Filed under: Politics | Tags: Border Wall, Gaps in the Wall, Homeland Security, Who gets Paid for What
The Washington Times reported that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told his departmental employees that he may restart border wall construction to plug what he called “gaps: in the current barrier”.
In a conversation with ICE employees last week, Mr. Mayorkas was asked about his plans for the wall and he said that while Mr. Biden has canceled the border emergency and halted Pentagon money flowing to the wall, “that leaves room to make decisions” on finishing some “gaps in the wall.”
Donald J. Trump left office with 460 miles of border wall constructed, but in many difficult spots, gaps were left open to be filled with different equipment or streams to be diverted, stuff like that. The open gaps, of course, are a magnet for illegals or drugs to cross without interference and cannot all be manned 24/7. Contracts were issued to construction companies to deal with whatever the cause of the gap, and finish up the wall.
Construction contracts involve big costs like moving in heavy equipment, some rented at immense cost, hiring workers, that sort of thing, so they are firm, and involve significant cost. In the current case, the contracts to close the gaps left in the constructed wall are costing taxpayers about $6 million a day, because they have been halted. That can add up to a rather hefty sum rather quickly, which probably has something to do with Secretary Mayorkas’ announcement.
Enter Victor Davis Hanson with an article at American Greatness titled “Donald J. Trump: Joe Biden’s Best Friend”, which is a hilarious account of President Biden’s efforts to blame anything and everything that might embarrass the administration on the former president. Biden was even trying to claim that Trump didn’t do anything significant about the vaccine and he, Biden, was the one who was actually saving America from Covid-19. And there was Biden in late December, not yet inaugurated, getting his second vaccination shot.
Back in 2015, Christiana Figueres, General Secretary of the IPCC, announced at a press conference that the Climate Crisis presented the best opportunity to rid the world of dreaded Capitalism. 2021, and the world is trying desperately to get into the dreaded Capitalist country because it offers better pay, more opportunity, more peace, free schooling, little things like that. She undoubtedly knew back then that there was no real climate crisis.
President Biden says that the root causes of migration are hurricanes, earthquakes and floods. Unfortunately migration itself breeds more migration, and migrants write back to say how much better they’re doing. The unaccompanied children at the border are often there because a parent is already in country, and paying coyotes to get them across. One of the common myths is that South-North migration is driven by poverty and under-development, but most migration does not occur from the poorest countries nor the poorest segments of the population. Actually development and modernization initially lead to more migration, not less.
The migration legislation of all of the countries surveyed [El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico] requires parental authorization for all minors traveling outside of the country. The laws of Mexico and Guatemala make possession of a passport a mandatory requirement for travel, and Honduran law prohibits the travel of unaccompanied minors.
Unfortunately the president has a lot of misunderstandings about Migration matters. It would surely help if Democrats were not so anxious to increase their control of Congress and the country, by increasing their numbers of voters and congressional representation. Congress has set formal limits on the number of new immigrants the United States can receive in a year. I believe it was a million immigrants a year. That has more or less gone out the window with big flows of temporary workers, illegal immigrants, visitors overstaying, and special workers for the Tech industry who work for less than our own Tech graduates, I guess.
Then there are the little matters of who gets what. Do all these temporary workers get a stimulus check? Have you received a stimulus check? Do all the illegals get a stimulus check, or do those just go to actual citizens? That seems to be completely unclear. President Biden is apparently unconcerned about the enormous National Debt he is racking up with stimuluses and infrastructuring and offshore wind farms and trying to get rid of carbon dioxide and welcome migrants. Some of the people he has put in charge of the energy sector seem to think we should push for a change to all-electric cars promptly, but the Japanese who just had an edict for a complete change-over to a transportation system run on electricity instead of petroleum products, but have found out to their terror and astonishment that they do not have enough electricity to accomplish that, nor the ability to produce enough and are trying desperately to warn the Americans who pay no attention. Joe Biden is pushing for offshore wind farms off all three coasts. The current administration seems to be completely unfamiliar with Solyndra.
