your version of CIR flies in the face of these facts.

You may consider the immigrant blame game to be deplorable but that view ignores the real and significant adverse impacts excessive legal immigration and the presence of illegal aliens have on our country and will have on its future. This is not to deny the many contributions of legal immigrants and even some of the illegals who are willing to do the hardest work our economy requires. Nevertheless, we must limit the amount of foreign labor we import to the demonstrated needs of our economy and make sure employer pay the full cost of foreign workers rather than offloading some of it on unsuspecting taxpayers. With the current high unemployment rate this is the perfect time to enact enlightened tax and immigration policies that achieve the goal of a stable population but I suppose that is too much to expect from a Congress that hasn’t seen a true statesman since the days of the late Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan.

In the immigration debate, some things are indeed constant. They never change but they are regularly ignored by those who have an axe to grind: immigration lawyers, the ethnocentric communities and their leaders, and, of course, employers who want to be absolved of their past sins and be assured of a continuous flow of cheap labor. They are pushing an agenda that does not bode well for the America we know and love. Does any reasonable person really believe we can double or triple our population without affecting our quality of life or standard of living? Population-driven economic growth is not sustainable in the long run? As I stated above, the more there are of us, the less there is for each of us, and that includes Hispanic citizens as well as everyone else. Why is this simple fact not understood by the Hispanic community and the pro-immigration lobby?

There are lots of people out there who give lip service to border security, just as you do, but, in the next breath, would deny us the tools we need to achieve that goal. They are wolves in sheep’s clothing. If the truth were known, they would be clearly recognized as open borders advocates. They are the worst of the anti-America, pro-immigration elements in our country.

So what would it take to secure our borders? First and foremost it is clear that the borders can never be absolutely secure. It is also clear that if illegal aliens think they will be home free once they escape the immediate environs of the border, secure borders will always be just a pipe dream. Secure borders requires a many- faceted approach: continuing improvements in border infrastructure and border patrol staffing, improvements in the rules of engagement, penalties for employers and foreign workers who violate the law, and vigorous and continuous internal enforcement. We desperately need mandatory E-Verify across the board for all employers and employees, new and current, public and private. It is the sine qua non of in depth border security. If we deprive illegals of job opportunities, they will have less incentive to come. If we quickly apprehend them and send them on their way, they will stop violating our borders. If we sentence them to six months work on the border infrastructure at minimum wage, they will have some time to think about their transgressions.

Separate immigration courts with judges or justices of the peace in residence at all detention centers with a mandate to make decisions within 24 hours of apprehension would also provide a disincentive for illegal entry. Certainly, appeals must be limited to one week. Contractors who operate detention facilities should be compensated based on throughput rather than detainee-days. Quick decisions could be enabled by the enactment of a rigid set of criteria to be used by these judges and JOPs. These criteria should explicitly exclude family separation as a basis for a favorable immigration decision. Adults under a removal order must take their minor children with them regardless of citizenship. Adult children who are citizens, of course, can make their own choices whether to leave with their parents or remain. This would be no different from the situations of other immigrants who left adult relatives behind when they came to this country. I have many relatives in Germany and Denmark who are perfectly content with the decisions of their ancestors to stay there while their brothers and sisters moved on. Those immigrants made the decision to start a new life here while their adult relatives were content to continue living in their homeland.

The issues of how many legal immigrants to admit each year, whether to end chain immigrations, and to provide yet another amnesty for illegal aliens are too important to allow mere politicians to exercise complete control without accountability to the American voters. Cynical politicians ignore what is best for America and pander to those who they believe can help them to achieve perennial re-election and the power that comes with it to do more damage.

The comments of TV personalities are often closer to the truth than the typical politician’s rants. And the American people generally agree with them except when they indulge in some over-the-top comment that goes too far in an attempt to make a point or simply to be entertaining. For every Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh there is a Chris Mathews or Keith Olbermann. They all play the ratings game. Immigrants are only secondarily to blame for some of the economic, financial, and other woes of our country. The real culprits are the Congress and the Administration who have failed to enact, promote, and enforce immigration policies in the national interest.

The incessant promotion of illegal aliens and excessive legal immigration is the most deplorable element of public debate in our nation. We have failed to deal with the facts of excessive legal immigration, the continued violation of our borders, and their long term adverse impacts on our standard of living and quality of life. We need to look no farther than the teeming masses of China, India, Bangladesh, and Sub-Saharan Africa to know what that would be like.

Something else that has been predictable, constant, and dishonorable is the way that many of our nation’s Hispanic citizens have responded to the illegal presence of so many millions of aliens who are their ethnic brethren. They should know that their fellow non-Hispanic citizens want the immigration laws to be enforced. They want illegals to be removed unless an employer can provide irrefutable evidence that they are unable to fill their jobs with citizen labor, even after extensive advertising offering a living wage and a hiring preference. Instead of behaving as loyal Americans and making common cause with their fellow citizens to achieve real immigration reform, some Hispanics support those who have violated our borders and flaunted the rule of law, the very foundation of all civilized societies. They avoid completely any thoughts about the long term negative consequences to themselves and their descendents. In that respect, they are like most of our shortsighted politicians whose myopic approach to legislation has created many of the problems we face today: a huge national debt; perennial budget deficits; a negative balance of trade; a fading manufacturing capability; wasteful spending on multi-lingual ballots and other government publications and proceedings; the unprecedented Social Security and Medicare unfunded liabilities; the burgeoning costs of Medicaid, the special interest appropriations to organizations like ACORN and La Raza; and immigration and tax policies that do not serve the best interests of this country. The ineptness of Congress in keeping our fiscal house in order is well-known and hopefully will result in the failure of many re-election campaigns.

Does anyone believe that the importation of millions of people from failed countries run by oligarchs will improve America? What is the probability that a Latinized America will be less like the America we know and love and more like the countries the illegals fled to come here?

