I've added this article from the local Pensacola News Journal as an example of how the Great Depression V. 2.0 is killing the life out of our economy, and our society.
It's the story of shuffling 315 people between two companies in order to avoid paying any severances. The master company, Clearwire - an entity that gives every impression of being near-bankrupt - and TeleTech, a sub-contractor who agreed to accept the 315 people Clearwire wanted off the payroll.
TeleTech announced it would take them, but in just one month, announced all 315 would be terminated. An obvious scam to get around the federal WARN Act, a toothless bit of feel-good legislation that some sold-out stooge of the ruling elite bragged about at re-election time.
I took this article as an opportunity to note that we are in The Great Depression Version 2.0, and we need to admit it.
See the article for how people are being destroyed in this economic disaster, and take a look at the following commentary to think about why, and what can be done to fix it.
++++++++++++++++
The Great Depression Version 2.0 - it's time we began to deal with our economic realities admitting the truth about us being in a Depression.
Depressions are long-term events. That's why you hear the foolish talk about this being the upside of the now-ended Great Recession.
But the truth is that if you look at the Great Depression of the '30s, you'll find the same ups and downs. The economy doesn't just hit a certain level and stay there. It varies up and down; what makes it a Depression is that the long-term range of economic activity remains unacceptably low. Recessions are part of the Depression's long-term record.
In our local experience, we see in the Clearwire debacle the reality of the modern internationalism of the economy. The lesson here is simple: No owner is going to pay more for labor than absolutely necessary.
You can't beat the cheap overseas wages.
And if the CEO didn't go for those low-cost jobs, he or she would be unemployed by the Board in short order.
That's the Real World folks.
The real problem with our economy is that people are out of money. They've shut down the credit cards, the homes are being foreclosed, the cars and trucks are being repossessed, and the energy industry is celebrating with the finance industry the cold-blooded looting of our wallets.
When your economy is based on consumerism - 70% of ours is powered by your ability to purchase - then what you better do is figure out how to get money back into our hands.
We can't afford welfare - and we can't afford warfare. We can't shelter the Third World within our borders, and we can't continue to emulate the Roman Empire and bankrupt ourselves with endless wars.
End the "welfare enslavement" of urban America, and end the "foreign aid enslavement" of America's population.
Put the money back into our pockets, and we'll pop right back to prosperity.
-30-
Showing posts with label president. Show all posts
Showing posts with label president. Show all posts
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Obama's - and everybody else's - ethnic ID
This post updates the change in the method used by the federal government to define racial classifications. It comes from the post in the Federal Register by the US Census Bureau. You don't want to miss this . . . it's America's next BIG story about affirmative action.
Kenneth E. Lamb
++++++++++++
As a matter of integrity, I must update my findings by telling you that the US Census Bureau changed the definition of "race" for classification purposes. You'll find it in the Federal Register. The quotes following are from them:
Race is no longer defined by "genealogical or anthropological" characteristics as illustrated in my article. Race is now a matter of "sociopolitical self-identification." The Bureau now allows an individual to classify him- or her- self by as many, and whatever, "sociopolitical self-identification" classification(s) appeals to the individual. You can be African-American today, change your mind and be Native-American tomorrow, add Asian the day following, and toss them all out the next day and classify yourself whatever you please the day after that.
So as it stands now with this change in the law, Sen. Obama is legally anything he wants to be. Any of us are; more on that in a moment.
The effect of this was meant to give minority-gerrymandered districts more foundation by removing requirements that challenges to them rest upon the ability of district residents to "prove their lineage" and thus validate their minority status. In sympathy to the Bureau, it's reasonable to believe that coming up with birth records from say, the former South Viet Nam, or Myanmar, to prove Asian minority status, might prove daunting.
The same is true for America's African-American population. I won't go into it too deeply now, but here is a short explanation how it affects that particular segment of American society:
While there may be some states that do not do what follows, I am not aware of any:
States do not allow the mother of a child to claim a father's name on the birth certificate unless the father acknowledges paternity, either by being married at the time of birth, voluntarily admitting paternity, or through a court order assigning paternity.
The most recent figure on black illegitimacy that I am aware of is about 70%. You can figure this out for yourself; if your lineage is from a series of illegitimate births, as we now have with our multi-generational welfare underclass, with no father named on the certificate, how do you prove your "genealogical or anthropological" characteristics if the father is not listed through multiple generations of birth certificates?
Birth certificates lacking a father at high rates also apply to Hispanics as well, although not yet to that level. The reasoning is not only illegitimacy per se, but also the institution of some immigrants seeking to stay in America by having a child on US soil, thus creating an American citizen through that birth.
Either way, how do you prove your minority status if half your lineage through multiple generations doesn't exist on paper?
Please note especially that this is a "change" in the method of defining racial classification. My research was based on the rules before the Census Bureau changed the rules. For those defiling my work, go research for yourself what was the method the Bureau used before it made its "change" in classification methodology.
As the ignorance of the Obama apologists in this blog and other forums demonstrate, America is now to the point that the truth doesn't matter anymore. Just look at the referenced Chicago Tribune article about Mr. Obama's autobiography, and you see for yourself that "An Inconvenient Truth" is not the sole domain of any one political brand.
The reason there were definite standards defining racial classification was to keep the use of affirmative action programs, set-asides, and racial quotas enforceable by keeping out whites who tried to claim minority status. If you take people to court to deny them a seat in the classroom, you must have a defined set of characteristics in law to explain why those people do not qualify for the set-aside. It's too bad so many of America's so-called "intelligentsia" are too dense to get past that rather obvious legal construct.
If all it takes is a claim of, as one recently said, "a single drop of blood," then you have just set up a legal definition of what it takes to qualify as a member of the minority group.
In my own experience with my research, one after another Obama supporter attacked my work because they didn't like the criteria I cited; too bad, take it up with the courts. How do you think they kept whites out of Harvard who claimed to be blacks? They did it by saying the whites didn't have any black in their lineage. That then raises the question of how much black they needed to be classified as blacks. That is where the 1/8 (12.5%) rule of law came from. And it is that 1/8 rule that the Census Bureau tossed out the window in its "change."
