Truth

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

Arizona

Arizona
Showing posts with label law enforcement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label law enforcement. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Nuts to You

This is my kind of pizza!

I would add the ObamaCare Special: “I’m Sorry that’s bad for your Health, how about a nice organically grown  salad instead? no dressing, of course that’s evil fat”
But if you insist, that will $1,000.00 (That’s 992.00 for your Health insurance cost and 8.00 for the pizza with $50 per topping extra) :)
The Stimulus Pizza:  $1 Trillion dollars. And they serve you an empty plate because it will do nothing in the end so why bother but if you don’t buy it, the economy will crash!
The Mexican Pizza: If you don’t buy it you’re a Racist!
The Ground Zero Pizza: Islamic toppings but if you object you’re a Bigot!
Ever notice, Liberals are always wanting to point to a “few nuts” of their opponents as the mainstream way all of them are.
But you point to their “nuts” and you’re racist or a bigot for pointing to a “few nuts” as indicative of all of them.
Take Radical Islam. You point to the ground Zero Mosque and you are just overgeneralizing you bigot, but when they point to the 1 guy in 300,000 tea partiers who has a “nut” sign that’s indicative of the whole movement.
And the Liberal Media will be right their to ignore the Left’s “nuts” and 24/7 specials on the on the other “nut” (who may even be a plant by the Left to make it look like a “nut”). The Ministry of Truth really doesn’t care about silly little details like that.
Now that’s “journalism”. :)
*********************************************************************
Now, this was funny, to a cynic like me.
The Federal government has turned Arizona in as a Human Rights abuser (for crimes that haven’t actually been committed but because they COULD be committed) for wanting to enforce immigration laws and if we pull people over legally and then ask them if they are citizens.
The Horror! The Racism! Evil! Pure Evil!
So, now we get this from The Progressive Liberals Bible, The New York Times:
The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers.
That’s right. The Feds can do the racial profiling (“your papers please”) but if anyone else does it, you’re a racist and human right abuser!
Or as two lawyers on The O’reilly factor last night said when ask what’s the difference? They both said in near-unison, “It’s the Federal government not the States”.
So yet again, if the government wants to selectively enforce the law you aren’t allowed to protest or object and you sure as hell can’t do it yourself! God Forbid!
We are the Government and we are here to protect you. Doesn’t that swell your heart with Hope and love and peace. :)
“Are you a U.S. citizen?” agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. “What country were you born in?”
And since all the leftist think those kind of questions are racist, except when they are doing it of course.
When the answer came back, “the U.S.,” they moved on.
So if you are an illegal, all you have to do is lie and the liberals will just move on.
It’s not like if they arrest you and you have no criminal record that they will deport you. The ICE policy detailed in an earlier blog details that you’re not a “priority” so they will just let you go EVEN IF you are arrested for being here illegally. They don’t really care.
So this is just a game. They can claim they caught X number of illegals. They just don’t mention they let most of them go afterwards. Details…Details…Details….
The deportation of criminals is up. The dismissal of cases against “non-criminal” (which is laughable on it’s face since it IS A CRIME to be here illegally to begin with) is also up. But we just won’t talk about that one.
But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister’s in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.
RACIAL PROFILING!!! :)

He was one of hundreds of passengers taken to detention each year from domestic trains and buses along the nation’s northern border. The little-publicized transportation checks are the result of the Border Patrol’s growth since 9/11, fueled by Congressional antiterrorism spending and an expanding definition of border jurisdiction. In the Rochester area, where the border is miles away in the middle of Lake Ontario, the patrol arrested 2,788 passengers from October 2005 through last September.
The checks are “a vital component to our overall border security efforts” to prevent terrorism and illegal entry, said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection. He said that the patrol had jurisdiction to enforce immigration laws within 100 miles of the border, and that one mission was preventing smugglers and human traffickers from exploiting inland transit hubs.
In New York yes, In Arizona. Hell No! Too Dangerous. Let’s just put up signs warning people to stay away instead!
The patrol says that answering agents’ questions is voluntary, part of a “consensual and nonintrusive conversation” Some passengers agree, though they are not told that they can keep silent. But others, from immigration lawyers and university officials to American-born travelers startled by an agent’s flashlight in their eyes, say the practice is coercive, unconstitutional and tainted by racial profiling.
Well, if it’s done on the Mexican Border it sure is, according to Liberals.

