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by ShinShinKid » Thu Jul 03, 2014 3:10 pm
by elfismiles » Fri Jul 11, 2014 12:23 pm
by 82_28 » Fri Jul 11, 2014 12:47 pm
by conniption » Sun Jul 13, 2014 5:14 pm
NoMoreMisterNiceBlog
Been to Sean Hannity's Twitter feed lately? It's a trip....
continued:
http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2014/0 ... html#links
by elfismiles » Sun Jul 13, 2014 8:05 pm
PHOTOS: Obama Laughs His Way Through Meeting with Gov. Perry
by Bryan Preston / Bio
July 10, 2014 - 6:59 am
Reuters published these two photos from President Obama’s meeting with Texas Gov. Rick Perry Wednesday. The president and the governor met in Dallas to discuss the humanitarian crisis on the Texas-Mexico border. The federal government estimates that 57,000 unaccompanied children have been taken in after illegally crossing into the United States.
In the two photos, Gov. Perry and his team appear to be taking the moment seriously. President Obama is grinning and laughing.
Obama himself has described the situation on the border as a “humanitarian crisis.”
President Obama refuses to visit the border while he is in Texas this week, despite the fact that while he is in Austin for a fundraiser he will be a short flight from the Rio Grande Valley. The vast majority of the illegal crossings are occurring in that region.
President Obama has requested $3.7 billion in emergency funding to handle the crisis, with most of that going to process and care for the children, not secure the border.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/07/10/ph ... gov-perry/
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 14, 2014 7:30 am
ublished on Saturday, July 12, 2014 by Common Dreams
Those Kids Crossing the Border From Mexico Wouldn't Be There If Obama Hadn't Supported a Coup the Media Doesn't Talk About
by Ted Rall
2009 Honduran Coup
Supporters of ousted Honduras' President Manuel Zelaya clash with soldiers near the presidential residency Tegucigalpa, Monday, June 29. 2009. Police fired tear gas to hold back thousands of Hondurans outside the occupied presidential residency as world leaders appealed to Honduras to reverse a coup that ousted the president. (AP)
If you're reading this, you probably follow the news. So you've probably heard of the latest iteration of the "crisis at the border": tens of thousands of children, many of them unaccompanied by an adult, crossing the desert from Mexico into the United States, where they surrender to the Border Patrol in hope of being allowed to remain here permanently. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detention and hearing system has been overwhelmed by the surge of children and, in some cases, their parents. The Obama Administration has asked Congress to approve new funding to speed up processing and deportations of these illegal immigrants.
Even if you've followed this story closely, you probably haven't heard the depressing backstory — the reason so many Central Americans are sending their children on a dangerous thousand-mile journey up the spine of Mexico, where they ride atop freight trains, endure shakedowns by corrupt police and face rapists, bandits and other predators. (For a sense of what it's like, check out the excellent 2004 film "Maria Full of Grace.")
NPR and other mainstream news outlets are parroting the White House, which blames unscrupulous "coyotes" (human smugglers) for "lying to parents, telling them that if they put their kids in the hands of traffickers and get to the United States that they will be able to stay." True: the coyotes are saying that in order to gin up business. Also true: U.S. law has changed, and many of these kids have a strong legal case for asylum. Unfortunately, U.S. officials are ignoring the law.
The sad truth is that this "crisis at the border" is yet another example of "blowback."
Blowback is an unintended negative consequence of U.S. political, military and/or economic intervention overseas — when something we did in the past comes back to bite us in the ass. 9/11 is the classic example; arming and funding radical Islamists in the Middle East and South Asia who were less grateful for our help than angry at the U.S.' simultaneous backing for oppressive governments (The House of Saud, Saddam, Assad, etc.) in the region.
More recent cases include U.S. support for Islamist insurgents in Libya and Syria, which destabilized both countries and led to the murders of U.S. consular officials in Benghazi, and the rise of ISIS, the guerilla army that imperils the U.S.-backed Maliki regime in Baghdad, respectively.