Now the rule of law is "sociopolitical self-identification."
It escapes many Obama supporters that you must have a legal definition if you plan to enforce a law. Apparently, the Obama supporters ranting against my article missed the concept that the law is not allowed to be "arbitrary and capricious" - it must be defined, clearly, so that everyone knows when it does, and when it does not, apply.
It's truly scary to read these people and see they completely fail to grasp the idea that the law consists of definitions, or else you can't enforce the law. How else do you think you determine if an applicant for a set-aside qualifies if you don't have a legal definition of what it takes to meet the set-aside criteria? Yes, they are truly scary spouting off their brain-dead, hate-filled bigotries.
Unfortunately, this new twist to defining race is about to prove a major problem for many sectors of society. Let's start with Federal set-aside programs.
Now that anyone is able to classify him-or her- self by their own, private, "sociopolitical self-identification," anyone can legally cash in on these minority-directed programs. If there is a set-aside for African-Americans, just check the box because you feel that your "sociopolitical self-identification" is African-American that day. It's now all perfectly legal.
Couldn't get into the college of your choice because you didn't get past the minority set-aside hurdle? No problem; if you feel that your personal, private, "sociopolitical self-identification" is one of the targeted minority groups, well, go ahead and check the box. With the legal criteria now "sociopolitical self-identification," the days of Harvard, and the University of Michigan, or any of the other hundreds of institutions of higher education throwing you out when you show up white to fill one of their black set-asides is over. You met the legal definition. What are they going to argue in court now that your "genealogical or anthropological" characteristics aren't legal standards for defining racial classification?
I'll let the brains of America's shrinking cadre of affirmative action advocates work on that for a while. It will be breaking nationally soon enough.
Now a couple of very quick responses:
1) I have to admit I'm amazed at the circulation my research got. However, I often see it with a headline authored by someone other than me, and this causes problems because people reading the picked up article think I wrote the inflammatory headline.
My headline is: "Barack Obama: Washington Post, Chicago Tribune investigations confirm autobiography lies; now asking: Is "African-American" a lie too?" ( http://kennethelamb.blogspot.com/2008/02/barak-obama-questions-about-ethnic.html )
I note that particularly for those posters who did not comprehend that those first-tier news organizations are the source for much of the article. That's why I included their links. Too bad those of you trashing it didn't pick up on that validation of the article's contents. Perhaps you find reading articles that make your prejudices into lies too disconcerting. For you, it's just easier to hate, and run.
2) Many, many, people need a course in African culture before commenting on my work. For example, one poster named Kent Paul Dolan (you can Google him and find out he is a newspaper comics freak) is typical. He, and so many like him need a course in the realities of racial and ethnic segregation as practiced in Africa. Have you yet noticed the fierce tribal identities that cause the bloodbath in Darfur? Perhaps you missed the slaughter along tribal lines in Rwanda? Or the Congo? Or the Ivory Coast?
To Mr. Dolan, and others like him, Arabs do not intermarry with African Negroes in Kenya, or anywhere else in Africa. And neither do African Negroes intermarry with Arabs. Your ignorance of the realities of the African continent is appalling.
Which brings up the New York Times-created legend of Barack Obama's great grandmother. The "black" Obama "great-grandmother" trotted out by the NY Times is his "step" great grandparent. She is therefore not in his bloodline. It's a point the Times didn't dwell upon, just as they didn't bother to go to his father's relatives in the capital and show off their Arab characteristics and family photos.
This brings up another point about the senator’s father. Please note that the Times ran into a serious problem describing his father's relationship with a woman in Kenya that existed when he married "Barry's" mother in Hawaii. It turns out that Mr. Obama was already married to the Kenyan (who was not African Negro either.). That makes Senator Obama the product of a bigamous marriage. And we all know what that means as far as the legality of the marriage and the legitimacy of the marriage's offspring.
I had to laugh watching them wordsmith the relationship with the Kenyan woman as "unclear" and end up calling her his "consort."
And what is the definition of a "consort?" According to the dictionary, it is a spouse. Leave it to the NY Times to be so conflicted about telling the truth about Sen. Obama's situation, that they resort to using their own "unclear" description to paper over it.
-30-
Kenneth E. Lamb
++++++++++++
As a matter of integrity, I must update my findings by telling you that the US Census Bureau changed the definition of "race" for classification purposes. You'll find it in the Federal Register. The quotes following are from them:
Race is no longer defined by "genealogical or anthropological" characteristics as illustrated in my article. Race is now a matter of "sociopolitical self-identification." The Bureau now allows an individual to classify him- or her- self by as many, and whatever, "sociopolitical self-identification" classification(s) appeals to the individual. You can be African-American today, change your mind and be Native-American tomorrow, add Asian the day following, and toss them all out the next day and classify yourself whatever you please the day after that.
So as it stands now with this change in the law, Sen. Obama is legally anything he wants to be. Any of us are; more on that in a moment.
The effect of this was meant to give minority-gerrymandered districts more foundation by removing requirements that challenges to them rest upon the ability of district residents to "prove their lineage" and thus validate their minority status. In sympathy to the Bureau, it's reasonable to believe that coming up with birth records from say, the former South Viet Nam, or Myanmar, to prove Asian minority status, might prove daunting.
The same is true for America's African-American population. I won't go into it too deeply now, but here is a short explanation how it affects that particular segment of American society:
While there may be some states that do not do what follows, I am not aware of any:
States do not allow the mother of a child to claim a father's name on the birth certificate unless the father acknowledges paternity, either by being married at the time of birth, voluntarily admitting paternity, or through a court order assigning paternity.
The most recent figure on black illegitimacy that I am aware of is about 70%. You can figure this out for yourself; if your lineage is from a series of illegitimate births, as we now have with our multi-generational welfare underclass, with no father named on the certificate, how do you prove your "genealogical or anthropological" characteristics if the father is not listed through multiple generations of birth certificates?
Birth certificates lacking a father at high rates also apply to Hispanics as well, although not yet to that level. The reasoning is not only illegitimacy per se, but also the institution of some immigrants seeking to stay in America by having a child on US soil, thus creating an American citizen through that birth.