The Lake Shore Limited route is a journey across the spectrum of public attitudes toward illegal immigrants — from cities where they have been accepted and often treated as future citizens, to places where they are seen as lawbreakers the federal government is doing too little to expel.
The journey also highlights conflicting enforcement policies. Immigration authorities, vowing to concentrate resources on deporting immigrants with serious criminal convictions, have recently been halting the deportation of students who were brought to the country as children without papers — a group the Obama administration favors for legalization.
But some of the same kinds of students are being jailed by the patrol, like a Taiwan-born Ph.D. candidate who had excelled in New York City public schools since age 11. Two days after he gave a paper on Chaucer at a conference in Chicago last year, he was taken from his train seat and strip-searched at a detention center in Batavia, N.Y., facing deportation for an expired visa.
Where’s La Raza!? the ACLU!? Rev. Al?  This is an outrage! :)

For some, the patrol’s practices evoke the same fears as a new immigration law in Arizona — that anyone, anytime, can be interrogated without cause.
Don’t you love the mischaracterization and overgeneralization fallacies of that statement.

The federal government is authorized to do just that at places where people enter and leave the country, and at a “reasonable distance” from the border.
But doing it 40 Miles south of Phoenix and hundreds of miles from the border is “racial Profiling” and could lead to human rights abuse!

But as the patrol expands and tries to raise falling arrest numbers, critics say, the concept of the border is becoming more fluid, eroding Constitutional limits on search and seizure. And unlike Arizona’s law, the change is happening without public debate.
“It’s turned into a police state on the northern border,” said Cary M. Jensen, director of international services for the University of Rochester, whose foreign students, scholars and parents have been questioned and jailed, often because the patrol did not recognize their legal status. “It’s essentially become an internal document check.”
YOUR PAPERS PLEASE! :)

Domestic transportation checks are not mentioned in a report on the northern border strategy that Customs and Border Protection delivered last year to Congress, which has more than doubled the patrol since 2006, to 2,212 agents, with plans to double it again soon. The data available suggests that such stops account for as many as half the reported 6,000 arrests a year.
In Rochester, the Border Patrol station opened in 2004, with four agents to screen passengers of a new ferry from Toronto. The ferry went bankrupt, but the unit has since grown tenfold; its agents have one of the highest arrest rates on the northern border — 1,040 people in the 2008 fiscal year, 95 percent of them from buses and trains — though officials say numbers have fallen as word of the patrols reached immigrant communities.
“Our mission is to defend the homeland, primarily against terrorists and terrorist weapons,” said Thomas Pocorobba Jr., the agent in charge of the Rochester station, one of 55 between Washington State and Maine. “We still do our traditional mission, which is to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.”
Just Not in Arizona! That’s racist!

Legal scholars say the government’s border authority, which extends to fixed checkpoints intercepting cross-border traffic, cannot be broadly applied to roving patrols in a swath of territory. But such authority is not needed to ask questions if people can refuse to answer. The patrol does not track how many people decline, Mr. Pocorobba said.
Asked if agents could question people in Times Square, which like most of the nation’s population centers is within 100 miles of international waters, Mr. Pocorobba replied, “Technically, we can, but we don’t.” He added, “Our job is strictly cross-border.”
So as long as you lie, they move on and don’t feel any need to do more.
Note to terrorists: Just Lie. They won’t notice. :)
Lawyers challenging the stops in several deportation cases questioned the rationale that they were aimed at border traffic. Government data obtained in litigation shows that at least three-quarters of those arrested since 2006 had been in the country more than a year.
Though many Americans may welcome such arrests, the patrol’s costly expansion was based on a bipartisan consensus about border security, not interior enforcement to sweep up farm workers and students, said Nancy Morawetz, who directs the immigration rights clinic at New York University.
One case she is challenging involves a Nassau County high school graduate taken from the Lake Shore Limited in Rochester in 2007. The government says the graduate, then 21, voluntarily produced a Guatemalan passport and could not prove she was in the country legally. A database later showed she had an expired visitor’s visa.
Unlike a criminal arrest, such detentions come with few due process protections. The woman was held at a county jail, then transferred across the country while her mother, a house cleaner, and a high school teacher tried to reach her. The woman first saw an immigration judge more than three weeks after her arrest. He halved the $10,000 bail set by the patrol, and she was eventually released at night at a rural Texas gas station.
“I was shocked,” said the teacher, Susanne Marcus, who said her former student had been awarded a $2,000 college scholarship.
Another challenge is pending in the 2009 train arrest of the Taiwan-born doctoral student, who had to answer the agent after being singled out for intense questioning because of his “Asian appearance,” he said. His account was corroborated in an affidavit filed this month by another passenger.
OOH!!! MORE RACIAL PROFILING!

