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When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; When the government fears the people, there is liberty.  ~ Thomas Jefferson

 

Entries Tagged as 'Immigration'

FBI foils elaborate bomb plot in Oregon

November 29th, 2010 · Homeland Security, Immigration, National Security, Obama's Scheme, Selling Out the US, Terrorism from Within, Terrorist Attack, Terrorist Threat

By Jerry Markon – Sunday, November 28, 2010; 12:22 AM

Federal agents arrested an Oregon man intent on exploding a bomb and killing thousands of people at a nighttime Christmas tree lighting in Portland’s central square, authorities said Saturday. The arrest culminated a sting in which the FBI worked extensively with the man and assembled the fake bomb that he twice tried to detonate Friday night.

The capture of Mohamed Osman Mohamud is the latest indication that the government is increasingly turning to undercover operatives to infiltrate extremist cells and fight what authorities call a wave of homegrown terrorism.

Agents arrested Mohamud moments after he tried to detonate a van he thought was packed with explosives in the crowded public square Friday night, the Justice Department said. As he was taken away, Mohamud, 19, kicked agents and screamed “Allahu Akbar!” – Arabic for “God is great,” officials said. The bomb was an elaborate dud, assembled by FBI technicians.

Mohamud, a Somali-born naturalized U.S. citizen and former Oregon State University student, is expected to appear in federal court Monday. He faces up to life in prison if convicted of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. Neither an attorney for Mohamud or his family could be located Saturday.

Although the FBI’s tactics of using undercover operatives have been controversial among Muslims, officials say they have successfully broken up numerous recent plots, including the attempted bombing of Metro stations in Northern Virginia and a plan to blow up a Dallas skyscraper. And it was a tip from the Muslim community that led the FBI to Mohamud, federal officials said.

Unlike other high-profile cases such as the attempted Times Square bombing in May, federal law enforcement officials said there is no evidence that a foreign terrorist group was behind the averted Portland attack. There were no indications of any U.S. collaborators, and officials emphasized that Mohamud’s device posed no real danger to the public.

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Judge questions Justice Department’s lawsuit against Arizona immigration law

November 2nd, 2010 · Accountability, Democrats, Dissention, Homeland Security, Immigration, Immigration, National Security, Obama's Scheme, Selling Out the US, Terrorism from Within, Terrorist Threat

By Jerry Markon Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 1, 2010; 6:27 PM

A federal appellate judge expressed deep skepticism Monday about a Justice Department lawsuit challenging Arizona’s new immigration law, leaving uncertain the Obama administration’s chances of stopping the law from taking effect.

Judge John T. Noonan Jr. grilled administration lawyers at a hearing before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. He took aim at the core of the Justice Department’s argument: that the Arizona statute is “preempted” by federal law and is especially troublesome because it requires mandatory immigration status checks in certain circumstances.

“I’ve read your brief, I’ve read the District Court opinion, I’ve heard your interchange with my two colleagues, and I don’t understand your argument,” Noonan told deputy solicitor general Edwin S. Kneedler. “We are dependent as a court on counsel being responsive. . . . You keep saying the problem is that a state officer is told to do something. That’s not a matter of preemption. . . . I would think the proper thing to do is to concede that this is a point where you don’t have an argument.”

“With respect, I do believe we have an argument,” said Kneedler, who asserts that the Arizona law is unconstitutional and threatens civil liberties by subjecting lawful immigrants to “interrogation and police surveillance.”

The exchange came at a hearing on efforts by the Justice Department to overturn the Arizona law, which empowers police to question people they suspect are in the country illegally and has triggered a fierce national debate. A federal judge in Phoenix issued a July injunction blocking the law’s most contested provisions from taking effect. Arizona appealed, leading to the Monday hearing.

With Noonan, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, so bluntly stating his views, legal experts said the government’s chances of having the injunction upheld may rest with the other two judges on Monday’s panel: Carlos T. Bea and Richard A. Paez.

