The northward flow is down 13 percent for the first quarter of 2009. That should be good news for Californians, who are broke due in no small part to the impact of illegal immigrants and sanctuary cities.
The economic crisis, combined with a more fortified border, has led to what may be the first drop in the U.S. illegal-immigrant population in years.
There is nothing much to be optimistic about with a 13% decrease except for the direction it is going. Which is down. That’s a good thing. But it also means that there were 137,497 illegals that did enter the country in the first quarter. Down from 159,024 in 2008. I wonder how many of those were terrorists?
So goes the position of the United Nations, at least as far as the United States is concerned. Reacting to North Korea’s third nuclear bomb test after several missile tests including another missile test today, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said . . .
If North Korea’s leaders continue to act provocatively, “they’re going to find that they will pay a price, because the international community is very clear: This is not acceptable. It won’t be tolerated, and they won’t be intimidated,”
Rice said the United States would pursue within the U.N. Security Council a new resolution on North Korea, “a strong resolution with teeth.”
{emphasis added}
Well, it seems we are intimidated. Does this mean that the first three nuclear bombs are free? And when Kim Jong Il does it again, then what? Meanwhile the President wants to scale back our missile defense program. Is this the part that Vice President Joe Biden was talking about after the election, that Obama would be tested soon and hey, we might make the wrong decision. But hang in there will ya? We love you man. What?
SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea warned South Korea and the United States on Wednesday that Seoul’s participation in a U.S.-led program to intercept ships suspected of carrying weapons of mass destruction is equal to a declaration of war.
Biden’s remarks made the transition from campaign promises and speeches to a bit of the real world before being sworn in. Planned or not. I don’t know about you but he didn’t do anything for me that said that either he or Obama had a clue in dealing with the world’s worst and most dangerous dictators. Take the U.S. World Apology Tour 2009 for example.
There’s two ways to look at this. Is no decision better than the wrong decision? And, how many ‘free lives’ do they get?
On May 21, 2009, former vice president Richard B. Cheney, a member of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and a member of their Board of Trustees, spoke at AEI on the serious and ongoing threat terrorism poses to the United States. He also answers the criticism being levied upon the country and the Bush administration by President Obama over the prosecution of the war on terror. Even to the point of criminalizing the prosecution of it.
How history repeats itself. Didn’t we see what happens when political opposition becomes a criminal offense in the last century?
I haven’t seen his speech elsewhere in the media, outside of 10 second sound bites, so here it is below.
‘It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness, and would make the American people less safe.’
‘Critics of our policies are given to lecturing on the theme of being consistent with American values. But no moral value held dear by the American people obliges public servants ever to sacrifice innocent lives to spare a captured terrorist from unpleasant things. And when an entire population is targeted by a terror network, nothing is more consistent with American values than to stop them.’
‘Some members of Congress are notorious for demanding they be briefed into the most sensitive intelligence programs. They support them in private, and then head for the hills at the first sign of controversy. As far as the interrogations are concerned, all that remains an official secret is the information we gained as a result. Some of his defenders say the unseen memos are inconclusive, which only raises the question why they won’t let the American people decide that for themselves.
I believe this information will confirm the value of interrogations–and I am not alone. President Obama’s own Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Blair, has put it this way: “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al-Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.” End quote. Admiral Blair put that conclusion in writing, only to see it mysteriously deleted in a later version released by the administration–the missing twenty-six words that tell an inconvenient truth. But they couldn’t change the words of George Tenet, the CIA Director under Presidents Clinton and Bush, who bluntly said: “I know that this program has saved lives. I know we’ve disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us.”
If Americans do get the chance to learn what our country was spared, it’ll do more than clarify the urgency and the rightness of enhanced interrogations in the years after 9/11. It may help us to stay focused on dangers that have not gone away. Instead of idly debating which political opponents to prosecute and punish, our attention will return to where it belongs–on the continuing threat of terrorist violence, and on stopping the men who are planning it.’
VP Cheney’s daughter, Liz Cheney, speaks to the issue as raised by President Obama. ‘He has a Sept. 10th mentality.’
More specifically, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va) were briefed on the extreme interrogation technique. Back then, it was fine. In fact, they wanted to know if there was anything more they could do to break the terrorists to give up information. Today it’s a different story. Today it is torture. Something we need to investigate.
For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.
“The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.
Now, the Obama administration is in a quandary. Their far left base is still calling for the heads of Bush and Cheney. How to investigate the Bush administration over waterboarding at GITMO without including leaders of his own party?
Who would have thought that we would have seen this much change in under 100 days?
March 20, 2009, administration and congress pass a law taking the wages of certain private citizens via a 90% tax. This was the confiscation of bonuses paid to AIG executives that were expressly approved by (Chris Dodd) this administration in the stimulus bill. This was also the day the U.S. Constitution died.
March 31, 2009, administration takes over a private company, GM. U.S. Constitution not protected or defended.
April 2, 2009, the repeal of the Declaration of Independence by subjugating our sovereignty to a Financial Stability Board (FSB) invented by the G20 states.