And then there’s the little matter of actually getting the American people all vaccinated.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Freedom, Immigration, Intelligence, Middle East, Military, National Security, Politics, Progressivism, Terrorism, The United States | Tags: Homeland Security, Secretary Jack Kelly, Terrorism in Europe and Here
Many of us have wondered why Europeans seem to have welcomed so many migrants from the Middle East. At first, they welcomed the migrants with flowers and food and housing, and even song. Whether this was simply a case of accepting at face value the term “refugees” or “migrants,” and believing that they must help the unfortunate, or just being terminally uninformed, I have no idea. In the wake of the Manchester attack, the thoughts of German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble give a glimpse of the thought processes. The growing number of Muslims in Germany, he said, represent a learning opportunity rather than a threat.
“It is fanaticism, not only in Islam, that leads to terrible crimes,” he said, speaking on German public radio station Deutschlandfunk Wednesday evening, when asked about the Islamist attack in which 22 mostly young people, including an eight-year-old girl, lost their lives. …
“The world’s great religions all preach the message that one must look upon others as their sisters and brothers, and that one must live with the other because man cannot live alone,” Schäuble told presenter Christiane Florin.
“‘Islam is part of Germany’ is a sober, factual statement,” the minister remarked, commenting on sentiments voiced by Chancellor Angela Merkel on more than one occasion – which are not shared by the majority of Germans.
“Anyone who denies this denies reality and is therefore not suited to being a politician, because politics begins with the confrontation of reality,” he added.
The number of refugees in Germany who are capable of committing terrorist acts has quadrupled since 2011, the German Federal Criminal Police Office has said.
Security concerns have heightened in Germany after close to a million refugees arrived in 2015 from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Africa. Fears worsened when more than 1,200 women were reportedly assaulted in various German cities on New Year’s Eve in 2015.
Officials say there are 657 refugees capable of committing terror attacks and 388 potential accomplices in such attacks.
The Manchester attack has awakened British officialdom to the threat to their people, and armed military people are guarding the trains in Britain. Hungary has put up a wall, and is accepting no migrants. Other nations are having all sorts of trouble with the migrants who have arrived in their countries. France has ‘no go’ neighborhoods where even the police will not venture, and numbers of attacks.
The new French President, Emmanuel Macron, wants Islam to have more room in France. Like many European leaders Macron seems to be convinced that the remedy for the demographic deficit and the aging of ethnic European populations is more immigration. Besides, they seem to be more worried about climate change. Macron claimed to be a ‘centrist’, but the outgoing Socialist President François Hollande has spoken of him as a “continuity”, not an alternative. His entire program is socialist. Lots of additional public expenditures, and climate change is defined as the “key issue for the future of the world.”
Our own Secretary of Homeland Security, General John Kelly, remarked today that “if we knew what he knows about terror threats in this country, we’d never leave the house.”
He was interviewed on Fox and Friends on Friday and said that the terror threat is “worse than we realize.” He pointed out four major terror attacks in the last week, by “more or less the same groups,” in Manchester, England, in Egypt where 28 Coptic Christians were slaughtered, on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, and in Indonesia.
“It’s everywhere. It’s constant. It’s nonstop. The good news for us in America is we have amazing people protecting us every day. But it can happen here almost any time,” Kelly said.
Here’s Andy McCarthy:
Here is the blunt, inescapable fact: The United States is in a defensive war against what is imprecisely called “radical Islam.” The war proceeds on two tracks: the kinetic militancy of jihadists, and the cultural challenge of anti-Western, anti-constitutional Islamic law and mores. The ideology that catalyzes both tracks is sharia supremacism — the implementation and spreading of sharia, classical Islam’s societal structure and legal code, is the rationale for all jihadist terror and of all the Islamist cultural aggression that slipstreams behind it.
The dividing line is sharia supremacism. On one side of it we find patriotic, pro-American Muslims who are spiritually devout but reject the imposition of sharia on civil and political life; on the other, the Islamists — the sharia supremacists. The challenge posed by the latter is not merely that some percentage of them are jihadists; it is that as a population — or as enclaves that take hold in the West — they are assimilation-resistant, and their ideological havens will breed the jihadists of the future while stifling the Constitution in the here and now.