Either way, how do you prove your minority status if half your lineage through multiple generations doesn't exist on paper?
Please note especially that this is a "change" in the method of defining racial classification. My research was based on the rules before the Census Bureau changed the rules. For those defiling my work, go research for yourself what was the method the Bureau used before it made its "change" in classification methodology.
As the ignorance of the Obama apologists in this blog and other forums demonstrate, America is now to the point that the truth doesn't matter anymore. Just look at the referenced Chicago Tribune article about Mr. Obama's autobiography, and you see for yourself that "An Inconvenient Truth" is not the sole domain of any one political brand.
The reason there were definite standards defining racial classification was to keep the use of affirmative action programs, set-asides, and racial quotas enforceable by keeping out whites who tried to claim minority status. If you take people to court to deny them a seat in the classroom, you must have a defined set of characteristics in law to explain why those people do not qualify for the set-aside. It's too bad so many of America's so-called "intelligentsia" are too dense to get past that rather obvious legal construct.
If all it takes is a claim of, as one recently said, "a single drop of blood," then you have just set up a legal definition of what it takes to qualify as a member of the minority group.
In my own experience with my research, one after another Obama supporter attacked my work because they didn't like the criteria I cited; too bad, take it up with the courts. How do you think they kept whites out of Harvard who claimed to be blacks? They did it by saying the whites didn't have any black in their lineage. That then raises the question of how much black they needed to be classified as blacks. That is where the 1/8 (12.5%) rule of law came from. And it is that 1/8 rule that the Census Bureau tossed out the window in its "change."
Now the rule of law is "sociopolitical self-identification."
It escapes many Obama supporters that you must have a legal definition if you plan to enforce a law. Apparently, the Obama supporters ranting against my article missed the concept that the law is not allowed to be "arbitrary and capricious" - it must be defined, clearly, so that everyone knows when it does, and when it does not, apply.
It's truly scary to read these people and see they completely fail to grasp the idea that the law consists of definitions, or else you can't enforce the law. How else do you think you determine if an applicant for a set-aside qualifies if you don't have a legal definition of what it takes to meet the set-aside criteria? Yes, they are truly scary spouting off their brain-dead, hate-filled bigotries.
Unfortunately, this new twist to defining race is about to prove a major problem for many sectors of society. Let's start with Federal set-aside programs.
Now that anyone is able to classify him-or her- self by their own, private, "sociopolitical self-identification," anyone can legally cash in on these minority-directed programs. If there is a set-aside for African-Americans, just check the box because you feel that your "sociopolitical self-identification" is African-American that day. It's now all perfectly legal.
Couldn't get into the college of your choice because you didn't get past the minority set-aside hurdle? No problem; if you feel that your personal, private, "sociopolitical self-identification" is one of the targeted minority groups, well, go ahead and check the box. With the legal criteria now "sociopolitical self-identification," the days of Harvard, and the University of Michigan, or any of the other hundreds of institutions of higher education throwing you out when you show up white to fill one of their black set-asides is over. You met the legal definition. What are they going to argue in court now that your "genealogical or anthropological" characteristics aren't legal standards for defining racial classification?
I'll let the brains of America's shrinking cadre of affirmative action advocates work on that for a while. It will be breaking nationally soon enough.
Now a couple of very quick responses:
1) I have to admit I'm amazed at the circulation my research got. However, I often see it with a headline authored by someone other than me, and this causes problems because people reading the picked up article think I wrote the inflammatory headline.
My headline is: "Barack Obama: Washington Post, Chicago Tribune investigations confirm autobiography lies; now asking: Is "African-American" a lie too?" ( http://kennethelamb.blogspot.com/2008/02/barak-obama-questions-about-ethnic.html )
I note that particularly for those posters who did not comprehend that those first-tier news organizations are the source for much of the article. That's why I included their links. Too bad those of you trashing it didn't pick up on that validation of the article's contents. Perhaps you find reading articles that make your prejudices into lies too disconcerting. For you, it's just easier to hate, and run.
2) Many, many, people need a course in African culture before commenting on my work. For example, one poster named Kent Paul Dolan (you can Google him and find out he is a newspaper comics freak) is typical. He, and so many like him need a course in the realities of racial and ethnic segregation as practiced in Africa. Have you yet noticed the fierce tribal identities that cause the bloodbath in Darfur? Perhaps you missed the slaughter along tribal lines in Rwanda? Or the Congo? Or the Ivory Coast?
To Mr. Dolan, and others like him, Arabs do not intermarry with African Negroes in Kenya, or anywhere else in Africa. And neither do African Negroes intermarry with Arabs. Your ignorance of the realities of the African continent is appalling.
Which brings up the New York Times-created legend of Barack Obama's great grandmother. The "black" Obama "great-grandmother" trotted out by the NY Times is his "step" great grandparent. She is therefore not in his bloodline. It's a point the Times didn't dwell upon, just as they didn't bother to go to his father's relatives in the capital and show off their Arab characteristics and family photos.
This brings up another point about the senator’s father. Please note that the Times ran into a serious problem describing his father's relationship with a woman in Kenya that existed when he married "Barry's" mother in Hawaii. It turns out that Mr. Obama was already married to the Kenyan (who was not African Negro either.). That makes Senator Obama the product of a bigamous marriage. And we all know what that means as far as the legality of the marriage and the legitimacy of the marriage's offspring.
I had to laugh watching them wordsmith the relationship with the Kenyan woman as "unclear" and end up calling her his "consort."
And what is the definition of a "consort?" According to the dictionary, it is a spouse. Leave it to the NY Times to be so conflicted about telling the truth about Sen. Obama's situation, that they resort to using their own "unclear" description to paper over it.
-30-
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
How long until the bloodbath?
I found this on the Washington Times site today. The headline question above that it inspires should be a "must answer" question for the presidential candidates, and every member of Congress:
Border patrol agent held at gunpoint
Officers fear Mexican military encounters will turn violent
Jerry Seper * Wednesday, August 6, 2008
A U.S. Border Patrol agent was held at gunpoint Sunday night by members of the Mexican military who had crossed the border into Arizona, but the soldiers returned to Mexico without incident when backup agents responded to assist.
