The Scandal That Never Seems to End: Police Chief Murdered With Rifle Lost in Operation Fast and Furious
Yet another gun lost in the ATF’s disastrous federal gun-walking operation known as “Fast and Furious” has reportedly been used in a murder.
A high-powered rifle from Fast and
Furious was used to kill a Mexican police chief in the state of Jalisco
earlier this year, according to internal Department of Justice records.
The new revelation suggests “that weapons from the failed gun-tracking
operation have now made it into the hands of violent drug cartels deep
inside Mexico,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
More from the LA Times:
Luis Lucio Rosales Astorga, the police chief in the city of Hostotipaquillo, was shot to death Jan. 29 when gunmen intercepted his patrol car and opened fire. Also killed was one of his bodyguards. His wife and a second bodyguard were wounded.
Local authorities said eight suspects in their 20s and 30s were arrested after police seized them nearby with a cache of weapons — rifles, grenades, handguns, helmets, bulletproof vests, uniforms and special communications equipment. The area is a hot zone for rival drug gangs, with members of three cartels fighting over turf in the region.
A semi-automatic WASR rifle, the firearm that killed the chief, was traced back to the Lone Wolf Trading Company, a gun store in Glendale, Ariz. The notation on the Department of Justice trace records said the WASR was used in a “HOMICIDE – WILLFUL – KILL –PUB OFF –GUN” –ATF code for “Homicide, Willful Killing of a Public Official, Gun.”
The ATF allowed hundreds of guns to
walk across the border into Mexico with supposed intentions of tracking
them to Mexican cartel leaders.
The ATF declined to discuss the murder
of the Mexican police chief. Officials told the LA Times that they are
still creating an inventory of all the lost firearms for a complete
account of the Fast and Furious operation. The operation was started in
2008.
At least 211 people have been killed or
wounded by Fast and Furious guns, according to Mexican authorities.
This, of course, includes slain U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry,
who was gunned down by Mexican traffickers in 2010.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/07/05/the-scandal-that-keeps-on-giving-police-chief-murdered-with-rifle-lost-in-operation-fast-and-furious/
Only 47% of Adults Have Full-Time Job
The release of the June Jobs' Report Friday was something of a relief for the markets. The Labor Department reported that the economy gained 195,000 jobs in June, which beat economists' expectations. The Department also reported that the economy gained 70,000 more jobs in April and May than it originally estimated. The report, however, also provides clear evidence that the the nation is splitting into two; only 47% of Americans have a full-time job and those who don't are finding it increasingly out of reach.Of the 144 million Americans employed last month, only 116 million were working full-time. Friday's report showed that 58.7% of the civilian adult population of 245 million was working last month. Only 47% of Americans, however, had a full-time job.
The market's positive reaction to Friday's report is another sign of how far our economic expectations have fallen. If today the same proportion of Americans worked as just a decade ago, there would by almost nine million more people working. Just in the last year, almost two million Americans have left the labor force. With a majority of the population not holding a full-time job, it isn't surprising that economic growth has been so weak.
In June, the number of Americans who wanted to work full-time, but were forced into part-time jobs because of the economy, jumped 352,000 to over eight million.
The Jobs' Report is increasingly measuring only a part of the American economy. While Friday's report was better than expected, it only measures those who are working or actively looking for work. There is a growing number of Americans slipping through the cracks of the job market.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/07/05/only-47-americans-have-full-time-job
PK'S NOTE: MR IGNATIEV, YOU GO FIRST.
Harvard professor argues for 'abolishing' white race
A Harvard professor wants to abolish the white race.Noel Ignatiev, a founder of a journal called Race Traitor and a fellow at Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute, a leading black-studies department, argues in the current issue of Harvard Magazine that "abolishing the white race" is "so desirable that some may find it hard to believe" that anyone other than "committed white supremacists" would oppose it.
In excerpts appearing this week in newspapers nationwide, Mr. Ignatiev, who is white, writes that "every group within white America," including "labor unionists, ethnic groups, college students, schoolteachers, taxpayers and white women" has at one time or another "advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race."
Mr. Ignatiev pledges in the essay that his journal, Race Traitor, intends to "keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females, too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed not 'deconstructed' but destroyed."
His colleagues at Harvard seem not to take his proposal entirely seriously. Others cite the article as an example of Harvard's institutional racism.
Sara Stillman, assistant to the publisher of Harvard Magazine, says there's clearly some "misunderstanding" about what Mr. Ignatiev means by the inflammatory language.
Asked in a 1997 interview with the New York Times if he hates his own white skin, Mr. Ignatiev said, "No, but I want to abolish the privileges."
"The white race is like a private club based on one huge assumption that all those who look white, are, whatever their complaints or reservations, fundamentally loyal to the race. We want to dissolve that club, to explode it," he said.
