Filed under: Bureaucracy, Crime, Democrat Corruption, Election 2016, Intelligence, Law, National Security, Police, Politics, Progressivism, Russia | Tags: DNC IT Aide, Imran Awan, Spying on the US
Remember when the media was all a-flutter with the news that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked? All those Hillary emails, John Podesta’s computer. As they say…developing.
The FBI has arrested the top technology aide to Rep Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-FL former Democratic Party chairwoman. Imwan Awan, a Pakistani born aide, was arrested on Monday as he attempted to board a flight to Pakistan, after wiring $283,000 from the Congressional Credit Union to that country. Credit union officials permitted the wire to go through.
Imran Awan had access to all emails and files of dozens of members of Congress, as well as the password to the iPad that Wasserman Schultz used for Democrat National Committee business before she resigned from that post in July 2016.
Imran Iwan’s wife, Hina Alvi, was also on the House payroll. She withdrew her children from school and left the county in March. Police confronted her at the airport, found $12,000 in cash hidden in her luggage, but did not stop her from boarding a flight Pakistan via Qatar. House authorities told members in February that Imran and his relatives were suspects in a criminal investigation into theft and IT abuses, and they were banned from the Capitol network.
Wasserman Schultz refused to fire Imran, and has blocked Capitol Police from searching a laptop they confiscated because it was tied to him. The FBI has joined the search and seized smashed harddrives from Imran’s home. Soon after Imran began working for Schultz in 2005, four of his relatives appeared on the payroll of other Democrats at inflated salaries. The Awans own numerous rental properties with questionable multiple mortgages, told renters they want payments in untraceable ways. His wife made $165,000 working for House Democrats, took out a second mortgage against a house from the Congressional Federal Credit Union by claiming that it was her “principal residence,” said that she will “occupy” the property, which she did not, but also fraudulently reported no rental income on her taxes.
Awan has also worked for at least 25 other Democrat House members as an “information technology director.” He is now under arrest for bank fraud, released on bail under constraint of a GPS locator and a limited area in which he can move, while the FBI investigates further.
John Podesta’s computer was also hacked, supposedly because he used “password” as his password, but perhaps it is not that simple. Mr. Podesta, Hillary’s campaign chairman, seems to have his own interesting Russian connections.
Russian interest in American electoral campaigns is hardly anything new. Former president Barack Obama interfered in a number of political campaigns — in Israel, England, France and Egypt. Ted Kennedy once went to Russia to beg them to interfere. Obama’s promise to Medvedev of having “more flexibility” in his dealings with Russia “after the election” was interesting as well. Eventually, the truth will out.
Filed under: Afghanistan, Bureaucracy, Crime, Immigration, Law, National Security, The United States | Tags: An Expert Explains, Europe's Afghan Refugees, The Crime Wave
One of our biggest problems, it seems, is the matter of immigration. As a nation, we conflate a wide numbers of separate issues—George Soros advocates for open borders everywhere, then there are the terms migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, exile, emigre, displaced person, and stateless person. Can you tell the difference? In the first 3 weeks of May, we were admitting 830 people a week as refugees, but the State Department lifted the restriction on the number of refugees allowed to enter the U.S. to 1,500 each week.
Then there are 66,000 temporary non agricultural workers admitted under the H2B program—33,000 for the first half of the fiscal year and 33,000 for the second half. An increase is being added and will be announced today. The jobs are based on employer requests. Jobs are for landscapers, lifeguards, carnival workers, factory workers, cooks, maids, and fishery workers. Most come from Mexico, Jamacia, Guatemala, South Africa and the United Kingdom. The Center for Immigration Studies says a new analysis shows the locations where jobs have been offered to guestworkers are even in areas of high unemployment and low labor force participation, so there is some disconnect and the scrutiny for visa approval is inadequate. Some employers may be using the program as a way around the rules of other guestworker programs. These are not immigrants, but temporary workers.
The H1B program is similar, but for highly educated, highly skilled foreign workers for specialized occupations for a 3 year stay. They are also not immigrants, but temporary workers for jobs that require specialized knowledge or expertise. About half come from India, with significant numbers from China, South Korea and the Philippines. The numbers now stand at 65,o00 a year with another 20,000 for those with masters degrees. There are many complaints about American workers being replaced by cheaper foreign workers. Our illegal immigrant population includes many who have overstayed their visas.
