Displaying posts published in

September 2015

Keeping Track of Visa Violators Michael Cutler

The overlooked source of the nation’s illegal immigration problems that people are finally talking about.

On August 31, 2015 Reuters reported on Governor Christie’s August 31, 2015 statement that if elected president, he would engage Fed-Ex to track illegal aliens to make certain that aliens who violate their terms of admission are located. The title of the Reuter’s article was, “Christie defends plan to monitor immigrants like FedEx tracks parcels.” The article began with the following excerpt:

Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie pushed back on Sunday against “ridiculous” criticism of his proposal to track foreign visitors the way FedEx Corp tracks packages, saying government needs private-sector expertise to tackle illegal immigration.

“I don’t mean people are packages, so let’s not be ridiculous,” the New Jersey governor told an interviewer on Fox News Sunday who pointed out that foreigners do not have labels on their wrists.

The notion that the private sector is intrinsically better than the government is wrong. As you will shortly see, more than ten years ago, a private corporation, Accenture, was given the contract to implement such a tracking system.

Governor Christie is certainly right that we must be able to find aliens who go missing in the United States. He is also absolutely correct that people are not packages. People who ship packages want those packages to get to their customers; customers want their packages to be delivered. Finally, packages are incapable of moving on their own. Packages do not hide or use false aliases or bogus addresses.

Obama Secures Rubber Stamp for Iran Deal Catastrophe Nuclear Nightmare on the Horizon. Joseph Klein

Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland has pushed President Obama’s nuclear appeasement deal with Iran over the top. With her decision to vote in favor of the deal, Obama now has the support of the 34 senators he needs to uphold his expected veto of a congressional resolution of disapproval. If enough craven Democrats back a planned filibuster to prevent a vote on the floor of the Senate, Obama will not even have to use his veto pen.

The nightmare of a financially secure nuclear armed Iran, legitimized by the Obama administration and its international partners, is about to envelop us.

Ironically, Obama warned in a speech he delivered on September 1st in Alaska that a potentially bleak future could lie ahead, in which “there’s not going to be a nation on this Earth that’s not impacted negatively.”

Iran bars Daniel Barenboim over Israeli Citizenship —(Music to my ears….the “wunderkind” is a “wunderjerk”…rsk)

Iran has barred famed musician and conductor Daniel Barenboim from entering the country because of his Israeli citizenship, thwarting his plan to lead a performance in Tehran, media have reported.

Barenboim, the 72-year-old general music director of the Berlin State Opera House, said on Thursday he was in talks with Iran about a concert, in what would have been a major example of cultural diplomacy.

But an Iranian culture ministry spokesman, Hossein Noushabadi, said an investigation meant Barenboim could not enter the country for security reasons, though the Berlin orchestra was welcome.

“We have no problem with the German orchestra coming to Iran, but we are opposed to the person leading that group,” Noushabadi told news agency ISNA.

Sydney M. Williams Thought of the Day “A Culture of Meanness”

“Meanness” is defined as unkindness, spitefulness and unfairness. It can also suggest stinginess, as in depriving students of contrary opinions and of ignoring their need to be challenged and to think independently. The word describes today’s political and cultural environment, one characterized by divisiveness between the elite who govern and the masses that are governed. When George Bush exclaimed “you’re either with us or you’re against us,” he was referring to those who were committing acts of terror or who were harboring terrorists. Now it means Republicans, or at least it does to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Unlike most countries, the United States is a nation of immigrants – we come from all places, races and religions. The heritage we share is the history of our founding, which was based on the concept that “all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights…that governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers by the consent of the governed.” It is a heritage of ideas. Whether our ancestors were present in Philadelphia, or whether we arrived in the past decade, it is the knowledge that our basic rights do not come from government, but from a larger power, and that government is subservient to the people. It is that that distinguishes Americans. No matter our political differences, no matter whether we are conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican we share this history. We have an obligation to encourage its persistence. But today that sense of commonality seems at risk.

Michael Warren Davis Trump, the Great Pretender

He supports partial-birth abortion, cozies up to the Clintons and frames the issues in a perspective that, with a couple of notable exceptions, tag him as more Democrat than Republican. Yet the candidate beneath that preposterous pompadour continues to lead the GOP field and dominate the headlines.
Let’s do a little play-by-play and compare Jeb Bush’s positions with Donald Trump’s current left-leaning views. Jeb has a single serious one—immigration—while also boasting a robust gubernatorial record of tax cuts, defending the sanctity of life, and a slew of issues that should, by rights, strike chords with the GOP activist base that turns out in force for the primaries. Trump, on the other hand, fails on what should be the two deal-breakers for the rank-and-file: he’s a Planned Parenthood supporter and an advocate for universal healthcare.

Over the past 15 years, Trump has supported partial-birth abortion, plus Obama’s stimulus package. If that was not enough to condemn him, he openly expressed the ill-advised desire for Hillary Clinton to lead U.S.-Iran negotiations! He has also bragged repeatedly about his friendship with the Clintons, and how much he has donated to their various causes—often, it seems, in exchange for access and favours. Bush’s new anti-Trump ad makes those points — although not so far, according to the polls, to his advantage.