The Congress has responded to the immigration and illegal alien problems year after year with faulty legislation. While immigrant proponents have come to the table, they have failed repeatedly to craft a workable solution to our urgent crisis. Instead they offer thousand page bills containing the same old loopholes that weaken our immigration laws rather than reform them. The American people have sat patiently waiting for some statesman in the Congress to introduce a bill that meets the fundamental criteria for effective reform and that is based on a careful assessment of the long-term impact of excessive population growth and the abandonment of the rule of law.

In the public debate, some commentators and critics have used harsh language to get the attention of the American people regarding immigration’s unarmed invasion and its deadly consequences. The opposition has responded with charges of nativism, xenophobia, and racism. Then they introduce another CIR bill that they claim will cure all the ills of the immigration system but which instead merely sweeps the illegal alien problem under the carpet by offering yet another amnesty and opens the floodgates for unneeded and unwanted population growth. They try to bully those who oppose their brand of negative reform.

Immigrant citizens marched in the street flying foreign flags and ripping the American flag from counter demonstrators’ hands. They say they are asking for fairness but those who are citizens they are already enjoying all the fairness and benefits of our great country has to offer. What they are really asking for is amnesty for their illegal alien ethnic brethren and open borders for others so that hundreds of thousands more can enter without difficulty to participate in governmental welfare and largess. They are not acting like loyal citizens. They are giving precedence to foreigners who have violated our borders over the wishes of the American people who place the national interest first.

They attend community meetings to plot how to achieve their goals. They often focus on the concept of family unity or reunification. Having created the problem themselves by entering our country illegally, they now want to be absolved so that they can remain here. It is not a question of family unity. It is a question of the rule of law. Families can remain unified by simply returning as a unit to their homeland. Minor children must always accompany their parents if they are ordered to be removed. Adult citizen children can make their own choice. A fair immigration policy is one which does not grant special favors to those who have entered our country illegally and which requires families to take responsibility for their own actions. Chain immigrations obviously should be limited to the spouses and children of those who have already become citizens. There is no need for legislation to stop tearing families apart. Everyone knows they are free to return to their countries of origin or stay there to begin with.

We all have learned something from our religious leaders, who have reminded us of these words from the good book: “You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’; but I say unto you, whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Indeed America has done this through a number of immigration bills and amnesties in the past but enough is enough. The bible surely does not expect anyone to continue to turn the other cheek. I believe our country has turned its cheek so many times that our collective head is spinning like a top.

It’s easy to be angry and frustrated about immigration but still America has turned the other cheek with patience and tolerance and dignity. But our good will and humanitarianism is not unlimited. Americans are saying, “No más!”

It is time for the Hispanic caucus to come to the table as Americans not as hyphenated Americans. It’s time to negotiate and compromise until we have determined what is in the best interests of our country, not what is in the best interests of illegal aliens or all those who wish to come here. Let’s break any comprehensive reform bill into a series of shorter bills that everyone can read and understand before any vote is taken. As you point out immigration bills need not be complicated. Neither should they be 1000 pages long.

And let’s put the debate on C-Span for all to see. Let’s begin with the reforms I have listed in the attachment. With patience, tolerance, and dignity and putting country first, we can achieve comprehensive immigration reform.

Our nation’s immigration policy should be pro-jobs, pro-rule of law, pro-secure borders, pro-stable population, pro-enforcement, and pro-security. A number of smaller bills were introduced previously in 2007 and 2008 that placed top priority on securing the borders before any other reforms could be considered. That was the correct approach but the powers that be in Congress scuttled those bills. They would have been a great beginning for immigration reform.

Legal immigrants must indeed learn English just as my grandparents and parents did. And they should not be granted citizenship until they are fully fluent in English. Multi-lingual ballots and other government publications and proceedings should be dispensed with by repealing Executive Order 13166. Those legal residents who are unable to achieve fluency will still be free of any threat of deportation. Their children will be able to achieve citizenship immediately as they progress through American schools learning English and Civics. The current English test for citizenship is a farce.

We’ve waited long enough. Just because America has turned its cheek in the past doesn’t mean we should turn away from what’s right, what is legal, and what is in the national interest. Just because we’ve been patient with illegal aliens, doesn’t mean we can wait forever for them to return to their homelands until they can enter legally.

America has given. America has granted amnesty. America has waited for its Hispanic citizens to act like loyal Americans. And America has compromised. But there are some fundamentals that America simply cannot negotiate away and cannot wait for one minute longer: secure borders, the need for illegal alien families to return to their homelands as a unit to maintain family unity, the opportunity for citizenship based only on the needs of our economy, singular citizenship and allegiance, paying taxes, social integration, and linguistic and cultural assimilation.

We need immigration reform that will secure our borders, identify those who in our country illegally, remove those who are surplus to the needs of our economy, punish employers who exploit immigrant labor or who employ illegal aliens; and reform that absolutely prohibits another amnesty or anything like it. We must assert our values and our principles as a nation of laws. We were once a nation of immigrants but no longer should be. In the early days of our nation, a largely unsettled continent lay before the Founding Fathers. Natural resources like land, water, fish, game, timber, and minerals seemed limitless. Now we know better. We are sending our treasure to despots in the Middle East and South America to buy oil while Congress and the Administration fail to exploit all of the domestic sources available. We have 300 million people in America and some would argue that is already too many. Certainly adding more people compounds the problems we are faced with in the economy, the environment, and in the availability of food, energy, and natural resources.

It is not enough to merely understand that we must secure our borders. We must backup that understanding with action and objective results. We have to agree to buttress infrastructure and staffing improvements at the border with changes in the rules of engagement and continuous and vigorous internal enforcement. We must begin with mandatory E-Verify across the board for all employers, public and private, and all employees, current and new. These are the minimum essentials for CIR beginning with border security are listed in the enclosure. Without internal enforcement it will be impossible to achieve border security. Everyone knows that.

