Is the border crisis Obama's 'Katrina moment'?
....The administration is in cloud cuckoo land if they think anyone believes them when they claim they are enforcing the law. In fact, they are flouting the law and there's no sign that's going to change anytime soon.But in order for this crisis to be Obama's "Katrina moment," the media would have to pile on in criticizing his government's policies at the border. That's just not going to happen. Alreadd, the media is distancing Obama from the crisis by failing to report most of the bad news about what's happening in those camps. They aren't even reporting that the illegal alien kids are being let go after processing.
It would be nice to think that the incompetence and cynicism being displayed by the administration would be punished. But most of the media is still on Obama's pocket and it's likely that this story will go away soon - just like every other scandal in this administration.
Documents: Illegal Immigrants Sending Billions Back to Home Countries
By Tony Lee
Central American nations may have no incentive to prevent migrants from flooding across the U.S.-Mexico border because of the billions of dollars of remittances that illegal immigrants who are able to stay in the United States are sending back home.
As the number of illegal immigrants from Central America has been increasing over the last three years, so have the remittances that Central American nations have received.
According to a leaked June 4, 2014 internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that Breitbart Texas obtained, remittances from those in the United States to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras make up at least 10% of each country's GDP.
The report estimates that remittances to El Salvador from those in the United States totaled $3 billion in 2010 but ballooned to an estimated $4.2 billion in 2013, which is 16% of El Salvador's GDP.
Remittances to Guatemala from those in the United States totaled $3.76 billion in 2010 and increased to $4.4 billion in 2012, which is 10% of Guatemala's GDP.
And remittances to Honduras from those in the United States totaled $2.3 billion in 2010 and increased to $3.2 billion in 2013, which equaled 20% of Honduras's GDP.
Very sad to see Costco pull a stunt like this in retaliation to Dinesh D’Souza’s new movie
By Joshua RiddleBig mistake from Costco. Not only are they losing money, they are squashing political debate and angering half the country.
What in the world were they thinking? If liberals were actually confident in their ideas, they would have Saul Alinsky’s book right next to Dinesh D’Souza’s and let the American people decide for themselves who is full of it.
From WND:
NEW YORK – The retail giant Costco Wholesale has issued an order to remove all copies of Dinesh D’Souza’s bestselling book “America: Imagine the World Without Her” from the shelves of its stores nationwide, WND has confirmed.
The book, in this mid-term election year, is a strong rebuttal of the progressive ideology behind President Obama’s policies, which have been supported by Costco co-founder and director Jim Senegal, a major Democrat donor and a speaker at the 2012 Democratic National Convention that nominated the president. A Washington Post political reporter has noted Obama’s “romance” with the nation’s second-largest retailer.
At Amazon.com, D’Souza’s book, released June 2, is ranked No. 43 overall and is the No. 3 hardcover book in Amazon’s Politics and Government section and No. 1 in the Commentary and Opinion subsection of Politics and Government.
Costco has sold more than 3,600 copies of “America” nationwide, with about 700 copies sold last week as D’Souza’s film by the same name opened at more than 1,000 movie theaters nationwide.
But Costco’s book department issued the “pull-order,” requiring all Costco stores nationwide to remove the book, confirmed Scott Losse, an inventory control specialist in the book department at the Costco Wholesale corporate office in Issaquah, Wash., a suburb of Seattle.
VA Whistleblower: ‘They Had Us Stop Work Processing Vets Applications’ for ‘Obamacare Enrollment’, Complaint Was Leaked to His Boss by WH
By Katie Maguire
The VA is under fire once more for purging over 10,000 applications of Veterans seeking healthcare. No, that is not a typo. The VA DELIBERATELY disposed of these applications.
From Weasel Zipper’s Article:
We reported on VA whistleblower Scott Davis yesterday, charges that thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of VA applications were either destroyed or just never processed. We also noted his charge that VA employees were asked to stop working on VA applications to concentrate on Obamacare applications.
That would be shocking enough, in and of itself.
But there’s another headline out of the interview that we wanted to highlight. At around 4:18, Davis says he reported the destruction or losing of applications to White House deputy chief of staff, Rob Nabors, and gave him a copy of his whistleblower complaint. He says the complaint was then leaked to the very same people about whom he was complaining.