Next, consider that Bush is seen by many as a RINO, as in ‘Republican in name only’, even though it is an objective fact that he is more conservative than Trump and has been for years. I’m not shilling for Bush, by the way, just noting an empirical truth. It’s also objectively true to say that the Republican Party’s activist base has become increasingly hardline in its advocacy of conservative principles. They tried to torpedo Mitt Romney twice for “flip-flopping” on abortion and have ousted senior moderate Republicans in favour of Tea Party darlings. Why is it that these same proud and rock-ribbed conservatives are falling in behind Trump, the leftmost candidate in the GOP field?

Peter Smith The Asylum Seeker from Central Casting

Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of angry young men in Budapest demand they be allowed to proceed to Germany, where Angel Merkel thinks she has room for some 800,000 this year alone. Lousy poster children for the invasion of Europe, the BBC opts instead to focus on the fetching Ms Nour.
Now on my way back to Australia, the BBC’s take on the European refugee crisis sticks in my mind. Or, is it in my craw?

“Haven’t they a right to travel?” queried the BBC anchorwoman in conversation with a correspondent reporting from outside Budapest’s chief railway station. Only in my dreams did the correspondent respond by saying, “Sure they do — if you no longer think that having travel documents is a requirement to travel internationally, and that European law can be causally set aside.”

Hungary is acting absolutely in keeping with European law. Others, such as Greece, funnelling asylum seekers on, are not. Asylum seekers have the option to register at centres on Hungary’s border where they can apply for asylum. This, of course, does not suit them. The cameras show hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Syrian asylum-seekers/refugees/economic migrants — choose your descriptor according to ideology and preference — demonstrating outside the terminus, chanting in unison: “Where do we go? Germany!” Note that they are not chanting Wohin gehen wir, Deutschland! (Google translation, be warned), as what they seek is a far wider audience than German speakers alone. They are mostly young men, with the odd woman in a head scarf among them. From that, I safely take it, I think, that they are Muslims not Christians.

Thanks to GOP’s Corker Bill, Mikulski Puts Obama Over the Top … as Iran Vows to ‘Overthrow Israel’ By Andrew C. McCarthy

Good job, Mr. President, Sen. Mikulski, congressional Democrats, and GOP leadership.

Senator Barbara Mikulski has announced that she will vote in favor of President Obama’s Iran deal. Sen. Mikulski’s support is critical because she becomes the 34th Democrat to announce that she will vote yea. Under the Corker framework so ingeniously conceived by Republican leadership in Congress, this means Obama’s deal cannot be defeated – under the legislation Congress is deemed to endorse the agreement unless it can muster a now unattainable 67 Senate votes (and a similar two-thirds of the House) to enact a resolution of disapproval over Obama’s veto.

It is worth repeating that Republicans rationalized this abdication of their duty to use their constitutional powers to block Obama’s empowerment of America’s sworn enemies by claiming that the legislation ensured that Congress would get to review the deal. This, of course, was always preposterous:

(a) Congress has many tools – the power of the purse, the ability to block Obama appointments and legislative priorities, the power to conduct oversight hearings, the capacity to raise public alarm in media coverage – that could have pressured Obama to reveal the deal’s terms;

Iran Commander: We’re Getting Prepared to Overthrow Israel By Bridget Johnson

As the White House secured their last needed vote to block a veto override in the Senate on the nuclear deal, Iran unleashed a double-pronged attack: vowing to block inspector access to some sites, and vowing to continue preparations to destroy Israel.

Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan said today that the International Atomic Energy Agency — which inked confidential deals with Tehran that Congress has not been able to see — would not be able to see all the facilities it wants to.

“Iran does not plan to issue permission for the IAEA to inspect every site,” Dehqan said in an interview with al-Mayadeen news network on Wednesday, reported the semi-official Fars News Agency.

Europe Sells the Hangman’s Rope – Again By James Lewis

Europe has simply collapsed and surrendered — hoping the crocodile will eat it last.

It was V.I. Lenin who sneered that the last capitalist would sell communists the rope to hang him with. That’s what happened in the Soviet Empire, which ran Eastern Europe for half a century. But even in the 1930s most European nations were ready to surrender preemptively to the Nazi war machine.

Today Europe has suicidally imported more than 50 million Muslims — just as Obama wants us to do here. With America failing to provide international leadership, Europe has simply collapsed and surrendered — hoping the crocodile will eat it last.

Remember how well that worked the last few times?

Since 1945 Europe has been unwilling to defend itself, relying on the US-Anglosphere alliance to pull its chestnuts out of the fire. In the case of Islam, Europe is pre-emptively bowing to the Muslim onslaught. While ordinary people no longer believe pro-immigration propaganda, the ruling class knows it can ignore the people. People with common sense are powerless.

Putin Is Winning the Ukraine Cease-Fire -The West Pressures Kiev to Abide by a Deal that Moscow Violates Every Day.

As bad deals go, it’s hard to do worse than the “Minsk II” cease-fire signed in February between Kiev and Moscow. First the Kremlin reneged on its promises to stop fighting by Russian forces and Kremlin-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine. Now Kiev’s attempts to implement its half of the deal are sparking a political crisis among the good guys in this fight.

That was clear after Monday’s grenade attack outside the Parliament building in Kiev, which killed three and injured dozens. The attack appears to be an isolated incident, but it highlights the extent to which Kiev is struggling to maintain law and order as nationalist discontent rises and the government fights a war that the Minsk agreement was supposed to have ended.