I hope that you will give these remarks the thoughtful consideration they deserve.

cc Senator Bennett

Senator Udall

Rep. Polis

Comprehensive Immigration Reform

The essential elements of real comprehensive immigration reform in priority order are:

1. Secure our borders first before any other immigration reforms are considered.

a. Continue improvements in border infrastructure and staffing.

b. Buttress these improvements with comprehensive internal enforcement using as the primary tool mandatory E-Verify across the board for all employers, public and private, and all employees, new and current.

c. Demonstrate that the borders are secure with objective data collected by the border patrol and ICE regarding the number and trend of apprehensions at the border and internally and a valid estimate of the total number of illegals still present in the U.S.

d. Supplement objective data with secret surveys of all border patrol and ICE agents asking their opinions as to whether the borders are secure.

e. Solicit and implement ideas from the border patrol and ICE on how border security and internal enforcement can be improved.

f. Require all illegal aliens apprehended at the border or internally to spend six months working on border infrastructure at minimum wage before they are fingerprinted, photographed, DNAed, and escorted to the border.

g. Prohibit catch and release at the border and internally.

h. End voluntary self-removal by illegal aliens; all removals, self-removal or otherwise, must be considered involuntary so that if they return without the proper documents they will be considered felons and do a minimum of two years of hard time.

i. Require illegals and their employers identified via E-Verify to pay the cost of repatriation.

j. Revise the rules of engagement to permit hot pursuit of drug runners and the use of lethal force and granting immunity from prosecution for agents in the legitimate performance of their duties.

k. Establish a deadline beyond which the use of fraudulent documents and social security numbers will be considered a felony.

2. Tie legal immigration quotas to the U.S. total unemployment rate by sector, profession, or type of work. (For example, if the unemployment level among computer programmers is above the specified criterion, legal immigration in that sector would be halted.)

a. Limit legal immigration to no more than 200,000 per year. (All successful applicants must be briefed on the desirability of a stable population and the adaptation necessary to facilitate that goal and achieve a soft landing for a sustainable economy.)

b. Design immigration and tax policy to achieve a stable population, the conservation of energy and natural resources, and the reduction of environment-destroying pollution of all kinds.

c. Use “Cap and Trade” as one means for achieving a stable population. (Women who wish to have more than the replacement number of children, about 2.1 on the average per couple, will have to buy credits from those who wish to have fewer.)

2. Grant accelerated citizenship consideration to aliens who enlist in the armed forces for at least 4 years and who serve at least one tour in a combat zone.

3. Make English the official language of the United States to be used for all ballots and other government publications and proceedings at all levels of government. (Repeal Executive Order 13166 but make public interpreters available to those who cannot afford one and who do not have a family member who can serve in that capacity.)

a. Grant legal immigration priority to English speaking applicants who have the skills needed by America to stay competitive in a global environment. Give accelerated consideration to foreign PhD students in math, physical science, engineering, and MDs in medicine who wish to become American citizens and who are prepared to renounce all allegiance to foreign countries or potentates and any claim on dual citizenship.

b. Raise the bar for citizenship to real fluency in reading, writing, and speaking English rather than the current few words and phrases from a study guide. (Failure to achieve fluency would not be cause for deportation of legal residents.)

4. Require that at least one parent be a citizen of the U.S. before birthright citizenship can be granted under the 14th Amendment.

5. End chain immigrations, except for the spouses and children of those who have been granted citizenship.

6. Make Immigration Court decisions within 24 hours of apprehension. Allow only one week allowed for appeals.

7. Establish rigid criteria for successful appeals. (Successful grounds for an appeal of a removal order may include: evidence of social integration, and cultural and linguistic assimilation, testimony of employers and co-workers as well as evidence that their children are in school learning civics, citizenship and English and are willing to declare their sole allegiance to the U.S. and renounce any dual allegiance and citizenship Family unification is excluded as a basis for an appeal. All minor children, regardless of citizenship, must accompany parents under a removal order.)

8. Prohibit the flying of foreign national flags except at foreign embassies and consulates and by permit for parades on ethnic holidays honoring our immigrant past. (For example, Columbus Day, St. Patrick's Day, Bastille Day, and Cinco de Mayo.)

9. Build a string of triage and obstetric hospitals across on the other side of the borders and provide transport to those hospitals for any foreigners who show up at the border crossings who need medical assistance. Share the cost of constructing these hospitals with our neighbors but, in return, expect Mexico and Canada to staff them.

10. Prohibit unwarranted criticism of legal immigrants and violence against anyone based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual preference.

11. Allow employers to present irrefutable evidence that they have made a good faith effort to hire citizens by offering a living wage and a hiring preference before they can declare a hardship case for hiring foreign workers.

Culture Crisis or Health Care Crisis?

2010-02-22T14:29:00.000-08:00

Dear Mr. President:

During my shift in the Emergency Room last night, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient whose smile revealed an expensive shiny gold tooth, whose body was adorned with a wide assortment of elaborate and costly tattoos, who wore a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and who chatted on a new cellular telephone equipped with a popular R&B ringtone.

While glancing over her patient chart, I happened to notice that her payer status was listed as "Medicaid"! During my examination of her, the patient informed me that she smokes more than one costly pack of cigarettes every day and somehow still has money to buy pretzels and beer.

And, you and our Congress expect me to pay for this woman's health care? I contend that our nation's "health care crisis" is not the result of a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. Rather, it is the result of a "crisis of culture", a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on luxuries and vices while refusing to take care of one's self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance. It is a culture based in the irresponsible credo that "I can do whatever I want to because someone else will always take care of me".

Once you fix this "culture crisis" that rewards irresponsibility and dependency, you'll be amazed at how quickly our nation's health care difficulties will disappear.