Ed Sec. Arne Duncan Launches Unilateral 'Education Equity' Initiative
Dr. Susan BerryIn a press conference Monday, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said he was launching, without the approval of the U.S. Congress, the Excellent Educators for All Initiative, an endeavor that purports to assist states and school districts with support to hire “great educators for the students who need them most.”
Calling attention to the social justice agenda that underlies the Education Department’s initiatives, which include the Race to the Top grants for support of the Common Core standards and universal pre-school, Duncan said he “just cannot continue to wait” for Congress to respond to the needs of children.
...“Absent Congressional action, the President is moving forward on behalf of vulnerable children and families,” USED continues.
The Excellent Educators for All Initiative includes three parts:
Comprehensive Educator Equity Plans, in which the federal government will require “states to analyze their data and consult with teachers, principals, districts, parents and community organizations to create new, comprehensive educator equity plans that put in place locally-developed solutions to ensure every student has effective educators.”
Chief State School Officers, or the state departments of education and chairs of state boards of education, will receive a letter that indicates the plans are to be submitted to the federal government in April of 2015.
According to the letter, “in accordance with the requirements of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA),” each state educational agency must “describe the steps it will take to ensure that ‘poor and minority children are not taught at higher rates than other children by inexperienced, unqualified, or out-of-field teachers.’”
An Educator Equity Support Network, in which the federal government will spend $4.2 million of taxpayer funds “to launch a new technical assistance network to support states and districts in developing and implementing their plans to ensure all students have access to great educators.”
Educator Equity Profiles, in which the federal government will publish profiles of the states to “identify gaps in access to quality teaching for low-income and minority students…”
In addition to the profiles, USED says states will receive their “complete data file from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC),” so they can design strategies for improving their inequities.
Our Roost, Obama’s Chickens
From the Middle East to Russia to our own southern border, Obama’s bills are coming due.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Often, crazy things seem normal for a time because logical catastrophes do not immediately follow.
A deeply suspicious Richard Nixon systematically and without pushback for years undermined and politicized almost every institution of the federal government, from the CIA and the FBI to the IRS and the attorney general’s office. Nixon seemed to get away with it — until his second term. Once the public woke up, however, the eventual accounting proved devastating: resignation of a sitting president, prison sentences for his top aides, collapse of the Republican party, government stasis, a ruined economy, the destruction of the Vietnam peace accords that had led to a viable South Vietnam, the end of Henry Kissinger’s diplomatic breakthroughs, and a generation of abject cynicism about government. Did Nixon ever grasp that such destruction was the natural wage of his own paranoia?
In the post-Watergate climate of reform, for nearly three years a naïve Jimmy Carter gave utopian speeches about how American forbearance would end the Cold War and create a new world order based on human rights — until America’s abdication started to erode the preexisting global order. Scary things followed, such as the fall of the shah of Iran, the rise of Iranian theocracy, the taking of American hostages in Tehran, revolutions and insurrection throughout Central America, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, radical Islamists taking over Mecca, more gas lines, continued stagflation, and China invading Vietnam. Did the puritanical Carter ever understand what might be the consequences of his own self-righteousness in an imperfect world?
Barack Obama likewise has done some crazy things that seemed for years to have no ramifications. Unfortunately, typical of the ways of Nemesis (a bitter goddess who waits until the opportune moment to demand payment for past hubris), suddenly the bills for Obama’s six years of folly are coming due for the American people.
When a president occasionally fails to tell the truth, you get a scandal like the monitoring of the Associated Press reporters. When a president serially fails to tell the truth, you get that plus the scandals involving the IRS, the NSA, the VA, Benghazi, and too many others to mention.
The same is true abroad. The American public hardly noticed when Obama recklessly withdrew every peacekeeper from Iraq. Did he not boast of “ending the Iraq War”? It did not mind when the U.S. posted dates for withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trashing all the Bush–Cheney anti-terrorism protocols, from Guantanamo to renditions, did not make much sense, when such policies had worked and, in fact, were of use to Obama himself. But again, most Americans took no note. Apparently the terrorists did, however, and they regrouped even as the president declared them “on the run.”