That is what we have to vet for. That is what the majority of the American people want: Muslims who embrace our way of life invited in, Muslims who threaten our way of life kept out. You can’t get there without subjecting Muslim aliens to more-extensive inspection.
What can we do? Try to be informed, and I guess, be ready with the candles and flowers.
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Employer Bonuses, Immigration, Politics, STEM Graduates | Tags: Foreign Students, Homeland Security, STEM Graduates
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is expanding a program that allows foreign students with degrees in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) to extend their stay in the U.S to work after graduation. Since, unlike native Americans, they are still defined as “students” they are not required to pay social security and Medicare taxes. The bonus given to employers for hiring a foreign STEM graduate will increase from $10,000 to $12,000. So an employer is more apt to hire a foreign graduate to work in their field of study, than to hire a new American STEM graduate.
Our nation will benefit from keeping international students here, educated in U.S. colleges and universities here while they receive additional training, rather than sending them out of the country,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Sarah Saldaña said in a statement Friday. “At the same time, U.S. employers will benefit from the increased ability to rely on the skills acquired by U.S. educated-STEM students, as well as their knowledge of markets in their home countries.”
And proud parents of new STEM graduates might wonder why their kids can’t seem to find a job? It was recently reported that Disney tech employees were let go, but required to train the foreign workers hired to replace them. There have been many cases of our high-tech companies hiring cheaper foreign workers, who because they are only here because of the H1-B program, are not likely to complain or be difficult for fear of losing their visas.
I don’t understand how this makes sense. Some say that Obama is attempting to change the electoral college which is based on population at the time of the election, so more immigrants can skew the vote. He is clearly trying to get more immigrants, legal and illegal, through a simplified citizenship process so they can vote in the 2016 election. Apparently we are to be troubled by this petty tyrant for years and years to come.
Filed under: Domestic Policy, Humor, Intelligence, Law, National Security, Politics, The United States | Tags: Homeland Security, Investigation, Surveillance
(h/t: Maggie’s Farm)
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Liberalism, Politics, Terrorism | Tags: Homeland Security, Separtment of State, Terrorist Attacks
In almost six months, there have been two unsuccessful attacks on American soil, the Detroit Christmas Day bombing, and last Saturday’s Times Square attempted bombing. Warnings were ignored, facts were not put together.
Our first line of defense is the Visa Security Program which puts Homeland Security officers at U.S. Consulate offices to perform background checks on visa applicants. To date, the Administration has only deployed officers at 14 high risk countries, out of 57 likely candidates.
Jurisdictional disputes between the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security have interfered with the process. James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation emphasizes that “visas …are part of a layered national security system for fighting transnational terrorism.” Effective management of visas and passports has a vital role to play.
Obama is planning to freeze the program’s budget for fiscal 2011. It’s hard to avoid the idea that the administration does not take terrorism very seriously. There is a constant attempt to over-reassure, and play down the attacks that have taken place. It would seem that this is part of Obama’s efforts to reach out to Muslim countries in hopes of — successful talks someday?
Senators Lieberman and Collins are considering suing the administration to get information about why the signs of Major Nidal Hassan’s increasing radicalism were ignored or sloughed off. Shahzad was dismissed as an amateur, dismissed as a one-off attempt by a lone wolf angry about health care, and Abdulmutallab was given a visa in spite of warnings from his own father that he was dangerous. And at that, because his attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit failed, it was again sloughed off as unimportant. The terrorist attempt in Times Square is referred to on the White House website as “The Times Square Incident.” Another ‘Man-Caused” Event?
We just have different priorities. Will they change before there is another successful attack?
Filed under: Environment, Freedom, National Security | Tags: Border Patrol, Department of the Interior, Homeland Security
On March 27, Arizona rancher Robert Krentz was murdered by an unknown gunman who entered and exited the U.S. illegally in an area where border agents are widely prohibited from using motorized vehicles, constructing roads or installing surveillance structures.