Agents assigned to the Border Patrol station at Ajo, Ariz., said the Mexican soldiers crossed the international border in an isolated area about 100 miles southwest of Tucson and pointed rifles at the agent, who was not identified.
It was unclear what the soldiers were doing in the United States, but U.S. law enforcement authorities have long said that current and former Mexican military personnel have been hired to protect drug and migrant smugglers.
"Unfortunately, this sort of behavior by Mexican military personnel has been going on for years," union Local 2544 of the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) said on its Web page.
"They are never held accountable, and the United States government will undoubtedly brush this off as another case of 'Oh well, they didn't know they were in the United States.'
"It is fortunate that this incident didn't end in a very ugly gunfight," said the local's posting.
The NBPC represents all nonsupervisory personnel among the agency's 16,000 agents.
Border Patrol spokesman Michael Friel did not return calls for comment Tuesday.
State Department spokeswoman Nicole Thompson said Tuesday that the department had no information on the incident, and referred further questions to the Border Patrol. "It is not an incident that we are aware of," she said.
Ricardo Alday, spokesman at the Mexican Embassy in Washington, said Tuesday that Mexico and the United States are engaged in "an all-out struggle to deter criminal organizations from operating on both sides of our common border."
"Law enforcement operations have led, from time to time, to innocent incursions by both U.S. and Mexican law enforcement personnel and military units into the territory of both nations, and in particular along non-demarcated areas of our border," he said.
"We always try to solve these incidents in a cooperative fashion, and as acknowledged by the Border Patrol, this was the case in the episode at Ajo," he said.
Since 1996, there have been more than 200 confirmed incursions by the Mexican military into the United States.
Local 2544, the largest in the NBPC, is headed by veteran Border Patrol agent Edward "Bud" Tuffly II. He noted on the Web page that the local's leadership would "withhold further comment on this incident until we see how our leaders handle it."
"We don't have much confidence in most of them," the local's posting said.
Sunday night's incident bears similarities to other incursions by armed men in Mexican military gear in recent years:
* The incident occurred in the same area where heavily armed Mexican soldiers riding in a Humvee shot at a Border Patrol agent in 2002. A .50-caliber bullet ripped through the agent's rear window as he sped away.
Mexican officials denied at the time that the shooters were Mexican soldiers, saying they were criminals using military uniforms. It is a position they steadfastly have maintained.
But the agent who reported encountering the gunfire was certain he saw soldiers, said Mr. Tuffly. He said at the time that the agent was able to identify their attire "down to a T, and it matched exactly what they [Mexican soldiers] wear."
That purported incursion began after a Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation police ranger reported being chased by men in a Humvee.
* A year ago, U.S. law enforcement authorities were confronted by gunfire from automatic weapons as they chased and caught a drug-smuggling suspect in Texas trying to flee back into Mexico, the Hudspeth County (Texas) Sheriff's Office said.
No one was hurt in that incident, and the gunmen were not identified, although the area has been the scene of similar incidents over several months, including a confrontation in January 2007, when heavily armed men in Mexican military uniforms fired on Texas officers with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on a camouflaged Humvee.
The men were identified at the time by Hudspeth County Sheriff Arvin West as "soldiers."
In that incident, Hudspeth County deputies pursued three sport utility vehicles back to Mexico after spotting them driving north from the Rio Grande. The pursuit ended on the U.S. side of the border when the deputies encountered 10 heavily armed men in what they described as battle-dress uniforms.
At that time, deputies found 1,400 pounds of marijuana in one of the vehicles abandoned after it blew a tire early in the pursuit. Another made it into Mexico and a third got stuck in the Rio Grande and was burned by the "soldiers" after it was unloaded.
* In November 2007, the Border Patrol chased a dump truck full of marijuana in the same area when it also got stuck in the river while trying to return to Mexico. While agents sought to unload 3 tons of marijuana, the driver - who had fled - returned with a heavily armed group of men wearing Mexican military uniforms and carrying military-style weapons.
The soldiers backed the agents away and bulldozed the truck back into Mexico.
"Nothing was ever done," Local 2544 said. "Nobody was ever held accountable. Particularly galling is the fact that the Mexican military often pulls these stunts in Humvees donated to them by the American taxpayers. We note that Border Patrol agents have historically driven worn-out, junk vehicles."
A coalition of Texas border sheriffs has demanded that the U.S. and Mexican governments investigate incursions into the United States by heavily armed drug escorts dressed in Mexican military uniforms "before someone gets killed."
Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr. of Zapata County, Texas, who founded the coalition, said a growing number of suspected incursions and violence aimed at the area's law enforcement officers is making the border "a pretty dangerous place."
Sheriff Gonzalez said three of his deputies in 2006 spotted 25 men dressed in military uniforms in the U.S. during a late-night patrol. He said the men marched two abreast and carried duffel bags and automatic weapons, and that his "outmanned and outgunned deputies" were forced to retreat.
"The only thing you can do in that kind of situation is seek cover," Sheriff Gonzalez said. "I'm not going to lose someone in an unfair fight."
The State Department on Tuesday also confirmed a separate case in which two California police officers were arrested at the border Friday on charges of attempting to smuggle guns, ammunition and training materials into Mexico.
A Mexican court is expected to decide Wednesday whether the two Monterey County officers will remain in jail or be released on bail.
The U.S. Consulate in Tijuana said Mexico holds the largest population of U.S. prisoners outside the United States.
* David R. Sands contributed to this report.
+++++++++++++
It should be obvious that our Border Patrol agents are being sold down the river (the Rio Grande in this case) by our government. How long do you expect it to take for them to be completely demoralized and just quit putting their life on the line for a government that isn't going to back them?
Ask your congress member. In person. At a public function.
When the member weasels, tell the member that he or she is weaseling, and that being a weasel is unsatisfactory.
Then ask, "When are you going to quit being a weasel?"
-30-
Border patrol agent held at gunpoint
Officers fear Mexican military encounters will turn violent
Jerry Seper * Wednesday, August 6, 2008
A U.S. Border Patrol agent was held at gunpoint Sunday night by members of the Mexican military who had crossed the border into Arizona, but the soldiers returned to Mexico without incident when backup agents responded to assist.
