Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) addressed the audience at a North Tempe town hall meeting and shared a conversation he had with President Obama. In that meeting he was told by the president:
“The problem is, . . . if we secure the border, then you all won’t have any reason to support ‘comprehensive immigration reform.’”
He goes on to say that the Administration is holding border security hostage. They don't want to lock down the border unless it goes hand-in-hand with their concept of immigration reform, which in turn adds up to an expanding voter base to keep them in control.
Alternatively, they could just decide to give up altogether. As you will hear in this video, Sheriff Paul Babeu says rather than taking control of the situation, government agencies have opted to keep U.S. citizens out of a stretch of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge citing armed human and drug trafficers. They know about the problem, publicly acknowlege it, and, rather than enforcing the law, choose to turn over the area to the bad guys. Awesome job!
I had read about this court decision out of N.Y. last week but didn't post on it. After having read this update, however, that is going to change. This system could now spread to other towns. Ridiculous!
PORT CHESTER, N.Y. -- The court-ordered election that allowed residents of one New York town to flip the lever six times for one candidate - and produced a Hispanic winner - could expand to other towns where minorities complain their voices aren't being heard.
But first, interested parties will want to take a look at the exit surveys.
The unusual election was imposed on Port Chester after a federal judge determined that Hispanics were being treated unfairly.
The demographics of Port Chester (2000 sensus) were 60.70% White, 6.99% African American, 0.40% Native American, 2.06% Asian, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 22.98% from other races, and 6.83% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 46.23% of the population. To make the vote "fair" the judge has given almost 50% of the population six times the voting influence. What?!?
"It helped me get elected," said Marino, a Democrat who works in maintenance at the Scarsdale schools. "I will be representing all the people of Port Chester, but I am aware that I can help Hispanics bring their concerns to the board."
What about the poor Pacific Islander? Should their votes be worth 60 each? One person, one vote. If they're too lazy to haul their butt down to a voting booth on election day, you reap what you sow. Read more at The Washington Post.
UPDATE: 6/25/2010: Looks like the state commission will be shuttering the Nampa Classical Academy. In a unanimous vote, the school will have their charter revoked effective June 30, 2010. This seems to be more a case of bullying and a means to silence a detractor than a legitimate closure. The Idaho Statesman reports:
NCA leaders urged the Idaho Public Charter School Commission to give them more time to prove financial soundness and a new willingness to cooperate with the commission. But commission members needed virtually no discussion before accepting the hearing examiner’s recommendation.
...
“Bad day for charter schools,” NCA board member Erik Makrush said loudly as school representatives left the meeting room. He was quickly admonished by commission chairman Bill Goesling.
Just keep your mouth shut, your eyes down, and move along; nothing to see here, folks...
As I have mentioned before, the current interpretation of the separation between church and state is not the original intent of the First Amendment. It was borne from a 1947 Supreme Court ruling. Here is a good primer on the history.
There is a public charter school in the Nampa area that wanted to use the Bible as a source for history and literature. Idaho officials origionally gave approval but then later changed their minds. The school sued for the right to use the text but it was dismissed.
The headmaster and seven board members have since left over the issue. And now the Idaho Public Charter School Commission then moved to shut down the school siting financial instability as the reason. Hmm...
The first question that popped into my head was who uses the term "cyberspace" anymore? Lieberman? Really?
Ok, now that I have that off my chest, let's get into the text of the bill. It's easiest to go in order and work through it. Definition: Critical Infrastructure. In PCNAA, this is defined as it is in the Patriot Act.
"systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters."
Who gets to determine what those assets actually are? While I do believe that one defined authority of the federal government is the security of the nation, it's a bit broad to not specifically define what is or is not going to fall within the scope of this law. Actually, this comment is more directed toward the Patriot Act, but the PCNAA inherits it. If this were limited to just the infrastructure pertaining to government, not involving the private sector, it would not have been as big a deal.
On to the bureaucracy. This bill would create a new Office of Cyberspace Policy. Yay! Based on the qualifications for the Director spot, anyone that knows as much as a high school hacker could be appointed.