President Trump’s “Muslim Travel Ban” doesn’t really apply to Muslims, and leftist judges keep challenging the regulation, the latest concerns whether grandparents can be considered part of the immediate family. The so-called Muslim Ban is a temporary hold so the federal government can figure out how to vet those who have applied, when no state really exists to vouch for them. But the left has become somewhat deranged at the suggestion of even a temporary ban, looking for sympathetic cases to touch at the heartstrings.
An Iranian cancer researcher traveling to Massachusetts to work at Boston Children’s Hospital was detained last Tuesday at Logan International Airport along with this wife and children before being sent back to Iran. Outcries from the media. Immigration assured the media that it had nothing to do with the case of Dr, Mohsen Dehnavi, who holds a visiting work visa. The Trump administration order banning people from six Muslim-majority countries can be partially enforced according to the Supreme Court. His visa was valid, yet he was sent back. It seems that in Iran he was a head of a student branch of a volunteer militia linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Banning a jihadist is what Trump’s travel ban is all about.
Everyone claims that the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. are about 11,000, but they have been using that number for years, and it never seems to change. There are about 4.4 million people on the immigrant wait list, who have applied and are legally waiting their turn. Here’s a graph that shows how the appeal to immigrate to the United States goes.
European countries have their own laws, but the EU has decided for the countries of Europe how many refugees each nation should accept, and under what conditions and rules. Countries like Poland and Hungary have decided they will not accept Middle Eastern refugees in spite of EU rules. The Eastern European states have had no trouble limiting or banning migrants from the Middle East, or building fences. Germany’s Angela Merkel is the one who welcomed all refugees, and most of Western Europe fell in line. Bureaucrats are always good about making up rules, it’s the people upon whom the rules are inflicted that suffer.
They welcomed the refugees with food and clothing, but have slowly come to realize that it isn’t working. The Scandinavian countries have had some of the worst problems. Denmark observed what is happening in Sweden and made an effort to not fall into the same trap. The governments try to cover up what is happening.
Dr.Cheryl Bernard was the program director of the Initiative for Middle Eastern Youth and the Alternative Strategies Initiative with the RAND Corporation. She has worked with refugees for decades. That the newcomers did not speak the local languages, might be traumatized, take some time to find their footing and have brought their ethnic, religious and sectarian conflicts with them, was not surprising but they were expected to be manageable problems.
There was one development that had not been expected, and was not tolerable: the large and growing incidence of sexual assaults committed by refugees against local women. These were not of the cultural-misunderstanding-date-rape sort, but were vicious, no-preamble attacks on random girls and women, often committed by gangs or packs of young men. At first, the incidents were downplayed or hushed up—no one wanted to provide the right wing with fodder for nationalist agitation, and the hope was that these were isolated instances caused by a small problem group of outliers.
As the incidents increased …the matter could no longer be swept under the carpet of political correctness. And with the official acknowledgment and public reporting, a weird and puzzling footnote emerged. Most of the assaults were being committed by refugees of one particular nationality: by Afghans.
Actually Afghans should not even have been part of the refugee tide, at least not in significant numbers. It was the Syrians who were expected. Afghanistan, a place of lingering and chronic conflict, is no longer on the official refugee roster—that’s reserved for acute political and military emergencies.
Dr. Bernard is deeply experienced in work with refugees from all over the Middle East, and she was shocked. Her research is impressive and thorough, and the picture that emerges is devastating. Please read the whole thing. We all need to understand what is happening. She suggests that there are ways to deal with the refugee wave, but it’s not going to be easy and “the Left has to do a bit of hard thinking. It’s fine to be warm, fuzzy and sentimental about strangers arriving on your shore,” but we have our own values, freedom, and lifestyle to protect. And the freedom we have is worth defending.
We need to understand what is happening in Europe, which mostly doesn’t make headlines, because all too soon it may be happening here. Political Correctness rules in Europe as well as here. It is an important article, and casts a very different light on our ideas of immigration, refugees, and how we should think about them and how we should deal with them.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Crime, Domestic Policy, Foreign Policy, Immigration, Law, National Security, Regulation, The United States | Tags: Deadbeat Countries, Deporting Criminal Aliens, Illegal Aliens
ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has been working with the State Department to improve cooperation from other nations that have blocked our transfers of illegal immigrants. Their efforts have reduced the number of nations refusing to cooperate from 23 to 12. The Trump administration expects to continue to reduce the number of noncompliant countries even further.
The problem, of course, is that not only are these people illegal immigrants, but they have been convicted of a crime, and their own nation doesn’t really want them back. Sorry. That just doesn’t work.