Agents assigned to the Border Patrol station at Ajo, Ariz., said the Mexican soldiers crossed the international border in an isolated area about 100 miles southwest of Tucson and pointed rifles at the agent, who was not identified.
It was unclear what the soldiers were doing in the United States, but U.S. law enforcement authorities have long said that current and former Mexican military personnel have been hired to protect drug and migrant smugglers.
"Unfortunately, this sort of behavior by Mexican military personnel has been going on for years," union Local 2544 of the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) said on its Web page.
"They are never held accountable, and the United States government will undoubtedly brush this off as another case of 'Oh well, they didn't know they were in the United States.'
"It is fortunate that this incident didn't end in a very ugly gunfight," said the local's posting.
The NBPC represents all nonsupervisory personnel among the agency's 16,000 agents.
Border Patrol spokesman Michael Friel did not return calls for comment Tuesday.
State Department spokeswoman Nicole Thompson said Tuesday that the department had no information on the incident, and referred further questions to the Border Patrol. "It is not an incident that we are aware of," she said.
Ricardo Alday, spokesman at the Mexican Embassy in Washington, said Tuesday that Mexico and the United States are engaged in "an all-out struggle to deter criminal organizations from operating on both sides of our common border."
"Law enforcement operations have led, from time to time, to innocent incursions by both U.S. and Mexican law enforcement personnel and military units into the territory of both nations, and in particular along non-demarcated areas of our border," he said.
"We always try to solve these incidents in a cooperative fashion, and as acknowledged by the Border Patrol, this was the case in the episode at Ajo," he said.
Since 1996, there have been more than 200 confirmed incursions by the Mexican military into the United States.
Local 2544, the largest in the NBPC, is headed by veteran Border Patrol agent Edward "Bud" Tuffly II. He noted on the Web page that the local's leadership would "withhold further comment on this incident until we see how our leaders handle it."
"We don't have much confidence in most of them," the local's posting said.
Sunday night's incident bears similarities to other incursions by armed men in Mexican military gear in recent years:
* The incident occurred in the same area where heavily armed Mexican soldiers riding in a Humvee shot at a Border Patrol agent in 2002. A .50-caliber bullet ripped through the agent's rear window as he sped away.
Mexican officials denied at the time that the shooters were Mexican soldiers, saying they were criminals using military uniforms. It is a position they steadfastly have maintained.
But the agent who reported encountering the gunfire was certain he saw soldiers, said Mr. Tuffly. He said at the time that the agent was able to identify their attire "down to a T, and it matched exactly what they [Mexican soldiers] wear."
That purported incursion began after a Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation police ranger reported being chased by men in a Humvee.
* A year ago, U.S. law enforcement authorities were confronted by gunfire from automatic weapons as they chased and caught a drug-smuggling suspect in Texas trying to flee back into Mexico, the Hudspeth County (Texas) Sheriff's Office said.
No one was hurt in that incident, and the gunmen were not identified, although the area has been the scene of similar incidents over several months, including a confrontation in January 2007, when heavily armed men in Mexican military uniforms fired on Texas officers with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on a camouflaged Humvee.
The men were identified at the time by Hudspeth County Sheriff Arvin West as "soldiers."
In that incident, Hudspeth County deputies pursued three sport utility vehicles back to Mexico after spotting them driving north from the Rio Grande. The pursuit ended on the U.S. side of the border when the deputies encountered 10 heavily armed men in what they described as battle-dress uniforms.
At that time, deputies found 1,400 pounds of marijuana in one of the vehicles abandoned after it blew a tire early in the pursuit. Another made it into Mexico and a third got stuck in the Rio Grande and was burned by the "soldiers" after it was unloaded.
* In November 2007, the Border Patrol chased a dump truck full of marijuana in the same area when it also got stuck in the river while trying to return to Mexico. While agents sought to unload 3 tons of marijuana, the driver - who had fled - returned with a heavily armed group of men wearing Mexican military uniforms and carrying military-style weapons.
The soldiers backed the agents away and bulldozed the truck back into Mexico.
"Nothing was ever done," Local 2544 said. "Nobody was ever held accountable. Particularly galling is the fact that the Mexican military often pulls these stunts in Humvees donated to them by the American taxpayers. We note that Border Patrol agents have historically driven worn-out, junk vehicles."
A coalition of Texas border sheriffs has demanded that the U.S. and Mexican governments investigate incursions into the United States by heavily armed drug escorts dressed in Mexican military uniforms "before someone gets killed."
Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr. of Zapata County, Texas, who founded the coalition, said a growing number of suspected incursions and violence aimed at the area's law enforcement officers is making the border "a pretty dangerous place."
Sheriff Gonzalez said three of his deputies in 2006 spotted 25 men dressed in military uniforms in the U.S. during a late-night patrol. He said the men marched two abreast and carried duffel bags and automatic weapons, and that his "outmanned and outgunned deputies" were forced to retreat.
"The only thing you can do in that kind of situation is seek cover," Sheriff Gonzalez said. "I'm not going to lose someone in an unfair fight."
The State Department on Tuesday also confirmed a separate case in which two California police officers were arrested at the border Friday on charges of attempting to smuggle guns, ammunition and training materials into Mexico.
A Mexican court is expected to decide Wednesday whether the two Monterey County officers will remain in jail or be released on bail.
The U.S. Consulate in Tijuana said Mexico holds the largest population of U.S. prisoners outside the United States.
* David R. Sands contributed to this report.
+++++++++++++
It should be obvious that our Border Patrol agents are being sold down the river (the Rio Grande in this case) by our government. How long do you expect it to take for them to be completely demoralized and just quit putting their life on the line for a government that isn't going to back them?
Ask your congress member. In person. At a public function.
When the member weasels, tell the member that he or she is weaseling, and that being a weasel is unsatisfactory.
Then ask, "When are you going to quit being a weasel?"
-30-
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Obama's Authoritarians Shut Down This Blog
Add this blog, Reading Between the Lines, to the list of blogs shut down by Mr. Obama's authoritarian foot-soldiers.