Lecturing Israel while praising Islamist Turkey was likewise ignored. America snoozed as its president insidiously redefined its role in the Middle East as secondary to the supposed pivot to Asia. Each new correction in and of itself was comparatively minor; but in aggregate they began to unravel the U.S.-inspired postwar global order.
At first, who cared whether Iran serially violated every Obama deadline on halting nuclear enrichment? Did we worry that Libya, where Obama was proud of having led from behind, was descending into Somalia? Few Americans were all that bothered over Obama’s empty order to Syrian president Bashar Assad to step down, or over Obama’s later vacuous red-line threats that bombs would follow any use by Assad of chemical weapons.
Few noted that Obama lied to the nation that a video had caused the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, that Obama had known who the real terrorist perpetrators were but had ordered no immediate action to kill or capture them, and that Americans had been engaged in mysterious and still unexplained covert activities in Benghazi. After all that, we still shrugged when the president traded five top terrorist leaders for an alleged American deserter.
Trashing George W. Bush’s policy toward Vladimir Putin while promising a new reset approach (illustrated with a plastic red button) to an aggressive dictator raised few eyebrows at the time. Nor did many Americans worry that our Pacific allies were upset over Chinese and North Korean aggression that seemed to ignore traditional U.S. deterrence.
We were told that only Obama-haters at home had catalogued the president’s apologies abroad, his weird multicultural bowing to authoritarians, his ahistorical speeches about mythical Islamic achievements, his surreal euphemisms for radical Islam, terrorism, and jihadism, his shrill insistence about civilian trials for terrorists and closing Guantanamo, or the radical cutbacks at the Pentagon, coupled with the vast increase in entitlement spending.
But after six years of all that, our allies have got the message that they are on their own, our enemies that there are few consequences to aggression, and neutrals that joining with America does not mean ending up on the winning side. The result is that the Middle East we have known since the end of World War II has now vanished
Supposedly crackpot fantasies about a worldwide “caliphate” are becoming reified. What were once dismissed as conspiracy theories about an “Iranian arc” — from a nuclear Tehran through Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon to the borders of Israel to the Shiite minorities in the Gulf kingdoms — do not seem so crazy.
The idea of visiting the Egyptian pyramids or hoping to reengage with a reforming Libya is absurd. The best of the Middle East — Israel, Jordan, Kurdistan — no longer count on us. The worst — ISIS, Iran, Syria — count on us to remain irrelevant or worse. Old allies in the Gulf would probably trust Israel or Russia more than the Obama administration. In the next two years, if Obama continues on his present course, we are going to see things that we could not have imagined six years ago in the Middle East, as it reverts to premodern Islamic tribalism.
A deeply suspicious Richard Nixon systematically and without pushback for years undermined and politicized almost every institution of the federal government, from the CIA and the FBI to the IRS and the attorney general’s office. Nixon seemed to get away with it — until his second term. Once the public woke up, however, the eventual accounting proved devastating: resignation of a sitting president, prison sentences for his top aides, collapse of the Republican party, government stasis, a ruined economy, the destruction of the Vietnam peace accords that had led to a viable South Vietnam, the end of Henry Kissinger’s diplomatic breakthroughs, and a generation of abject cynicism about government. Did Nixon ever grasp that such destruction was the natural wage of his own paranoia?
In the post-Watergate climate of reform, for nearly three years a naïve Jimmy Carter gave utopian speeches about how American forbearance would end the Cold War and create a new world order based on human rights — until America’s abdication started to erode the preexisting global order. Scary things followed, such as the fall of the shah of Iran, the rise of Iranian theocracy, the taking of American hostages in Tehran, revolutions and insurrection throughout Central America, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, radical Islamists taking over Mecca, more gas lines, continued stagflation, and China invading Vietnam. Did the puritanical Carter ever understand what might be the consequences of his own self-righteousness in an imperfect world?
Barack Obama likewise has done some crazy things that seemed for years to have no ramifications. Unfortunately, typical of the ways of Nemesis (a bitter goddess who waits until the opportune moment to demand payment for past hubris), suddenly the bills for Obama’s six years of folly are coming due for the American people.