Respectfully,

STARNER JONES, MD

Comprehensive Immigration Reform

2010-02-07T14:41:00.000-08:00

The essential elements of real comprehensive reform are not too hard to list:
1. E-verify across the board for all employers and all employees, public and private.
2. Legal immigration quotas tied to the U.S. unemployment rate by sector, profession, or type of work. (For example, if the unemployment level among computer programmers is above the specified criterion, legal immigration in that sector would be halted.)
3. Secure our borders first before considering amnesty for any illegal aliens. (Demonstrate that the borders have been secured with objective data from the border patrol regarding the number and trend of apprehensions at the border and internally. Supplement these objective data with the results of secret surveys or questionnaires completed by all border patrol and ICE agents. Ask their suggestions for completing the job.)
4. Recognize that the borders cannot be secured without vigorous and continuous enforcement based on E-Verify.
5. Illegals under removal orders must serve six month working on border infrastructure at minimum wage; two years for repeat offenders.
6. Grant legal immigration priority to English speaking applicants who have the skills needed by America to stay competitive in a global environment. Give accelerated consideration to foreign PhD students in math, physical science, engineering, and MDs in medicine who wish to become American citizens and who are prepared to renounce all allegiance to foreign countries or potentates and any claim on dual citizenship.
7. Raise the English bar for citizenship to real fluency rather than the current few words and phrases from a study guide.
8. Require that at least one parent be a citizen of the U.S. before birthright citizenship can be granted under the 14th Amendment.
9. End chain immigrations, except for the spouses and children of those who have been granted citizenship.
10. Grant accelerated citizenship for aliens who enlist in the armed forces for at least 4 years and who have served at least one tour in a combat zone.
11. Prohibit the flying of foreign national flags except at foreign embassies and consulates and by permit for parades on ethnic holidays honoring our immigrant past. (For example, Columbus Day, St. Patrick's Day, Bastille Day, and Cinco de Mayo.)
12. Illegals identified through E-verify must be detained for ICE processing.
13. Immigration court decisions should be made within 24 hours of apprehension with only one week allowed for appeals.
14. Successful grounds for an appeal of a removal order may include evidence of social integration, and cultural and linguistic assimilation. Testimony of employers and co-workers as well as evidence that any children are in school learning civics, citizenship and English may also be presented. Family unification is excluded as a basis for an appeal. All minor children, regardless of citizenship, must accompany parents under a removal order.
15. Legal immigration should be limited the historic level of no more than 200,000 per year. All such immigrants will be briefed on the desirability of a stable population and the adaptation necessary to facilitate that goal and achieve a soft landing for a sustainable economy.
16. Immigration and tax policy will be designed to achieve a stable population, the conservation of energy and natural resources, and the reduction of environment-destroying pollution of all kinds.
17. Cap and trade will be another means for achieving a stable population. Women who wish to have more than the replacement number of children, about 2.1 on the average per couple, will have to buy credits from those who wish to have fewer.
18. There will be no bashing of legal immigrants and no violence against anyone based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual preference.

Census Waste

2010-02-05T07:52:00.000-08:00

Christian Science Monitor: Homegrown terrorism a growing concern for US intelligence

Homegrown terrorism is a growing threat, US intelligence chief Dennis Blair said this week. But the number of American Muslims engaged in extremist activity remain small and still largely focused overseas.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0204/Homegrown-terrorism-a-growing-concern-for-US-intelligence

USA Today: Glitches still remain in Census count

Despite an unprecedented $340 million promotion that includes $130 million for ads in 28 languages (including Tagalog, Yiddish, Khmer, and Urdu), user guides in 59 languages and the Census questionnaire itself in six — English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese — glitches and gripes surround the Census effort.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2010-02-04-censusgripes_N.htm

One Nation under God

2009-12-30T11:29:00.000-08:00

Social Security under the Democrats

2009-12-28T10:32:00.000-08:00

After you read this you may have a different perspective on health care reform and all the promises the pols made to convince you it would be a good deal.

Franklin Delano. Roosevelt

32nd. President, Democrat

Terms of Office March 4, 1933, to April 12, 1945 Our Social Security

Franklin Delano. Roosevelt (Terms of Office March 4, 1933, to April 12, 1945), a Democrat, introduced Social Security (FICA) Program. He Promised:

1.) That participation in the Program would be Completely voluntary,

2.) That the participants would only have to pay 1% of the first $1,400 of their annual Incomes into the Program,

3.) That the money the participants elected to put Into the Program would be deductible from Their income for tax purposes each year,

4.) That the money the participants put into the Independent 'Trust Fund' rather than into the General operating fund, and therefore, would Only be used to fund the Social Security Retirement Program, and no other Government program, and

5.) That the annuity payments to the retirees would never be taxed as income.

Since many of us have paid into FICA for years and are now receiving a Social Security check every month -- and then finding that we are getting taxed on 85% of the money we paid to the Federal government to 'Put Away' -- you may be interested in the following:

----------THEN---------------------------------------------------

Dwight David Eisenhower

34th. President, Republican,

Term Of Office: January 20, 1953 to January 20, 1961
If I recall correctly, 1958 is the first year that Congress, not President Eisenhower, voted to remove funds from Social Security and put it into the General Fund for Congress to spend.

If I recall correctly, it was a democratically controlled Congress.

From what I understand,Congress' logic at that time was that there was so much money in Social Security Fund that it would never run out / be used up for the purpose it was intended / set aside for.

-------------WORSE STILL------------------------------------------------

Lyndon Banes Johnson 36th. President,Democrat

Term Of Office: November 22, 1963 to January 20, 1969

Question: Which Political Party took Social Security from the Independent 'Trust Fund' and put it all into the General Fund so that Congress could spend it?

Answer: It was Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat,Term of Office: November 22,1963 to January 20, 1969) and the democratically Controlled House and Senate.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Question: Which Political Party eliminated the income tax Deduction for Social Security (FICA) withholding?

Answer: The Democratic Party.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

William Jefferson Clinton

(Bill Clinton)

42nd. President

Democrat Term of Office: January 20, 1993 to January 20, 2001

Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.

(Al Gore)

45th. Vice President

Democrat Term of Office: January 20, 1993 to January 20, 2001

Question: Which Political Party started taxing Social Security annuities?

Answer: The Democratic Party, with Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. (Al Gore) [Vice President Term of Office: January 10, 1993 to January 20, 2001] casting the 'tie-breaking' deciding vote as President of the Senate, while he was Vice President of the US ....