Confusing the issue for casual American news consumers is that the current border crisis doesn't involve the usual Mexicans traveling north in search of work. Instead, we're talking about people from Central American nations devastated by a century of American colonialism and imperialism, much of that intervention surprisingly recent. Central American refugees are merely transiting through Mexico.
"The unaccompanied children crossing the border into the United States are leaving behind mainly three Central American countries, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. The first two are among the world's most violent and all three have deep poverty, according to a Pew Research report based on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) information," reports NBC News. "El Salvador ranked second in terms of homicides in Latin America in 2011, and it is still high on the list. Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are among the poorest nations in Latin America. Thirty percent of Hondurans, 17 percent of Salvadorans and 26 percent of Guatemalans live on less than $2 a day."
The fact that Honduras is the biggest source of the exodus jumped out at me. That's because, in 2009, the United States government — under President Obama — tacitly supported a military coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras. "Washington has a very close relationship with the Honduran military, which goes back decades," The Guardian noted at the time. "During the 1980s, the US used bases in Honduras to train and arm the Contras, Nicaraguan paramilitaries who became known for their atrocities in their war against the Sandinista government in neighbouring Nicaragua."
Honduras wasn't paradise under President Manuel Zelaya. Since the coup, however, the country has entered a downward death spiral of drug-related bloodshed and political revenge killings that crashed the economy, brought an end to law, order and civil society, and now has some analysts calling it a "failed state" along the lines of Somalia and Afghanistan during the 1990s.
"Zelaya's overthrow created a vacuum in security in which military and police were now focused more on political protest, and also led to a freeze in international aid that markedly worsened socio-economic conditions," Mark Ungar, professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York, told The International Business Times. "The 2009 coup, asserts [Tulane] professor Aaron Schneider, gave the Honduran military more political and economic leverage, at the same time as the state and political elites lost their legitimacy, resources and the capacity to govern large parts of the country."
El Salvador and Guatemala, also narcostates devastated by decades of U.S. support for oppressive, corrupt right-wing dictatorships, are suffering similar conditions.
© 2014 Ted Rall
by 82_28 » Mon Jul 14, 2014 10:24 am
by elfismiles » Mon Jul 14, 2014 12:29 pm
82_28 » 14 Jul 2014 14:24 wrote:That Perry guy is such a clown. His glasses of feigned intelligence are, for the time being, hilarious. They did the same thing with "Jeb". Throw some glasses on those dicks and all of a sudden they become artificially respectable. Someone besides them has to be behind their political existences. We need to figure this out.
I mean, a guy named "Jeb" and a bush to boot. Jesus. This Rick Perry takes the cake. Soon all of Texas will be wearing fancy glasses as an accessory to their Stetsons. Can you imagine?
by elfismiles » Mon Jul 14, 2014 12:31 pm
Report: SMALL LIFELESS, DEAD CHILDREN Found “Washed Up Along Riverbank” of Rio Grande
Posted by Jim Hoft on Monday, July 14, 2014, 9:12 AM
Guest post by Kristinn Taylor
Mexican emigrants crossing the Rio Grande near El Paso, Texas. (Danny Lehman/Corbis)
A Fox News exclusive reported this morning by Jana Winter inexplicably buried the lede.
Winter reports that several dead children have been discovered “washed up along the riverbank” of the Rio Grande, but fails to note that there have been no reports by the Obama administration on this.
This indicates a pattern of covering up dead illegal alien kids by the Obama administration. It was two weeks before news was reported on the sole child death acknowledged by the Obama administration, Gilberto Ramos, a 15 year-old boy from Guatemala whose body was found in the Texas brush dead from the heat.
From Jana Winter’s report:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/07/14/ni ... de-valley/
“FoxNews.com accompanied Texas lawmaker Louie Gohmert, a former judge and current Republican Congressman, to the site in the pre-dawn hours of Saturday. Gohmert, whose district lies some 550 miles northeast of what has become the most heavily-trafficked people-smuggling route in the world, has been to the location many times, but has never seen it so understaffed and overwhelmed.