Four Republican congressmen introduced legislation on Wednesday that bans the Interior Department from using environmental regulation to forestall Border Patrol access. The congressmen say that their bill will address environmental degradation of federal lands and help to close national security gaps along the border.
Securing the borders against illegal entry is a matter of national security, and the illegals who cross the border do considerable damage to the environment as has been shown on videos of the area. Internal documents show that the Interior Department and the U.S. Forest Service have actively prevented Border Patrol agents from securing U.S. borders by requiring Department of Homeland Security officials to complete lengthy environmental analyses, and even blocking agents from entering some areas.
And DHS has paid the Department of the Interior more than $9 million since 2007 to “mitigate the environmental damage” of protecting the border. That would be the areas where the Border Patrol is restricted from using motorized vehicles, building roads or installing surveillance. A 2009 memorandum of agreement agrees that DHS will pay DOI an additional $50 million for mitigation funds, but DOI officials have not revealed how those funds will be used.
This is typical of Big Government. Congress has passed their regulatory tasks off to governmental agencies, and the right hand seldom knows what the left hand is doing. Not that Congress does a good job of regulation, but at least there is some oversight, and they are responsible ultimately to the voters. But government money is easily shuffled around. If we could track the useless and unnecessary expenditures, hold a lot of official feet to the fire, perhaps tax day wouldn’t be so painful.
Filed under: Islam, Law, National Security, Terrorism | Tags: Al-Shabaab, Customs and Immigration, Homeland Security, illegal immigrants
Authorities are searching for 270 Somalis believed to have illegally entered the United States with help from a Virginia man who admitted contacts with an Islamic terrorist group.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Thomas Eyre testified in a hearing in Alexandria’s federal court, that authorities are “concerned” about Anthony Joseph Tracy’s connections to the group. According to an affidavit filed with the court, Mr. Tracy told authorities that he came in contact with the Somali terrorist organization Al-Shabaab, which announced an alliance with al Qaeda earlier this year. Tracy has been held without bail.
Tracy’s emails, combined with information on Facebook, show that the Somalis have spread across the country and are living in New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Minnesota and Arizona. They are believed to have made a complex trip from Kenya to Dubai to Moscow to Cuba to South America to Mexico and then across the U.S. Mexico border.
Well, they got the guy who provided fraudulent information for the travel visas, but the 270 Somalis are missing. You know that fence on the U.S./ Mexico border that they were going to build? I wonder how many jobs that would provide?
According to this website, the State Department has admitted 83,991 Somali Muslims in the last 25 years, and had to suspend family reunification because DNA testing revealed widespread immigration fraud.
Filed under: Law, Military, National Security, Progressivism, Terrorism | Tags: Fort Hood, Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — The American Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, says that her agency is working with groups across the United States to try to deflect any wave of anti-Muslim sentiment after Thursday’s dreadful massacre by U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim who reportedly expressed growing dismay over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is enlightening to see just what the Obama administration means by “homeland security.” Can’t offend anyone. Don’t want any hurt feelings.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Energy | Tags: Energy Independence, Homeland Security, Junk Science
Do you have storms in your area that damage power lines and cause a widespread loss of power? Then you are familiar with trying to stay warm, cooking on the barbecue, using candles for light, or perhaps you are one of the lucky ones who has a generator. Nevertheless, you appreciate your electricity. But do you know where it comes from?
Surprisingly, no one in congress or the administration does. At least they must not, for their math simply does not add up. If you cannot read this lovely pie chart, 48.9 % of our electricity comes from coal, 20% from natural gas, 19.3 % comes from nuclear, 7.1 % from hydroelectric plants, 1.6 % from petroleum and the little pinky-peach wedge represents wind, solar and geothermal.
The Waxman-Markey climate bill will punitively tax the energy sources that contribute 90 percent of our current American electricity in order to bet our future on the wedge that is able to produce only 2.4 percent of our electricity. But we can do it. The conventional phrase is “if we can send a man to the moon we can…..