------------------THE STRAW THAT BROKE THE CAMEL'S BACK !!---------------------

James Earl Carter, Jr

(Jimmy Carter)

39th President, Democrat

Term of Office: January 20, 1977 to January 20, 1981

Question: Which Political Party decided to start giving Annuity payments to immigrants?

AND MY FAVORITE:

ANSWER: That's right! JAMES EARL CARTER, JR. (JIMMY CARTER) (DEMOCRAT, TERM OF OFFICE: JANUARY 20, 1977 TO JANUARY 20, 1981 AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.

IMMIGRANTS MOVED INTO THIS COUNTRY, AND AT AGE 65, BEGAN TO RECEIVE SOCIAL SECURITY PAYMENTS: THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY GAVE THESE PAYMENTS TO THEM,EVEN THOUGH THEY NEVER PAID A DIME INTO IT!

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Then, after violating the original contract (FICA), the Democrats turn around and tell you that the Republicans want to take your Social Security away!

And the worst part about it is uninformed citizens believe it!

If enough people receive this, maybe a seed of Awareness will be planted and maybe changes WILL evolve! . Maybe not, some Democrats are awfully sure of what isn't so.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Thomas Jefferson

3rd. President, Democrat

Term of Office: January 20, 1777 to January 20, 1781

"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have".

Thomas Jefferson

America -- Founded as a Christian Nation

2009-12-25T20:21:00.000-08:00

And if one can READ History, this nation was founded on Christian Tenets, it was not secular it was Bible reading, Bible Based Christians from England.

Obama: "Although, as I mentioned, we have a very large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation."

Really? But didn't the Mayflower Compact proclaim the Pilgrims were establishing their colony for "the advancement of the Muslim faith." And what about "In Allah We Trust" on our coinage and currency, not to mention what's been called our second national anthem, "Allah Bless America"?

Seriously, if the "we" who don't consider ourselves a Christian nation refers to the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the editorial board of The New York Times, Obama is on target.

An April 3 Newsweek poll showed 62% of us do consider America "a Christian nation." But for those like our president, the nation's mood is determined not by the majority, but by the cultural elite - individuals who, by education and refinement, are entitled to shape the national consciousness for the rest of us.

Due to ignorance or willful blindness, throughout our history, most Americans, including our leaders, didn't understand that we are a secular republic - one nation under Rousseau, Darwin and the Humanist Manifesto (I and II).

Patrick Henry remarked: "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religions, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ."

The Constitution is dated "in the year of our Lord, 1787," in reference not to Allah, Krishna or Buddha, but to Jesus. Supreme Court Associate Justice Joseph Story, in his 1833 treatise on the Constitution, observed that the Founding Fathers believed "that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state."

In the 1931 case of U.S. v Macintosh (decided before the federal judiciary began to deconstruct the First Amendment), the Supreme Court declared, "We are a Christian people."

Every President of the United States, including B. Hussein Obama, took an oath to uphold the Constitution on a Bible. In every case save one, it was the King James Version.

Speaking of Obama's predecessors - clearly less enlightened and worldly than the Messiah-in-Chief and probably in thrall to the religious right - their opinion is unanimous:

George Washington: "It is impossible to govern rightly without God and the Bible." By the Bible, the Father of our Country was not referring to the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita.

John Adams: "The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were...the general principle of Christianity."

John Quincy Adams: "The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: It connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity."

Andrew Jackson: "The Bible is the rock upon which our Republic rests" - again, in reference to the Christian Bible, not the Lotus Sutra.

Abraham Lincoln: "Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty." The "present difficulty" that Lincoln believed Christianity would resolve favorably was a civil war in which more than 600,000 Americans died.

Before the McGovernite takeover of the Democratic Party (now under the direction of George Soros), the presidents of Obama's party also sang in the Christian-America choir.

Woodrow Wilson: "America was born a Christian nation. America was born to exemplify the devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelation of Holy Scripture."

Franklin D. Roosevelt, speaking of World War II: "Today, the whole world is divided, divided between human slavery and human freedom - between pagan brutality and the Christian ideal."

Harry S. Truman, writing to Pope Pius XII: "This is a Christian nation. ... It is not without significance that the valiant pioneers who left Europe to establish settlements here, at the very beginning of their colonial enterprise, declared their faith in the Christian religion and made ample provision for its practice and support."

John F. Kennedy, in the midst of the Cold War: "And yet the same revolutionary belief for which our forbearers fought is still at issue around the globe, the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God."

Thomas Jefferson said something strikingly similar: "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we remove their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God."

Still, the Great Community Organizer can blithely proclaim that America - which is 75% to 80% Christian - is no more a Christian nation than it is a Moslem nation.

In a 2007 speech, Obama qualified this opinion --"Whatever we once were, we're no longer a Christian nation."

The president thereby allowed for the possibility that America once was a Christian nation, but is no longer. But when did Christianity's dominance over American life end - with the Supreme Court's 1962 school-prayer decision, its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision or Bill Clinton staining an intern's dress with his bodily fluids circa 1995?

While insisting that "we" do not consider America a Christian nation, Obama praised the religion of peace. "We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better, including my own country."

Source: Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer

We Have a Constitution

2009-12-19T10:07:00.000-08:00

MESSAGE FROM AMERICA TO THE AMERICAN DELEGATES IN COPENHAGEN and PRESIDENT OBAMA

AND THE REST OF THE WORLD

In America, We Have a Constitution

It Begins: "We the People"

Our Constitution Requires International Agreements

to Be Agreed Upon By our Senate

Our President Does Not Have Support in our Senate

for Binding Carbon Emissions Limits

Our Environmental Protection Agency Recently Asserted It Has the Power to Impose Carbon Emissions Limits

Such Action would be Tantamount to our Executive Branch Taxing the American People without

Approval from the Elected Representatives in our Legislative Branch

That's Called "Taxation without Representation" and

We Will Not Stand for it

The American Revolution and a Famous Tea Party in

Boston in 1773 Was About Rejecting Taxation without Representation

We Reject Taxation without Representation even if it

is attempted by our President through an

international "political" agreement like the

Copenhagen 15

Through Our Election Process, our Presidents, Representatives, and Administrators Are

Accountable to the American People

Unlike Other Countries, We Do Not Have a

Democracy Deficit

In America, Mesdames and Messieurs, We the People Govern

--Lisaed

How did he know?