I had posted a number of articles about Mr. Obama's ethnic make-up. It is nothing that his camp wants to discuss. So apparently, the fastest way for the Obama "true believers" to act out their rage is to flag blogs hosted by Blogspot, a division of the so-called "Do No Harm" Google monolith, and have them frozen as "spam blogs."
I hadn't thought of that at first when, about 2 weeks ago, I went to post an update about Mr. Obama and found I was blocked out as a "spam blog." OK, so I innocently clicked the email button to get a human from Google to check the blog and get it freed.
Well, that didn't work in a 48-hour period, and so I did it again. I did it a total of 4 times over 14 days.
About 3 or 4 days ago it dawned on me that Google was playing footsie with the Obama campaign and blocking out blogs that the authoritarians running his campaign wanted silenced.
As you can see for yourself, the blog is now open. But here is what else showed up today; an article by Anna Phillips of the NY Sun:
Anti-Obama Bloggers Say They Were Silenced
Web loggers who are campaigning against Senator Obama's presidential run are accusing Google and Obama supporters of silencing them after their Web logs were marked as spam and their accounts temporarily frozen.
On Thursday, hours after publishing a post about an online petition demanding that Mr. Obama publicly produce his birth certificate, an associate professor of business administration at Brooklyn College, Mitchell Langbert, found that he could no longer access his Web log.
Google's Blogger hosting service had suspended "Mitchell Langbert's Blog," which Mr. Langbert describes as "two-thirds academic stuff I'm working on and one-third politics," until it could verify the Web log was not a "spam blog," or a site designed solely to increase the page views of associated Web sites.
A day later Google lifted the block on the account, but the incident and earlier Web log freezes in late June have led Mr. Langbert and other anti-Obama bloggers to accuse the Illinois senator's supporters of intentionally identifying their blog addresses to Google as spam blogs. They also say the company has reflexively suspended the sites.
"These tech-savvy smart alecks have figured out that if you report a blog you don't like, you can do some damage to a person," Mr. Langbert said.
A spokesman for Google, Adam Kovacevich, said in a statement that an overzealous antispam filter was responsible for the blocks.
"We believe this was caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the 'Just Say No Deal' network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam," he said. "We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression."
Several of the blogs that were blocked, including hillaryorbust.com and comealongway.blogspot.com, are part of the "Just Say No Deal" network of anti-Obama blogs.
But Mr. Langbert's blog is not, leading him to conclude that Obama supporters had targeted him.
On her right-leaning blog "Atlas Shrugs," Pamela Geller keeps a list of blogs that Google has temporarily blocked. "The blockings do come in waves," she said. "The last wave was this past week, and now it got very quiet."
Some writers have had their blogs unblocked, while others have moved them to WordPress, a rival blog host.
"I don't think" Google has "malicious intentions at all, it's just that spammers can literally overrun a service if you're not careful, so their defenses have become overzealous," a spokesman for WordPress, Matthew Mullenweg, said in an e-mail.
"We always have human review before turning off an active blog," he said. "People invest so much time into their blogs, to treat it with anything less than the utmost respect is criminal."
+++++++++++++
Well, there you have it. I have to ask, "Are you ready for the type of people who will shut down the First Amendment as soon as look at you running the government?"
And for journalists, what does this tell you?
I am amazed that Mr. Obama's campaign would be so amoral, but then what do you expect from him? The more you know, the scarier he is.
-30-
I had posted a number of articles about Mr. Obama's ethnic make-up. It is nothing that his camp wants to discuss. So apparently, the fastest way for the Obama "true believers" to act out their rage is to flag blogs hosted by Blogspot, a division of the so-called "Do No Harm" Google monolith, and have them frozen as "spam blogs."
I hadn't thought of that at first when, about 2 weeks ago, I went to post an update about Mr. Obama and found I was blocked out as a "spam blog." OK, so I innocently clicked the email button to get a human from Google to check the blog and get it freed.
Well, that didn't work in a 48-hour period, and so I did it again. I did it a total of 4 times over 14 days.
About 3 or 4 days ago it dawned on me that Google was playing footsie with the Obama campaign and blocking out blogs that the authoritarians running his campaign wanted silenced.
As you can see for yourself, the blog is now open. But here is what else showed up today; an article by Anna Phillips of the NY Sun:
Anti-Obama Bloggers Say They Were Silenced
Web loggers who are campaigning against Senator Obama's presidential run are accusing Google and Obama supporters of silencing them after their Web logs were marked as spam and their accounts temporarily frozen.
On Thursday, hours after publishing a post about an online petition demanding that Mr. Obama publicly produce his birth certificate, an associate professor of business administration at Brooklyn College, Mitchell Langbert, found that he could no longer access his Web log.
Google's Blogger hosting service had suspended "Mitchell Langbert's Blog," which Mr. Langbert describes as "two-thirds academic stuff I'm working on and one-third politics," until it could verify the Web log was not a "spam blog," or a site designed solely to increase the page views of associated Web sites.
A day later Google lifted the block on the account, but the incident and earlier Web log freezes in late June have led Mr. Langbert and other anti-Obama bloggers to accuse the Illinois senator's supporters of intentionally identifying their blog addresses to Google as spam blogs. They also say the company has reflexively suspended the sites.
"These tech-savvy smart alecks have figured out that if you report a blog you don't like, you can do some damage to a person," Mr. Langbert said.
A spokesman for Google, Adam Kovacevich, said in a statement that an overzealous antispam filter was responsible for the blocks.
"We believe this was caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the 'Just Say No Deal' network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam," he said. "We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression."
Several of the blogs that were blocked, including hillaryorbust.com and comealongway.blogspot.com, are part of the "Just Say No Deal" network of anti-Obama blogs.
But Mr. Langbert's blog is not, leading him to conclude that Obama supporters had targeted him.
On her right-leaning blog "Atlas Shrugs," Pamela Geller keeps a list of blogs that Google has temporarily blocked. "The blockings do come in waves," she said. "The last wave was this past week, and now it got very quiet."
Some writers have had their blogs unblocked, while others have moved them to WordPress, a rival blog host.