Christopher Reed, executive editor of Harvard Magazine, defended what Mr. Ignatiev wrote in the September-October issue. "He's arguing against the mind-set and attitude that automatically grants privileges to white people he wants more fairness," Mr. Reed said in a statement.
The university's public affairs office said it had no comment.
The article already has stirred anger among some conservatives, who see the article as typical of the liberal climate in academia. "Suppose Frontpagemagazine.com ran a headline 'Abolish the Black Race'?" asks David Horowitz on his magazine's Web site. "What do you think the reaction would be? But at Harvard, where demonizing whites is merely the standard curriculum, an article like this can appear in a glossy magazine whose cover story is 'Whither the Art Museum?'
"Race hatred, if directed against white people, is just part of the progressive culture," says Mr. Horowitz, a radical-turned-conservative and author of "Civil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery."
Mr. Ignatiev, a one-time steelworker and Marxist activist who earned a doctorate at Harvard, could not be reached for comment. But he writes about what he believes at the Web site of Race Traitor, whose motto is: "Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity."
"The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race, which means no more and no less than abolishing the privileges of the white skin. Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue, domestic and foreign, in U.S. society," the journal's statement of purpose says.
"The existence of the white race depends on the willingness of those assigned to it to place their racial interests above class, gender, or any other interests they hold. The defection of enough of its members to make it unreliable as a predictor of behavior will lead to its collapse."
Among the "privileges" of being white, according to Race Traitor, are not being followed by security in stores, not being harassed by police, having easier access to better schools, jobs and housing, and not being asked whether skin color or affirmative action got you a job.
In the essay in Harvard Magazine, Mr. Ignatiev says he always expected "bewilderment" at his views from "people who still think of race as biology."
"We frequently get letters accusing us of being 'racists' just like the KKK, and have even been called a 'hate group.'" he wrote.
Mr. Ignatiev attempts to clarify how he could be seeking to abolish the white race without calling for genocide. "Our standard response is to draw an analogy with anti-royalism: to oppose monarchy does not mean killing the king; it means getting rid of crowns, thrones, royal titles, etc."
Abolition of a monarchy has often been marked by killing the monarch and sometimes his family members; for example, England in 1649, France in 1792, Russia in 1917 and Iraq in 1958. Even those nations that have abolished kings or emperors without regicide generally have forced the monarch into exile.
Mr. Ignatiev grew up in a Philadelphia family that he says was devoid of racial bias. As a child, he swam at a free community pool, where he was the only white patron. He says his parents refused to pay a $1 fee that was designed to keep other public pools all-white.
Mr. Ignatiev's parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia, were not college educated, but he attended the University of Pennsylvania, dropping out after three years. He worked in a Chicago steel mill and in factories that made farm equipment and electrical parts for two decades. At the steel mill, he helped organize strikes and protests by the predominantly black work force.
He was laid off from the steel mill in 1984, a year after he was arrested on charges of throwing a paint bomb at a strike-breaker's car. He set up Marxist discussion groups in the early 1980s. In 1985, Mr. Ignatiev was accepted to the Harvard Graduate School of Education without an undergraduate degree. After earning his master's, he joined the Harvard faculty as a lecturer and worked toward a doctorate in U.S. history.
His dissertation was his book, "How the Irish Became White." Mr. Ignatiev said the book told how Irish immigrants came to the United States and became "oppressors" by emulating American whites.
Washington & Wall Street: Barack Obama's Dangerous Foreign Policy Adventure
“Commerce between master and slave is barbarism.” -- Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson Memorial
As we celebrated the Fourth of July, Americans were greeted with the spectacle of a military coup in Egypt, another former British colony that has not yet recovered from centuries of foreign rule and the aftermath. The whole notion of Egypt and other Middle Eastern nations as states is a legacy of foreign colonial rule going back to the Ottomans and Byzantines. Watching the cronies of former president Hosni Mubarak taking power in Egypt should remind us all of the evils done in the name of empire, most recently by Rome, Britain, and the United States.
Since a declining Great Britain withdrew its military “East of Eden” in 1971, Washington has been the great colonial power of the world. The military industrial apparatus in Egypt has been a client of Washington for decades and before that, of the Soviet Union. What we call Egypt today has been dominated by European powers for centuries. In Iran, by comparison, a largely secular military industrial state that happens to be anti-American rules that nation under the religious label of the "Revolutionary Guards."