Jessica Vaughn, ddirector of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies said:
I am confident that the number of deadbeat countries can be reduced even further – for starters, China and Hong Kong should be the focus of pressure. On the at-risk list, there is no way places like Bermuda should be stiff-arming us. Others, like Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Pakistan, have a lot to lose if they don’t cooperate more fully. There are plenty of visa programs that could be turned off in a heartbeat if they do not improve very soon.
ICE and State have the authority to punish recalcitrant countries, but it was almost never used in past administrations. President Trump seems to understand that if people think they can come here and stay on even after being caught—it will only encourage more illegals. If we don’t want illegal aliens, we should not be hanging out a big welcome sign. Conservatives, of course, are accused by the left of being cruel and bigoted, racist, etc. for refusing to welcome illegals.
We have immigration laws, though they need updating, and we can expect them to be obeyed. We have something well over a million people on the wait list—waiting their turn to be admitted legally to become American citizens. Illegals should not be able to jump the queue. It will greatly help to discourage illegals if the rules are clear and clearly observed.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Economy, Foreign Policy, Media Bias, Politics, Regulation, The United States | Tags: Deporting Criminal Aliens, Progress on All Fronts, Trade Agreements
A study from Britain suggests that President Trump’s aggressive statements on trade may actually be influencing some of our trading partners. Critics suggested that Trumps blunt talk on trade fairness would alienate trade partners or even start trade wars. But the Center for Economic Policy Research in London reported that the other 19 G-20 economies steps, like quotas, duties or tariffs on U.S. imports are down by 29% since the first six months of last year, under a different administration.
Trump has ranted in public remarks and even tweets about the global playing field being tilted against U.S. trade. Trump sounds dangerous, and is clear about what is troubling him. Simon Everett, a professor of economics at St. Gallen University in Switzerland, one of the authors of the Global Trade Alert, wrote:
The G20 countries that had hit U.S. interests more often before President Trump was elected are the very G20 countries that have cut back on protectionism the most in 2017,” said . “Why should [they] do that unless they feared being singled out for retaliation?
On another front, the Trump administration has increased its efforts to deport criminal illegal immigrants by getting their home countries to stop blocking the transfers and take them back. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said that working with their partners at the Department of State, they have made significant improvement to cooperation on removals. The number of recalcitrant countries has dropped from 23 in May 2016 to 12 in May 2017, an ICE official said. Sanctuary cities will find that the president means business with them as well.
Recently, US courts have interfered. Last month, courts blocked the administration from deporting more than 1,000 Iraqis with horrific criminal records, claiming they might fact threats back home. ICE and the State Department have the legislative authority to punish countries refusing to take their own people back, by threatening to cut off their visa privileges, for example.We take our right to sovereign independence seriously. They need to understand that.
There’s lots of progress being made, even with some very difficult programs, although it gets no mention in the mainstream media. They’re just too focused on finding Russian connections or contacts to notice. Not that they would mention any accomplishment by the Trump administration anyway. I think we’ve established that they have some rather strange ideas about what the profession of journalism requires.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Domestic Policy, Economics, Energy, Environment, Foreign Policy, Media Bias, National Security, Progressivism, Statism, The United States | Tags: Climate Science Is Not Settled, No Measurable Difference, Paris Climate Accord
Angela Merkel is furious that President Trump refused to join in the Paris Climate Accord. As Roy Spencer PhD admits, it would make no measurable difference. It is Dr. Spencer and Dr. Christie at the University of Alabama at Huntsville who run the satellites and weather balloons that give us our most accurate measurements of climate around the world. Climate science has been dominated by the assertion that the following 5 general points are indisputable. They range from scientific to economic.
1) global warming is occurring, will continue to occur, and will have dangerous consequences
2) the warming is mostly, if not totally, caused by our CO2 emissions
3) there are no benefits to our CO2 emissions, either direct (biological) or indirect (economic)
4) we can reduce our CO2 emissions to a level that we avoid a substantial amount of the expected damage
5) the cost of reducing CO2 emissions is low enough to make it worthwhile (e.g. mandating much more wind, solar, etc.)
For things like the Paris Climate Agreement to make much sense, Spenser says, all five must be essentially true. There is peer reviewed and published analysis in science and economics which would allow one to contest each of the five claims.
A growing volume of evidence undercuts “consensus” science. Already 285 Scientific Papers published in 2017 support a skeptical position on Climate alarm. They cast doubt on the position that anthropogenic CO2 emissions function as the climate’s fundamental control knob, or that otherwise question the efficacy of climate models, or the related “consensus” positions commonly endorsed by policy makers and mainstream media.