Similar complaints have been made by others, including a Chicago couple who encountered the patrol on a train to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for the woman’s graduation from Vassar College.
“At least in Arizona, you have to be doing something wrong to be stopped,” said the woman, a citizen of Chinese-American descent who said her Mexican boyfriend was sleeping when an agent started questioning him. “Here, you’re sitting on the train asleep and if you don’t look like a U.S. citizen, it’s ‘Wake up!’ ”
Mr. Pocorobba denied that agents used racial profiling; the proof, he said, was that those arrested had come from 96 countries.
So how’s that different from Arizona? 43% of illegals are from other countries other than Mexico. OTM= Other Than Mexican to use Customs parlance.
So we have another liberal hypocrisy. It’s not racial profiling when they do it, but it is if the State does it or it’s the Mexican Border. I see… :(

Agents say they often act on suspicion, prompted by a passenger’s demeanor. Of those detained, most were in the country illegally — including the Mexican, 24, who admitted that he had sneaked across the southern border at 16 to find his father. Others were supposed to be carrying their papers, like a Pakistani college student detained for two weeks before authorities confirmed that he was a legal resident.
Some American-born passengers welcome the patrol. “It makes me feel safe,” volunteered Katie Miller, 34, who was riding Amtrak to New York from Ohio. “I don’t mind being monitored.” :)

To others, it evokes travel through the old Communist bloc. “I was actually woken up with a flashlight in my face,” recalled Mike Santomauro, 27, a law student who encountered the patrol in April, at 2 a.m. on a train in Rochester.
Across the aisle, he said, six agents grilled a student with a computer who had only an electronic version of his immigration documents. Through the window, Mr. Santomauro said, he could see three black passengers, standing with arms raised beside a Border Patrol van.
“As a citizen I’m offended,” he said. But he added, “To say I didn’t want to answer didn’t seem a viable option.”

Don’t do as I do, Do as I say!

Thursday, August 26, 2010

How To Stay Here Illegally 101

Big Sis, DHS Secretary and Pro-Illegal Janet Napalitano has figured out a new strategy for creating a de-facto amnesty.
If they aren’t “serious criminals” you let them walk. Period.
So all you have to do to be an illegal alien permanently in this country is not be a “serious”  criminal in this country.
More or less. More on that after a this…

The Department of Homeland Security is systematically reviewing thousands of pending immigration cases and moving to dismiss those filed against suspected illegal immigrants who have no serious criminal records, according to several sources familiar with the efforts.
Culling the immigration court system dockets of noncriminals started in earnest in Houston about a month ago and has stunned local immigration attorneys, who have reported coming to court anticipating clients’ deportations only to learn that the government was dismissing their cases.
Richard Rocha, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman, said Tuesday that the review is part of the agency’s broader, nationwide strategy to prioritize the deportations of illegal immigrants who pose a threat to national security and public safety. Rocha declined to provide further details.
Critics assailed the plan as another sign that the Obama administration is trying to create a kind of backdoor “amnesty” program.
Raed Gonzalez, an immigration attorney who was briefed on the effort by Homeland Security’s deputy chief counsel in Houston, said DHS confirmed that it’s reviewing cases nationwide, though not yet to the pace of the local office. He said the others are expected to follow suit soon.
Gonzalez, the liaison between the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which administers the immigration court system, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said DHS now has five attorneys assigned full time to reviewing all active cases in Houston’s immigration court.
Gonzalez said DHS attorneys are conducting the reviews on a case-by-case basis. However, he said they are following general guidelines that allow for the dismissal of cases for defendants who have been in the country for two or more years and have no felony convictions.
In some instances, defendants can have one misdemeanor conviction, but it cannot involve a DWI, family violence or sexual crime, Gonzalez said.

Massive backlog of cases

Opponents of illegal immigration were critical of the dismissals.
“They’ve made clear that they have no interest in enforcing immigration laws against people who are not convicted criminals,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for strict controls.
“This situation is just another side effect of President Obama’s failure to deliver on his campaign promise to make immigration reform a priority in his first year,” said U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “Until he does, state and local authorities are left with no choice but to pick up the slack for prosecuting and detaining criminal aliens.”
Gonzalez called the dismissals a necessary step in unclogging a massive backlog in the immigration court system. In June, there were more than 248,000 cases pending in immigration courts across the country, including about 23,000 in Texas, according to data compiled by researchers at Syracuse University.