When a president occasionally fails to tell the truth, you get a scandal like the monitoring of the Associated Press reporters. When a president serially fails to tell the truth, you get that plus the scandals involving the IRS, the NSA, the VA, Benghazi, and too many others to mention.
The same is true abroad. The American public hardly noticed when Obama recklessly withdrew every peacekeeper from Iraq. Did he not boast of “ending the Iraq War”? It did not mind when the U.S. posted dates for withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trashing all the Bush–Cheney anti-terrorism protocols, from Guantanamo to renditions, did not make much sense, when such policies had worked and, in fact, were of use to Obama himself. But again, most Americans took no note. Apparently the terrorists did, however, and they regrouped even as the president declared them “on the run.”
Lecturing Israel while praising Islamist Turkey was likewise ignored. America snoozed as its president insidiously redefined its role in the Middle East as secondary to the supposed pivot to Asia. Each new correction in and of itself was comparatively minor; but in aggregate they began to unravel the U.S.-inspired postwar global order.
At first, who cared whether Iran serially violated every Obama deadline on halting nuclear enrichment? Did we worry that Libya, where Obama was proud of having led from behind, was descending into Somalia? Few Americans were all that bothered over Obama’s empty order to Syrian president Bashar Assad to step down, or over Obama’s later vacuous red-line threats that bombs would follow any use by Assad of chemical weapons.
Few noted that Obama lied to the nation that a video had caused the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, that Obama had known who the real terrorist perpetrators were but had ordered no immediate action to kill or capture them, and that Americans had been engaged in mysterious and still unexplained covert activities in Benghazi. After all that, we still shrugged when the president traded five top terrorist leaders for an alleged American deserter.
Trashing George W. Bush’s policy toward Vladimir Putin while promising a new reset approach (illustrated with a plastic red button) to an aggressive dictator raised few eyebrows at the time. Nor did many Americans worry that our Pacific allies were upset over Chinese and North Korean aggression that seemed to ignore traditional U.S. deterrence.
We were told that only Obama-haters at home had catalogued the president’s apologies abroad, his weird multicultural bowing to authoritarians, his ahistorical speeches about mythical Islamic achievements, his surreal euphemisms for radical Islam, terrorism, and jihadism, his shrill insistence about civilian trials for terrorists and closing Guantanamo, or the radical cutbacks at the Pentagon, coupled with the vast increase in entitlement spending.
But after six years of all that, our allies have got the message that they are on their own, our enemies that there are few consequences to aggression, and neutrals that joining with America does not mean ending up on the winning side. The result is that the Middle East we have known since the end of World War II has now vanished
Supposedly crackpot fantasies about a worldwide “caliphate” are becoming reified. What were once dismissed as conspiracy theories about an “Iranian arc” — from a nuclear Tehran through Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon to the borders of Israel to the Shiite minorities in the Gulf kingdoms — do not seem so crazy.
The idea of visiting the Egyptian pyramids or hoping to reengage with a reforming Libya is absurd. The best of the Middle East — Israel, Jordan, Kurdistan — no longer count on us. The worst — ISIS, Iran, Syria — count on us to remain irrelevant or worse. Old allies in the Gulf would probably trust Israel or Russia more than the Obama administration. In the next two years, if Obama continues on his present course, we are going to see things that we could not have imagined six years ago in the Middle East, as it reverts to premodern Islamic tribalism.
The same trajectory has been followed on the home front. Americans at
first were amused that the great conciliator — and greatest political
recipient on record of Wall Street cash — went after the rich with an
array of hokey epithets and slurs (fat cats, corporate-jet owners, Vegas
junketeers, limb-lopping and tonsil-pulling doctors, business owners
who should not profit, or should know when they have made enough money,
or should admit they didn’t build their own businesses). Few connected
the dots when the polarizing attorney general — the John Mitchell of our
time — referred to African-Americans as “my people” and all the rest of
the nation as “cowards.” Did we worry that the craziest things seem to
come out of the president’s own mouth — the Trayvon-like son he never
had, the stereotyping police, the absence of a “smidgen” of corruption
in the Lois Lerner IRS scandal, or the mean Republicans who “messed”
with him?