"I don't think" Google has "malicious intentions at all, it's just that spammers can literally overrun a service if you're not careful, so their defenses have become overzealous," a spokesman for WordPress, Matthew Mullenweg, said in an e-mail.
"We always have human review before turning off an active blog," he said. "People invest so much time into their blogs, to treat it with anything less than the utmost respect is criminal."
+++++++++++++
Well, there you have it. I have to ask, "Are you ready for the type of people who will shut down the First Amendment as soon as look at you running the government?"
And for journalists, what does this tell you?
I am amazed that Mr. Obama's campaign would be so amoral, but then what do you expect from him? The more you know, the scarier he is.
-30-
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Barack Hussein Obama: Our Political Messiah?
I had to post this column by Kathleen Parker. She writes for the Washington Post Group, so she's as mainstream as you can get.
The column is the most precise explanation of Mr. Obama's unprecedented "American Idol" success as a political candidate. Ms. Parker accurately captures the broader cultural underpinnings of his attraction, and argues that he is the cusp of a new generation's self-expression through the political process.
She is absolutely correct.
If you want to understand how an out-of-nowhere candidate like Mr. Obama can torpedo the decades-long ambitions of Hills, read this article:
By Kathleen Parker
Much has been made of the religious tenor of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Reports of women weeping and swooning — even of an audience applauding when The One cleared his proboscis (blew his nose for you mortals) — have become frequent events in the heavenly realm of Obi-Wan Obama.
His rhetoric, meanwhile, drips with hints of resurrection, redemption and second comings. "We are the ones we've been waiting for," he said on Super Tuesday night. And his people were glad.
Actually, they were hysterical, the word that best describes what surrounds this young savior, and that may be more apt than we imagine. The word is derived from the Greek hystera, or womb. The ancient Greeks considered hysteria a psychoneurosis peculiar to women caused by disturbances of the uterus.
Well, you don't see any men fainting in Obi's presence.
Barack Obama has many appealing qualities, not least his own reluctance to be swaddled in purple. Nothing quite says "I'm only human" like whipping out a hankie and blowing one's nose in front of 17,000 admirers. The audience's applause was reportedly awkward, as if the crowd was both approving of anything their savior did, but a little disappointed at this rather ungodly behavior.
So what is the source of this infatuation with Obama? How to explain the hysteria? The religious fervor? The devotion? The weeping and fainting and utter euphoria surrounding a candidate who had the audacity to run for leader of the free world on a platform of mere hope?
If anthropologists made predictions the way meteorologists do, they might have anticipated Obama's astronomical rise to supernova status in 2008 of the Common Era. Consider the cultural coordinates, and Obama's intersection with history becomes almost inevitable.
To play weatherman for a moment, he is a perfect storm of the culture of narcissism, the cult of celebrity, and a secular society in which fathers (both the holy and the secular) have been increasingly marginalized from the lives of a generation of young Americans.
All of these trends have been gaining momentum the past few decades. Social critic Christopher Lasch named the culture of narcissism a generation ago and cited addiction to celebrity as one of the disease's symptoms — all tied to the decline of the family.
That culture has merely become more exaggerated as spiritual alienation and fatherlessness have collided with technology (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.) that enables the self-absorption of the narcissistic personality.
Grown-ups with decades under their double chins may have a variety of reasons for supporting Obama, but the youth who pack convention halls and stadiums as if for a rock concert constitute a tipping point of another order.
One of Obama's TV ads, set to rock 'n' roll, has a Woodstock feel to it. Text alternating with crowd scenes reads: "We Can Change The World" and "We Can Save The Planet."
Those are some kind of campaign promises. The kind no mortal could possibly keep, but never mind. Obi-Wan Obama is about hope — and hope, he'll tell you, knows no limits.
It is thus no surprise that the young are enamored of Obama. He's a rock star. A telegenic, ultra-bright redeemer fluent in the planetary language of a cosmic generation. The force is with him.
But underpinning that popularity is something that transcends mere policy or politics. It is hunger, and that hunger is clearly spiritual. Human beings seem to have a yearning for the transcendent — hence thousands of years of religion — but we have lately shied away from traditional approaches and old gods.
Thus, in post-Judeo-Christian America, the sports club is the new church. Global warming is the new religion. Vegetarianism is the new sacrament. Hooking up, the new prayer. Talk therapy, the new witnessing. Tattooing and piercing, the new sacred symbols and rituals.
And apparently, Barack Obama is the new messiah.
Here's how a 20-year-old woman in Seattle described that Obama feeling, "When he was talking about hope, it actually almost made me cry. Like it really made sense, like, for the first, like, whoa . . ."
This New Age glossolalia may be more sonorous than the guttural emanations from the revival tent, but the emotion is the same. It's all religion by any other name.
Whatever the Church of Obama promises, we should not mistake this movement for a renaissance of reason. It is more like, well, like whoa.
-30-
KATHLEEN PARKER
Write Kathleen Parker, Washington Post Writer's Group, 115015th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Sen. Barack Obama: It's time to test the DNA
In reviewing some of the many comments I've received about the ethnic composition of Barack Obama, the range of social intercourse has come from every imaginable angle.
I've had pictures taken from Mr. Obama's so-called "African Tour" purporting to show just how black the people who live in the area of his father's birth are, Ph.D. level dissertations on the Luo tribe and its interaction with the Arab slave trader forefathers of Mr. Obama, to opinions that this controversy shows the madness of trying to run a "Melting Pot" society with ethnic labels pasted on the foreheads of its citizens.
In reading this range of thought, I've come to believe the Big Scoop on this topic will come when someone grabs something with Mr. Obama's DNA smeared on it, then runs it to a lab for analysis.
I'm serious about that. There is no better proof available in our time than a DNA test.
The challenge is, however, who will hang the bell on the cat's tail - when Secret Service agents, local law enforcement, and big-bruiser bodyguards keep everyone but the pre-screened supporters too far away to get something suitable for testing.
DNA analysis is not my field. So I'm stuck with only what I've been told about it; I hope one of you reading this will send in a comment to flesh out the hows, and what the results can tell us.
I'm thinking that the most vulnerable time for Mr. Obama will be when he makes local talk radio and TV appearances.
