RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Center for Immigration Studies is releasing a report today showing that 124 illegal aliens who were subsequently released over the last five years by the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security have been charged with murder.

Washington Times:

In all, some 121 immigrants who were freed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement between 2010 and 2014 went on to be charged with a total of 135 homicide-related crimes. Another three immigrants were charged with murders in 2015, bringing to 124 the total number of murder suspects the government had, then released.

Two of the immigrants in question had even been convicted of homicide before, but they were released anyway and went on to rack up new murder charges again, the report said. The others had amassed 464 total criminal charges, ranging from drugs to drunken driving, before they landed on the homicide list.

The information was released to Congress by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Jessica Vaughan at the Center for Immigration Studies analyzed the data and said it shows dangerous practices.

“The names of the criminal aliens were redacted by the Judiciary Committee, but the list presumably includes murderers like Apolinar Altamirano, an illegal alien who was arrested by ICE in 2013 following his conviction on local charges involving a burglary and abduction, but who was released on a $10,000 bond and permitted to remain free and elect to have deportation proceedings that would take years to complete. In January 2015 Altamirano shot and killed 21-year-old Grant Ronnebeck while he was working at a convenience store where Altamirano had come to buy cigarettes,” Ms. Vaughan wrote.

Barack Obama—do you remember him?—will remain in office for another 311 days. But not really. The president has left the presidency. The commander in chief is on sabbatical. He spends his time hanging out at a festival in Austin. And with the cast of “Hamilton,” the musical. And with Justin, the tween sensation from Canada.

In his place, an exact look-alike of Mr. Obama is giving interviews to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, interviews that are so gratuitously damaging to long-standing U.S. alliances, international security and Mr. Obama’s reputation as a serious steward of the American interest that the words could not possibly have sprung from the lips of the president himself.

I was a bit late in reading Mr. Goldberg’s long article, “The Obama Doctrine,” which appeared last week and is based on hours of conversation with the president, along with ancillary interviews with John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, Manuel Valls of France, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and other boldface names. Kudos to Mr. Goldberg for his level of access, the breadth of his reporting, the sheer volume of juicy quotes and revealing details.

Still, it’s a deep dive into a shallow mind. Mr. Obama’s recipe for Sunni-Shiite harmony in the Middle East? The two sides, says Mr. Obama, “need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood,” sounding like Mr. Rogers. The explanation for the “sh— show” (the president’s words) in Libya? “I had more faith in the Europeans,” he says, sounding like my 12-year-old blaming her 6-year-old sister for chores not done. The recipe for better global governance? “If only everyone could be like the Scandinavians, this would all be easy,” he says, sounding like—Barack Obama.

Then there’s Mr. Obama the political theorist. “Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence,” the president says in connection to Vladimir Putin’s gambles in Ukraine and Syria. That’s true, in a Yoda sort of way. But isn’t seizing foreign territory without anyone doing much to stop you also a form of “real power”? Is dictatorial power fake because it depends on the threat of force? CONTINUE AT SITE

Earlier this month, mentally ill Kyle Odom shot pastor Tim Remington in Idaho because he “knew” the pastor was a Martian. In his untreated delusional state, Kyle then flew to the White House and started throwing his possessions over the fence to get the president’s attention so he could inform him about all the other Martians in government, including Senators Mitch McConnell, Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin, Roger Wicker, and Patty Murray.

Congress should learn from episodes like that. Yet at the same time Kyle went on his mission, Senators Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D., Wash.) went on theirs. They revealed a discussion draft of their Mental Health Reform [sic] Act of 2016, which is perhaps the worst mental-health bill ever conceived. It is a rudderless hodgepodge of studies, reports, commissions, and added bureaucracy that would do nothing to help people like Kyle.

John Snook, of the Treatment Advocacy Center, an organization focused on improving care for the seriously mentally ill, told Modern Healthcare, “If this were to pass as is, it would be of no benefit to [people with] severe mental illness.” Mental-illness-policy advocate, blogger, and former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley wrote, “The Senate has now set a low standard.”

Alexander and Murray should know better. There are plenty of bills floating around that include useful provisions they chose to ignore. Senator John Cornyn (R., Texas) introduced the Mental Health and Safe Community Act of 2015 (S2002) specifically to reduce violence by the most seriously mentally ill. It encourages states to use assisted outpatient treatment (AOT). Assisted outpatient treatment is only for a tiny group of the most seriously ill who have already accumulated multiple episodes of violence, arrest, homelessness, incarceration, or hospitalization because they refused to stay in treatment. It allows judges to order them into six months of mandated and monitored treatment while they continue to live in the community. It is less expensive to taxpayers and less restrictive and more humane to patients than the alternatives, incarceration and inpatient commitment. It is the only program with independent research showing it reduces homelessness, arrest, incarceration and violence in the 70 percent range.

Senators Alexander and Murray also ignored provisions in the Mental Health Reform Act of 2015 (S. 1945), proposed by Senators Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) and Bill Cassidy (R., Louisiana). That bill would slightly ameliorate the federal proscription on using Medicaid mental-health funds for those who are so seriously mentally ill they need hospitalization. New York City Police commissioner William Bratton recently described the lack of hospital beds as the top difficulty for officers who are called to assist the seriously mentally ill.