““I’m more concerned than ever [that the border is] so seriously undermanned and I’ll be raising hell in Washington,” Gohmert, who invited FoxNews.com to see the situation first-hand, would later tell Border Patrol officials.
“The Border Patrol agents loaded and unloaded their vehicles packed with the newly-arrived illegal immigrants — including women pregnant or nursing infants, and small, unaccompanied children — throughout the evening and early morning hours. At first, they were mostly teenagers, ages 14 to 17, arriving with their mother or brothers or no one at all. Then came the pregnant women. A mother nursing her infant. A small girl with wide eyes clutching a doll.
“A total of 72 came in during the first dark hours of Saturday morning. A third were unaccompanied children.
“The life jackets helped many make it across the Rio Grande from Reynosa, the Mexican city across the water from Mission, just west of McAllen. Sources say they come over on rafts ferried by the so-called “coyotes,” the human smugglers whose means of transport are rendered useless whenever discovered by the Border Patrol. Many don’t make it across the river; multiple sources became emotional when recounting their discoveries of small, lifeless bodies washed up along the riverbank.”
That is all Winter has to report on the dead children.
More needs to be known about the price children are paying for the Obama administration’s lawless immigration policies.
n May of 2014, more than 9,500 unaccompanied alien children were referred to ORR – an increase of more than 850% since 2012. (MIN)
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/07 ... io-grande/
Border Patrol Captures Over 27,000 Illegal Immigrants This Year in 'Non-Border' Texas County
by Bob Price 14 Jul 2014, 6:43 AM PDT
FALFURRIAS, Texas—A sign at the entrance to the Falfurrias Checkpoint of the U.S. Border Patrol proudly states the capture of 27,206 illegal aliens this year. It is interesting to note, the Falfurrias Checkpoint is located in Brooks County, Texas which is not a border county.
This checkpoint is located about eighty miles from the Texas/Mexico border and yet Border Patrol agents managed to apprehend well over 27,000 immigrants who have entered the country illegally. That represents nearly one hundred fifty people every single day this year.
This checkpoint puts a severe financial strain on the officials of Brooks County, Texas who must deal with the budgetary impact of extra services the county must provide as a direct result of checkpoint and related border patrol activities. Because Brooks County is not designated as a “border county” they are not eligible for federal and state grants and other funding that is otherwise available to counties actually located on the border.
Many of these expenses come in the form of increased law enforcement support. County deputies are often called out by the Border Patrol to pick up vehicles that are used in human smuggling when the occupants “bail out” from the vehicle. Additionally, because many of the illegal aliens wander off and get lost in the ranch fields of Brooks County, they often die from lack of water and heat exhaustion.
When this happens, county officials must process the death as a crime scene and the county picks up the expenses of burial of the corpse or what is left of it. This comes at a cost to the county of about $2,500 per body according to Brooks County Chief Deputy Benny Martinez.
These costs, born by the poorest county in the state of Texas, have force pay cuts for county employees, loss of health benefits and a reduction in the size of the law enforcement arm of the Sheriff’s Office. The county now has only one deputy per shift to cover 1,000 square miles (nearly the size of the State of Rhode Island).
Breitbart Texas has had the opportunity to ride along with some of the volunteer police officers who are giving their off-duty time from other law-enforcement jobs in South Texas to help the county fill the void its budget cannot meet. These off-duty police officers have formed a tax-exempt organization called the Border Brotherhood of Texas to recruit and equip these volunteers to safely provide assistance to Brooks County.
During the rides, Breitbart Texas has witnessed the time required by county officials and first responders to assist the Border Patrol in their duties which are an essential part of our border security program, yet the county bears this national security cost on its own shoulders.
Chief Martinez suggested to Breitbart Texas that perhaps counties that include a border security checkpoint should also be designated as a border county and be eligible for the funds available for the other counties. “When you compare the numbers of illegal immigrants captured in Brooks County to actual border counties, our numbers stack up very well,” Martinez told Breitbart Texas.
Bob Price is a staff writer and a member of the original Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX.