The president before the 2012 elections lamented to Latino groups that he did not have dictatorial powers to grant amnesty but urged them in the meantime to “punish our enemies” — a sort of follow-up to his 2008 “typical white person” incitement. Who was bothered that with “a pen and a phone” Obama for the first time in American history emasculated the U.S. Border Patrol, as part of a larger agenda of picking and choosing which federal laws the executive branch would enforce?
Those choices seemed to be predicated on two extralegal criteria: Did a law contribute to Obama’s concept of social justice, and did it further the progressive political cause? If the answer was no to either, the statute was largely unenforced. No president since World War II has done more to harm the U.S. Constitution — by ordering the executive branch not to enforce particular laws, by creating by fiat laws never enacted by Congress, by monitoring the communications of journalists and average Americans, by making appointments contrary to law — to the apparent yawns of the people.
Too few also seemed to care that almost everything the president had promised about Obamacare — keep your health plan, retain your doctor, save money on your premiums, sign up easily online, while we were lowering the annual deficit and reducing medical expenditures — was an abject lie. In such a climate, Obama felt no need to issue accurate data about how many Americans had lost their health plans, how many had simply transferred to Obamacare from Medicaid, how many had actually paid their premiums, or how many were still uninsured. The media ignored the serial $1 trillion deficits, the chronic high unemployment and low growth, the nonexistence of the long-promised “summer of recovery,” and the nonappearance of “millions of shovel-ready and green jobs.” The fact that electrical-power rates, gasoline prices, and food costs have soared under Obama as wages have stagnated has never really been noticed. Nor have the record numbers of Americans on food stamps and disability insurance.
Meanwhile, as Obama has refused to enforce immigration law, the result is chaos. Tens of thousands of children are flooding across our border illegally, on the scent of Obama’s executive-order amnesties. Advocates of open borders, such as progressive grandees Mark Zuckerberg and Nancy Pelosi, assume that these impoverished Third World children will not enroll in the private academies attended by their children or grandchildren, or need housing in one of their vacation estates, or crowd their specialists’ waiting rooms. They do not worry about the effects of illegal immigration on the wages of low-income Americans. Dealing first-hand with the ramifications of open borders is for unenlightened, illiberal little people.
Obama’s economic legacy is rarely appreciated. He has institutionalized the idea that unemployment between 6 and 7 percent is normal, that annual deficits over $500 billion reflect frugality, that soaring power, food, and fuel costs are not proof of inflation, that zero interest rates are the reward for thrift, that higher taxes are always a beginning, never an end, and that there is no contradiction when elite progressives — the Obamas, the Clintons, the Warrens — trash the 1-percenters, while doing everything in their power to live just like them.
We are the roost and, to paraphrase the president’s former spiritual adviser, Obama’s chickens are now coming home to us.
The Obama administration also took a break from its grueling daily photo-ops designed to change the topic of discussion from any number of ongoing Obama predicaments. Joe Biden was secluded in his waterfront Delaware home. Secy. of State John Kerry pursued Mideast peace by kite-surfing off Nantucket.
And President Obama sought to protect his reputation for being oblivious to political optics. He made a brief appearance at a White House party for military and played golf with the usual suspects. This afternoon he leaves for three days of fundraisers in Colorado and Texas. (But no border visit.)
Analysts, meanwhile, pored over an unusual videotape released by the terrorists currently conquering Iraq. It purports to show Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the shadowy head of ISIS, speaking in a Mosul mosque at Friday prayers.
Obama aides, invested in the president's claim that he left no residual U.S. forces in Iraq in 2011 because it was so well-situated, have expressed surprise at how quickly ISIS was able to move through a large swath of Iraq.
However, subsequent reports reveal that, just as with the ObamaCare rollout debacle and the IRS scandal, administration officials had been warned of the looming problem many months ago. But they did nothing in preparation and ignored the Baghdad government's pleas for help early this year. As Nobel Peace Prize winner, you may recall, Obama launched a war on Libya when its dictator merely threatened to kill civilians.