‘Absolutely fantastic’

Gonzalez said he went into immigration court downtown on Monday and was given a court date in October 2011 for one client. But, he said, the government’s attorney requested the dismissal of that case and those of two more of his clients, and the cases were dispatched by the judge.
The court “was terminating all of the cases that came up,” Gonzalez said. “It was absolutely fantastic.”
“We’re all calling each other saying, ‘Can you believe this?’ ” said John Nechman, another Houston immigration attorney, who had two cases dismissed.
Attorney Elizabeth Mendoza Macias, who has practiced in Houston for 17 years, said she had cases for several clients dismissed during the past month and eventually called DHS to find out what was going on. She said she was told by a DHS trial attorney that 2,500 cases were under review in Houston.
“I had five (dismissed) in one week, and two more that I just received,” Mendoza said. “And I am expecting many more, many more, in the next month.”
Her clients, all previously charged with being in the country illegally, included:
An El Salvadoran man married to a U.S. citizen who has two U.S.-born children. The client had a pending asylum case in the court system, but the case was not particularly strong. Now that his case is terminated, he will be eligible to obtain permanent residency through his wife, Mendoza said.
A woman from Cameroon, who was in removal proceedings after being caught by the U.S. Border Patrol, had her case terminated by the government. She meets the criteria of a trafficking victim, Mendoza said, and can now apply for a visa.

Memo outlines priorities

Immigrants who have had their cases terminated are frequently left in limbo, immigration attorneys said, and are not granted any form of legal status.
“It’s very, very key to understand that these aliens are not being granted anything in court. They are still here illegally. They don’t have work permits. They don’t have Social Security numbers,” Mendoza said. “ICE is just saying, ‘At this particular moment, we are not going to proceed with trying to remove you from the United States.’ ”
In a June 30 memo, ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton outlined the agency’s priorities, saying it had the capacity to remove about 400,000 illegal immigrants annually — about 4 percent of the estimated illegal immigrant population in the country. The memo outlines priorities for the detention and removal system, putting criminals and threats to national security at the top of the list.

Up to 17,000 cases

On Tuesday, ICE officials provided a copy of a new policy memo from Morton dated Aug. 20 that instructs government attorneys to review the court cases of people with pending applications to adjust status based on their relation to a U.S. citizen. Morton estimates in the memo that the effort could affect up to 17,000 cases.
Tre Rebsock, the ICE union representative in Houston, said even if the efforts involve only a fraction of the pending immigration cases, “that’s going to make our officers feel even more powerless to enforce the laws.” (Houston Chronicle)
Mind you bullets from the recent gun battles in Mexico have been flying across the border and hitting building, including the University of Tex El Paso, but don’t worry about that DHS has it all under control. :)


Now to that “less” I spoke of…
An illegal immigrant arrested five times for driving offenses, including a 2005 hit-and-run that ultimately left an elderly Dacula man dead, was voluntarily deported last October, the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s office said Monday. Whether he will be involuntarily deported following his latest charge remains uncertain.
“He either didn’t leave the country as agreed or he left and came back,” said sheriff’s spokeswoman Stacey Bourbonnais. Added Sheriff Butch Conway, “they put him on the honor system, more or less.”
Celso Campo-Duartes’ current whereabouts are no mystery. He’s been in Gwinnett’s custody since May 28, when he was charged with disorderly conduct and unlicensed driving.
In January 2008, the suspect entered a negotiated plea to a charge of failure to stop at or return to the scene of an accident in the death of Aubrey Sosebee, an 83-year-old World War II veteran who was run over by the plumber as he was retrieving his mail. Campo-Duartes was sentenced to two years in prison and three years of probation and was released for time served.
A little more than a year ago, he was arrested for driving without a license and released the same day on $760 bond. In October, he was arrested on the same charge. (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

So is he “serious” enough” or are the drug runners, smugglers, and coyotes coming across the border with impunity “serious” enough for DHS??
Like I have said before, now we know why the judge put SB1070′s enforcement provision on hold because they would “overwhelm” the system. :(
The problem is so big they don’t, cant, and won’t deal with it. But they will lie about it and call anyone who disagrees with them a racist!