Climate science is not settled.
Modern temperatures, sea levels, and extreme weather events are neither unusual nor unprecedented. Many regions of the Earth are cooler now than they have been for most of the last 10,000 years.
Natural factors such as the Sun (84 papers), multi-decadal oceanic-atmospheric oscillations such as the NAO, AMO/PDO, ENSO (31 papers), decadal-scale cloud cover variations, and internal variability in general have exerted a significant influence on weather and climate changes during both the past and present. Detecting a clear anthropogenic forcing signal amidst the noise of unforced natural variability may therefore be difficult.
And current emissions-mitigation policies, especially related to the advocacy for renewables, are often costly, ineffective, and perhaps even harmful to the environment. On the other hand, elevated CO2 and a warmer climate provide unheralded benefits to the biosphere (i.e., a greener planet and enhanced crop yields).
For a list of the papers and links to them, click on this link, and scroll down.
In the United States, despite tens of billions of dollars in government subsidies provided, an EIA report on energy production shows that wind and solar combined provided only 3.2% of U.S. energy in 2016. 90% of 2016 U.S.Energy production was provided by fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro, with rising petroleum and natural gas use while the use of coal has declined.
The mainstream media continues to hype the role of heavily subsidized renewable energy, the reality of energy use continues to be dependent on fossil fuels, nuclear and hydropower energy sources.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health Care, Law, News, Science/Technology, United Kingdom | Tags: Charlie Gard, England's High Court, Great Ormond Street Hospital, Pope Francis, President Trump?
It appears that worldwide publicity and public outcry have had an effect on the sad case of Great Ormond Street Hospital and the baby Charlie Gard. Seven medical experts have suggested that unpublished data showed therapy could improve the 11-month-old’s brain condition. The High Court said previously that it was unlikely a U.S. doctor offering to treat Charlie would be able to cure him. The Great Ormond Street Hospital has said it would “explore” the data. The case will be heard on Monday by Mr. Justice Francis.
According to the previous High Court ruling GOSH is forbidden from allowing Charlie to be transferred for nucleoside therapy anywhere.
Charlie has mitochondrial depletion syndrome, a rare genetic condition which affects the cells responsible for energy production and respiration and has left him unable to move or breathe without a ventilator.
The parents have raised £1.3 million on a crowdfunding site to pay for the experimental therapy. Public attitudes may have been different if the cost was to be borne by taxpayers, but it has seemed to many that it’s not something for a court to decide if the parents can pay, even if it should prove to be futile. It’s the hospital and the High Court that have so enraged people around the world.
Filed under: Cool Site of the Day, Foreign Policy, History, National Security, Russia, Syria, The United States | Tags: Stephen Cohen PhD, Trump and Putin, Tucker Carlson
This is turning out to be a very interesting day, as we digest the news from Poland and the Hamburg G20 meeting.
Stephen F. Cohen PhD is an American scholar and emeritus professor of Russian studies at Princeton and New York University. He is 78, an unabashed liberal, a contributing editor to the far left The Nation where his wife Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor. Dr Cohen appeared on the Tucker Carlson show:
Tucker Carlson: Professor, the first thing you notice is just how much the press is rooting for this meeting between our president and the Russian president to fail. Why would they want it to fail?
Stephen Cohen: It’s a kind of pornography. Just as there is no love in pornography, there is no national interest in this bashing of Trump and Putin. As a historian, let me tell you the headline I would write instead, about what we witnessed today in Hamburg. “Potentially New Historic Detente Anti-Cold War Partnership Begun by Trump and Putin but Meanwhile Attempts to Sabotage It Escalate.”
You said I was an expert. I actually do have one expertise. I’ve seen a lot of summits, as we call meetings between American and Russian presidents. I was present at some, and even participated in the first George Bush’s summit preparation. When he met with Gorbachev, he invited me to Camp David to debate before his team.
In that context, I think what we saw today was potentially the most fateful meeting between an American and Russian president since the war time [WW II]. The reason is, is that the relationship with Russia is so dangerous and yet we have a president who might have been crippled or cowed by these Russiagate attacks on him, and yet he was not. He was, I think, politically courageous. It went well. They did important things. And this will be astonishing to be said, I know, but I think maybe today we witnessed President Trump emerging as an American statesman. I think it was a very good day for everybody.
Do read the whole thing. Just as most of the left is demonstrating just how far gone they are in political insanity, an informed voice of reason emerges. How welcome an actual conversation is, and how troubling the excess of the left that has left Steve Scalise back in intensive care.