The ability of great foreign powers to guide outcomes in these various states is uncertain at best but is always done under the guise of good intentions. Such are the rules of “the great game,” to borrow another phrase from the era of British colonial power a century ago. Brian Urquhart writes in The New York Review of Books, “Disaster: From Suez to Iraq”:
Only seventy years ago, Great Britain ruled over more than one quarter of the land surface of the planet. It policed, as far as anyone did, the oceans and seas, and it was the most important force in world finance, trade, and economy. All this was a source of national pride and a sense of mission that, for most people, conveniently evaded moral questions about the right of one race or nation to dominate another. Lord Curzon, the ultimate British proconsul, wrote that the British Empire was the greatest instrument for good that the world had ever seen.America likes to believe that it too is a great instrument for good in the world, but in the Middle East you can certainly ask whether Washington’s policies are creating stability or larger chaos. President Barack Obama has overtly encouraged social unrest in Libya, Egypt, and Syria, but without any apparent grand goal. Veteran foreign affairs analyst Sol Sanders notes that “Obama is on record publicly as negating the concept of American exceptionalism,” but he notes that Obama and his advisers have no vision for the future.
They do not believe in the U.S. overwhelming role as the leader of the free world nor in what most observers see as its constructive and stabilizing influence since World War II… They do not believe in guiding the almost inevitability of a huge role for the U.S. in international politics because of its inherent overwhelming and comparative economic, political and military power.In a sense, the U.S. under Barack Obama has declared independence from world leadership and accountability. The cadre of incompetents buzzing around the American president don’t see any problem allowing events in the Middle East to careen out of control or to encourage precisely that outcome. The Obama Administration has even considered military intervention on the side of Syria’s insurgents, many of whom have ties to Al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel, the policies of the Obama White House lack any evidence of thought, much less a clear U.S. objective.
Along with this dangerous political trend, growing energy production in the US is causing the financial unraveling of the Arab oil cartel led by OPEC -- and with it the financial underpinnings of the pro-Western regimes of the Middle East. Despite the best efforts of the Obama Administration to curtail energy production and waste billions on failed energy projects at home, the US is about to become an exporter of crude oil and eventually natural gas. Nobody inside the White House has even begun to consider the strategic implications of U.S. energy independence for our allies in the Persian Gulf.
It’s the children’s hour at the White House. A combination of technological innovations and market forces has lessened America’s need for imported energy and thus the need for America to play the role of global policeman in the Middle East. The bad news is that the misguided foreign policy of Barack Obama in the Middle East could eventually lead to a regional war or worse.
In the absence of a global power in the Middle East, events in that region will increasingly take their own course. Hundreds of millions of people are declaring independence from Anglo-American colonial rule. All this is happening under an absentee American President who neither understands nor cares about the historical or global implications of his reckless actions. And best of all, Americans face three more years of non-government under the lame duck regime of Barack Hussein Obama.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/07/05/Washington-Wall-Street-Barack-Obama-s-Dangerous-Foreign-Policy-Adventure
Real Americans Don't Trust the Government
...The
very meaning of America is that imperfect men must both be restrained
from potential misdeeds by government, yet those same imperfect and
untrustworthy men also populate the government. The same nature of
people who make government a necessity also fills that government and
makes it also dangerous and suspect itself.
In The Federalist Papers, No. 51, first published February 6, 1788, James Madison explained:
It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.This is the problem: "If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." James Madison understood that government is not run by angels. Yet, the government being made up of perfect, noble, demi-gods who are all-wise and morally pure is the vision of liberals, moderates (but I repeat myself), liberal-tarians (nasty liberals trying to hijack and abuse the noble libertarian tradition), and the like.
But how dare we assume evil motive by government leaders? Well then, why do we need a government at all if you believe that people are fundamentally good?
Conservatives fight for precautions to make sure that dangers do not materialize. Even if you have never been robbed, do you lock your door? Do you leave your keys in the car? You've never had a fire, so go ahead and smoke in bed or put candles next to the curtains on the window sill. The entire concept of America's political tradition is to prevent problems by assuming the worst, and creating structures that minimize the risks. The goal is to make sure that bad things almost never happen.
When conservatives fight for safeguards, checks and balances, restraints on government, protections, and precautions, they are scoffed at and ridiculed, on two themes: First, that conservatives are paranoid and worried about nonexistent or minimal threats. Second, that it is offensive to suggest that our American government could ever misbehave or trample on our rights.
From the other side, a tea party sign "Dissent is The Highest Form of Patriotism" headlines the political website "Delaware Politics." One cannot be a real conservative, or even a real American, without recognizing the danger that government decisions cannot be trusted and that government needs to be viewed with skepticism, and with public scrutiny. Distrust of government is baked in to the cake of America's governmental institutions and traditions.
A real American believes nothing the government says -- but remains open to seeing proof. We know that the government lies. But more than that, we know that everyone lies more the more often they see they can get away with it.
If the government ever declares martial law, it will be done in the name of some good purpose like saving the children. A law that suspends the U.S. Constitution will be labeled "the child protection and defense of women act of 2017." And naïve and gullible people will fall for it, and believe the label, without looking at the substance.
So, this 4th of July weekend, let us celebrate our unique, strange and wonderful American invention: we live with a government we must never trust. And that is not so unusual, really. The government should be applauded when it does well and criticized when it does wrong. But government leaders and bureaucrats must realize that we are watching and we will know the difference.
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