2009-12-05T09:16:00.000-08:00

It has been said the greatest volume of sheer brainpower in one place occurred when Jefferson dined alone...

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from thosewho are willing to work and give to those who would not.

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes.

A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

'I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered..' -- Thomas Jefferson

'If you don't read the newspaper [ or watch TV] you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper [or watch TV] you are misinformed.' --Mark Twain

Joys of Muslim Women - Obama's Folly

2009-10-12T12:55:00.000-07:00

In the Muslim faith a Muslim man can marry a child as young as 1 year old and have sexual intimacy with this child,consummating the marriage by age 9. The dowry is given to the family in exchange for the woman(who becomes his slave) and for the purchase of the private parts of the woman, to use her as a toy. Even though a woman is abused she can not obtain a divorce. To prove rape, the woman must have four male witnesses. (How likely is that?) Often after a woman has been raped, she is returned to her family and the family must return the dowry. The family has the right to execute her (an honor killing) to restore the honor of the family.

Husbands can beat their wives 'at will' and they do not have to say why they have beaten them. The husband is permitted to have four wives and atemporary wife for an hour (prostitute) at his discretion. The Shariah Muslim Law controls the private as well as the public life of the woman. In the West World (America) Muslim men are starting to demand Shariah Law so the wives can not obtain a divorce and the husbands can have full and complete control of them. It is amazing and alarming how many of our sisters and daughters attending American Universities are now marrying Muslim men and submitting themselves and their children unsuspectingly to the Shariah Law. By passing this on, enlightened American women may avoid becoming a slave under Shariah Law. Criticizing the West, the author says the goal of radical Islamists is to impose Shariah Law on the world, ripping Western law and liberty in two. The author's recent the book is Cruel and Usual Punishment:The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law . She was born in Cairo and spent her childhood in Egyptand Gaza before immigrating to America in 1978, when she was eight years old. Her father died while leading covertattacks on Israel. He was a high-ranking Egyptian military officer stationed with his family in Gaza. When he died, he was considered a "shahid," a martyr forjihad. His posthumous status earned Nonie and her family an elevated position in Muslim society. But Darwish developed a skeptical eye at an early age. She questioned her own Muslim culture and upbringing. She converted to Christianity after hearing a Christian preacher on television. In her latest book, Darwish warns about creeping Sharia Law- what it is, what it means, and how it is manifested in Islamic countries. For the West, she says radical Islamists are working to impose Sharia on the world. If that happens, Western civilization will be destroyed. Westerners generally assume all religions encourage a respect for the dignity of each individual. Islamic law (Sharia) teaches that non-Muslims should be subjugated or killed in this world. Peace and prosperity for one's children is not as important as assuring that Islamic law rules everywhere in the Middle East and eventually in the world. While Westerners tend to think that all religions encourage some form of the golden rule, Sharia teaches two systems of ethics - one for Muslims and another for non-Muslims. Building on tribal practices of the seventh century, Sharia encourages the side of humanity that wants to take from and subjugate others. While Westerners tend to think in terms of religious people developing a personal understanding of and relationship with God, Sharia advocates executing people who ask difficult questions that could be interpreted as criticism. It's hard to imagine that in this day and age, Islamic scholars agree that those who criticize Islam or choose to stop being Muslim should be executed. Sadly, while talk of an Islamic reformation is common and even assumed by many in the West, such murmurings in the Middle East are silenced through intimidation. While Westerners are accustomed to an increase in religious tolerance over time, Darwish explains how petro dollars are being used to grow an extremely intolerant form of political Islam in her native Egypt and elsewhere. In twenty years there will be enough Muslim voters in the U.S. to affect the election of Presidents by themselves! I think everyone in the U.S. should be required to read this, but with the ACLU, there is no way this will be widely publicized, unless each of us sends it on! This is your chance to make a difference.

by Author and lecturer Nonie Darwish

FREEDOM OF SPEECH!

2009-10-12T10:42:00.001-07:00

You are only lying to yourself if you think this isn't happening right now and right here in America. They have a camp in Virginia of all places. I know why--do YOU? If you don't care about yourselves? What about your kids and grandkids?

Radicals aim to set limits on our freedom of expression. In particular, radical groups seek to censure any individual or
group that speaks out against the dangerous threats of Radical Muslims.

These restrictions are a step towards the implementation of Sharia law in the West. Freedom of speech as we know it in the United States is not permitted in countries such as Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Libya and others. By limiting speech in the West, we are furthering the goals of Radical Muslims.

The direct outcome of these restrictions is the strangulation of our freedom of expression. In liberal societies, individuals are sometimes offended. Mutual respect is certainly commendable but it is not, and should not be, obligatory. Open debate, including the right to offend, ensures the existence of a free society.

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that, "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

U.S. Population On Track for 1.182 Billion

2009-08-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

For some time I have been writing about excessive population growth and its consequences for the environment, our finite natural resources, and our quality of life. It now appears that my worst fears are coming to pass. In the year 2000, the United States Bureau of the Census issued three population projections(Middle Series, Lowest Series, and Highest Series respectively) for the United States. To These are the most recent projections (in thousands) that go up to the year 2100.
For the year 2009, the three series show (in thousands) 297,436; 290,018; 307,060 respectively with the figure 286,322 added to show what the result would be if immigration was reduced to zero. For the year 2100, the three series show 570,954; 282,706; 1,182,390; and 377,444 for zero immigration respectively.

So, on which trajectory do we find ourselves? Answer: The Highest Series.

The Census Bureau's "Highest Series" projected the population of the United States would be 307,060,000 on July 1, 2009.

So, what did it turn out to be? The Census Bureau now estimates that we hit 307,070,000 people as of that date. That means we are almost precisely on the Highest Series trajectory. And that means we are on track for a population of 1.182 billion persons in the year 2100. For comparison, India currently has a population of 1.16 billion, and China 1.3 billion.(1)

The United States reached a replacement level fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman in the year 1972.