I listened to what I believe is the original radio broadcast of this story and it is pretty much the same as what is written. The short version is that Tim Adams, who was working in Hawaii at the time of the election as the Senior Elections Clerk, had access to the systems needed to verify records of both voters and politicians. He attempted to verify Obama's birth location with both area hospitals (at the time there was confusion about which was the right one) and neither had record of the birth, nor did they have the official long-form certificate. Here is an exerpt of the story from WND, with a link to the whole story below:
A college instructor who worked as a senior elections clerk for the city and county of Honolulu in 2008 is making the stunning claim Barack Obama was definitely not born in Hawaii as the White House maintains, and that a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Obama does not even exist in the Aloha State.
"There is no birth certificate," said Tim Adams, a graduate assistant who teaches English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Ky. "It's like an open secret. There isn't one. Everyone in the government there knows this."
Adams, who says he's a Hillary Clinton supporter who ended up voting for John McCain when Clinton lost the Democratic nomination to Obama, told WND, "I managed the absentee-ballot office. It was my job to verify the voters' identity."
He says during the 2008 campaign when the issue of Obama's constitutional eligibility first arose, the elections office was inundated with requests to verify the birthplace of the U.S. senator from Illinois.
"I had direct access to the Social Security database, the national crime computer, state driver's license information, international passport information, basically just about anything you can imagine to get someone's identity," Adams explained. "I could look up what bank your home mortgage was in. I was informed by my boss that we did not have a birth record [for Obama]."
At the time, there were conflicting reports that Obama had been born at the Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, as well as the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women and Children across town. So Adams says his office checked with both facilities.
"They told us, 'We don't have a birth certificate for him,'" he said. "They told my supervisor, either by phone or by e-mail, neither one has a document that a doctor signed off on saying they were present at this man's birth."
To date, no Hawaiian hospital has provided documented confirmation that Obama was born at its facility.
She disgusts me more and more with each article I read. via lifenews.com:
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- A newly-produced document today from the Clinton archives is the second to show Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan defending ex-President Bill Clinton's veto of a bill to ban partial-birth abortions. The memo, and others, may increase Republican opposition to her nomination.
In one of the documents that comprises the 46,000 pages of material the William J. Clinton Presidential Library released today, Kagan opined on the ban for Clinton as an attorney with the administration's Office of Domestic Policy.
In a February 27, 1997 memo to top White House staff, Kagan referred to the startling admission from Ron Fitzsimmons, at the time the executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers.
The debate then had been on whether the partial-birth abortion procedure was done for health reasons for the mother or essentially on healthy unborn children for elective reasons only.
Leading pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and NARAL made claims that flew in the face of medical practice by saying the three-day-long abortion procedure would somehow be able to save a woman's life in a life-threatening medical circumstance.
Fitzsimmons signed on to that mantra but eventually relented, saying he "lied through my teeth" about the statistics and supposed reasons for the abortion procedure.
According to CNN, the new memo showed Kagan advising Clinton, saying it "it would be a great mistake to challenge" Fitzsimmons' statements give how embarrassing they were for abortion advocates.
I recently commented on a press release from the Mexican embassy in D.C. The first section of their statement said, in part,
...the Government of Mexico trusts that this decision will help to channel additional US resources to enhance efforts to prevent the illegal flows of weapons and bulk cash into Mexico, which provide organized crime with its firepower and its ability to corrupt.
Again I say it's pretty convenient to blame the U.S. as the source for all of these weapons in the hands of criminals. Last Monday, however, mexidata.info published an article with some interesting tidbits from the Mexico City paper El Universal. So what is the real deal? Kurt Hofmann at the St. Louis Gun Rigths Examiner does a good job of tying it all together.
The fable of the U.S. civilian gun market being responsible for "arming" Mexico's brutal drug cartels has become so deeply entrenched, that to question it is to be labeled a "right wing gun lobby shill." The claimed numbers, though, as National Gun Rights Examiner David Codrea points out, have continued to drop, as more light is shed on the actual facts.
Hence, the Brady Campaign's and Violence Policy Center's claims of "95 to 100%" of Mexican "crime guns" coming from the U.S. civilian market first dropped a bit to "over 90%," and now Mexican President Felipe Calderón has settled on 80% (with Brady Campaign backing).
What those who toss these numbers around rarely mention, if not pressed, or under oath, is that whatever the percentage they're currently quoting, that's the percentage of guns submitted to the BATFE for tracing (and successfully traced). We've discussed the fact that Senator John Kerry (D-MA)--no friend to gun owners--admitted once that only about a quarter of the seized guns are ever submitted for BATFE tracing. Go to Mr. Codrea's piece to see the details (here's the link again), especially the National Shooting Sports Foundation's (NSSF) explanation.