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Employers looking at health insurance options

October 25th, 2010 · Corruption, Deception, Democrats, Ethics, Federal Spending, Government Control, Healthcare, Immigration, Money Lost, National Security, Non-Transparency, Obama's Scheme, Selling Out the US, Small Business, Tax Dollars, Taxes, Terrorism from Within, Treason, Treasury, Unemployment

By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR – The Associated Press
Monday, October 25, 2010; 4:12 AM

WASHINGTON — The new health care law wasn’t supposed to undercut employer plans that have provided most people in the U.S. with coverage for generations.

But last week a leading manufacturer told workers their costs will jump partly because of the law. Also, a Democratic governor laid out a scheme for employers to get out of health care by shifting workers into taxpayer-subsidized insurance markets that open in 2014.

While it’s too early to proclaim the demise of job-based coverage, corporate number crunchers are looking at options that could lead to major changes. Gov. Phil Bredesen, D-Tenn., said the economics of dropping coverage are “about to become very attractive to many employers, both public and private.”

That’s just not going to happen, White House officials say.

“The absolute certainty about the Affordable Care Act is that for many, many employers who cover millions of people, it increases the incentives for them to offer coverage,” said Jason Furman, an economic adviser to President Barack Obama.

Yet at least one major employer has shifted a greater share of plan costs to workers, and others are weighing the pros and cons of eventually forcing employees to strike out on their own.

“I don’t think you are going to hear anybody publicly say ‘We’ve made a decision to drop insurance,’ ” said Paul Keckley, executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. “What we are hearing in our meetings is, ‘We don’t want to be the first one to drop benefits, but we would be the fast second.’ We are hearing that a lot.” Deloitte is a major accounting and consulting firm.

“My conclusion on all of this is that it is a huge roll of the dice,” said James Klein, president of the American Benefits Council, which represents big company benefits administrators. “It could work out well and build on the employer-based system, or it could begin to dismantle the employer-based system.”

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Lou Dobbs’ five undocumented workers — Who’s News 10-7-10

October 7th, 2010 · Accountability, Immigration

LOU DOBBS. He may no longer be on CNN, but that doesn’t mean folks have forgotten media personality Lou Dobbs‘ years-long campaign against “illegal aliens” — especially as he gears up for an Oct. 9 keynote appearance at the Virginia Tea Party Patriots Convention. The radio host is the subject of a just-released major investigation by Isabel Macdonald, whose online bio describes her as “a freelance journalist and former communications director of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting,” published in The Nation. From her story:

But with his relentless diatribes against “illegals” and their employers, Dobbs is casting stones from a house—make that an estate—of glass. Based on a yearlong investigation, including interviews with five immigrants who worked without papers on his properties, The Nation and the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute have found that Dobbs has relied for years on undocumented labor for the upkeep of his multimillion-dollar estates and the horses he keeps for his 22-year-old daughter, Hillary, a champion show jumper….

When I asked whether the Dobbs family knew that undocumented workers were caring for their horses, Gomez responded by saying that at least in the case of Hillary Dobbs, “I believe she knew.” The stable owner knew “that some people didn’t have papers,” Gomez said, and had even taken precautions to keep the workers away from the immigration agents who often patrol the areas around horse shows. Gomez said it was hard to believe that Dobbs’s daughter, who was in close contact with these undocumented workers almost every weekend, could have been unaware of their status.

Hillary Dobbs did not respond to repeated attempts to contact her for comment….

In addition to those who worked with the horses, the magazine also found two undocumented workers who worked on the grounds of Dobb’s Florida home through a company hired to maintain it. Dobbs declined to comment for the story but invited Mcdonald onto his radio show; she said she would only appear there once the story was published. So stay tuned…

Posted by Garance Franke-Ruta  10/07/2010

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Mexico’s mayors becoming casualties of drug wars; many towns without leaders

October 4th, 2010 · Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Immigration, Immigration, National Security, War on Terrorism

By Anne-Marie O’Connor and William Booth Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 3, 2010; 4:10 AM

TANCITARO, MEXICO – Gustavo Sanchez worked hard in this Mexican farming town at one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. He was a mayor. Last weekend, Sanchez and a town councilman disappeared. Their bodies were found Monday, the skulls smashed open in the fifth killing of a mayor in six weeks.