More importantly, Alexander and Murray ignored all the extraordinary work of Representative Tim Murphy (R., Pa.) and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D., Texas) in the House. They introduced the bipartisan Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act (H.R. 2646), which would eliminate wasteful, counterproductive federally funded mental “wellness” programs and reallocate the savings to programs that are proven to help the most seriously mentally ill. H.R. 2646 would start by defanging the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), perhaps the most useless bureaucracy in Washington. Its own employees rated it one of the worst federal agencies. SAMHSA funds anti-psychiatrists who lobby Congress, encourages states to use federal mental-illness funds on people who don’t have mental illness, certifies as “evidence-based” programs that don’t help the mentally ill, and wastes money. There is no support for it other than from those who receive funds from it. Alexander and Murray would add more bureaucracy rather than taking a scalpel to it.

Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, the Director of the Miami, Florida-based American Muslim Association of North America (AMANA), is advertising on social media a report claiming that the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s was fabricated. This is just one example of many of how Zakkout has belittled and maligned members of the Jewish community and others with the most grotesque manifestations of bigotry – and that’s just in this past month!

On February 14th, Zakkout took to Facebook to promote a report questioning the validity of the Holocaust, entitled, ‘How the Holocaust was faked.’ The piece, which includes gruesome photos of dead bodies piled upon one another, begins, “The alleged ‘Holocaust’ of ‘6 million Jews’ at the hands of Adolf Hitler and National Socialist Germany during WWII is the biggest lie ever foisted upon humanity.”

The piece was produced by The Realist Report, a white supremacist outfit located on the outskirts of San Diego, California that regularly targets Jews, blacks and homosexuals. On the group’s website, its viewers are commanded to: “Fight White Genocide. Rise up against the destruction of your race!” while an accompanying video’s narrator ominously states, “We are told to accept our inevitable brown future.”

In April 2013, The Realist Report devoted an entire page on its website to offer birthday wishes to Adolf Hitler. The page states, “Happy Birthday, Adolf Hitler. You were and remain the greatest leader in modern Western history, and offer unparalleled inspiration and guidance to us all. God bless you, and may you forever rest in peace. Heil Hitler!”

Set aside for a moment all the controversies over illegal immigration—the wall, deportation, amnesty, Donald J. Trump, “comprehensive immigration reform,” etc. Instead, contemplate what happens in a social, cultural, and economic context when several million immigrants arrive from one of the poorest areas in the world (e.g., Oaxaca) to one of the most affluent (e.g., California). For guidance, think not of Jorge Ramos, but of the premodern/postmodern collision that is occurring in Germany, Austria, and Denmark.

The first casualty is the law. I am not referring to the collapse of federal immigration enforcement, but rather the ripples that must follow from it. When someone ignores a federal statute, then it is naturally easy to flout more. In Los Angeles, half the traffic accidents are hit-and-run collisions. I can attest first-hand that running from an accident or abandoning a wrecked vehicle is certainly a common occurrence in rural California. Last night on a rural road, a driver behind me (intoxicated? Malicious? Crazy?) apparently tried to rear-end me, then turned off his lights, sped up, and at the next stop sign pulled over swearing out the window in Spanish. In this age and in these environs, why would one call a sheriff for a minor everyday occurrence like that? The point is simply that when there is no federal law, no one has any idea how several million arrive in the U.S., much less what exactly they were doing before their illegal arrival. I note the latter consideration, because legal immigration does require some sort of personal history, and at the airport I am always asked by U.S Customs what exactly I was doing in Greece or Germany that prompted my trip.

Out here almost all laws concerning the licensing and vaccination of dogs seem to have simply disappeared. No one can walk or ride a bicycle along these rural roads without being attacked by hounds that are unlicensed and not vaccinated—and that have no ID or indeed owners that step forward to claim ownership once the victim is bleeding. The Bloomberg Rule reigns (i.e., if you can’t keep snow off the street, deplore global warming or cosmic war): we talk of dreamers because we have not a clue how to ensure that hundreds of thousands of pets are registered and given rabies shots. No one suggests that once one breaks the law of his adopted home, and continues to do so through false affidavits, aliases, and fraudulent documents, then the law itself become an abstraction, useful as a shelter, expendable if an inconvenience. Again, one assumes that if a citizen were to do that, he would face a felony indictment.

Almost every day seems to bring more bad news about the Zika virus: babies born with malformed brains; adults suffering the progressive paralysis of Guillain-Barré syndrome; Americans diagnosed after traveling to the tropics; active transmission of the disease in U.S. territories. Several companies are working on a vaccine, but primarily because of regulatory requirements none is likely to become commercially available before the end of the decade.

Last month President Obama announced that he will ask Congress for $1.8 billion to fight the mosquito-borne disease. But the president seems unaware that the bumbling of his Food and Drug Administration is blocking progress on a vital tool to control the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that carry and transmit Zika and the viruses that cause dengue fever, chikungunya and yellow fever.