The majority of population growth since 1972 has been due to post-1970 immigrants and their descendants. They will account for nearly all of our population growth the rest of this century. Not that immigrants are bad people, but they tend to come from cultures where the women have a lot of children. The United States is on track to add its next 100 million people faster than any nation in the world except for Pakistan and India. The U.S. population for the year 2100 in a scenario where immigration is halted (the “zero migration series”) is 377 million persons.

There are those who find it convenient to ignore these facts but yet claim to be patriots. They are in actuality far from it. They are more like what Thomas Paine referred to as the "sunshine soldiers and summer patriots" back in the 1700s.

The attention of all citizens is essential to making sure that the United States does not become as populated as China or India. The immigration bills that citizens helped defeat in 2006 and 2007 each would have increased legal immigration to 2 million per year, and the legalized illegal aliens would have been entitled to bring in their extended families, who in turn would have been entitled to bring in their extended families in a snowballing process of virtually unlimited chain migration. There would also have been a guest worker program, and children born here to guest workers would have been U.S. citizens under current interpretation of the law. A population of 1 billion or more by the year 2100 would have been virtually locked in by either of those bills. This is a scenario that was completely outlandish even 15 years ago, but is now a distinct possibility if you do not make your voice heard.

Notes:
1. Robert E. Lang, Mariela Alfonzo, and Casey Dawkins, American Demographics, Planning Magazine, May 2009, at p. 13 and see Arthur C. Nelson, Mega Trends: Thinking Beyond the Crisis. Presentation at the University of Pennsylvania, March 17, 2009. http://www.upenn.edu/penniur/pdf/Nelson%20Presentation.pdf, at page 3 of 49.

2. The Census Bureau’s U.S. Population Clock is actually an estimate. The year 2000 Census revealed the U.S. population to be 6.8 million persons larger than the census bureau had previously estimated. One factor that could have already reduced population growth in 2009 is the recession. There are reports that families are having fewer children due to the uncertainty. The Center for Immigration studies recently concluded that the illegal population has dropped by more than 1.5 million persons in the past year. I do not know if the census bureau has incorporated those factors into the current Population Clock estimate.

3. The Census Bureau Working Paper describing the assumptions behind the population predictions can be found by clicking here.

Extort thy neighbor, or how to ruin a nation

2009-08-15T09:35:00.000-07:00

The code words used for so-called "health care reform," single-payer, universal coverage, etc. bring images into the minds of many of "free" health care, something for nothing.

When I was a boy, I was often puzzled why Dad didn't go for the special deals, discounts, etc. when we shopped for something. Now I understand that these were tricks crafted for the consumer looking for something for nothing. Dad knew that if you went after "something for nothing," you would be hooked and reeled in like a fish who took the bait. In the real world there is no "something for nothing." Those promising "something for nothing" have something else in mind. In the case of health care the "something else" is frightening. What would Dad have said about this?

Something for nothing is a trap for suckers.

How many voters in the last election thought they would get something for nothing with the "tax cut for 95%", or, worse, knew they would be mooching off the other 5%? How many votes were cast thinking more "goodies" would be coming from the government?

It didn't used to be like this. My great grandfather John C. was a teenager when his father, John M. died during the Civil War. As the only son, he undoubtedly had to carry the responsibility for the family. John C. later married and raised three sons and a daughter, and then two grandsons after the daughter died in childbirth. He and his wife Ida provided for the family by their own efforts on their small farm in Kentucky. They raised their own food or sold or traded what they produced for what they needed. They never asked the government or their neighbors to give them anything. John didn't go to some government office crying that he now had two orphans to take care of. They were self-reliant. They lived in a time when it was considered less than honorable not to be.

The moral code they lived by, which continued all the way down to my father, was "I refuse to accept what I have not earned." My father and mother held to that code, and would have considered accepting a hand-out (much less asking for one) profoundly immoral and lower than low. If some government agent had come to John C.'s farm demanding he give money to be used to support another or else, he would have been met with a few choice words unsuitable for this article, and probably a shotgun. John C. would have never have voted for a candidate promising to "spread the wealth around."

The Founders never intended to create a Constitution allowing the taking from one to give to another.

James Madison said:

Government is instituted to protect property of every sort.... This being the end of government, that alone is not a just government, ....nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest.

And John Adams:

Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist.

And Thomas Jefferson:

[A] wise and frugal government... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.

Samuel Adams believed the Constitution prohibited spreading the wealth around:

The Utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the Crown. [These ideas] are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court agreed with Samuel Adams in a 1795 decision:

The legislature, therefore, had no authority to make an act divesting one citizen of his freehold, and vest in it in another, without just compensation. ..... It is contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution.

Later courts strayed from the Constitution, as in the 1936 Butler case, saying that transfer of wealth from one citizen to another was allowed by virtue of the "General Welfare" statement in the Constitution. The judgment in the Butler case contains the remarkable statement:

It results that the power of Congress to authorize expenditure of public moneys for public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution.

This is a blank check and indeed a curious stretch of logic, since harming one citizen to benefit another cannot by definition promote the general welfare. President Obama's statement is equally self-contradictory:

..and I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody

Spreading the wealth will not be voluntary but forced by the power of the federal government. Suppose a fictitious individual (I'll call him Jack) decides he needs some extra funds. After living a life of excess, he finds himself in need of some medical procedures, and, by the way, some Viagra would be nice too. So Jack comes to my door and asks me to help. I tell him no. In a rational, civilized society, that would be the end of it. But Jack is more persistent. The next time he comes to my door there are a couple of burly-looking guys waiting in his car. He points to his "friends" and warns of serious consequences if I don't hand over the dough. Now in my little dictionary, this is called "extortion"

to get (money, etc.) from someone by force or threats

Extortion is, of course, illegal. Not easily intimidated, I refuse again. But Jack tries again, this time sending one of his burly-looking friends. Since I answered the door with a mean looking hammer in my hand, he goes away.