April 5, 2009, North Korea successfully tested a multi-stage missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The missile went 2390 miles, 500 miles further than their last test. April 6, President Obama cuts the Pentagon’s missile defense program.
April 17, 2009, Obama administration declassifies memos detailing harsh interrogation techniques and the justification for it. Laying bare the program to our enemies. And at the same time does not release the memos showing that those techniques were successful in saving lives and preventing attacks. And at the same time announces that those techniques will be discontinued. Going forward, either Dr. Phil or Oprah will be interrogating the terrorists1. 1(terrorist: the ‘man’ part of a man-made disaster)
April 19, 2009, after pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the banking system, replacing CEO’s, confiscating salaries, trying to set maximum salaries for financial industry workers, the Obama administration is now considering converting the bailout loans into common shares, giving the government a large ownership stake. All the while refusing to let banks repay the bailout money they received.
After the longest campaign in history, and after distancing himself from his radical friends like William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. It’s not hard to imagine the three of them giving a fist-bump to each other and Obama saying ‘How do you like me now America?’
Now that the election is over, what we are seeing is the fastest slide from freedom and free-market capitalism in history. Through legislation, this administration has trashed the very documents it is sworn to protect and defend. In less than 100 days, President Obama (the Constitutional lawyer) has managed to re-write the Constitution without laying a pen on it.
Visiting the CIA today in Langley, Virginia, President Obama came to justify to them why he released documents relating to interrogation techniques to the media, and al-Qaeda.
If you were under the impression that those interrogation techniques played a part in keeping us safe these last eight years, then you are mistaken. According to the President, that was a mistake.
Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge that potentially we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn. But the fact that we are willing to acknowledge them and then move forward, that is precisely why I am proud to be president of the United States and that’s why you should be proud to be members of the CIA.
You’re not really mistaken. They did play a role in keeping us safe. That fact is not even debatable. What the President is saying is that he will not protect us as vigorously as his predecessor did. Does that make you feel warm and fuzzy, and secure?
Good news for Prime Minister al-Maliki and the people of Iraq. They won over the terrorists, the militias, and those who would want Iraq to return to some sort of autonomous Shiite enclave in Iraq led by the Supreme Council. Much to the disappointment of Mookie alSadr and Iran.
Some forecasts point to widespread losses for the party across the main Shiite provinces. The blows could include embarrassing stumbles in the key city of Basra and the spiritual center of Najaf – hailed as the future capital in the Supreme Council’s dreams for an autonomous Shiite enclave.
No criticism from here on this. Election day in Iraq goes peacefully in the first election under total Iraqi control. This is part of ‘the plan’ you know. President Obama rightly praises the Iraqi people. What? He forgot to mention his troops and their families and Gen. Betraeus, all of whom also made this day in Iraq possible. Whether it was a tactical omission (so as not to offend Iraqis his base) or one born of inexperience remains to be seen. If we don’t soon see some praise for our troops for this then we will know which it was.
Obama said . . .
“Millions of Iraqi citizens from every ethnic and religious group went peacefully to the polls across the country to choose new provincial councils,” Obama said in a statement released by the White House. “It is important that the councils get seated, select new governors and begin work on behalf of the Iraqi people who elected them.”
Obama also noted that the U.S. provided technical assistance to the Iraqi electoral commission, as did the U.N. and other international groups.
Gen. David Petraeus . . .
who heads the U.S. Central Command, praised the Iraqi government for its efforts in making the elections “an event of which all Iraqis should be proud and an effort the world should applaud.”
Not only should the world (I’d settle for the UN) applaud Iraq’s election day, but a free Iraq will serve as an example of what a free people can do for themselves and their economy. Also part of the plan.
No, I’m not going to begin counting them. But President Obama’s decision to close Club Gitmo, Guantanamo Bay’s Camp Delta, the tropical resort where the world’s worst terrorists are being held, without first deciding what he plans to do with them is putting the cart before the horse. Sound like good judgment to you? Of course not.
His decision to close Gitmo within 12 months had more to do with political expediency than national security. Clearly, pacifying his far left base is more important to him. Either that, or he is more incompetent as a Commander in Chief than anyone has imagined. You can decide which, and there is no good answer.
Letting them go, or affording them the same Constitutional protections as U.S. citizens, which would end with the same result, so that they can again take up arms against us does not make me feel safer. It does, however, make terrorists feel safer. Prisoner #372 probably likes the idea.
Cairo, Egypt: An Internet posting purportedly by al-Qaida in Yemen says the group’s No. 2 is a Saudi national who is a former Guantanamo detainee.
For all the ways that President Bush has stuck it to conservatives like myself in the last eight years (government spending, bigger government, lost veto pen), there remains a couple things he did right, and I hope his successor carries forward. He kept us safe to the extent that our enemy has been on defense and we have been on offense. He did not yield to his anti-war critics which has allowed us 7 years of safety at home by doing what was necessary (Patriot Act) against an enemy like no other we have ever faced.
Makes one wonder what could have or would have happened in the US had the war on terror not usurped his presidency. Nothing could be worse, however, than to forget that we are in a war.
Belly up to the counter. Politics are on the menu and Ross is on the grill.