The Obama administration said it would focus its enforcement of illegal immigration laws by targeting workplace activities, but a recent report shows that while audits of employers are slightly up over the Bush administration, worker arrests are down drastically since the end of 2008.
Under Obama, employer audits are up 50 percent, fines have tripled to almost $3 million and the number of executives arrested is slightly up over the Bush administration.
But under President Obama, the numbers of arrests and deportations of illegals taken into custody at work sites plummeted by more than 80 percent from the last year of the Bush administration. In the current fiscal year 2010, which ends Sept. 30, ICE has arrested 900 workers.
That compares to immigration agents under Bush raiding hundreds of businesses from factory to farm — and arresting and deporting more than 6,000 illegal immigrants in raids in 2008 — more than 5,000 simply for being in the country illegally.
“No administration in the history of this nation removed more illegal immigrants from the country than we did last year and I expect the records to continue. We’re serious about enforcement. We’re going to go out and we’re just going to do it,” he said.
Can you guess if this was Obama, Napalitano or ICE? they’ve all said the same talking point.

But if they aren’t “serious” criminals they can now walk. And even if they are “serious” they can always self-deport so they can walk across the border again tomorrow. No problem.
So we raid your business, we fine you, you’re workers are taken by ICE. Then if they aren’t “serious” criminals they let them go so you can rehire them again or you can hire the group let go by another employer yesterday.
Let’s just swap workers and call that jobs “saved or created”. Yeah, that’s the ticket! :)
That is unless you’re a chronic drunk in Atlanta who kills people at their mailbox that is. :( Maybe…
So just like the Blank Panther case and others, the government has made the decision on what selective enforcement they wish to pursue. The law is mailable to their political whims of the moment.

“It is tough when you have law enforcement turning a blind eye to entire categories of aliens — and that is what is happening here — it is a de facto amnesty,” Julie Myers, an ICE director under Bush said.
“No one is talking about giving a free pass for fraud, or ID theft is to be taken lightly, but we know the vast majority of the workforce did not commit any crime,” Marshall Fitz, director of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress (a liberal think tank) said.
After all, being her illegally is not a crime to Liberals. It is to Federal law, but not to Liberals. So it’s no big deal.
And you’re a racist if you disagree, just remember that. :)
The law is there to enforced when they feel like it and how they feel like it.

SAN DIEGO — The speedboat is about three miles offshore when a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent cuts the engine to drift on the current in quiet darkness, hoping for the telltale signs of immigrant smuggling — sulfur fumes or a motor’s whirr.
“It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and the haystack is the Pacific Ocean,” agent Tim Feige says minutes before sunrise marks the end to another uneventful shift.
This is a new frontier for illegal immigrants entering the United States — a roughly 400-square-mile ocean expanse that stretches from a bullring on the shores of Tijuana, Mexico, to suburban Los Angeles. In growing numbers, migrants are gambling their lives at sea as land crossings become even more arduous and likely to end in arrest.
Sea interdictions and arrests have spiked year-over-year for three years, as enforcement efforts ramp up to meet the challenge.
And that doesn’t even count the sea piracy on the lake in Zapata in Texas.

1 if by land 2 if by Sea. The Illegals are Coming! The Illegals are coming! :)
But don’t worry, if you’re not a “serious” criminal Big Sis and her pals don’t actually care. And even if you are, it depends on their mood ring at that moment. And you can always self-deport yourself so you can come back tomorrow.
No big deal. But it looks like we give a damn.
And if criticize us you’re a racist! :)
So why are they so against securing the border against the drug dealer, coyotes and bullets? Hmmm…
So lesson #1 for Terrorists coming across the border, keep your nose clean and no one will be paying any attention to you, or at the very least just don’t be “serious”, until you set off your bomb!
If unrestricted illegal immigration is unsatisfactory and “sealing the border” is unsatisfactory, where is the path ahead?
How to look like we’re are doing something, but in fact we aren’t doing diddly. :)
SNAFU :)