It's not hard to imagine a resourceful soul getting what the DNA analysts need: "Here you are, Sen. Obama, have a glass of water, and here's a kerchief to wipe your brow to keep the sweat from rolling down your face . . . and I'll be happy to dispose of the glass and kerchief when you're finished."
Of course, now that I've laid out the scenario, it will be interesting to see what his traveling campaign staff does to keep anyone from doing what I just described. I'm not so unaware of the early timeline nature of this ethnic composition problem; right now, I seriously doubt anyone at that level of his campaign knows anything about this fermenting in the blogs.
What that means to our resourceful soul is that there is no better time than now to get a sample. Once his staff gets wind of this, they will lock out everyone else from getting anything that can be tested.
But the irony of it all is that by turning themselves into a cross of Mr. Clean, and Rosie "The Quicker Picker Upper," picking up anything he breathed upon and spraying Lysol on everything he touches, they will actually be telling us all that they know that what we want to prove is the truth.
The bizarre picture of his staff behaving that way will just turn up the heat for someone to get through their lines. I can see some first-tier journalist telling the senator's press secretary, "I just want this dinner napkin to take home to my kids as a souvenir."
Now that will be funny.
If you have the ability to get something that can be analyzed, please do so at your first opportunity. It really does matter. You will be doing a tremendous "good deed" for America, and the world.
Be sure to establish a "chain of custody" from his body to the lab. You know Sen. Obama will lie about everything having to do with getting to the truth about him.
And when he does that, it will bring more attention to it. The goal here is to create such a level of interest that the first-tier information organizations are forced to deal with the issue. Be sure to be nice to them by giving them a loophole big enough for a 747 to explain away why they never thought of this first. They will be incredibly grateful to you for that loophole.
If the test came up as I researched, with a African Negro component less than the federal threshold of 12.5%, then Sen. Obama will have a major problem on his hands.
Unlike his non-votes of "Present" in the Illinois State Senate when bombshell issues arrived at his doorstep and he couldn't take an honest stand one way or the other on them, a DNA test will be published, it will have the necessary scientific gravitas to demand attention from the first-tier information organizations; he can't duck out and hide.
I don't know who will get the sample for testing, but now that the idea is out in the open, it will be only a matter of time until it happens.
And to whomever this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity graces, get yourself a great lawyer when the results come back to you. I can assure you that Sen. Obama will do everything he can to lock you down.
But like little white spots on the front of a dress, this sample of DNA will also bring a political life of lies to a sudden end. "Hell hath no fury" like an ethnic constituency played for fools.
-30-
I've had pictures taken from Mr. Obama's so-called "African Tour" purporting to show just how black the people who live in the area of his father's birth are, Ph.D. level dissertations on the Luo tribe and its interaction with the Arab slave trader forefathers of Mr. Obama, to opinions that this controversy shows the madness of trying to run a "Melting Pot" society with ethnic labels pasted on the foreheads of its citizens.
In reading this range of thought, I've come to believe the Big Scoop on this topic will come when someone grabs something with Mr. Obama's DNA smeared on it, then runs it to a lab for analysis.
I'm serious about that. There is no better proof available in our time than a DNA test.
The challenge is, however, who will hang the bell on the cat's tail - when Secret Service agents, local law enforcement, and big-bruiser bodyguards keep everyone but the pre-screened supporters too far away to get something suitable for testing.
DNA analysis is not my field. So I'm stuck with only what I've been told about it; I hope one of you reading this will send in a comment to flesh out the hows, and what the results can tell us.
I'm thinking that the most vulnerable time for Mr. Obama will be when he makes local talk radio and TV appearances.
It's not hard to imagine a resourceful soul getting what the DNA analysts need: "Here you are, Sen. Obama, have a glass of water, and here's a kerchief to wipe your brow to keep the sweat from rolling down your face . . . and I'll be happy to dispose of the glass and kerchief when you're finished."
Of course, now that I've laid out the scenario, it will be interesting to see what his traveling campaign staff does to keep anyone from doing what I just described. I'm not so unaware of the early timeline nature of this ethnic composition problem; right now, I seriously doubt anyone at that level of his campaign knows anything about this fermenting in the blogs.
What that means to our resourceful soul is that there is no better time than now to get a sample. Once his staff gets wind of this, they will lock out everyone else from getting anything that can be tested.
But the irony of it all is that by turning themselves into a cross of Mr. Clean, and Rosie "The Quicker Picker Upper," picking up anything he breathed upon and spraying Lysol on everything he touches, they will actually be telling us all that they know that what we want to prove is the truth.
The bizarre picture of his staff behaving that way will just turn up the heat for someone to get through their lines. I can see some first-tier journalist telling the senator's press secretary, "I just want this dinner napkin to take home to my kids as a souvenir."
Now that will be funny.
If you have the ability to get something that can be analyzed, please do so at your first opportunity. It really does matter. You will be doing a tremendous "good deed" for America, and the world.
Be sure to establish a "chain of custody" from his body to the lab. You know Sen. Obama will lie about everything having to do with getting to the truth about him.
And when he does that, it will bring more attention to it. The goal here is to create such a level of interest that the first-tier information organizations are forced to deal with the issue. Be sure to be nice to them by giving them a loophole big enough for a 747 to explain away why they never thought of this first. They will be incredibly grateful to you for that loophole.
If the test came up as I researched, with a African Negro component less than the federal threshold of 12.5%, then Sen. Obama will have a major problem on his hands.
Unlike his non-votes of "Present" in the Illinois State Senate when bombshell issues arrived at his doorstep and he couldn't take an honest stand one way or the other on them, a DNA test will be published, it will have the necessary scientific gravitas to demand attention from the first-tier information organizations; he can't duck out and hide.
I don't know who will get the sample for testing, but now that the idea is out in the open, it will be only a matter of time until it happens.
And to whomever this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity graces, get yourself a great lawyer when the results come back to you. I can assure you that Sen. Obama will do everything he can to lock you down.
But like little white spots on the front of a dress, this sample of DNA will also bring a political life of lies to a sudden end. "Hell hath no fury" like an ethnic constituency played for fools.
-30-
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