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Texa ... xas-County
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 14, 2014 12:39 pm
by elfismiles » Mon Jul 14, 2014 2:12 pm
seemslikeadream » 14 Jul 2014 16:39 wrote:fuck breitbart....fuck gohmert....fuck fox news..and fuck Reagan while I'm at it
all human pieces of shit
they only show up cause it makes the black man look bad
do they care about SMALL LIFELESS, DEAD CHILDREN?? NO! They only care about how that makes Obama look
by 82_28 » Mon Jul 14, 2014 2:28 pm
elfismiles » Mon Jul 14, 2014 8:29 am wrote:82_28 » 14 Jul 2014 14:24 wrote:That Perry guy is such a clown. His glasses of feigned intelligence are, for the time being, hilarious. They did the same thing with "Jeb". Throw some glasses on those dicks and all of a sudden they become artificially respectable. Someone besides them has to be behind their political existences. We need to figure this out.
I mean, a guy named "Jeb" and a bush to boot. Jesus. This Rick Perry takes the cake. Soon all of Texas will be wearing fancy glasses as an accessory to their Stetsons. Can you imagine?
Yeah, it's crazy ... then again, I'll be wearing some glasses soon as my eye-sight is diminishing with age...
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 14, 2014 3:19 pm
Human Blowback from US Interventions
July 13, 2014
The flight of Central American children north to the U.S. border is another form of blowback from decades of U.S. refusal to permit reformist governments in the region, including the State Department’s support for a 2009 coup ousting Honduran President Zelaya, writes William Blum at Anti-Empire Report.
By William Blum
The number of children attempting to cross the Mexican border into the United States has risen dramatically in the last five years: In fiscal year 2009 (Oct. 1, 2009 – Sept. 30, 2010) about 6,000 unaccompanied minors were detained near the border. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimates for the fiscal year 2014 the detention of as many as 74,000 unaccompanied minors.
Approximately 28 percent of the children detained this year are from Honduras, 24 percent from Guatemala, and 21 percent from El Salvador. The particularly severe increases in Honduran migration are a direct result of the June 28, 2009 military coup that overthrew the democratically-elected president, Manuel Zelaya, after he did things like raising the minimum wage, giving subsidies to small farmers, and instituting free education.
The coup – like so many others in Latin America – was led by a graduate of Washington’s infamous School of the Americas.
As per the standard Western Hemisphere script, the Honduran coup was followed by the abusive policies of the new regime, loyally supported by the United States. The State Department was virtually alone in the Western Hemisphere in not unequivocally condemning the Honduran coup.
Indeed, the Obama administration has refused to call it a coup, which, under American law, would tie Washington’s hands as to the amount of support it could give the coup government. This denial of reality still persists even though a U.S. embassy cable released by Wikileaks in 2010 declared: “There is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 [2009] in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch.”
Washington’s support of the far-right Honduran government has been unwavering ever since.
The questions concerning immigration into the United States from south of the border go on year after year, with the same issues argued back and forth: What’s the best way to block the flow into the country? How shall we punish those caught here illegally? Should we separate families, which happens when parents are deported but their American-born children remain?
Should the police and various other institutions have the right to ask for proof of legal residence from anyone they suspect of being here illegally? Should we punish employers who hire illegal immigrants? Should we grant amnesty to at least some of the immigrants already here for years? … on and on, round and round it goes, decade after decade.
Those in the U.S. generally opposed to immigration make it a point to declare that the United States does not have any moral obligation to take in these Latino immigrants. But the counter-argument to this last point is almost never mentioned: Yes, the United States does indeed have a moral obligation because so many of the immigrants are escaping a situation in their homeland made hopeless by American intervention and policy.
In addition to Honduras, Washington overthrew progressive governments which were sincerely committed to fighting poverty in Guatemala and Nicaragua; while in El Salvador the U.S. played a major role in suppressing a movement striving to install such a government.
And in Mexico, though Washington has not intervened militarily since 1919, over the years the U.S. has been providing training, arms and surveillance technology to Mexico’s police and armed forces to better their ability to suppress their own people’s aspirations, as in Chiapas, and this has added to the influx of the oppressed to the United States, irony notwithstanding.