We have eleven whole years in which to build, install, and connect to the grid at least 180,000 turbines. Each one of which requires a backup of conventional energy for the times when the wind does not blow, which is often.
And as for solar, not only is it far more expensive, suitable only in the Southwest, but perhaps you have noticed that the sun sinks beneath the horizon at night, just when we need lighting.
This energy policy is built on a lie, or more accurately a whole bunch of lies. The whole thing is conceived of as a way to stop the globe from warming, but it stopped warming in 2002.
It’s necessary to remove the CO2 that is causing global warming isn’t it? CO2 is not the cause of global warming or climate change. Reducing it is unnecessary and will cost trillions.
There are not, as yet, any large-scale, practical and cost-competitive replacements for fossil fuels. If you punish fossil fuel use with either taxes or by capping how much energy is allowed to be used, you punish the economy.
When a country institutes cap-and-trade legislation unilaterally, it makes that country less competitive in the global economy. Imports and trade deficits increase as prices at home rise, while companies or whole industries close and move abroad to countries where they can be more competitive.
And it is the citizen, the consumer, who pays for all of this, either in the form of higher prices or less availability, or less economic growth. This shouldn’t be rocket science, but consequences are not of much interest to Democrats. It’s still worth trying to figure out what the consequences will be.
Filed under: Islam, Law, National Security, Progressivism, Terrorism | Tags: Debunking Liberal Lies, Homeland Security, Jihadism, Media Bias
Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, famously referred to terrorism with “nuance” as “a man-caused disaster.” If that wasn’t enough, she didn’t know how the 9/11 terrorists got into the country — she thought they came in from Canada, and Immigration is part of her department. She added that crossing the border illegally is not a crime, which it is, and then approved an absolutely moronic intelligence assessment that warned of increased “radical right-wing extremism” including the recruitment of returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. Conservatives were justifiably insulted.
The “unbiased” media is now claiming that Secretary Napolitano was right. Why just look at the past two weeks:
In the past two weeks, the country has seen the bombing of a Starbucks coffee shop in New York City, the arrest of four men for allegedly plotting to blow up synagogues and shoot down planes, the shooting of two soldiers at an Army recruitment center in Arkansas, the assassination of a doctor inside a Kansas church, and the shooting at the Holocaust Museum…. Although these are not all cases of right-wing extremism, each is an example of domestic terrorism.
What a grouping of odd people. You have domestic Islamist jihadists, a crackpot who murdered an abortion provider, and an 88 year old “9/11 Truther,” a neo-Nazi, who hates Bush, Cheney, the Neo-Cons and is a violent anti-Semite, and this is the fault of radical Right-Wing extremists? The only connection is that many conservatives are opposed to abortion. How crass of Liberals to instantly think of how they can exploit these events to score cheap political points.
We have been confronting an international terrorist threat domestically for over 20 years when the World Trade Center bombers began training in the New York area in 1998. This latest example of domestic jihadism is hardly the only domestic plot that has been exposed and prevented.
Democrats, for political purposes, have chosen to claim that there really never has been a terrorist threat, that it was only the actions of the evil BushCheneyRumsfeld that drove otherwise innocent young Muslim men into the arms and training camps of Osama bin Laden. If these terrible men had not tried to scare you into voting Republican by threatening you with terrorism, then, well the terrorists would just vanish— poof! Madrid, London, Bali? The Cole? The embassies? Never mind.
But it’s all under control. Jake Tapper (ABC) asked what would happen to the first terrorist to be tried in U.S. court were not found guilty? Would he be released in the U.S.? Imprisoned anyway? Sent back to the battlefield? Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said he wasn’t going to get into hypotheticals.
The administration announced that it was sending four of the Uighurs to Bermuda. Great Britain announced that Bermuda is a British protectorate, and nobody asked them, and they want to know exactly under what conditions and safeguards these people are being sent to Bermuda. It was noted recently that the Uighurs at Guantanamo threw a television across the room because a woman on the screen bared her arms. There are consequences to be considered.