According to supporters at city hall, Sanchez was honest and brave. Less than a year ago, the 36-year-old schoolteacher and martial-arts instructor agreed to lead this prosperous western community after the previous mayor abruptly quit, citing threats by drug traffickers, and took the entire town council with him.

Sanchez’s short political career ended on the side of a muddy, lonely road, his handsome, mustachioed face unrecognizable. His mutilated colleague Rafael Equihua lay dead beside him.

At least 11 mayors have been killed this year across Mexico, as a spooky sense of permanent siege takes hold in the many communities where rival mafias fight for control of local drug sales, marijuana and poppy fields, methamphetamine labs and billion-dollar smuggling routes to the United States.

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ObamaCare’s Hotel California: The state moves to impose price controls you can never leave.

September 28th, 2010 · Deception, Democrats, Economy, Federal Spending, Government Control, Healthcare, Immigration, Non-Transparency, Selling Out the US, States, Tax Dollars, Unemployment

California, the novelist Wallace Stegner famously wrote, is like the rest of America, only more so—meaning that wherever the country is headed, the Golden State is probably there already. So the state’s ObamaCare advance planning deserves closer scrutiny, given that it mirrors the regulatory and ideological model that the White House favors for everyone else.

In a matter of days, California will set a precedent for the future of the U.S. individual and small-business insurance markets via ObamaCare’s “exchanges,” where people will purchase coverage at heavily subsidized rates. The exchanges don’t start up until 2014, but the states were given wide bureaucratic latitude in how they’re run, and Sacramento is using this flexibility to convert them into a pretext for imposing de facto price controls on the insurance industry.

Jerry Seib and Gerard Baker discuss the renewed furor over health care, including the war of worlds between House Minority Leader John Boehner and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

That may be what Democrats had in mind when they passed the bill, but it’s particularly unfortunate because in principle exchanges could be a useful reform. States could sponsor transparent, neutral clearinghouses that compare costs and benefits among plans, encouraging insurers to compete to offer the products that consumers find most valuable. An exchange could operate much like travel websites such as Expedia.com, and a good one along those lines started in Utah last year.

California looked further east for inspiration—to Massachusetts, which has the only other exchange in the country. Known as the connector, it’s the centerpiece of the ObamaCare beta test that Mitt Romney passed in 2006 and is now the power center of the state’s public utility-style insurance regulation. In the daisy chain of “expertise” that is the health policy world, California’s regulations were shaped by Jon Kingsdale, a devout White House ally who used to run the Massachusetts connector and is now a consultant.

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Money transfers could face anti-terrorism scrutiny

September 27th, 2010 · Accountability, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Immigration, National Security, Treasury, War on Terrorism

By Ellen Nakashima  Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 27, 2010; 2:50 AM

The Obama administration wants to require U.S. banks to report all electronic money transfers into and out of the country, a dramatic expansion in efforts to counter terrorist financing and money laundering.

Officials say the information would help them spot the sort of transfers that helped finance the al-Qaeda hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They say the expanded financial data would allow anti-terrorist agencies to better understand normal money-flow patterns so they can spot abnormal activity.

Financial institutions are now required to report to the Treasury Department transactions in excess of $10,000 and others they deem suspicious. The new rule would require banks to disclose even the smallest transfers.

Treasury officials plan to post the proposed regulation on their Web site Monday and in the Federal Register this week. The public could comment before a final rule is published and the plan takes effect, which officials say will probably not be until 2012.

The proposal is a long-delayed response to the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which specified reforms to better organize the intelligence community and to avoid a repeat of the 20S01 attacks. The law required that the Treasury secretary issue regulations requiring financial institutions to report cross-border transfers if deemed necessary to combat terrorist financing.

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McCain and Graham lash out at Levin over defense bill: Dems misleading again.

September 19th, 2010 · Deception, Defense, Democrats, Ethics, Federal Spending, Government Control, Immigration, Immigration, National Security, Non-Transparency, Obama's Scheme

By Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin – Wednesday, September 15, 2010; 8:32 PM

McCain and Graham lash out at Levin over defense bill

The Senate is expected to take up the defense authorization bill next week, but top Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee are promising to oppose the legislation because of its language on gays in the military and the possible insertion of an amendment on immigration.