Jack really wants that Viagra, so he calls his Congressman. Later an IRS agent appears at my door. The IRS is not deterred by a hammer. The IRS agent carries the threat of incarceration in his briefcase. If I resist, I may find myself sharing a cell with one of Jack's burly friends. The conversation might go like this:

Me, "What are you in for?"

The burly guy, "Extortion, what about you?"

Me, "Resisting extortion."

Who can tell me why when Jack's friend visits, it is extortion, and when the government agent visits it isn't? No one can, because logically there is no difference. Ayn Rand in fact gives a slight moral edge to Jack's friend (from Collectivized Ethics in The Virtue of Selfishness):

In fact, the private hoodlum has a slight edge of moral superiority: he has no power to devastate an entire nation and his victims are not legally disarmed.

Who are the villains here?

Number one are the voters who choose politicians who will extort money for them from their neighbors. "Fair share of the rich" to these voters means they will be getting some of that money, with visions of free stuff dancing in their heads. As Will Rogers observed:

We say the way the government is run now is all nutty and that it's throwing money away. But anytime any is thrown our way, why we've never dodged it.

"Free" government money is not free, but has been extorted from your neighbors.

The other villain and the master at this extortion game is the modern Democratic Party, which might as well rename itself the Parasite Party. The road to power for the Democratic Party is by creating parasites of different groups, in essence, buying votes from the parasites by extorting from the hosts. By doing so, they pit one group of citizens against another. They manipulate the human emotions of compassion, greed, and envy for political gain. They make the claim to be compassionate, but never to anyone who has worked hard to produce wealth for themselves, instead promote hatred and envy of them.

People are tiring of being forced to pay for someone else. Anger is growing against politicians who have become elitist and tyrannical, with nothing but disdain for us "common folks." The time is rapidly approaching when too many parasites kill the host. As the wise Benjamin Franklin observed about the new Constitution,

Once the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the Republic.

America has not been free, prosperous, and economically strong by magic. No other-worldly force guarantees us a high standard of living. We are economically strong only because our people have been free to pursue their own wealth. This year there are numerous examples of businesses not expanding or hiring because of an anti-business administration. History is full of examples of the failure of collectivized schemes, including the miserable failure of the initial communal structure at Jamestown.

We are well down the road to ruining the nation. We the People need to remember the lesson of Jamestown, and reconsider the values of John C. and our ancestors.

by Gary Horne, The American Thinker

ObamaCare Fuzzy Math

2009-08-09T15:16:00.000-07:00

According the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2006 report, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States,” 46.9 million people are uninsured in the U.S. There’s only one problem with this statistic: approximately 31.85 million of them do not actually exist.

The numbers really cannot lie, although the report does. Out of a total population of 297.05 million, the report states on Page 20 that the “number of people covered by private insurance was… 201.7 million in 2006” and the “number of people covered by government health programs was… 80.3 million in 2006.”

Therefore, 282 million had insurance. Which means that out of a total population of 297.05 million, 15.05 million did not have insurance. Right?

Not at the U.S. Census Bureau. There, 297.05 million minus 282 million equals 46.9 million Americans uninsured. How?

Well, call it “fuzzy math.” In the above figure, taken from Page 20 of Census’ report, the fine print reads, “The estimates by type of coverage are not mutually exclusive; people can be covered by more than one type of insurance during the year.” But, nobody can be covered by insurance and not covered by it.

In other words, some 31.85 million people reported as uninsured in 2006 did have some coverage, and the Census included them in both categories. Why? They were probably between jobs at some point during the year, which is not abnormal.

It doesn’t mean they do not have access to health care at all. They were simply temporarily uninsured. Only 15.05 million people fell into the category of being completely uninsured according to the Census’ own data.

Of course, there’s an obvious problem with the use of the Census’ methodology. Nobody told the American people of this critical footnote.

Instead, as recently as July 22nd, they were told by Barack Obama that “This is not just about the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance. Reform is about every American who has ever feared that they may lose their coverage if they become too sick, or lose their job or change their job.”

He said it without any qualification. Without any footnote explaining the complex methodology that grossly overstates the amount of people without any health coverage at all. And certainly without explanation as to why he would propose offering health coverage to over 30 million people who actually have it.

According to the data, 10.1 million of the 46.9 million of Census’ reported uninsured were unemployed for the entire year, and 5.6 million worked part-time, which can safely be said for the most part not to have had access to care. Of the other 31.2 million, 22 million worked full-time, 8.6 million were under 18, and 542 thousand were 65 or older.

So, if we’re to believe Census’ report, every year, over 30 million Americans have coverage, subsequently lose that coverage, and then for most of the year fail to get new coverage.

Only that’s impossible, since 22 million of them were working full-time according to the report. They didn’t lose their jobs. So, how is it possible that they lost their coverage?

It isn’t. But, based upon the data, in the next year, roughly the same amount of people again had access to coverage, lost it, and then for most of the year failed to get new coverage—and yet did not lose their jobs.

Remarkably, the number of individuals without any insurance at all has remained about the same, meaning that folks who did lose insurance regain it in less than a year’s time. In both 2005 and 2006, the number of absolutely uninsured was 15 million. In the more recent 2007 report the number decreased to 13.6 million who had no health coverage at all. 285 million did have coverage out of a total of 298.6 million. So, what gives?

Simply put, the reports are wrong, and they have simply become the bureaucratic means of giving politicians the “proof” they want to fit their hypothesis of a “crisis.”

It therefore makes no sense to screw over the 285 million who already have coverage by completely reorganizing the entire system to offer welfare to some 13.6-15.05 million without it.

Because, it is not necessary for the government to take over the entire health care system, such as is proposed under ObamaCare, in order to offer health coverage to those people. And the politicians know it.

This is why they are making use of gross exaggeration to concoct the crisis of 47 million “uninsured.” It’s not about providing health care at all. It’s about expanding bureaucracy. It’s about a takeover. It’s about control. Only, now you know.