The president before the 2012 elections lamented to Latino groups that he did not have dictatorial powers to grant amnesty but urged them in the meantime to “punish our enemies” — a sort of follow-up to his 2008 “typical white person” incitement. Who was bothered that with “a pen and a phone” Obama for the first time in American history emasculated the U.S. Border Patrol, as part of a larger agenda of picking and choosing which federal laws the executive branch would enforce?
Those choices seemed to be predicated on two extralegal criteria: Did a law contribute to Obama’s concept of social justice, and did it further the progressive political cause? If the answer was no to either, the statute was largely unenforced. No president since World War II has done more to harm the U.S. Constitution — by ordering the executive branch not to enforce particular laws, by creating by fiat laws never enacted by Congress, by monitoring the communications of journalists and average Americans, by making appointments contrary to law — to the apparent yawns of the people.
Too few also seemed to care that almost everything the president had promised about Obamacare — keep your health plan, retain your doctor, save money on your premiums, sign up easily online, while we were lowering the annual deficit and reducing medical expenditures — was an abject lie. In such a climate, Obama felt no need to issue accurate data about how many Americans had lost their health plans, how many had simply transferred to Obamacare from Medicaid, how many had actually paid their premiums, or how many were still uninsured. The media ignored the serial $1 trillion deficits, the chronic high unemployment and low growth, the nonexistence of the long-promised “summer of recovery,” and the nonappearance of “millions of shovel-ready and green jobs.” The fact that electrical-power rates, gasoline prices, and food costs have soared under Obama as wages have stagnated has never really been noticed. Nor have the record numbers of Americans on food stamps and disability insurance.
Meanwhile, as Obama has refused to enforce immigration law, the result is chaos. Tens of thousands of children are flooding across our border illegally, on the scent of Obama’s executive-order amnesties. Advocates of open borders, such as progressive grandees Mark Zuckerberg and Nancy Pelosi, assume that these impoverished Third World children will not enroll in the private academies attended by their children or grandchildren, or need housing in one of their vacation estates, or crowd their specialists’ waiting rooms. They do not worry about the effects of illegal immigration on the wages of low-income Americans. Dealing first-hand with the ramifications of open borders is for unenlightened, illiberal little people.
Obama’s economic legacy is rarely appreciated. He has institutionalized the idea that unemployment between 6 and 7 percent is normal, that annual deficits over $500 billion reflect frugality, that soaring power, food, and fuel costs are not proof of inflation, that zero interest rates are the reward for thrift, that higher taxes are always a beginning, never an end, and that there is no contradiction when elite progressives — the Obamas, the Clintons, the Warrens — trash the 1-percenters, while doing everything in their power to live just like them.
We are the roost and, to paraphrase the president’s former spiritual adviser, Obama’s chickens are now coming home to us.
Obama goes fundraising as ISIS head emerges to preach jihad, killings continue
By Andrew MalcolmNot that you'd know it from most U.S. media, but the shootings, beheadings, hangings and crucifixions continued in ISIS-controlled Iraq over the holiday weekend, as Americans focused on barbecues and benevolently beautiful fireworks.The Obama administration also took a break from its grueling daily photo-ops designed to change the topic of discussion from any number of ongoing Obama predicaments. Joe Biden was secluded in his waterfront Delaware home. Secy. of State John Kerry pursued Mideast peace by kite-surfing off Nantucket.
And President Obama sought to protect his reputation for being oblivious to political optics. He made a brief appearance at a White House party for military and played golf with the usual suspects. This afternoon he leaves for three days of fundraisers in Colorado and Texas. (But no border visit.)
Analysts, meanwhile, pored over an unusual videotape released by the terrorists currently conquering Iraq. It purports to show Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the shadowy head of ISIS, speaking in a Mosul mosque at Friday prayers.
Obama aides, invested in the president's claim that he left no residual U.S. forces in Iraq in 2011 because it was so well-situated, have expressed surprise at how quickly ISIS was able to move through a large swath of Iraq.
However, subsequent reports reveal that, just as with the ObamaCare rollout debacle and the IRS scandal, administration officials had been warned of the looming problem many months ago. But they did nothing in preparation and ignored the Baghdad government's pleas for help early this year. As Nobel Peace Prize winner, you may recall, Obama launched a war on Libya when its dictator merely threatened to kill civilians.
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