Moreover, Washington’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has brought a flood of cheap, subsidized U.S. agricultural products into Mexico, ravaging campesino communities and driving many Mexican farmers off the land when they couldn’t compete with the giant from the north. The subsequent Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) has brought the same joys to the people of that area.
These “free trade” agreements – as they do all over the world – also result in government enterprises being privatized, the regulation of corporations being reduced, and cuts to the social budget. Add to this the displacement of communities by foreign mining projects and the drastic U.S.-led militarization of the War on Drugs with accompanying violence and you have the perfect storm of suffering followed by the attempt to escape from suffering.
It’s not that all these people prefer to live in the United States. They’d much rather remain with their families and friends, be able to speak their native language at all times, and avoid the hardships imposed on them by American police and other right-wingers.
by ShinShinKid » Wed Jul 16, 2014 7:54 pm
by elfismiles » Mon Jul 21, 2014 11:15 am
Gov. Rick Perry to deploy 1,000 National Guard troops to RGV
Posted on Jul 20, 2014
by Jacob Fischler
Supervisory Border Patrol Agents Rolando Garcia, right, and Pablo Gonzales walk through a park along the Rio Grande on Monday, May 19, 2014, in Laredo, Texas. Border Patrol agents are guided to illegal immigrants by National Guard troops in Lakota helicopters equipped with thermal imaging camera systems. (Kelly West/Austin American Statesman/MCT)
Texas Gov. Rick Perry plans to announce he will activate the Texas National Guard at a news conference Monday in Austin, said state Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, D-McAllen.
Hinojosa did not have details of the effort, but an internal memo from another state official’s office said the governor planned to call about 1,000 Texas National Guard troops to the Rio Grande Valley — at a cost of about $12 million per month.
The memo was provided to The Monitor on the condition of anonymity because the information is not yet public.
Troops are expected to enter the area gradually, building up to 1,000 after about a month, the memo said.
The troops will join the Texas Department of Public Safety in its recent surge to combat human smuggling and drug trafficking amid the influx of mostly Central Americans illegally crossing the Rio Grande. Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, and Texas House Speaker Joe Straus announced the $1.3 million per week effort last month.
State leaders approved funding for extra DPS troopers to fill in gaps in Border Patrol coverage in the Valley as the federal authorities were overwhelmed with an influx of children and families from Central America. The state officials feared Mexican drug cartels might exploit the situation to move their own drugs and human contraband while Border Patrol attention was turned elsewhere.
Hinojosa said Perry's move smacked of political gamesmanship.
“All these politicians coming down to border, they don't care about solving the problem, they just want to make a political point,” he said.
State officials denied the move amounted to a militarization of the border.
“This is not a militarization of the border,” the memo states. “The DPS and the National Guard are working to keep any drug and human trafficking south of (U.S. Highway) 83 and with the goal of keeping any smuggling from entering major highways to transport East/West/and North.”
DPS officials want to send National Guard troops into western areas of the Valley and the ranch lands further north, according to the memo.
“Smuggling has supposedly according to DPS moved West on the border with an increase in Jim Hogg County," the memo states. "DPS especially wants to apply the Guard in the rural areas to patrol.”
The National Guard deployment — added to the DPS surge — will bring the price tag of troopers on the border to about $5 million per week, the memo said. And the funding source for the effort remains unclear.
“It is not clear where the money will come from in the budget,” the memo states, adding that Perry's office has said the money will come from “non critical” areas, such as health care or transportation.
Hinojosa said the National Guard was not equipped to aid immigrants crossing the Rio Grande.
“They (cartels) are taking advantage of the situation,” he said. “But our local law enforcement from the sheriff’s offices of the different counties to the different police departments are taking care of the situation. This is a civil matter, not a military matter. What we need is more resources to hire more deputies, hire more Border Patrol.
“These are young people, just families coming across. They're not armed. They're not carrying weapons.”
http://www.themonitor.com/news/local/go ... b2370.html
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