Saturday, May 15, 2010

LA Vs. AZ

No, it’s no the Lakers vs. The Suns.
But it is LA vs Los Suns. :(
Los Angeles’ city council votes to boycott Arizona for its enforcement of existing federal law. No word yet on how China’s human rights violations will be treated. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
The next time the Lakers play Los Suns in Phoenix, traveling fans are advised to bring their own snacks. The L.A. City Council voted 13-1 on Wednesday to economically boycott the state of Arizona for daring to protect its borders against the crime, violence and illegal immigration that recently took the life of an Arizona rancher and has made Phoenix the kidnapping capital of the U.S.
Council member and co-sponsor Janice Hahn, who is also running for California lieutenant governor, was asked about the Lakers’ upcoming NBA playoff series with the Suns. Games 3 and 4 are scheduled in Phoenix. Hahn told NBCLA, “If you go, we’re hoping you take your own snacks and won’t buy things in Arizona.” This is beyond silly.
The Arizona law, SB1070, empowers local police officers to check the immigration status of individuals whom they have encountered during a “lawful contact,” if an officer reasonably suspects the person stopped of being in the country illegally, and if an inquiry into the person’s status is “practicable.”
Councilman Ed Reyes, one of the measure’s co-sponsors, sees it differently: “As an American, I cannot go to Arizona today without a passport. If I come across an officer who’s having a bad day and feels that the picture on my ID is not me, I can be … deported, no questions asked. That is not American.” Neither is it true.
The police are authorized to act only when an individual is suspected of some other violation of the law and “reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States.” The law says that police “may not solely consider race, color or national origin” in inquiring about the immigration status of a suspect individual. However, if you’re caught speeding without a valid driver’s license and don’t speak a word of English, that’s probable cause.
This doesn’t make Arizona South Africa or require Councilman Reyes to carry a passport lest he be immediately taken to the transporter room and beamed to Mexico City. As Heather MacDonald of City Journal points out, the law does require legal aliens to carry their immigration documents. This mirrors an existing federal law that also applies to Swedish moms.
Failure to comply with the federal law on carrying immigration papers becomes a state misdemeanor under the Arizona law. Critics of Arizona enlisting local police to enforce federal immigration law fail to note the existence of the federal 287G program that trains local police to do just that.
Los Angeles, of course, is considered a sanctuary city for illegal aliens. This policy is embodied in Special Order 40, a more than 30-year-old Los Angeles Police Department rule that bars police from arresting anyone based solely on their immigration status, or from notifying immigration officials about an illegal immigrant in their custody.
We won’t even go into the irony of L.A. declaring a boycott of another state at the very time its most productive citizens have declared a silent boycott against the city — leaving it in droves due to the corrupt and highly racialized political culture, high taxes, excessive regulations and overtly hostile attitude toward businesses and entrepreneurs.
Addressing her state’s new law, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said: “It’s already the law in the United States, and I have a responsibility to stand up and protect the people of Arizona and we will do that. I find it really interesting that we have people out there that are attempting a boycott in favor of illegal actions in Arizona. That to me is just unbelievable.”
We find it unbelievable too. There are plenty of unsavory places on this planet to boycott. We also know Phoenix is lovely this time of year. (IBD)
I would add, since Arizonians love to to go to LA and San Diego for vacations in the summer time that maybe you should rethink that.
Your “racist” “Nazi” License plate may attack unwanted attention from the California Holy Crusaders.
After all, if they want to boycott us, why not boycott them?
Go to Utah instead. It’s beautiful country and they don’t have any “sanctuary” cities like California, Colorado, New Mexico and parts of Texas.
And you won’t risk some liberal vandalizing your property in the name of their “moral superiority”.
Or you could go to these places and just say “in your face”.
Your Choice.
******
As of yesterday, AG Eric Holder still hasn’t read the law. But Holder’s spokesman, Matthew Miller, said Friday that his boss “has been thoroughly briefed on the law, which has already been amended since the initial version passed, and has heard concerns from a range of law enforcement and community officials. He and the Department will continue to review it in detail to determine what options are available to the federal government.”
Translation: He hasn’t read it and probably never will.
It’s beneath his time and stature to do so.
But he will pontificate and pass judgment though.
Beside, it’s better to not know the truth and look a fool than to know the truth and BE a fool.
That’s what Liberals do.

Friday, May 14, 2010

Cutting on the Bias

Any foodie would recognize the phrase, but this is not about food, it’s about The Mainstream Media.
The Fifth Column.
The Ministry of Truth.
The Mainstream Media.
The Ministry of Truth is involved with news media, entertainment, the fine arts and educational books. Its purpose is to rewrite history and change the facts to fit Party doctrine for propaganda effect. For example, if Big Brother makes a prediction that turns out to be wrong, the employees of the Ministry of Truth go back and rewrite the prediction so that any prediction Big Brother previously made is accurate. This is the “how” of the Ministry of Truth’s existence. Within the novel Orwell elaborates that the deeper reason for its existence is to maintain the illusion that the Party is absolute. It cannot ever seem to change its mind (if, for instance, they perform one of their constant changes regarding enemies during war) or make a mistake (firing an official or making a grossly misjudged supply prediction), for that would imply weakness and to maintain power the Party must seem eternally right and strong. (1984 by Orwell)

ABC,NBC,CBS,CNN,MSNBC, LA TIMES, NY Times, et al anyone? :)
And Today’s Ministry of Truth-Busting: Arizona and The Illegal Immigration Law

NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd seemed astonished by how a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll confirmed solid agreement with Arizona’s immigration enforcement law – “a whopping 64 percent support the law,” Todd marveled, “and we read them the law verbatim exactly as it’s been written” and still, he repeated, “64 percent approve of it.” NBC also treated as surprising the majority backing for racial profiling to prevent terrorism.
Whopping? :)
BTW: that similar to “Unexpectedly” when things don’t go the way the Liberals wanted it to. Like, unemployment UNEXPECTEDLY rose last month…
As noted above, Todd pointed out that on Arizona “we read them the law verbatim exactly as it’s been written.” Here’s that question, #34:

The Arizona law makes it a state crime to be in the U.S. illegally. It requires local and state law enforcement officers to question people about their immigration status if they have reason to suspect a person is in the country illegally, making it a crime for them to lack registration documents. Do you support or oppose this law? (IF SUPPORT/OPPOSE, THEN ASK) And, do you strongly (support/oppose) or just somewhat (support/oppose) this law?
(46 percent “strongly support,” nearly double the 24 percent who “strongly oppose.”)
So even though they asked the question with an obvious bias they didn’t get the answer they wanted. :)
In fact, the statute requires a prerequisite lawful reason for stopping someone before the law enforcement officer can check their immigration status:
For any lawful stop, detention or arrest made by a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency of this state or a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency of a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state in the enforcement of any other law or ordinance of a county, city or town or this state where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien and  is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person, except if the determination may hinder or obstruct an investigation.

Something the Ministry of Truth just completely forgets about. Call it a blind (Partisan) spot.
CBS and ABC promoted the cause of activists in the minority. Both devoted full stories to the “uproar” and “emotional civil war” over the law and moves by a few liberal local government bodies to enact boycotts, only getting late in their stories to those who like the law.
The Thursday night stories were pegged to a boycott vote by the Democratic city council of Los Angeles, but CBS’s Bill Whitaker and ABC’s Barbara Pinto both also played a three-day old clip of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger mocking Arizona and pointed to the cancellation of a trip to Arizona by a suburban Chicago high school’s girls basketball team – not to deride adults for using teens to grind a political axe, but to illustrate the supposed depth of opposition to Arizona’s law.
“The boycott of Arizona is spreading,” Katie Couric trumpeted before Whitaker touted: “The city of Los Angeles, the latest to react strongly to Arizona’s tough new anti-illegal immigration law.” He pushed how “a growing number of states and municipalities are boycotting or considering boycotting Arizona,” citing how “Highland Park High School in Chicago’s suburbs is pulling its champion girls’ basketball team from a tournament in Arizona because of the law.”

I saw an interview with the father of one of the girls and another one with 1 of the girls on the team, they don’t get it.
“What does the immigration law have to do with us going to play sports in Arizona?”
Using kids as political weapons is frankly disgusting, but that’s nothing knew to the “for the children” liberal crowd.
Cuing up Schwarzenegger, Whitaker insisted: “The state has become the butt of jokes.” Schwarzenegger, from Monday, on not traveling to Arizona: “But with my accent, I was worried they were going to deport me back to Austria.”(MRC)
One LA Councilman I saw on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 said he afraid to drive in Arizona now because they would just randomly stop him because of his looks and DEPORT him.
Deport Him? Where? L.A.? :)
Anderson Cooper ignored this and continued.
From April 23 to May 3, the top three television networks offered viewers 50 stories and interview segments on their morning and evening news programs. The tone was strongly hostile to the law and promotional to the “growing storm” of left-wing protesters: 37 stories (or 74 percent) were negative, 10 were neutral, and only three were positive toward the Arizona law’s passage — 12 negative stories for every one that leaned positive. Stories were much kinder and sympathetic to illegal aliens than they were to police officers. Cops were potential abusers of power. Entering the country illegally was not an abuse of power. It was portrayed as an honorable step by the powerless.
The soundbite count was also slanted, with 92 quotes against the law and only 52 in favor. The pro-law numbers, however, included many soundbites of Arizona public officials defending themselves against liberal charges that they were racists or in favor of racial profiling.
Opponents of the law didn’t even have to speak English to be quoted sympathetically. In a May 3 CBS Evening News story, Katie Couric fretted “many” illegals “no longer feel welcome.” Reporter Kelly Cobiella focused on the story of non-English-speaking Manuela Quintana, who decided to move to Colorado. Cobiella cued up the mother of ten to deny she was a criminal: “‘No,’ she says, ‘a criminal is someone who kills. I just want to work.’” Over video of the kids piling into an SUV, Cobiella concluded: “The family packed up before dawn today and headed north to Colorado. Manuela says she’s lost hope in this state. She thinks she’ll find it again in another.” (NewsBusters)
I guess they could find any of the Coyotes or other Smugglers for a comment…
ABC Good Morning America host Bill Weir chided Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a well-known enforcer of immigration law, “With this new law, will you ramp it up?…Will you grab people on street corners?”
No media bias there, kids… :(
While the harshest Tea Party activists were scorned by the networks for any suggestion President Obama was a “Nazi,” on 11 occasions these same networks unquestioningly forwarded smears that proponents of the Arizona law were like Nazis or Civil War-era slaveholders. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell used these slurs from liberal comedians to demonstrate how Arizona was becoming a “laughingstock.”
Violence was downplayed. Only one ABC story reported violence by the protesters (in a “mostly peaceful” protest), and only one CBS story mentioned vandalism (smearing refried-bean swastikas on the state capitol building). There were only two references to the murder of rancher Robert Krentz, and four to the shooting of a deputy in Pinal County, all four in larger celebrations of May Day marches.
Viewers would assume protesters were in the majority. ABC Saturday anchor David Muir touted May Day protests on World News. “Angry backlash from coast to coast. Huge rallies across this country tonight against that new controversial immigration law.”
The networks were very reluctant to note that the Arizona law was popular: only five stories mentioned that the protesters were on the losing side of public opinion, where almost 90 percent of those polled by CBS consider illegal immigration a serious problem. It’s a stunning contrast, then, that 74 percent of the stories channel the view of a tiny minority. (NB)