Every year, both parties agree to pass the defense bill, even while large parts of the rest of the legislative agenda go uncompleted. For that reason, it is often viewed by senators as a convenient vehicle for other legislation they want to move through Congress – whether or not it is related to the military.

Last year, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), to the chagrin of Republicans, successfully added language expanding protections from hate crimes. This year, Democrats are expected to attempt to tack on the “American Dream Act,” a bill that would provide a path to U.S. citizenship for illegal immigrant students.

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Tension over Obama policies within Immigration and Customs Enforcement

August 28th, 2010 · Deception, Democrats, Dissention, General, Homeland Security, Immigration, Immigration, National Security, Obama's Scheme, Selling Out the US

By Andrew Becker – Friday, August 27, 2010

As it poises for further immigration initiatives, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is struggling with festering internal divisions between political appointees and career officials over how to enforce laws and handle detainees facing deportation.

Under the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security has shifted its focus away from the worksite raids and sweeps employed during George W. Bush’s presidency to deporting more criminals and creating less prisonlike detention settings. But ICE, a branch of DHS, is facing intensified resistance from agency middle managers and attorneys, and the union that represents immigration officers.

The internal conflict has grown increasingly public over ICE’s plans, among them to expand a risk assessment tool to guide agents on detention decisions, cut down on transfers of detained immigrants, and open more “civil” detention facilities — what field directors call “soft” detention.

Immigration officers say the new measures limit their enforcement efforts and the revamped lockups will compromise their safety. In June, their union took the unprecedented step of issuing a vote of no confidence in the agency’s director, John Morton, and the official overseeing detention reform, Phyllis Coven.

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Imam Rauf: Mosque planner has been mostly silent during noisy debate

August 23rd, 2010 · Defense, Democrats, Homeland Security, Immigration, National Security, Non-Transparency, Obama's Scheme, Selling Out the US, Treason, War on Terrorism

Remember:  Those who carried out 9/11 learned how to fly in the US; Nidal M. Hasan – Shooter at Fort Hood:  Simple Muslims Protected under the very freedom they wish to distroy.

By Michelle Boorstein – Monday, August 23, 2010

To pundits skeptical of Feisal Abdul Rauf, the New York imam is a wolf in sheep’s clothing who claims to be building a monument to tolerance near Ground Zero but is actually an apologist for radical, anti-American Muslims.

To people who have worked with him in the interfaith community, the white-bearded Sufi is a visionary for peace and progressive Islam, an American patriot who has toiled for decades to build bridges between this country and like-minded Muslims around the world.

Unquestionably, the 61-year-old Rauf (pronounced rah-oof) is the product of some strange circumstances.

Rocketed to prominence after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by government and interfaith leaders interested in promoting the voices of moderate Muslims, the former industrial filter salesman won a book contract and gigs representing the State Department in the Muslim world and teaching FBI agents about Islam. He was asked to become a member of the World Economic Forum and invited to speak with the likes of Antonin Scalia and Karen Hughes. In just a few years, he went from an ambitious, well-liked leader of a small TriBeCa prayer group to a world player.

“After September 11, when we were all afraid, Imam Feisal was one of the people who stood up for American Muslims who totally rejected terrorism. He built a significant network of Christian and Jewish supporters,” said D. Randall Benn, a D.C. lawyer and interfaith activist who has worked as Rauf’s Washington adviser for about two years. “It was where he was, and the power of his ideas, that made him big.”

Ironically, the same symbolic power of Ground Zero that elevated Rauf now threatens to take him down.

At the center of a global firestorm of debate, Rauf is absent, sticking to his commitment to lecture for the State Department in Bahrain about, of all things, “how we emphasize religious tolerance in our society,” department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters last week. Rauf’s wife said he would not be available for an interview until next month — though he told a gathering at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Bahrain on Sunday that the attention generated was a “sign of success” and could bring about greater understanding.

Though now largely invisible, Rauf seems to have become a proxy for Americans’ anxiety about Islam and its legal system, sharia. The intense reaction against Rauf’s proposed project and some of his political views have laid bare Americans’ fragile acceptance of its Muslim minority.

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