The rest of the Uighurs are going to Palau in exchange for $200 million.
Filed under: History, Military, National Security, Terrorism | Tags: Democrat Demagogues, Homeland Security, War on Terror
In his second day in office, Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center within one year. He had no idea what to do with the 241 inmates who are usually described as “the worst of the worst.” He is determined to close the facility because he believes that the world disapproves, and that closing it will somehow improve our image in the world. He apparently feels that prisoners can be brought to the United States, and prosecuted in the criminal justice system.
But as historian Arthur Herman explains in a brilliant history of the facility:
Gitmo was never meant to be a prison where inmates were to serve sentences for crimes. It was, in the words of a Defense Department document, a detention facility set up n order to prevent “enemy combatants from continuing the fight against the U.S. and its partners in the war on terror.” Its goals were military and tactical, not juridicial or penal. Still the conditions under which these unconventional prisoners were to be held did involve questions.
The Senate, alert to public opinion, and including the Democratic leadership and 99 of its members, refused to grant the President the $80 million he asked for to close the detention center, and stripped the requested funds from a war-spending bill. Senate Leader Harry Reid said “Democrats under no circumstances will move forward without a comprehensive, responsible plan from the president. We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States.”
The REAL ID Act of 2005 prohibits anyone connected to terrorist activity from entering and living in the United States. (A bill that Obama voted for). There are approximately 30 detainees who have been cleared for release from incarceration. The administration is trying to find them a home. European nations are reluctant to make any commitment unless President Obama also allows a number to live freely in the United States.
One federal district court judge has ruled that 17 Chinese Muslims be brought to Washington D.C. The judge cited no law or treaty to support his order. The Uighurs have appealed to the Supreme Court, where it rests at present.
It is doubtful that it is legal to incarcerate detainees in the federal prison system without trial, or to put them in solitary confinement without trial in maximum security prisons. Trials are a problem, because the prisoners were meant to be detained, not tried. As David Rivkin and Lee Casey point out:
Guantanamo has always been a symbol, rather than the substance, of complaints against America’s “war on terror.” It’s the military character of the U.S. response to 9/11 that foreign and domestic critics won’t accept.
President Obama has made the naive assumption that the Bush administration did not consider these problems when they opened the Gitmo detention center. It was not decided on either lightly or without reservations, and there were efforts from the first to make sure that the facility was responsible and honorable. The first ‘building’ was a trailer home for the representatives of the International Red Cross, who help inmates to write home. Rivkin and Casey again:
Mr. Obama can still reverse his decision to close Guantanamo. This would cost him significant political support among his base. But making unpopular decisions to serve the national interest is a president’s duty and obligation.
Filed under: Foreign Policy, Law, Military, National Security, Politics | Tags: Homeland Security, Terrorism
The Obama administration is repeating the national security mistakes of the Clinton Administration. Andy McCarthy, who prosecuted the first World Trade Center bombing and knows what he is talking about, writes at National Review Online:
On Thursday, Josh Meyer of the Los Angeles Times broke the story that the FBI is edging the CIA out of the business of fighting international terrorism. Under the bureau”s “global justice initiative, Meyer reported that “FBI agents will have a central role in overseas counter-terrorism cases. They will expand their questioning of suspects and evidence-gathering to try to ensure that criminal prosecutions are an option.” Who needs a War on Terror, or even an “overseas contingency operation,” when all the world”s a crime scene?
If you’re thinking, “Hey, we’ve seen this movie before,” you”re right. Slowly but surely, it’s September 10 again, a retreat into Clinton-era counterterrorism, when radical Islam prosecuted a war while we tried to prosecute radical Islam in court, playing cops-and-robbers while jihadists played for keeps.
Do read the whole article. Dick Cheney was right. The Obama administration is weak on national security, and our enemies have noticed.
The administration’s problem is an inability to recognize the difference between a criminal matter and a military matter. They are not the same. Obama is not much interested in foreign affairs, and it shows. As Andy McCarthy says, “Yes, we’ve seen this movie before. And we know how it ends.”
American Elephants 