But they aren’t biased at all, just ask them… :(
And here’s the Kicker!
Sanctimonious Attorney General Eric Holder who has been making the round of the Liberal Talk show and in Press Conference has been decrying Arizona for the Law, BUT he admitted on camera Yesterday(!!!) THAT HE HASN’T EVEN READ IT!!!!
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/05/13/attorney-general-holder-admits-never-reading-arizonas-immigration-law
REPRESENTATIVE TED POE, (R-TEXAS): So Arizona, since the federal government totally fails to secure the border desperately then passed laws to protect its own people. The law is supported by 70 percent of the people in Arizona, 60 percent of all Americans, and 50 percent of all Hispanics according to the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll done just this week. And I understand that you may file a lawsuit against the law. Seems to me the Administration ought to be enforcing border security and immigration laws and not challenge them, and that the Administration is on the wrong side of the American people. Have you read the Arizona law?
ERIC HOLDER, ATTORNEY GENERAL: I have not had a chance to, I’ve glanced at it. I have not read it.
POE: It’s ten pages. It’s a lot shorter than the healthcare bill which was 2,000 pages long. I’ll give you my copy of it if you would like to have a copy. Even though you haven’t read the law, do you have an opinion as to whether it’s Constitutional?
HOLDER: I have not really, I have not been briefed yet.
CBS (apr 27th, 2010): Headline: Arizona’s New Law is Subject to Potential abuse, Attorney General Eric Holder Said Today
Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano were critical Tuesday of Arizona’s new law on immigration and Holder said the federal government may challenge it.
Napolitano said the new state law could siphon federal money and staff from hunting down dangerous immigrants.

Dear Janet,
You’d have to hunt them down to begin with first! You fraud!
And is over 2 weeks before Mr. Holder attempted he hadn’t EVEN READ IT!!
No Media bias here… :(
Holder’s response will even FURTHER amaze most Americans on both sides of the aisle:

HOLDER: Well, what I’ve said is that I’ve not made up my mind. I’ve only made, made the comments that I’ve made on the basis of things that I’ve been able to glean by reading newspaper accounts, obviously, looking at television, talking to people who are on the review panel, on the review team that are looking at the law. But I’ve not reached any conclusions as yet with regard to. I’ve just expressed concerns on the basis of what I’ve heard about the law. But I’m not in the position to say at this point, not having read the law, not having had the chance to interact with people doing the review, exactly what my position is.
Yep. The most powerful law enforcement official in our nation hasn’t bothered reading an important, sixteen-page bill that he and the Administration have been making negative comments about since it was passed weeks ago.
Instead, he’s relied on “newspaper accounts” and “looking at television” to establish his opinion.
You really can’t make this stuff up!
But The Ministry of Truth is hard at work do there very best to do just that and to do it convincingly.
1984 By George Orwell on the Ministry of Truth:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.  Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.
There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
Just a “racist”, “Nazi” “bigot”… :)