Using genetic engineering techniques, the British company Oxitec (a subsidiary of American-owned Intrexon) has created male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes with a specific mutation that causes them to need a certain chemical (the antibiotic tetracycline) to survive. Without it, they die—and their offspring die before reaching maturity. Releasing the males over several months causes a marked reduction in the mosquito population. Because male mosquitoes don’t bite, they present no health risk, and, because their progeny die, no genetically engineered mosquitoes persist in the environment.

This approach has already been widely and successfully tested abroad. Brazil has approved it, and Oxitec is helping to control mosquitoes in the city of Piracicaba. But in the U.S. the FDA has been paralyzed, unwilling to permit even small-scale testing. How did the feds go wrong? CONTINUE AT SITE

The U.S. Senate is on the verge of settling the nation’s fiercest food fight: GMO labeling. And if you need an example of lawmakers, lobbyists, special interest groups, and corporations wasting time and money on a manufactured problem that is completely inconsequential to the health and welfare of the American people, look no further than this.

The fight is about whether food companies should disclose the presence of GMOs, or genetically modified organisms, in their products. This applies to hundreds of ingredients, from soybean oil to vitamins to cheese. In the U.S., almost all corn, soy, and cotton crops are genetically engineered to tolerate herbicides or resist pests, so any by-product of those crops would require a label. Same with canola. Sugar from sugarbeets, which produce more than half the sugar supply here and are also grown via genetically engineered seeds, would need a label. The list goes on.

No good justification for a label exists: Ingredients derived from these crops pose no health or safety concern and do not compromise the nutritional value of food. That, however, has not impressed our esteemed United States Senate, which will take a break from terrorism and trade pacts to deliberate a new label on a can of soup.

On immigration, as on so much else, the Democrats have become the party of Obama — only more so.

Because Wednesday’s debate was co-hosted by Spanish-language network Univision, and the questioning spearheaded by Jorge Ramos, an immigration activist masquerading as a journalist, there was little doubt that the evening would feature what Hillary Clinton’s detractors have derisively labeled “Hispandering.” But Clinton and her remaining challenger, Bernie Sanders, effectively promised an end to American immigration law.

Clinton had previously affirmed her support for President Obama’s massive exercises in “prosecutorial discretion,” DACA and DAPA, both flagrantly unconstitutional amnesties covering together some 5 million people. However, prodded by Ramos, Clinton promised not only that she would not deport children — an assurance that every “unaccompanied minor” who has crossed the southern border in the past few years would be permitted to stay — but that she would not deport anyone without a criminal record, period, guaranteeing a permanent home to almost every illegal immigrant residing in the country, and effectively reducing crossing the border illegally to a minor and ignorable infraction. Clinton also reiterated an earlier commitment to somehow reunite families separated by deportation. With all of this, Sanders concurred.

Failures of the immigration system have a profound impact, exacerbating nearly every challenge and threat that America and Americans confront on a day-to-day basis. However, the true significance of immigration is rarely, if ever, discussed by politicians or by journalists upon whom we depend for information.

Unbridled greed and hunger for power lead the list of factors that motivate many politicians to ignore this side of the immigration debate. Journalists may be ideologues or may be controlled by the executives of their news organizations who are impacted by greed as well.

On June 18, 2015 FrontPage Magazine published my article, “Theft By Deception: The Immigration Con Game: How politicians are robbing citizens of access to the American Dream” in which I laid out some of the ways that so many profit from the failures of border security and failure to enforce our immigration laws from within the interior of the United States.

The premise of my November 29, 2015 article for the Daily Caller, “Immigration: A Matter Of Integrity – Or A Lack Thereof,” was that the immigration system’s lack of integrity simply parallels the lack of integrity of all too many of our politicians who write our laws, provide or deny funding for programs and devise strategies to either effectively carry out various governmental missions or seek to obstruct missions — often while providing the false illusions that everything that can be done is being done.

Do you remember when we had a First Amendment? It seems to have vanished in the view of the attorney general of the United States, Loretta Lynch, who testified yesterday to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Jon Street reports at TheBlaze:

During Lynch’s testimony at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said that he believes there are similarities between the tobacco industry denying scientific studies showing the dangers of using tobacco and companies within the fossil fuel industry denying studies allegedly showing the threat of carbon emissions.

He went on to point out that under President Bill Clinton, the Justice Department brought and won a civil case against the tobacco industry, while the Obama administration has “done nothing” so far with regard to the fossil fuel industry.

Whitehouse concluded his comments by posing a question to the country’s top law enforcement officer.

“My question to you is, other than civil forfeitures and matters attendant to a criminal case, are there other circumstances in which a civil matter under the authority of the Department of Justice has been referred to the FBI?” he asked.

“This matter has been discussed. We have received information about it and have referred it to the FBI to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for which we could take action on,” Lynch answered. “I’m not aware of a civil referral at this time.”

As a matter of fact, Lynch and Whitehouse understate the degree of persecution of dissent underway. Over a week ago, it was disclosed that the DoJ has made a criminal referral for views on a scientific dispute. David Hasemyer reported for Inside Climate News last week:

The U.S. Justice Department has forwarded a request from two congressmen seeking a federal probe of ExxonMobil to the FBI’s criminal division.